#so I'm trying to do this without a readmore so you don't get any of the other gillion sketches.. sad! | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

andreabandrea · 1 year ago

Text

The AndreaBandrea UTY post

I need some place to put my Undertale Yellow (UTY for short) thoughts & criticism, and this is my blog, so I might as well put them here. If you don't want to see constructive criticism about Undertale Yellow, don't click below the readmore!

Pretty much everyone I talk to really likes this game, and honestly, I'm really sad that I don't like it more. I like some parts of it quite a bit! But I have mixed feelings about other parts-- I think the writing and characterization could have been a little more impactful than they were, and I’ll be discussing that here. I don’t want to just rag on this game without expressing suggestions and parts that I do like in more detail, so those will be covered as well.

I also want to add a disclaimer that I don't have negative feelings towards the development team or fans of this game in the slightest. I have nothing but respect for the creators of Undertale Yellow. This project was obviously a massive undertaking with a lot of love behind it, and I'm glad to see that it's found success and a community of people who do enjoy it.

The reason I’m writing this post is that, again, I liked parts of this game and wish I enjoyed it more. If I didn’t like it at all, I just wouldn’t engage with it at all anymore. I also haven’t really seen any other people expressing constructive criticism on the game’s writing, so it’s felt more important for me to express these thoughts, be heard, and see if others feel the same way.

The Good

I'll start off with the things I like. The art, the animation, and the music are all fantastic. I was very impressed by the battle backgrounds and the little touches, like the way Clover runs. Clover doing things like reaching for other’s hands, giving fistbumps, drawing their weapon, changing their expression at times-- they feel very dynamic and fun to play as.

The music is really catchy and fun. I love the iterations on the battle theme-- Snowdin’s battle theme having bells, for example.

I also had fun with most of the fights in the game! I liked the unique mechanics that came into play (e.g. the lasso in North Star's battle). I think that changing the way Clover attacks compared to Frisk feels organic and fun.

I also love the mail system. Ever since you could deliver and receive letters in Paper Mario 64, I’ve been hooked on mail as a storytelling system in video games. I think the letters you receive are interesting and clever, and it’s a great way to keep past characters relevant in lieu of a cell phone.

I’m going to be discussing criticism of the characters later, so I’m going to take a moment to talk a little about things I liked about them. I really like Martlet’s optimism and belief in humans. Starlo made me laugh quite a few times and the Feisty Five have a great dynamic with each other. A lot of the background characters in the game are fun-- I like the one who serves you at the Honeydew Resort. The fact that you can go back to these vendors later on and get four new topics to talk about is fantastic and makes the world feel a lot more alive.

The Slightly Less-Good (and more disclaimers)

The writing is where the game falls short for me-- and it’s sad for me, because the writing is the heart of Undertale. I don’t think that the writing is bad by any means! I like the characters and story well enough, but- again- I just wish that I liked them more. I’ll try to incorporate suggestions so this isn’t just a total downer post without anything backing it up.

I want to express something about the ‘suggestions’ that I’ll be offering after the criticism. I know that Undertale Yellow is now out, and the team isn’t going to go back and change it now, and that’s totally fine. I don’t want to make it sound as if the team should change Undertale Yellow just because I have some reservations about it. I’m just one fan out of many. In the very off chance that a member of the Undertale Yellow development team is reading this--

First of all, hi!

Second of all, I know that changing major parts of Undertale Yellow at this point is very unrealistic, and I wouldn’t want you to. If anything, I’m honored you’re reading my ramblings at all. I’d be touched if you’d be willing to take some of my words to heart as you move onto your next creative projects.

The reason I’m including suggestions, therefore, isn’t because I think that the team should or must make these changes, but because I don’t want to just sound excessively negative about this game without offering a little feedback.

I don’t presume that my criticism and suggestions are objectively correct or better than what the Undertale Yellow team created. This is my personal blog, and these are my personal rambly thoughts about Undertale Yellow. The reason I’m including so many disclaimers is because I’ve gotten into discourse before due to poorly thought-out posts about Undertale, and I hope to avoid that this time. I don’t want to just not post something on my own blog, though, because I’m afraid it could be misconstrued or possibly upset somebody. So, I’m trying to discuss this as carefully as I can.

As one final disclaimer, I'll say that I know that it was more likely than not that I'd be at least a little disappointed by Undertale Yellow. The original Undertale was a very important game for me, and very little could reach that standard. (I think this is one reason why Toby decided to do Deltarune, a sort of AU/spinoff rather than a full-on "Undertale 2", and I respect that decision.)

I also think that quite a bit of my criticism is subjective-- several of the characters didn't fully click with me and several of the jokes just didn't land for me, personally. More people than you might think just didn’t connect with the regular Undertale, either. I’ll be talking a little about my subjective opinion on characters, but I’ll try to explain why I feel the way I do rather than just say, “XYZ character sucks because they’re lame, moving on.”

With that said, the post. I’ll be addressing my criticisms from smallest to largest. To begin, I’ll recap the plot of UTY to better analyze aspects that I do and don’t quite like. Spoilers abound.

Undertale Yellow Plot Recap!!!!

The central story of UTY, to my memory and understanding, is as follows:

In the past, a fallen human being went on a rampage in Snowdin and hurt Kanako, the daughter of Chujin, a former royal scientist and monster who happens to be a boss monster. Dalv, an unrelated monster, was also hurt in this incident and sealed himself away in the Ruins in a self-imposed isolation. Chujin’s family (presumably him or Kanako, but not Ceroba, as she doesn’t recognize Dalv) felt bad about this and left him corn from Starlo’s farm as a gift. But, when Chujin died, the corn gifts stopped coming.

Stepping back a bit, after the incident, Chujin developed a deep hatred for humanity. He invented a security robot called Axis and told it to go kill the human. Axis did this (and we will return to this later). Chujin kept the soul (at least, for a time) to experiment on.

At some point in this, Axis failed to impress Asgore and Chujin was fired as the royal scientist. At some point as well, he began to teach Martlet how to build puzzles. Martlet got a job in the royal guard and Chujin disapproved because humans are very dangerous.

Due to experimenting on his own boss monster soul in an attempt to find a way to turn regular monsters into boss monsters so that monsterkind could potentially stand up to the threat of humanity, Chujin wound up very ill and then passed away. He left video tapes to his wife, Ceroba, asking her to finish his research. However, he asked her to leave Kanako out of this so she could live a normal life.

Ceroba agreed to finish this research, but Kanako found out about it and asked to be experimented on because she, like her father, has the power of a boss monster. Ceroba agreed to experiment on her, which injured Kanako and caused her to ‘fall down’. Ceroba sent the near-death Kanako to Dr. Alphys, the new royal scientist, who was collecting ‘fallen down’ monsters for her own experiments with determination.

Plot summary over. I’ll take a closer look at some of these aspects going forward.

UTY Plot Criticism

I don’t feel like this is a bad story, necessarily. With that said, it doesn’t feel quite as tied together as Undertale’s story does, and I think certain aspects don’t land.

First, I feel that the majority of the plot elements about Chujin & Kanako get dumped on you at the last minute. You might be thinking that the story about Chara & Asriel is also dumped on you at the last minute-- and to an extent, this is true. You do get a massive amount of information regarding their story near the end of the game, in the True Lab.

However, Chara & Asriel's story is a massive part of the narrative from the very beginning. You meet 'Asriel' (Flowey) in the very beginning of the game. Toriel is in the Ruins due to the fallout of Chara & Asriel's deaths. Asgore and the monsters are trying to kill Frisk and steal their soul because of this, and the royal guard has taken it up as their mission. Sans is aware of an anomaly that will end everything (implied to be the player), and he would have 'killed Frisk where they stand' had he not made a promise to Toriel. And so on.

I’ll be reviewing criticism of the game’s plot in sections themed around each major character. I will be discussing suggestions about each character in their respective section here, as I discuss things I didn’t quite like about each character, my suggestions are intrinsically tied to why I didn’t quite like them.

Dalv

The connections between characters and the Chujin & Kanako plot feel a bit tenuous to me. Similarly to Toriel, Dalv is in a self-imposed isolation in the Ruins due to a major incident in his past. He fears humans due to the attack he suffered in Snowdin, and he suffers loneliness after losing his friend (who left him corn). When he sees Clover, he wonders if this is “some sort of haunting” (implying he knows that the human who attacked him was killed).

In the pacifist route, Clover can prove to Dalv that not all humans are evil and Dalv can move out and learn how to trust people again. This becomes a recurring theme-- Clover, pure of heart, proving to monsters that humanity isn’t that bad after all.

However, Dalv then disappears from the story. His motivation is to basically be left alone, but once you prove to him that humanity isn’t so bad, his role in the story is essentially complete.

I feel that, by comparison, Toriel’s motivation is more active-- to protect humans who fall down from Asgore. It’s this motivation that drives her to return at the end of the true pacifist route and ultimately make the true ending of Undertale possible.

Dalv’s passiveness makes him a weaker character to me. Now that you’ve proven that you’re his friend and humanity isn’t so bad, I would have liked to have seen him take an active motivation to protect his friend or help them in some way. We don’t have to copy Undertale beat for beat and have him dramatically save Clover from Asgore or anything, but it would have been nice to see him vouch for Clover in some way at some point.

Now, for the final time, I know that UTY is released and major changes aren’t likely. Some of my suggestions are “I would have liked to see this, but this change would require redoing the entire game,” which I don’t think should or could be done at this stage. This is just daydreaming and- if I’m praising myself highly- potential considerations for the devs’ future works (and the works of any other creatives who are reading this).

With this proposed major change to Dalv’s character out of the way, I’ll suggest instead the most minimal possible change that I would like to see, so my suggestions don’t feel entirely like just daydreaming.

I really like how Dalv sends Clover a letter about his moving out to Snowdin. This is active of him in terms of motivation-- Clover is his friend and he wants to keep in touch with his friend. I’d be absolutely thrilled to see a little bit of extra dialogue for him in an update. After you go back to Snowdin and see him, I think the dialogue he already has is totally fine! But, I’d be really happy if he’d take initiative and tell Clover a little more about his experience with the past human, or invite them to rely on him, too.

Martlet

Martlet felt… a bit restrained in terms of her writing, to me. I think that one aspect of Undertale’s writing is that it’s not afraid to go over the top. Papyrus isn’t just silly, he wears a costume every day and cartoon eyes pop out of his head when he’s surprised. Undyne isn’t just determined, she aspires to be a badass anime heroine. I like Martlet just fine, but she never had a moment where she really stood out to me in this way.

Martlet’s defining traits are that she likes puzzles, she loves reading and abiding by the rules of the royal guard, and she believes in humanity and wants to help Clover. As I said before, I really like this optimism and belief. I’d like to see more of it.

Near the end of the true pacifist route, Martlet says that she was taught in the royal guard that humans are scary, but Clover proved to her that humans are kind. This felt very abrupt to me at the time-- we know that Chujin disapproved of her joining the royal guard due to his own trauma, but Martlet had no personal involvement in the last human’s violent actions.

Martlet doesn’t seem to have any reason to dislike humans more than any other monster. We learn in her diary that she essentially joined the royal guard out of a desire to help people and build puzzles, and also because she needed a job.

If she’s just supposed to be a representative of the average monster and their feelings toward humanity, and her growing to like Clover is meant to represent how all of monsterkind could grow to like humankind, that would be one thing-- but I think that she specifically is meant to represent a person who wholeheartedly believes that humans can be good and that humans and monsters can live in harmony. In the no mercy route, she repeatedly pleads to Clover to do better, that they don’t have to act this way, that she wants to help them. That’s not the response of the average monster, who fights Clover or tries to flee from them.

I believe the intention is that Chujin & Martlet represent either end of an ideology axis (no pun intended). Chujin believes all humans are evil no matter what, but Martlet believes that humans can choose to be good. But why does she choose to believe in humans other than a sense of personal optimism?

I would have liked to have seen some defining event that made Martlet choose to believe in the goodness of humanity. I would have liked to have her being kind and optimistic to a fault be more of a defining trait-- to have that go over the top in an Undertale-style way. A lot of her interactions with other characters just personally weren’t very memorable to me.

Martlet spends a lot of the game sidelined. She loses you in the Mines. She gets thrown in jail in the Wild East. She has to go back to Snowdin once you're freed. Yes, she's there for you in the true pacifist route, but she's otherwise pretty absent through the neutral/true pacifist routes.

I recognize that the main characters in Undertale can be absent after you leave their respective sections of the game. However, you're able to call Papyrus & Undyne as much as you want, and you get a major hang-out (or “date”) with each of them and Alphys which gives time to expand on their backstory and character arc. Martlet doesn't get that. We even get a little bit of time to hang out with Dalv after we become his friend, but Martlet shoves us on a boat and hurries us to the next area as soon as we beat her. And sure, we get to talk to her on the boat, but it’s just a bit of silly dialogue-- it doesn’t really expand on her character. It feels like a missed opportunity.

So, yes, my major suggestion on her would be to zoom in more on her belief in you and let her be a liiiiitle sillier and more over the top, and give more opportunity for Clover to hang out with her.

At this stage, however? In this proposed minor ‘dialogue update’, I’d be really excited to see a little something more from her. Maybe a letter? She does send you one, but only in the neutral route to tell you to meet her on top of the apartments. It would be a good opportunity to either let her be silly or explain a bit about when she came to want to believe in humans-- or both, ideally.

Starlo

I honestly have very little to say on Starlo. He seems to be the fan favorite, and I did find his section fun! Ultimately, though, he's just kind of… there? I mean, he's on the periphery of Ceroba's (and Chujin and Kanako’s) story because he's her childhood friend (and his family grew the corn that Chujin gives to Dalv), and yes, he later on reminds her that she can still choose to be a better person because he also almost killed Clover! However, every monster in the game almost killed Clover.

There’s nothing wrong with having a silly character who wears a costume and isn’t a major player in the plot. I feel like Starlo is similar to Papyrus in this way. But Papyrus isn’t just a goofball, he’s the monster in Undertale who believes unerringly in Frisk & the player’s ability to do better because he firmly believes that you can make anything happen if you just try. This belief helps elevate Papyrus from comic relief to an actual rounded character.

I don’t feel like Starlo has any sort of strong conviction like that. We do learn that he wants to bring hope to the Underground by roleplaying as a sheriff in the Wild East town, giving them a slice of (supposed) surface life. I think this is fine, but I’d like to see a bit more of it. In the no mercy route, he does bravely stand against you because he’s a sheriff and it’s his job to bring justice to murderers like Clover.

My expectation when I first met him, a fellow cowboy (gender-neutral), was that he’d have his own ideas about justice. I expected that he would clash with Clover about these ideals, and neither of them would be quite right or wrong-- and this would prove that justice can’t be measured mathematically, and one outcome can’t be applied to all situations.

But, he’s not at all bad the way he is. He has a lot of fans, after all. The minor change I’d suggest now that the game is out is that I’d be interested in learning why the cowboy aesthetic specifically appealed to him. Maybe a diary in his room explaining that Westerns are the epitome of ‘justice’ to him? I’d like to see a peek into the motivation that transformed an ordinary farm boy into someone who could bravely stand against a murderous human.

Ceroba

I’ll be honest. I want to like Ceroba, but I don’t.

I understand that there's an attempt to mirror Asgore in that the war against humanity, in general, has taken Ceroba's partner and her child from her-- and ultimately, Clover forgives her and helps her learn how to move on. It's about letting go, just like Undertale. I get that. But Ceroba’s story doesn't land for me, personally. In order to talk about Ceroba, I need to talk about her husband, Chujin, because Ceroba spends so much of the story acting out Chujin's will.

Whereas monsters in Undertale do attempt to kill Frisk and steal their soul, and Asgore has killed other children before, it's framed in a very 'video game' violence sort of way (again, Undertale has these meta elements). Ultimately, in the True Pacifist route, none of Frisk's deaths have stuck, and Asgore's actions- while reprehensible- allowed for Asriel to break the barrier once and for all.

Chujin, in the video tapes he leaves for Ceroba, implies that Axis’s murder of the human- presumably a child, like Clover and Frisk- was very violent and bloody. It feels a tiny step beyond the 'video game violence' aspect, for me. While it’s shown that Chujin regrets this, it still doesn’t change the way that this violence is expressed in the game.

Instead of giving the human’s soul right to Asgore to bring monsterkind closer to freedom, Chujin- who has already been fired by Asgore, I should add- chooses to keep the soul and experiment with it.

This is very selfish, even though he has good intentions. He’s told nobody else about his experiments with his soul at this point- not even his wife- and Asgore has told him to cease all activities as the royal scientist.

While monsters do want Frisk's soul for their own selfish reasons, they notably do not butcher them violently, succeed in this, and still try to get painted with the same quirky and fun brush that the other characters get.

After Chujin dies, he leaves detailed instructions for his wife to continue his work-- and although he says "don't involve Kanako", he leaves her all the tools she would need to experiment on Kanako, and notably, no other way to finish his work except to experiment on Kanako.

As I said, Kanako finds out about this and asks to be experimented on. And while she does give consent, she is a child. I cannot stress this enough-- she is a child who just lost her father and is still wracked by grief. Kanako is a child who cannot possibly know what she is consenting to.

Ceroba chooses to experiment on Kanako and more or less kills her. And then she chooses to send her 'fallen down' daughter to Alphys's experiment, despite the fact that Kanako presumably has some sort of trace of human soul/determination left in her-- which could have compromised Alphys's work as well.

Let's return to how I said that Ceroba is a mirror for Asgore. She's made so many mistakes and it's cost her her family and she can't stop now or it will all be for nothing. She's done horrible things, just like Asgore.

But the difference is that Asgore is the king of monsterkind. Asgore has no desire to kill human beings. He declared war on humanity in a fit of anger and grief, but the Underground had lost hope due to the loss of Chara & Asriel. Believing that Asgore could gather seven human souls and free them all brought hope back to the Underground.

His actions, while wrong, are selfless-- and much less explicitly violent and more 'cartoon violence'-like. Chujin & Ceroba have the well-being of monsterkind as their own pure intentions, but their actions are far more selfish and violent. Axis, Chujin’s creation, massacred a human being. Yet we're still expected to find them silly and fun and relatable-- it just feels unusual.

I’m not someone who hates nuance or morally gray characters. One reason I’m so sad that I don’t quite like Ceroba is that I love morally gray women. It’s just that we’re not allowed to really dislike Chujin or Ceroba for what they’ve done, and instead we’re supposed to see Ceroba- and Axis- as silly and relatable like the rest of the characters.

Immediately after Ceroba’s boss battle, instead of processing what just happened to a greater extent, Clover chooses to sacrifice their soul for monsterkind.

I understand that the intention is that Ceroba's grief and Chujin's desperation to protect monsters from humanity contributed to Clover's decision to sacrifice their soul. However, the idea is- to me- abrupt. Ultimately, too, Clover's decision is just as much about how much they love their friends (and how it's impossible for them to hide out in the Underground forever) as it is about Ceroba and her family.

Chara & Asriel’s deaths, Asgore’s war on humanity, the war of humans and monsters-- these elements impact every part of Frisk’s journey. But Chujin and Ceroba’s actions, while impactful on Martlet and Dalv to varying extents, are only part of Clover’s journey. And Chujin and Ceroba did awful things for this comparatively minor impact on the plot.

EDIT: Further analysis about how Ceroba doesn't have a lot of agency and spends a lot of the plot just acting out Chujin's will, as well as the inconsistency in her characterization (and feelings about sacrificing Clover and the well-being of Kanako), with input from @carlyraejepsans. Thank you!

I would have liked to have seen a bit more from Ceroba without any influence from Chujin- maybe an interaction explaining her relationship with Martlet and an additional conversation about Martlet’s nearly unwavering belief in humans vs Ceroba’s inherited grudge against humanity- but I don’t know where this would fit in. Adding more time for Clover to process Ceroba’s boss fight before sacrificing their soul might throw off the pacing.

In general, though, Ceroba's boss fight- while flashy and fun- ultimately feels pointless with how little she learns from it and how quickly she changes her stance on using Clover's soul for the benefit of monsterkind, and what will happen to monsters after they break the barrier. To quote @carlyraejepsans in the ask linked above:

In addition, it's like the writing didn't want to commit to her delusions and little character development. She feels that her daughter is alive and thinks she can save her—wait no that was a lie—wait it wasn't. The moment she's defeated she goes "Agh, what was I thinking!" out loud (which is already a questionable writing choice imo but i digress), and recognizes that sacrificing Clover for her plans is horrible... and then 5 seconds later Clover chooses to sacrifice themself to break the barrier and whoops nevermind she's suddenly the one getting the others onboard with the idea... wait. didn't she say she was making the serum because the humans would've only slaughtered them again if they broke the barrier? oh wait wasn't that also chujin again? whoops.

I would have felt better if there were more room to view Chujin and Ceroba in a critical light (and time to view Ceroba outside of just being a mom and wife). I can’t think of any ‘minor’ suggestion that wouldn’t require a lot of editing.

Axis…

And... okay. Let's talk about Axis real quick.

I want to give the dev team the benefit of the doubt, but I need to point out that this security robot's name is "Axis 014." If you don't know what I mean by pointing this out, I'll just say that both of these terms are nazi dog whistles and allow you to look up the specifics.

I recognize that, by this point, it’s too late to change his name. I’d at least be grateful if the team would acknowledge this and confirm that they aren’t nazis.

Axis’s name makes his actions far worse in retrospect. He, as a security robot wants to kill a child, but he isn't able to anymore because his programming has changed. So, as a legal loophole, he forces them to hold 'a weapon' (a trash can lid) so he can justifiably kill them. This is the same robot that brutalized and murdered a human being in the past at Chujin's behest.

It feels tone deaf and ultimately the one thing I’d just outright call bad about UTY. I don’t think it was intentionally done this way, but I don't like that we're supposed to find this nazi-aesthetic police brutality robot "quirky and relatable" like the Undertale cast. In the true pacifist ending, he falls in love with a robot made out of a trash can and his eyes turn into cartoon hearts and etc. It’s even more jarring than viewing Chujin & Ceroba in a fun/relatable way.

In the no mercy route, Axis will defend himself and claim that his programming forced him to kill the human and he didn't want to. This "just following orders" defense feels weak to me as well, personally. Axis clearly delights in harming humans, going out of his way to try to kill Clover. But also, Axis spends a significant amount of the game displaying a very similar amount of free will to the other characters. He’s not just a janitor robot that sweeps back and forth.

He’s a nearly sentient being-- and the fact that there are these nearly sentient robots makes Alphys’s accomplishment of creating “a robot with a soul” (at least, so she claims-- Mettaton is only the ghost in a machine) much less impactful to me, personally. Yes, Asgore thinks that Chujin failed in creating a sentient robot, and so it’s impressive that Alphys supposedly did it. But I don’t know why Asgore wouldn’t be more skeptical of Alphys’s accomplishment after Chujin failed more than eight times and set fire to his flowers.

