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elyvorg · 4 months

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Kieran Part 2: It’s All About YOU

Well, looks like The Indigo Disk didn’t remotely drop the ball – it caught it in incredible style! Pokémon’s best character-writing job yet has been followed up and capped off with, if anything, something even better. Kieran is far and away the most complex and well-written character that mainline Pokémon has ever achieved, and I am here to talk about the second half of why this is, in very great detail. Consider me just, blown away. I have So Many Feelings about this boy.

This is of course a follow-up to my earlier analysis post about Kieran’s character and arc during The Teal Mask, which you can find here. Reading that before this is recommended!

(This will contain a couple of brief references to some post-epilogue lines, so if you haven’t got to that stuff yet and you really care about seeing it completely fresh, you might want to hold off on reading this for now. But there’s no actual spoilers for the epilogue itself in here, because, whoops, I think I’m gonna have to cover all of that in yet another post of its own.)

(Like last time, I will be largely referring to the player character as “you” for convenience, although I may shift into third person occasionally when I’m talking about the vague implications of a personality that they are given, since that’s a little more relevant this time.)

The gaping pit of inferiority

First, though, before getting into The Indigo Disk, I want to re-establish where Kieran’s character ended up at the end of Teal Mask, now that I have a clearer idea of exactly how that relates to where things are headed.

Kieran was always gripped by an aching inferiority complex, one too huge and unbearable for him to ever face directly. Prior to Teal Mask, he’d coped with that by clinging to the figure of the ogre as an ideal of strength. He imagined that maybe one day if he managed to grow strong enough to be just like it, the ogre would acknowledge him and be his friend – and that would finally mean that he mattered and he really was strong after all. He finally wouldn’t have to deal with the crushing pain of his inferiority complex any more.

But then, of course, you swept in with your amazingly perfect protagonist strength, ripping away Kieran’s chance of ever befriending Ogerpon and doing so in the most tragically agonising way possible that only seemed to validate and hammer home to him just how hopelessly weak he really is. Left with nothing but an even bigger gaping pit of inferiority inside him, and no longer able to cling to the idea of Ogerpon as a way for him to one day escape it, the only thing Kieran could do in order to cope was find something else to latch onto: you.

You became a greater ideal of strength to Kieran than even Ogerpon ever was during the events of Teal Mask, so now he’s hung everything on the thought of making himself strong enough to prove he’s just as good as you. If he can become strong enough to beat you, surely that of all things will be enough to prove that he matters and isn’t weak at all. It’s the only thing he can conceive of that might just free him from the grip of his terrifyingly massive inferiority complex, and he’s clinging onto it for dear life, striving for it to the point of obsession.

I saw a lot of people talk in the lead-up to this DLC like it was going to be about Kieran wanting revenge on you, but that’s not remotely it. He isn’t even able to comprehend the idea that anything you did to him could be considered wrong in the first place; that’s just how things were meant to go when you’re strong and he’s weak, right? Even though it was you who took everything away from him and made him feel so crushingly inferior, that pales in his mind next to how incredibly strong you are and how badly he needs to be like that himself. This isn’t even about him getting another shot at winning over Ogerpon, either – as much as you having become her trainer is a huge source of pain and jealousy for him, he seems to have pretty much accepted that there’s no changing that now.

What Kieran actually, consciously wants out of all this is… well, it’s extremely vague and nebulous, but that’s precisely the point, because there is no rationality involved in any of it. What is he really hoping to gain from it, when (if) he beats you? For you to decide to be his friend after all? For him to instantly become happy and finally feel strong? For him to magically turn into you and have all the good things you have that he envies about you? Obviously none of those things would necessarily happen, but Kieran is not consciously thinking any of this through to its logical endpoint. He’s not actually hoping to get a specific Thing out of beating you – he just desperately, indescribably feels like he needs to beat you, more than anything else in the world.

What Kieran really needs out of this deep down is for you, this person he’s warped himself into idolising as the Strongest Most Perfect Person Ever, to acknowledge him and his strength. It’s just like he wanted Ogerpon to acknowledge him before, shifted onto a new target of idolisation and grown far more desperately obsessive. If you of all people acknowledged him, then just maybe it might actually be true that he really is strong and worth something after all. At its most fundamental level, Kieran has always just deeply needed to gain a sense of self-worth, and yet his self-esteem is so horribly low that he’s basically incapable of doing so on his own without outside validation. But I really don’t think he’s aware on a conscious level that this is what he needs and what he’s striving to get out of all this.

(And of course there’s no way you’d ever acknowledge him and his worth as a person anyway, right? He thought you’d maybe done that when you called him a friend back in Kitakami, but any fleeting hope of gaining self-worth that way evaporated when you went and lied to him, validating his fears that obviously you’d couldn’t possibly have meant it. After all, why would someone as strong as you ever want to be friends with someone weak like him? The only way you’d ever possibly acknowledge his worth is if he conclusively proved that he’s even stronger than you, by defeating you in battle.)

Blueberry Academy

The other thing I want to do before getting into the events of The Indigo Disk itself is to re-evaluate a few assumptions I made about Blueberry Academy in the previous post, now that we’ve actually seen it for ourselves.

I was assuming that a significant part of the reason for Kieran’s inferiority complex was due to him being bullied at Blueberry, but… there’s absolutely zero indication from any of the NPC dialogue that any such thing happened. If the writers wanted this to be a fact that was relevant to Kieran’s character, they absolutely would have put something in. However, in hindsight, I realise that maybe I was primed to assume a bullying problem at Blueberry due to the Team Star storyline, when actually, Kieran being bullied there doesn’t necessarily fit. His issues about being shunned and his paranoia that people are laughing at him behind his back are so ingrained that they have to have originated from quite a while ago in his childhood – and he’s only a first-year at Blueberry.

So, scratch that part of the previous post: Kieran was not bullied at Blueberry Academy, but he was almost certainly bullied earlier on in his childhood, at whatever school(s) he attended beforehand. It wouldn’t necessarily have needed to be a really overt, physical kind of bullying either – that’s the sort of thing that Carmine would certainly have noticed and protected him from. But even something more low-key like being constantly left out of things and looked down on by others would have left a huge psychological mark on him, and would have probably been too subtle for his socially oblivious sister to do much about. (Or, in some ways, she might just have made such things worse by being so fiercely overprotective of him. Most people wouldn’t want to go near the kid with the Scary Big Sister who’ll bite their head off if they so much as look at him wrong.)

Bullying aside, I was looking for any kind of clues at all from the NPCs as to what Kieran was like at Blueberry Academy before his big change… and there’s almost nothing. Plenty of people comment on Kieran now, because everyone knows who he is as the Champion, but nobody shows surprise that it was this timid kid who rose up and beat Drayton. It seems that as far as most of the students are concerned, he just came out of nowhere. But maybe that’s the point; maybe almost nobody ever even noticed him or thought anything of him at all until he grew stronger. By the time he joined Blueberry Academy, Kieran’s default coping mechanism must have been to make himself as small and invisible as possible, so that basically nobody even really thought twice about him.

