#you don't like my novel? let me tell you about what happened with my dissertation

[saltcherry]

one nice thing about being brutally professionally destroyed previously is that the disappointments of the book industry have no power over my ego.

[revclver-jesus]

How do you feel when people say that Takaya is just using Jin and Chidori?

{{ You mean like that one hot take that drove me up the wall? lmao I am going to give you the full blown dissertation here i go-- let's call this essay

The Most Commonly Misunderstood Thing About Takaya's Character: or Why Team Strega Is Not Literally A Cult lol

When people say that Takaya is just 'using" Jin and Chidori, what they're implying in most contexts is that Takaya is incapable of forming attachments and his motivations are fairly shallow-- essentially Takaya is not a complex villain and should be dismissed as purely selfishly motivated and malicious. He's a "simple" villain.

Now I realize....... that I might be biased as that girly that's written him on a dedicated blog for multiple years now, but purely objectively speaking, removing all my own headcanons, using only the information provided to use in canon? It's just thoroughly false, tbh!

First I'll go into why he isn't purely selfishly motivated and then I'll explain his relationship with Strega because I can prove the motivation with just Reload as an example, let alone the novel. Takaya, in Reload especially but even in the original game, I would argue has a full blown character arc off screen. At the start of the game he does appear to be more selfish, he has no real motivation and is just living out the last of his life doing underhanded assassin work-- nothing's really challenging him. But as the story progresses, Takaya begins to express a meaningful ideology-- he develops a greater concern for the world around him and expresses a full blown motivation. He says, in protest to the choices of the protagonist in one of his social events, and I quote: " Choosing to turn a blind eye towards your own power, to the grief of the fallen, to the unchosen and the unloved." Its clear he is not talking about himself here, as he mentions grief for the fallen. Takaya is expressing that he feels grief for something-- he is sorry about something that has happened to someone else, and it bothers him enough to nearly scream about it.

I think, often times, people dismiss what Takaya says as insincere almost automatically without any indication that he doesn't mean the words he's saying besides perhaps being vain and dishonest in other scenes, but these social event scenes are clearly meant to be interpreted as him being unusually earnest. By the end, Takaya is not just trying to keep his own power, but, as he says " this is not just my will but the will of all people. " which all culminates into Takaya's final character arc moment, where, in his final boss, he says the line " I will throw away my pride! " before using an evoker instead of trying to summon without help, implying that he is finally sacrificing his ego to better fight for what he believes in. If he was fighting for a positive cause, this would be a heroic moment, but it is still concrete evidence that his motivation is no longer meant to be seen as purely selfish. He is now fighting for " the will of all people ". He cares about the " the fallen, the unchosen and the unloved."

So what about Jin and Chidori? To put it simply, Takaya is not some puppet master that breaks them down emotionally and treats them like tools. They're his friends, and he happens to have a leader's personality, so they follow him, much like the protagonist he is designed to mirror. Its a lot easier to guess how he feels about them when you don't assume the worst and look at all his canon interactions with them. And even easier to tell if you can manage to read any english translated pages of their strega-focused novel ( which we can assume is fairly canon since Reload references it with the child turned into a large shadow ).

In the novel, as far as I've seen ( its only partially translated ), team Strega is extremely informal and lighthearted around each other. There is no sign that they fear Takaya, as they are willing to tease each other and disagree. The opening scenes of the book quickly establish a sort of family-like dynamic, with Takaya having an older brother-like role. He teases Chidori ( in a bit of heavy handed foreshadowing ) that she will understand why people fall in love when she's older-- of which Chidori sort of says gross and "as if" and rolls her eyes at him. Jin, being the narrator perspective, shows no sign of intimidation when around Takaya, something that would bleed through into their every interaction-- especially the establishing scene introducing the cast-- if that were the case. I feel, even if the novel is not canon, the writer would be instructed not to write Takaya so friendly if he was meant to be a heartless manipulator regardless.

In the game, the most manipulative thing he ever does to either is when Chidori is pulled back into Strega. Takaya tells her that there is nowhere else she can go and reminds her that death is not to be feared in a way that sounds like he's repeated this mantra often enough he knows she can guess it. This seems spooky, but the tension is immediately alleviated by the flippant and kind of sassy way that Chidori assures them she remembers Takaya's advice. This is not how you talk to your cult leader and this is not a cult, this is something closer to a gang or a club-- at worst, a coven of witches ( considering their team name is "witch" in italian.). They simply have an in-group and out-group sort of mentality, a shared since of identity, and a shared view of the world to go with it, which is to be expected when you've been openly shunned and mocked by the average person ( as seen at the start of the first scene with Shinji ) But this scene, when compared to all their mundane and lighthearted interactions, doesn't imply anything more severe than the leader of your misfit club reminding you why we don't hang out with the normies. You're "one of us" and a level of loyalty and commitment is expected when you otherwise always act as a group.

