#i was a little worried i'd somewhat overdone the grumpy-aro-ness in the last post but it seems like you didn't mind

[commentaryvorg]

entirely fair and accurate takes on kaitos love suite event, honestly one of main reasons kaitos event is my favourite is because it doesn't get uncomfortably nsfw vibes like some of the others' (especially considering they're all teenagers AND it's pretty non-consensual... big yikes). but also, as his "ideal", the best outcome would be the object of affection returning his feelings, but in the fantasy, again, his "ideal", he didn't believe it would happen. that seems pretty bad.

Yeeaah, I’ve very deliberately never read a lot of other characters’ Love Suite events and am even more sure about never ever doing so, based on what I’ve gathered about them. Compared to those, I’m sure Kaito’s really is pretty tame and reasonable and one of the better ones, not that there’s a very high bar here.

I get what you’re saying now about how he theoretically should expect his feelings to be reciprocated at least in this “ideal fantasy” where he gets everything he wants - I didn’t quite pick up on that specific point before. That’s an interesting thought, but after considering it… I’m not entirely sure that’s how the fantasies work?

If it really was 100% perfectly “ideal”, then every single thought and action should be something that makes the character happy. But if that was the case, then it might just come across as too perfectly ideal for them to even be able to feel like it’s realistic at all. I went and reread some of the other tamer scenes that I’d read before to check how this is generally handled (Rantaro’s, Ryoma’s and Gonta’s are all nicely platonic), and, yeah, they’re all like this. Rantaro’s sisters are still missing and he’s having to abandon his surrogate younger-sibling-figure to search for them; most of Ryoma’s loved ones are still dead and he outwardly insists that his former manager wouldn’t want to stay with him; Gonta messes up in his attempts to be the perfect gentleman because he knows he still has a lot to learn. The events are still bound by that person’s reality and by how they expect things to work for them. They’re getting a nice reprieve from their troubles, but things aren’t completely perfect and happy. (The one partial exception to this is that Maki never became an assassin in her fantasy and seems to genuinely not remember that part of her life during the dream. That’s interesting, but I’m not sure if there’s actually a significant reason for why she’s the only one, given that Ryoma’s problems are just about as bad as hers. She’s still an orphan, though, so things still aren’t perfect for her.)

So I don’t think that the fact that love-suite-Kaito doesn’t expect his feelings to be reciprocated is any more meaningful than him hypothetically not expecting that in real life. The hotel’s magical dream powers (usually) don’t actually warp a person’s outlook to make them see the world any differently to how they normally do, nor to expect things they wouldn’t reasonably expect in reality, no matter how much they might want them.

(anon also added some tag commentary in their reblog of the initial post that I want to respond to a bit as well)

#i never really thought that the love suite events were *really* that character heavy so mostly the ask was a sudden realisation p late

I agree with you that evidently most of them really aren’t that much about the characters at all (well, presumably, though of course I’ve only seen some of the tamer ones). But here’s the thing - at least some of them could be, in theory, and a couple of them are. Rantaro’s and Ryoma’s are really pretty good - they’re relevant to their issues and give some more insight into their backstories and how they deal with their difficulties in ways that we don’t get to see much of in canon, considering that they both die so early on. (Rantaro’s in particular I might even go so far as to call my favourite piece of Rantaro content - when I reread it earlier I found myself having some Thoughts that may turn into a post of their own.) The “ideal fantasy” concept has potential to be more than just a lazy excuse for romantic and sexual stuff and to actually be used as a tool for some interesting character exploration. It’s just that, unfortunately, most of the time that either didn’t occur to the writers, or they just didn’t care.

It’s kind of like how most characters’ Harmonious Heart events are about something reasonably superficial or at most the character worrying about something they’d already told Shuichi about in their FTEs. Nearly all of them just range from almost no character insight at all, to maybe some but not much more than what we got from their FTEs. …Then there’s Kaito’s, which makes absolute maximum use of the potential of the “Shuichi gains inexplicable mindreading powers” premise to explore the core of Kaito’s issues and allow Shuichi to help him with them to an extent that is simply not possible in any of Kaito’s more regular content, and it’s the best. And, sure, I don’t think anyone else quite has such stubbornly-hidden issues that practically require mindreading to fix them to the point that their Harmonious Heart events could ever be quite as good as Kaito’s. But there’s definitely some characters who I feel could have had one that’s more relevant to their most interesting issues than what they actually got, if the writers had really thought about using this concept to its fullest potential for them.

So, well, I do think it would have been possible for Kaito’s Love Suite event to genuinely be really character-driven (and if that were the case I would personally have also preferred it to not be romantic at all). There are things you could do with the “ideal fantasy” concept that could absolutely be very deliberately about his issues.

What if it drew off Kaito’s deeply-buried subconscious need to have someone he could safely talk to about his weaknesses and worries, without having to be afraid of letting them down by telling them all this? And then, as Kaito vents to him about his worries in the dream, Shuichi realises with dawning horror that he’s the person Kaito’s terrified of admitting any of this to in reality, and that Kaito has no idea that Shuichi’s actually hearing every bit of it right now. And to keep up the “ideal fantasy”, because Kaito reacts very negatively if he tries to do otherwise, Shuichi has to just play along and agree with Kaito’s unhealthy outlook and be all, “Yeah, don’t worry, I won’t tell any of this to your sidekicks, your secret’s safe with me,” even though he wants to do the exact opposite because he knows that’s the best way to help. (That’d be a neat deconstruction of the dodgy non-consensual aspect of the place in a way that didn’t even have to get all nsfw about it.) …Admittedly this would be along rather similar lines to the Harmonious Heart event Kaito already has and probably not quite necessary next to it, but, you know, just as a proof-of-concept example.

Or, instead of that, to make it something different, they could have still made it about the rival thing, but not have the romance be the main point (or not even there at all). Instead, we’d actually spend the scene properly exploring the concept like you talked about: that in some ways Kaito feels more at ease around a rival than a sidekick because there’s no expectation to be completely invincible, that if they’re evenly matched then he’s supposed to lose sometimes as well as win, to be weak as well as strong, and that’s okay. We could even sort of combine this with my previous idea and have Kaito end up kind of accidentally venting a little to his rival about his worries, and then saying, “Y’know, it’s weird. I could never tell any of this to my sidekicks. But it doesn’t matter if you know all this, ‘cuz that doesn’t change the fact that I’m gonna beat you!” Or something like that. Your asks made me realise that I’d actually really enjoy some proper exploration of how Kaito feels about the concept of rivals, and it makes me so frustrated that the only time the game does touch on this topic to any extent is unnecessarily focused on obligatory romance and not really about his issues at all.

#anyway thanks for answering my ask i really loved your commentary it really made me think about why i liked kaitos arc so much

You’re welcome; I’m glad you enjoyed the commentary! Again, I am so happy I could help people who already liked Kaito realise even more of how great he is. :3