I think that Axis is ultimately a missed opportunity to make a really villainous character. This concept that he disobeys his programming- used as sort of a parallel for law, as a security robot- to attack Clover could have been explored to further the ‘justice’ theme. He doesn’t write his programming (the laws), he just carries it out (violently enforces the laws).

The ‘minor’ suggestion I’d make, though, is to just acknowledge the name.

Undertale & Meta Elements

Now, we’ll be addressing my largest criticisms-- the omission of meta elements and the way Flowey is written.

Undertale Yellow never quite stopped feeling like a fan game to me. And it is, of course-- but I think that it feels as if it tries so hard to be Undertale (in the writing style, the humor, etc) that it fails to forge an identity of its own, and that holds it back from being just a fangame to a fangame that succeeds in expanding on the original creative work.

At the same time, although UTY tries to feel like Undertale, I don’t think it captures certain elements that make Undertale be Undertale.

Whereas Undertale was ultimately about video games as a medium and the normalization of violence in them, UTY doesn’t have this level of metatextual commentary. UTY does have a running theme of 'justice'-- and I don’t think this is bad! After all, if Undertale already said all there was to say about video games and violence, why retread that path? I respect that UTY knows its limits and simply focuses on justice as a concept instead.

At the same time, Undertale isn’t just an RPG about mercy-- it’s an RPG about RPGs. The fact that you can talk to and spare enemies isn’t just a quirk of the game, it’s what the game is about. This is one thing that makes Undertale great that UTY doesn’t focus on.

UTY doesn’t completely ignore these elements, of course. Flowey takes over resetting for you, and you do have three distinct paths based on whether or not you kill enemies-- the ‘true pacifist’ path, the ‘neutral’ path, and the ‘no mercy’ path (I will not be calling it the ‘genocide’ route, especially in light of recent world events). Through whether or not you choose to kill enemies, the theme of ‘justice’ is explored-- who is Clover seeking justice for? In the true pacifist route, Clover seeks justice for the monsters, while in the no mercy route, Clover seeks justice for the fallen humans before them.

However, Flowey taking over the mechanics of saving and resetting for you makes concept of ‘the player’ obsolete. I recognize that not everyone in the Undertale/Deltarune fandom quite enjoys the concept of 'the player' and the meta elements of these games due to the fact that there can be implications that playing Deltarune (as an example, which ups the meta elements quite a bit) can actively hurt Kris and make their world a worse place. However, Deltarune isn’t a complete work and we don’t know this for certain. Additionally, I feel as if at least acknowledging Toby's intentions are important to analyzing the work, no matter what one's personal feelings are about them.

The Importance of the Player

The presence of you, the player, is important in Undertale. Frisk is a subversion of the 'blank slate protagonist' trope. You think that you're able to name them and control them, but in the True Pacifist route, Frisk begins to act on their own (they walk slowly in some parts of the True Lab because they're presumably afraid, etc). In the end, you realize that Frisk is their own person with their own name, and you as the player have to let go-- when Frisk & the monsters go to the surface, Flowey (a mirror of the player themselves) urges you to let them go. Don't treat this as a game anymore-- don't replay and wring out any last drops of content you can. You enjoyed it, now move on.

But many players want to see the No Mercy route because it’s the last thing they haven’t done in the game, and they don’t want to let go. And that's where the role of you, the player, becomes undeniable in the game's story. What is the No Mercy route except playing a 'typical' RPG in the way it's meant to be played? You grind to become stronger, killing every enemy that stands in your way. And when you've killed all the monsters and become as strong as you can be, you've won.

Many players didn't do this because they hate the characters in Undertale and want to hurt them-- if they hate them, they likely just wouldn't play the game. Many players did it because they like the characters in Undertale, and wanted to see what would happen. They couldn't stop playing. And this is exactly what Sans means in his dialogue during his boss battle-- to paraphrase, "you think that because you can, that means you have to."

This is one of the ways that Flowey is a mirror of the player. Flowey didn't start killing out of malicious intent, but because he had become so bored and isolated that he just "had to see what happens".

Chara's role at the very end of the No Mercy route is to call you out directly for this. They tell you that their power was yours. Their words were very misconstrued by fans for a long time, and they themselves wound up as a scapegoat for the No Mercy route-- but ultimately, there's no reason for Chara or Frisk to kill every monster in the Underground. The only reason is because of you, personally. You want to see what would happen. You want to grind and play it like a typical RPG.

They call you out for this if you don't want to delete the game world at the end. Why go back to that world that you've already destroyed? Why play nice with the monsters that you just massacred because you can?

Why am I talking about this at such length? Because I believe that ‘the player’ and how they interact with the world of Undertale is important. Characters lampshade the UI and battle mechanics often-- Flowey talking about the world as a game and ‘saving’ and ‘loading’, Papyrus telling you to “press C to open the dating HUD”, Sans explaining ‘LV’ and ‘EXP’, and so on.

This is my personal opinion, and I recognize this is very nitpicky, but I feel that not acknowledging this or adding to these meta elements in some way makes UTY weaker for me.

Flowey’s Role in UTY

Flowey essentially saves and resets for you because he's bored, and he wants to use Clover as a tool to access Asgore’s five stored human souls. His role as a mirror for the player becomes him essentially just acting as a stand-in for the player. While this in itself can invite self-reflection, I think that the execution of his role is a little awkward.

We learn at the end of the neutral route that Flowey has already reset the timeline hundreds of times by the time we first start playing the game. According to him, Clover always ends up at a dead end (they choose to stay in the Underground for the rest of their life) or they die (and they can’t reset of their own power). Thus, Flowey chose to set Clover on an alternate path by sabotaging a lever in the Ruins, which made them fall into the Dark Ruins and meet Dalv.

Flowey then tries to kill Clover and absorb their soul because they, again, hit a dead end. Yet he gives up on it after a while because Clover won’t stop fighting back, and he thinks he can just reset and try again anyway.

At the end of the true pacifist route, Clover instead opts to sacrifice their soul willingly to Asgore & monsterkind. Flowey comments that he could just reset (and you still can, if you want to play again), but Clover “earned their rest” and he calls them a friend.

This progression from “Clover is a tool that Flowey is using to access the 5 human souls” to “Clover is a friend and Flowey willingly lets them die and stay dead” feels undeserved and underdeveloped to me.

"But, Andrea," you might say, "Flowey went from trying to kill Frisk as Omega/Photoshop Flowey to hugging Frisk as Asriel really quickly too!"

Yes, but in that short time, Frisk and Flowey/Asriel had a Whole Thing where Frisk 'saved' him like everyone else and he learned he needs to let go, too. It was a short time, but it was a poignant time. By contrast, Flowey is pretty much absent throughout most of UTY's true pacifist route. Sure, you could easily say that he just got bored of Clover and gave up-- but that, too, doesn’t feel quite right to me.

I really hate to say this, but I feel that Flowey’s writing in UTY cheapens the original Undertale for me, which is why this is one of my major criticisms of the game.

Flowey's entire character arc in Undertale is about how he was stuck with the same places and same people for an endless amount of resets. In my opinion, the limited amount of places and characters for him to interact with in Undertale only adds to how trapped he is (and the Underground being so small really strengthens the concept of "there's overpopulation and the monsters are running out of time to find a solution/earn their freedom" that we see in the game, but I digress).

So when something finally changes and he meets Frisk, it's deeply impactful to him. Finally, someone new to play with! Finally, potential for change! Even though Flowey admits that, even if Chara came back, there's a great chance that he couldn't really love them due to his lack of soul, just experiencing something new for the first time in ages is as close to love as he can possibly get. So Flowey:

Starts to believe that Frisk is Chara, this person he ‘loves’ or wants to love, or some manifestation of Chara.

Refuses to let Frisk go, even if that means- when Asriel has the power of seven human souls- just resetting the Undertale timeline over and over instead of going to the surface or doing anything else.

For Flowey to have gone through everything that he does in UTY- all these new places, all these new people, Clover included- weakens this, in my opinion. And sure, there's very heavily implied to be lots of places that Frisk doesn't explore and people they don't meet-- 99% of New Home and its residents, for instance. But Clover themselves is the real problem for me.

No matter how many times Flowey reset with Clover, I really struggle to believe that he would get bored of a human being that easily. He even said that Clover's actions and choices would sometimes change from reset to reset, and he only recently learned how dramatically he could alter their path by sabotaging that lever in the Ruins. Clover isn't a static being-- and even if they were, they're at least a new static being.

And although we learn in the neutral route that Flowey can't really absorb Clover's soul because they fight back too much, I can't believe that would stop Flowey so easily. What about at the end of the pacifist route, where Clover has given it up willingly and it's being transported in a little jar? Clover’s body is separated from the soul, now-- could Clover still fight back?

Or, what about if Flowey tried to kill them as soon as they entered the Ruins? Or, what if Flowey played nice the entire route and then at the end tried to convince Clover that if they sacrificed their soul, he would take it to Asgore for them? With access to full control of the timeline, I don't think Flowey would give up on this. We learn in Undertale how painful it is for him to be soulless and how desperate he is to access power so that things will change.

For Flowey to acknowledge Clover as a 'friend'- maybe even a true person, not just a compilation of dialogue- suggests character growth. It suggests remorse for his resets that he isn't capable of having and doesn't have until the events of Undertale. I just don't feel like it’s earned.

Flowey is, of course, an unreliable narrator.

At the end of the no mercy route of UTY, Flowey expresses that he never saw Clover as a friend-- he only enjoyed watching them die over and over again. It should be noted that this was said while under extreme duress (Clover is LV 20 by this point and has killed everyone save for Asgore), and this route isn’t canon in the way that the neutral and pacifist routes are.

With that said, if we agree that Flowey can’t feel love as a soulless being, then I could argue that this is about as much of a ‘friend’ as anyone could be. This is how he wanted to keep Frisk (“Chara”, in his mind) for eternity when he had the six human souls + the entirety of monsterkinds’ souls-- just watch them try over and over again, for eternity.

Why am I contradicting myself? Because, let’s suppose that Flowey doesn’t mean Clover is a ‘friend’ in the traditional sense- that they earned his respect and he cares for them in some way- but Clover is a new toy that he got bored with and gave up on. I feel like this, too, makes Undertale a little weaker.

If Flowey did have some type of positive regard for Clover, but was willing to let them go, then it feels- to me- like Frisk’s role in his story isn’t that significant. Frisk helped him learn how to let go and move on, but Flowey has already demonstrated being capable of this. The circumstances are different- if Flowey gives up at the end of Undertale’s true pacifist route, it’s over for real, whereas if he gives up at the end of UTY, he can just wait for another human to fall- but I feel like the core feeling is the same. Flowey, by the start of Undertale, doesn’t strike me as someone who’s capable of letting go.

So, how would I have changed this?

I recognize that- again- Undertale already made these points about video games and violence, and Flowey has his entire character arc in that game. For Flowey to have more of an arc in this game would potentially make this game no longer line up with canon Undertale or weaken Undertale further. And why retread old ground that Undertale already talked about?

I respect the decision to tell a self-contained story, but the meta commentary about video games in Undertale is so significant for me that I personally would have liked to see a bit more of it in Undertale Yellow. I also recognize how much of my criticism of Flowey’s writing in UTY is subjective. It feels unrealistic for me, his arc feels abrupt for me, it makes Undertale less poignant for me.

A lot of people love his inclusion in this game, and it’s very novel to see Flowey as a friend throughout most of UTY and hear his snarky commentary on demand rather than having him as an enemy who’s absent through most of the game, as he is in Undertale.

The Flowey Suggestions

First, I’ll be honest. I know this is not and has never been possible, but my easiest solution to the dilemma of Flowey’s lack of a character arc- and the lack of an ability to give him a character arc- would have been to just remove him from UTY.

I think that Flowey’s inclusion in the story of the yellow soul human and his role saving and loading could have been interesting. It goes against certain story elements implied in Undertale, and popular fan theories-- and I don’t mind that, if something meaningful is done with it. But, I feel as if Flowey’s relationship to Clover isn’t impactful enough to justify including him.

To clarify on ‘implied story elements’ and ‘popular fan theories’:

While I might be misremembering, I thought that it was implied in Undertale that Flowey came into being after Asgore had already collected six human souls, and that a significant amount of time had passed since the last human had fallen down.

I won’t go into it at length because this post is long enough and I, again, am not an Undertale expert. With that said, it’s also implied that all human souls are capable of saving/loading/resetting in the Underground. If you make Frisk tell Asgore that he killed them before, he just nods as if he’s used to it-- and he’s the one character who we know has killed humans before.

Now, how did Asgore successfully kill beings that can just reset the game whenever they die? Well, Sans faces the same dilemma in Undertale’s no mercy route. There’s no way that he can permanently defeat you, the player, who is a real being. Therefore, the way he ‘wins’ is by infuriating you enough with his difficult boss fight until you give up and stop playing Undertale (or, at least, reset and make better choices).

Think about all the times you’ve played a game, got stuck on a hard boss, and never played it again. While it’s not ‘canon’ to the story- giving up on your copy of Mario doesn’t mean Bowser really wins- functionally, giving up on a game means that the story ends for you. This is how I believe Asgore captured the six human souls, even if they were also capable of resetting like Frisk is-- he fought them until they gave up.

Humans all are said to have great amounts of ‘determination’, not just red soul bearers. We don’t even know what trait the red soul exemplifies. Whatever it is, I don’t think it’s determination itself.

The bottom line is that I don’t think it would be unrealistic for Clover to be able to save/load/reset on their own, or for Flowey to not exist yet during the time they fell down.

But, I get it, Flowey was in UTY’s demo that has been out for seven years. He’s in the trailers. He couldn’t be removed at any part of development, and he sure as hell can’t be removed now.

My second suggestion would have been to zoom in on him, instead. While the prequel is about Clover, the yellow soul human, I would have liked to see it be about Flowey in a significant way. I kept hoping for Clover to have an opportunity to ask Flowey at some point, “why are you helping me, anyway?”.

This is my personal interpretation, but I’ve come to believe that Flowey thinks that the reason he’s stuck as a flower is that it’s a punishment. Because he, as Asriel, refused to fight back, he failed Chara, and now they’re dead. Now he’s stuck as a rinky-dink flower with no soul, he can’t love his former family, and he can’t stop playing this game.

In the no mercy route of Undertale, Flowey feels very much like he’s trying to appeal to Frisk- the person he believes is Chara- in a way like a younger sibling trying to impress an older sibling. He says he’s impressed by how you killed everyone. He helps solves puzzles so you won’t have to slow down. He brags to you about how he’s also a heartless killer.

Notably, he talks about his past. He tells ‘Chara’ that he was afraid to start killing, at first. He said he wouldn’t enjoy it, but he just had to know what would happen.

Then, Flowey laughs and says that you (Chara) know how liberating it is to be this way-- to kill people and shape their fates. He ‘recognizes’ Frisk as being actually Chara because of how they killed everyone in the Ruins.

But we have no indication that Chara was a violent or evil person in their life. I believe that Flowey is partially projecting and partially recognizes Chara because, in the last moments of their life, they were telling him to kill. He always knew that Chara hated humanity and wanted power to better the position of monsterkind. This is why Flowey brags about how he has a plan to get the human souls, and once they do so, they can go to the surface and “finish what [they] started.”

To Flowey, in my opinion, killing people isn’t just about seeing what happens. It’s about trying to understand and appease Chara and doing what he thinks he should have done all that time ago, as Asriel.

I bring this up because I think that I would have liked to have seen this be explored in Undertale Yellow. Flowey is still a very misunderstood character today due to being an unreliable narrator. I believe that a lot of Flowey misinterpretations are due to taking him at face value-- hearing him say that he’s an unfeeling, manipulative, patient killer and agreeing with him.

But Flowey contradicts himself at several points. He gives up his “catch these friendliness pellets” trick after you dodging just a few times. These aren’t the makings of a perfect manipulative killer, but an impatient child. That’s who Flowey is at his core-- a child.

I recognize that, again, if Flowey told all of his tragic backstory to Clover and they became true friends, this wouldn’t fit with canon Undertale and his actions in that game. Flowey and Asriel distance themselves from each other, and it wouldn’t make sense for Flowey to tell this to Clover-- especially if he just views them as a tool to use and play with.

I think, however, it wouldn’t have been impossible for Clover to have learned this information about Flowey in a way that could still be canon compliant with Undertale itself. Hypothetically, maybe the “hopes and dreams” statue in the UG Apartments near the Core could have sparked intrigue in Flowey.

Maybe analysis of Flowey could have come up during his neutral route boss fight-- after all, Clover appears to peek into the minds of Ceroba and Martlet during the true pacifist and no mercy run boss fights, respectively. We already get a little of this- Clover has to run through a hallway of flowers in Flowey’s boss fight, and we hear sad and scared dialogue that’s presumably from a past version of Flowey himself. However, it’s not necessarily new and doesn’t quite add to Flowey’s character in my personal opinion.

I feel that including Flowey’s story more in some way would justify having Flowey in the game, and knowing the history of Asriel & Chara could factor into Clover’s decision to give up their soul for the sake of monsterkind. Chara, too, sacrificed themselves willingly, after all.

I don’t have a ‘realistic suggestion’ that could be implemented with a dialogue update because these suggestions are so vast-- and, ultimately, very personal and subjective. I have very strong feelings about Flowey.

Meta Elements of Undertale

In Undertale, you’re asked when you should or shouldn’t fight. As a pacifist, you can get through the Ruins without killing anyone. Flowey will then ask you what you would do if you met a relentless killer. Would you betray your morals and fight? Or would you give up and let yourself die?

Undertale is the friendly RPG where nobody has to die. While you have to kill Asgore at least once to do the neutral route, and you do have to fight back against Omega/Photoshop Flowey to end his battle, the game ultimately posits that there never is a good time to fight. You don’t beat Omega Flowey by being stronger than him, you do it by appealing to the souls and allowing them to rebel. You don’t beat God of Hyperdeath Asriel Dreemurr by beating him up, you do it by saving your friends- him included. The game, again, is about an inversion of the necessity of violence in video games to me.

I would have been interested in seeing an exploration of when it is necessary to fight, and this could be done through the lens of ‘justice’. Would Clover fight if it brought them closer to justice (on a pacifist route)? Is it morally correct to kill one person if it saves thousands?

Sparing someone is always the correct option in Undertale. In that way, the true route is quite linear-- there’s one solution that works for everyone. What if there were situations in UTY in which there is no single correct option that works for everyone? What if Clover were placed in situations in which they had to act as arbiter and decide between two outcomes and what is right? It could have been like how they get forced to solve the trolley problem in the Wild East, but with consequences.

Adding to putting a ‘twist’ on the elements that Undertale introduces with its combat system-- what if sparing someone ultimately enabled them to keep hurting others? What if fighting to weaken someone was the correct solution for once? These inversions could have built on the meta elements of Undertale, and I think that it would make Clover’s decision to sacrifice themselves to bring justice to monsterkind more poignant to me.

Again, I have no ‘realistic’ suggestion for this in the full release of UTY. I think that the plot about justice alone isn’t bad, but I would have been happy to see it tie into the gameplay a little more.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I think that UTY tries too hard to be Undertale without iterating on the aspects that made Undertale memorable. The characters feel like they fail to pop or relate to the game’s story in meaningful ways, and to me, the main story isn’t executed as well as it could have been (and far darker than the main Undertale in ways that don’t feel as if they’re handled sensitively).

I will say, again, that this project is very impressive in scope, and I applaud the dev team for finishing it and releasing it. I recognize that a lot of my distaste is subjective, and creating another Undertale is a fool's errand considering the acclaim that Undertale got. I recognize one final time that my suggestions are just daydreaming, and this game has already found a lot of success-- which I think it deserves.

I tend to criticize a lot of media I like, which might sound contradictory to some, but it makes perfect sense to me. If I don’t like something, I won’t engage with it. I think that the original Undertale has its flaws, too. At the end of the day, I like UTY, but no media is perfect. This is how I think it could have been better, and I hope that I think other creatives who want to make Undertale fanworks (or any creative works, for that matter) will take these thoughts into consideration.

Thanks for reading.

#bandrea blabbers #long post #the uty post

172 notes · View notes

neechees · 4 months ago

Note

hello! I’m Deaf and white. I will be going to my first powwow this month. May I ask, is it okay to stay the whole time or do I leave whenever? It is from 10-5pm. Also, are there cues I can look for for knowing when to stand? I will be going alone so I am nervous because of my Deafness, but really excited. Thank you if you see this :)

That's a good question! And that's so exciting for you!!

Yes! Anyone can come and go at any time they please. Some people even just drop in for food and then leave, that's also acceptable :) While generally there's a schedule for when different dances and events are planned throughout, it's not like mandatory that guests stay for the entirety of those planned events. You can stay for the whole thing (or leave whenever)! I can't really think of why you wouldn't be able to. Also, don't be surprised if, despite the schedule, things happen later than expected. Most pow wows aren't very punctual lol

Based on the schedule, it sounds like you're attending a mini pow wow. For pow wows, usually they take place in a circular structure known as an "arbor", and the outskirts of the structure will most times have bleachers, stands, and a walkway/path just in front of it. For cues on when to stand, if you see most people in the bleachers standing, then you can stand too. below is an example of a pow wow arbor where lots of people will be sitting in the stands, so that's where you can look to for the cue.

Most of the time, people will be asked to stand for at least parts of Grand Entry, the victory song, walking the flags out, and/or any prayers or other things (but based on the schedule of the pow wow, it's unlikely they'd have the things I'm thinking of, so I won't tell you about them because you likely won't have to worry about them). Once again, you can find the cue of when these things are happening just by looking at the crowd.

However, pow wows also recognize many people have disabilities, and it's not uncommon for emcees to specifically point out that if you have a disability (Ex: in a wheelchair, have a chronic illness that makes standing for long periods painful, walk with a cane, have an injury, etc), then you are not required to stand. If you're nervous, I'd say this could apply to you as well. Also, even many non-disabled Natives will also sometimes sit through times they are asked to stand, there's no like designated scolder that's going to come and get mad at you for not standing lol.

Also, tip, but I'd say you should try standing next to a/the drumgroup when they sing, you'll be able to feel the vibration and enjoy the music that way :) Lots of people like to go up and watch the singers or record them, so you won't be alone or look strange for doing this!

under the readmore below, I'm just also listing some general pow wow etiquette just in case you've never been taught about it!

Big one, but don't bring any alcohol, recreational drugs, or weapons to the pow wow. Security can and will kick you out if you do

if you see lawn chairs, those are people's personal chairs brought by other attendees, so you can't just sit on them because people brought their own seating.

additionally, if you see a blanket placed upon the bleachers, that is also someone's seating, the blanket means someone has marked their territory and will be back at some point, so don't sit there. feel free to bring you own blanket for this!

do not touch a dancer's regalia without permission

do not take any photos of any dancers without permission. There are also certain times when you are not allowed to record video or photos, but this might not be likely to happen to the pow wow you're going to just because it's so short: if you're nervous though, just don't take any pictures of the dancing or singing just to be safe.

hope this helps!

