#time for specterthief's opinion

[specterthief]

Rules: Make a poll of your favorite female characters, as many or as little as you want, and see who your followers like the most!

stolen off the dash from @ancient-day

10 seemed like a good even number, mutuals feel free to steal and say i tagged you if you want!

[specterthief]

For the rare pairs thing idk even know how rare this is, but I'm so curious to hear your take on a goro akechi and yosuke hanamura relationship

send me the rarest pair you can think of and I'll tell you if I ship it and how I think it can work

i... have been defeated, i really can't come up for anything for this one, it has been a hot minute since i played p4 and yosuke was one of the characters i was least invested in out of a cast i mostly did not like very much in the first place 😭 so i have to admit that my understanding of him is really not that deep and i'm drawing a blank on anything in particular that could even get them to meet and form a relationship or anything about yosuke that would bring out anything interesting in akechi, let alone what could then make it shippable to me...

you definitely did succeed at picking a rarepair though! i decided to look at AO3 and see if anyone had written anything to try and spark any thoughts on this and it's not even an existing tag

[specterthief]

rarepair!! :) shiho and akechi? hope you're doing well :)

send me the rarest pair you can think of and I'll tell you if I ship it and how I think it can work

akechi is one of a few characters out there that i so unshakably read as 100% Gay that i just categorically can't see a m/f romance working for them, so unfortunately that is always going to be no on if i could actually ship him with any girl orz

i do think they could have some interesting interactions though! as with all of the fellow teenagers used and abused by adults, i think there would be some pretty complicated sympathy in both directions between them (and post-third semester akechi and shiho even have the weird venn diagram overlap both having been initially a footnote to someone else's wish.) i think given akechi's particular history he'd also a bit of his mother in shiho, with all the emotions of seeing what life looks like for someone who survived, who got help, who has a best friend that loves and supports them and parents who could step in to help them and an abuser who was brought to justice with her still alive to know that it was done, and i think in a situation where shiho knows about what happened to akechi (phantom thief shiho AU, something where she finds out from ann, idk) i think she wouldn't have any trouble understanding why he was as desperate as he was. in the right circumstances, i definitely think they could come to be friends!

[specterthief]

TOP 5 FRUITS!!! GO!!!!!

top 5 anything

OH SHIT HUH

nectarine

peach

apple (the good kinds)

watermelon

plum

[specterthief]

Takemi and Kawakami!

send me the rarest pair you can think of and I'll tell you if I ship it and how I think it can work

i've seen this before and the art is very cute!!! neither of them are characters i have a lot of deep thoughts about but i do enjoy both of them more as characters taken out of the specific context of their confidants and generally like all the adult confidant crackshipping options. i think either meeting through joker or incidentally in their own lives could be interesting... and man there's a parallel in their respective backstories with kawakami's student and takemi's patient and their respective ways of dealing with their guilt and the harassment they're facing in the aftermath.

they're two very messy women that could have an intriguing relationship and i'd be interested to see how it could play out!

[specterthief]

Raido Kuzunoha and Akira Kurusu!

send me the rarest pair you can think of and I'll tell you if I ship it and how I think it can work

(assuming you mean raidou rather than the AU raido because... i don't know how to characterize that guy asdhjfk) i actually did a version of this in a crosscanon rp once and it was a delight, so i can say i ship this one! :D

raidou and joker are really fascinating mirrors of each others as protagonists - they have a ton of really interesting commonalities, from aesthetics to plot beats to small characterization quirks (to raidou and seimei in the unfortunately poorly fan-translated manga i swear i will get back to redoing it someday basically being proto-shuake) and are simultaneously incredibly similar and totally different in where they come from. raidou is, even when chaos-aligned, still functionally serving as an instrument of peace and not a rebel fighting for social upheaval - but could joker's been a pawn in a game beyond his understanding himself, and could certainly have a lot of compassion for someone only a couple years older than him who knows and struggles with being raised to be a weapon. and with raidou defying the expectations for him to be an emotionless tool and using the strength of his bonds with the people he loves being such a core beat of the manga, i think joker's ability to form and draw on those bonds so easily would be really admirable to raidou. and he's even technically a detective to joker's phantom thief! he lives with a guy who's super passionate about coffee and curry! they have not-cats in common! i think they're neat and if the dsrk-typical timeline shenanigans allowed them to coexist in a story they could definitely develop a really interesting relationship.

also they're my two favorite megaten protags so the thought of them interacting just makes me happy

[specterthief]

uhhhhhh. joker persona5 x erina persona5tactica for the rarepair thing

send me the rarest pair you can think of and I'll tell you if I ship it and how I think it can work

