#its just baiken related

[bloodykora]

Kora: Baiken, I have some serious news.

Baiken: Hmm?

Kora: They diagnosed me. As... your wife.

Baiken: Well, hold on now.

Kora: Yeah they said its terminal with no cure and you have to stay with me fore-

Baiken: Who the hell is they? Was it Testament?

[broken-clover]

I like thinking about crossovers with guilty gear and samurai shodown because of baiken's dlc status in the latter but whenever I come back to the concept it ends up making me profoundly sad and it's basically always for one of two reasons

One is the fact that from the get-go, Samsho in part shows off its archaic setting by having a character, Ukyo, that's contracted tuberculosis, in a setting where it's more or less a guaranteed death sentence. Of course his repeated presence as a playable character means he has a bit of plot immunity and has had at least one death retconned, but still, a lot of his character relates to the fact that he's a terminally ill man who's deeply suffering from something that will, inevitably, kill him. Guilty Gear, being a futuristic setting with magic means that even if conventional treatments were potentially wiped out, TB very likely is something that's relatively trivial to cure. And I could see that being either a happy-sad or just a sad thing whether or not it's something that Baiken would be capable of fixing.

And one is the fact that, suddenly, Baiken is home. It's not the place she grew up in, she's a couple of centuries early, but the grass and dirt and rock beneath her boots belong to a place that, in her world, was literally blasted out of existence. Even if it isn't the same people and exact places she lost, she suddenly sees her own culture alive and thriving. Everything in her world that was destroyed or died off or banned is just...right there.

But at the same time, what does that mean for her sense of vengeance? The place she's mourned for decades and fashioned into a deep well of fury and will to survive is fine. It's all been undone. Even if she may or may not have come to terms with the loss, suddenly the thing you've devoted so much of your life to, used to power your will to go on, and it meant nothing. And in having her old existence handed to her on a platter, would she even fit into it anymore? Baiken the person, who she exists as now, owes so much of that to rising from the ashes of her homeland. She isn't the happy, innocent little girl she was when her home was still standing. Adult Baiken has only ever had a burnt-out husk of a home. How do you just suddenly pretend everything is fine when everything you've done has suddenly been made completely pointless?

[broken-clover]

maybe its my bias talking but im certain Anji is like the one person on earth aside from Sol that can piss Asuka off. Like he knows just enough about the guy to really get under his skin, and has spent enough time with him while he was still That Man to really know how to push his buttons. Asuka is the same, he KNOWS Anji in a way not even Baiken does. I keep thinking of them fucking each other up because Sol and Asuka patched things up but SOMEONE needs to punch asuka in the face

I think it would be fascinating to see Asuka pissed off. And, in a related note, I feel the same about the idea of him getting physically dirty. Here we have character whose entire presence has to do with being physically and psychologically removed from the series' main events, so he has the luxury of calm. Sure, at times he gets harried or flustered, but never full-on loses his temper or properly lashes out. I think it could make for an interesting grounding moment to see someone who's spent a century keeping to himself and putting on a facade of rationality and logic and superiority suddenly be unable to contend with something as basic as his own emotions when the right buttons get pushed by someone who actually knows how to prod them.