#anonymous

42 notes · View notes

shaanks · 5 months ago

Text

Hello!! So, for the lovely @quinloki 's birthday request event, I have written a thing!! It's a day later than I intended, but we made it!!

This thing is a monster and it got away from me lmfao, but I genuinely hope you enjoy it. :)))) Even in the short time I've known you, I've found you to be a lovely person and a wonderful friend, and you deserve all the fun and joy in the world. If this manages to be even a little part of that, I will be honored and thrilled.

So, without further ado, please allow me to introduce:

Cabin in the Woods

summary: A break-in, a road-trip, and a mysterious cabin all coalesce on what should have been a quiet Tuesday night in August. The world is changing, and our reader must adapt to a mystery they could not have imagined, and circumstances they could not have foreseen.

cw: op x reader with Sabo, dark content, yandere stuff. (nothing graphic or even violent really happens, but the circumstances are still there). there is a gun, but no gun violence is involved. no pronouns are used, but the reader is mentioned as having breasts and a vagina. there's smut, both explicit and implied. petnames used: darling, love, sweetheart, baby.

I don't think i'm forgetting anything but as always if this kinda stuff isn't your cup of tea, don't read it.

14k word count so it's going under a readmore, but yeah!! Here we go!

A bump in the road jolted you awake, head snapping up from where it had slumped against the passenger side window.

“Sorry love,” a soft, familiar voice whispered from beside you, accompanied by the soothing warmth of a palm smoothed over your thigh and you sighed, relieved, allowing your eyes to slip closed for a moment again before you straightened up in your seat.

It was hard to tell how long the two of you had been on the road. Sabo had insisted on driving so that you could rest, but that had been in the wee hours of the morning. It was still dark now, the sky a sickly, bruised grey that could have been dawn or dusk, and you scrubbed a hand over your face, trying to get your bearings. With a heavy sigh, you dropped your hand into your lap again, eyes roaming aimlessly around the car before settling on the dash radio. 5:15 AM.

You frowned, muted worry etching itself across your brow as you shifted your hand to rest atop the back of your fiance’s. He must have read the look in his periphery, or felt your concern seeping into his skin at your touch because he chuckled warmly, turning his hand palm-up to lace his fingers with yours.

“Don’t you worry, okay? I’m a veteran roadtrip driver, and besides...you needed the rest. Last night was…” your lover trailed off for a moment, something vague and inscrutable flittering across his features for a moment.

“...a little hectic,” you supplied, finishing his thought, and that gentle smile returned to his features once more as he regarded you with a wink.

“Hectic. Yeah. S’as good a word for it as any,” He squeezed your hand a little more tightly, rubbing his thumb along the back of it in tender, absentminded circles.

Silence settled back over your little car for a while then, and you turned your attention out the windows again, trying not to let the memory of the previous night, or the reason for your impromptu flight from civilization, enter your mind. When you’d drifted off, it had been on an empty, nondescript stretch of freeway, fallow farmland on either side, no other cars in sight beyond one lonely set of taillights which had bobbed along ahead of you for perhaps ten miles before drifting off down an exit of its own, leaving the two of you to the liminal solitude of late night travel.

If Sabo had pulled off at any stops along the way, he hadn’t woken you for them, but given that the scenery had changed from open farmland to winding, forested foothills, it couldn’t have been more than once. Under normal circumstances you might have chided him for it ‘Breaks are normal, it’s not worth the hour saved to give yourself a UTI trying to do the whole trip in one go,’ but given the circumstances…

You blinked your eyes shut hard, shaking the thoughts away before stretching to the side a little to rest your head on Sabo’s shoulder.

“Want me to take over for a bit, ‘Bo?” You asked softly, running your free hand up his forearm a little.

Sabo leaned over slightly, slumping his cheek against the top of your head for a moment before pressing a soft kiss there, lingering just long enough to breathe the scent of you in before straightening back up.

Nah, s’okay. We’re only a couple hours out from it now, and the side road is really hard to catch. Hell, I used to come out here every summer with my brothers, and I still drive right past it sometimes.” He said, the corners of his lips turning slightly upwards at the memory.

You adored his brothers, boisterous and warm in their own ways. They were the only people on earth that Sabo loved as much as you, and for a moment your heart clenched at the thought. Between the bars of your mental blockade, you hoped faintly that they were holed up somewhere safe, too. That they’d found their way out of the city before--

“Do you think we should try the radio again? See if there’s any news...any updates?” Your voice sounded grave, frightened and thin in your own ears, and you winced.

Sabo squeezed your hand a little more tightly. “...Let’s wait til we’re up at the cabin. If the car radio runs out of signal we’ve got the ham radio, and that old long-range one Luffy’s grandfather left up there.” He lapsed into silence for a moment, and when he spoke again, his voice was lower, betraying the first hint of worry he’d let slip since your departure. “We beat the first wave out, and there’s nothing we can do ‘til we’re safe up there. Won’t help anything to get ourselves all wound up before then, right love?” his voice was low, reassuring, reasonable. He didn’t want you to be scared. You didn’t want you to be scared.

He offered you the out, and you took it. “Yeah. May as well get everything set up before we start taking stock of how bad it is.”

“Brilliant as always,” he crooned, lilting his voice with that cartoonishly syrupy sweetness that never failed to make you laugh. He grinned at the sound, heart fluttering in his chest, and exhaled a long, slow breath. He wasn’t worried about what might be on the radio. All that mattered was that he had you here, had you safe. Whatever else happened, you could weather it together.

True to his word, the little road that led back to the cabin was barely visible until the car was almost on top of it; even with the help of the morning light, filtering grey through the thickening cloud cover, the path Sabo slowed and pulled off onto could barely be called a road. You’d already pulled off the freeway maybe 30 minutes before, onto a two lane little back road that veered off and up into the hills and valleys beyond. This was an unpaved, overgrown footpath with delusions of grandeur, that seemed to meander almost aimlessly through the trees. Slowly but surely, the road behind you slid into the foliage and out of view, and though you knew he must be exhausted, you found yourself deeply grateful that Sabo had opted to finish the drive himself.

You could barely imagine picking your way through this on foot without prior knowledge, let alone in a car. At regular intervals Sabo’s side of the road would simply open up into nothing, offering a stunning view of the valley, of the forested mountain on the other side, and what you were sure was likely a precipitous drop off into the river below. The thought of it made you a bit queasy, despite the beauty of the scenery, and you leaned back into your seat, opting instead to watch the high wall of fallen leaves and hillside passing by on the passenger side.

“Just a little bit longer, I promise. The cabin’s just on the other side of the hilltop. You’re going to love the view. Plus it’s got good access to a little lake. The water is always unreasonably cold, but it’s gorgeous,” He said, turning his head only slightly towards you to keep his focus on the road. “Tell ya what, if the old rowboat is still functional, I’ll take you out on it. Tomorrow, after we’ve had some rest.”

You smiled at that, humming acquiescently. The thought of spending time out on the lake with him—spending time out anywhere with him—was wonderful, perfect, of course, though at the moment the only thing you could muster any true enthusiasm for was a long bath and the promise of a comfortable bed. The whole place was probably going to need aired out and dusted off, and while there was a generator Sabo had made it clear that it might need a little TLC before there would be any power. That was fine. If you two needed to spend the first night cooking hotdogs and smores in the fireplace, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

That phrase rattled around in your mind a little, and you shuddered. Sabo glanced at you, before reaching out and flicking the AC down a couple of notches.

“Don’t worry,” he whispered. You squeezed his hand tightly, before drawing it up to your lips.

“With you? ‘Course not.” you whispered back.

He smiled, perhaps a little smugly, though that simply made you kiss the back of his hand once again.

When the road had finally meandered off the slope of the mountain you were on, following a little rise into a nestled clearing between peaks, you’d sighed in relief and slumped back in your seat, making Sabo laugh good-naturedly.

“The ride in is a little harrowing the first time, but I promise it’s gonna be worth it,” He’d said, letting go of your hand so he could ruffle it through your hair, and down to rest at the back of your neck, soothing the tense muscles with warm, precise little movements.

You weren’t honestly sure what you’d been expecting the cabin to look like. Vague images of a hunting lodge, of a summer camp bunk house, of a better homes and gardens style airbnb, and Rapunzel’s tower had all made their aimless way across your mind on the way in.

What you found was nothing short of magical. Even in the grey, dreary light of what had turned out to be a drizzly, windy sort of day, the little valley nestled between the peaks still seemed to glimmer with the echos of sun-warmed adventures and youthful secrets. The road you were on petered out into the soft green grass of a charmingly overgrown clearing. The hilltop seemed to cup the clearing like a giant hand, curving trees and bushes and delicate little wildflowers inward towards the cabin, more like the framing of a painting than the work of nature.

The cabin itself was larger than you’d anticipated, but not nearly as campish or dilapidated as Sabo had suggested. Dark old wood comprised both stories of the house, with a wraparound porch and swing visible as you approached, and a balcony on the one upstairs room you could see from this side.

The windows were boarded up, sure, but Sabo had assured you that was standard practice every time he and his brothers left the place for the season. Safer that way in case of storms, and it kept most of the animals from scratching around too much.

“We’ll pull the boards off the windows of the upstairs rooms so we can get a cross-breeze up where we’re gonna sleep. Rest of em we can work through tomorrow. No rush. We’ve got time to settle in.” he said, cheerful despite the situation, as he finally pulled the car to a stop, and killed the engine.

You leaned forward for a moment, taking in the place through the tinted blue of the top of the windshield, before unclipping your seat belt and climbing out of the car at long last. Without the rumble of the engine and the whirring of the AC, the place was even more beautiful. Wind swept through the valley, rustling in the trees, stray leaves twirling and trailing in the wind as they fell.

Sabo climbed out of the car too, leaning against the open driver’s side door to watch you, a gentle smile on his lips.

‘It’ll all be worth it. Even if all that ever came of it was this, it’d be worth it,’ the thought settled across his mind like gossamer silk, his eyes growing dreamy and unfocused, as he drank in the sight of your excitement. You seemed to glow in the gentle light that filtered down through the trees, and he knew in that moment that there was no one in the world more perfect than you. His love, his darling.

He could make you happy here. He would make you happy here. Happy, and safe, and loved. As you deserved.

You almost yelped in startled delight when you lowered your head from observing the trees around you to find Sabo directly by your side, lips quirked up into a grin. It was one of the things you loved about him, one of his many fascinating little quirks, he could be so quiet when he wanted to be. Your high little peal of laughter only widened his grin, and in one swift motion he had you lifted up into his arms, cradled against his chest, nestled into a grip that spoke of unfathomable reverence, and a heat that seemed always to be boiling just inches beneath his skin, a hunger that only ever found satiation in your love, your touch, your pleasure.

You looked up into the face of the man you loved breathlessly, the hint of color and responding heat beginning to touch your cheeks, and he sighed, letting those beautiful cornflower blue eyes of his slip closed, poorly feigning a chiding expression as he leaned forward to press his lips to your forehead.

“I see how it is,” he sighed airily, turning towards the cabin with you as though you weighed nothing at all. “What am I, compared to pretty leaves and a mysterious old cabin~” he intoned, hyperbolically mournful, and you rolled your eyes playfully before turning your head to kiss his chin.

“My guide through the darkness, as always,” you returned, mimicking his feigned mournfulness, though just as the words left your lips, Sabo carried you up onto the creaking old wood of the porch, and into the semi-darkness that came with it. The cloud cover was too heavy to throw off the pal of disuse, and you couldn’t quite manage to suppress the shiver that ran through you. Up close, with its boarded windows and unfamiliar shadows, there was something...ominous, about the place. Sabo stilled for a moment, glancing down at you, his playful expression giving way to concern, and something like remorse, as he set you gently onto your feet again.

“Nobody’s been out here in a couple years,” He squeezed your shoulders softly, rhythmically, before pulling you forward into a hug. “That’s all it is. There’s no way that anythi—that anyone would even know to come out this way beyond Ace and Luffy, and they’re out of state. You know that,” his voice was so even, so reasonable, and when he pulled back just far enough to rest his forehead against yours you sighed, and nodded.

“Whatever’s happening out there, it can’t get to us here. I’ll keep you safe.”

You sighed, leaning in to kiss him, and as he stroked your cheek and let you sink into his warmth, you willed the worry to subside, at least a little.

“Yeah,” you whispered, and he nodded with a soft sigh before turning his attention back towards the task at hand.

He seemed to ponder the boarded up door for a moment, brows furrowing thoughtfully. If you hadn’t known him so well, you might have wondered whether you were locked out...but after a moment of “contemplation,” Sabo tilted his head down towards you, and winked.

“We always board everything up when we leave...except the front door. Watch,” Sabo leaned forward, running his fingertips along the outside of the door frame until something gave way with a small click. Without bothering with the visible lock and seemingly independently of the doorknob, the entire boarded up apparatus swung open a couple of inches, and Sabo pulled it open the rest of the way with a flourish.

“Is it...fake?” you asked, reaching out to touch the camouflaged button he had pressed, watching the simple release mechanism punch outwards curiously.

“False front door,” Sabo replied proudly, almost excitedly, as he ran his palm down the old wood. “One of the few good ideas Luffy’s grandfather ever had. The actual front door is on the lakeside of the house. This way, even if someone did somehow manage to approach from the road, all they’d see is what looked like a boarded up old house.”

Something about that felt a little odd. Why would such a decoy be necessary in general, let alone for a place as secluded as this? But beyond what sounded like an old man’s paranoia, you couldn’t quite place why it struck you so strangely, nor did you have time to properly contemplate it, as Sabo was moving ahead of you into the house, striding confidently into the gloom.

You hesitated in the doorway, still gripped by that odd sense of foreboding; distantly, the sound of thunder began to roll through the hills, and it might as well have been night for all the grey light did to illuminate the interior of the cabin. Little slits of feeble light peeped out from impossibly far back in the space, and you noticed, once the rumbling of thunder died down, that the cabin had fallen quite silent. You couldn’t hear the sound of Sabo’s boots on the wooden floor, nor any of his usual stream of cheerful commentary.

It was as though the house had simply swallowed him whole.

Behind you, the wind seemed to be slowly picking up in intensity again, carrying the distant rolling thunder closer. Fat droplets of rain began to plop down through the trees, into the grass, hitting the windshield with intermittent but purposeful force.

The anxiety of the previous night began to creep up the back of your neck again, adrenaline pooling in your lungs as cool as rainwater.

Pat. Pat. Splat.

You’d been dead asleep when it started. The crash of glass had jarred you awake, the sound of screaming shortly after like nothing you’d ever heard. High and ragged and inhuman, like someone burning, like agony and rage and consumption tearing insufficient human vocal cords raw in punishment for attempting to express a pain and hatred so vast.

The sound had frozen you to your core, welding your joints in place, leaving you trapped and horrified in what had only moments before been one of the safest places in your world. There was a moment of quiet, punctuated by gasping, sickened breathing, by the steady pattering of something thick and wet falling to the floor of your bedroom. Shambling steps cracked the glass that littered the floor, erratic, listless...and this time, when that primal shriek ripped through the nauseating silence, you jolted beneath your sheets. Just barely. Just enough.

Something heavy had pressed down on the end of the bed, so close to your frozen legs that any further movement would have brought you into contact instantly. The thick, wet liquid dripped against the blankets as the unseen thing made its unsteady way up towards the headboard where you lay and it stank, rot and decay flooding your nostrils, turning your stomach almost enough to make you retch--

If it hadn’t been for Sabo, if he’d taken even a second longer, if he hadn’t dropped his water glass to shatter in the sink and flown down the hallway like a man possessed, it might have touched you. It might have dribbled that foul bile onto your face, into your mouth, and you would have screamed...you were sure you would have died. But as it was, you never saw it. Mercifully, you never saw it.

The weight had lifted from the bed the second your bedroom door had crashed open, and though you still hadn’t quite been able to make yourself move you heard it, Sabo’s fury and something that sounded suspiciously like metal as it sang through the air, only to crash into the thing with a sickening crack.

When he’d pulled you out of bed, he’d faced you away from the thing. From the mess you were sure must lay just beside where you’d been sleeping. The second he had you standing, the same spell that had frozen you sent you spinning into action, and he followed your lead. The two of you had grabbed what was easiest, throwing food and ice into a cooler, grabbing the first aid kit you usually kept for camping excursions, and you’d been in the car and out onto the road without evening looking back.

If it hadn’t been for several overturned cars, for several houses that stood like guttered ghosts with gaping eyes of broken glass, for the smoke that rose and billowed in the direction of town, it might have seemed like a normal night.

Sabo had turned on the radio only long enough to confirm that they were in range of nothing but the emergency broadcast system. Other than that one set of lonely taillights, you might have been the only two people left on--

All at once, the cabin lighting sprang to life, startling you from your reverie in a moment of mingled relief and panic. The warm orange glow of welcoming old lights filled the previously menacing space, and faintly over the sound of the rising storm, the labored rumbling of the generator could be heard.

“Looks like Ace actually left the thing topped off last time he was here, but we can still cook out in the fireplace if you w—” Sabo jogged back into view from where he’d disappeared—either to the basement or the back of the house—but his triumphant tone sagged into worried silence when he found you, ashen, still standing in the open doorway where he’d left you.

“I’m okay,” you said, though your voice wavered unconvincingly. A gust of wind splattered the steady drizzling rain against the back of your neck and this time you did jump, before stepping over the threshold and closing the door a bit harder than you’d intended.

“I’m okay.” You said again, more an order for your own frightened heart than a reassurance for your fiance, but he stepped forward anyway and pulled you into his arms again.

“We’re okay,” Sabo replied.

You breathed deeply into the warmth of his chest, and believed him.

That first day passed in a near constant stream of activity that kept your mind thankfully occupied, either by the seemingly endless stream of maintenance tasks the cabin seemed to need, or the loving, doting, and supportive attentions of your lover.

The storm that had blown in had made getting the windows unboarded and opened untenable, but the downstairs bathroom hadn’t required much to get to a usable state, and with the boiler kindly willing to acquiesce to your request to light, you’d been able to share a hot bath before changing into your set of spare clothes.

By the time you were nestled down in the sea of blankets Sabo had pulled out of their vacuum-sealed prisons and roasting hot dogs in the fireplace, the memory of the night before had slunk back into the recesses of your mind again, like the dregs of a bad dream. Sabo had said something about the storm likely interfering with the radio, and that he’d try to get it working once it had blown over.

You hadn’t argued. Eventually, you knew, you would have to open those floodgates, to see how bad things were...but if you had to wait another night to make it real, that was okay.

When your lover had rolled you gently onto your back in that sea of blankets, in the warmth of the dying fire and the storm raging outside, you had opened beneath him like a flower. He’d made short work of the boxers you’d borrowed, of the t-shirt which had been your only quick option during your flight.

The warmth of his hands as they cradled you to him, as they lifted your hips onto the improvised cushions and angled your body into a comfortable position, burned away, at least for the moment, any worries for the world outside.

Instead you sank into the sight of him, into the way the firelight seemed to dance across every inch of soft skin, every furrow of relaxed muscle, entranced by the way his belly contracted as he shimmied out of his pajama pants.

“Beautiful,” You’d whispered, as you opened your arms to him, following the familiar lines of muscle up over his shoulders to clasp around him, to close the gap between you that kept his warmth so cruelly from you.

“Not like you, love,” Sabo sighed softly, reverently, stifling any possible retort as he licked into your mouth at last, lapping over your tongue, tasting you as much as kissing you until any breath, any thought but desire for him, had been consumed.

Sabo had always been ravenous, had always run you up against the limits of what you thought you could take with, and though he was as gentle and supportive of your pleasure as he was of all aspects of your life, there was always that glimmer. That glint in his eye that suggested he would always need one more, one more from you, to ever properly be sated.

That night, with the outside world denied entry and the distractions of your previous life distant and moot, he was like a man possessed.

Even as the kiss left you gasping, wanting, he’d trailed lower, suckling marks into your throat that would take days to fade, lapping and soothing over each one as though determined to taste every inch of you.

“You know I’d give you all of me...everything I am,” his voice, usually so smooth and even and honey-sweet, came out raw and low, more a sensation against the peak of your nipple than voice before he closed his mouth around the bud, swirling it with his tongue as a promise of pleasure to come. Warmth blossomed through your body and when you whined softly in response, body flexing as you arched your back to press more of yourself into his mouth, he obliged in earnest, his palm sliding between your shoulderblades and lifting you like you weighed nothing at all.

Under any other circumstance he might have teased you. Might have made you ask, might have made you use your words, but the patience required had fled him. He kissed across your chest, watching the way your eyes fluttered, the way you flushed and writhed at his touch, and simply could not imagine a world where making you wait could be worth it. At least, not today.

This time, when he closed his mouth over the sensitive peak of your nipple, the fingers of his free hand trailed lower, soothing over your belly, calming your writhing body down even as he worked his teeth into the tender flesh there. This time when you cried out, he moaned sympathetically in return, as though the sudden surge of pleasure had rushed straight from your nerves into his, though he did nothing to lessen the intensity, the sympathetic noise turning into a low groan of need as his fingers dipped lower still, stroking the slick building between your thighs gently.

“Sabo, please,” your voice, thick and heavy with need, with a desperation much bigger than the moment, snapped his gaze towards yours for a moment.

“I know, I know,” he’d whispered, burying the quirk of his lips between your breasts, down your belly, nestling momentarily in the tuft of hair just above where you needed him most. “Gotta get you ready, darling, I—”

Rather than finishing the thought, rather than giving you the opportunity to thrash or beg him further, Sabo had dipped his tongue between your lips, watching you with hazy eyes as the taste of you flooded his senses. He teased the hood of your clit with the tip of his tongue, barely swiping over it in little circles before dipping lower, kissing between your legs, licking and suckling you open.

By the time he’d lifted his head again, chin slick with the evidence of your need, you almost felt hysterical. He watched in mesmerized pride as your clit twitched like a second heartbeat, swollen almost entirely out from under its hood, though only for a moment before finally giving you what you needed. The sound you made when he’d closed his lips around your desperate nub had almost sounded wounded, and Sabo had smoothed his palms up the backs of your thighs, tapping them wordlessly to get you to hold them while he drove you towards your peak.

It took almost nothing for the first orgasm to take you, racing up and crashing against your clit with every swirled beat of his tongue, though he’d given you only a moment to revel in it before slicking two fingers into your spasming cunt. He knew your body better than his own, knew where the little spot inside you was that made you growl and thrash in his arms like a thing wild, and he grinned against your core as your breathlessness gave way to a wail of pleasure that might almost have contained his name.

He didn’t let you rest. The pleasure of the first orgasm never quite ebbed enough to end as he dragged you through the pleasure up, up towards another peak. You were burning in his arms, beneath his mouth, molten desire stripped of more complex concerns, and he hadn’t even filled you yet.