OOOOH i wouldn't especially say i ship it but they do play off each other well in tactica and had some pretty good moments throughout the game. i think there's a lot of mutual admiration between them! erina (by design) is embodying a more straightforwardly heroic kind of rebel than the phantom thieves (and joker/arsene in particular) and i think he appreciates and respects that, and she obviously really loves and respects all the phantom thieves too. given that she was born from the heart of someone whose sense of justice first started to shape around wanting to be a hero for his mom, i think in some ways erina could also evoke a more earnest and uncomplicated version of prince!akechi, with all the feelings an immediately post third semester joker could have about that.

i'm not sure how it could work on the level of anything actually coming of it, and there's the inevitable issue of navigating that for all she's very much her own person in the metaverse (and the phantom thieves all clearly want her to know they recognize that,) she is part of toshiro in the real world, but i think i could be sold on there being some unfulfilled feelings going on. there's lots of room for missing scenes of him opening up to her about his life and teaching her about the real world and stuff that could allow some pre-relationship buildup like that. some kind of "jose's wishing star ex machina" AU where she gets to come back to the real world as a human could be a thing too, i guess 🤔 it's an interesting thought!

[specterthief]

top 5 sandwiches? uwu

top 5 anything

chicken parm

BLT

salami + feta cheese + cucumber + crispy onions

smoked salmon and cream cheese

leftover pork chops the really specific way my dad makes them

[specterthief]

demifiend/dante from the devil may cry series

send me the rarest pair you can think of and I'll tell you if I ship it and how I think it can work

WELL i will admit i have played neither a single devil may cry game nor the version of nocturne with dante in it but i have enjoyed people's art for this ship, aesthetically it's fun and demifiend deserves to do a little 30 year old man bullying as a treat

it feels like it's pretty intuitive for how it could work for the exact same reason demifiend/raidou is - either way it's the only actually human ally demifiend ends up having, who's by his side constantly through life-or-death battles and some of the heaviest and most consequential parts of the story, who has also tried to kill him multiple times and chased him down with a gun. you've got your hurt/comfort, you've got your murder attempts as foreplay, etc. i don't know nearly enough about dante to have any real thoughts about what this ship would mean for him as a person, but for demifiend i think it would be believable enough for him to feel some kind of way about basically anyone who he could trust to watch his back and give him some basic human contact before he loses himself completely, and i think that's what makes both the ally ships in a game as lonely and hostile as nocturne interesting

[specterthief]

The "just not the dub" in your tags, thanks 🙏. (I do think the dub has its place and it's got some stuff but it's not necessarily the same show. And the original is just superior when it comes to the emotional beats. The dub I think tried too hard to be "funny" and it kinda took away some of the characters' good qualities (esp Reki imo).)

tbh ironically reki is the one character who i think suffers least from the dub because when the script is good his performance is generally really good on a technical level and pretty fitting to the character's original tone, and he seems to have suffered from the least like... active material changes to his characterization, i guess because no one really had any problems with reki lol

but saying "when the script is good" is kind of fraught in the first place, because untangling the absolute mess of the general scriptwriting from the intentional character changes from the actors improvising with no oversight is such an overwhelming task i've tried to break it down and given up multiple times already, so even generally feeling like reki was the character who had the best transition to dub he's still held down by being in this dub

i do think it can have some entertainment value just to watch a bit here and there to hear the characters speaking english but the fact that they self-admittedly completely rewrote characters and altered the script to the point of changing the actual plot and themes of the show just kind of supersedes the few praiseworthy things it's got, because it's treated as an equal and equivalent way of enjoying the story and it's just... really functionally not the same story. and now the fandom is full of people going solely off the dub and thinking it's the same story and projecting that back on the original text or gleefully praising the dub's (again, admitted) efforts to "improve" the source material and "make it gayer" by adding fanservice while censoring the actual text. it doesn't even hold up for a theoretical accessibility use case, before you even get to the story changes, because important information in the visuals that's conveyed in characters' dialog and tone in japanese gets completely cut or lost in english.

i can't stop people from enjoying it obviously but i wish there could at least be an understanding that it's not the same show and shouldn't be discussed as if they're interchangeable, and i'm always going to put disclaimers like that on any kind of recommendation because the original story is what i'm recommending and the dub isn't that. i love the original show and i want people to experience that as nearly as they possibly can, not someone's smug fanfiction pasted over the original animation.