Only two whole NPCs actually make any kind of reference to what Kieran was like before he became Champion. (Well, other than Carmine, of course, and also discounting Amarys because she’d have only known Kieran through her friendship with his sister.) One of them is Drayton, who’d noticed him as the incredibly shy kid who nonetheless lit up with joy more than anyone else when watching battles. And then there is one random NPC you can find in the Central Plaza who comments on how Kieran has turned into a completely different person. That’s it. Only two people happened to have noticed this timid kid enough to realise he’s the same guy who suddenly became Champion. (And, while they both seem at least a little concerned, neither of them appear to have outright considered Kieran a friend, because of course not. You really were the first friend he’d ever managed to make, until everything went horribly wrong.)

One thing I was expecting to get from the vibe at Blueberry that it absolutely did deliver, mind you, was the culture around battling. There’s all sorts of talk about battling and getting stronger, double battles as standard to make things more strategic, and even the random NPC trainers can actually be kind of challenging. So I was definitely right that this culture must have contributed to Kieran fixating on getting stronger and proving himself to you through gaining more battling strength in particular. One NPC near the entrance also remarks that “you don’t look strong”, as if people here assume battling strength to be correlated with physical appearance, which… yeah, that explains a bit about why Kieran felt he needed to look different alongside becoming stronger in battle, doesn’t it.

Changing himself

Of course, Kieran’s reasons for changing up his appearance go much deeper than just wanting to superficially “look stronger”. In order to achieve the nigh-impossible feat of managing to match you in strength, he felt like he had to become nothing short of a completely different person. He can’t be anything like that timid, weak, pathetic kid from Kitakami who got walked all over, because there’s no way that kid would ever, ever be able to beat you.

Which means that absolutely everything about who he used to be needed to get thrown away. That hairstyle that practically covered his face and let him hide himself behind it? Gone. His country accent and way of talking due to being raised in Kitakami? That always made him feel different and outcast among the students at Blueberry already, but more than that, it’s a distinctive feature of that kid he used to be and cannot be any more, so he had to cast it away and learn to mask it. Even the unambiguously good parts of him – the way he’d always get so excited and passionate over things he finds cool! – they’re a part of his old self, so they had to go, no exceptions. Far be it from him to ever say “wowzers” any more, for more than one reason. His old hairstyle may have been the one that visually resembled a mask, but now he’s putting on much more of a metaphorical mask than he ever was before. (Putting on a mask to become stronger and hide his reasons to be cast out and shunned – a bit like a certain ogre.)

(And since Kieran’s just on the cusp of puberty, I find it fun to imagine that maybe his voice happened to start breaking in the interim between the two DLCs, so that he doesn’t just talk differently and mask his accent, his voice literally sounds different now compared to how it did before.)

Unfortunately for Kieran, no amount of fervently doing everything in his power to change and grow stronger can make his growth spurt come any sooner. It seems it hasn’t happened quite yet, leaving him awkwardly still the smallest person in the room even as he is trying to project an air of being Strong and Tough now. He gets around this as best he can by adopting a mannerism of taking a step back from people, to give him less of an angle to look up at, and tilting his head far enough back that he can kinda sorta still be looking down on them, in a sense. He is so desperate to not feel small any more.

(Fittingly – or ironically, perhaps – you are the one relevant person who is the same height as Kieran and can face him eye-to-eye. That’s bound to be feeding into his complex about you: all the other people he looked up to and saw as stronger than him were older than him and so they had a good reason to be that strong – but you and he are the same age. You should be his equal, and yet you can already do and have all these things that he could only dream of.)

And his timid demeanour isn’t the only thing from before that Kieran cast away – he also got rid of almost his entire team of Pokémon from those battles back in Kitakami. Nearly all of them went the same way as poor Furret and Cramorant before them, because they weren’t strong enough to win him that vital battle that would definitely have decided who got to become Ogerpon’s partner (right?), so there’s no way they’d ever be able to help him beat you now. The only exception to this is Dipplin, perhaps precisely because Kieran knew it was capable of evolving again and so still had more strength it had yet to show him. The rest of his team got completely overhauled, no doubt informed by his fervent studies in battling strategies to let him put together the strongest and most optimal team he could come up with.

I nearly had a whole spiel here about how excruciating it is that his new team has a Politoed, in that he could almost have kept another of his old partners from his Kitakami team if he hadn’t hastily evolved Poliwhirl into the less strategically-optimal evolution as part of his efforts to prove himself to you during Teal Mask. Except, actually, a postgame line implies that Kieran’s Politoed is also a longtime partner of his, along with his Poliwrath, like they’re a pair. So it’s not that he went and caught a “replacement” Poliwag that he was less attached to – apparently he always had two Poliwag friends from the start and just only ever trained up one of them to use against you in Teal Mask. Then, when that one had failed to be good enough for him, it was the other one’s turn to prove how strong it could really be.

As for his other new team members: Porygon-Z and Incineroar are both available in the Terarium, but Grimmsnarl is only available, to Kieran at least, in Kitakami. So that must be another one he’d caught during the school trip, maybe a candidate he’d considered training up back then but never quite had the time to alongside the rest of his team. And then there’s Dragonite, which is an interesting one, because the Dratini line is nowhere in either Kitakami or the Terarium – meaning, Kieran must have gone out of his way to trade for it in order to get one. Perhaps he was really impressed by the strength of Drayton’s Dragonite and wanted one of his own to match that? (but his has a very different build to Drayton’s, so it’s fine, he’s definitely not just copying Drayton in order to win, okay.) I like to think that maybe he got it from Carmine, who’d apparently been visiting loads of other regions with Briar during Kieran’s obsessive training arc and therefore could have been in a position to catch a Dratini.

More importantly than just catching these new Pokémon, though, would have been training them, which Kieran threw himself into so obsessively that it and studying battling strategies now consume every single moment he has, to a concerningly unhealthy degree. He’s cutting back on sleep, barely eating proper meals, because spending any more time than necessary on even things like basic physical needs is not acceptable to him. You are so overwhelmingly, impossibly strong in his mind that, in order to match your strength, Kieran feels like he has to give everything, no matter the cost to himself.

Being Champion

And, well, his fervent desperate self-destructive training did indeed make him strong enough to become Champion of the BB League. It’s only a stepping stone, a means to an end for his ultimate goal of being strong enough to beat you – but it’s something. As Champion, Kieran’s known to everyone in the school, getting awed murmurs wherever he shows up. People respect him now, because he’s proven that he's strong. (The very converse of how everyone ignored and shunned him back when he was weak. That’s how it goes, right?) And on top of that, he’s earned himself a position of authority over everyone in the League Club.