“M’ready, I’m ready, S—aaa, Sabo please, plee-eeeaaa,” your pleas dissolved into another wordless groan as the pleasure began to crest again; this time when you came, your back arched so sharply that it practically lifted off the floor, your legs falling open at your sides as sense momentarily left you, displaced by the sensitive ecstasy he had driven into you.

You’d looked down then, vision hazy and eyes half-lidded through a cloud of bliss, and the small part of your mind still capable of thought expected to see him pulling away, getting to his knees, surely, surely you were wet enough now, pliant enough now...but the gaze that met yours from where your lover still lay between your legs seemed almost maddened with lust. At some point in the fog of your pleasure he had moved, knees spread out in a low crouch, and despite your previous two orgasms arousal twisted low in your guts as you realized he was rutting himself against the blankets beneath him, mindlessly soothing his own need while he drank from yours.

“Awww, I felt that, baby,” he whispered against you, grinning positively lethally in the firelight as you clenched and dribbled around his fingers. “Do you like that? Do you like knowing what you do to me, my love? How desperate you make me?” his voice was low, almost teasing despite all, as he rutted his hips against the blankets in quiet demonstration.

“Yes...fuck, yes,” you hadn’t bothered to hide it, he knew, and even if he didn’t, it wasn’t like your body was capable of covering for your lie. Sabo kissed the inside of your thigh in appreciation, though that hunger seemed to rise in him again when he slicked his fingers out of you only to watch your hole flutter around nothing.

Part of him wanted to simply dive back down into you, to slick his tongue in as deeply as he could and drink until he was full...but that would have been selfish. And besides...he had all the time in the world now worship at the altar of your thighs.

Gently, carefully, Sabo shifted his weight, sitting up on his knees properly again. He rested his cock, swollen and red and leaking, along the entire length of your slit as he leaned over your, taking his weight on one splayed palm so that he could lean down over you, nuzzling his forehead against yours. Beneath all that ferocious hunger, he loved you so, and the warmth that spread through his chest at the way you lifted your watery eyes to meet his almost quelled the need scrabbling between his ribs.

Almost.

He allowed you one last moment to breathe, enjoying the way you rolled your hips against his as he rutted the head of his cock against your clit once, twice, and then he was guiding himself lower, slick with your own pleasure and his slick as he rocked himself forward, fucking himself just barely through the spasming ring of your opening. The heat of you nearly knocked him senseless, and the mingled cry of desperate pleasure and relief was so mutual that there was no way to tell where your voice stopped and his started. His hips stuttered, pleasure surging through him at even this shallow connection, and he only managed to pull himself partially out of you before plunging back down, this time to the hilt.

Whether it was the terror that had driven you here, or the desperation for the normalcy of this intimacy, you might never know, but you would have sworn in that moment that you’d never felt so full in your entire life. Sabo gasped again, the sound sending rippling shocks of pleasure out from where you were connected, grinding himself in deeper still, fucking little spurts of precum against your cervix. When he kissed you it was so soft as to be jarring; a tender lament for what was to come.

Carefully, purposefully, Sabo moved you, unhooking the leg you had wrapped around his waist on instinct so that he could drape your knees over his elbows. Palms splayed against the makeshift bed as he held you open, letting you feel the way he pulsed and twitched inside you as he pulled halfway out, and fucked down in again, angling his hips to rut over the spot he’d been worrying with his fingertips before.

“Breathe for me, love,” he whispered, tone almost cloyingly sympathetic as he drove his hips downwards, patience finally slipping away as he took you in deep, rough strokes.

The instruction did nothing to stop the way the pleasure rushed into you again, leaving no room for air, for thoughts, for intention. Your eyes rolled back, and Sabo suckled your tongue into his mouth, toying with it the way he had your clit even as he ground his hips down to scrub against the little nub in turn.

You were going to cum again, he was going to make you cum again, and you babbled incoherencies against his tongue as that familiar feeling began to twist and tighten inside you again.

“That’s it darling, that’s it. Perfect love, gorgeous, do it for me, I know you can,” he panted against your lips, and you could feel it too, the way he was swelling inside you, the way his hips were starting to stutter and twitch.

You wanted him to feel good, needed him to follow you over the edge this time, and you knew he knew, somehow, knew he could tell what you wanted like he was living inside your head with you. Some distant part of you wondered if he was. If that would really be so bad.

With a last push of coordination Sabo wedged his hand between your bodies, fingers finding your clit and pressing down against it, rubbing neat, almost vicious circles, and you were gone, that final orgasm chasing away any sense that wasn’t the pleasure he fucked down into you. The all-consuming heat of it stole his breath too, and it was all he could do to rut you through it before he had to bury himself in you, teeth clenched and cock twitching as he filled you with hot, thick spasms of his pleasure.

Time seemed to trickle by, thick and slow as the heat between you as you both tried to settle back into reality. Love seemed to cradle you in all directions as Sabo murmured to you, gentle praise and careful check-ins melding together in your mind into a comforting static of safety.

You weren’t sure when sleep took you, only that when it did it was to the feeling of your lover’s lips against yours, and the soft slickness of his cock softening out of you. Bliss.

It almost felt like a honeymoon, despite the circumstances. That first week had been a whirlwind of activities, interspersed with spontaneous, increasingly intense lovemaking that left you dizzied, but satisfied and contented.

Sabo had always been an early riser, and you often found that by the time you joined him—at the oh-so-late hour of 9ish every morning—he had completed some new battery of tasks that left the day open for less strenuous maintenance, or walks down by the lake, or a bonfire in what turned out to be a very lovely firepit in the back yard.

If it hadn’t been for what had driven you from your home to begin with, you might have been content to simply let yourself fall into the routine he had set up for the two of you. Sabo certainly seemed devoted to keeping your mind off things—he hated to see you worry, hated the idea of you ever having to feel frightened—and had it not been for the issue of the radio, you might have settled into this new life without terribly much regard.

Sabo had always been, as far as you knew, an open book with you. Even when you’d just started dating, even when your relationship was fresh and tentative and new, he had always answered your questions honestly, had prioritized open communication and honesty as a core tenet of your life together.

So it concerned you when, after a week of trying to get signal, Sabo had outright refused to let you into the radio room to give it a try.

You’d thought he was joking at first, had laughed and tried to brush past him, but he’d taken your hand and spun you into a little dip, dancing you away towards the stairs that led down to the loft room you’d taken up residence in.

“It’s kinda...unsafe in there, to be honest,” he’d said, when it was clear that simply kissing you wasn’t going to put the conversation to bed.

“What do you mean ‘unsafe,’” you’d asked skeptically, the corners of your lips still upturned in a grin despite all, half-convinced this was all one of his jokes, though the good humor had started to melt back towards confusion and concern when his expression didn’t give.

For a long moment, Sabo didn’t answer. Instead he chewed on the inside of his cheek, eyes unfocused, and something in your stomach started to churn.

“Did you hear something?” you asked quietly. Sabo shook his head firmly.

“No no, nothing like that, it’s just. The only room in the cabin that’s not really finished.” He paused again, like he was trying to choose his words carefully, and when he met your gaze again there was something mournful, a little, in the blues of his eyes.

“Luffy’s grandfather set that room up in case of...emergencies. We weren’t even allowed to go into it while he was still alive, none of us had seen it until the deed to the place passed to us with his will. It’s just…” another short pause, and then. “It’s...boobytrapped. Kind of.”

There was a slight pause. Part of you had been tempted to laugh at the suggestion, vague images of Roadrunner and Wil E. Coyote running through your mind, but something in his expression stopped you from doing so.

“What kind of boobytraps…” you asked carefully, rubbing his arms with your palms. Sabo just shook his head.

“Luffy’s grandfather...Garp...got a little paranoid towards the end. He was sure Ace’s biological father was going to show up, that he needed to be ready for some kind of an attack…”

“Was he not on good terms with Ace’s father?” You asked quietly.

“No idea, we never knew him. By the time Garp started talking about this, Ace’s dad had been dead for nearly 20 years.”

Whatever concern or confusion had settled into your heart began to give way to sadness. Sabo’s eyes slid away from yours for a moment before he leaned forward to kiss your forehead.

“I wasn’t trying to hide anything from you, but the guy’s ex-military, special forces, we only figured out there was anything wrong with the room because Luffy stepped on a loose board and almost lost his foot to some kind of wire trap set into the space beneath it.”

You sighed heavily, glancing warily over his shoulder to where the door to the radio room stood partially ajar.

“Sorry baby, I shouldn’t have pressed,” you started, but Sabo shushed you, pulling you into his arms and rocking you gently.

“Nothing to be sorry for, I’d have been curious too! It’s just...tough to talk about. I’ve got it mostly mapped out in there, but I’d die if you got hurt, and it seems safe to assume there probably aren’t...hospitals. To take you to, in any event.”

You swallowed the lump in your throat, and nodded, and for a time you let the radio room and its mysteries slip out of your mind. If he caught a signal, you knew he would tell you, and until then...it seemed reasonable to give the room a wide berth.

The real trouble started when your hastily gathered supplies began to ran low. Clothes weren’t really an issue, the cabin had a washer and a line to dry things on, and enough dry detergent to last the next 20 years, but the food had began to dwindle after the third day, and while the lake seemed to be well stocked with fish, running it dry didn’t make a lot of sense.

Hunting wasn’t an option, neither of you were particularly proficient with firearms, and the idea of killing and gutting anything bigger than a fish turned you both off immensely...which left only one real option.

“I’m going to make a run into town—”

“We’re going to make a run into town—”

“There’s one just about a half hour away back up the main road, and I’ll be back before you can even miss me,” Sabo said, kissing your forehead and then your nose despite the fact that you had crossed your arms rather tightly against your chest and were refusing to budge.

He sighed. You arched your eyebrows and stared at him, waiting.

“Do you think I’m not capable of putting canned food in a shopping cart?” you asked dryly.

Sabo scrubbed a hand over his face, looking helpless. “Of course not, this has nothing to do with competency or ability,” he said evenly, though that mournful look at begun to creep its way into his eyes again.

“Okay. Then help me understand. This is basic horror movie rules, Sabo, don’t split the group, don’t send people off on their own. How do I keep in contact with you with no phones, what if the car breaks down, what if you d—” you stop yourself, wincing, irritated at the tears prickling the edges of your eyes.

Gently, patiently, Sabo pried your arms apart, rubbing and relaxing the muscles until you went limp enough for him to take your hands.

“I’m going to come back. I know it’s horror movie rules, but another horror movie rule is to not leave home base unattended, right?” he asked, kissing the backs of both your hands. You scowled up at him, though the expression was somewhat dampened when you leaned forward to gently bonk his forehead with yours. He laughed, the chiming sound of it wriggling stubbornly into your heart, and you sighed.

“Okay...next time I’m going though. We’ll trade off. Deal?” You asked.

Sabo linked his pinky with yours. “I’ll even bring back walkie-talkie’s, there’s a hunting store in town that ought to have decently long range ones.”

You nodded, placated for the time being, though it made you queasy with anxiety to watch him pulling away from your little safe haven, even moreso to watch the way the little car seemed to vanish into the foliage like it had never been there at all.

Sabo felt it too, nausea churning in his stomach as he pulled away. He knew you’d be safe this far out, but leaving you behind felt awful.

Lying to you felt awful, too. You were so good, so loving, so trusting, and it broke his heart to have to not be honest with you...but it was only for a little while longer. Routine cured a great many ills, and once he had everything settled, your life together would be secure. Unshakable.

Just a little while longer.

It had been eerie, a little, that first time, walking back up into the cabin alone. Not quite so ominous as the very first day, but the silence of it was unsettling. Without the semi-constant flow of conversation with your lover, or the sound of hammering, or the promise of outdoor activities, the reality of your situation...of, potentially, the world’s situation...began to creep in at the corners again.

Sabo had made fairly quick work of...whatever the creature had been, that was sure, but he had taken it by surprise. And there had only been one.

What if they moved in groups? What if only some of them were shambling and loud and slow like that that? What if—

You shut the thoughts down, slapping your hands gently against your cheeks until the mental noise started to subside. If you were going to be functional through this, you were going to have to learn to adapt...and to trust the man you loved to keep his promises.

He would come back to you, car loaded with enough soup to make you sick of the prospect, and everything would be fine.

For a moment you had simply stood in the middle of the livingroom, looking around the space thoughtfully. Most of the actually necessary maintenance had been done by now, the only rooms still boarded were ones where the glass had been damaged somewhat, whether by the storm or disuse.

You’d found so many bed linens and vacuum-sealed bags of clothes you’d both wondered how many people Garp had actually intended to have stay at the cabin, despite Sabo’s assurances that to his knowledge he, Luffy, Ace, and the old man had been the only ones he’d ever seen there.

Still, there were two floors and a basement full of closets and storage that it would hurt nothing to sort through, and so you set about that task. In a blind stroke of luck, the first closet you’d gone through in one of the side rooms on the first floor had contained a record player, and five boxes worth of old vinyls. That, at least, was something, and you had chased the eerie silence out of the cabin with The Eagles and Steely Dan while you worked.

By the time Sabo came back—almost exactly an hour and a half on the dot—you had cleaned out several shelves worth of vinyls, card games, and board games, and were feeling in considerably better spirits.

Your lover had laughed when he’d come in to find you sitting in a sea of old school entertainment, blasting classic rock, and you’d dashed up into his arms, kissing him thoroughly once you’d checked to make sure he wasn’t injured.

“Not a hair out of place, just like a promised,” he’d said, cradling your cheeks to kiss you back for a moment before reaching around you to turn the record player off. You’d gone out with him then to find a pretty impressive haul. Canned food, a better can-opener than the rusty old one in the kitchen, what looked like bulk boxes of jerky and dried meats from what was likely backstock, dried beans, rice, a rice cooker, snacks, a much nicer first aid kit, and, as promised, two long range walkie-talkies.

“This should hold us for a month if we’re careful with it, and fish at least once a week,” he said. You blinked up at him.

“Sabo I’m reasonably sure there’s enough soup and rice here to last us to Christmas if we had to ration,” you said, looking at all of it. Nothing was in bags, as though he had hastily loaded everything he could grab into carts and dumped it into the car.

Silence stretched between you for a long moment.

“How bad was it,” you asked quietly, watching his expression carefully.

Sabo exhaled, long and slow. “Not as bad as it could have been, maybe. Mostly it looks like people just evacuated, there’s a lot of places to hide in the mountains, but…” he worried the inside of his cheek for a moment, and ran his hand through his hair. “There were a lot of places that looked...damaged. Windows smashed in, a couple of places looked burned out. I didn’t...see anything. Anyone. But there was blood. In too many places to just have been an accident, I fear.”

Wind swept through the clearing, rustling through the trees, and a small part of your new reality began to settle over the pair of you at last. There was plenty of what had been to scavenge...but it did not seem as though there was anything to go back to.

“If things are that bad all the way out here, then the cities…” you trailed off, eyes focused a little too heavily on a can of chicken soup.

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” Sabo sighed. “Only thing we can do is stick it out here, and keep trying to find something on the radio.” He paused for a moment before leaning down to rest his chin on your shoulder. “Hey, at least we don’t have to worry about paying off those student loans anymore,” he said, kissing your cheek, and despite all you laughed just a little.

“That is one of the perks of the apocalypse. No rent either, credit scores are dead…” you said, glancing up at him with the tiniest grin before tugging him back towards the house.

“At least we’re together,” you added, and he beamed.

“At least we’re together.”

It took both of you, a bed sheet, and three trips to get everything he’d packed into the car in the house, and another hour spent organizing the kitchen into a well stocked and usable resource.

As you’d curled up together to sleep that night, you resolved to set what was out of your mind. There would be time to grieve...forever, perhaps, to grieve...but the first priority had to be keeping each other safe, and your spirits high. All you’d ever really had before was each other, at least on a daily basis, and you could do worse in the nebulous end of the world than having the love of your life by your side.

Sleep took you more easily, and when thunder rolled and rumbled through your little valley, nestled warmly in Sabo’s arms, you didn’t even stir.

Months passed, late summer blend into fall bled into early winter, and you and Sabo had fallen mostly into a comfortable routine.

Intermittently, perhaps a handful of times, Sabo had managed to raise someone on the radio. The people he contacted seemed healthy, sometimes scared, but nobody he spoke to seemed to know any more than they did. Occasionally, one of them would be willing to share their approximate location, but according to Sabo this part of the country had never been particularly trusting of strangers at the best of times, and he wasn’t terribly surprised most people didn’t want to give up their safe havens.

The people you did get information out of went up on a map you two had set up. While mostly people wouldn’t tell where they were, they were willing to share info about towns nearby, about the accessibility of supplies, and the levels of...activity that they’d seen.

It had been decided, after a week’s worth of debating back and forth, that given what appeared to be an increasing amount of activity, and given that Sabo was vastly more familiar with this area of the state than you were, that he would do the supply runs. They were few and far between, provided that he found well-enough stocked stores, and with the compromise that he go as early as possible, so that he wasn’t running around in broad daylight for...whatever might be there to see, you had eventually acquiesced.

The cabin was remote, but there was logic to keeping it locked and guarded with at least one occupant, as whatever this new world’s creatures were, they weren’t the only possible dangers that might crop up. While neither of you liked it, on the second big supply run Sabo had returned home with a rifle.

“You don’t have to use it, but I’d feel a lot better if you at least had it.” He’d explained, as you’d looked the thing over on the front lawn, frowning.

The idea of someone just stumbling onto your little refuge seemed extremely unlikely...but so had the world ending on a random Tuesday evening in August, previously. While you’d been mostly opposed in your previous life, it would have been silly to deny the ambient protection having the thing around provided. In the end, you’d agreed to keep it by the front door for emergencies during the day, and by your bedroom door for emergencies at night, and that had been the end of it.

All-in-all, you felt that the two of you were doing pretty well, all things considered. The cabin was comfortable and well-secured, you’d worked out a supply-running system that seemed to be keeping Sabo safe, and while the other people he’d found weren’t...accessible...knowing that the two of you weren’t the only people who had made it out, at least within range of the radio, was comforting enough to keep you both in good spirits.

For better or worse, everything seemed...perfect.

Which was why, when you were sorting through the most recent supply haul, trying to get all the consumables sorted from the toiletries and such, you weren’t exactly sure what to make of the slip of paper.

You’d almost thrown it away without thinking, eyes glazing over it when it dropped from between two bottles of shampoo, but just before it slipped out of your fingers and your mind entirely, you paused. Froze, rather, in the middle of the movement, and turned the paper over to look at it.

It was a receipt. It had been folded up and in on itself multiple times, long enough, perhaps, to accommodate the long list of supplies currently spread out at your feet.

Something acrid and metallic felt like it was creeping up your windpipe. Quickly, you had poked your head around the corner to check where Sabo was, only to find him chopping wood in the back yard, his breath clouded around his face in the cool winter air.

You watched him, your great love, until he looked up and smiled. You smiled back, and laughed a little when he blew you a kiss before going back to work.

You looked at him, and at the folded piece of paper on the counter, then back at him.

Maybe it was old. Neither of you had been the most fastidious people alive in the times before, perhaps this was simply from a long past shopping trip. Maybe it was from CVS, maybe that’s why it appeared to be several feet long.

That horrible, cold feeling lingered in your chest, though. Part of you wanted to look at it, if only to confirm that you were being ridiculous. Part of you felt like looking at it was a betrayal, was suggesting that you didn’t trust the love of your life.

Part of your mind began to turn over the radio room again, the fact that he was the only one leaving the clearing, that you hadn’t seen any part of the outside world beyond the lake and trails and grounds of the cabin in months.

It was absurd. A terrible train of thought. The manifestation of deferred grief, trying one last time to reason its way out of the end of your old life. You took a deep breath before picking up the piece of paper, determined to simply throw it away and be done, but the door opened just as you were about to let it go. On instinct, terrified for reasons you couldn’t imagine naming, you had stuffed it into your pocket instead, grabbing a jar of peanut butter and plastering on a grin just as Sabo came around the corner into the kitchen.

He paused for a moment at the sight of you, brows knitting together curiously as he approached you.

“You alright darling? You look a little pale,” he said, though he still stuffed his chilly fingers under your shirt, making you jump and laugh.

“Yeah, yeah,” you said, a little breathlessly, as you forewent the peanut butter in favor of warming him in your arms. “Just trying to get everything edible sorted out from cleaning stuff and meds, I think I’m just hungry,” you said bracingly, and he visibly relaxed.

“Tell ya what, let’s have a bath, and then I’ll get the stove going so we can make dinner, there’s enough wood chopped up to last us through the week I think,” he said, kissing your lips, your forehead, your nose.

You sighed contentedly, leaning into his affections with a nod. “Sounds perfect ‘Bo,” you said, and he grinned before popping off to run the water.

You stood there for a moment, fingertips brushing the outline of the receipt in your pocket, before calling out to Sabo that you were going to grab you both some fresh clothes and then you’d be in to join him. He acquiesced airily, easily, and you dashed upstairs, guilt and fear clawing at your throat.

You hated lying to him. You couldn’t even remember the last time you had. You stashed the crumpled receipt inside your pillowcase, before grabbing the promised clothes to bring down to him.

Next time he left, you’d look. It would be nothing, he’d laugh it off or console you for the misunderstanding...it would be nothing. You had no reason in the world to suspect him—objectively, the world’s most perfect partner—of anything at all. Let alone whatever your paranoid little mammal brain seemed to be trying to put together here.

When you reappeared with comfortable clothes and sank down into the bath with him, he held you tightly, washed your hair, your back, drained the water and refilled it when it started to cool, and made tender, gentle love to you until the water had half sloshed out and you were both laughing and sated.

‘Stupid,’ you’d thought dreamily, sleepily, as your fingers brushed the receipt later, tucked into bed and warm and safe.

‘I’ll just throw it away in the morning,’ you promised silently, as Sabo’s arms drew you into sleep.

But you didn’t though.

You kept it on you, somewhere, at all times. A strange, cursed talisman, unopened and dangerous, Schrödinger’s evidence of something unformed and unfathomable that you couldn’t bring yourself to define.

The winter holidays came and went, a New Year passed, to be spent fully in the new world you’d come to accept. The folded, worn piece of paper burned a hole in your pocket until finally, towards the end of January, supplies had dwindled low enough that Sabo announced he would be going on another run.

If he noticed your tension, or the way you seemed to hover and linger around him while he mapped out the route, he seemed to attribute it to nerves. Which wasn’t entirely an inaccurate, made it feel at least a little less like lying when you wrapped your arms around him and made him promise, as always, to come back to you safely.

Sabo watched you in the rearview mirror as he drove away, watched the little wave you raised as he trundled onto the path...and watched you disappear into the house before he’d made it fully into the trees.

Something was wrong. Like a miasma wafting through the air, nebulous, maddening, something had been wrong for weeks now.

It wasn’t always, of course, it wasn’t even often...but it was enough. Every now and again he’d catch you staring into space, eyes furrowed, worrying at the seams of your pants like you were trying not to be sick.

