#like... if they could afford to give Yoosung a haircut and/or his natural hair colour back

[haine-kleine]

as someone who has been playing mysme since the release and developed a hyperfixation as soon as i first laid eyes on the edgy mysterious twink, i just want to say how annoying i find the soft retcon of Saeran's redesign.

the deal with his eye colour and hair colour has never been explained throughout the 9 years of the game's existence so the fandom developed their own crazy theories about the elixir genetically changing his appearance, which i was sure was fanon bullshit up until the Ray After Ending release.

and you know what, okay, him still looking like Ray/Unknown/Evil!Saeran in the AE might be chalked down to very little time passing since he was rescued from the cult. what i find more annoying is the new official arts consistently depicting him with the white hair in what is clearly intended as post-canon content. do they really think we won't be able to tell the twins apart if they both had red hair???

just look at the 707 AE Saeran. what a beautiful little tomato. the red hair is such a clear and natural sign of him accepting both himself and Saeyoung and healing from the years of brainwashing and hatred.

does the red colour clash with his pale skin? maybe, a little. but should you really pick aesthetics over essence when you are writing a story about IDENTICAL TWINS? a story where you have already defined the white haired, ghostly look as an unhealthy state of the character whose happy ending is about accepting his past and reuniting with his twin brother, whom he had been brainwashed to hate by the designated Evil Manipulating Story Villain?

in the originally released After Story for Saeran, following 707's route good ending, he looks like a washed out, unhealthily pale copy of Saeyoung. he is meant to look a little off-putting, because that's the literal visual depiction of his physical and mental state, which was amazing writing!

this is the healthy, default state of both characters, because they are identical twins. it was their separation that had started the tragic backstory for both Saeran and 707. on top of lying to the boys and forcibly separating them for no real reason other than Evulz™, Rika had altered Saeran's physical appearance, erasing all physical likeness to Saeyoung that she could. it doesn't really matter whether she had convinced Saeran that it would be safer for him to look different, if she had asked him to dye his hair and start wearing colored contacts or if she had painstakingly developed a chemical formula that would permanently change his eye and hair colour, as ridiculous as that particular theory is, the point is that looking the way Unknown does would certainly be associated by Saeran as a very dark place in his life. that would be the time when he had less agency over himself than he ever did, and we are talking about a person who was often physically restricted, starved and deprived of water by their primary caretaker since they were a child. other than MC in the Ray route, Saeyoung would be the only person who had ever cared about him since he was born, and Rika manipulating him into despising his brother, from Saeran's point of view after he learns the truth and has the time and safe space to self-reflect would be especially cruel. Saeran is naturally a very affectionate and loyal to a fault person, who is extremely insecure and believes he doesn't have anything else to offer to the person he cares about other than his loyalty.

for this reason, i firmly believe that whatever is the actual reason behind his hair and eye colour, Saeran absolutely would dye his hair red if anything just to show Saeyoung physical evidence of his forgiveness. my headcanon is that even if his hair does keep naturally growing out white, he would dye it for the rest of his life, so that his past as Rika's brainwashed lapdog can be left behind him, instead of buried in the nearest mirror.

for his eye colour situation, i still don't believe the colour was permanently changed, unless Rika was fucked up enough to make him go through a surgery treatment for that, but this is an angsty scenario for another day. my interpretation is that both twins have horrible eyesight from staring into phone and computer screens for 75% of their waking time, but unlike Saeyoung who had bitten the bullet and accepted he is blind without having glasses on, Saeran had started wearing colored contacts with prescription. considering this change had happened while under Rika's care, it's pretty obvious she would be the one to buy him the contacts, so the 'mint eye' fits the whole idea. this leaves several new points for interpretation though. first, Rika is the one who taught both twins to hack, so i am choosing to believe miss girl also has terrible eyesight but wears eye contacts because she is obsessed with always looking her absolute best and avoids touching glasses for this reason. Saeyoung's glasses being a fashion statement (as goofy as they may be) aside, knowing how awful Saeran was at taking care of himself while living in the cult, i am absolutely sure the 'damn bitch you live like this?' boy may have kept forgetting to take his contacts out before sleep but would keep pushing against the irritation and eye tiredness, because it would never occur to him to just. buy a pair of glasses.

