#oh... the things they could do together
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Being someone who read Under The Red Hood and came out with the firm belief that, for Jason, it's not about killing Joker, it's about Jason wanting proof Batman would choose him over the Joker (bc shelia chose the joker). Makes seeing any other media where it's all about just wanting the Joker dead is a teeny bit frustrating. to be honest
Jason could've killed the Joker himself, really, really easily. Jason kidnaps the Joker before the confrontation. I can't open my comic for a reference right now, but it felt like he had the Joker for quite a bit before the confrontation. He had him. He beat him up with a crowbar. He had every single opportunity to kill the Joker himself, but he didn't because that wasn't his goal. Make no mistake, he did plan for the Joker to be dead by the end of it, but do you see what im trying to say here
Edit: If I knew this post was gonna get 1000+ notes I would've tried to word it better or something, this was a rant I made on the way to the grocery store 😭
It's not about making Batman kill either. When Batman says he won't kill, Jason adjusts and goes, 'Let ME kill the Joker or kill me to stop me' instead. The test is all about Batman choosing him. The whole final confrontation is Jason's first death again. The parent, The Joker, and the explosives. It even ends with Jason unable to move as a bomb goes off right next to him again because the parent didn't choose Jason. And instead tried finding an option that'd benefit them and (consequencely) letting the Joker walk, again, lol, lmao <-in agony
#the final confrontation was basically his first death again#and YES he Does want the Joker dead#and it would've been really really nice if Batman was the one who did it#but when batman made it clear he wouldn't kill the joker. Jason easily switched to saying “LET me kill the joker” to accommodate#because he Wanted batman to pass his test#he gave a test to dick too. and technically tim but it wasnt the family test it was a different one so it doesnt rly count#AFTER utrh and the reveal and the batarang you can go hog wild about it. i care less about it then#granted i do believe they make jason more scared of the joker after it at some point#i guess because hes a bit too willing to kill the joker and ive heard jason wasnt meant to live after utrh#my watsonian explain for that is he was so fixated on his plan he cpuld override his fear. or maybe the pit. either work#i prefer the fixation bc i dont like the explanation that the pit was the /only/ reason he could get all plan together and done#BUT THATS UNRELATED!!!#dc stop putting the joker in jason stories im begging you please please please. lock him in a vault for the next 20 years or something#it Cpuld be good and i understand. but also. after so long of people that dont know or go for jasons need for family and parents#that love him and he can trust#the joker starts to feel like?? hm. words. a cop out? oh haha its that guy that killed him woagh hes here#i bet you dont even know that jaybin got beat until unconsciousness by an angry mob#while asking batman to save him only for batman to have to walk away#anwya. where was i going with this#i think i got off topic#jason todd#dc comics#batman#ADDED AN EDIT. SORRY. this post has been haunting me it keeps me awake. what if people misunderstand#they cant read my tags where i ramble more depth. thisbis the only option#EDIT EDIT: hiii#removed the sentence abt jason having the joker for several days bc i misremembered some things#go read its-your-mind 's addition instead also#ok no more i wont edit this post anymore i promise
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this year my challenge for everyone is to unlearn the association between love and morality. love is not something that is inherently morally good, and the absence of love is not something that is inherently bad. sex without love isn't morally bankrupt, it's just an action. people without love aren't less kind or less good, they're just people. when we can get past this false (and often unnoticed) dichotomy of good love/evil lovelessness then i think we are going to be able to take leaps and bounds in sex positivity, aro advocacy, certain discussions of mental health...
#and also. not the direct focus. but love doesn't make things good. you can be in love and do terrible terrible things.#people do bad things in the name of love and in despite of love all the time.#but!! imagine a world where people could exist as people and not be demonized.#sex positivity means being cool about All sex. reexamine your internal systems of moral judgement.#this goes for sex workers. for aroallo people. especially aroallo men. for aro people in general who might enjoy sex.#and frankly i think it can easily bleed into discussions about mental health disorders around 'not feeling' certain things#especially demonizing ppl who don't feel as much empathy. i think there's definitely a correlation between that and the emphasis on love.#our support needs to go out to Everybody and i think these things are all structured together in one way or another!!#it might not be immediately obvious but when i tell you it all leads back to amatonormativity..... little bit wild.... large bit wild....#anyway. horror movie psychopath 'oh he can't feel emotions or love' damn alright. well. let's take a closer look at that.#silly that there's an association between lack of love and Murdering. feel like that might affect some stuff.#love is just an emotion/a feeling it doesn't mean anything about you one way or another#same with empathy. you can feel it all you want but it doesn't inherently change the actions you choose to take#anyway. thesis statement. there is a socially constructed link between love and morality. unlearn that.#kiss kiss (<— lovelessly)#aromantic#aromanticism#arospec#talking#aroace#aspec#sex positivity
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going through some old logs, and I need you to understand just how truly unhinged early 2010s RP omegle was.
genuinely you could stay on there for hours with just one person, hashing out complex traumatic backstories, drawn-out love confessions, detailed action scenes...collaboratively describing graphic violence, past abuse, comfort, hurt/comfort, hurt/no comfort, any number of sex acts...and then one of you would be like, "oh haha it's 2AM! I have to sleep :(" and the other person would say, "omg saaaame. :( gnight!!!" and then you'd exit the chat and never speak to each other again, and this was. fine.
you could just spend an entire evening shoving your wretched, bleeding soul into a chat log with someone you'd never meet or learn the name of, achieve some form of emotional catharsis, and then go about your day or night like this was an average way to spend your time.
I'm really normal about this, actually
#sbs rambles#omegle#it wasn't always serious ofc. there was a lot of lighthearded silliness#but I usually went in for the darker sadder stuff that built up to a happy ending#there's really a special form of intimacy when you and an internet stranger are each controlling a fictional character#and describing them doing things like bandaging each other's wounds#checking each other for bruises. asking them to talk about what they've been through. great stuff!#I hope there are still places where people do stuff like this. like I know there are forums and servers for this but that's not the same.#and I mean. I keep thinking ''there must be other places like this!'' but then I remember the goodbye message when omegle shut down#and...I dunno. the internet is different now#we don't live in that world anymore#anyway if you ever RP'd sherlock stuff on omegle you might have talked to me. :) we might have written something together#and despite it being superwholock-era fandom “cringe”#I'm proud of that#that was a really important part of my life#it was fun :) though I definitely had issues I wasn't willing to confront yet lmao#and I wish I had saved more of the logs :/#oh! I also liked the moments where you'd have to take a break#like you could be right in the middle of something intense and then the other person would be like#(brb I have to finish making dinner for my husband) and you'd say (sure!)#and then 20mins later you'd start up again where you left off
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Sleepover with two puny mortals that you're in love with (and everything can go right).
Lowkey based on a fanfic I was writing, but as usual I haven't the confidence to post it! Yeah~
Had this in the drafts for months,,,, figured I'd finish it up now so it's done. I like to kinda have some Finished art on the page hahahaha
#me when I'm unable to do streaming and music bc of my flu so I have time to focus on art instead#I recommend having multiple hobbies yall#hobbies you can do in different situations I mean#anyway this fic was so cute I'm ngl#it was meant to be timkon but then Bern materialised and had some extremely sweet moments with Kon and then ended up with the three of them#getting together casually and feeling it out as a three and then BOOM they're all in love#also Tim quit being a field vigilante and became a new comms guy (without alfred Barbara was rly just In A Situation)#and I fixed a few patches in the insane working conditions of the Wayne family business#basically it was extremely self indulgent because Tim's cool and chill vibe taking over WE and also performing a coup so Batman could retir#resulted in the family just kind of chilling out#and so he became free to explore romance and his Tim life (like he wants to do!)#bat workers rights!#art#digital art#fanart#screentone#manga style#illustrationish#tim drake#tim drake wayne#red robin dc#kon el#conner kent#superboy#bernard dowd#timkon#timbern#konbern#timbernkon#oh Tim's new vigilante name was Stalker (I'm not good at naming things) but the fam tends to refer to him as Chat (bc funni)
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when your main characters start dating after years of writing so they finally get to be like this
#rare WIP preview from me#this is in like. 10 episodes. lmfao#its been really hard working this far ahead#my editor isnt giving me any feedback and my friends are very busy so it's felt quite lonely#which is fine! for my friends I mean. but its my editors job to give me feedback...#but the webtoon editors are extremely extremely extremely overworked and my series is set to end so I understand its low priority#its not her fault its webtoons fault. however. its still demotivating...#oh well l m a o#I should be much further ahead ngl LMFAO I want like 12 done but I come back in 2 weeks.#we'll see#when I get really stressed out I go full gamer mode#and usually I'll sink like 60 hours (like 5 days) into a game and then I'm good and move on#but this recent game that grabbed me is. its too much actually#bit uncontrollable ngl I think its an ADHD thing I mostly have just quit playing videogames at all#cause its like yeah being stressed cause theres too much work to do is not going to be helped by losing a week and a half to a game...#and yet.#anyways the game is satisfactory#my friend bought it for me and we've been playing together#and our shared file has. 100 hours on it. and we still havent beaten the game#we're close to beating it and it's not like we're rushing or anything#cause its fun to fuck around and zap eachother or whatever#but it's got me doing math. the exact kind of math I love to do. optimization#and its reminding me yeah in another life id have been an engineer#I'm glad I'm an artist but its always weird like yeah this is easily a path I could have gone down#'artists hate math' speak for yourself doing math calms me down! I love math!#I love math and I love business. I'm almost the perfect artist but I hate advertising so. we can't have it all#anyways theyre so fucking cute its sickening. I love them so much. I could cry#WIP#lineart#time and time again
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THIS THING IS SCUUUFFED AS HELL & ITS ALSO THE BEST THING I HAVE ANIMATED THUS FAR. IM SO IN LOVE WITH EMIZEL. JUST WISH I GAVE HIM MORE STUPID TATTOOS. NEXT TIME THO. NEXT TIME. I ALSO LOVE VEX&VIV SOOOO MUCH. charlies flavor of Deranged is my FAVORITE!!
#cw gore#jrwi fanart#THE SQUIRMING IMAGE#jrwi suckening#jrwi suckening spoilers#ACTULY FINISHED THIS A WHILE AGO. kept going back n forth between trying to work on it more or call it done#in the end i chose DONE!! i worked on this for a full day n a half. NO idea what possesed me but it is NOT happenin again anytime soon#i shall do better NEXT TIME!! in the meantime tho OH MY GOOOOOD WHO WANTS TO SCREAM ABT THE SUCKENING WITH ME#THE FUCKINNN THE FUCKIN THING WITH VEX N VIV BEING THE SHADOW LEADERS OF THE FANGS/DEMONS#OH MMYY GOOOODDD THATS THEIR LIL MEAT GENERATOR... THTS SO FUCKED UP AND COOL UUUGHHH I LOVE THEM...#THEIR FLAVORE IS SO WONDERFUL. I LOOOVE HOW SILLY THEY ARE. MAKING PUNS WHILE PULLIN A SCREAMING VICTIM APART#vex n his lil fashiony art workshop and viv n her sterile n clean doctors office#i bet she doesnt even HAVE a medical liscense. it would be funny if vex did tho. could u imagine#they main MEDIC in tf2 together. viv is the battlemedic while vex only pocket medics for her. COULD U IMAGINE#guh i could go on abt these two forever n ever n ever i LOVE THEMM i gotta draw em more....#OH ALSO before i run outa room. i should say. i took inspiration from a tf2 animation called POOTIS ENGAGED#the animator. Ceno0. uses black bars in the action sequences in SUCH A COOL WAYYY everytime i watch that video i feel inspired#oneday ill make more complex fight scenes... one day....#in the meantime UGHHH I LOVE THE SUCKENING SO MUUUCH CAN I JUST FUCKIN SAAAYY THAT I THINK EMIZEL IS A SMART COOKIE!!#THESE PPL FUCKING FEAR HIM NOW!!! 'SHAMIA SHAMI' IS NOW THEIR MORTAL ENEMY!! POWERFUL ILLUSIONIST. CANT DIE.#THAT PART AT THE END THERE WHERE HE FUCKIN. KILLS HIMSELF INFRONTA THEM. THATS SO AWESOME. THATS SO METAL. AND THEN HE COMES BACK!!#I WATCHED EP 7 ASWELL BUT I WONT SPOIL IT HERE. BUT OMYGOD. EMIZEL IS SO COOL AND CAPABLE N SMART N FUNNY N UGHHHHHH I LOVE HIMMMMM#OKAY THATS MY RAMBLE FOR THE DAY THANKYOU FOR READING. I READ ALL TAGS SO YOU SHOULD RAMBLE TOO. IF YOU WANT. IF YOU CAN.
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One of the fun things about shipping Haladriel and about Galadriel's story in Rings of Power, for me, is that we know exactly where this is going to end up. And I wanted to babble for a bit about where that place is because I have seen so many people view it as "she is retired to some woods to be a passive wife-and-mother who can do magic but in a mystical New Age-y way", and: no! No.
So a quick overview of where she will end up by LOTR:
Very much not removed from the war against Sauron.
She is constantly mind-battling against Sauron: One of the lines that inspired McKay and Payne's whole show was her talking about this: "I say to you, Frodo, that even as I speak to you, I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind, or all of his mind that concerns the Elves. And he gropes ever to see me and my thought." In one of the versions of the Annatar story in Unfinished Tales, Sauron immediately realises she will be his 'chief adversary', and has apparently not changed that assessment 3500 years later.