You never flinched away when he reached for you in those moments, always sank into the comfort of his touch...but you wouldn’t talk about it, either. At first, he’d been willing to brush it off as grief; your whole life, your whole world had changed, outside of your relationship with him. It was only natural that, eventually, that that wound would need tended to.

It was the little moments of fear that he couldn’t quite place, that unsettled him the most. Sometimes he would walk into the room and you would jump, startled; you always laughed it off as a moment of inattention, but even minutes later that haunted look would still be there, glimmering in the depths of your eyes…

He hated it. He hated that something was frightening you...and he hated that he couldn’t figure out what it was. He’d made sure everything here was as perfect, as comfortable, as safe and quiet and enjoyable as he possibly could. You had routine, you had fresh air, good food, books and games and music and—not to be forward—as many orgasms as he could give you in a given night.

Everything was perfect. So what had changed? What was different now, that hadn’t been there before?

Sabo pulled to a stop at the opening of the little side road, staring at the depression on the other side of the road for a moment before picking up the walkie-talkie.

“Eagle 1 to Kid Gorgeous, you there baby?” Sabo called casually into the receiver, and waited.

And waited. And waited.

He frowned, his heartbeat starting to falter, to race.

Something was wrong.

You’d never taken this long to answer, not since the first time when you’d accidentally gotten on different channels. Sabo pulled out onto the street wide, pulling back around to head back to the house, when the receiver crackled to life. He stopped dead in the street in his haste to answer it.

“Sorry, sorry hon, Kid Gorgeous was an idiot and dropped the pitcher of iced tea on the floor,” your voice settled over his frightened heart like balm on a wound, and he sighed, almost laughing before pressing the button down to answer you.

“Eagle One’s sorry to hear that, do you need me to come back and take care of the glass?”

“No, no, nothing here broken but a pitcher and my pride. Hopefully they’ve got another one where you’re headed.”

Sabo sighed, willing himself down out of panic mode, and put the car in drive, turning back onto the road again. “Roger that. I love you.”

“I love you, too, ‘Bo.”

With a deep breath, he set the receiver down in the cupholder, and willed himself to let the paranoia go.

If there was something wrong, you’d deal with it together. He had to trust you, he had to, or this was never going to work.

Sabo had been gone for maybe an hour by the time you collapsed onto the livingroom couch, annoyed with yourself and sweaty in the heat of the cabin despite the chill outside.

Part of you just wanted to take a shower and lay down, sleep through the empty hours until your lover returned. This time he was going on a run a couple little towns over, having mostly exhausted anything useful from the tiny town you’d been taking things from so far.

Your bed was comfortable, and so inviting after cleaning up glass and spilled tea and feeling very silly indeed...but the receipt was also up there, burning a hole in the innocent linen of your pillowcase.

Unwilling to go up there and face it, even for the reward of a nap, you had picked yourself up, resolved to grab a granola bar and head to the back of the cabin, to start going through the larger storage closet and its contents.

This little organization project had become something of a personal challenge for you, and Sabo had respected it, sitting with you while you worked on it sometimes, but largely leaving it to you. It was nice to have something to be working on ongoingly, nice to have something to do beyond just tidying up and listening to music when you were guarding the fort.

In hindsight, it was a little funny that the one truly unattended thing you were allowed to do here was what unraveled the entire facade.

The back bedroom seemed to have been Sabo’s youngest brother’s bedroom from when he was a child. The bed was covered over with protective covering still—as presumably Luffy had chosen a different room in the oddly cavernous cabin when he’d gotten older—the walls adorned with posters about different insects, the jungle-themed wallpaper adding a little extra fun and whimsy to what appeared to be a large collection of toys, action figures, and little pirate ships along the dressers.

You smiled fondly, but mostly left those things alone, determined instead to make the closet accessible, and to see if there was anything they might find useful inside.

It had occurred to you to ask, early on in your time here, whether Sabo’s brothers might try to find the cabin themselves. Sabo had looked hopeful for a moment, though his expression had quickly turned thoughtful.

“Lu’s off working on that nature preserve, and Ace is out there working with some of his buddies with the firewatch again,” he had said, smiling, if perhaps a little sadly. “They’re way out west...and while Ace has his Jeep, I don’t know that they’d risk such a long ride back. At least not until...or if...this craziness starts to die down.”

And that had made sense. It saddened you that Sabo might be out of range of his brothers for quite a long time, but neither of you had a solution for it, and so, like so many other things, you had simply learned to let it go.

You’d mostly been going through the boxes on autopilot, letting your tired mind drift while you went through what looked like children’s toys, books about beetles, old boxes with parts of expired experiments, a very dead chia pet...but you stopped when, at the bottom of the third box, a hand-crank radio slid into view.

It was pristine, despite how long it had likely sat buried underneath other toys and the remnants of childhood adventures past. You pulled it out of the bottom of the box, and for a long time you just...stared at it.

You glanced up at the ceiling, up towards the vague direction of the radio room that you’d never entered, towards the radio that was your only link to the outside world, the one thing in the house you’d effectively been forbidden to tamper with.

“It’s just a toy...it probably doesn’t have enough range to pick anything but the emergency broadcast system up,” you muttered to yourself, turning it over in your hand. Nothing on the back listed a distance, only a range of frequencies the little radio could pick up.

“Nothing but AM out this far probably, anyway. Maybe some automated church broadcast…”

you swallowed hard, suddenly stifled, like the walls of the cabin were pressing in on you, frozen, waiting.

What could it hurt? With slightly shaking fingers, you pulled the crank out of its cradle, and turned it. The first few times, nothing seemed to happen. Maybe it was broken, maybe it was so old it couldn’t be charged.

You turned it for 30 seconds, nothing. You turned it for another 30 seconds, nothing. You turned the crank for a full additional minute to no immediate response, and just as you were about to give up, to call it dead or broken and put it back in the box marked as unusable...the little front display lit up, and a voice blared out, lively and jarring in the solitude you’d come to accept.

“Annnnd folks we’re at the top of the hour, you’re listening to 43.3 AM, The Buzz. This is Buzz McCallan, comin to you with News on the 8s!”

You sat there for nearly 40 minutes, unmoving and sick. Through News on the 8s, through the update on sports, through a call-in section that seemed to be comprised of mostly disgruntled truckers...and through the Daily Update. A section on the reconstruction efforts, after the world’s brush with death.

After. The end of the world, as it turned out, had lasted for perhaps 3 weeks of sustained bloodshed and chaos, before the world had figured out how to fight back. It had taken another month after that to take stock of what had been lost, and to begin airdropping packets of a compound that seemed to reverse the damage to the parts of the brain that governed behavior and pain tolerance that the infection had damaged.

Now, nearly 6 months after the initial outbreak, the world, while still recovering...had mostly put itself back together again.

The little radio had finally run out of the charge you’d given it just as Buzz McCallan had finished his rant about gas prices, and when it shut off you simply sat there in the tinny, ringing silence.

Your mind was blank, perhaps mercifully so, as you rose on shaking, numb legs, and let your internal autopilot carry you up the stairs to the bedroom you’d been sharing.

By this point, you knew what you’d find as you fished out the crumpled receipt, and let it fall open in your hands.

Every item, listed and accounted for, dated and timestamped ‘Your cashier today was Marta!’ He’d paid in cash. He’d received $5.29 in change.

You wondered, somewhat perversely, if the people in the parking lot had thought he looked strange, dumping all of his neatly bagged groceries out, bag by bag, into the back of his car. You wondered if they thought it was one of those doomsday preppers, still too affected by the near-miss with apocalypse to think clearly.

You wondered if they thought he was nuts.

The whole world was still out there. Your job, your friends. Chinese takeout and movie trailers and neighbors you had always greeted politely but had no desire to meet.

“He’s keeping you prisoner,” a voice in your mind whispered. You frowned, brows furrowed, and shook your head.

“He’s never tried to stop me from leaving the cabin,” you whispered into the stagnant air.

The voice in your mind, which remembered horror movies and true crime podcasts, tutted. “Not the cabin. But have you so much as touched that car, unless he was there with you unloading groceries?”

You knew you were having a breakdown. You knew it was too much to take in, to understand.

“Something really did happen to us...to everyone, though. Maybe he’s just scared. He’s trying to keep us safe…” you whispered, your throat tightening around panic and tears and anger and grief.

“Sure. And that holds up for the first supply run...but you know he knew by the second. He’s paying in cash. He kidnapped you.”

Kidnapped. The word rocketed around your mind like a meteor, crashing through your rational thoughts, your excuses, battering your wounded and confused heart as it made its way down to lay like lead in your stomach.

Your internal voice didn’t have anything else to add, it seemed; the damage had been done, the illusion shattered. You had no idea what to think, what to do—your phone had been misplaced at some point early on, although now you wondered whether he hadn’t just chucked it into the lake, your purse was where you’d left it ages ago: in the car.

Still...you had to get out. Didn’t you? You couldn’t stay here, you couldn’t pretend that you didn’t know what happened. You couldn’t trust the love of your life.

Hot, stinging tears welled up and began to fall at that. Did you even know him? What was he capable of? Would he hurt you, if you tried to get away?

You shook your head so roughly your neck cracked, leaping up off the bed as you tried to stave off what you were sure was a panic attack.

You changed your clothes into something warmer, changed into a pair of the hiking boots you wore when the two of you went out fishing. The road was out there, you could follow it to the highway. Find someone. As long as you made it off the forest drive before he came back, you could make it. You tore through the kitchen, gathering food, filling your water bottle, getting a backpack you’d taken from one of the closets ready to depart.

You’d leave him a note. With the receipt and the radio. You could at least do that. Despite all, the idea of leaving him with nothing, with no way of knowing what had happened to you, hurt too much to consider.

After a moments thought, you grabbed the rifle from where it sat, primed, leaning against the doorway, and slung it over your shoulder. You didn’t know how far you’d have to go to find help, but walking alone in a world you hadn’t been part of in six months without any sort of protection seemed unwise, somehow.

The adrenaline in your system wasn’t helping the way you thought it should. Your body felt sluggish and unwieldy, like it might give out and drop you to the floor at any moment. Writing out the note felt like moving your hand through cement, comprehending the words to explain felt like sand against your brain. Everything hurt. The lights were too bright, your ears were ringing.

It was hard to hear anything over the sound of your body’s resistance to its new conditions. Which was probably why you hadn’t heard it when the car had come trundling to a stop. Hadn’t heard the sound of Sabo’s footsteps as he’d bounded up the stairs.

You almost screamed when the front door popped open, but when you whirled around with the rifle, at first, your lover had laughed—instinctively, nervously.

“Hey love, wh...what’s going on? You weren’t answering on the walkie,” he asked, raising his hands slowly, head cocked to the side in confusion, as he looked from the muzzle of the rifle to you.

The words seemed locked in your throat, and when you just stared at him, the look on his face changed from confusion to alarm. To fear. You grit your teeth, hating it, hating him, hating yourself.

“What’s going on, sweetheart...what happened here…?” Sabo took a tentative, slow step towards you. Your body, frozen to the spot, only managed to stare back at him, the muzzle trained on his chest still.

Those cornflower blue eyes you loved so dearly flickered between you and the gun again before looking back towards the entry hall table...only to fall upon the offerings you’d left there. The radio. The receipt. The rudiments of a note.

For the briefest flickering of a moment, Sabo’s expression went entirely blank, eyes darkening down to blackened slits of panic and pain that seemed to flash through your own chest sympathetically.

“Luffy’s room, probably, huh,” he whispered thickly.

You nodded, your own voice still trapped in your chest. You wondered idly whether you had truly lost your voice, or whether your body knew that if it let you speak you might never never never stop screaming.

You took a deep, unsteady breath. Sabo took another step towards you, pain and sorrow etched across his face once more.

“Let me have the gun, sweetheart. I swear I’ll explain, I’ll tell you everything. No more secrets. Just...let me have this,” He said softly, earnestly, lowering one hand slightly towards the rifle.

You took a jerky step back and he stopped, raising his hands again.

With a voice that was more breath and pain than sound, you whispered “I’ll shoot you.”

Tears welled delicately in Sabo’s eyes, but he shook his head. “No, you won’t.”

Your hands started to shake. Of course you wouldn’t. You couldn’t. The image of him, bloodied and cooling in the entryway, carved its way out of you like a knife and you whimpered...but held on.

“Why not,” you whispered again. “Why shouldn’t I?”

Sabo smiled gently, sadly, the tears slipping down his beautiful cheeks. “Because you love me...and the only ammunition I brought for the rifle are blanks.”

Dark spots began to swim in your vision then, the panic of the moment, the heat of the cabin, the agony of betrayal and confusion all beginning to wear through your senses. You had no plan for this, no experience to fall back on, the only comfort and safety you’d known in your adult life was standing opposite you, perched atop a castle of lies and coercion that you simply could not understand.

On instinct, you flung the rifle at him, winging it with all your waning strength as you lunged past him for the door.

He caught it with one hand, tossing it to the side as he spun to give chase, pressing something on the key ring as he did so.

Ahead of you, just barely out of reach, the front door swung closed ahead of you, and the odd trick mechanism clicked heavily into place. You ran into it, clumsy and sick with sadness and fear, just as Sabo caught up with you, colliding with your body and trapping you against the front door as the rest of the cabin responded to the panic button he had pressed.

His voice at your ear was so warm, so comforting, so unbelievably sad as he explained to you what was happening.

“Luffy’s grandfather really did lose it in his later years, the radio room actually is dangerous,” he whispered, running his palms soothingly up and down your arms despite the weight he was using to keep you pressed to the door. Just the way he had done a hundred thousand times before, conditioning you with his touch to be calm, to be pliant. Your mind felt like it was fracturing, leaning into the comfort of his touch just as it tried to wrestle your muscle control away from him.

Sabo shifted to make sure you could breathe and then continued. “He didn’t stop at the radio room, though. The doors and windows are all reinforced with steel, the doorframes are rooted into the foundation with concrete and rebar. I don’t know what he thought Ace’s biological father might be coming to do, but he prepped this place for war.”

Tears streamed down your face, frustrated, scared; part of you wished you’d just left well enough alone. That things could just go back to the way they were. Part of you didn’t understand how someone who loved you as thoroughly, as honestly as Sabo did, could do this to you. How anyone could ever do this.

“Why is this happening,” you whispered, partially muffled by the door.

Sabo sighed, sounding more weary than you’d ever heard him. “It was real, at first, whatever happened at the apartment. In the beginning all I could think about was making sure we got out here before it got worse, before people started to panic and the roads closed up. The storm really did interfere with the radio reception, and that little town really did look guttered out when I first made a run for supplies,” he said softly, fingertips lulling your unwilling body, coaxing you to relax. He kissed the back of your head, and it took all your control not to lean back into it.

“And it worked, you know, didn’t it? We got set up out here so fast, and since it’s private property and set so far back in the forest, nobody was able to follow us. Nothing sick made it out this far. You were safe, we were together, and…” he trailed off for a moment, forehead leaning against the back of your head, still trying to soothe you as the tears fell harder.

“...and we were happy. So happy. Happy as we’ve always been...and without any of the drudgery or people or circumstances that ever caused us stress. Remember, you said no student loans? No bills at all. No politics. None of your mean, ugly distant relatives, no more morning commute to work, no more mocking up powerpoints for rich assholes that never even commend you for your work.”

Your heart felt like it was going to beat out of your chest, but he continued, his voice steadying into something righteous, something indignant, although it was clear that furor wasn’t directed at you.

“Every day some nonsense or another kept us apart, wore you down, caused us trouble...there was plenty enough in the inheritance to keep us comfortable, if the cost of living hadn’t just kept climbing and climbing and climbing...but then the infection started. Then we came out here, we got away...and I know it’s awful, but part of me was desperate for it to be the end. To be a REAL reset. The whole system is rotten…” One of Sabo’s hands slid down until he could wrap it around your waist, pulling you to him, rocking you carefully back and forth against the door.

It frightened you that he was still trying to comfort you, it frightened you more how badly you wanted him to, how badly you wanted all of this to go away.

Maybe he was right...it wasn’t like rent was getting any lower.

“Stop, please...Sabo, please,” your voice sounded reedy thin in your ears. Sabo splayed his palm out against your belly, kissed the back of your neck softly.

You sighed against the door, warmth blossoming through you. You couldn’t think. This wasn’t right.

When he spoke again, his lips still brushing the back of your neck, it was with a voice so wounded, so desperate, that you almost didn’t recognize it.

“Has this really been so bad?” he asked softly, rocking with you again, fingertips stroking the slight line of skin where your shirt had ridden up. You shivered, and he sighed with you, sympathetic, in sync.

“Is being here...being together...being beyond everything that hurt us before...safe and comfortable...is it really such a bad thing to want?”

Your eyes slip closed as his fingers, blunt and warm, dip beneath the waistband of your pants. Your brows furrow, but the fight’s gone out of you now. Whatever moment there might have been to escape this, to escape back into your body and yourself and the world...had passed you, at some point.

“We’re safe here...we’re taken care of here...we can live for each other and no one else...not many people get to boast a life like that,” this time when he kissed the back of your neck, lips trailing down towards your ear, you leaned back into him, into his touch.

The world stopped, the cabin walls pressed in, anxious, greedy. Waiting.

“No,” you whispered, and this time when you shifted, Sabo leaned off just enough to let you turn in his arms.

When he kissed you, long and deep, you sank into it. Back into the comfort, back into the stability of a world—of a life—that your lover had made so, so simple for you.

Sabo’s body shook against you, in longing, in relief, even as his fingertips slid lower to find you wanting. Needing.

He’d hated lying to you. Hated every moment of it. He’d tell you, he’d spend the rest of his life on his knees for you if you needed it. Anything for you to feel safe.

“You’re perfect,” he mouthed against your lips, your throat, between the valley of your breasts once he’d removed the stupid sweater that had kept you hidden from him.

“I love you,” he vowed as he sank to his knees before you, taking away the winter pants you would no longer need, tossing your hiking boots with them over his shoulder and away.

“I’m sorry,” he intoned, as he slid his tongue between your lips, laved worship and remorse against you, filled your exhausted body and broken mind with pleasure.

“Not like you,” you’d whispered back, to this, and to all, as you let him take the pain away.

He offered you an out, as he slicked his fingers into you, curling forward, giving you everything just like he’d always promised.

He offered you an out, as the pleasure peaked, wracking you with relief far beyond the moment at hand…

...and you took it.

#av writes #op x reader #Sabo #cw dark content #cw yandere stuff #Quin hello!!!!#idk when you will see this but I'm sorry it took longer than intended!!!#I hope it's okay at least #I have done my damndest anyway #if anyone else reads this silly long ass thing #hello to you too and thank you!!!!#birthday request event 2024 #stuff for my buddy Quin #happy belated birthday my friend!!

48 notes · View notes

lokiina · 1 year ago

Text

I wasn't gonna do it. But I'm gonna do it.

I'm gonna kjhdkfjghdkfjg

If you don't want character spoilers I'm slapping this under a readmore but I need to cry a lil about Gale.

So many people just think he's annoying or Solas 2.0 and that's kdghdfkjgh

if it's not coherent I apologize I need to word vomit.

!! also some mental health related TWs ahead as a warning !!

THIS MAN IS SO DEEPLY DEPRESSED. His self worth is so low and it's so heart wrenching to listen to and the writing is incredible.

(A lot of the characters in this game deal directly with like Gods and the abusive relationships they have with them but this is for Gale specifically. Everyone's got their own mess that's it's own thing. )

Holy fucking shit. I don't know if you get some of the dialog options I have gotten if you don't actively romance him but omfg. Man openly admitted to being suicidal so you talking him out of blowing himself up while everyone else including the last love his life is saying "kill yourself" is such a big big deal. Even if the end result is being framed as help. It's not. It's more manipulation and down right fucking EVIL.

His relationship with Mystra is messed up, the power imbalance is fuckin wild and if anyone out of this is expecting a goddess to be the victim when she was clearly a manipulator is unreal. Their situation he was just trying desperately to prove his worth to her and her essentially stringing him along until he wasn't of any use anymore. He wanted Mystra to see him as equal to her, and nothing he ever did was enough for her. Cuz she did not care about him. If it was a proper relationship and she actually loved him back he wouldn't have had to try to continuously prove himself.

He was taken advantage of through his relationship and his entire self worth has been shattered. Now he's not entirely without fault through some of it and acknowledges where he screwed up himself.

When you offer to find another way for him that doesn't end up in him exploding, you kick a lil spark back into him and as someone who's fuckin struggled with self worth and depression. I feel for him so hard. Sometimes it does take another person simply acknowledging your worth to be that lil spark. It doesn't even have to be in a romantic sense.

This man is high key autistic coded. Everything about the way he loves so purely, misses cues on certain things and misunderstands and needs direct clarification on stuff. Ask him about his special interest, magic. The gloom drops in these moments. It's fuckin precious as hell to see him light up.

The writing in this game is fucking phenomenal and I just. I have a lot of deep feels on this whole thing. Every character has so many lil layers to them and I wanna just smooch the whole dev team.

Anyway. He's my fav character out of this chaotic game and I just. I will protect this silly wizard with my life. He deserves good things. Fuck his haters.

I wanna go get some comfy fluffy art of him and my boy.

#baldur's gate 3 #baldur's gate 3 spoilers #bg3 spoilers #his haters can cancel me

152 notes · View notes

inkblackorchid · 8 months ago

Text

What the hell happened with Crow: an autopsy (Part 4)

*Deep breath* Okay, everybody. Let's do this one more time.

First off, hello, or welcome back. Let's get the introductions and disclaimers out of the way, shall we?

This is the fourth and final instalment in my very, very long-winded attempt to analyse the character writing of Crow over the course of the entirety of yugioh 5Ds. For everyone who hasn't read the previous parts of the analysis, you can find part one here, part two here, and part three here.

This post, and my analysis as a whole, is neither meant as a Crow hate post, nor as a manifesto to convince people who don't like him that they're wrong. It's as genuine an attempt to simply look at and dissect what the show gives us about him as I can make, though I admit to personal bias because I do like Crow. That said, I'm trying to stay as neutral as possible, because the aim of this entire post tetralogy is to look at the writing decisions made for this character and how they impact him—and how they possibly influenced the audience's perception of him.

My previous three posts all reference this as well, but since I still see these things parroted all across the internet to this day: Please don't read this post under the assumption that any of the 5Ds production rumours are true, especially not the ones surrounding Crow. Because, to make this as short as possible, every popular theory as to why certain characters were mishandled during the later parts of the show fails to line up with the production timeline of said show. Chiefly among those theories, the idea that Crow was meant to be a dark signer and that his popularity correlated to his cards, and the idea that Aki, specifically, had to give up her screentime for him because her VA got pregnant, which both lack any basis in reality, as you can read in the posts I linked. (One final shoutout to @mbg159 here, who compiled these incredibly comprehensive posts and can also be found here on tumblr. Huge thanks.) So if you can do me one favour, please just let the 5Ds rumours die already and read this analysis without the hope of seeing any of them confirmed. I'm so sick of these crackpot theories at this point that I can hardly find the words for it. And while we're on the topic, I also don't want to see this post used as a means to pit Aki and Crow against each other in any way—both have good reasons to be well-liked and both deserve their spot in the narrative, all right? All right.