…Frankly, it’s a very stupid rule the club has to make the Champion be automatically in charge of the whole thing, precisely because of situations like this, in which the trainer who happens to be strongest also happens to be someone nobody else wants bossing them around. But thanks to that stupid rule existing, Kieran’s in charge now, and everyone else has to do what he says whether they like it or not, because he’s the strongest of all of them. Way to validate and perpetuate Kieran’s toxic worldview that having strength (battling strength) means you get to call the shots and walk all over anybody who’s weaker than you, and that’s just how things work.

Our first glimpse of how drastically Kieran’s changed, the interaction we see him having with that one poor club member, is bound to be the epitome of how he’s been treating everyone in the club these days. And he is not simply being a dick for the hell of it just because he can now and he’s turned Edgy or whatever – everything about his behaviour here is agonisingly rooted in his own deeply ingrained worldview about strength and weakness.

It's so tragically telling how he phrases his scathing disapproval of the poor guy as, “So that means you’re just OK being this weak forever? That what I’m hearing?” That’s not at all what the guy was saying, but Kieran hears it that way because he can’t help but see his own former, weaker self everywhere he looks. At the end of Teal Mask, he was trapped in that horrible pit of feeling like there was nothing he could do except be this weak forever, unless he devoted himself obsessively to becoming stronger and stronger and stronger with everything he had. Any tiny sign of weakness in anybody else reminds him of that place, reminds him that the only reason he’s not trapped there himself right now is because he’s spending every waking moment trying to claw his way out.

The guy’s reason for not completing Kieran’s training assignment wasn’t even that he didn’t want to do it. He said he’d had hectic stuff going on at home that meant he didn’t have time, which ought to be a perfectly reasonable excuse! But… not to Kieran, it isn’t. Kieran has sacrificed everything to become as strong as he is, even basic physical self-care; he would have chosen training over busy home-life stuff in a heartbeat. Anyone who isn’t willing to do the same, anyone to whom growing stronger isn’t the most important thing in the world – they’re not good enough. They must obviously just want to stay weak forever, like Kieran himself absolutely could not bear to be. So he kicks the poor guy out of the club, thus dooming him, in Kieran’s view, to really being stuck this weak forever with no chance to improve.

It's bound to be just like this for everyone else in the club, too, based on plenty of comments we hear about how Kieran becoming Champion has taken the fun out of everything, and the ridiculously strict rules he’s apparently put in place. He’s projecting his own unhealthily high standards of strength onto everyone else, then shunning them if they don’t manage to live up to that, because that’s just what happens to people who are weak, right? It is agonising to watch Kieran perpetuating the exact same toxicity that he used to always feel like he was on the receiving end of, especially as that isn’t even really why he was ever treated that way.

None of this is the behaviour of someone who is even remotely secure and confident in their strength. Despite being Champion and having the respect of the entire school, Kieran is still constantly terrified that even the slightest thing, even so much as allowing a tiny instance of “weakness” in anyone associated with him, will cause all of the strength he’s worked so hard to build to come crashing down in an instant. (One detail I really love about the scene where he’s telling that one guy off is the way Kieran’s tapping his foot at the beginning. He probably means it as a way to express impatience, but really it comes across as incredibly anxious and insecure. The animators did some excellent stuff with Kieran in this DLC.)

And what’s extra heartbreaking is that Kieran doesn’t need to be doing any of this. He’s the Champion now; he is undeniably strong; he’s able to talk to others; people notice and respect him. He is already in a position to reach out and grasp everything he’s ever wanted: acknowledgement, friendship, fun. He used to love battling – he’s supposed to love battling – so he could be having a great time with all this! If he just dropped this toxic mindset and stopped letting it turn him into a massive jerk, he could make friends with the Elite Four and others in the League Club and not be alone any more!

But he’s not able to see any of that. None of the things he’s already genuinely gained for himself truly feel like they matter, not when they’re all just a means to an end for the one thing that does – proving he can beat you. By desperately hanging his entire self-worth on the idea of becoming strong enough to measure up to you and nobody else, Kieran has blinded himself to the fact that he’s already found a good amount of what he’d always truly wanted in the first place. And it also means that, if he can’t beat you when that day comes, everything he’s done will be for nothing.

Drayton and Carmine

But although nobody is happy with the way things are now (least of all Kieran himself), it seems only a couple of people have been willing to question Kieran’s “authority” enough to try and talk him out of this.

One of them is Drayton, who’s doing this not just out of wanting his club to go back to normal, but also because he’s the almost-only person to have noticed the timid yet battle-loving kid Kieran used to be, and he genuinely wants to help Kieran remember how to have fun like that again. Unfortunately, it seems that any of Drayton’s attempts to tell him this bounced right off Kieran, because fun and excitement were a part of that weak kid he used to be and absolutely cannot be any more.

Plus, with his newfound authority and validation of his toxic worldview, Kieran would easily be able to brush off anything Drayton said to him with the excuse that he doesn’t have to listen to someone who can’t beat him. He actually mentions at one point that Drayton “always loses” to him, implying they’ve battled more than once. Apparently, in an attempt to get Kieran to listen, Drayton actually went and challenged him to a rematch at some point, or maybe even several – a remarkable amount of effort, coming from Drayton – but he still couldn’t win.

(Kieran is bound to be super jealous of the way Drayton appears so effortless in his strength, when Kieran himself had to train and strive so hard to reach this level. But on the flip side, now that Kieran is the stronger one, he can use Drayton’s laziness as another way to paint himself as superior. Obviously the reason Drayton keeps losing to him is because he doesn’t train nearly as hard as Kieran does.)

It also doesn’t help that Drayton’s attitude towards Kieran when he’s not specifically trying to encourage him to have fun again is very sarcastic and condescending, drawing from his deep frustration at Kieran’s attitude. It must be very easy for Kieran to completely overlook the part where Drayton is actually doing this because he cares – he probably feels that Drayton just hates him and wants him gone. (Just like everyone who’d always shun him and treat him like an outcast before, right.)

Then there’s Carmine, who’s been incredibly worried about the change in her brother and is bound to have done her fair share of trying to talk him out of this too, evidently also to no effect. It’s certainly easy for Kieran to remain oblivious to the fact that she’s doing this because she cares about him and isn’t just trying to bring him down, since she has, uh, historically not been very good at showing that.

It seems that Kieran has largely been avoiding Carmine since he overhauled everything about himself. No doubt a lot of that is because, what with her being part of the reason for his inferiority complex in the first place, she’s capable of triggering his insecurities more intensely than anybody else can. But maybe it’s also partly because on some level, he’s aware that she’s got a point now with the things she’s trying to say to him, and that makes him feel bad, and have doubts that he can’t afford to be having. Carmine’s certainly right to be concerned that his behaviour now would be driving any friends of his away – although she is almost definitely wildly wrong to be assuming Kieran even had any friends other than you before all of this.

(For that matter, she’s very wrong to assume that you are still his friend right now in a totally normal way; ha ha ha. But then, based on your options of “yes” and “yes” when Drayton asks you if you're Kieran's friend, it seems that you – the player character – are also somehow completely oblivious to the fact that Kieran just maybe might not consider you a friend any more on his end. Which just makes this whole thing even more excruciating.)