She co-ordinates joint efforts against Sauron: The White Council that Elrond talks about in LOTR, the combined force of Ring-bearers, wizards and elf-lords that first drives Sauron out of Dol Guldur - she's not just on that, she founded it.
She gets Gandalf back after Moria and the Balrog: Galadriel learns what's happened to Gandalf from the Fellowship when they arrive in Lothlórien. The the Fellowship are sad; the elves of Lothlórien mourn; Celeborn loses it a bit and says Gandalf 'fell into folly'; but Galadriel sends Gwaihir the eagle to get him, returns him to health, updates him on the situation with Boromir, gives him some messages to take to the others, and sends him back on his way.
She is possibly in Lothlórien because of its position of strategic importance: from Unfinished Tales here, she 'saw that Lórien would be a stronghold and point of power to prevent the Shadow from crossing the Anduin in the war that must inevitably come' and that's why she and Celeborn go there. (There are other versions as with almost everything else in Tolkien, but this is one of them.) She's not there to hide away from Events.
2. Calmer than in TROP, but not all-wise and all-sweet and still pretty scary.
She is still tempted by power and world domination: "I do not deny that my heart has greatly desired to ask what you offer [...] In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the morning and the night!"
And, she doesn't just turn down the One Ring because it's abstractly eeeevil. She turns it down because she knows what she, specifically, would do with it. Sam sees a vision of the Shire, and tells her "I wish you'd take his Ring. You'd put things to rights. You'd stop them digging up the Gaffer and turning him adrift. You'd make some folk pay for their dirty work," to which she says that yes, she would: "That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas! We will not speak more of it."
And saying she wants to rule the world here is not me joking about! This is Tolkien describing that moment in LOTR:
It was not until two long ages more had passed, when at last all that she had desired in her youth came to her hand, the Ring of Power and the dominion of Middle-earth of which she had dreamed, that her wisdom was full-grown and she rejected it
People are scared of her: The only scary moment we directly see is the Ring temptation, but she does other unsettling things. When she meets the Fellowship she tests them by reading their minds and offering something they really want to see if it would make them "turn aside from the road and leave the Quest and the war against Sauron to others." (She offers Sam a garden; the One Ring later on tempts him with the same thing.) Even the hobbits are a bit disturbed by this and Boromir, who's already said he doesn't want to go into Lothlórien because people who do that never leave again, absolutely does not trust her.
Éomer, a few chapters later:
'Then there is a Lady in the Golden Wood, as old tales tell!' he said. 'Few escape her nets, they say. These are strange days! But if you have her favour, then you are also net-weavers and sorcerers, maybe.'
She's scary! She's ancient and powerful and people are scared of her.
3. Married, but not in the character-limiting way the nerdbros want it to be and would have you believe it is.
I am not telling anyone they should ship Galadriel/Celeborn or even find it interesting just because I do, but, the angry nerdbros fancasting Celeborn as Henry Cavill and talking about how he'll come back to tame her and tidy her neatly out of the narrative are writing their own little AU headcanons because that is not what's in the text.
She's the more powerful one. Partly because she's one of the 'High Elves' - she's Noldor and has lived in Valinor seen the light of the Trees - which for various reasons about the way Tolkien's elves work just makes her more powerful, partly because she has a Ring of Power and Celeborn doesn't. It's her Mirror; she's the one reading people's minds; she's the one locked in endless mental battles with Sauron; she's the one the Rohirrim (whose lands border Lothlorien's) tell each other scary stories about. Celeborn at no point ever seems to have an issue with this, and calls her his 'treasure'.
They work together. Even in a big-action-sequences sense: after Sauron's defeat, Celeborn 'led the host of Lorien over Anduin in many boats' to Dol Guldur, where Galadriel 'threw down its walls and laid bare its pits'. But the rest of the time, too: she says of him that 'together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat'.
You really get the sense that they have been married for a loooooong time. An actual sequence of events in LOTR, somewhat condensed:
The Fellowship reveal there's a Balrog in Moria;
Celeborn goes "!!!!", complains about dwarves waking it up and says he'd never have let Gimli into Lothlorien if he'd known that;
Galadriel smacks Celeborn down for being rude to their guest;
Celeborn apologises to Gimli;
Galadriel tells the Fellowship that Celeborn is accounted the wisest of elves;
Boromir says something about "old wives' tales";
Celeborn, whose wife is one of the oldest beings in Middle-earth, tells Boromir not to be so dismissive because "old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know";
Galadriel hands Celeborn a drink.
Whatever is going on here is clearly something that works for them, is what I'm saying! And you don't have to find their marriage interesting just because I do, of course; but what it's not is some trad fantasy of domestic subservient-wife anything.
So where her TROP story ends up is ultimately with LOTR Galadriel: powerful, important, tempted to rule the world, a bit calmer than in TROP, a bit happier than in TROP, co-ordinating big strategic efforts in the war, married to someone who's got her back and adores her and they fall out a bit sometimes but generally work pretty well together, and still having Sauron constantly trying to get into her head. I am fine with this! I am more than fine with this.
#rings of power#galadriel#haladriel#celeborn#multishipper rights#'but I don't like Celeborn' oh what a shame he always said such nice things about you#I do not need characters in a ship to be canonically married and walk off into the sunset together#tbh I do not even need the characters in a ship to have ever met#but a ship where they end up locked in endless mind-battles and she's still tempted by what he offered her 3000 years later - so good!#genuinely find it baffling that anyone would think ANYthing season 2 of TROP could do would kill off a ship that we know ends up here#eyeofacat meta
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Double Indemnity, Veritas Ratio and Aventurine
This was originally a part of my compilation post as a short analysis on the Double Indemnity references, linking to this great thread by Manya on Twitter. However, I've recently watched the movie and found that the parallels run much deeper than just the mission name and the light cone itself, plus as the short synopsis I've read online. Since there isn't really an in-depth attempt at an analysis on the film in relation to the way Aventurine and Ratio present themselves throughout Penacony, I thought I'd take a stab at doing just that. I will also be bringing up things from Manya's thread as well as another thread that has some extra points.
Disclaimer that I... don't do analyses very often. Or write, in general — I'm someone who likes to illustrate their thoughts (in the artistic sense) more than write. There's just something about these two that makes me want to rip into them so badly, so here we are. If there's anything you'd like to add or correct me on, feel free to let me know in the replies or reblogs, or asks. This ended up being a rather extensive deep dive into the movie and its influences on the pairing, so please keep that in mind when pressing Read More.
There are two distinct layers on display in Ratio and Aventurine's relationship throughout Penacony, which are references to the two most important relationships in the movie — where they act like they hate/don’t know each other, and where they trust each other.
SPOILER WARNING for the entire movie, by the way. You can watch the film for free here on archive.org, as well as follow along with the screenplay here. I will also be taking dialogue and such from the screenplay, and cite quotes from the original novel in its own dedicated section. SPOILER WARNING for the Cat Among Pigeons Trailblaze mission, as well.
CONTENT WARNING FOR MENTIONS OF SUICIDE. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
To start, Double Indemnity (1944) is a film noir by Billy Wilder (and co-written by Raymond Chandler) based on the novel of the same name by James M. Cain (1927). There are stark differences between the movie adaptation and the original novel which I will get into later on in this post, albeit in a smaller section, as this analysis is mainly focused on the movie adaptation. I will talk about the basics (summaries for the movie and the game, specifically the Penacony mission in tandem with Ratio and Aventurine) before diving into the character and scene parallels, among other things.
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[THE NAME]
The term "double indemnity" is a clause in which if there’s a case of accidental death of a statistically rare variety, the insurance company has to pay out multiple of the original amount. This excludes deaths by murder, suicide, gross negligence, and natural causes.
The part of the mission in Cat Among Pigeons where Ratio and Aventurine meet with Sunday is named after the movie. And before we get further into things, let's get this part out of the way: The Chinese name used in the mission is the CN title of the movie, so there's no liberties taken with the localization — this makes it clear that it’s a nod to the movie and not localization doing its own thing like with the mission name for Heaven Is A Place On Earth (EN) / This Side of Paradise (人间天堂) (CN).
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[SUMMARY OF THE 1944 MOVIE]
Here I summarised the important parts that will eventually be relevant in the analysis related to the game.
Insurance salesman Walter Neff, wounded from a gunshot, enters his office and confesses his crime on a dictaphone to his boss Barton Keyes, the claims manager. Much earlier, he had met Phyllis Dietrichson, the wife of Mr. Dietrichson and former nurse. Neff had initially wanted to meet Mr. Dietrichson because of car insurance. Phyllis claims her husband is mean to her and that his life insurance goes to his daughter Lola. With Neff seduced by Phyllis, they eventually brew up a scheme to murder Mr. Dietrichson in such a way that they activate the "double indemnity" clause, and the plan goes off almost perfectly. Initially, the death is labeled a suicide by the president of the company, Norton.
Keyes finds the whole situation suspicious, and starts to suspect Phyllis may have had an accomplice. The label on the death goes from accidental, to suicide, to then murder. When it’s ruled that the husband had no idea of the accidental policy, the company refuses to pay. Neff befriends Phyllis’ stepdaughter Lola, and after finding out Phyllis may have played a part in the death of her father’s previous wife, Neff begins to fear for Lola and himself, as the life insurance would go all towards her, not Phyllis.
After the plan begins to unravel as a witness is found, it comes out that Lola’s boyfriend Nino Zachette has been visiting Phyllis every night after the murder. Neff goes to confront Phyllis, intending to kill her. Phyllis has her own plans, and ends up shooting him, but is unable to fire any more shots once she realises she did love him. Neff kills her in two shots. Soon after telling Zachette not to go inside the house, Neff drives to his office to record the confession. When Keyes arrives, Neff tells him he will go to Mexico, but he collapses before he could get out of the building.
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[THE PENACONY MISSION TIMELINE]
I won’t be summarising the entirety of Aventurine and Ratio’s endeavours from the beginning of their relationship to their final conversation in Heaven Is A Place On Earth the same way as I summarised the plot of the movie, so I will instead present a timeline. Bolded parts means they are important and have clear parallels, and texts that are in [brackets] and italics stand for the names of either the light cone, or the mission names.
[Final Victor] Their first meeting. Ratio’s ideals are turned on its head as he finally meets his match.
Several missions happen in-between their first encounter and the Penacony project. They come to grow so close and trusting with each other that they can guess, understand each other’s thoughts, way of thinking and minds even in high stakes missions. Enough to pull off the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Aventurine’s E1) and Stag Hunt Game (Aventurine’s E6) and come out on top.
Aventurine turns towards Ratio for assisting him in the Penacony project. Ratio's involvement in the project is implied to be done without the knowledge of Jade, Topaz, and the IPC in general, as he was only sent to Penacony to represent the Intelligentsia Guild, and the two other Stonehearts never mention Ratio.
Aventurine and Ratio cook up the plan to deceive Sunday before ever setting foot on Penacony. Aventurine does not tell Ratio the entirety of his plan.
Aventurine convinces Topaz and Jade to trust him with their Cornerstones. Aventurine also breaks his own Cornerstone and hides it along with the jade within a bag of gift money.
[The Youth Who Chase Dreams] They enter Penacony in the Reverie Hotel. Aventurine is taken to the side by Sunday and has all his valuables taken, which includes the gift money that contains the broken aventurine stone, the jade, and the case containing the topaz.
Aventurine and Ratio speak in a “private” room about how Aventurine messed up the plan. After faking an argument to the all-seeing eyes of Sunday, Ratio leaves in a huff.
Ratio, wearing his alabaster head, is seen around Golden Hour in the (Dusk) Auction House by March 7th.
[Double Indemnity] Ratio meets up with Sunday and “exposes” Aventurine to him. Sunday buys his “betrayal”, and is now in possession of the topaz and jade. Note that this is in truth Ratio betraying Sunday all along.
Ratio meets up with Aventurine again at the bar. Ratio tells Aventurine Sunday wants to see him again.
They go to Dewlight Pavilion and solve a bunch of puzzles to prove their worth to Sunday.
They meet up with Sunday. Sunday forces Aventurine to tell the truth using his Harmony powers. Ratio cannot watch on. It ends with Aventurine taking the gift money with his Cornerstone.
[Heaven Is A Place On Earth] They are in Golden Hour. Ratio tries to pry Aventurine about his plan, but Aventurine reins him in to stop breaking character. Ratio gives him the Mundanite’s Insight before leaving. This is their final conversation before Aventurine’s grandest death.
Now how exactly does the word “double indemnity” relate to their mission in-game? What is their payout? For the IPC, this would be Penacony itself — Aventurine, as the IPC ambassador, handing in the Jade Cornerstone as well as orchestrating a huge show for everybody to witness his death, means the IPC have a reason to reclaim the former prison frontier. As for Ratio, his payout would be information on Penacony’s Stellaron, although whether or not this was actually something he sought out is debatable. And Aventurine? It’s highly implied that he seeks an audience with Diamond, and breaking the Aventurine Cornerstone is a one way trip to getting into hot water with Diamond. With Aventurine’s self-destructive behaviour, however, it would also make sense to say that death would be his potential payout, had he taken that path in the realm of IX.
