#parahumand

[greatwyrmgold]

Been thinking about Ai Hoshino (Oshi no Ko) and Kenzie Martin (Ward).

They're both girls from abusive households (including one incident where their parents put a hazardous substance in their food). Both are desperate to love and be loved, and contort their personalities around whatever they think other people would want from them. This involves a lot of fake smiles and false personas and a deeply flawed understanding of how interpersonal relationships are supposed to work, inhibited by disorders that were probably not diagnosed by anyone except fans. Both of them end up in industries where their talents can be exploited, which caused more problems.

The second-most-obvious difference between them is their age. (The first most obvious is Kenzie's tinker powers.) Ai is, what, 12 when she becomes an idol and 16 in chapter 1? Something like that? Kenzie became a parahuman at age 8 and she's 11 by the time Ward starts. By the end of her story, Kenzie might be as old as Ai was at the start of hers.

Kenzie also arguably has more supportive adults in her life. First her foster dads, later Breakthrough, probably some PRT staff in between. Unfortunately, where Ai tries to avoid potential problems, Kenzie has no social boundaries, which tends to sabotage any healthy relationships she wants to develop. (The iconic example being what happened with the foster dads, of course. She didn't know better and didn't have the intuition to realize she was missing something important.)

Ai's inhibitions are stronger, for better and for worse. This lets her function in society, but also means she isn't quite sure whether she loves her kids or not until the last minutes of her life. Where Kenzie dives into her relationships headfirst, Ai keeps a bit of distance between her and the people around her.

If circumstances allowed Kenzie to try and latch onto Ai, her response would probably be—to quote @aihoshiino—"free daughter??? Free daughter for Hoshino Ai????" Which could be good for both of them, they have complimentary needs and trauma...but the same was true of Ai and Hikaru, and we all saw how that ended.

I suspect Kenzie would find Ai weirdly cold. Sooner or later, I think Kenzie would pick up on that distance Ai keeps from people and start to worry. Ai doesn't have much use for Kenzie's cameras, so what does Ai get out of their relationship? Meanwhile, Kenzie's competent acting skills and advanced technology let her hide her emotions really effectively; sooner or later, Ai would notice that Kenzie is always energetic and helpful, and realize that she has no way of figuring out how Kenzie actually feels about anything. Not that either of them would actually voice these concerns. Neither of them is going to do anything that might drive someone away.

And that's before we consider whether Kenzie would get jealous of the twins (or whether Ruby would get jealous of Kenzie), or problems encroaching on them from their jobs as idol and superhero, or the plots of OnK and Ward.

Considerations about how to make characters in two very different worlds and timelines (and continents) interact are below the cut.

Let's start with time.

Wildbow's pretty good about his timelines and the fandom is great at putting the dates together. Kenzie was born in 2003, got powers in 2011, spent a few years in the Wards, and joined the therapy group that would become Breakthrough in 2015 (before her 12th birthday). And she participated in the big Worm spoiler in 2013 to some degree. (Houndstooth agrees that she "actually really helped".)

If I understand the OnK timeline, the twins were born around 2009, when Ai was 16. That means Ai was born around 1993, which would put her in first grade when the Kyushu incident happened, which would be as good an excuse as any to put her on the same continent as Kenzie. However, I'm pretty sure Ai gets murdered in 2013.

I'm more inclined to adjust OnK's timey-wimey line than Worm's detailed chronology. If we move the twins' births up to 2011 and Kenzie met Ai right after the big spoiler, Ai's murder would be scheduled either right before or towards the beginning of Ward's plot, which feels right.

That would put the start of Ai's career around 2007, her birth to 1995, and her family's refugee-ing to preschool. Leviathan's tsunamis and their aftershocks might be some of Ai's first memories, which I don't think is relevant to this scenario but it is sad. Anyways, it also means that Kenzie meets the twins when walking and talking isn't that suspicious. That reduces the chance of the Hoshino-Martin drama getting diverted by Kenzie's cameras catching magic babies doing un-baby-like things, which is good.

[sincerelynotserious]

Updated template to accommodate the heartless that I negotiated with for some space

Hi wormblr if anyone wants to help me stake out a spot on a streamers pixel canvas project I’ve got a start already

Here’s a link

[edust-assassin]

Absolutely

(holy shit its gwg, who i see everywhere; on bay12, on parahumand discussion forums, on strange reddit posts)

Guy who has only read Worm, experiencing his second piece of media: Getting a lot of 'Worm' vibes from this...