[specterthief]

Ok, see, I only ever played the original release of ddlc, what do you mean that the re-release says that the plot of the first game didn't happen, that's so fucking stupid

yeah the new lore revealed through all the in-game files and stuff is "the girls are part of a virtual sandbox AI simulation to study artificial consciousness, monika had advanced permissions within the simulation to be able to report data, the bishoujo game structure of the original VN is the result of a rogue programmer altering it for his own purposes and either he or monika created the player character, who is not supposed to exist, and it was literally never meant to be an actual galge, the (third person slice of life after school special-esque vignettes about mental health) side stories are the 'control setting' where monika's advance permissions are suppressed and therefore the closest thing to how the characters would be 'normally'", basically. ddlc+ says there was never a "real" romance VN at all, monika is a regular old rogue AI in a setting that only resembles a galge because of some asshole messing with it, not a self-aware visual novel character because in the new story she was never "supposed" to be a visual novel character

and as someone who really liked the original and really likes the actual genre it was referencing i am. not a fan of any of this

[specterthief]

gimme the joe/tadashi fluff

send me the rarest pair you can think of and I'll tell you if I ship it and how I think it can work

oh hey it's a ship i have actually written before! needless to say i ship this very much and it's probably my favorite ship for both of them

i pretty much reverse engineered this one from all the yume interviews about their dating preferences, particularly starting from "shopping for ingredients and cooking a meal together" being cited as a date that tadashi would enjoy:

and leading to studying all the other answers and how they compare, like both of them liking simple/casual dates, tadashi paying for his date + joe having to save money, tadashi wearing simple fast fashion in his private life and having to dress up for work (because adam would harshly criticize his casual clothes) while the thing joe finds most attractive on someone is casual clothes they don't usually wear because he likes to see people let their guard down, (animedia september 2021) + the summer date Q&A mentioning that a chance to relax and let his guard down where he might "show a different side" is what tadashi would want from a date (animedia august 2021)... the things they'd both like in relationships seem to be surprisingly compatible and like they'd have a nice time together. they also have some really interesting parallels even in the show - they both have very similar conversations with langa and reki respectively about the risks and "stupidity" of skating, but coming from completely opposite places (joe coming from already totally accepting himself and what he loves, tadashi from terrible self-hatred and guilt)

and they're the two people who've stuck by cherry and adam's sides for the last seven years, also in very contrasting way... they both influence reki and langa to resolve things and are the two people who are most integral to langa reaching adam. despite not interacting directly they play really interesting parallel roles in the overarching narrative that make me really like the idea of seeing how they would actually interact, and it's so easy to imagine how they could post-canon if adam starts to rekindle his friendship with joe and cherry. i think pairing a character who's as openly and confidently sexual as joe with someone as repressed as tadashi is also really fun to think about, and that with all tadashi's Issues having someone so attractive and confident be interested in him could be a really good experience for him

i just think they're neat!! i think about them a lot!! it's very much a crack ship but i think they would genuinely work together and you can see that i've thought about this one a lot because i have citations prepared for it

[specterthief]

slides in with a crosscanon crackship bc that's how i roll: yusuke kitagawa/raidou kuzunoha (also i enjoy smooshing together crosscanon peeps thinking how they'd mesh if they actually met...)

send me the rarest pair you can think of and I'll tell you if I ship it and how I think it can work

ooooh not something i've considered before! i think it could be interesting, and it's plausible enough within the universe for raidou to end up in the p5 timeline for some length of time (intentionally or otherwise), and i can imagine how fascinated yusuke would be to meet someone from nearly a century ago - and someone who can see demons at that!! all the PTs would probably absolutely overwhelm raidou trying to figure him out lmao but i can see yusuke being particularly quick to try and spend time with him and get to know him. meanwhile raidou... he has a pretty high tolerance for eccentricity and i think he'd be pretty easily dragged into yusuke's shenanigans/nude posing/etc, and i can see him finding him charming (and wanting to try and do something about his dire finances, given that that would be the biggest reminder of his own time of anything here.) yusuke's eccentricity might actually make him a bit easier for raidou to get comfortable with than the other PTs at the start, because there's something kind of classic/timeless about his vibe compared to a lot of the others being very much Modern Teenagers.

there'd be a lot of room for them to genuinely bond given the opportunity too, i think, because despite the vast difference in specific circumstances, yusuke's complicated feelings about madarame and about being seen as a tool to be discarded by the closest thing to living family he has would be something raidou would have some Thoughts about... also the dead mom issues... man

i can definitely see some interesting potential here with the right setup!!