Compared to the movie, the timeline happens in reverse and opposite in some aspects. I will get into it later. As for the intended parallels, these are pretty clear and cut:
Veritas Ratio - Walter Neff
Aventurine - Phyllis Dietrichson
Sunday - Mr. Dietrichson
There is one other character who I feel also is represented in Ratio, but I won’t bring them up until later down the line.
For the sake of this analysis, I won’t be exploring Sunday’s parallel to Mr. Dietrichson, as there isn’t much on Dietrichson’s character in the first place in both the movie and the novel. He just kind of exists to be a bastard that is killed off at the halfway point. Plus, the analysis is specifically hyper focused on the other two.
—
[SO, WHAT’S THE PLAN?]
To make things less confusing in the long run whenever I mention the words “scheme” and “plan”, I will be going through the details of Phyllis and Neff’s scheme, and Aventurine and Ratio’s plan respectively. Anything that happens after either pair separate from another isn’t going to be included. Written in a way for the plans to have gone perfectly with no outside problems.
Phyllis and Neff —> Mr. Dietrichson
Goal: Activate the double indemnity clause by killing Mr. Dietrichson and making it look like a freak train accident
Payout: Twice or more of the face value of the life insurance ($100,000)
Main Actor: Walter Neff | Accomplice: Phyllis Dietrichson
During the entire time until the payout, Phyllis and Neff have to make sure to any outsiders that they look like complete strangers instead of lovers in an affair.
Step-by-step:
Neff convinces Mr. Dietrichson to sign the policy with the clause without him suspecting foul play, preferably with a third party to act as an alibi. This is done discreetly, making Mr. Dietrichson not read the policy closely and being told to just sign.
Neff and Phyllis talk to each other about small details through the phone (specified to be never at Phyllis’ own house and never when Neff was in his office) and in the marketplace only, to make their meetings look accidental. They shouldn’t be seen nor tracked together, after all.
Phyllis asks Mr. Dietrichson to take the train. She will be the one driving him to the train station.
On the night of the murder, after making sure his alibi is airtight, Neff sneaks into their residence and hides in their car in the second row seating, behind the front row passenger seat. He wears the same colour of clothes as Mr. Dietrichson.
Phyllis and Mr. Dietrichson get inside the car — Phyllis in the driver’s seat and Mr. Dietrichson in the passenger seat. Phyllis drives. On the way to the train station, she makes a detour into an alley. She honks the horn three times.
After the third honk, Neff breaks Mr. Dietrichson’s neck. The body is then hidden in the second row seating under a rug.
They drive to the train station. Phyllis helps Neff, now posing as Mr. Dietrichson, onto the train. The train leaves the station.
Neff makes it to the observation platform of the parlour car and drops onto the train tracks when nobody else is there.
Phyllis is at the dump beside the tracks. She makes the car blink twice as a signal.
The two drag Mr. Dietrichson’s corpse onto the tracks.
They leave.
When Phyllis eventually gets questioned by the insurance company, she pretends she has no idea what they are talking about and eventually storms off.
Phyllis and Neff continue to lay low until the insurance company pays out.
Profit!
Actual Result: The actual murder plan goes almost smoothly, with a bonus of Mr. Dietrichson having broken a leg. But with him not filing a claim for the broken leg, a witness at the observation platform, and Zachette visiting Phyllis every night after the murder, Keyes works out the murder scheme on his own, but pins the blame on Phyllis and Zachette, not Neff.
Now for Aventurine and Ratio. You can skip this section if you understand how deep their act goes, but to those who need a refresher, here’s a thorough explanation:
Aventurine and Ratio —> Sunday
Goal: Collect the aventurine stone without Sunday knowing, ruin the dream (and create the grandest death)
Payout: Penacony for the IPC, information on the Stellaron for Ratio, a meeting with Diamond / death for Aventurine
Main Actor: Aventurine | Accomplice: Veritas Ratio
From the moment they step onto Penacony, they are under Sunday’s ever present and watchful eyes. “Privacy” is a foreign word to The Family. They have to act like they don’t like each other’s company the entire time and feed Sunday information through indirect means so that the eventual “betrayal” by Ratio seems truthful to Sunday. Despite what it looks like, they are closer than one would ever think, and Ratio would never sell out a person purely for information.
Step-by-step:
After Sunday takes away the bag of gift money and box, Aventurine and Ratio talk in a room in the Reverie Hotel.
Aventurine establishes the Cornerstones’ importance, and how he lost the gift money and the case containing the Cornerstones to Sunday. Ratio turns to leave, saying “some idiot ruined everything”, meaning the Cornerstones were vital to their plan. (Note that Ratio is not wearing his alabaster head while saying it to said “idiot”.)
Aventurine then proceeds to downplay the importance of the Cornerstones, stating they are “nothing more than a few rocks” and “who cares if they are gone”. This lets Sunday know that something suspicious may be going on for him to act like it’s nothing, and the mention of multiple stones, and leaves him to look up what a Cornerstone is to the Ten Stonehearts of the IPC.
Ratio points out his absurd choice of outfit, mentioning the Attini Peacock and their song.
Ratio implies that without the aventurine stone, he is useless to the IPC. He also establishes that Aventurine is from Sigonia(-IV), and points out the mark on his neck. To Sunday, this means that Aventurine is shackled to the IPC, and how Aventurine may possibly go through extreme lengths to get the stone back, because a death sentence always looms above him.
Aventurine claims Ratio had done his homework on his background, which can be taken that this is their very first time working together. (It isn’t, and it only takes one look to know that Aventurine is an Avgin because of his unique eyes, so this comment does not make sense even in a “sincere” way, a running theme for the interaction.)
Ratio mentions how the true goal is to reclaim Penacony for the IPC, establishing their ulterior motive for attending the banquet.
Ratio asks if Aventurine went to pre-school in Sigonia after saying trust was reliant on cooperation. Aventurine mentions how he didn’t go to school and how he doesn’t have any parents. He even brings up how friends are weapons of the Avgins. This tells Sunday that the Avgins supposedly are good at manipulation and potentially sees Ratio possibly betraying Aventurine due to his carelessness with his “friends”. Sunday would also then research about the Avgins in general (and research about Sigonia-IV comes straight from the Intelligentsia Guild.)
Ratio goes to Dewlight Pavilion in Sunday’s Mansion and exposes a part of Aventurine’s “plan”. When being handed the suitcase, Ratio opens it up due to his apparent high status in the IPC. He tells Sunday that the Cornerstone in the suitcase is a topaz, not an aventurine, and that the real aventurine stone is in the bag of gift money. This is a double betrayal ��� on Aventurine (who knows) and Sunday (who doesn’t). Note that while Ratio is not officially an IPC member in name — the Intelligentsia Guild (which is run by the IPC head of the Technology Department Yabuli) frequently collaborates with the IPC. Either Aventurine had given him access to the box, or Ratio’s status in general is ambiguous enough for Sunday not to question him further. He then explains parts of Aventurine’s gamble to Sunday in order to sell the betrayal. Note that Ratio does not ever mention Aventurine’s race to Sunday.
Ratio brings Aventurine to Sunday. Aventurine offers help in the investigation of Robin's death, requesting the gift money and the box in return.
Sunday objects to the trade offer. Aventurine then asks for just the bag. A classic car insurance sales tactic. Sunday then interrogates Aventurine, and uses everything Ratio and Aventurine brought up in the Reverie Hotel conversation and their interactions in the Mansion, as well as aspects that Ratio had brought up to Sunday himself.
Aventurine feigns defeat and ignorance enough so that Sunday willingly lets him go with the gift bag. After all is said and done, Aventurine leaves with the gift money, where the Aventurine Cornerstone is stored all along.
Ratio and Aventurine continue to pretend they dislike each other until they go their separate ways for their respective goals and plans. Aventurine would go on to orchestrate his own demise at the hands of Acheron, and Ratio… lurks in the shadows like the owl he is.
Profit!
Actual Result: The plan goes perfectly, even with minor hiccups like Ratio coming close to breaking character several times and Aventurine being sentenced to execution by Sunday.
This is how Sunday uses the information he gathered against Aventurine:
• Sunday going on a tirade about the way Aventurine dresses and how he’s not one to take risks — Ratio’s comment about Aventurine’s outfit being peacock-esque and how he’s “short of a feather or two”. • “Do you own a Cornerstone?” — Ratio talked about the aventurine stone. • “Did you hand over the Cornerstone to The Family when you entered Penacony?” — Aventurine mentioned the box containing the Cornerstones. • “Does the Cornerstone you handed over to The Family belong to you?” — Aventurine specifically pluralized the word Cornerstone and “a bunch of rocks” when talking to Ratio. • “Is your Cornerstone in this room right now?” — The box in the room supposedly contained Aventurine’s own cornerstone, when Aventurine mentioned multiple stones. • “Are you an Avgin from Sigonia?” —Aventurine mentioned that he’s an Avgin, and Ratio brought up Sigonia. • “Do the Avgins have any ability to read, control, and manipulate one’s own or another’s minds?” — Aventurine’s comment on how friends are weapons, as well as Sunday’s own research on the Avgins, leading him to find out about the negative stereotypes associated with them. • “Do you love your family more than yourself?” — His lost parents. “All the Avgins were killed in a massacre. Am I right?” — Based on Sunday’s research into his background. • “Are you your clan’s sole survivor?” — Same as the last point. “Do you hate and wish to destroy this world with your own hands?” — Ratio mentioned the IPC’s goal to regain Penacony, and Aventurine’s whole shtick is “all or nothing”. • “Can you swear that at this very moment, the aventurine stone is safe and sound in this box?” — Repeat.
As seen here, both duos have convoluted plans that involve the deception of one or more parties while also pretending that the relationship between each other isn’t as close as in reality. Unless you knew both of them personally and their histories, there was no way you could tell that they have something else going on.
On to the next point: Comparing Aventurine and Ratio with Phyllis and Neff.
—
[NEFF & PHYLLIS — RATIO & AVENTURINE]
With the short summaries of the movie and the mission out of the way, let’s look at Phyllis and Neff as characters and how Aventurine and Ratio are similar or opposite to them.
Starting off with Aventurine and Phyllis. Here is where they are the most similar:
Phyllis is blonde and described as a provocative woman. Aventurine is also a blond and eyes Ratio provocatively in the Final Victor light cone.
Phyllis was put under surveillance after Keyes starts figuring out that the so-called accidental death/suicide may have been a murder after all. Similarly, Aventurine was watched by Sunday the entire time in Penacony.
Phyllis never tells Neff how she's seeing another man on the side to possibly kill him too (as well as how she was responsible for the death of her husband‘s previous wife). Aventurine also didn't tell Ratio the entirety of his plan of his own death.
Phyllis puts on a somewhat helpless act at first but is incredibly capable of making things go her way, having everything seemingly wrapped around her finger. Aventurine — even when putting on a facade that masks his true motives — always comes out at the top.
Now the differences between Aventurine and Phyllis:
Phyllis does not care about her family and has no issue with killing her husband, his previous wife, and possibly her daughter Lola. Opposite of that, Aventurine is a family man… with no family left, as well as feeling an insane level of survivor’s guilt.
Really, Phyllis just… does not care at all about anyone but herself and the money. Aventurine, while he uses every trick in the book to get out on top, does care about the way Jade and Topaz had entrusted him with their Cornerstones, in spite of the stones being worth their lives.
Phyllis also uses other people to her advantage to get what she wants, often behind other people's backs, with the way she treats Neff and Zachette. Aventurine does as well (what with him making deals with the Trailblazer while also making a deal with Black Swan that involves the Trailblazer). The difference here is Phyllis uses her allure deliberately to seduce men while Aventurine simply uses others as pawns while also allowing others to do the same to himself.
Phyllis makes no attempt at compromising the policy when questioned by Norton. Aventurine ends up compromising by only taking the gift money (which is exactly what he needs).
The wig that Barbara Stanwyck (the actress of Phyllis) wore was chosen to make her look as “sleazy” as possible, make her look insincere and a fraud, a manipulator. A sort of cheapness. Aventurine’s flashy peacock-esque outfit can be sort of seen as something similar, except the outfit isn’t cheap.
Moving on to Ratio’s similarities to Neff… There isn’t much to extrapolate here as Ratio is more of a side character in the grand scheme of Penacony, however this is what I’ve figured out.
Neff has dark hair. Ratio has dark purple hair.
Neff almost never refers to Phyllis by her name when speaking with her, only as “baby”. The few times he refers to her as Phyllis or Mrs. Dietrichson is during their first conversations and when he has to act like he doesn’t know her. Ratio never calls Aventurine by his name when he’s around him — only as “gambler”, sometimes “damned” or “dear” (EN-only) gambler. Only in the Aventurine's Keeping Up With Star Rail episode does Ratio repeatedly say his name, and yet he still calls him by monikers like “gambler” or, bafflingly, a “system of chaos devoid of logic”.
Both Neff and Ratio committed two betrayals: Neff on Mr. Dietrichson and Keyes, and Ratio on Sunday and Aventurine. With the former cases it was to reach the end of the trolley line, and with the latter it was on a man who had put his trust in him.
As for the differences…
Neff is described as someone who’s not smart by his peers. Ratio is someone who is repeatedly idolised and put on a pedestal by other people.
Neff is excellent at pretending to not know nor care for Phyllis whenever he speaks about her with Keyes or when he and she are in a place that could land them in hot water (the office, the mansion when there are witnesses). His acting is on the same level as Phyllis. With Ratio it’s… complicated. While he does pull off the hater act well, he straight up isn’t great at pretending not to care about Aventurine’s wellbeing.
