#i hate every other sigma ship for varying reasons

[lagomort]

sigma and reaper since uve been talking about them?

OUAGHHHHHHHHH YESSSSSSSSSSS

Literally literally the ship of all time. Thank you for sending me an ask about them I have SO many opinions. So many thoughts. Open invitation to all the people of the world forever to send me asks about these two to give me an excuse to write thinkposts on this godawful Tumblr blog.

Yes I despise Activision Blizzard and haven't played Overwatch in years. Yes I love these two enough to have written over 150,000 unpublished words about them. We exist.

[marsketti]

It's not like Akane pulled the trigger but I think it'd be incorrect to say she didn't intend for Ace to kill the others. Remember that the whole hosting of the Nonary game was to trigger Junpei's esper abilities via Epiphany and Danger. The murderous scenarios were I think intended to strengthen the chances of Junpei developing esper abilities, in addition to the general "we're on a sinking ship and everyone's gonna die" scenario. (Which was also a falsity.) Having a deadly scenario inside the events of the Nonary Game would be intended to function much like the Nonary Game in VLR that was hosted to strengthen Sigma and Phi's SHIFTing abilities. Most of the point of 999's Nonary Game was to get Junpei to access the morphogenetic field and communicate with Akane in the past. I do think it's true that Akane would want her games to play out in the least deadly manner possible. In VLR, no one has to die. But in 999, the game doubled as a revenge plot, to kill Hongou's conspirators and make him survive in the true end as evidence of the atrocity he committed by hosting the game and forcing children to take part, ultimately killing Akane. She definitely hated all those men, and being an esper as well as connected to Junpei's experience playing the game, she likely knew how it would play out from the beginning. If the game was just to save herself in the past then the men from the first Nonary Game wouldn't need to be there at all, unlike in VLR where every player contributed to the information Sigma needed to gather in the different timelines. Ace and the others' inclusion and incentives were intentional. That doesn't mean she was necessarily responsible for their actions: she was their victim, and wanted them to take responsibility for the evil they had done. Ace was ultimately the one who refused to comply with that. Maybe Akane could have simply removed Snake when he was in danger and kept the body count lower, but there's no guarantee that more people wouldn't have died, or maybe the game wouldn't have been able to accomplish its goal without "Snake's" murder, since it's a trigger for other things such as Clover's reactions and suspicions.

I want to state that I know Akane to be a well-intentioned and good person, to a degree. But to ignore the complexity and facets of her motives, by ignoring information on what she has experienced during and after the first Nonary Game and what her esper abilities have made her able to experience and understand, would be an unjust simplification. There are a lot of her behaviors and motives that are under question, or at least subject to fan interpretation, due to how they vary between games, perhaps to best serve her situation, whether that be to strengthen her bond with Junpei in 999, to inform and manipulate Sigma in VLR, or to make her best attempts at understanding a system she's never experienced in ZTD. She is often described by Uchikoshi as not quite being as her appearances may suggest. It's my personal belief about her that by manipulating how her consciousness interacts with time, she fundamentally must act a certain way, perhaps differently than she may personally prefer, in order to achieve a good outcome. She even spends one or more timelines in VLR as K, keeping up a very convincing act during the period of the game. We know, then, that she's capable of keeping up an act, especially as a means to an end, especially when she knows how things will play out. Therefore I think it's entirely possible for her actions in 999 to be at least partially an act, including her demeanor when it comes to her feelings towards the other players, especially Ace, who she seems comfortable with despite having every reason to hate him and want to at least avoid him. Sometimes she can be perceived as naive but her capacity to understand her situation is likely much more intelligent than she lets on.

I do appreciate your point about her fevers, but the theory about them being a symptom of plans not proceeding as intended or required are flawed. We never see her have a similar reaction to death in other games, so it's not due to being overwhelmed by the deadly scenario in the moment. She set up the game expecting that outcome in the first place. It also couldn't be some kind of reaction to a bad timeline, since that isn't how esper abilities and SHIFTing work, or even if we bring the machine from ZTD into the mix it still wouldn't apply.

I have a very complex idea of Akane, so I would say I don't agree or disagree with you, or that I both do and don't. It's just that her intent is present, even if she made space to allow the murders not to happen. Some might state this as "she killed them", but that would be a simplification and wouldn't include that Ace also killed them. We've seen Akane's potential to murder, or at least be a host to it. I think that's worth enough to not be ignored. (And it wouldn't exactly fly in a court of law, if it had the capacity to analyze her situation accurately.) But by all means, her goal was to host successful Nonary Games towards an end. For me, it's impossible to really tell how much of what she portrays is genuine, especially when her portrayal varies greatly in every game. The fact that she marries Junpei at the end of ZTD suggests that there must be some of her behaviors towards him and their other companions that should have been genuine, but personally it's hard for me to accept ZTD as entirely canon due to several finer contradictions with my understanding of esper abilities and the morphogenetic field as the games portrayed them. Akane is, at a larger scale, a character capable of much good an much evil. We know she wants to save the human race and has done a lot to try and understand what is going to happen, but has also killed repeatedly, for both selfish and selfless reasons. In the scope of the Zero Escape series, whether she killed and why seem like pretty minor details. She doesn't necessarily need a reason of why or why not to commit some seemingly inconsequential murders. Maybe it was just to make everyone understand what had happened in the first Nonary games by being forced to uncover it for themselves. But that, too, would be intentional. It's true they didn't have to die. But the fact that she left Ace with the agency to decide all of their fates, knowing how selfish he would be with the opportunity as she had framed it, to me makes it seem that she expected his behavior in response, and makes me a little curious of what would have happened with any of the other men in his position. He was the one who designed the first Nonary Game in the first place. Whether or not she knew how things would play out, she definitely should've expected it.

i kno this is Very Random but i really dislike it when people say that akane killed three people in the nonary game, like no offense but that totally lets ace off the hook for, you know, actually being the one who killed them. the way akane set up the game, all three of them could have lived had ace not been so eager to save his own skin. the only one that i could really argue to be akane’s fault would be nagisa nijisaki/imposter snake since akane n aoi dressed him up for the sole purpose of confusing ace. however it also means that ace would have killed light instead so it’s not like there would be any less of a body count. but anyway she set up the game so that, had ace had any regrets or morals, he could have confessed, they all could have done the puzzles real quick, junpei could have done the sudoku puzzle, and they all could have gone home (and ace n co. to jail but anyway). like i guess you could argue that she knew how ace would react but she still gave him a chance to change n he didn’t