#manaka iwai

[sinlizards]

Eitoku High, 1999

[crocrubies]

yuri so good they had to make one of them haunt the narrative

[dragonymango]

the symmetry of it all

[bennflynt]

something in the moon

[hirudinyuta]

magma doodle of manaka I did with a mouse between class breaks

[scientist-of-love]

Learning to dance

[datomis]

i may be tumblr user datomis but actually hitomana is so important to me

yeah i made up that shipname with no further thought i havent seen anyone else care about them so does it matter

and in the words of my dear twin, "hitomanapower"

but anyways i guess this is less ship and more one sided crush because obviously but yeah thumbs up emoji

[alto-tenure]

the tragedy that fucks me up the most about aitsf is and always be manaka's. she was nineteen!! she wasn't even out of her teens yet!! he was 42. and who knows how long they knew each other before they were in a relationship. and she died still believing in him.

[theriveroflight]

A story about growth. Wherein Iris's eighteenth birthday comes with a much less pleasant surprise, and Manaka finally confronts what she went through. Rated M, please read the content warnings before proceeding. This one gets heavy.

[niginithechaoticbicon]

People who are the victim of the first cyclops serial killings

[luxraydyne]

I am very invested in the idea of an eitoku high era prequel (<- biggest manaka fan I know) and am interested to know your ideas for it? Putting a question mark at the end of that sounds weird but. This is an ask I guess

me 'n anon right now

tbh i have less than ideas and more like a big globule of vaguely channeled feelings knocking around in my brain lmao. from what little we see of her manaka seems like such a charming, bright, optimistic young woman, and with the trio having such different backgrounds and approaches to their lives i so want to see the three of them in action and what experiences caused them to form such a powerful bond such that we see even just in the awful horrible (albeit wonderfully done) snippet we get in aitsf. like hitomi and renju's conversation about baby iris and 'a war is about to begin between you and the baby' is hilarious and sweet in a way that is so indicative of their dynamic i want to see all three putting their heads together over something. i guess something somewhere between aitsf's real-world investigation sequences, a very pared back persona 4, maybe a dash of ace attorney or even older point-and-click mystery-adventure type games, a serious, but very local (like, within the school sort of local), contained sort of plot they bring into their personal life out of a combined sense of curiosity, naivete, and frustration at a lack of agency in their own lives, that steadily spirals out of their control in some way without becoming, yknow, a literal apocalypse level disaster. branching end pathways could be tricky, for one, knowing from the jump there is one precise complicated scenario we have to end up with in at least one "canon", and for two, also having to weave in throughout some pretty major side-happenings with renju's entrapment by the kumakuras, hitomi as an only child dealing with the sudden death of her parents, manaka meeting so sejima and becoming his "mistress", however that happened (this is reminding me more and more of a more mature but equally nutty persona plot actually, minus the demon fighting, although that could also be a fun romp, and that draws me back to my psyncer!hitomi/renju revenge au. anyway.) like for a writer i am in fact shit at plotting out anything lol.

i suppose as a footnote to all this i should add that a dedicated prequel letting us see more of them would probably remove much of the vague, ghost-like presence that manaka and renju both have in aitsf, retroactively (retroactively?? would that be right??? for something made after but set before?? idk) making aitsf less interesting. but part of what makes characters like those two fun is the almost-not-quite-futile effort trying to reconstruct a sense of a whole complex living person out of the bitty unstable artifacts they left, allowing them to persist beyond death and intrude on the present in this fragile, timeless state (and that's real haunting the narrative baybeeee), which is kind of what we're doing with this exercise, dressed up as "imagining the fake eitoku gang prequel which would be way too grounded and non-meta, non-sci-fi to ever actually exist anyway"

[sinlizards]

two really normal and well adjusted people who aren't hiding anything at all

[crocrubies]

a mother's embrace

[3scythes]

Rant re: Renju & Hitomi’s secret

CAUTION: SPOILERS FOR AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES AHEAD

at like 1:30 in the afternoon yesterday I was so fucked up about Manaka being in the forklift for 18 years that I had to send my brother (who played the game before me) a rant about it, so now you all get to see my thoughts because I finished the game last night and I’m still mad about this. Stories like this so often ignore the reality of the human psyche and it makes me angry.

[lattedecoffee]

Also me with certain ships, like sometimes I want a character to have more than one SO but sometimes I like to explore multiple separate ships for one character.

(I maxed out on tags rip)

want to be clear that if i ever talk about a headcanon and then later discuss a headcanon that is directly contradictory to the first one, that’s because headcanons exist in a quantum state where they are all simultaneously true and not true up until the point where i discuss it in detail, in which case that is the one that is true in that instance. schroedinger’s headcanons

[jojea]

characters/pairs and songs under the cut 🤙🏽

Kaname Date: Hourglass by Set It Off & Dirty Mind by 3OH!3

Aiba: I Am Not A Robot by MARINA

Mizuki Okiura: A Better Son/Daughter by Rilo Kiley

Iris Sagan: U by millennium parade

Ota Matsushita: Out Of My League by Stephen Speaks

Hitomi Sagan: In My Daughter’s Eyes by Martina McBride

Mayumi Matsushita: Homesick by Dua Lipa

Shizue Kuranushi (Boss): Woman by Doja Cat

Futa Amanoma (Pewter): Words Fail by Ben Platt

Hayato Yagyu (Falco): The Grey by Icon For Hire

Saito Sejima: devil may care by fae

So Sejima: Karma by MARINA

Moma Kumakura: My Family by Migos, KAROL G, Snoop Dogg, & Rock Mafia

Rohan Kumakura: Bury Me by Huxlxy

Shoko Nadami: Self-fulfilling Prophecy by Maria Mena

Renju Okiura: Unholy by Sam Smith

Manaka Iwai: My Immortal by Evanescence

Mama: I Like Boys by Todrick Hall

Ritsuko Enshu: Coconuts by Kim Petras

Araya Kagami: That’s Not My Name by The Ting Tings

Date & Mizuki: Neptune by Sleeping At Last

Date & Aiba: Whenever Wherever by Shakira

Falco & Iris: Suddenly by Hugh Jackman

Hitomi & Iris / Mayumi & Ota: Mother by Voices From Mars

Mizuki & Shoko & Renju: Older by Sasha Alex Sloan

Boss & Date: Woah by Jonny Glenn, Ally Hills

Boss & Hayato: Again by Flyleaf

Boss & Date & Pewter: Drunk With My Friends by Ashnikko

Date & Saito: Replay by Lady Gaga

Falco/Hitomi: Queen of the Night by Hey Violet

Renju/Pewter: Lover, Please Stay by Nothing But Thieves

Shoko/Renju: Where I Come From by Maria Mena

Hitomi/Manaka: Six Feet Under by aeseaes

Hitomi & Renju & Manaka: ilomilo by Billie Eilish