Instead of getting his gunshot wound treated in the hospital like a normal person, Neff makes the absolutely brilliant decision of driving to his office and talking to a dictaphone for hours. Needless to say, this is something a medical doctor like Ratio would never do.
Now here's the thing. Though it's very easy to just look at Phyllis and Neff in the movie and go "okay, Aventurine is Phyllis and Ratio is Neff — end of story" and leave it at that, I find that they both take from the two leads in different ways. Let me explain. Beginning with Aventurine and Neff…
Neff is the one who hatches the plan and encourages Phyllis to go through and claim the double indemnity clause in the first place. He is also the key player of his own risky plan, having to fake being the husband to enter the train as well as fake the death. Aventurine puts himself at great risk just by being in Sunday’s presence, and hoping that Sunday wouldn’t figure out that the green stone he had uncovered wasn’t the aventurine stone.
Adding onto the last point, Neff had fantasised about pulling off the perfect murder for a long time — the catalyst was simply him meeting Phyllis. Aventurine presumably sought out Ratio alone for his plan against Sunday.
Neff makes a roulette wheel analogy and talks about a pile of blue and yellow poker chips (the latter in the script only). I don‘t even have to explain why this is relevant here. (Aventurine’s Ultimate features a roulette wheel and the motif is on his belt, thigh strap, and back, too. And of course, Aventurine is all about his chips.)
Neff has certain ways to hide when he’s nervous, which include hiding his hands in his pockets when they were shaking, putting on glasses so people couldn’t see his eyes. Aventurine hides his left hand behind his back when he’s nervous: Future Aventurine says that "they don't know the other hand is below the table, clutching [his] chips for dear life", and in multiple occasions such as the Final Victor LC, his character trailer, and even in his boss form in the overworld you can see that Aventurine hides his left hand behind his back. And he is also seen with his glasses on sometimes.
Neff says a bunch of stuff to make sure that Phyllis acts her part and does not act out of character (i.e. during their interactions at the market), like how Aventurine repeatedly tries to get Ratio back on track from his subpar acting.
Neff is always one step ahead of the game, and the only reason the plan blows up in his face is due to outside forces that he could not have foreseen (a witness, Keyes figuring out the plan, the broken leg). Aventurine meanwhile plays 5D chess and even with the odds against him, he uses everything he can to come out on the top (i. e. getting Acheron to kill him in the dream).
Even after coming home on the night of the murder, Neff still felt that everything could have gone wrong. Aventurine, with his blessed luck, occasionally wavers and fears everything could go wrong whenever he takes a gamble.
Neff was not put under surveillance by Keyes due to him being extensive with his alibi. After witnessing Robin’s death with eyewitnesses at the scene, the Family had accepted Aventurine’s alibi, though he would be under watch from the Bloodhounds according to Ratio.
Neff talks about the entire murder scheme to the dictaphone. Aventurine during Cat Among Pigeons also retells his plan, albeit in a more convoluted manner, what with his future self and all.
Continuing with Ratio and Phyllis, even with their personalities and motivations being quite different, they do have a few commonalities.
Phyllis was a nurse. Ratio is a medical doctor.
Her name is Greek of origin. Veritas Ratio, though his name is Latin, has Greco-Roman influences throughout his entire character.
The very first scene Phyllis appears in has her wearing a bath towel around her torso. Ratio loves to take baths to clear his mind.
Phyllis was instructed by Neff to be at the market every morning at eleven buying things. Ratio is seen in an auction house with his alabaster head on so no one could recognize him.
Phyllis mostly acts as an accomplice to the scheme, being the one to convince her husband to take the train instead. She is also generally seen only when Neff is involved. Ratio plays the same role as well, only really appearing in the story in relation to Aventurine as well as being the accomplice in Aventurine’s own death. Even him standing in the auction house randomly can be explained by the theory that he and Aventurine had attempted to destabilise Penacony’s economy through a pump and dump scheme.
With these pointers out of the way, let’s take a closer look at select scenes from the film and their relation to the mission and the pair.
—
[THE PHONE CALL — THE REVERIE HOTEL]
Before the murder, there is a scene with a phone call between Phyllis and Neff discussing the plan while Keyes is in the same room as Neff. Neff has to make sure that Keyes doesn’t think of anything of the phone call, so he acts like he’s calling a “Margie”, and says a bunch of stuff that sounds innocent out of context (“Can’t I call you back, ‘Margie’?” “What color did you pick out?” “Navy blue. I like that fine”), but are actually hinting at the real plan all along (the suit that Mr. Dietrichson wears.)
In a roundabout way, the conversation between Ratio and Aventurine in the Reverie Hotel can be seen as the opposite of that scene — with the two talking about their supposed plan out loud on Penacony ground, a place where the Family (and in turn, Sunday) has eyes everywhere. Despite being in a “private” room, they still act like they hate each other while airing out details that really do not make sense to air out if they really did meet the first time in Penacony (which they didn’t — they’ve been on several missions beforehand). It’s almost like they want a secret third person to know what they were doing, instead of trying to be hushed up about it. The TVs in the room that Sunday can look through based on Inherently Unjust Destiny — A Moment Among The Stars, the Bloodhound statue that disappears upon being inspected, the owl clock on the left which side eyes Ratio and Aventurine, all point to that Sunday is watching their every move, listening to every word.
Rewinding back to before the phone call, in one of the encounters at the marketplace where they “accidentally” run into each other, Phyllis talks about how the trip was off. How her husband wouldn’t get on the train, which was vital for their plan, because of a broken leg. All this, while pretending to be strangers by the passersby. You could say that the part where Ratio almost leaves because Aventurine had “ruined the plan” is the opposite of this, as the husband breaking his leg was something they couldn’t account for, while Aventurine “being short of a few feathers” was entirely part of the plan.
—
[QUESTIONING PHYLLIS — THE INTERROGATION]
This section is going to be a little longer as I will cover two scenes in the movie in a more detailed manner — Mr. Dietrichson signing the policy, and Phyllis being questioned — and how they are represented in the Sunday-Aventurine interrogation and the prior conversation between Ratio and Sunday in multitudes of ways.
Going about their plan, Neff has to make sure that Mr. Dietrichson signs the policy with the double indemnity clause without him knowing the details, all the while having Phyllis (and Lola) in the same room. He and Phyllis have to pretend that they don’t know each other, and that this is just the standard accidental insurance process, instead of signing what would be his downfall. To sell it, he gets Mr. Dietrichson to sign two “copies” of the form, except with Mr. Dietrichson’s second signature, he’s duped into signing the accident insurance policy with the respective clause.
You can tie this to how Ratio goes to Sunday in order to “expose” the lie that the suitcase didn’t actually contain the Aventurine Cornerstone, as well as there being more than one Cornerstone involved in the scheme. Ratio must make sure that Sunday truly believes that he dislikes Aventurine’s company, while also making sure that Sunday doesn’t figure out the actual aventurine stone is broken and hidden in the gift bag. The scheme turns out to be successful, as Sunday retrieves the two Cornerstones, but not the aventurine stone, and truly does think that the green stone he has in his possession is the aventurine.
This whole scene with Sunday is also reminiscent of the interrogation scene in the middle of the movie, where Phyllis was questioned by the boss (Norton) who was deducing that Mr. Dietrichson's death was a suicide, not accidental death. Neff, Phyllis, Keyes and Norton were all in the same room, and Neff and Phyllis had to act like they never knew the other. Phyllis acts like she knows nothing about what Norton insinuates about her husband and eventually, Phyllis explodes in anger and storms out the room, even slamming the door. Her act is very believable to any outsider.
Now back to the Ratio and Sunday conversation. One glaring difference between the movie and here is that his acting isn’t great compared to either Phyllis nor Neff. It never was throughout the Penacony mission. He even comes very close to breaking character several times, and is even defending Aventurine in a somewhat aggressive manner during his one-on-one conversation with Sunday, as in he literally tells Sunday to see a shrink. It’s very different from the way he was acting in Herta Space Station — like Ratio cares about Aventurine too much to keep his hands off.
It's also worth pointing out that Neff doesn't speak a word when Phyllis was being interrogated. Similarly, Ratio is silent throughout the entire scene with Sunday and Aventurine, with his only “line” being a “hm”. When Aventurine calls him a wretch to his face, all he does is look to the side. In fact, he can only look at Aventurine when the other isn’t staring back. Almost like him uttering a single word would give them away. Or his acting is terrible when it has to do with Aventurine, as he has no issue doing the same thing in Crown of the Mundane and Divine (Mundane Troubles).
So, Sunday finds out about the Cornerstones and reveals them to Aventurine, and reasons that he cannot give them back to him because Aventurine had lied. Note that in that same scene, Aventurine attempted to use the two murders that had occurred beforehand against Sunday to retrieve his own cornerstone. Similarly, when it was revealed that Mr. Dietrichson did not know about the accident policy and that the so-called “accidental death” was not, in fact, accidental, the insurance company refused to pay out the money.
Unlike the movie, this was all planned, however. The double-crossing by Ratio, the gift money being the only thing required for Aventurine’s real plan. All of it was an act of betrayal against Sunday, in the same manner as the meticulous planning as Mr. Dietrichson’s murder — To sign the policy, get him to take the train, kill him on the way, and to have Neff pose as the husband on the train until the time is right to get off and lay the body on the tracks. A key difference is that they could not have expected their scheme to be busted wide open due to forces outside of their control, while Ratio and Aventurine went straight down the line for the both of them no matter what.
From here on out, we can conclude that the way Ratio and Aventurine present themselves in Penacony to onlookers is in line with Neff and Phyllis.
—
[“GOODBYE, BABY” — FINAL VICTOR]
And now for the (in)famous light cone, Final Victor. The thing that truly kickstarted the Ratio and Aventurine ship in the fanbase, and the partnership between the two in general. It’s a direct reference to the final confrontation between Neff and Phyllis in the movie.
I’ll fire through all the similarities between the two scenes.
During the respective scenes, Aventurine and Phyllis both outsmart their partner one way or the other: Aventurine with his one-sided game of Russian Roulette, and Phyllis hiding her gun underneath the cushions until Neff turned away.
The guns are owned by Phyllis and Aventurine, not Neff and Ratio.
Phyllis couldn’t bring herself to fire any more shots after she realised she truly did love Neff. Ratio could do nothing but watch as Aventurine did what he did — he couldn’t even pull away if the LC animation is anything to go by him struggling as Aventurine firmly keeps the gun to his chest.
Neff says he doesn’t buy (believe) that Phyllis loved him. She then goes “I’m not asking you to buy […]”. The LC description has Aventurine ask Ratio “You don’t believe me?”, while in the LC animation Ratio straight up says “You expect me to believe you?” and Aventurine answering “Why not, doctor/professor?”
The visual composition of the LC and the scene are nearly identical, from the lighting to the posing to the way Aventurine looks at Ratio — Aventurine and Ratio are even wearing different outfits to fit the scene better. The background in the LC is also like the blinders in the movie, just horizontal.
In the shot where Phyllis’ face is more visible, the way she looks at Neff is strikingly like the way provocatively looks at Ratio. Even their eyes have a visible shine — Phyllis’ eyes brightly shining the moment she realised she really fell in love with Neff, and Aventurine having just a little light return to his eyes in that specific moment.
And now the differences!
Neff holds the gun in his right hand. Aventurine makes Ratio hold his gun in his left.
Neff is the one who takes the gun from Phyllis‘ hand. Aventurine is the one who places the gun in Ratio’s hand and fires it.
Three gunshots are fired. In the movie, Phyllis shoots the first shot and Neff the second and third. Aventurine unloads the gun and leaves only one bullet for this game of Russian Roulette. He pulls the trigger three times, but they all turn out to be blanks.
Phyllis does not break her façade of not smiling until the very last moment where she gets shot. Aventurine is smiling the entire time according to the light cone description, whilst in the animation, it’s only when he guides the gun to his chest that he puts it on.
So, you know how Neff meets Phyllis and it all goes off the rails from there. The way Neff goes from a decent guy to willingly involve himself in a murder scheme, having his morals corrupted by Phyllis. His world having been turned upside down the moment he lays eyes on Phyllis in that first meeting. Doesn’t that sound like something that happened with the Final Victor LC? Ratio, a man all about logic and rationality — a scholar with eight PhDs to his name — all of that is flipped on its head the moment Aventurine pulls out his gun in their first meeting and forces Ratio to play a game of Russian roulette with him. Aventurine casually gambles using his own life like it’s nothing and seemingly without fear (barring his hidden left hand). All or nothing — and yet Aventurine comes out alive after three blanks. Poetic, considering there’s a consumable in the game called “All or Nothing” which features a broken chess piece and a poker chip bound together by a tie. The poker chip obviously represents the gambler, but the chess piece specifically stands for Ratio because he plays chess in his character trailer, his Keeping Up With Star Rail episode and his introduction is centred around him playing chess with himself. Plus, the design of the chess piece has golden accents, similar to his own chess set. In the end, Aventurine will always be the final victor.