And now, at last, let's get down to business. The last time I got on a virtual soapbox and yelled about Crow, I covered the entire WRGP, murder-duel-robot induced break included. That means that for this, final stretch, we'll be looking at everything from episode 137 onwards—the Ark Cradle arc. (A side not for dub aficionados here: Episode 136 was the last episode that got an English dub. In other words, everything I talk about here never even made it into the English version. Because 4Kids, I guess.) As we've done before, we'll take a look at what exactly Crow gets up to during the final stretch of the show (and, notably, the epilogue), then see whether any of it needed improving, and if so, how it could have been improved.

You'll find all further yelling below the readmore, and I'll leave you with the other, usual warning here, as well: This will be long. Even if the Ark Cradle arc, relative to the rest of the show, isn't, this post most certainly will be. So get some snacks and perhaps don't start reading this late at night unless you're good at knowing when to stop and reading stuff in bursts. (I'm not.)

As I concluded at the end of my last post, the WRGP ended up being a bit of a mixed bag for Crow. He's there, he duels, but at the same time, despite being positioned as an equal third of a protagonist trio, he's notably less important and arguably also weaker than Yusei and Jack. Moreover, where the plot is concerned, he sure didn't get too much to do—not to speak of the fact that the writers didn't grace him with any meaningful interactions with a certain character who'll become very relevant here.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, the preamble.

With the end of the Team New World duel, the final arc of the show drops the by this point unexpected arrival of the Ark Cradle right on our heads. So, what does Crow do here, at the start, other than be shocked? Well, not much. A lot of the first episode that introduces the Ark Cradle focusses more on the imminent threat said structure poses to New Domino City, and we flash back to our protagonists mostly to ascertain that things are, in fact, going to shit. Even once that focus on the city evacuating shifts again, the episode concerns itself more with Yusei than with Crow. However, meagre as it is, we do get the first interaction between Crow and Sherry during the Ark Cradle arc in this episode.

(Uh.... at least they're technically talking to each other?)

And frankly... It's not much. Unfortunately, up until the duel where he faces her, the Ark Cradle arc continues a trend regarding interactions between Crow and Sherry that we already saw in the WRGP: They barely get to interact, and even when they do, they never have anything so much as resembling a meaningful conversation, mostly because Sherry basically never addresses Crow directly, nor seems very interested in him, while Crow is usually there only to react to what she's saying, rather than actually talk to her. While digging through my mountain of screenshots, I found that latter part to be especially interesting, because as it turns out, this is a trend not just in Crow's interactions with Sherry, specifically. Many moments that probably contribute to the nefarious "screentime" (I've explained my gripes with this term in part two) some people like to accuse Crow of hogging have him only be part of a scene so he can react to what happens in it, to the point of him sometimes feeling like a stand-in for the audience reaction the writers might be hoping for. The above is a perfect example, because as far as character writing is concerned, Crow's "interaction" with Sherry here is utterly devoid of meaning. He's just there to communicate his disbelief over the ominous prediction that Yusei is guaranteed to die if he goes to the Ark Cradle, which feels like exactly the kind of reaction the writers probably wanted from the audience. After all, it's a bold, shocking statement to make. The protagonist, dying? In a card game anime geared towards twelve year-olds? It's downright preposterous. And Crow seems to agree with that, if his dialogue is anything to go by.

This one and other scenes (mostly the kind that contain plot elements that Crow doesn't actually interact with) got me thinking, though, and after having gone through so much of the show with a fine-tooth comb now, I think I've come to a conclusion, so permit me a tangent here: I believe the choice to let Crow, specifically, be a character who often only reacts to events or interactions after the DS arc, rather than contributing much himself, is deliberate. Don't get me wrong, I don't think he's the only character who is frequently put in this position—Aki, the twins, and even Bruno, especially when they're on the sidelines in the WRGP, also often only seem to be there to react or comment on things, perhaps partially to remind us viewers that they still exist, despite not being in a position where they contribute anything to the plot. With how much the twins and Aki got pushed to the side after the pre-WRGP and the Unicorn duel, respectively, and with how toned-down Bruno's entire character is until the very end, as not to spoil his tragic antagonist status too much, Crow in particular ending up as an often reactive, rather than active character stands out a bit more, though. And I think this has everything to do with his personality, because it contrasts that of Jack and Yusei. Think of it. Sure, Crow is shown several times to be just as cool and competent as the other two, but what he has that the other two crucially lack is the ability to freak out like a normal person. I'm being hyperbolic here, of course, but I do genuinely believe this, because when I think back to the show, Jack and Yusei, due to their character writing, only ever seem to be allowed to lose their cool during pretty specific circumstances, and only in very specific ways. Jack, for example, only ever gets to freak out either when a scene paints him as the butt of the joke (like during his infamous, dramatic outburst over cup ramen), or when the freakout is caused by—and expressed as—righteous (or not so righteous) fury (like when he storms off angrily after catching everyone watching his old duel with Dragan). Meanwhile, Yusei is played so straight that we barely ever see him lose his composure at all, outside of intensely dramatic, high-stakes situations (think his dark signer duels with Kiryu, his confrontation with Roman, his initial failure to accel synchro). Hell, the closest we get to ever seeing him be mildly upset about something like a normal person, as far as I can recall, is when he gets embarrased by Martha calling him out on his perceived crush on Aki. That's it.

Crow, though. Crow's allowed to do something the other two aren't: He's allowed to react to the world around him like your average guy. Jack blows through their household money for expensive coffee. Crow gets upset. Understandable. Crow gets injured right before his big debut in a turbo duelling tournament and is upset to the point of snapping at his friends over it. Understandable. Seeing Yaeger's kid cheering his dad on and knowing that this kid will cry if his dad loses makes Crow relent and throw the match. Understandable. Sherry predicts Yusei's imminent death due to hocus pocus and Crow calls bullshit. Understandable.

Do you see what I'm driving at? With how the show treats the other two Satellite boys, I'd argue none of the moments above would have worked anywhere near as well if the writers had tried to make Jack or Yusei take Crow's place in any of them. Because while Yusei and Jack, I feel, were certainly written to be the coolest characters (at least to the target audience), Crow seems like he was written to be the most relatable. He's the guy who takes on a delivery job when they need money. He's the guy who complains about his cranky landlady. And he's the guy who reacts to insane nonsense happening around him a little more realistically than his defeated-an-ancient-devil-to-absorb-its-power brother, his shouldering-the-guilt-of-a-cataclysmic-event-decades-ago other brother, their mutual previously-violent-psychic-who-was-part-of-a-cult friend, and the one-of-us-can-see-spirits-and-we-share-a-weird-kind-of-magical-bond twins. As such, it doesn't feel too out there to me to claim that in many situations, they made Crow the stand-in for the audience, because he has a less iron composure than Jack and Yusei, is readily available in many scenes by virtue of living with the other two, and happens to be the guy who has the arguably most normal backstory out of the signers. (Save, perhaps, for Rua, but I've already addressed before why the writers barely ever pulled Rua centre stage for anything. And they certainly wouldn't have pulled him centre stage for this, either.)

Now, as far as character writing is concerned, assuming I'm at least halfway correct with my hunch above, I feel that whether or not this decision is good or a shot in the foot on the writers' part depends largely on every audience member's individual perception of Crow after the DS arc. If you liked seeing this scrappy guy introduced during the DS arc, of course you would have been happy to see more of him! Even if he's only present in scenes to comment on what's going on and doesn't actually get to do anything meaningful. If you didn't like Crow that much, though, I can see how him popping up so often only to yap a bit and contribute essentially nothing could have grated on you. And as I said, I think this is where the "screentime" discussion comes in again, because yeah, Crow is very much on screen in all these little-bit-of-nothing scenes. He doesn't get to do much and his character isn't fleshed out or reinforced in any way, but he sure is there. For better or for worse.

And this—this is where I can finally get back to him and Sherry. Because in his interactions specifically with her, it is for worse, due to the fact that all the scenes that contain both of them before the Ark Cradle duel are pretty much exclusively these kinds of little-bit-of-nothing, reactive scenes. Crow doesn't get to interact with Sherry meaningfully, and he never—and I need to empathise this—, not once gets to interact with her one on one, not until the end-of-series duel both of them take part in happens. What makes Crow's lack of meaningful interactions with Sherry even worse is that his later duelling partner against her is Aki, of all people, who by contrast gets to interact with Sherry a whole bunch, most notably during her duel against Yusei. Not only that, but Sherry is also shown to actually be interested in Aki, which cannot be said for Crow. Yet, still in the same episode I was describing above, while the Ark Cradle begins its descent, it's not Aki, but Crow who is entrusted with this card by Mizoguchi/Elsworth:

(I'd like to point out that the dialogue following this moment doesn't make it clear whether Crow even knows what Sherry's connection to this card is. For all we know, this could be the first time Crow sees it, without being aware of any of the context surrounding it.)

You know, the card that's essentially a symbol of Sherry's attachment to her parents and her commitment to revenge. The card that basically her entire character revolves around. For a single piece of cardboard, this thing comes with a lot of narrative baggage attached, yet canon doesn't even take the time to assure us that Crow knows what Z-ONE means, other than it being a memento of Sherry's parents, as Mizoguchi explains. And frankly, this all feels like a rather ham-fisted attempt to get some last-minute setup for the later confrontation between Crow and Sherry in. It's like the writers desperately wanted to feel the emotional moment in the duel later to feel earned; they wanted to have their cake and eat it, too. There's only one problem: They didn't even bake the damned thing, the ingredients are just sitting around, untouched, as if staring at them long enough will magically make a cake manifest.

But, well, since I'm already talking about this, I may as well get into the actual meat of the matter, because frankly, it's not like Crow gets much else to do at the start of the arc. Yusei takes off because he at first wants to go to the Ark Cradle alone (like an idiot), leading to the signers coming after him (and telling him he's an idiot). Joining this effort and assuring Yusei that they won't let him die alongside the others is as much as Crow gets to do before the inevitable three-way duel starts.

(That said, while it doesn't accomplish anything, I've always appreciated this little moment while Yusei still tries to pull his stupid kamikaze plan—Crow would know more shortcuts in the BAD area than he does. After all, he lived there for a good while!)

After that, everyone gets up to the Ark Cradle and, as we all know, the signer group is forcibly split up by Z-ONE before deciding to go to a Yusei gear each in order to shut down Ark Cradle's negative Moment. (Top ten sentences that wouldn't make a lick of sense to anyone who isn't up to their neck in 5Ds lore.) And the very first duel on the menu in this final stretch of episodes is also Crow's final duel in the entire show.

(Drumroll please.)

Here's the thing. I love this duel, actually. I get extremely hyped every time I rewatch it. BUT. But. I do not love it so blindly that I couldn't see that it has not one, but several issues. Not only that, but those issues don't just rest on Crow's shoulders, they sadly rest on the shoulders of all three participants in this duel, because frankly? Alongside the four-way Jack/Rua/Ruka/Aporia duel, this duel is one of the Ark Cradle arc's desperate attempts to tie up loose ends. Because as much as I enjoy this arc, that's exactly what it is: A race to the finish line, an attempt to tie as many loose ends as possible up in as little time as the show could get away with. To make clear why I think this, let me just list off all the things this arc resolves or at the very least tries to tie up with a neat bow:

It reintroduces Aki's psychic powers, which we were previously led to believe she'd lost. Notably, we didn't get a reason for why they disappeared and don't get a reason for why they reappear, either. It also turns them into healing powers in an attempt to establish a reason for why she later studies medicine.

It explains what happened to Sherry and what actually drives her revenge. Furthermore, it releases her from her narrative fridge-prison in order to actually let her duel Aki (yes, Aki, specifically), which is a confrontation that was subtextually implied several times previously.

It resolves the question of Bruno's identity by revealing him as an antagonist.

It finally reveals Life Stream Dragon, who was at this point teased over seventy episodes ago.

It also finally rewards Rua, who was teased to possibly become a signer during the DS arc, with an actual signer mark. (As short-lived as it may be.)

It actually explains Iliaster's real plan, which is Z-ONE's hope that the 5Ds gang can actually save the future.

Speaking of which, it actually explains who Z-ONE is and why he's a big deal. (Remember, this guy was first teased a good while ago at this point in time.)

Alongside Sherry, it dusts off several protagonists who didn't get an opportunity to duel on-screen and lets them duel one, final time. (Notably, Aki, Rua, and Ruka, who at this point haven't been seen duelling since the early WRGP or even pre-WRGP.)

You may notice that none of these bullet points contain Crow. They do, however, contain Aki and Sherry, both of whom went into this finale with several unanswered questions as to their characters. Crow, not so much. But let's just put a pin in that for now while we actually jump into the duel.

*Cracks knuckles* Aki & Crow VS Sherry. Here we go at last. Fair warning, the character writing of all three participants of this duel overlaps a fair bit here, so expect to hear a bit of a mishmash about our revenge trio.

So, how does this duel start? Firstly, with Sherry waxing poetic about why she's even opposing Team 5Ds now.

(A dramatic switch of sides that sadly doesn't hold a candle to Bruno turning out to be Antinomy. Which, funnily enough, might be why this duel is front-loaded and Bruno's comes later.)

I won't dig into this too much, but I just want to point out the one thing this moment gives us: It establishes character motivation. Sherry claims she can no longer get revenge and has thus lost her purpose. (The reason why she can no longer get revenge, if you're interested, is because Moment Express, her final lead, vanished in its entirety, as far as canon is concerned.) Thus, she took the bait when Z-ONE offered her a new purpose, and, more importantly, a reward. Now, Aki and Crow at this point in the episode don't get to hear what that reward is, but for our analysis, it's important to keep in mind: Z-ONE promised Sherry he'd alter the timeline so she would get her parents back if she helps him. And I think this is immensely important because this is not only Sherry's goal in the present, I think it's actually the core of her character from the very first moment we meet her. In classic, tragic-avenging-type character fashion, she claims to want revenge when what she's really doing is trying to numb the pain of the awareness that she'll never get her parents back. (Though I'll admit this may also be my generous read of her as a person who likes revenge-obsessed characters.) And then, Z-ONE dangles the actual thing she wanted all along before her. Of course she took the bait.

This brings us to the start of the duel itself. As we know, Sherry employs some tactics that feel quite different from what she previously did in this duel. First and foremost, she messes with the mechanics of the duel itself by using the field spell Ecole de Zone, creating an illusion that confuses Aki and Crow into duelling not her, but each other at first. Sherry, meanwhile, takes a very passive role, clearly intent on letting the two destroy each other while she sporadically activates card effects to accelerate this. What makes all this stand out as even more unusual for her is that she sets this up by lying. At the beginning of the duel, she tells Aki and Crow that there's two of her, and that each duellist will fight one copy of her on a seperate field each, but this is a misdirection to make the two signers duel each other instead of her. And, look. I don't need to tell you this is out of character for Sherry. Canon literally does that for me.

(Case in point.)

It's only after Crow and Aki catch onto the fact that something's wrong and after Aki destroys the field spell that Sherry uses her "real strategy", switching to Soul Binding Gate, which inflicts real damage every time a monster with less attack points than her life points is summoned, in order to whittle away at both other duellists' life points. This is also the point where she reveals to her opponents that she's doing all this to get her parents back. While she does that, we get a bit more back and forth in terms of cardplay, until Aki sets the field up just right so Crow can land a very high-damage hit with Black-Winged Dragon to end the duel. And that is pretty much the gist of it on the duelling side of things.

So what's going on on the narrative side of things, then? Well. Let me front-load something I've noticed on the narrative end: This duel heavily interacts with Crow's and Sherry's characterisation, but barely at all with Aki's. I'll make clear what I mean by that below. For now, let's just get an overview by going through the character moments as they occur in the duel. Why go through all of them? Because most either interact with Crow in some way, or set up a later interaction in the same duel that he's a part of, that's why. I'll get into the nitty-gritty of what this duel did well and what it didn't after that. (Mostly. You may have noticed I like tangents and rambling excessively.)

So.

The first moment belongs to Aki and Crow in equal measure, and happens just as Ecole de Zone is destroyed—which Aki accomplishes by using Crow's monster to synchro summon Black Rose Dragon, as well as prevent that synchro summon from being negated through the same monster's effect, so she can use her dragon's field wipe to get rid of Sherry's field spell. When Sherry is surprised by this, Aki and Crow explain that they memorised each other's cards as part of a strategic effort as a WRGP team.

(Friendship is, in fact, magic.)

Not only does this explanation make perfect sense, it's also an excellent little tidbit to tie Aki and Crow together as a tag-team here, as it strengthens the connection between them. The only gripe I could possibly see with this is that it feels like this didn't necessarily need to be a surprise, end-of-the-show reveal. Frankly, it could have been pretty cool to see this much earlier, to have members of Team 5Ds realise what their teammates were getting up to during the WRGP duels, for example. (Instead of so often having the other signers react just as shocked as the announcer to their teammates' plays—I'm side-eyeing the infamous "a trap from the graveyard"-moment in particular. Like, Aki, sweetie, if you memorised Crow's deck, why are you surprised that he has a trap he can activate from the graveyard? I digress.) Moreover, this could have built anticipation for this particular duel, as viewers would have been excited to see what Aki and Crow would come up with to defeat Sherry as a team. So this moment is not bad, really. Just a bit underutilised, at least to me. (The word "underutilised" might become a trend in this post.)

Every other character-driven moment from here on out is shoved into the second duel episode, 140. Speaking of which, this episode starts with Aki and Crow getting the reveal of why Sherry is helping Z-ONE, where she admits that she joined the bad guys because she wants her parents back. She even goes as far as stating that because Z-ONE showed her the future, she has no hope that it can be saved and thus at least wants her lovely past back so she can have some solace before everything goes to hell for humanity. But we already went over that above.

Next up, albeit this moment should probably be considered more of a running theme than just one self-contained thing, we have Crow's struggle with Soul Binding Gate. Remember, the effect of this field spell causes all players to take damage every time a monster with less ATK than Sherry's LP is summoned. And at this point in the duel, Aki is barely above 1000 life points, so Crow worries about triggering the field spell's effect and hurting her, which leads to him playing suboptimally because he's more concerned about his friend than about winning the duel. Notably, Aki calls him out on this.

(She has a point.)

Outside of providing an internal conflict for Crow to grapple with, this isn't much to write home about. (Side note: I do find it interesting that they introduce the fear of physically hurting someone in a duel specifically in connection to Aki here, though, given that through her psychic powers, she had to grapple with this exact issue many times in the past. I have no idea if this was intentional, though.)

Between this and the next moment, there's a nice bit of interplay between Crow and Aki again, where he activates a card to refill her life points just in time so she doesn't drop to zero through Soul Binding Gate, while Aki uses a defensive trap to protect Crow in return.

(This is just here because it's a money shot to me. The juxtaposition of their faces and their life points, showing that while Aki may have the lowest life points, she still has the coolest head in this duel, and while Sherry technically has the upper hand, she's beginning to falter because she didn't anticipate the other two to work so well together. It's chef's kiss. Mwah.)

What follows after this, is, of course, the Big Moment. Where Sherry tries to convince Crow to forfeit so she can win and have Z-ONE change the past. And this is the one I really need to dig into.

With Sherry's earlier admission that she's on Iliaster's side because she wants her parents back acting as setup, she begins her attempt to sway Crow by telling him that if he had the opportunity to change the past, he would do it, too. And while Crow initially protests, Sherry challenges this, then proceeds to show him what Z-ONE's power could accomplish, and we get a lengthy sequence where Sherry, through weird cyborg-techno-magic-shenanigans that are never explained, takes Aki and Crow to a dreamlike space where Crow sees the orphans he used to take care of being happily reunited with their parents. Sherry also ominously tells him that this is "what he desires deep in his psyche" before promising him that if he surrenders the duel, Z-ONE can give him a world where Zero Reverse never occurred and all the kids can have happy lives with their real families. (I wanted to post most of this sequence in screenshots, but while I have them, I've realised I'm only a few images short of tumblr's limit already, so forgive me because I will need those remaining image spots.) This moment proceeds to introduce some serious doubt on Crow's end. Aki, meanwhile, remains steadfast, telling him not to fall for Sherry's manipulation, which leads to her giving an almost Yusei-style speech. In a moment where Crow wavers, both because he's genuinely considering whether taking Sherry's offer might be the wiser choice, and because he doesn't want to hurt Aki by triggering Sherry's field spell effect, Aki calls out to him and tells him to snap out of it by reminding him of how Yusei reached out to her during their second duel. This speech is a bit, um. Clunky, I feel. (At least if the translation is correct. If it isn't, then that may be the issue.) See, she tells him that Yusei "saved her from the darkness of her psychic powers", that "he wasn't concerned about his own safety and risked his life to persuade her", that, because her psychic powers are now gone, she's "renewed" and that this somehow brought her to the epiphany that as long as she believes in her own potential, she can change the future. This is lifted almost verbatim from the scene, by the way. Leaving aside the fact that half of this feels like a mild to severe misrepresentation of Aki's character arc during the DS arc (don't talk about it, don't talk about it, I need to make this another post of its own, damn it), I, personally, can't exactly follow how she ended up with that final epiphany from the circumstances she listed. But lucky for us, Crow apparently gets what she's driving at, because he quickly echoes her statement and they both conclude that Crow's kids also believe in the future and fight to live, that they're not sad about their lives the way they are right now, even though they don't have parents. Thus, Crow catches himself, echoing Aki's sentiment and telling Sherry that he, too, believes in the future. And through the power of Friendship and Believing in the Future, he manages to use Aki's cards to land the final hit, nicely mirroring how she used his to destroy Ecole de Zone.

...Phew. Okay, look. First off, that above, large section is basically several character beats stacked on top of one another. On Sherry's end, we have the intriguing fact that she's specifically trying to manipulate Crow, not Aki. In fact, she doesn't so much as try to sway Aki, as though she knows it's no use. Then, on Aki's end, we've got her pulling a real Yusei, staying level-headed almost the entire duel and reaching out to make sure Crow stays on track. This moment also ties back to her own conflict with her powers again. (Which, unfortunately, I will talk about, and yes, I'll be chewing drywall the entire time I do it.) Finally, on Crow's end, we've got a nice, proper moment where he doubts himself and, by his own admission, nearly makes a terrible mistake because he wants nothing more than for the kids he used to take care of to have good lives.

Now, before I go over what worked about this moment and what didn't, let me just chew through the rest of the actual duel itself, too, then circle back too highlight some things. In other words, time for me to chew some drywall.

*Sigh*

At the very end of the duel, there are two more character moments that are noteworthy.