The dynamic between the siblings during the one brief time we see them interact here has notably changed, in that Kieran is finally able to stand up for himself more, telling Carmine to shut up when she tells him off. And yet, he doesn’t do so very forcefully, averting his gaze in a way that suggests he just sort of mumbles it. He probably realises she has a point about what she was saying – that he shouldn’t act so condescending towards you. Which on Carmine’s end, she said because she doesn’t want him to drive away the one friend he still (supposedly) has, but that’s not how it’d read on Kieran’s end, because he doesn’t believe you ever were his friend at all. He must have felt like his sister has a point only because he doesn’t have the right to act that way towards you, not when he still hasn’t proven himself to you yet (and maybe never will).

Unexpected reunion

See, there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on under the surface of Kieran’s reaction to suddenly meeting you here. Literally everything he’s been doing this entire time has been for the sole purpose of defeating you when he sees you again. Which means that you showing up and challenging the BB League should be exactly what he wants and has always been waiting for. And yet.

The first notable thing is that he had nothing to do with inviting you here – the person responsible for that was Carmine. She probably figured that you’d be able to help her brother out, so she recommended you to the director when she heard he was looking for an exchange student to invite from Paldea. As Champion of the school, Kieran should also have had enough influence to make such a recommendation – but he didn’t.

Then, when Kieran comes to the cafeteria, he has plenty of condescending things to say to Drayton (about how taking a lunch break is a waste of time, because who needs to bother with basic physical needs like eating when they could be training instead, right). But the moment he sees you, he’s just shocked at you even being here… and then he’s very quiet for the entire rest of the conversation.

Drayton puts things to a vote among the Elites plus Kieran as to whether you should be allowed to join the BB League, and – despite that this should be exactly what he wants – Kieran is the last to vote. He only does so when he’s forced to break the tie.

(Although, it’s revealing in a different way that the Elite Four all ask each other for their opinions first, with none of them naturally thinking to consult Kieran. Despite his newfound strength and authority, he is still socially excluded – but this time he really has nobody but himself to blame.)

Kieran’s wording of how he casts his vote is so very telling. Just: “It doesn’t matter who I’m facing… I don’t lose.” – and he says nothing else before leaving in a huff. He words this in a generalised way, as if this an overarching principle of his that has nothing to do with you in particular, even though it’s always been about you. Because if he let himself think about how you in particular will be his opponent, then suddenly the statement that he doesn’t lose doesn’t feel so certain. But, put on the spot like this, he cannot show any sign that he’s afraid he might lose to you – that would be like giving up and accepting that all the effort he’s put in for all this time has been for nothing. So he has no choice but to let you join.

(Drayton totally knew he would refuse to lose face like this if put on the spot, of course, and that the Elites would vote 2-2 between them and leave Kieran with the deciding vote, which is precisely why he set things up this way. Kieran’s not unaware of this, either.)

There’s a brief interim here as you head to the front desk to officially sign up for the League. This gives Kieran a moment alone to process the fact that, welp, this really is happening, you’re really here, and, isn’t this supposed to be exactly what he always wanted? Hasn’t everything always been so that he can beat you this time? He manages to twist things around in his head, convince himself that yes, this is it, the chance he’s been waiting for, and he will win when it comes down to it, he will, because that’s what it’s all been for.

As such, when he shows up at the front desk to confirm that he’s allowing you to join, Kieran is able to be a lot more direct about you challenging him than he was in his one whole sentence on the topic in the cafeteria. Even then, he makes a comment to Drayton about how he feels like he was manipulated into this… then immediately insists that he’s fine with it because this is what he wanted anyway. If it was truly 100% what he wanted, he wouldn’t have felt manipulated!

To sum all of this up: it is abundantly, delightfully clear beneath the surface that Kieran does not actually feel ready to face you. He would never have felt ready for this, no matter how long he’d spent training and pushing himself, because your impossible unreachable strength and his own inherent worthlessness are both so deeply ingrained in his mind that he is incapable of truly believing he can match you.

But, well, here you are, and now Drayton’s trapped Kieran in this situation where he has no choice but to keep up the mask of strength and confidence he’s been putting on all this time. So he’s got to act like he’s fine with you challenging him, whether he truly feels ready or not.

Your Elite Four challenge

As you work your way through the Elite Four’s ranks to earn the right to challenge him, Kieran is very insistent that you’d better not dare lose to anybody else before facing him, or to have gotten weaker in any way since he last met you.

You might think that Kieran would be glad if you actually did lose to one of the Elite Four and never manage to make it to him, because, hey, that means he’s already stronger than you! He doesn’t even have to worry about whether he can win his battle against you! But… no, that wouldn’t be how it’s supposed to go. The way Kieran’s been building things up in his head the entire time, his whole life is supposed to magically somehow get better when he beats you. He needs to prove himself and his new strength to you, specifically. It wouldn’t mean anything if someone else beat you first, or if you’re somehow not actually still the impossibly strong person he’s idolised and fixated so hard on becoming equal to. That’d just be the most crushing anticlimax for him, in which he never gets to achieve what he’s been striving so hard for, and in which he’d have to somehow come to terms with the fact that… he’s already stronger than you, and yet he still doesn’t feel better or any less agonisingly inferior than he always did? If that happened, he’d be at a complete loss as to any other way to escape how he feels about himself.

But, fortunately for him (for some value of “fortunate”), you of course still are just as strong as you always were. On hearing you assure him of this, and also on seeing it for himself as he watches one of your Elite Four battles, Kieran gives this awful twisted grin that does not even slightly reach his eyes (because he has completely forgotten how to genuinely smile and no doubt hasn’t ever done so this entire time). Yes, he will still get to have his long-anticipated showdown with you, and winning that will still somehow magically definitely fix everything that was ever wrong in his life. Definitely.

There’s also the part where, because you come with such glowing recommendations, you get to skip working your way up the BB League from the very bottom and can start right at challenging the Elite Four. Kieran has to feel all kinds of ways about this – on the one hand, he’d tell himself he’s glad because this means he has less time to wait until the battle that he’s definitely totally ready for, and he knows full well that you wouldn’t need to waste your time on small fry at the bottom. But on the other hand… he had to painstakingly work his way all the way up from zero in order to get where he is, so it sure is something that you’re so special that you just get to skip doing that. (And if you did have to start at the bottom, then it’d give him more time to train himself, just to make absolutely sure that he really is ready to face you…)

When you’ve beaten the final Elite, Kieran shows up again and scoffs that this was kind of slow for you, wasn’t it? I believe this isn’t just posturing and was his genuine reaction – you’re so impossibly perfect in his mind that he can’t even comprehend the idea that you wouldn’t breeze through this effortlessly without a single hitch. But still, at least he can turn the fact that you fell short of his impossible expectations into condescension that helps him feel above you and definitely capable of beating you. (How long did it take him to beat the Elite Four, I wonder? Probably longer than you – but of course he’s not gonna bring that up.)