Furthermore, Neff had deduced that Phyllis wanted to kill her husband and initially wanted no part in it, but in a subsequent visit it was his own idea that they trigger the double indemnity clause for more money. As the movie progresses though, he starts to have his doubts (thanks in part to him befriending Lola) and makes the move to kill Phyllis when everything starts to come to light. It’s strikingly similar to how Ratio initially wanted no part in whatever Aventurine had in mind when they first met, but in the subsequent missions where they were paired up, he willingly goes along with Aventurine's risky plans, and they come to trust each other. Enough so that Aventurine and Ratio can go to Penacony all on their own and put on an act, knowing that nobody in the IPC other than them can enter the Dreamscape. The mutual respect grew over time, instead of burning passionately before quickly fizzling out like in the movie.
Basically, in one scene, three shots (blanks) start a relationship, and in the other, it ends a relationship. In the anan magazine interview with Aventurine, he says himself that “form[ing] an alliance with just one bullet” with Ratio was one of his personal achievements. The moment itself was so impactful for both parties that it was immortalised and turned into a light cone.
—
[THE ENDING — GOLDEN HOUR]
The ending of Double Indemnity that made it into the final cut has Neff continue his confession on the dictaphone until he realised that he wasn’t alone in the room. Keyes had come inside at some point, but none had said a thing, only listening to a dead man speak of his crime. When Neff sees Keyes, they talk for a moment, Neff says he plans on fleeing to Mexico. Keyes does not think he will make it. He tries to leave, only to collapse at the front of the elevator, Keyes following just behind him. Neff attempts to light a cigar but is too weak to do so, so Keyes does it for him.
Parts of the ending can still be attributed to the interrogation scene between Sunday and Aventurine, so I’ll make this quick before moving on to the conversation in Heaven Is A Place On Earth, Ratio and Aventurine’s final conversation together. Once Sunday mentions how quickly Aventurine gave up the suitcase, he inflicts the Harmony’s consecration on him, which forces Aventurine to confess everything that Sunday asks of. In a way, it’s the opposite of what happens in the movie — where Neff willingly tells the truth about the murder to his coworker. Aventurine does not like Sunday, and Neff is close to Keyes. Ratio also does not speak, similarly to how Keyes didn’t speak and stood silently off to the side.
Post-interrogation in Golden Hour, Ratio worriedly prods at Aventurine and asks him about his plan. He then gives him the Mundanite’s Insight with the Doctor’s Advice inside when Aventurine tells him to leave. Throughout Heaven Is A Place On Earth, Aventurine gets weaker and his head starts to buzz, until he falls to the ground before he can hand in the final gems. Similarly, Neff progressively grows weaker as he records his confession. Keyes says he’s going to call a doctor and Neff says he’s planning to go to Mexico. And when Neff collapses near the elevator, they talk one final time and Keyes lights Neff’s cigar as the other was too weak to do so himself.
—
[OPPOSITE TIMELINES AND DEVELOPMENTS]
Remember how I said the way certain events happen in the movie and the game are mostly opposite and reverse of one another?
The Final Victor LC is the first meeting of Ratio and Aventurine, and Neff killing Phyllis is their final meeting.
Between that first and last meeting between Phyllis and Neff’s whirlwind romance, their relationship becomes strained which ultimately leads to Neff not trusting whatever Phyllis has to say at the end point of the movie. As for Ratio and Aventurine, the exact opposite had happened, to the point where Ratio trusts Aventurine enough to go along with his plans even if they went against his own ideals. The basis of the mission involved Veritas Ratio, whose full name includes the Latin word for “truth”, lying the entire time on Penacony.
Aventurine is sentenced to the gallows by Sunday after his unwilling interrogation. The movie starts and ends with Neff willingly confessing everything to Keyes.
It bears repeating, but I have to make it so clear that the trust between Ratio and Aventurine runs incredibly deep. Being able to predict what your partner says and thinks and plans in a mission as critical as the Penacony project is not something first-time co-workers can pull off flawlessly. All the while having to put on masks that prevent you from speaking sincerely towards one another lest you rat yourselves out. You have no way of contacting outside reinforcements from within Penacony, as the rest of the IPC are barred from entering. To be able to play everybody for fools while said fools believe you yourselves have handed your case on a silver platter requires a lot — trust, knowledge of the other, past experience, and so on. With Phyllis and Neff, the trust they had had been snuffed out when Neff grew closer to Lola and found out what kind of person Phyllis truly was on the inside. Phyllis did not trust nor love Neff enough and was going behind his back to meet with Zachette to possibly take Neff and Lola out. And the whole reason Neff wanted to perpetrate the murder was due to him being initially taken by Phyllis' appearance, which single handedly got the ball rolling on the crime.
Now then, how come trust is one of the defining aspects of Aventurine and Ratio’s relationship, when Phyllis and Neff’s trust eventually lead to both their deaths at the hands of the other? Sure, this can be explained away with the opposite theory, but there’s one other relationship involving Neff which I haven’t brought up in excruciating detail yet. The other side of Ratio and Aventurine’s relationship.
—
[NEFF & KEYES — AVENTURINE & RATIO]
Here is where it gets more interesting — while Phyllis and Neff are at the centre point of the movie, there is another character to whom Neff has a close relationship with — Keyes. It’s also the only relationship with no pretences, at least, until the whole murder thing happened and Neff had to hide his involvement from Keyes. Watching the movie, I couldn't help but feel there was something more to the two than meets the eye. I knew that queer readings of the film existed, but I didn't think too much of them until now. And though Aventurine and Ratio parallel Phyllis and Neff respectively, the fact that they also have traits of their opposite means that it wouldn’t be completely out of the question if parts of their relationship were also influenced by Keyes and Neff on a deeper and personal level. Let me explain.
Keyes and Neff were intimate friends for eleven years and have shown mutual respect and trust towards one another. They understood each other on a level not seen with Phyllis and Neff. Even after hearing Neff confess his crimes through the dictaphone (and eventually standing in the same room while Neff confessed), he still cared for the other man, and stayed with him when Neff collapsed at the front door. The only reason Keyes hadn’t deduced that it was Neff who was behind the murder was because he had his absolute trust in him. Keyes is also Neff’s boss, and they are always seen exchanging playful banter when they are on screen together. Neff even says the words “I love you, too” twice in the movie — first at the beginning and second at the end, as the final line. There’s also the persistent theme of Neff lighting Keyes’ cigarettes (which happens in every scene where they are face-to-face), except in the end where it’s Keyes who lights Neff’s.
Doesn’t that sound familiar? Mutual respect, caring too much about the other person, the immense amount of trust… Ratio says he’s even the manager of the Penacony project (which may or may not be a lie), and despite their banter being laced with them acting as “enemies”, you can tell that in Dewlight Pavilion pre-Sunday confrontation that Aventurine genuinely likes Ratio’s company and believes him to be a reliable person. From the way he acts carefree in his words to the thoughts in his head, as seen in the mission descriptions for Double Indemnity. Their interactions in that specific mission are possibly the closest thing to their normal way of speaking that we get to see on Penacony.
Not to mention, this is the way Neff describes Keyes. He even says (not in the script) “you never fooled me with your song and dance, not for a second.” Apart from the line about the cigar ashes, doesn’t this ring a bell to a certain doctor? “Jerk” with a heart of gold?
After solving the puzzle with the statues, Ratio jokingly offers Aventurine to join the Genius Society. Aventurine then goes "Really? I thought you’ve given up on that already", and then Ratio says it was, in fact, a joke. Solving the puzzle through brute force has Ratio telling Aventurine that the Council of Mundanites (which Ratio himself is a part of) should consider him a member. In the movie, where the scene with the phone call with Neff and Phyllis reiterating details of their plan happens, Keyes actually offered Neff a better job (specifically a desk job, as Keyes’ assistant). The two pairs saw the other as smart, equals, and were invested in each other’s careers one way or another.
Because of all this, the character parallels for this side of the relationship are as follows:
Aventurine - Walter Neff
Veritas Ratio - Barton Keyes
With the way I’ve talked about how Aventurine and Ratio take from both leads in terms, it does fit to say that Aventurine is Neff, and Ratio is Keyes in this layer of their relationship. Since we’re on the topic of Keyes, let me also go through some similarities with him and Ratio specifically.
Keyes says the words “dimwitted amateurs” in his first on-screen conversation with Neff. You can’t have Dr. Ratio without him talking about idiocy in some way.
Keyes almost only appears in the movie in relation to Neff, and barring a single interaction in Neff’s house, is also only seen in the office. Same with Phyllis, Ratio also only ever appears regarding Aventurine.
Keyes genuinely wanted the best for Neff, even offering to celebrate with him when he thought the case truly had been busted wide open by forces when Zachette entered the picture. You could say the same for Ratio, as he hoped that Aventurine wouldn’t dwell on the past according to his response on Aventurine’s Interview, as well as telling him to “stay alive/live on (CN)” and wishing him the best of luck in his Doctor’s Advice note.
Whether or not you believe that there was more going on with Neff and Keyes is up to you, but what matters is that the two were very close. Just like Ratio and Aventurine.
—
[THE ORIGINAL FILM ENDING]
Something that I hadn’t seen brought up is the original ending of Double Indemnity, where Neff is executed in a gas chamber while Keyes watches on, shocked, and afterwards leaves somberly. The ending was taken out because they were worried about the Hays Code, but I felt it was important to bring it up, because in a way, you can kind of see the Sunday interrogation scene as Sunday sending Aventurine to his death in seventeen system hours. And Ratio doesn’t speak at all in that scene, and Keyes doesn’t either according to the script.
Another thing that’s noteworthy is that Wilder himself said “the story was about the two guys” in Conversations with Wilder. The two guys in question are Keyes and Neff.
—
[THE NOVEL]
With the original film ending covered, now it is time to bring up the novel by James M. Cain. I bought the book just to read about the differences between the adaptation and the original source material, and to list a few more similarities and opposites I could gather. For this section alone, due to the changes in the (last) names of certain characters, I will be referring to Walter Huff (Neff in the movie) as Walter, and Mr. Dietrichson as Nirdlinger. The plot is pretty much the same as the movie’s apart from a couple of changes so there isn’t a need to recount everything.
From my two read-throughs of the novel, these are the following passages that stood out to me the most. Starting with Aventurine:
Walter, as a top businessman of the company, knows how to sway a deal and to get what he truly wants with what the other gives him. Aventurine is the same, reliant on his intuition, experience and whatever information he has on the table to claim the win. Him luring out Sparkle in Heaven Is A Place On Earth and his conversation with Acheron in the Nihility is indicative of that.
• "But you sell as many people as I do, you don't go by what they say. You feel it, how the deal is going. And after a while I knew this woman didn't care anything about the Automobile Club. Maybe the husband did, but she didn't. There was something else, and this was nothing but a stall. I figured it would be some kind of a proposition to split the commission, maybe so she could get a ten-spot out of it without the husband knowing. There's plenty of that going on. And I was just wondering what I would say to her."
Phyllis, like in the movie, had been hiding her true intentions of talking to Walter in their first conversations, always saying things that she didn’t actually mean. In a similar vein, Aventurine consistently says stuff but almost never truly means any of it, which is all part of his façade.
• "And I could feel it again, that she wasn't saying what she meant. It was the same as it was the first afternoon I met her, that there was something else, besides what she was telling me. And I couldn't shake it off, that I had to call it on her."
When discussing the murder plan with Phyllis, Walter makes this comment, kind of like how Aventurine seems to operate in a way where he has a plan, but is ready to improvise and think fast when needed.
• "And then it's one of those things where you've got to watch for your chance, and you can't plan it in advance, and know where you're going to come out to the last decimal point."
Remember the roulette wheel line from the movie? In the novel, the gambling metaphor that Walter makes about the insurance business goes on for two paragraphs, mentioning a gambling wheel, stack of chips, a place with a big casino and the little ivory ball, even about a bet on the table. Walter also talks about how he thinks of tricks at night after being in the business for so long, and how he could game the system. Needless to say, insanely reminiscent of Aventurine.
• "You think I’m nuts? All right, maybe I am. But you spend fifteen years in the business I’m in, and maybe a little better than that, it’s the friend of the widow, the orphan, and the needy in time of trouble? It’s not. It’s the biggest gambling wheel in the world. It don’t look like it, but it is, from the way they figure the percentage on the oo to the look on their face when they cash your chips. You bet that your house will burn down, they bet it won’t, that’s all. What fools you is that you didn’t want your house to burn down when you made the bet, and so you forget it’s a bet. To them, a bet is a bet, and a hedge bet don’t look any different than any other bet. But there comes a time, maybe, when you do want your house to burn down, when the money is worth more than the house. And right there is where the trouble starts." • "Alright, I’m an agent. I’m a croupier in that game. I know all their tricks, I lie awake thinking up tricks, so I’ll be ready for them when they come at me. And then one night I think up a trick, and get to thinking I could crook the wheel myself if I could only put a plant out there to put down my bet." • "I had seen so many houses burned down, so many cars wrecked, so many corpses with blue holes in their temples, so many awful things that people had pulled to crook the wheel, that that stuff didn’t seem real to me anymore. If you don’t understand that, go to Monte Carlo or some other place where there’s a big casino, sit at a table, and watch the face of the man that spins the little ivory ball. After you’ve watched it a while, ask yourself how much he would care if you went out and plugged yourself in the head. His eyes might drop when he heard the shot, but it wouldn’t be from the worry whether you lived or died. It would be to make sure you didn’t leave a bet on the table, that he would have to cash for your estate. No, he wouldn’t care."