First, right before the final hit, we get Sherry desperately defending herself against Aki and Crow's newly strengthened belief that the future can, in fact, still be saved, which she does by (rather heartbreakingly) asking what's so wrong about wanting her parents back, about wanting their love and warmth back. It's at this point that Crow's allowed to get back at Sherry by challenging her beliefs, telling her that people "work hard to live because they only get one chance at life", and that there's no point in trying to go back to do things differently, that the only way to keep going is to believe in the future, regardless of whatever painful and sad events one has had to live through. I'd say this sentiment certainly fits Crow, character-wise, especially given his rough Satellite background. It does partially fall flat because it feels a bit weird for him, specifically, to now be acting like he knows Sherry inside and out, much like she did with him earlier, but again, this is simply a matter of setup and I'll try not to belabour that point again. The horse is already dead, no sense in beating it. It's after this speech and the final attack that Sherry finally realises her error.

Buuut this leads us right into the next character moment. Because as the duel ends, Sould Binding Gate physically falls apart, pelting all three of our duel participants in debris and threatening to crush them under it. While everyone does briefly fall over (and Sherry gets a moment to realise that her father wanted her to live strong, not accept seemingly inevitable doom and die weak), they soon realise they were not, in fact, buried under rubble, though. Because guess what! Black Rose Dragon to the rescue. Black Rose Dragon, who can suddenly physically affect her surroundings again. You know, that thing we were led to believe Aki could no longer make her monsters do because she lost her powers completely out of nowhere. And there's more! Because not only does Black Rose Dragon take care of the debris for the trio, as she disappears, she also heals all three of them, and in response, Crow gets a line that I unfortunately cannot for the life of me discuss without bias because it kills me every time.

(Crow. Crow, please. You're killing me. I beg you.)

This line out of Crow's mouth feels extremely weird to me, and in the process of typing up this post, I've been trying to find the reason why. Here's the conclusion I've come to: Firstly, it feels a bit out of place from him, somehow. A line hypothesising about what psychic powers can or can't do—this is something I would have expected out of Aki's mouth, but not out of Crow's. I believe what makes it feel so out of place, though, isn't necessarily that it seems a bit odd for him, specifically, to theorise about this, but that when I hear it, I don't feel like the character is saying it. Instead, in this moment, moreso than in some others that suffer from the same issue, I hear not Crow, but the writers speaking. I hear them telling me "look, we know we made it seem like Aki's powers are super gone and like they were super, irredeemably bad, and like she and you should be happy that they're gone, but here, see, this is what they're really like. Don't you think we came up with something clever here, to set her becoming a doctor later up nicely? No, this isn't because we needed to backpedal on our decision to make her lose them and be happy about it at the last second, why do you ask?". And yes, I concede this might just be me. (So feel free to disregard this in terms of analysis, I just have some weird kind of vendetta against this line.) But still, even without my personal issues hampering me, this line of dialogue out of Crow's mouth is just plain odd. After all, how would he know what "real" psychic powers are? Since when is he the expert, especially considering we've never so much as seen him comment on Aki's powers before? (And for the record, this line would have seemed just as weird had any other character other than Aki said it imo. It just has that unmistakable "writers trying to justify something at the last second"-tang to me.)

And do not. Do Not get me started on the fact that the writers, despite going to such great pains to paint Aki's psychic powers as an exclusively negative thing especially during the WRGP arc, decide to reintroduce them here, suddenly as a good thing that can also heal people, which directly contradicts every choice they've made when it came to Aki's relationship to her powers ever since the Team Catastrophe duel. While crucially also lacking the one thing this entire duel is practically begging for: Fucking. Setup. But at this point, the handling of Aki's powers, specifically, really needs its own post, so I'll hold off on any further comments here and come back to that another time. I feel like I'm beginning to talk in circles, anyhow. Setup. Setup, setup, setup. This duel wishes it had it, because then the ideas presented here—which, in a vacuum, are compelling—might have worked smoothly.

But, with that. We have finally made it through the duel itself. Sherry, at the very end, gets her change of heart and at last cements herself as a good guy, and that concludes the first duel in the finale, and also both Aki and Crow's last duel in the entire show.

And good lord, was this duel all over the place. Though I think my meandering scene-by-scene breakdown of it showed as much. Now, onto the proper evaluation of what worked and what didn't here. First, let's get the good these two episodes do out of the way, shall we. (Because there is a lot of Bad I need to yell about, unfortunately.)

By virtue of being one of the final duels, this is Aki and Crow's last chance to shine, and shine, they do. Both in the duelling department and in the character department. Aki makes two major plays that upend Sherry's strategy and Crow's perfectly in sync with her, showing that the two truly are teammates, and paying off all the character moments they had specifically in the Team Unicorn to Team Catastrophe section of the WRGP. Their friendship and cooperation is believable and entertaining to watch. Then on the character side, Aki's growth is (somewhat) paid off—where she used to be a character that doubted herself and was afraid of hurting people, she is now the one who can keep a level head and help others fight their self-doubt. Meanwhile, Crow gets to show off his unfailing dedication to community and family again, both by watching out for Aki and by selflessly desiring not for himself to have a better life, but for the kids he used to take care of. And Sherry, who was previously removed from the narrative in such an unsatisfactory way, finally gets to duel again, gets to explain why she actually does what she does, and gets to join the heroes at the end, permanently joining the ranks of the good guys instead of the villains. Happy endings all around.

Ehem. And this is where I'm gonna be less nice about this duel. Because the problem is, due to the specific constellation of characters involved in this duel and how they previously interacted in the show, there's a lot of stuff here that doesn't work nearly as well on a second watch as a first watch would like to make you believe.

First, a broader issue on the card game end of things: The way this duel feels, it's very much more Aki's duel than Crow's, which is also kind of confirmed in the card plays being made. Though it's Crow who's first shown to catch onto the fact that a third party is activating additional card effects out of nowhere, it's Aki who fully solves the mystery, uses Crow's monster to synchro summon Black Rose Dragon, then activates her dragon's effect to get rid of the illusion for good. And while Crow gets to land the final hit, it's Aki's setup and her trap, Synchro Stream, that make it possible for him to win for both of them. And yet. On the dialogue- and character-interaction side of things, this duel is made out to be much more Crow's than Aki's. Because, perhaps surprisingly to some, Aki doesn't waver one bit in this duel. She's got her head in the game the entire time. She's here to do business—that business being defeating Sherry—and by god, does she do it. Moreover, unlike Crow, she has much, much better setup to be duelling Sherry than he does. And this comes right back around to the main thing this duel suffers from, which I've already harped on about: Crow and Sherry, up until this point, have not interacted in a way that would make the connection between them seem in any way significant. Unfortunately for this duel, though, Aki and Sherry have.

From the first episode where we're introduced to Sherry, she's shown to be interested in who Aki is and what she can do. During the duel between her and Yusei, she comments on Aki's powers. Later, when Aki is getting her turbo duelling license, Sherry watches on with interest. At some point while Aki's training, Sherry drops by to speak with her and Yusei again. My point here being, of course, that Aki, unlike Crow, got several scenes where she interacted with Sherry or had Sherry meaningfully take note of her existence before this point. Yet, whatever dynamic the writers may or may not have been aiming for between these two is, at best, underutilised in the final duel, if not completely ignored, at worst. Instead, the writers shift their focus to Crow and try to make us believe that Sherry, a character who has barely acknowledged his existence thus far, would know him well enough to consider him the better target for her attempt at manipulation. (And don't get me started on how the hell Z-ONE's weird robot magic is supposed to expose what Crow "desires deep in his psyche". That is simply a chasm the show expects us to suspend our disbelief over.) And look. The thing is, I don't think the Big Moment where Sherry tries to convince Crow to forfeit is terrible in isolation. Like, they could have made this work, had they given these two setup, had they given us, the audience, reason to believe Crow could be swayed like this (which they, notably, also didn't), and had they given us the impression that Sherry knows Crow well enough to pull something like this. What hurts the scene immensely, however, is that it's preceded by everything before, starting from the WRGP, where there is no setup between these two, no reason to believe Crow could be convinced to forfeit a duel against a major antagonist, and no meaningful interactions to support the belief that Sherry knows who Crow really is at all.

What also stands out to me is that Crow really doesn't feel like the best character to parallel Sherry, here, either. Parallel in the sense that she tries to get to him by expressing a desire she believes they both feel—getting a certain, nicer version of the past they never had back. Because the thing is, Sherry and Crow hardly feel like they have very much in common, and there's certainly no previous hints to make anyone believe they would have this in common. (So for all we know, Sherry could have just been taking a shot in the dark by trying to convince Crow.) You know who could have made for an excellent character to mirror Sherry, though? Yeah. The third person in the room during this scene. Aki.

See, here's the thing about these three as characters, in relation to what this scene tries to accomplish (getting a protagonist to waver by having the antagonist appeal to certain emotional similarities between them): While Crow may perhaps be more relatable to the audience, he isn't all that relatable to Sherry. He comes from dirt poor origins, she from rich ones. He doesn't even remember his parents, she defines herself by the memory of hers. She's a lone wolf, he's incredibly community-focussed. The only parallel you could have drawn between these two, up until this duel, is knowing what it feels like to want revenge. (Sherry with her parents, Crow with his kids back in the DS arc.) But guess what, unfortunately, Aki knows that too, what with her past as the Black Rose Witch and wanting to make people pay for ostracising her. And to make matters worse, she has a lot of other things going for her that parallel Sherry much, much better, too. They both come from well-off families, both have had major, traumatising events in their lives revolve around their parents, both left their initial family structure by way of drastic changes in their life, both are intimately familiar with the desire for vengeance, and, most damningly, Aki knows what it's like to stand on the side of the bad guys—like Sherry is doing in that very scene—because you feel like it's the only place that gives you hope/meaning. Not to speak of the fact that Aki, given her turbulent past with her psychic powers, would probably know exactly what it feels like to want a past you never had back. There would have been so much to work with there, and it makes whatever they were gunning for with Crow look... lacklustre, to put it mildly, by comparison.

The worst part is, I think, that the blame lies neither with the characters nor with the scene concept here. Solely with the execution. Because I truly think they could have made this work. They could have made the entire duel work, big character moments and all. But the keyword is and always has been setup. Setup, which the writers, at least in part, strangely gave to Aki, but not to Crow, which is what hurts particularly his portion of this duel, and, arguably, his character writing in general. Because—and this may be a small thing in the grand scheme of things, but permit me this—while Crow wanting a better future for the kids he used to take care of over a better future for himself feels perfectly on brand, the idea of him forfeiting a duel against a major antagonist, while the threat of the entire city being destroyed is hanging above his head... doesn't. Like, yes, I've talked about the fact that Crow is the only character in 5Ds who ever actually loses duels on purpose. What you may remember, though, is that both occasions we've seen him do this—against Lyndon and Yaeger, respectively—were much lower-stakes duels than this. Not to speak of the fact that it also feels a little odd that Crow, of all people, would buy into the idea that Z-ONE's genuinely powerful enough to just give those kids their parents back, given how liberally he called bullshit on pretty much any and all supernatural mumbo-jumbo claiming that fate is inevitable, or that the gods have this-and-that power, or what have you the entire show. (Also, doesn't he strike you as the guy who'd wonder why Z-ONE's not using his fancy powers for better things, if the extent of them is so great? Or is that just me?) It's a moment of character doubt that tries to sell itself as believable, even though we've never been given any hints that this kind of temptation, specifically, could work on Crow.

Ultimately, Crow & Aki VS Sherry feels like a very hot-and-cold duel. On the cardplay side, the teamwork between Aki and Crow is well done, yet the duel does feel like it skews more towards Aki than towards Crow. Sherry, meanwhile, plays tricky and mean like a proper antagonist, but does so at the expense of sacrificing all her previous tactics and monsters (and, arguably, some of her character, though this is probably on purpose, given her transformation into an antagonist). Then, on the character side, we've got Aki in an interestingly Yusei-ish role, which, while it feels like a good way to show how she's matured and learned, wastes her character dynamic with Sherry. On the other side, Crow and Sherry interact in several personal ways throughout the duel that leave you wondering when exactly these two got to know each other so well, because the show certainly didn't give us a visible progression of their dynamic. The only dynamic that leaves nothing to be desired is that between Aki and Crow (stilted speeches aside), because it excellently showcases their friendship and teamwork. Very weird decisions made in the writing here all around.

We'll get into the nitty-gritty of what changes I would have suggested to improve this duel below, but first: What happens after this duel? Well, two more Yusei gear duels, Aporia briefly standing up to Z-ONE, and then, the final, big clash between Yusei and Z-ONE.

Given that Crow isn't even present for two of these duels and then barely gets more to do than stand on the side and react during the final two, I will dare to skip all that, though. Because really, Crow's occasional comments and the play-by-play he sometimes joins the others in giving when spectating a duel don't exactly contribute anything to his character. They're just there so he gets something to do and doesn't fade into the background entirely when a duel that doesn't involve him is going on. This includes the moment where he, much like the other signers, gets to give Yusei Black-Winged Dragon for the final duel, as well as the later moment when Yusei uses it, chanting in tandem with Crow as BWD arrives. And other than that and the tear-jerking moment when he later reacts to Yusei returning despite all odds, he really doesn't get any noteworthy scenes.

In other words, we are skipping straight to the end. So, where do we find Crow there?

(Oh, y i k e s.)

There's a popular post circulating around this site that goes something like "the worst thing you can do to a character is make them a cop during a timeskip". And, look. I don't think I need to tell anyone that becoming a sector security officer is an extremely jarring character choice for Crow. Crow, of all people! The guy with the face full of markers, who used to be part of a duel gang, who was introduced in the show gleefully stealing from security Robin Hood-style, and who has every reason to despise law enforcement! (Leaving aside the obvious logistical issue that Crow in no country in the world could have completed his police training in the few months between the Ark Cradle debacle and this scene. But given that 5Ds generously brushes realistic concerns like this one aside on multiple occasions, this is, funnily enough, the thing I'm also more willing to overlook here. The character dissonance, however, less so.)

I'll try to be generous and guess that the writers were aiming to convey a message somewhere along the lines of "even someone who's done bad things in the past can become an example for others" or something like it. The problem is just that Crow didn't need any such message because he was already the good guy while he was still actively stealing from security. He was the lovable rogue to a T, damn it! But this, in particular, is a surface scratch hinting at a bigger issue, I think—namely, the issue of the show's complete pivot when it came to the depiction of law enforcement after the DS arc. Because when we think back to that part of 5Ds, good security officers were the exception, rather than the rule. And this is exactly what makes Crow of all characters becoming one even weirder. He would know, would remember how security used to treat him, his kids, his friends, his brothers. And if the idea here was that, well, he's trying to improve sector security by joining it and changing it from the inside, so to speak, then guess what was missing again: Our good, old friend setup. I'm starting to feel like a broken record. So yeah, I don't think a ton of people, whether they like or hate Crow, would disagree that this is a supremely weird position to put his character in.

As we find out through 5Ds' epilogue, however, his sector security job isn't quite what Crow actually wants, though. (And thank god, because that would have been such a bizarre position to leave him in.) Instead, we're shown fairly quickly that several duelling leagues are apparently trying to scout Crow out, and that he's tempted to accept one of the offers and go into pro duelling. This is at first shown in a short scene where something like a league scout follows Crow, then later, when the whole group—sans Jack, at first—is getting together and everyone starts discussing their futures. Aside from complaining a bit about his job and upsetting Aki without meaning to, Crow doesn't get much to do here, either. For what it's worth, at least him feeling tempted to ditch the security job feels more in line with the original Crow we got than with whatever strange twist the writers were going for after this shorter timeskip.

What follows is the very last duel of the show, the long-awaited Yusei VS Jack rematch, of course. And while he doesn't get to participate in this one, Crow, much like Aki and the twins, spectates the duel and ends up having an epiphany about what he wants to do. This epiphany ends up being that he does want to turn to pro duelling, and as a reasoning, canon provides us with this:

(As is known, intense card games are the only way to make children smile.)

Personally, I wouldn't say this is a terrible or out of character reason for Crow to decide to go pro. But there's more to that I'd like to discuss. First, though, let's take a quick look at where we find Crow after the second, bigger timeskip, which is inserted right in the middle of Yusei and Jack's final duel.

(Okay, yeah, I'm a sucker for the bullet earrings.)

The quick scene Crow gets here makes it unmistakably clear that he did go into pro duelling, just like he decided during the duel in the past, and not only that, he went into tag-team duelling and apparently managed to reach world champion status with his teammates. The above scene, however, is the exact same moment he decides to leave said team, so he can instead go solo and (presumably) try to beat Jack.

Now, we can discuss this in a bit more detail. Personally, I'm extremely in two minds about Crow being one of three characters, total, who ends up becoming a pro duellist after canon. Jack seems obvious, especially given the pivot back to his more Fortune Cup-esque persona the writers did around the Red Nova episodes. Rua also makes sense, given that Jack was his idol from the start. Crow, though, feels a little more complicated. The thing is, like so many things surrounding Crow in the Ark Cradle arc, the writers gave us no indication pro duelling is something he's really passionate about before this point. Worse, they didn't even really tell us what reason he saw to participate in the WRGP with his brothers beyond "could be fun". So there isn't really a connection here. The same thing goes for the fact that he specifically talks about teaching his teammates above, which is also something he wasn't associated with all that much previously. Though this one is admittedly less egregious, because at least Crow was seen briefly coaching Aki as she prepared to take his spot during the Unicorn duel. Still, while I wouldn't go as far as saying it's an out of character choice for Crow to go pro, it still feels a little odd that he went down the same route as Jack. Personally speaking, it feels like the writers didn't quite know what to do with him. Because as I said, Jack is obvious and Rua also makes sense, and I'd say the same goes for Yusei. Then there's Ruka, who is treated about as in-depth in the epilogue as she was throughout canon, and Aki, whose "setup" for her timeskip self was done extremely hasty and last-minute, but at least it was there. Between all of them, Crow occupies a weird spot where it doesn't so much feel like he ended up on the wrong trajectory for his life, as it simply feels like there were choices the writers could have made that would have fit him much better. What with his theme of legacy and community, trying to make Pearson's dream of a place where disenfranchised children can learn good life skills a reality would have been a good fit, for example. Especially considering his close ties to the Satellite orphans he used to take care of, which, funnily enough, are reinforced one more time as canon flips back to present day and Crow is seen bidding his kids goodbye.

("Come back"? When, precisely? And what part about "literally saved the world twice" doesn't qualify you as a hero to a bunch of kids ten times over already?)

Considering canon seems hellbent on making sure we know the signers went their separate ways and that they aren't anywhere near each other by the very end of the show, though, my guess is that Crow had to end up doing something like pro duelling, in order to get him out of New Domino City and away from the friend group whose shenanigans we were so accustomed to following by that point. Of course, there's also the argument to be made that Crow staying in NDC and getting a more community-focussed ending would have also been significantly less cool than making him a kickass pro duellist with bullet earrings, which circles back to how the writing interacts with its target audience.

The only thing that follows after this, then, is the big goodbye, and with that, ladies, gentlemen, and other lovely 5ds nerds, we have successfully followed bird boy's path throughout the entire show. And what a ride it was. (I did not think this analysis would end up stretching over a whole four posts.) Time for some closing thoughts before I do my thing and suggest some rewrites that could have made all this feel more coherent one more time.

Crow's character arc, if it can even be called that, feels about as hot and cold as his and Aki's final duel with Sherry over the course of the show. His introduction is fast-paced, he's made to be likable quickly, and his integration into the main protagonist group is as quick as everything else about his narrative. Between the way he shows up out of nowhere, briefly disappears without fanfare, and is then reintroduced with even more importance before slipping into the signer group like he's always been there, it truly feels like his entire inclusion in the narrative was a last-minute decision by the writers to include that one, additional character concept Kazuki Takahashi had originally created after all. If there was one way to describe his whole arc, it would be that it's a rush. At the start, the writers are in a hurry to make him likable, then they're in a hurry to make him a signer, then they're in a hurry to give us a whole backstory for him, then they're in a hurry to give him a believable character dynamic with Aki, and at the end, they're in a hurry to pay off a character dynamic with Sherry they didn't properly set up with him. You may notice that leaves significant gaps, and the lack of balance between those gaps and the rushes surrounding them, I believe, are part of why he's such a polarising character.

Crow is integrated so thoroughly into the signer group at the end of the DS arc that, much like Aki and the twins, he gets stuck in the position of being a character that cannot simply be removed from the narrative for a longer amount of time. And this, I think, ends up biting him in the ass, because in the gaps where the writers don't rush to do something big with him, it often feels like they don't quite know what to do with him at all. So, he instead gets relegated to small side tasks, like inane duels that don't affect the plot, or becomes the person who reacts to unfolding situations in whatever manner wouldn't fit Yusei or Jack. He feels like he's the third portion of the protagonist trifecta only in theory—the status of an equal third player seems to be what the writers had in mind, yet, looking at the show, it feels like an honorary title, at best, because the writing choices made for him don't convey anywhere near the same amount of thought and effort as those of Yusei and Jack. Crow's backstory doesn't intersect significantly with that of his brothers, his dragon is introduced way too late and never given an upgrade, he never gets to clash with Iliaster until the Team New World duel, and throughout the entire WRGP and Ark Cradle arc, there isn't a single duelling victory that's solely his. People who prefer other characters over Crow like to harp on about how much screentime he gets; I argue that this is exactly what showcases how poorly the writers took care of him in many instances. For as much as Crow is plastered onto the screen and given the aesthetics of an equal player in a protagonist trio, his many appearances are as much of a curse as they are a gift, because too many of them aren't spent setting up anything meaningful or developing his character in any way. Speaking of character development: There is none. Crow exits the show pretty much exactly the same as he entered it, brief security stint aside. And, look, this need not necesarily be a bad thing. Static characters exist and they have their place in stories. It's just that in Crow's case, his utter lack of development feels like another damning indicator of the writers' cluelessness when it came to utilising him, given his weird, sort-of-elevated-protagonist. Aki, who is so often weighed against him, gets significantly more development than he does. And though Jack also ends up in almost the same place at the end of the show as he was at the start, at least he had a dip in the middle where his character was somewhat malleable and not set in stone. Crow didn't.

What we end up with, then, is a character whose concept is perfectly fine on paper, but whose execution proceeded to turn him into the one and only favourite for some, and the embodiment of piss poor writing for others. Having now looked at pretty much his entire run in the show with a bloody microscope, I end up somewhere in the middle, myself. He's a good character and much of his writing is confusing at best, utter dogshit at worst. As for what decisions in the writing room led to him turning out like this, I'd still pay good money to know them. For what it's worth, I've tried my very best to make an educated guess as to all of them.

And now, for the final time, allow me to do my very best to suggest how the issues of the Ark Cradle arc could have been addressed in order to make Crow's part in it less messy.

In previous posts, I've split up my rewrite suggestions depending on one circumstance: Whether or not Crow stays a signer. However, this time, I will deliberately forgo this, for one, very simple reason—Crow's status as a signer doesn't matter one bit for the Ark Cradle arc. Regardless of whether he has a mark or not, his duel with Sherry remains unaffected, and so does his later timeskip-self. Thus, pick your favourite, both versions work for the Ark Cradle.

