#this is the closest you'll ever get to a dark ai fic from me so enjoy LOL

[aihoshiino]

I've been thinking a lot lately about the idea of "Dark/Evil/Black Hoshigan/etc" Ai lately - not for any real particular reason, just because as a fixation of the fandom, I've always been weirdly fascinated by people's eagerness to leap to it as an assumption of her character despite it being in such obvious conflict with the text. I think a lot of this comes from, as I've said before, people seeing Ai herself and other characters describe her as a 'liar' and instantly concluding that her entire front-facing personality is an entirely fabricated act with no footholds in sincerity or authenticity. And it's baffling to me because Ai really isn't that complicated or dramatic as a 'liar' character - she's just doing her best to be liked by other people because she's so desperate to connect with them and she hates herself so much that the only way she can imagine doing so is editing every singe potentially objectionable part of her personality out of her worksona lol.

And the thing is, I don't even necessarily hate the idea of exploring BH/Dark Ai! I've done it myself before in RP and other stuff and I think it's a suuuuuper fascinating concept. It's just that the way I see it done in fanworks and fan theories is always kind of… shallow? It's Disney Twist Villain tier - it's not about building on and exploring the character that exists in the text, it just replaces her with an entirely different one and goes "isn't it crazy that she was there all along". And that's just not as fun to me!

The thing about dark/manipulative/'evil' Ai is that it's unavoidably, inherently OOC because she doesn't really have a malicious bone in her body. If it's already out of character behaviour, why not lean into it and make the OOCness part of the premise? Why not really examine just how fucking miserable Ai would need to be to finally give up all hope and go down this path?

One of the most important things about Ai is that because she just naturally struggles with empathy as a result of her neurodivergence and because she has so consistently been mistreated her whole life, her kindness and her warmth and compassion are to a degree things she actively chooses to put out into the world. Because she wants to love other people. She wants to sincerely form connections with them and be with them. So, in a situation where she comes to believe that her end goal of loving and being being loved as a real human is impossible, it's not really that hard for me to imagine her deciding like. well okay. If people don't want a human being, why should she try?

Becoming an idol is all people want from her. That's what makes people happy. So if that's how it is, the best thing for everyone is for her to ruthlessly dedicate herself to it no matter how many things she has to break in the process.

They asked for something that "wasn't human", after all. So that's exactly what they'll get.