[specterthief]

gimme the sweet, sweet rin/rei (swimming anime) mess

send me the rarest pair you can think of and I’ll tell you if I ship it and how I think it can work

I LIKE IT!!! rei isn't a character i feel like i have an especially solid grasp on (honestly i don't have as solid a grasp as i'd like on any of the characters, i've only seen the first season once and would need to refresh myself on it to go too in depth with this) but i loved their interactions in the back half of the season and think it's a really solid ship. it feels like one of those casts where the rapport between the whole group by the end is so strong that basically anything could work with a little nudging, and i can imagine the s1 finale could put them in an interesting place. rei's seeing rin at his best, finally, being able to put aside his burdens and have fun with his friends again (i think he'd find that beautiful!) and rin's just had rei do this incredibly selfless thing for the sake of his friendships despite their one on one interaction before being so hostile... much to chew on there

i also think it's inherently interesting for rin's character to focus in on the one person on the iwatobi team he doesn't have deep personal history with already - maybe predictably considering my sk8 takes i like thinking about how a relationship could build with someone who only knows him as he is now without a "purer" past version of him to compare to

they're fun and good and i'm sure i will have more opinions to add when i've seen more of the anime/seen s1 again!!

[specterthief]

Rarepair ask meme: Flynn/Walter from SMT 4!!

send me the rarest pair you can think of and I’ll tell you if I ship it and how I think it can work

i am a fraud smt fan who still hasn't played 4 despite having it sitting on my 3ds since before the eshop closed so let me just drop that disclaimer here but at risk of sounding completely insane, i think there's some inherent eroticism to protagonist/alignment rep relationships that immediately creates an interesting basis to build a ship from. like in large part the representative will often be a major deciding factor that sways the player (and by extension the protagonist, who by their nature has to start the game uncertain of their values) and therefore there's a sort of seduction of the player-via-protagonist toward their beliefs. it's immediately this very fraught dynamic and even MORE fraught if you turn against them, especially with characters you have a substantial amount of time to bond with before your paths diverge, and it makes an interesting foundation to turn into something More either way!

so i don't know the smt4 reps well but i think just intrinsically yeah it Works yknow. plus they're like. samurai knight hybrids and that's inherently kind of homoerotic

[specterthief]

for the meme, joe and cherry's dynamic in general >:3c

reverse unpopular opinions

I ACTUALLY REALLY ENJOY SO MUCH ABOUT IT IS THE THING, i think their antics are really funny and they serve a perfect purpose as foils to the younger characters (and having characters who are largely static to balance out the very tumultuous drama that reki/langa/adam/tadashi have going on was a really good choice and roles that they serve really well.) i love the contrast between their apparent life-long constant bickering rivalry and the fact that that still means they've been friends for 20 uninterrupted years. i love the difference in their outlooks on that relationship and what that says about their respective emotional maturity, with joe being very conscientious about how important that friendship has always been (and how adam is hurting for not having someone in his life like that) compared to how cherry seems to take joe's constant accommodation for granted. i think the fact that the series makes a point of how important platonic connections are while actively acknowledging (and not condemning) m/m romantic attraction as an option (unlike a lot of sports anime about Really Intense Friendship) adds a really interesting vector to how their relationship fits into the narrative. in particular i think the fact that for joe, a character who's openly very poly and loves flirting and dating and hooking up with girls, that his longest lasting and most emotionally significant relationship is a friendship is an interesting characterization beat itself, especially in a series where he's surrounded by messy unrequited love that Does Not Fix Anyone who doesn't also have strong friends and community to lean on. joe being very open and confident and having blurry boundaries between S and his day to day life compared to cherry's strictly locked down divide between his work and his true self is also SO GOOD for The Allegories, and the fact that this is the one place where joe doesn't really get it is an underrated point of tension that i really want to write something digging into sometime.

i'm really curious to learn more about their youth in the OVA and i'm ESPECIALLY curious if their popularity in s1 is going to lead to them getting more devoted character arcs in s2, since i think there's a lot that could be done with them if they actually get a chance to grow and be challenged by a narrative they're more central active players in. i think cherry in particular could really go some tasty places as a character from being put in a situation where joe as a constant stable presence is actually tested and cherry has to be the one to Be There and work for their friendship. put them in the plinko i would love to see it

also because i can't talk about their dynamic without talking about the shadow of adam looming over them: the contrast between the way they both relate to him (cherry being far more forgiving but not understanding adam at all, joe understanding adam better than almost anyone else but not personally forgiving him, the whole way that forgiveness is decoupled from sympathy, aaaaaa) is delicious, i am so excited to see how things shift between the three of them after the finale and how joe and cherry's own relationship might change now that their relationship as a trio seemingly will.

unironically one of my favorite dynamics in the series, i just don't talk about it very much because i have been a victim of the wizard's curse (really really specifically into it platonically or exclusively one-sidedly in the past) so i appreciate the chance to go off about all the stuff about it i do love about it, thank you lmao

and tbh maybe s2 will shake up their dynamic in the right way to get me into the ship, utsumi and okouchi are unhinged so i'm not ruling anything out