Yes, he is very cold and indifferent to the sight of his team members getting hurt-- or hurting themselves, for that matter, but the reason for this is obvious. In Reload, Takaya plainly expresses that he is feeling attachment ( for the protag at the moment ) but is avoiding his own capability for attachment intentionally. That scene was meant to establish that he can feel attachment, that he isn't as cold as he pretends to be, to encourage the viewer to see him with a little more nuance. What causes a man to force himself to be colder than he really is? What can cause an avoidance toward emotional attachment? Maybe...... watching 100 children die after being orphaned and stolen away to live underground for years? lmao

And so, when Takaya watches Chidori do self harm or literally sacrifice her life, for one-- he's not going to parent her, they don't have that kind of relationship, and he would be a hypocrite if he tried to encourage her not to do what she wants to to her dying body-- and two, of course he doesn't mind if Chidori dies, he's expecting that to happen anyways. His one greatest gift is his uncanny ability to accept death and the death of others. Mourning you openly is not how he expresses emotion. Especially when he sincerely believes death is a blessing. Its just the way she died that he's a little annoyed by. ( And why shouldn't he be honestly-- the girl threw her life away on the first nice guy she met at the mall just to make his work harder from his perspective, lmao ) BUT. In the comic version of that scene, Takaya does let himself be cut across the chest purely because he hesitated to shoot when he saw Chidori's spirit protecting Junpei. So... that might imply something.

However, if there is any greater evidence against any who claim that Takaya does not care about Jin especially... Takaya's final words, in multiple renditions of the story including the movies and Reload, are to say that he wishes Jin was with him as he died. If there is anyone that Takaya cared for, at least one single character in the entire game, it is above all Jin Shirato.

In the movies its very obvious, with the sad closeup shot of him looking beaten and washed up as he wishes Jin could be here to see it all end with him. I have the scene as an icon ! Look at how emotional the framing is !

So yeah, that's how I feel, it just drives me crazy when people remember Takaya as just Some Asshole lmao-- he IS an asshole! But he's no Chairman Ikutsuki, he has a lot of complexity to him beyond being the guy who killed Shinji, and not everything he does is black and white. There is highly plausible reason to believe Takaya cared for both of them in his own way, but the ever loyal, best friend, Jin Shirato, especially so. }}

[ginevralinton]

8, 10, 18, 20?

Thank you for the ask!!

8. Is what you like to write the same as what you like to read?

I think so! I tend to write more for the characters and relationships that I enjoy most, and I wouldn't write something I wouldn't want to particularly read. Still, I think I probably read more broadly than I write?

10. How would you describe your writing process?

Generally it goes:

I get an idea and make a note of it

I make a really rough plan (unless it's going to be super short) and scribble down any sentences/phrases that I've already got

If I don't start writing then, I tend to 'write' the piece in my head as I go about my normal day

Then, I sit down to write it, with varying degrees of success and speed

Finish it, leave it for a little (a few hours or days or weeks or months, depending...) and then edit

18. Do any of your stories have alternative versions? (plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations?) Tell us about them.

There were several alternative/abandoned ideas for House Share:

In the first plan, when Mike makes the pet cemetery for Fanny, he makes a mistake or something isn't precisely right, Fanny criticised, but later Alison tells Mike she's seen her visiting it and admiring it. I decided to ditch that because it felt too negative

Mike was going to introduce Thomas to some new poets (that he'd just googled - or asked a friend about) and Thomas might or might not have hated them. I just wasn't really feeling that in the end

For Robin's chapter, they were going to go stargazing outside at night and then Mike ended up with a cold, but it felt a bit too expected, unexciting, and again, negative, which wasn't the vibe I was going for. I was discussing it with @thelastplantagenet who gave me a lot of the actual idea (thank you!!)

With Julian, I was considering a games night, Mike creating a night club type thing, them exchanging music suggestions (and listening to the worst songs). I tried writing all of them, but kept getting stuck so I scrapped it and started over

Oh, and in general, it was supposed to be a one chapter fic, maybe 4k words with a short section for each ghost (a bit like Hard-earned privileges) however, well, you know how long it became...

20. Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

This Feeling and Inheritance both mention Julian taking Rachel out to a restuarant and going against Margot's wishes and letting her have one of those fancy sundaes that are always on the menu for kids but which the kid never actually eats - so naturally Rachel doesn't eat it and steals from Julian's cheeseboard instead. This is now some kind of core memory for both of them in my head

Talking of This Feeling, it mentions 'that ice-cream based uproar at the local hospital, involving smashed bowls, screaming arguments and no willingness to compromise on either side' - which er... was a thing that happened when I was in hosptial

There are some fun references in Still the same girl. I say fun, they are fun only to me and are mostly literary since I drew a lot from Victorian novels for this one! The references include: Middlemarch by George Eliot, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, The Grey Woman by Elizabeth Gaskell (which seemed fitting, considering Fanny's ghostly appearances in photos), Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte, Great Expectations and Bleak House by Charles Dickens and Dracula by Bram Stoker. It also mentions Mrs Greville, who owned Polsden Lacey (which is a National Trust place these days) and also Royal Holloway College/university, which is where I went and did indeed open for women in the 1880s.

Don't let them get you down, you're the best thing I've seen is, in many ways, my dissertation in the form of a story, including all the extra details/paragraphs that I had to cut from my final essay (as in, they didn't even get written, because halfway through the original plan, I realised I was already 5000 words over the word limit, which...yeah)

Okay, that got very, very lengthy - thank you to anyone who actually reads that. (I could expand further but I do not think that would be read 😁)