Now. Onto the elephant vengeful Frenchwoman in the room. Let me repeat my favourite word in this post one more time. What the dynamic between Crow and Sherry needed, more than anything else, in order to satisfyingly be paid off during their Ark Cradle duel, was setup. There was so much time Crow spent on screen doing fuck all, and some of that time could have so easily been allocated to him interacting with Sherry in a meaningful manner. (I'm side-eyeing especially his pre-WRGP duels. Those did nothing to add to his character and could have easily been replaced with episodes where he actually gets to talk to Sherry one on one.) And if not that, then the writers could at least have done themselves the favour of letting Aki talk to Crow about Sherry, which would have arguably set up their three-way clash even better. Moreover, show us how the hell these two characters parallel each other and how they differ, damn it! The main issue with the big moment Sherry and Crow had in the duel was that Crow's faltering and his sudden, deep understanding of Sherry came completely out of nowhere. So what if they had shown some of that earlier, then? What if they had shown where the lmits of Crow's resolve lie, what could get him to doubt himself? What if they had drawn the parallel of Sherry and Crow both supposedly being characters that sometimes wistfully think about a past they never had earlier? It would have done so much to make that duel hit exactly the way it was probably meant to. As a bonus, if we had gotten Aki and Crow talking about Sherry, too, the scene of talking Sherry out of helping Z-ONE could have been a team effort, just like their card playing was. Both of them would have reasons to know different aspects of Sherry each, and both could have brought up good arguments. And this is really all this duel woild have needed to be better on the story end, I think: A solid, narrative foundation to make it obvious to us why it has to be these three characters duelling, why it could have only been this setup, why it made the most sense to let these three bounce off each other. Crow only needs that extra step to slot in better with the girls here.

As for the epilogue, I don't think anyone will be surprised to read that I would have never made Crow a cop, not even temporarily. The depiction of law enforcement 5Ds gives us during the DS arc is too damning for that. However, given the way the ending is structured, he does need some sort of occupation that feels like it's not quite the right thing so he can later change his mind about it, of course. Here, though, is where I, purely in service of Crow's character, would suggest a change that probably doesn't work with the ending's final aim of separating the 5Ds gang by hundreds of kilometres each. I would let Crow go into pro duelling first, then let him figure out that's not what he actually wanted. Crow, to me, is a character who is so intrinsically tied to community and family that turning him into a solitary pro duellist—even if he claims to do it to make the kids back home smile—feels off to me. Thus, from a character standpoint, I would let him pivot back to wanting to take care of those kids. Either through what I suggested above, letting him carry on Pearson's dream, or, which also feels fitting to me, by letting him help out Martha again and setting him up as the guy who'll take over when she can no longer run the orphanage. It's not the cool, glamorous end the show gave him, but it's what feels more like the family-focussed guy we first met in the show. It doesn't gel with the idea of permanently separating him from the other signers, though, unfortunately. To do something like that while keeping his community theme, one would probably have to send him away to shack up with Brave or something, to help orphans in other countries. But this, I think, nicely showcases the dissonance between what Crow's character writing would suggest he might do at the end, and what the show demanded he needed to do so he'd no longer be close to the others. Because my focus, as always, is only on character here. And Crow, with his personality and his writing, feels like the character who chafes the most against the idea of striking out solo, abandoning his ties to the community he was so invested in previously. To that extent, the above suggestion is the best I can provide with what we were canonically given. If we wanted to keep the canon ending he gets and actually make it make sense why he suddenly wants to be a lone wolf pro, the only thing I could suggest would be more setup for that. (Ah, there it is again. One final time.) Show Crow having some actual competitive drive, show him enjoying the whole tournament thing more than he thought he would during the WRGP. Just give us something that shows why he would want to go down this path, and why some other things that were previously important to him might not be a priority anymore. It all comes back to setup.

*Deep breath*

So, here we are, then, and this is it. This is all I could make of Crow's character writing in the entire show. To everyone who read this post in its entirety, a heartfelt thank you. To everyone who read the whole series of posts in its entirety, I'm so glad you're as insane about this show as I am, it makes me feel incredibly appreciated. Hope you enjoyed the ride, more meta posts will come eventually, just about different topics. In the meantime, see ya.

#yugioh 5ds #crow hogan #ygo 5ds #5ds #sherry leblanc #yugioh meta #IT IS DONE #HOLY SHIT IT IS DONE #I can't believe I've reached the point of my life where I do gratuitous media analysis for fun #this was such a ride god damn #but I completed it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!#I'm sticking a gold star on my forehead as a reward #anyway hope you enjoy this last part #feel free to yell at me (enthusiastically) about it #orchid rambles

47 notes · View notes

gamebunny-advance · 10 months ago

Text

Let's Just Rip Off This Band-Aid (Kliff Doll Repaint)

I still haven't finished adding the fringe to his scarf, but at this point, I don't think y'all will actually care that much. It's a personal project anyway, so I'll just finish it on my own time. Right now, I want to be released from the shackles of this project.

Once again, my poor camera and lack of editing do him no favors (he's got a real bad case of jaundice in that first pic. I PROMISE he's not that yellow-orange IRL ;o;), but he is (mostly) done.

Well, he was (mostly) done like a week ago, but just yesterday I decided to redo a few things to try and "fix" what was really bothering me about him, so I really made recursive progress. That said, I do like him more now than I did a week ago, so I'm not mad about it.

A little backstory: Alongside Kun3h0, I've been working on him for the past month, so I've been pretty occupied with this project for a while. Now, I do wonder to myself why exactly I thought making this would be a good idea. All I can really say is that my impulsive tendencies drive me to do things against my better judgement.

But, I will still give y'all my documentation and thoughts on the process + more pictures.

(I'll talk a little more about it later, but for those of you that aren't going to go through the long-ass readmore, the Neon J. mask is a reference to an old comic I drew.)

(It's so old, I was still writing everything by hand~)

So, the "real" answer to "why" I made this is really as simple as "because I could." As I said in the Kun3h0 post, I've been wanting to repaint dolls for a long time, years even, so in the back of my mind, I'm always thinking of ways I could finally start one.

Well, recently I just finally put together the ideas and motivation I needed to start. And of course, that was with Kliff.

I don't remember *exactly* how I stumbled across everything, but I do recall looking at doll clothes online and stumbling across this trench coat (pictured with the other clothes for this project).

(I took this pic mostly because I thought I was going to take pics of every major step of the process, but that didn't end up happening).

I thought it was pretty darn close to Kliff's coat, and I got the horrible idea that, "I could def make a Kliff doll to go with this coat as long as I can repaint it."

I feel like usually people would think the other way around, but that is basically the truth of this project: I didn't find clothes to fit the doll, I made the doll to fit into the clothes. Because for me, customizing the doll wasn't really the intimidating part: it's making the clothes. I don't know how to use a sewing machine, and currently lack the patience to learn (and due to some personal trauma that I don't really want to get into), but I can hand-sew, so starting any project that involves it requires me to be willing to set aside a lot of energy for me to do it, which I don't often have.

But, if I could find ways to cut down on the sewing, then I'd be more willing to start. And somehow, I was able to find just about everything I would need for a potential Kliff doll without having to sew anything. In the end, I only sewed together one thing, and it's the one thing that isn't actually finished: the scarf.

So, I blame the trench coat for the entirety of this project: if I'd never seen it, I would have never made a Kliff doll. In fact, I got the clothes before I even had the doll.

Since I was brainstorming this project, one of the most important parts is of course the base doll, which was tricky. Male doll repaints are fairly uncommon, especially of older men, so there weren't a lot of resources or places to get inspiration for this project.

From what I found, most male (fashion) dolls were very youthful, and the ones that weren't usually took heavy modifications to achieve, which was out of the question. Kliff was supposed to be an "easy" project, so on top of not wanting to sew any clothes for him, I also didn't want to have to alter the doll that much to make it look like him. This was a lot to ask for without putting in any personal work, but in a way, this goal was supposed to keep me from actually starting this project: really this whole thing was supposed to just live in my head as a fantasy as most things do, but then I just stumbled into the right set of things, so I couldn't stop myself from going through with it.

The doll I landed on was a BTS Mattel doll. Now I've said before that I know basically nothing about BTS, and that is still true, but that's beside the point. In my research for finding a suitable doll to work with, I found out that a popular base were these BTS dolls. At first, I wasn't into it because I was still running into the "youthful face" problem that I was with other brands: most of them had pillowy lips and nice soft faces, but I did eventually find one that I thought was close enough: J-Hope.

(It's not the worst match up.)

I don't have pics of my doll before I started working on him, but it was pretty close to the stock photo. He has much thinner lips than the others, and a taller, more angular head shape that I thought would work best for Kliff. I did worry a bit that the nose wasn't "strong" enough to really be Kliff (and IMO, it wasn't XP), but it was the closest I found yet, so I decided to bite the bullet and get one, and if I had one, that meant I needed to start gathering everything I would need for this project.

So, no backing out now.

Now, actually acquiring this doll was a whole other song and dance, but here's the part that's important for how the process went:

Due to a miscommunication with the seller I eventually got him from, there was a delay with shipping, so I didn't actually get him until weeks after "officially" starting this project. In the meantime, the clothes and things for Kun3h0 (who I started as an impulse project within the impulse project) had already been gathered.

The original plan was that I was going to work on and subsequently post about Kliff first since he was a comparatively simpler project. All the things I was avoiding for Kliff: sewing clothes and making modifications to the doll, were all going to be incorporated into Kun3h0, so she was theorhetically going to take longer and be posted later, thus telling a small story of "starting simple, ending complex." But since I didn't have his doll, but didn't want to delay working on Kun3h0 just to wait on him, I started on her and repainting his clothes anyway.

So, I don't have any pics of the doll or his clothes from when I was working on them, unlike the sparse ones I had for Kun3h0, I only have pics from after he was finished.

But I'll still tell y'all what I can to at least preserve the story.

For starters, repainting this coat was probably the most time-consuming part of this process.

I really thought that it would take one or two days maximum to turn this coat bright yellow, but I think it actually took over a week. And I really should have known; the coat was a medium tone, and I know that yellow takes a while to build up on anything that isn't light. I lost count at some point, but I swear that thing has over 20 coats of paint on it. Mind you, the first 10 or so coats were watered down with the textile medium, which also contributed to how long it was taking for the coat to take color, but at some point I just got so frustrated that I stopped mixing in the medium and painting directly onto the coat to get the color to layer faster. This is a huge no-no for painting acrylics onto fabric, lest the paint crack from creasing the fabric, but I just couldn't be bothered anymore. I needed this thing to be dandelion yellow NOW or I was gonna lose it.

There were consequences for taking that shortcut, such as the paint cracking in high motion areas and the coat getting stiff, but it's not terrible. In the end, I accepted the trade-offs or else I might still be painting the coat. Perhaps one day I'll reverse engineer the pattern for the coat and make him a new one, but I wouldn't count on it. In retrospect, I wonder if I would have had an easier time if I had thought to bleach the coat first?

As you might notice, I contoured/shaded part of the coat in orange. That's something that I actually *just* added yesterday and added another couple of hours to the work time. It was just bothering me that the doll was essentially a giant slab of yellow, and was part of the reason I didn't like it very much. But I got inspired by this repaint to try contouring the coat to give it more depth.

youtube

(I also used this person's videos to modify the hands. He has one deidcated to just reshaping the BTS hands.)

In the end, I'm pretty happy with the results.

The rest of the clothes weren't as difficult to deal with.

The pants took the paint a lot better, likely due to being dark paint on a light surface. Since I used less paint, it's not as stiff as the coat and still go on very easily. Though, they are VERY high waisted, and I'm not sure if that's normal XP

The shoes are also painted (and slightly modified), though I had to paint them twice because the first time, the paint got stretched off when I tried to put them on the doll's feet: the shoes were just *slightly* too small for the feet of the doll, so they really get stretched to fit his feet, and his heels don't actually go in all the way XP.

He's still capable of standing on his own, but I try not to remove the shoes, so I can avoid having them crack again.

In my "initial clothes" pic, I put down a different shirt than the one he's wearing. The original plan was to repaint the shirt black, but my work space is very limited, so I couldn't really repaint three pieces of clothes at once without significantly risking that I would stain other things. In the end, after getting scarred by how long it was taking for the coat to take color, I decided to just give him one of the black shirts that came with the coat. This does make him somewhat inaccurate since the current shirt has flowers/plants on it, but I'm gonna say that they make up for the lack of flowers on his scarf. Maybe someday I'll make him a new shirt from an old sock or something, but for now, I don't think it's a bad look.

Other clothing of note is the scarf, but since it's not technically finished I didn't take any close pics of it. It's actually made of an old headband of mine that I just cut and painted to look like his scarf.

Originally, I had actually glued on ribbon to it for the stripes, which took a couple days for the drying, but because I couldn't flatten out the scarf to easily glue the ribbon, it turned into a mess and bulked it out too much: since the scale of the doll is already small, I really needed to keep the fabrics thin. This was especially important for the scarf since it was going to wrap around his neck: if it were any thicker, it was going to practically eat up his face, which it still does, just less so.

Speaking of face...

When I finally got the doll in the mail, I started working on him right away, so I don't have any "before" pics of the doll.

After I did the usual "wiping off the face and pulling out his hair," I started with repainting the entire body and head.

Despite Kliff being ambigously "WHITE 🫵," Kliff isn't as pale as the original doll. I'd say even the stock picture I posted above has more warmth than the actual doll did. So, I got the base to be "coral" all over, dusted him in light orange chalk pastels for contouring, and most of his details are outlined in shades of burgandy. I didn't take any nude pics of this doll, but he is countoured all over his body and you can rest easy knowing I gave him some nips XP. But maybe someday I'll show y'all doll!Kliff's washboard abs XP.

TBH, I did want to detail some tattoos and some body hair too, but I just didn't trust myself to do either of those well with the tools I have (my brushes aren't thin enough, and my hand not steady enough for those kind of intricate details). Maybe someday I'll at least get his tattoos in (and after I've actually designed them XP), but we'll see. I don't plan on having the doll in short sleeved clothes very often, so details like that are the least of my concerns.

TBH, I was pretty proud of how the face paint originally went on. I really took my time to make sure it went down flat. It really was beautifully smooth~

But disaster struck.

I had painted the head while it was still separated from the body, and when it finally came time to reunite them, the paint on the head cracked and peeled when I shoved it back on. And, foolish fool that I am, instead of accepting my losses and starting over from a perfectly clean head, I just peeled the lose ends and repainted the exposed parts, which of course made the paint uneven. I somewhat justified this with the idea that most of it would be covered by other details, but in retrospect, I really should have just started over properly.

But, after that ordeal was over with, it was time to actually work on the face.

I can't clearly remember if I worked on Kun3h0 or Kliff's face first. I think I worked on them simultaneously because it took me a LONG time to actually get the courage to work on Kun3h0's face.

I thought I did a decent job on Kun3h0 since I really only had the 1 eye to repaint (the hidden eye is painted, but it's basically just a void with no details), and it was a bigger "canvas", so it was easier to paint. Besides having 2 eyes that I would need to make nearly identical, they were also a lot smaller, so it took a lot longer to paint them in a way that satisfied me (and since it's not easy to "redo" acrylic paint, his eyes lost a lot of smoothness too).

Again, I don't have any "before" pics, so it won't be easy for me to convey my troubles about it, but I do want to say that I think Kliff with a closed mouth is very cursed.

He just looks like he's itching to say something heinous and that is no different for the doll.

It was so difficult for me both match his expression on a face that wasn't *completely* his and still look like him. Although I chose this doll because he most resembled Kliff, he was never gonna be a perfect likeness of him, but despite knowing this, it still bothered me that the face was still just very "young" looking.

Granted, I don't think the original Kliff looks *that* old either (if I didn't know any better, I would assume he was in his 30s, not his 50s, especially compared to other characters around the same age), but still not as *smooth* as the doll is (even with my paint mishaps).

If you can believe it, the face actually used be worse. I don't have pics of it, but like the coat, I actually repainted his face yesterday to again try and fix what was making me dislike it before. I think the problem is that I didn't outline the eyes as much as the final one (like, I don't think I lined his undereye at all), so he was lacking depth. The mouth was also a little more off. Instead of being like "<--->" it was more like "|-|"

(A rough illustration of what I'm trying to describe.)

So, while it's still not perfect, I do like him more today than I did a week ago.

I think the only things left to talk about are his accessories, starting with his wig:

I'm not actually a big fan of the color. When I started this project, I wanted to try and make him as accurate as possible, and the original Kliff design has a very "cherry jolly rancher" hair color.

However, how I draw him and how he appears in Encore Edition gives his hair a more red-orange tone which isn't as intense. In the end, I opted for accuracy towards his first design since that's the one I was technically most familiar with and wanted to replicate, but in retrospect, I should have realized that I was never gonna be able to seperate my personal quirks from this personal project, so I should have gone with a color that was more accurate to how I interpret him. (I dunno if I would have gone as far as to give him triangular eyes, but one of my biggest takeaways from this project has been that I should have just allowed this to be "my take" on the character instead of trying to be "accurate," meeting in the middle, and satisfying neither condition.)

I don't think I really got across how much I HATED brushing out yarn for the wigs when I posted Kun3h0. It was just such a tedidus process, from brushing it out, to straightening it, to gluing it down. It was such a mess. I'm still finding loose wisps of yarn hair floating around my home since I made them.

Since I had more than had my fill from making Kun3h0's wig, I once again started taking shortcuts when it came to Kliff: I really should have made more wefts for him. I figured since his hair was (compartively) shorter, that I wouldn't need to make as many, but in the end his wig turned out both too thin and too thick.

Since his hair is so messy, I didn't follow any kind of guide for his hair like I did Kun3h0. I basically just glued around the perimeter of the cap, horizontally on the inside, and made sure it would fold over in the front.

Part of the problem is that I made the wefts too thick: instead of just gluing down what could actually touch the surface of the work area, I wound up gluing layers on top of each other, so the wefts would be like a mm thick when they should have been less than half of that. So, I barely got enough coverage for the scalp, and the parts that I did get down are very thick. I think it makes his head look bigger than it should which kinda adds to the uncanniness of him.

I did try to style it as close to canon as possible, but there are some things that just aren't (easily) possible in certain mediums, and Kliff's wild hair is one of them.

In retrospect, I probably should have just sculpted his hair with clay or something: it probably would have been more accurate, but I don't have much confidence in my sculpting ability, and again, I didn't want to modify the doll that much, so I stuck with the yarn.

I might suck it up and try and make him a new wig, I still have a LOT of red yarn left over, so maybe I can make him some new styles too. But the tedium of going through with it makes it very unlikely that I'll follow through~

(The wig from other angles.)

Since the beard is made from the same yarn, I'll lightly talk about that. There aren't too many resources about bearded dolls, but I've seen people root it, glue it, and even just paint it if they weren't supposed to be thick. In the end I used this repaint for reference (suggestive content warning) and glued it on.

youtube

The scarf covers most of it, but I think it turned out okay. I need to add just a *little* more to his left cheek, but otherwise I feel like I was successful.

Next, it's usually hidden due to all the crap that's on his head, but I did give him an earring.

I didn't think about it until way too late in the process, and I tried to poke a hole through his ear so he could actually wear it. However, when I tried to do so, I almost ruined his head paint a second time. Saying, "fuck that," I decided to just glue it on.

If I had been more brave with modifying this doll, I might have just resculpted his ears entirely, because, being based on a real life human being, the doll's ears don't flare out that much, so they're easily covered by other things.

His glasses are just a piece of painted plastic that hold to his face using some plastic cord. They fit well while his wig is off, but putting them on with everything else is a goddamn nightmare.

Since his ears are so small, and his hair is so short, there's nothing for the glasses to "grab" onto without the cord, but the cord is too short to fit around the wig once it's on, but I can't make the cord longer to sit over the wig, because the glasses need to go over the headband, and it's a pain in the ass trying to layer everything like that.

So, I have to put the glasses in place first, TAPE the cord to his scalp so they don't move, put on the wig, then put on the headband. It's really such a hassle, but I don't think I can truly convey the annoyance of having to do it all without showing you. So, unless I absolutely have to, I'm never taking any of those things off him again.

I think the last things are the headband, mask, and tablet.

The headband is just a spare scrunchy that I have. I don't have one in the *exact* same color as the real one, so I went with the closest one I had, which was this teal color.

I didn't feel comfortable repainting one since it's essentially an elastic band, I don't think the paint, even with the textitle medium, would be able to hold up to all the stretching I have to do to even get it on his head.

If I happen to find a white one somewhere in my stash, then I might try dyeing it using water and acrylic paints to see if I can get it green, but for now, I think this works. A little thick, but it works.

The tablet is just a piece of foam painted with paint markers and the mask is a piece of cardboard. I wasn't planning on really recreating any scenes with this doll, but since I remembered that comic, and thought it would be easy enough to make, I went ahead and made it as an in-joke to myself.

Honestly, I think it's the most charming piece of the entire ensemble. Plus, he can wear it without me having undo/redo any of his other head accessories, so it's easy to make him wear it whenever.

My final comments about the doll itself are that he's fucking huge. I should have taken a pic of him next to Kun3h0, but he is too tall to even fit on my display shelf without sitting.

(Please ignore any mess you might see in the reflection. This is just one of the only flat pieces of furniture he can stand on without me standing on something to take a pic.)

Despite my interests, I don't actually collect dolls (I'm more into figures and plushies), so I wasn't expecting him to be so big. In fact, Kun3h0, who would be considered a small to medium doll in collector's spaces, was also bigger than I thought she'd be, so you can imagine my surprise when I got my hands on him.

So... I don't really know where I can put him. He obviously can't live in front of my TV, but beyond being too big for my shelf, he also doesn't fit in with any of my other collectibles. And I'll be honest, the contrast of him "clearly not belonging" among my more "kawaii" items was a motivator in starting this project, I live for the gap moe after all, but in practice he really just sticks out like a sore thumb. (This is also why his first pics are in a slightly different location without many props. I just couldn't put together anything from my collection or find a spot among my things to take a good thematic pic with. The magazines/CDs he's with are from my dad's collection.)

I do have space at higher elevations in my room, but it's kinda off putting to have him staring down my room, looking like he's plotting something (my space is too small to ignore it). So I dunno what I'm gonna do with him. I did have plans to make him some... cuter outfits so he wouldn't stick out as much, but that requires sewing, and I'm kinda worn out from this project.

In conclusion, despite my troubles with this project, I'm not entirely displeased with the results. At the very least, it was an experience, and one that I might even be willing to do a third time 👀...?

But for now, I'd like to rest and maybe go back to drawing again. I feel like I haven't drawn anything "real" for a while now. We're inching closer and closer to the next follower milestone (4 digit number BA-BY!), so I'd like to at least get back to being good enough to sketch some stuff for y'all soon~