#oooo i should talk about The Replacement... krrei essay next...?

[kurokeip]

The thing about keirei to Me is that they do love and care about eachother, but in a way that has a fundamental disconnect. I Will Elaborate.

Keito -> Rei

He can't see Rei as his equal. He struggles with humanizing Rei in his mind because of how high up on a pedestal he's put him. Rei was like his personal deity, and in a combination of reliance and hubris, he tried to use Rei like. Nobita did to Doraemon. (if that makes sense lol) Someone who had all of the answers and who could give him the gadgets he needed to solve any problem. To him, an existence like Rei is unreachable, but it is also worthy of centering a narrative off of. Rei is a great character. But he's not often aware of how dehumanizing that feels to Rei.

Rei -> Keito

That is his Dear childhood friend. Crossroad is about him realizing his friend didn't see him as an equal human. He even states that at one point, he'd held Keito to the same degree of closeness as Ritsu. And we know that he Yearns for a true friendship with Keito, but he's scared of reconnecting and reaching out, because theres a chance that Keito still doesn't see him as a human. It's why he's so unnecessarily roundabout with Keito, why he speaks harshly at times and kicks him away. He doesn't feel like he can help Keito in the same way normal friends do. He wants Keito to be a character in his own story, and also doesn't want to be written into another one. It's selfish of him to crave that, he knows.

This is why he seemed to defy the script in Succession Match too. It came from a place of care and longing. In Altered, Rei states that he played along with the Story that Keito and Eichi created out of a fondness for its writers (paraphrasing a bit), but that was a story that had large implications.

On the stage of the restoration live, where it's just the two of them in their own little world in a way, they can battle and bicker like kids with capes and large sticks, and Rei can relive the days where Keito would debate him relentlessly, face to face.