Drayton, meanwhile, has now picked up on the fact that Kieran isn’t just obsessed with winning like he’d initially thought – he’s obsessed with you. Maybe he’d have approached things a little differently if he’d been aware in the beginning that you were a lot more to Kieran than just an old friend. But, welp, bit too late to back out of what he’s set up now, whoops.

And on Kieran’s end, he hasn’t let go of the feeling of being manipulated into this, and now feels like you and Drayton are plotting against him. This poor kid’s paranoia and tendency to assume people are laughing at him behind his back has still not gone away, even if it’s taken on a slightly different form now. It’s probably a good thing he doesn’t ever learn that Carmine was the one who called you here, or he’d think she was in on this supposed conspiracy too.

(But, hey, while Kieran could never do anything about it before whenever he was ganged up on and shunned by others, at least now he’s finally strong enough to fight back and hold his own, despite being outnumbered, right? Just like the ogre did.)

THE BATTLE

So now, it’s finally time: the battle that Kieran has absolutely everything riding on. Of course I’ve already made it abundantly clear here that every single thing he’s done has been for the sole goal of beating you right here and now – but it says a lot that he spends his pre-battle speech making sure you know this. He probably feels like you’re such an amazing superstar trainer that challenging someone for their Champion title is basically just another Tuesday for you, like this is nothing on your end – but this battle is everything for him, everything that he’s been spending every single moment of every single day building up towards for all this time, and he needs you to acknowledge this.

And as if that wasn’t enough, as the battle opens, Kieran screams into the sky with the sheer uncontainable emotion of how much this means to him. Everything he’s been feeling, bottling up, clinging to for so long is spilling out of him now that he’s finally here in this one pivotal moment he’s always been waiting for.

It comes spilling out in a lot more than just that scream, too; he has so many things to say throughout the battle as it all reaches fever pitch inside him. While some of his in-battle dialogue during his Teal Mask fights had fun hints at his issues in there, this one battle here absolutely takes the cake. This is quite possibly the most dialogue in any battle in any Pokémon game, and all of it has something interesting and nuanced going on that’s rooted in Kieran’s massive issues. I cannot resist taking this opportunity to talk about every single bit of it.

His first line as the battle begins is, “I know I’m making the right choice… You’ll understand that soon enough!”, which seems kind of odd on the surface. What “choice” is he even talking about that he feels the need to justify? Accepting a challenge to his Champion position is just what Champions are meant to do. But that’s not what Kieran’s thinking about here – he’s thinking about all of those times that Drayton and Carmine tried to talk him down from the entire way he was acting and pushing himself too hard. Every time they did, he insisted to himself that no, training this insanely hard is the right choice, he needs to do this, and it’ll all be worth it when he beats you. …Somehow. Definitely. You’ll see, you will, you have to…!

On the very first hit he lands on you – it doesn’t even need to be super-effective, any damaging hit will trigger it – he says, “How do you like that? See how hard I’ve trained? Not like that kid you battled in Kitakami, huh?!” In reality, the hit he lands here isn’t necessarily any bigger than the kinds of hits he dealt to you back in Kitakami – but it feels bigger to Kieran. He’s trained so hard that he feels so much stronger and so different from the kid he was back then, and he needs you to see and acknowledge this too.

Meanwhile, your first super-effective attack you land on him manages to pierce through his mask for a moment and get a “wowzers” out of him. It’s not actually any more impressive than any other super-effective hit he might receive from any other trainer – but because it’s coming from you, it feels so much more incredible, triggering his instinctive irrational idolisation of you just for a moment before he collects himself and puts his mask back up.

Then he insists that he’ll still win anyway, even if “the type matchups work out for you”. Which… isn’t how type matchups in battles work? Sure, you landed one super-effective hit, either because one of your Pokémon happened to have a good matchup, or you just had a good coverage move. That doesn’t mean that all of the type matchups in the battle are inherently in your favour. But Kieran apparently feels like they are – because, when it comes to him versus you, he always feels like everything in the world is on your side and he has to claw and grasp to regain the tiniest bit of ground against his inherent overwhelming disadvantage.

Speaking of everything being on your side, when you land your first critical hit on him (and I say “when” here because this battle is long enough that statistically you’re extremely unlikely not to at some point!), his response is delightful, raging that “even luck’s chosen you over me!” and that it’s “not fair!!!” All of his bitterness and jealousy about Ogerpon choosing you over him is still raw, evidently, so even something like you getting a statistically near-inevitable critical hit feels to him like luck itself taking your side against him, because everything always does. And on some level, he may have realised that you befriending Ogerpon was partly due to the sheer luck of you happening to meet her while he wasn’t around, so of course he’s bitter about luck because of that, too. It’s not fair, how you always get everything, so effortlessly, while he has nothing.

(He doesn’t comment at all if and when he lands a critical hit, because of course not. Confirmation bias is one hell of a drug.)

And of course, you bringing out Ogerpon herself gets an extremely strong reaction from Kieran. “You’ve got some nerve,” he snarls among broken mirthless laughter, to bring her out “NOW of all times?!” This, right here and now, was supposed to be his moment, his time to finally shine and show you how strong he is and take the victory. And yet you’re choosing this moment to parade Ogerpon in front of him, a reminder of the painful losses and inferiority he suffered back in Kitakami that he’s tried so hard to forget and overcome by making himself stronger, just rubbing it in his face that you got to have her because you’re so strong and lucky and perfect.

His expression during this line is one hell of a thing as well: shocked and wide-eyed and practically terrified, in stark contrast to all of his other expressions in this fight. He’s not only reeling from the pain of having his inferiority from back then shoved in his face, but also, he’s always believed that Ogerpon is so incredibly strong. If you’re using her against him in this battle, you and her working together… how is he ever going to be able to defeat that combination of impossible strength…?

(Apparently, Kieran’s trainer AI actually has a modification in this fight that makes him prioritise attacking Ogerpon more than an AI trainer otherwise would, which is delightful, I love that that’s a thing devs programmed in there. Of course he’d desperately want to get Ogerpon off the field as fast as he could before she utterly destroys him.)

As his back’s against the wall and he’s sending out his final Pokémon, Kieran’s still raging, with increasing desperation: “Just go down already! How are you still standing after I’ve thrown everything I have at you?!” This battle is not at all going how he’d insistently imagined it would in his head, in which he’d prove himself and win, not even though he’s giving it absolutely everything he has. (And the thought that you still won’t go down even then is terrifying to him. He really has given everything to this, he couldn’t possibly have done more – and yet, what if that still isn’t enough to beat you? That’d mean it’s just impossible for him, no matter what he does, and he’d have absolutely no idea how to cope with that.)