Returning home from the murder, Walter attempted to pray, but was unable to do it. Some time passed and after speaking to Phyllis, he prayed. Aventurine presumably hadn’t done the prayer ever since the day of the massacre, and the first time he does it again, he does it with his child self.
• "I went to the dining room and took a drink. I took another drink. I started mumbling to myself, trying to get so I could talk. I had to have something to mumble. I thought of the Lord's Prayer. I mumbled that, a couple of times. I tried to mumble it another time, and couldn't remember how it went." • "That night I did something I hadn’t done in years. I prayed."
Phyllis in the book is much more inclined towards death than her movie version, even thinking of herself as a personification of death. She’s killed ten other people (including infants) prior to the events of the novel. Something to keep in mind as Aventurine had mentioned several times that he attempted to kill himself in the dream, plus his leadup to his “grandest death”. Just like Phyllis, he’s even killed at least a few people before, though the circumstances of that were less on his own volition and more so for the sake of his survival (i.e. the death game in the maze involving the 34 other slaves where he was the winner and another time where he murdered his own master). Instead of Phyllis playing the active role of Death towards everybody else, Aventurine himself dances with Death with every gamble, every time his luck comes into play. Danse Macabre.
• "But there’s something in me, I don’t know what. Maybe I’m crazy. But there’s something in me that loves Death. I think of myself as Death, sometimes." • "Walter, The time has come. For me to meet my bridegroom [Death]. The only one I ever loved."
Moving on to Ratio:
Walter says several times that it’s hard to get along with Keyes, and how he says nice things after getting you all worked up. A hard-headed man to get along with, but damn good at his job. Sound like someone familiar?
• "That would be like Keyes, that even when he wanted to say something nice to you, he had to make you sore first." • "It makes your head ache to be around him, but he’s the best claim man on the Coast, and he was the one I was afraid of."
Keyes sees Walter as smarter than half the fools in the company. Ratio can only stand the company of Aventurine in regards to the IPC.
• "Walter, I'm not beefing with you. I know you said he ought to be investigated. I've got your memo right here on my desk. That's what I wanted to tell you. If other departments of this company would show half the sense that you show—" • "Oh, he confessed. He's taking a plea tomorrow morning, and that ends it. But my point is, that if you, just by looking at that man, could have your suspicions, why couldn't they—! Oh well, what's the use? I just wanted you to know it."
After going on a rant about the H.S. Nirdlinger case (Phyllis’ husband) and how Norton is doing a horrible job, he ends it by saying that it’s sheer stupidity. “Supreme idiocy”, anybody?
• "You can’t take many body blows like this and last. Holy smoke. Fifty thousand bucks, and all from dumbness. Just sheer, willful, stupidity!"
Phyllis’ former occupation as a nurse is more elaborated on, including her specialization — pulmonary diseases. One of Ratio’s crowning achievements is curing lithogenesis, the “King of Diseases”.
• "She’s one of the best nurses in the city of Los Angeles. […] She’s a nurse, and she specialized in pulmonary diseases. She would know the time of crisis, almost to a minute, as well as any doctor would."
As for the murder scheme, they talk about it a lot more explicitly in the novel. Specifically, Walter mentions how a single person cannot get away with it and that it requires more people to be involved. How everything is known to the party committing the crime, but not the victim. And most importantly: Audacity.
"Say, this is a beauty, if I do say it myself. I didn't spend all this time in the business for nothing, did I? Listen, he knows all about this policy, and yet he don't know a thing about it. He applies for it, in writing, and yet he don't apply for it. He pays me for it with his own check, and yet he don't pay me. He has an accident happen to him and yet he don't have an accident happen to him. He gets on the train, and yet he don't get on it."
"The first is, help. One person can't get away with it, that is unless they're going to admit it and plead the unwritten law or something. It takes more than one. The second is, the time, the place, the way, all known in advance—to us, but not him. The third is, audacity. That's the one that all amateur murderers forget. They know the first two, sometimes, but that third, only a professional knows. There comes a time in any murder when the only thing that can see you through is audacity, and I can't tell you why."
"And if we want to get away with it, we've got to do it the way they do it, […]" "Be bold?" "Be bold. It's the only way."
"I still don't know—what we're going to do." "You'll know. You'll know in plenty of time."
"We were right up with it, the moment of audacity that has to be be part of any successful murder."
It fits the situation that Aventurine and Ratio find themselves in extremely well: For the first point— Aventurine would not be able to get away with simply airing out details by himself, as that would immediately cast suspicion on him. Having another person accompany him who not only isn’t really a part of the IPC in name (as the IPC and The Family have a strenuous relationship) but would probably be able to get closer to Sunday because of that means they can simply bounce off each other without risking as much suspicion with a one-man army. Which is exactly what Ratio and Aventurine do in the conversations they have on Penacony. Secondly — they knew how Sunday operates: as a control freak, he leaves no stone unturned, which is how he became Head of the Oak Family, so their acting required them to give off the impression that a. they hated each other, b. Ratio would go against Aventurine’s wishes and expose him in return for knowledge, c. there were only the two Cornerstones that were hidden. This would give Sunday the illusion of control, and lead to Sunday to lower his guard long enough for Aventurine to take the gift money in the end. The pair knew this in advance, but not Sunday. And thirdly — the plan hinged on a high-level of risk. From breaking the Aventurine Cornerstone, to hoping that Sunday wouldn’t find it in the gift bag, to not telling Ratio what the true plan is (meaning Ratio had to figure it out on his own later on), to Sunday even buying Ratio’s story, it was practically the only way they could go about it. “Charming audacity”, indeed.
An interesting aspect about the novel is that the ending of the novel is divergent from the movie’s final cut and the original ending: Phyllis and Walter commit suicide during a ferry ride to Mexico. The main reason this was changed for the movie was because of the Hays Code, and they wouldn’t allow a double suicide to be screened without reprecussions for criminals. There’s also a bunch of other aspects that differentiate the novel from the movie (no narration-confession as the confession happens in a hospital, less characterization for Keyes and instead a bigger focus on Lola and her boyfriend, the focus on the murderous aspect of Walter and Phyllis’ relationship instead of actual romance, Walter falling in love with Lola (with an unfortunately large age gap attached), etc.)
As for the ending, this wouldn’t even be the first romance media reference related to Aventurine and Ratio where both the leads die, with the other being The Happy Prince and San Junipero (in relation to the EN-only Heaven Is A Place On Earth reference), which I normally would chalk up as a coincidence, though with the opposite line-of-thought I have going on here (and the fact that it’s three out of four media references where the couple die at the end…), I think it’s reasonable to say that Ratio and Aventurine will get that happy ending. Subverting expectations, hopefully.
—
[THE HAYS CODE — LGBT CENSORSHIP IN CHINA]
I’ve brought up the Hays code twice now in the previous two sections, but I haven’t actually explained what exactly it entails.
The Hays Code (also known as the Motion Picture Production Code) is a set of rules and guidelines imposed on all American films from around 1934 to 1968, intended to make films less scandalous, morally acceptable and more “safe” for the general audiences. Some of the “Don’ts” and “Be Carefuls” include but are not limited to…
(Don’t) Pointed profanity
(Don’t) Inference of sex perversion (which includes homosexuality)
(Don’t) Nudity
(Be Careful) Sympathy for criminals
(Be Careful) Use of firearms
(Be Careful) Man and woman in bed together
What does this have to do with a Chinese gacha game released in 2023? If you know a little bit about miHoYo’s past, you would know that pre-censorship laws being upheld to a much stronger and stricter degree, they had no problem showcasing their gay couples in Guns Girl Z (Honkai Gakuen 2/GGZ) and Honkai Impact 3rd, with the main three being Bronya/Seele, Kiana/Mei (admittedly the latter one is a more recent example, from 2023), and Sakura/Kallen. Ever since the Bronya and Seele kiss, censorship in regards to LGBT content ramped up, causing the kiss to be removed on the CN side, and they had to lay low with the way they present two same-sex characters who are meant to be together. They can’t explicitly say that two female or male characters are romantically involved, but they can lace their dynamics with references for those “in the know” — Subtext. Just enough to imply something more but not too much that they get censored to hell and back.
So what I’m getting at is this: The trouble that Double Indemnity had to go through in order to be made while also keeping the dialogue of Phyllis and Neff as flirtatious as they could under the Hays Code among other things is quite similar to the way Ratio and Aventurine are presented as of now. We never see them interact outside of Penacony (at least up until 2.2, when this post was drafted), so we can only infer those interactions specifically until they actually talk without the fear of being found out by Sunday. But, there’s still some small moments scattered here and there, such as when Aventurine goes near Ratio in the Dewlight Pavilion Sandpit, he exclaims that “the view here is breathtaking” (he can only see Ratio’s chest from that distance) and that Ratio could “easily squash [him] with just a pinch”. Ratio then goes “If that is your wish, I will do so without a moment’s hesitation.” Not to mention the (in)famous “Doctor, you’re huge!” quote.
It’s not a coincidence that Ratio and Aventurine have three explicit references to romance media (Double Indemnity, Spellbound, Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince), possibly even four if you take the EN-only Heaven Is A Place On Earth as a reference to Black Mirror’s San Junipero. It’s not a coincidence that the storylines or characters of said references parallel the pairing, from surface-level to deep cuts. It’s not a coincidence that the CN voice actors were asked to “tone it down” by the voice director when it came to their chemistry. It’s not a coincidence that Aventurine has only flirted with (three) men throughout Penacony, even referring to a Bloodhound NPC as a “hunk of a man” inside his thoughts, all the while ignoring Himeko and Robin when it came to their looks — women who are known across the cosmos with a myriad of adoring fans. There are so many other so-called “coincidences” related to the two that you could make an iceberg just based on versions 2.0-2.2 as well as content miHoYo themselves have put out on social media. They absolutely knew what they were doing, and were trying to get their point across through subtle means — the extent they went to with the Double Indemnity reference while also keeping it under wraps from a “surface” level point of view is proof of this — the implications are there if you take the time to look for them, and are simply hard to ignore or deny once you do find them.
—
[CONCLUSION]
This was supposed to be short considering the other analyses I’ve seen were also pretty short in comparison, but I couldn’t get the movie out of my head and ended up getting carried away in the brainrot. I hope you could follow along with my line of thinking, even with the absurd length of this post, and the thirty-image limit. I tried to supplement context with some links to videos and wiki pages among other sources wherever I can to get around it.
I will end it with this though — the love in the movie turned out to be fake and a farce, going off track from what was a passionate romance in the beginning because of the murder scheme. Meanwhile, the whole reason why Ratio and Aventurine can pull off whatever they want is because of their immense trust in one another. What was initially shown to be distrust in the Final Victor LC grew into something more, for Ratio, someone who would have never put faith into mere chance and probability before this, put his trust in Aventurine, of all people.
TL;DR — (I get it, it’s over ten thousand words.)
Not only is the relationship between Neff and Phyllis represented in the deception and acting side of Ratio and Aventurine, but the real and trusting side is shown in Neff and Keyes. They have a fascinating, multi-layered dynamic that is extremely fun to pick apart once you realise what’s going on underneath the bickering and “hatred” they display.
Many thanks to Manya again for making the original thread on the movie. I wouldn’t be here comparing the game and movie myself if it weren’t for that.
By the way, I really do believe that Shaoji totally watched this movie at least once and really wanted that Double Indemnity AU for his OCs. I know exactly how it feels.
—
Other points I'd like to mention that didn't fit anywhere else in the main analysis and/or don’t hold much significance, have nothing to do with the Penacony mission, or may even be considered reaching (...if some of the other points weren’t). Just some potentially interesting side bits.
Phyllis honks three times to signal Neff to go for the kill. That, and the three gunshots in the confrontation. Aventurine is all about the number three.
The height difference Aventurine and Ratio have going on is close to Phyllis and Neff’s.
Phyllis had killed her husband’s previous wife and went on to marry Mr. Dietrichson, pretty much taking the wife’s place. Aventurine killed his previous master, and had taken certain attributes from him like his wristwatch and the rings on his hand and the “all or nothing” mantra.
When calling Ratio a wretch (bastard), Aventurine smiles for a moment. This is exclusive to the EN, KR and JP voiceovers, as in CN, he does not smile at all. (Most definitely a quirk from the AI they use for lip syncing, but the smile is something that’s been pointed out quite a few times so I thought I’d mention it here.)
Sunday specifically says in the CN version that he knew of Aventurine's plans the moment Aventurine left the mansion, meaning that he realized he had been played the fool the moment Ratio and Aventurine talked in Golden Hour
In the description for the "All or Nothing" consumable, teenage Aventurine says this specific line: "Temptation is a virtue for mortals, whereas hesitation proves to be a fatal flaw for gamblers." According to Ratio, this is Aventurine's motto - he says as such in Aventurine's Keeping Up With Star Rail episode. Note that in the anan interview he explicitly says he does not have a motto, and yet Ratio in the video says otherwise. They definitely have to know each other for a while for Ratio to even know this.
A big reason why Neff even pulled off the murder scheme in the first place was because he wanted to see if his good friend Keyes could figure it out, the Mundane Troubles Trailblaze Continuance showcases Ratio attempting to teach the Herta Space Station researches a lesson to not trust the Genius society as much as they did.
In Keyes’ first scene he’s exposing a worker for writing a policy on his truck that he claimed had burnt down on its own, when he was the one who burnt it down. Ratio gets into an Ace Attorney-style argument with the Trailblazer in Mundane Troubles.