which is how we end up with this scenario.

knowing the Choi twins' particular brand of soap opera drama, the whole thing would boil down to a misunderstanding. Saeran, who had never been taught actual self-care skills because all of his caretakers were either intent on murdering him, never learned these skills themselves, or some combination of both, would just keep wearing his old colored contacts even past the expiration date, because there is no Rika to order him a new pair and because it never occurs to him that his bad eyesight can be helped with clear contacts or a pair of glasses. Saeyoung, who is still a dedicated expert at self-loathing, would interpret Saeran's continued use of the mint colored contacts as yet another way to show him how much he hates him, refusing to share an eye colour with his twin unless he is asleep. the misunderstanding would continue on and on without either mentioning anything until Saeran's eyes are going red and he can't blink without crying so Saeyoung rushes him to an ophthalmologist and then MC bonks both of them over the head for their shared refusal to mention anything.

on a less related note but since i am writing a whole essay bitching about character design, let me once again mention Ray's route redesign. what was even the reason oh my god. he was already perfectly fine as Unknown. he is still Saeyoung's identical twin, why give him the huge moe anime girl eyes? i see the dedication to woobifying him as much as possible, but he was already Mr Woobie Worldwide as kid!Saeran, like??

look at this absolute ray of sunshine (ha). i promise we won't care for him any less if his eyes aren't twice are huge as his tsundere twin brother.

look at these pictures and tell me they didn't give my poor man a whole cosmetic surgery while preparing him for the Ray route. the game was never famous for their consistent art style, but at the very least, looking at the old art, you could tell the two characters were clearly intended as identical twins, when put side by side. from the Ray route onwards, Saeran is consistently depicted as Saeyoung's uwu bug eyed cutie little bwother :3

the one thing i do like about the chronological progression of his character design is the pipeline from Ray/Evil!Saeran to Unknown. since more time has passed in the main route, there are telling signs that Rika is not as controlling of Saeran as she was two years ago. this is starkly highlighted by her abandoning him/forcing him out of the cult in one of Yoosung's bad endings, but also pretty prominent in his physical appearance. Ray still believed himself to be ugly, but he was putting consistent effort into his appearance, in both identities. his hair is perfectly bleached and brushed, he is wearing those formal attires, even the Saeran identity is running around spreading mayhem in a perfectly tailored and ironed black suit.

two years later, Saeran is going on his infiltration missions in a leather jacket cuntily leaning off his tattooed shoulder (which i am 85% sure was his own idea that Rika wasn't involved in) with studded bracelets and leather chokers. knowing what we know of Rika, it's very hard for me to imagine her approving of this kind of style lmao. his hair is also in a much worse condition, having not seen brush in ages and not even wild in the style Ray route!Saeran's was or Saeyoung's naturally is, slightly longer, visibly damaged. the bleach job is a mess, leaving him with the famous pink tips that Ray was clearly missing.

the one thing i hate however is that in V's after ending, where he supposedly rescues Saeran and miraculously takes such a good care of him that it works better than therapy... his hair is still fucking white. this version of Saeran wanted to reunite with his brother more than any others did, and had more time to himself after being rescued from Mint Eye, and for some reason he or V just kept bleaching his hair? i can hear the choir of 'it's not that deep', but personally? yes, it is that deep. all of the non-Mint Eye endings for Saeran are inherently bound to be about change, and for a sweet uwu twin who is very explicitly transformed by their tragic backstory narrative, in a visual novel game i can't believe we only have two (2) cgs of adult Saeran with his natural hair colour, one of which doesn't even come from the in-game content.

Cheritz please release my boy from the contract forbidding him to change his appearance ever since he got his own route.

In conclusion, red haired!golden eyed!Saeran deserves rights and to be seen more