Just before he Terastallises his Hydrapple, he insists that he “doesn’t need the old me”, that he’s changed – here’s the way he felt he had no choice but to throw away everything about his former weaker self in order to get stronger, even the positive parts. But then he adds, “and I’ll show you I can change again!” He’s not just literally referring to the Terastallisation he’s about to do (although it’s thematically fitting that he brings up this topic as he’s doing this – and his Hydrapple’s Fighting Tera-type is a neat link to him having changed himself into being obsessed with strength) – rather, he’s referring to what he’s convinced himself will happen when (if) he wins this fight. That’ll change everything for him, right? That’ll make everything good, finally; he’s going to change for the better once he wins this, he has to…!

And then… Kieran’s animation while he’s Terastallising is an odd one. He’s remarkably expressionless about it, compared to the intensity of his expressions in the entire rest of the fight. But I think the reason for this must be: most trainers wince with the force of it as they begin charging their Tera Orb – and apparently, Kieran doesn’t want to be seen doing that, because that’d make him seem weak. So he’s trained himself to put on an expressionless mask, not even looking at the orb directly, to avoid that. (And one of the few trainers who doesn’t wince, who’s able to stare directly at the dazzling power coming from their Tera Orb without flinching, holding it up for all to see… it’s you, of course. Kieran almost certainly saw this from you a few times back in Kitakami.)

His last possible line in the fight, as he orders an attack from his Hydrapple, at which point he is guaranteed to have only one or two Pokémon left and be desperately fighting to hold on with his back against the wall, includes him saying, “I’m capable of winning too, you know!” Because that is definitely a very normal thing for a reigning Champion to need to say to their challenger. Even with all the victories he’s had on his way here, Kieran still has to fight to convince himself that he is capable of winning, because being up against you and teetering on the brink of defeat like this just reminds him of all his previous agonising losses at your hands, his inferiority complex rising up to overwhelm him with the feeling that he’ll never be able to be strong or win anything at all.

(And, hey… what if he had actually managed to win? Tragically, the game does not let you see any of his reaction if you do happen to lose to him; it just rewinds time like it never happened. But there’s no way that Kieran beating you here would truly have helped or fixed anything about that massive inferiority complex of his. He’d ride the high for a bit, but then he’d go back to the same condescending façade he’d had before and gradually realise that… he doesn’t actually feel any better about himself beneath it like he was supposed to once this happened. Funnily enough, beating you in a Pokémon battle would not have magically turned him into you.)

Everything falls apart

But, of course, because the game refuses to let you not be the Perfect Protagonist (or, perhaps, because the narrative needs to go this way in order for him to actually get better in the long run), Kieran loses. The last time he lost a pivotal battle against you that he’d told himself everything depended on, back in Kitakami, he crumpled immediately in defeat – but this time, his reaction’s a lot more drawn out. Back then, the conviction that he could never ever beat you was right there at the surface to the point that he was basically expecting to lose despite his determination. But here, he’s spent so long insisting to himself over and over that he will win this time, he will, convincing himself that things just have to go that way… that it takes him a moment to even process the fact that they haven’t. He’s just shocked, lost, dumbfounded, not knowing how to react, because this wasn’t supposed to happen…!

But then the spectators around him mutter and begin to leave, apparently because he lost, because he’s no good after all and so there’s no point staying to watch him, and this seems to be what agonisingly drives home the reality to Kieran. All the respect and esteem he’d managed to grasp for himself – in this one awful moment it feels like all of it is crumbling away before his eyes. All of his effort to get here (so much effort) was worthless, all because he couldn’t beat you. He’s gone right back down to being nothing. I adore the blurry effects in the cutscene as Kieran sways and staggers and collapses, giving a visceral sense that the shock of this is hitting him so deep that it's rendered him physically light-headed and dizzy. Guh, this poor kid.

And then Drayton has to come along and rub it in. Kieran winces in agony as he gets smugly called “ex-Champion” – though he was never doing any of this for the Champion title itself, having it meant something and made him matter, and now that’s gone like it was never there at all. It’s bound to sting especially hard coming from Drayton, whom Kieran believed was plotting with you to take him down, take away everything he had, and now that’s exactly what’s happened, because he wasn’t strong enough to stand up for himself after all.

…The fact that Drayton felt the need to be a smug bitch about this first and foremost does not remotely help Kieran actually listen to and internalise the genuinely good advice Drayton gives just a few moments later. He really was doing this because he cares, and because Kieran ought to go back to having fun with things! But of course Kieran isn’t in any state to listen to that, not after all his paranoia about Drayton manipulating him, and then Drayton rubbing his loss in on top of that; he still has no idea that the guy genuinely wants to help him. (Unfortunately, while Drayton cares about the person Kieran should be, he has been deeply frustrated by the person Kieran is being, and that comes out in sarcasm and smuggery first, hence why this completely bombs.)

So instead of taking on board Drayton’s advice, which he probably wasn’t even listening to, Kieran just starts desperately, incoherently mumbling about how he’ll win next time. It’s the only thing he can cling to – the same thing he always has, to escape the all-consuming, unbearable thought of just being achingly inferior forever and ever with no way out. He still can’t see any other way out that isn’t beating you. (But… how is he ever going to win next time, when he’s already given it absolutely everything he had and still couldn’t manage it…?)

Seeing him being so clearly Not Okay, you approach him and (probably) attempt to say something to him, but it seems like even if you try, you barely get any words out before Kieran just shuts down even more. He reacts with slumping, and with an “Aw, man…” – the same words and body language he’d often have back in Teal Mask whenever something (usually his sister) would push back at him and make him feel small. Now that he can no longer cling to his façade that he totally is stronger than you and just hasn’t proven it yet, he’s reverted right back to the state of mind he was always in back then. And it’s you in particular that triggers his inferiority complex harder than anything else right now, even if you just silently approach him, or say a few words that certainly wouldn’t have been anything cruel.

It's a bit of a shame that the game doesn’t actually let us see what you try to say to him, assuming you do. But it most certainly couldn’t have been anything along the lines of “You put up a really tough fight!”, because that kind of thing – acknowledging Kieran’s strength, even though he lost – is exactly what he’d need to hear right now, and he’s clearly not hearing it. Whatever it was you did say, he probably barely even heard it beneath his crushing sense of inferiority at being near you, and you probably trailed off pretty quickly upon seeing his reaction.

(In fact, it might say a lot that your dialogue options here are so non-specific that they’re literally just “Say something/nothing”. This suggests that the player character has no idea what to say to Kieran at seeing him in this absolute state, and they can only choose to either accept that and remain silent, or to fumble for something to try and say anyway. I believe it’s pretty important to “your” role in Kieran’s arc that the player character is extremely socially awkward and just finds themselves utterly lost as to how to deal with him breaking down like this because of them. Someone with better social intelligence would be able to say the right thing here to help him at least begin to feel better! But that someone is emphatically not you, it seems. This apparent social obliviousness also tracks with the fact that you – the player character – agreed with Carmine’s very short-sighted decision to lie to Kieran back in Kitakami, thus unwittingly setting off this whole domino effect of his issues in the first place.)