Neff talks repeatedly about how it won’t be sloppy. Nothing weak. And how it’ll be perfect to Phyllis, and how she’s going to do it and he’s going to help her. Doing it right — “straight down the line”. Beautifully ironic, considering what happens in the movie, and even more ironic as Ratio and Aventurine’s scheme went exactly the way they wanted to in the end. Straight down the line.
#honkai star rail#double indemnity#veritas ratio#aventurine#golden ratio#ratiorine#an attempt at analysis by one a-u#relationship analysis#you know what‚ i guess i can tag the other names of this ship#aventio#raturine#you could make a fucking tierlist of these names#um‚ dynamics (yk what i mean) dont really matter here in the analysis just fyi if youre wondering its general enough#also if you're wondering about the compilation thread - its not done. it'll take a while (a long while.)#this post was so long it was initially just a tumblr draft that i then put into google docs. and it ended up being over 2k+ words long#is this a research paper‚ thesis‚ or essay? who knows! this just started as just a short analysis after watching the movie on may 5#final word count according to docs (excluding alt text): 13013 - 43 pages with formatting#i wish i could have added more images to this‚ 10k words vs 30 images really is not doing me any favours…#plus‚ i hit the character limit for alt text for one of the images.#if you see me mixing up british and american spelling‚ you probably have!#oh yeah. if any of the links happen to break at some point. do tell. i have everything backed up#there also may be multiple links strung together‚ just so you know.#I link videos using the EN and CN voiceovers. Just keep that in mind if the jump between two languages seems sudden.#I had to copy and paste this thing from the original tumblr draft onto a new post because tumblr wouldn't let me edit the old one anymore.#Feels just like when I was finalising my song comic…#(Note: I had to do this three times.)#I started this at May 5 as a way to pass the time before 2.2. You can probably tell how that turned out.#Did you know there is a limit to the amount of links you can add to a single tumblr post? It's 100. I hit that limit as well.#So if you want context for some of these parts... just ask.#I'm gonna stop here before I hit the tag limit (30) as well LMAOO (never mind I just did.)
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trying not to talk too much abt the bear s2 but im Really fuckin frustrated that even with everyone demanding that they’re sooo media literate and sooo smart that no one has talked about claire and the way she sparks audience discomfort. like, she feels out of place within the show because CARMY cannot accept that he is getting this good thing—she feels out of place in HIS life. she’s actually crafted to be the ideal girlfriend, with glowy bokeh lighting in a grocery store and beauty shot close ups and a sweet instrumental leitmotif to show to you, an audience member, that she’s too good to be true in carmys eyes. if you’re an audience member, she raises alarm bells in YOUR head because she raises alarm bells in HIS. he literally tells us that—that’s the crux of his final monologue, that he doesn’t believe he can have the life of food and wines best chef and a life of love and human connection. he doesn’t believe he’s deserving of good things because his family has always been so fucked, because nothing he’s ever tried to hold together has held together—except for his cooking. it’s done this way on purpose, to make you feel that anxiety that he feels around this relationship, and to make you question why you feel it too
#the bear s2#the bear spoilers#the bear#eenposting#carmy berzatto#the bear s2 spoilers#the bear season 2 spoilers#IDK IF THIS IS PHRASED RIGHT BUT LIKE#DO YOU REAAAALLY THINK THAT THE WRITERS WHO GAVE US FISHES ARE GOING TO DO SOMETHING UNINTENTIONAL#LIKE YOU. YOUUUUU#oh my GOD#everythifn in this show is so fucking meticulously crafted. CLAIRE WAS PURPOSEFUL#claire was PURPOSEFUL she was kind and lovely and beautiful and lived a perfectly mundane life which is NOT THE LIFE YHAT CARMY LIVES#and he can’t find the place where those two things meet#he can’t find the place where calm and peace and love and adoration exist next to or inside the chaos of culinary life#and while there IS A PLACE WHERE THEY CAN LIVE TOGETHER. everything that happens to him this season yells at him that it’s impossible#and confirms this ridiculous notion#his uncle sydney the fridge moment. they’re all just fuckin yelling at him that it doesn’t work#BUT. RICHIE NAT AND CLAIRE HERSELF. ALL CONFIRM THAT THEY COULD EXIST TOGETHER#he just can’t find it. and he won’t find it till he makes peace with himself and his childhood#and figures out WHY he got into this business (he still is trying to prove something. he’s still trying to prove he’s worth it)#edit: INCH RESTINNG YOU ALL TOOK THIS TO SHIPPING AND SYDCARMY. NEVER SAID ANYTHING ABT THAT GUYS#NEEEEEVER SAID ANYTHING ABT TJAT.
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last night i got home kind of tipsy and very much in tears and my mother told me the force you exert to keep someone in your life is proportional to the force with which they will leave your life. if you have to fight tooth and claw to keep them, their leaving will be just as hard, just as harsh, and just as definite.
#she said it like a law. its just momentum.#also she told me to get a therapist and start archery ASAP bc i need to get it together#and also she said even granting that this person u were in love w was So Special . as in hot motorcycle-riding iranian masc lesbian in ldn#they arent the only one on earth and that once i start my proper adult life outside of studies etc etc i will probably no longer live in th#UK. she said most non straight iranians u would like have left the country anyway . where do you think they went? theyre out there#and also she asked me to imagine how many hot gay iranians there may be in italy or amsterdam or smth and i was like ok points 😭 maybe#ur right. anyway i was having a feeling of dread bc crying into the arms of ur strict asian mother while buzzed usually results in#death chaos destruction etc in the next few days but actually i think maybe she has genuinely changed as a person and the fear is#unwarranted#anyway i need to eat breakfast and study w the date person i met yesterday#they are so nice ??? genuinely so so sweet i dont feel attracted to them at all omg i genuinely think i have a thing for hot evil ppl 😭#but we could b besties . theyre a lot more romantic than the ex situationship person too like generally . ugh they should be perfect but#alas it appears i am shallow as fuck or potentially a lesbian actually#OH THEY MIGHT ALSO BE POTENTIALLY A LESBIAN BTW#i think i just tend to not date cis ppl entirely by accident#....feel free to rb if u want btw sorry for the rant
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the way some of you clearly think bisexuals don't experience actual attraction and feelings for people, but rather decide ahead of time if they want a man or a woman this time and then just go and pick whoever comes into their line of sight next is so obvious and definitely makes me think you all don't need to speak on things you don't know about
#if you aren't bi I realllly don't want to hear you talking about us or our experiences#because it's just gonna be stereotypes or bitterness from a bi woman who upset you#I know damn well I would not get away with saying some of the shit that you guys do if it was about lesbians instead of bi women#and I don't want to#I shouldn't be able to get away with that!#but some of you absolutely are completely prejudiced and I feel like no one takes that seriously#if you use the term 'bihet' this is about you btw#gonna call out 'bi lesbians' because 'that's not how sexuality works!! you're one or the other!!' but then turn around and say it's okay as#long as it's to insult us??#doesn't add up.#so if you aren't bi go ahead and don't bother talking about bi people#you don't understand how bisexuality works#you don't understand how relationships in general work#('you could just get over your attraction to women and eventually find a man you'd be happy with so you aren't actually oppressed!')#(like okay. you could just never act on your attraction and not tell anyone. just like you want us to do. oh wait? sound familiar? yeah.)#'you could lie about your sexuality and force yourself to only date men' is not an argument you want to be making and I can't believe you#haven't pieced that together. because that exact same thing can be said about anyone
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That feeling when he can't stand to see you that way, no matter what you do, no matter what you say😩😭💔
#scott pilgrims precious little life#scott pilgrim vs the world#spvtw#spto#scott pilgrim#wallace wells#lisa miller#scollace#kim pine#natalie adams#envy adams#don't rlly know if I like how this turned out but oh well;;;#hope its obvious that this is based on the song “Scott Pilgrim” which the creation the comics were inspired from#the lyrics always make me think of Wallace and Lisa's feelings for Scott every time I hear it#ofc you could also relate it to Kim especially since the singers voice kind of reminds me of her#but overall the lyrics fit these two much better since Scott never truly “saw them that way” despite how long they've liked him#and they always seem happier to see him compared to Kim#Im surprised tho that I havent yet seen anyone draw these two together now that their dialogue parallels have been acknowledged more lately#also tho I wish more people pointed out that they both got cucked by red heads LOL#and Kim and Envy actually do look really similar when scott first meets them#makes me wonder if Scott subconsciously went for Envy since she reminded him of Kim (which would be fitting given that you could argue that#Envy dated Scott because he reminded her of Todd. Since he and Scott are confirmed to be meant to be seen as similar to one another#so much so that even their first and last names rhyme#last thing I'll add tho is that while Wallace and Lisa are very similar even personality wise#the one big difference is that despite that whole conclusion on vol4 of Scott not cheating on Ramona with Lisa because he loves her#the writers apparently think it would be “organically correct” for him to have an affair with wallace LMAO#but I guess we shouldn't be surprised since Wallace and Ramona are both in the front of the official valentines art which is clearly#a deptiction of Scotts wet dream or smth (oh and you could also argue that Wallace and Lisa parallel on that art since they're both#shirtless with white socks.. which could be a reference to how lisa wears skimpy clothes for Scott and Wallace often only wears boxers#to like sexually frustrate Scott for fun or smth
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Okay but imagine being in ZeeNuNew’s shoes - you’re queer, confirmed dating but haters still pair you with women you interact with or just meet (business or not), tell you that you’re not ‘queer enough’ and your relationship that you confirmed years ago must be fanservice and if you tell something like ‘NuNew likes cold showers, I prefer warm/hot ones and it’s torturous for me’ (Zee has said it recently by the way, like days ago) people still act surprised:/ but I hope it’ll be better for them
It's definitely an interesting situation. Because like, coming at it from an outside perspective as I was, I was confused for a while. Over the top fan service is a staple of the genre tbh. But I think maybe people get stuck on the black and white and forget the nuance.
Like yeah, it can be fan service and they can also actually care for each other. Which is where I ended up. Because they were definitely playing it up, especially at the beginning of the relationship, but you can also see the genuine affection and emotional honesty, and you can see how it shifts over time.
Again, so wild to me that it's like living your own fake dating au. Committing to the bit to the point where it's no longer a bit. It sounds like a bl plot. (I mean DMD is literally doing a bl with that plot right now lol) That's so meta.
I think people are naturally skeptical, and I think that's probably for a good reason, as it's always best to keep yourself self aware when it comes to celebrities. But what's weird is the intensity with which people are either "pro" or "anti."
As if it's a matter that affects them personally. Like, if they are "pro" and proven wrong true love doesn't exist and they were fools all along and if they are "anti" and they're wrong they were hateful homophobic crones. When like. We are not part of the equation. But people are dedicating themselves to their stance so fully. Which is why I think I was going back and forth for a while before just being like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They are or are not whatever they are. They're cute as hell and act like a couple so that's the assumption I'm gonna live under.
You know the whole "if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's probably a duck" thing?
I don't shower with my bros.
But instead of being like "hey, I change my mind once I've encountered new information" people double down in weird and frankly, queer phobic ways.
I can understand the confusion about their label because I understand it's a bit different culturally. Like, in a western sense most people would not consider it a confirmation because it was more of a "make your own assumptions" kind of thing. Which was what tripped me up for a while.
Tbh that would be the best possible response if it were secretly all fan service all along somehow. Because then that would give people the feeling of confirmation they want while still having the deniability of "I never actually said that."
But also, given the untraditional nature of their relationship, labels like that, especially at the time, may have just not been something they were worrying about. Like, I don't think there's a guidebook for this whole situation.
Sidenote: I am so charmed by the epic saga that is them vs showers.
Especially how Nunew likes to tease about Zee's snoring vs Zee teasing Nunew about his bad habit of not showering before bed. (But it's ok if Nunew does it because Nunew is always the exception it seems. Something the besties have in common. Nat is always the exception for Max.)
The shower ghost, etc. it's peak old married couple bickering.
Kind of like for whatever reason what convinced me about earthmix (on top of everything else) was that Mix pops Earth's zits. Like. That's a level of intimacy that simple costars do not have lmao.
When it's not just the cute shit, but also the gross stuff and the every day bickering that makes it feel genuine.