Sudden legendary hunt

If Kieran had had longer to process his defeat, maybe he’d have realised that there really is no way he can “win next time” when he already gave it his absolute all this time, and he might have begun to approach the fact that there’s nothing he can do but let things go. However, while he’s still reeling, he almost immediately gets dragged into the meeting with Briar about her expedition to Area Zero.

Kieran looks like he’s barely even listening to the conversation at first, just staring miserably into space in front of him, no doubt stuck endlessly thinking how can I ever be stronger than you when everything I had still wasn’t enough??? But then Briar mentions that they’ll get the opportunity to find a legendary Pokémon on this quest – and whoops, now Kieran’s paying attention. Because here’s the answer to his impossible conundrum of how he can beat you next time.

Make no mistake: this is nothing like Ogerpon was to him. He’d been fixated on her and cared about her ever since he was little for deeply personal reasons based on him relating to her situation and projecting onto her. Her strength was part of it, but it wasn’t that he wanted to obtain that strength by catching her; he just admired her strength and wanted to be like her, and if he could, then maybe one day she’d acknowledge that by being his friend (and therefore also incidentally his Pokémon partner). But Terapagos is nothing to Kieran here other than a source of potential strength for him to acquire for himself by capturing it, a tool that will finally let him beat you.

Nonetheless, because this is another legendary Pokémon, Kieran can’t help but draw the surface comparison to Ogerpon anyway and remember the way she chose you over him. He’s probably already imagining that Terapagos might just do the same thing, because you’re so strong and special while he’s nothing – so he tells himself, fervently, that no, he won’t let that happen again, he won’t let this chance go.

He doesn’t ever say as much, but he’s bound to be already having doubts as to if he really could ever capture such an amazing Pokémon. Legendary Pokémon – or really, any Pokémon in general – are supposed to join trainers once they acknowledge their strength; that’s what battles to weaken and capture a wild Pokémon are all about. How is Kieran ever going to get Terapagos to do that for him when he’s so weak? But even so, even if it seems too good to be true, he has to cling to this possibility. It’s the only chance he has left to still just maybe be able to beat you, to continue running away from that gaping pit of inferiority inside him that he doesn’t know how to face.

(A minor nitpick I have with the game’s writing: it’d have been fun here if things had been subtler and Kieran hadn’t outright said that he wants to catch Terapagos at all. His intent would have been very clear regardless for anyone who could read between the lines – I realised what was up the moment he reacted to hearing about a legendary, because Oh No. But nonetheless, it seems like you the player character and also Carmine are both socially oblivious enough to fail to follow Kieran’s stated intent to catch Terapagos through to its obvious conclusion of “he’s still fixated on beating you”. I guess the two of you just assume, oh, hey, he’s found another legendary Pokémon to get excited about, that’s good, that means he must be getting over Ogerpon, right…? Ha. Ha ha ha. If only.)

Journey through Area Zero

As you make your way into and through the depths of Area Zero, Kieran seems to have largely lost hold of the condescendingly superior façade he’d been putting up all this time (after all, he doesn’t have the right to act that way towards you when he’s still weaker than you). This allows a few little hints of his true self to begin to rise to the surface and shine through again, at least a little bit.

He lets slip a “wowzers” on seeing the sheer alien beauty of the place for the first time, and later at the lab he’s so excited at the technology reminding him of a spy movie that he even forgets to mask his accent for a whole sentence. But both times, he’s quick to catch himself and brush it off and act aloof. That excitableness was part of who he used to be, that kid who was weak, and he's still convinced that he can’t afford to be that person any more. But, hey, getting these little reminders that he actually enjoys being his true self and has missed it, at least certain parts of it, has to help! Plus, Carmine seems happy at these moments of him being the little brother she knows and loves again; they have a bit of regular healthy sibling banter; she notices him being considerate about Briar reading someone’s private diary…

These are all good signs that Kieran’s starting to get back to normal, maybe just a little… but, not completely. The spark still isn’t there in his eyes, even when he’s smiling about the cool spy vibe of the lab. Despite the distractions, he’s largely very intent on just getting to the legendary Pokémon and nothing else. And perhaps most relevant of all, he barely says anything of substance to you, even if you try and talk to him.

He does have a notable reaction near the beginning when you mention that you came here last time with some friends of yours. Kieran had probably never quite considered the idea of you having other friends before – Ogerpon did not exactly prime him to imagine that about his idols, after all – but, now that he’s hearing it… of course you’ve got friends. Why wouldn’t you? You have everything, everything he’s always wanted so badly for himself but could never, ever have.

Then, of course, you’re the one who does all the hard work in the Underdepths to deal with the sparkling Pokémon that are blocking the way forwards. For the first one, Carmine almost asks Kieran to take care of it before changing her mind and asking you, which, ouch, that’s got to have stung. (I don’t think she did that to deliberately be unkind, though; it’s probably that she still feels a little weird and uncomfortable about her brother battling, because of the way he’s been, so she’d rather just watch you battle it instead.)

Because of all this, later on Kieran bitterly comments that he feels like everyone’s relying on you too much. Really, the only reason this is the case is because you just happen to be the one who has the lizardbike buddy that can navigate you to the Pokémon you need to defeat… but then, that in itself is another sign of how special and favoured by legendaries you are, isn’t it.

And actually, you’re not necessarily the only one who can reach the sparkling Pokémon! Kieran has a Dragonite, which must have been what he rode on for the flying Elite Four trial, so, in theory, he could go and deal with those sparkling Pokémon himself. But he doesn’t, because you’re already doing it anyway, and he doesn’t feel worthy of taking the spotlight from you. (Or, he could ask to join you on your lizard buddy as you head over there, but ha, even less chance he’s about to do that.)

One bit of optional dialogue Kieran has during this part is insisting that he could totally make quick work of those sparkling Pokémon if only they weren’t so far away. This is very true… but the fact that he never tries to do so despite actually having the ability to reach them himself tells us that his words are just desperate posturing that he doesn’t truly believe. He can’t even register the part where he genuinely has a really strong team of Pokémon that he worked hard to train, because he did all of that for the sole purpose of beating you, and since he couldn’t manage that, that means that none of it matters and he’s just useless.

Then there’s the moment near the end where Carmine tells Kieran it’s his turn to call out to you to let you know the path opened up, but Kieran miserably assumes you’d prefer to hear it from her instead. (As if who tells you that even makes any difference!) Carmine did this to try and begin bridging the gap between you, and she forces him to do it anyway despite his protest, but then when she asks if he’s got anything more to say to you, he just says no. He still doesn’t feel like he’s worthy of even interacting with you in any way at all, still convinced he must be nothing to you.

There’s a heartbreaking hypocrisy to this, too, since he knows you’re perfectly okay interacting with Carmine, and it’s not like she’s ever been able to beat you in battle either. But… but that’s different, right, because she’s already someone who’s strong and cool and worthy of your friendship. In Kieran’s head, he is the single person in the world who is so automatically, inherently worthless that he needs to prove his strength before he is allowed to Matter to you or to anybody.