#zeenunew#i just think they're cute. like.#they've been going hard lately. idk what got into them but im here for it.#i saw a gossipy comment about what nunew did in a concert recently that was like#“if that man doesnt pop the question nunew is about to do it himself” and that i mean. yeah i could see it lol.#i amso hope though. that like. they get more time to just chill and be alone soon.#i know they're very busy and their careers are very important to the both of them.#and they're very showy with their type of affection. which is I think is probably a part of why they work.#and i personally love the little mood boost i get from those two being cute. but i think they deserve a vacation.#sidenote sidnote: dor real when i saw the pimple popping and sheet farts videos (re earthmix) i was like. “yeah. thats some true love shit.”#more than co-parenting 9 cats. i would not put up with that lmao.#i dont know a lot about Buddhism but i know they're always doing couple things at the temple together#sidenote sidenote sidenote: considering it's a non theistic religion. do people still culturally say “oh my god/s”#i think ive seen it a few times but not a lot.#ssk tag#i got distracted
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a family bigger than 4! part 19
What I like about so much about Ai is that...she's so loving. Sure, she isn't perfect with it, but she's tried so hard to convey that to people...she was scared but she did so much, I really would have liked her to get all the things she wanted because that's very precious of her.
part 1 / part 2 / part 3 / part 4 / side story 1 / part 5 / part 6 / part 7 / part 8 / part 9 / side story 2-1 / 2-2 / 2-3 / 2-4 / part 10 / part 11 / part 12 / part 13 / part 14 / part 15 / part 16 / part 17 / part 18
#hikaai#oshi no ko spoilers#oshi no ko#hikaru kamiki#ai hoshino#and the fact that she loved this guy so much?? I'm so convinced there WAS something about him that sold it for her. he does love her alot#one thing I like about this ship is that.. they could have had this awkward(?) clumsy but really wholehearted newlywed kind of dynamic#if that's what Ai wanted I do see it#that part of it is like half-canon to my eyes#doodle#I mean didn't they live together at some point? she did live/move in with him didn't she?#or at least came by often to his apartment enough to leave toothbrushes(oh god the toothbrush...UGH.)#spoilers#this one is referencing 154 a bit#ai deserved so much guys I'm still mad at the ending!!!
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Lucid Dreamer (1/2)
part 2
Gepard notices that it's been. Quiet lately. Like weirdly quiet. TOO quiet. He hasn't seen Sampo Koski in almost a week, which is about the longest he's ever been absent. And he is NOT worried. He's not! So what if they've been getting along more lately! So what if Gepard sometimes looks for him in his favorite hiding places! So what if he's been dreaming about blue hair and green eyes! It's nothing!!
But they're….strange, these dreams. Gepard doesn't usually remember what he's dreamt. It's out of his mind seconds within waking up. But these stick with him, they won't leave him be, they feel different somehow.
He dreams of Sampo bringing food to the frontlines and eating breakfast in his tent with him. Sampo always sneaks him extras. He dreams of chasing Sampo through the alleyways, Sampo sometimes letting himself be caught, Gepard sometimes catching him, and trying to ignore how it feels more like a game now more than anything else. He even dreams that Sampo tags along with him on one of his few civilian days. Sampo runs errands with him, prattles about inane bullshit while Gepard picks out groceries for the week, drags Gepard into some bakery he's never been to but he thinks Serval mentioned once.
And sometimes, it feels so close to reality, that Gepard half expects to see Sampo, shamelessly swaggering into the frontlines with all the guards' breakfast like his wanted poster wasn't only recently taken off the walls of Belobog. He's disappointed when it's always someone else instead. He tells himself his disappointment is ridiculous and if Sampo wants to go prowl around the Snow Plains or wherever he is, then fine. It's not any of his business.
…But it IS his job to investigate any unusual criminal activity relating to the frontlines. And the frontlines are Sampo's usual haunting grounds, and this is unusual activity, and Sampo IS technically a criminal, so it is absolutely part of his duty to look into this - is what Gepard tells himself the entire tram ride down into the Underground.
Natasha tells him he's gone, and Gepard has to steel himself. He knew Sampo made enemies wherever he went, there are a lot of people who would love his head on a platter, but he didn't think-
Natasha corrects him that she means literally gone. As in off-planet. Sampo always leaves her a note before he goes anywhere, so she knows not to expect any supply runs from him. He should be back in exactly two weeks. Thank the Preservation.
Gepard goes back home. He waits.
The uneasiness doesn't leave him.
"Where did you go?" Sampo stops dead in the middle of some story about Seele, and how you'd think someone with as blunt a mouth as her wouldn't have so much trouble asking a woman out, even if that woman IS the Supreme Guardian, and stares at him. He nearly fumbles his cigarette.
"Ahaha, what do you mean, I'm right here?" Sampo smiles at him the same way he always does. Gepard has no idea why he asked. It just popped out. He can never tell when Sampo is lying, anyway.
"I don't know. I feel like I haven't seen you in a long time." Gepard idly mouths at his own cigarette. He almost never smokes, but he wants to ration their stocks of Blizzard Immunity, and it helps with the cold. It's seemed colder lately, for some reason.
Gepard flicks his lighter once, twice, sighs at the third time because a metal prosthetic and thick gloves make the damn things so difficult. Sampo reaches over and wordlessly kisses the end of his cigarette to Gepard's, lighting it. "Thank you."
Nothing happens for almost a full 30 seconds. Something churns behind Gepard's ribcage. Because Sampo never leaves a "thank you" hanging. This is the part where he gives his spiel about how helpful and kind he is and Gepard either brings up how long his rap sheet was before Bronya helped clear his name, or just stares deadpan because seeing Sampo squirm is weirdly satisfying.
"…I'll be back in one more week."
Gepard jolts awake in his cot, mouth dry and eyes bleary.
The hell.
The next dream he has, Sampo looks tired. Sometimes he seems normal. Sometimes he says strange things, like how he wishes he'd gone to some restaurant in Belobog. Ate his favorite food more recently. Brought something with him. Gepard asks why he can't do that now. Where would he bring something? Sampo only shrugs. His rebuttals have less energy.
Gepard doesn't know if he wants to dream more, or less.
He ticks down the days on his calendar. Natasha hasn't told him any different. She promised she would if she got any kind of message. Sampo returns tomorrow, from whatever vacation or seedy business dealings he's been off having. He is not excited about it. He is not looking forward to it. He's not!!
Gepard falls asleep late that night, unable to settle. He dreams again.
He's alone. There are tons of people everywhere, the frontlines are always crowded. But he's alone. They all pass right by him as though he were a ghost. Gepard starts to walk before he realizes his feet are even moving.
He checks the trashcans in the dead end alley. He checks the supply crates that someone always stacks too high because they don't feel like finding more space for them. He pauses to check the soldiers that march past him, watching their footprints in the snow.
He finally finds Sampo on the rooftop along the northernmost wall, the one that looks out over the plains, towards Everwinter Hill, towards where the Stellaron had once been kept. With a full moon and an entire land of white snow, Gepard can almost see clear out to the horizon.
"Found you." Sampo stiffens, and Gepard is almost prepared for him to sprint off the roof. He doesn't. But he doesn't relax either. Gepard sits down next to him and stares out at the wastelands.
"…I fucked up." It wasn't what Gepard had been expecting. Sampo never 'fucks up,' Sampo just gets into incidents that are entirely, supposedly, not his fault and that he just happens to always be within the vicinity of.
"What did you do now?" It must be really bad if Sampo is coming to the Silvermanes for protection.
Instead, Sampo ignores his question completely. "See out over there? Right on the other side of that mountain. There's a safe house that way. It's hidden under a lot of snow and dead trees, but it's there. And in that safe house is a box full of letters. I need you to deliver those letters for me."
Gepard's brow furrows. It's a weird favor to ask. Sampo would never tell anyone where his hidden safehouses were. It defeated the whole purpose of a hidden safe house.
Something is wrong, something is really really wrong.
Gepard turns back to look at him again and startles, all of his questions dying in his throat, because the entire left side of Sampo's head is suddenly matted down, dark and sticky, his skin is dyed red red red-
"In three more months, there's gonna be something big happening." Gepard grabs Sampo's hand and it feels slick and warm against his palm. "I won't be here. So I need you to do my end of things for me." Gepard tries to keep hold, but something is fading, something is slowing, the sun is coming up but the colors are all wrong, everything feels like encroaching fog, Sampo's hand slides right through his. "I was gonna come back with my mask to finish setting the stage, but…" Gepard makes a frantic grab for Sampo's wrist, the air twists, he comes back empty-handed. "They have you. And you're the Iron Wall of Belobog. So it'll be ok."
Gepard finally manages to find his grip, snatches the front of Sampo's dark wet jacket and yanks him forward to hold onto him, and this close up, he can see it better, his colors are bleaching out, leaking outside the lines as if Sampo will become part of the background, as if he's fading into the strange fog that's been closing in on them. His fingers are already starting to feel empty again.
"Wake up."
Gepard jolts awake, uncurls his hands from where they're fisted in the blanket, scrubs the dampness off his face. Breathes. Breathes. Breathes. Today is supposed to be the day.
He throws on his civilian clothes, and he goes down to the shipyard the IPC had built. He finds a spot where he can see every person that returns to Belobog, and he waits.
And he waits and he waits and he waits.
No one he recognizes appears.
#sampard#gepo#hsr gepard#hsr sampo#gepard landau#sampo koski#honkai star rail#hsr#blood#my fics#lucid dreamer#there was more to this but it didn't feel right included here so part 2 tomorrow maybe?#I just think Penacony being the land of dreams presents some FASCINATING possibilities like showing up in other people's dreams#the end of masquerade duet killed me just beat me dead#Sampo going through all this trouble just to protect Belobog...#poor Ray got such an earful that night haha#In the Penacony dreamscape someone can change their appearance however they want but I think in this case where one of the dreamers AREN'T-#-on Penacony it would take more concentration to keep that illusion up#and if someone were say. hurt and badly bleeding. it would start to fall apart eventually as they lost their concentration.#but oh my heart#Sampo being away and missing Belobog so badly he shows up in his friends' dreams just to do the same mundane shit they always do...#He probably showed up to everyone#he sat around and kept Natasha company in her clinic. he pestered Seele until he provoked her into asking Bronya on a date.#he played one last song with Pela and Serval. he told them he'd always kept his old bass guitar.#he took Hook out on one last joyride on his scooter and he even let her sit up front and steer like she'd always wanted.#and he stood around to shoot the shit with Gepard#he got to go do things like run domestic errands together with him. as if they could have been something more than what they were at the en#it was nice to get the chance to do all that#it was nice
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Look.
Ace Attorney fandom.
I know why people don't like Turnabout Bigtop. I am among the people who dislike Turnabout Bigtop.
But I GET why people like the case. I'm not going to be one of those annoying people who just blindly dump on it because I hate those mfs too.
Thing about Bigtop isn't that it sucks. Thing isn't the weird grooming stuff (though that is a huge part of it). It's not that it could've been good.
It's that - in my personal OPINION - it could have been *great*.
I think it had the potential to be one of the best third cases in the trilogy. It had everything; a fun and goofy setting fit for a pretty dang goofy lawyer game - where the environment itself had jokes and quips and one-liners and mishaps and tomfoolery written all over it, it had the previous case introducing a very interesting and important plotline that gave background for one of the more well-loved characters while also introducing an equally fucked up and lovable new one who was a child forced into a shit childhood of naivete in a CIRCUS with another character who was very naive and childish - whose interactions could have been funny and cute and reflective of said shit from the previous case (seriously she becomes such an important character in the 4th case, WHY would they not include her in this one for some character development? How did they fuck up letting a CHILD explore a CIRCUS?? That would have made the interactions flow MUCH better).
They had a pretty good, sympathetic killer imo, a morally dubious victim, an asshole of a client (who was pretty flat admittedly in-game, but I like his weird, topsy-turvy reasoning for it in the anime. Also, I think Max being kinda a dick would have bode well for the themes of Farewell since most of his clients up to this point have been like...nice? Not nice, but sympathetic, but him having to defend someone who's innocent but a prick would have shown him that just because someone is an asshole, doesn't mean they deserve to suffer for it and that they have the potential to grow as people, which is almost a complete foil to what Matt was. Ultimately, I would have loved the contrast of them as clients and I think it would have also served as character development for Phoenix, especially with his low-empathy tendencies).
They just didn't think that far ahead. They just didn't execute it well enough. They just decided to make three of the adult characters fight for the hand in marriage of a teenage girl. (Bat's part of the story was actually kinda good if he was just YOUNGER, I think him doing that for Regina would have been a stupid thing someone in the circus would do to impress their crush. Damn you Ace Attorney and your weird treatment of underage girls!!)
It just flopped and that's ok.
Even though it kinda sucked, it can still mean something to me.
Also I'm a Moe Curls apologist. I liked him, shut up.
#didn't care for the dialogue either.#DON'T GET ME STARTED ABOUT FRANZISKA DON'T DON'T DON'T DON'T DON'T YOU DARE GET ME STARTED#THIS CASE WAS SO GOOD FOR HER DEVELOPMENT THAT'S NOT EVEN A “COULD HAVE” THING#sure she could've been fleshed out a bit more#but the stuff we get from our interactions with her in this case is GOOD. SHIT. It's just that this case is so hated that it's overshadowed#and yeah. i like Moe Curls. i think he's cool and he added some flair in an otherwise bleak case.#i think his whole unfunny clown schtick was very entertaining. it reminded me of this one shel silverstein poem i loved as a kid#clooney the clown.#tbh ive wanted to rewrite Bigtop for a while now#get a script together and all that. but im an amateur writer who's burnt out as shit and never posts anything writing related#except analysis i get way too excited and proud of. oh well#maybe someday.#also rq why does every other tripple-a game get really good in depth analysis video essays#with their complex literary themes talked about#but with Ace Attorney - a game about reading longer than most books - half the fans have the absolute most dogshit literacy comprehension#it's actually painful. ESPECIALLY with Franziska's character#anyway i'll stop.#ace attorney trilogy#ace attorney#ace attorney justice for all#turnabout big top#franziska von karma#phoenix wright#phoenix wright ace attorney#pearl fey#farewell my turnabout#moe curls#regina berry#ig ore if this is incomprehensible i did not proofread this.#i simply do not like how fran's only traits to somea these mfs is “annoying overemotional teenager haha grumpy whip lady”
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