Outburst at the crystal

As the group reaches the final chamber, Kieran rushes ahead into it and begins pulling at the crystal the moment he figures it even might be Terapagos, because he is so desperate not to lose this chance to anybody else (meaning you). In his urgency, completely oblivious to how messed-up this sentiment is, he blurts out that this’ll mean he can finally beat you, at which Carmine, who failed to realise this was still the reason he was doing all this until now, tries to call him out on it—

—And Kieran can’t stand that; he can’t let her try and take this away from him too on top of everything else, because this feels like the one remaining chance he’ll ever get to still have something and matter next to you. So in a kneejerk attempt to defend why he needs this, everything comes tumbling out. All of those feelings about how you have everything he’s ever wanted, and he has nothing, how he trained so so hard but even that ended up worthless because he still lost to you in the end, so this is all he has left.

(Well, it’s not quite everything that comes spilling out of Kieran here. He doesn’t say anything about why he feels he needs to beat you, and how that’ll totally magically solve everything for him – because there is no actual logic behind that part. There’s nothing he can say to make that make sense, and on some level he must be aware of that, must know it doesn’t, really. But if he admits that, admits that there really isn’t any way at all to escape from his crushing inferiority, then he’ll have nothing left whatsoever, which he cannot bear.)

Hearing Kieran’s outburst about how worthless he feels, Carmine tries to put in a good word for him about how he’s tried his best too – which is good! That’s exactly the kind of thing he needs to hear; she’s finally getting it! But unfortunately, because she herself is one of Kieran’s sore points, in regards to how you magically went and befriended her, he doesn’t properly register what she’s saying. Hearing her speak at all just triggers that thought and spurs him into venting about that, too.

His hang-ups with you befriending Carmine are interestingly reversed from how they appeared to be in Teal Mask. Back then, he seemed more low-key jealous that she might have been trying to take you, his first ever friend, away from him. But now (now that he’s convinced that you were never really his friend in the first place), it’s all twisted around into yet another sign of how perfect you are, because you managed to win over even someone as prickly and abrasive as his sister so remarkably fast. (Which, of course, has less to do with you than it has to do with the fact that Carmine’s actually a lot softer at heart than Kieran realises.)

He’s also maybe thinking about Drayton here, about the one time Drayton claimed in the cafeteria that you and he were “already tight”. That was a massive exaggeration, but no doubt Kieran filed that away as another person – someone else he finds infuriating and impossible to get along with – that you instantly won over with your magical friendship powers because of course you did. And on top of that, he’s bound to be thinking about his recent realisation that you came to Area Zero last time with your friends, plural, because of course you’d already got a bunch of friends, you’re perfect, you can do anything you want, you can be friends with anyone!

And yet – even as Kieran says this, it is objectively not true. Because you’re not friends with him right now! No amount of your amazing protagonist powers has been able to cut through his pile of issues and properly befriend him, even though you want to, because you are in fact not perfect in the slightest and have no idea what to say to get through to him and help him! But of course Kieran doesn’t realise this contradiction in what he’s saying – he's worthless, so the fact that you’re not friends with him is obviously just because you never wanted to be.

Speaking of you not being perfect, this moment here in which Kieran outright voices his jealousy and sense of inferiority compared to you is bound to be the first moment in which you, the player character, actually begin to realise that this has been his problem this whole time. (And, to be fair to your poor socially-oblivious avatar, it really wasn’t very apparent from their perspective until now! The only time Kieran ever gave any real explicit indication of his issues around you before was in Teal Mask, after the third battle when he lamented that “it’s because I’m weak” – but at the time, the player character wasn’t aware (like we the players were) that he knew they’d lied to him, so they couldn’t have known he was thinking about that. They probably just chalked his reaction down to him taking the lost battle particularly hard. The lie reveal was messy but seemed to work itself out; he was obviously upset when you caught Ogerpon but appeared to accept it well enough in the moment – then all of a sudden he showed up later being really determined to beat you for some reason??? Why.)

Another thing I love about this moment is the animation of Kieran desperately pulling at Terapagos’s crystal, the way he has to pause to catch his breath in between each huge tug, which really gets across that he is giving this every ounce of his strength. And that still isn’t enough, because it never is – he’s always too weak to be able to grasp even one thing for himself, but he is never ever going to stop trying no matter how impossible it seems.

(And I wonder if it’s going through his mind as he does this that surely this wouldn’t be nearly so hard for you. Like this is a sword-in-the-stone kind of thing, in which Terapagos would slide out smoothly like butter for someone who’s truly worthy of it, while a weakling like him is stuck hopelessly yanking on it with everything he has and just making himself look pathetic, because of course he doesn’t deserve this.)

Catching Terapagos

Except it turns out Kieran can manage to pull out the crystal after all, doing so with such force that he accidentally flings it halfway across the cavern to land between you and him. He rushes to pick it up before anyone else can, because this is his and he can’t let anyone take it from him, he can’t—

But then Terapagos wakes up, pops out of the crystal that serves as its shell… and it’s facing you. It doesn’t even see or acknowledge Kieran at all. It looks up at you adorably, like a baby imprinting on the first thing it sees, taking a few steps towards its new friend…?

(this has to be such an aching reminder of the way Ogerpon so quickly came to adore you and didn’t care about him, all compressed into one single agonising moment, ouch)

…This was not Terapagos choosing you over Kieran in any meaningful way. Kieran was behind it, such that it literally couldn’t see him and didn’t even know he existed. All it was doing was latching onto the first person it saw, which was you, because – completely by chance – it happened to wake up facing you and not him. If it’d woken up facing Kieran, it’d have seen and approached him in exactly the same way. Terapagos’s dormant crystal form is symmetrical; Kieran had no way to know which end was the head and which was the tail until it popped out.

This was, almost literally, a fucking coin flip. Only the coin was a magical crystal turtle and the winner was whoever “heads” landed facing towards.

(But then, luck has always chosen you over Kieran, too, hasn’t it?)

And so, seeing this happen to him yet again, seeing his one last chance of maybe finally having something and mattering about to be casually snatched away by you, like always, because the universe always gives you everything he wants… Kieran makes an awful, desperate split-second decision and throws the Master Ball. Because of course he does. It’s not right; it’s not fair on Terapagos – but it is so achingly understandable why Kieran would be driven to do this in this moment. The whole thing was so cruelly, rudely unfortunate. This poor kid just wants so badly to have something, to have anything at all where he’s not immediately overshadowed and upstaged by you.

(Also, shout-outs to the narrative cleverness of quietly establishing that BB Champions get given Master Balls, by the game giving you one when you beat Kieran, such that you think nothing of it at the time but can realise right away in this moment where Kieran got his from.)

Still, it’s notable how quickly Kieran was able to pull out the Master Ball, which suggests he’d had it ready near the top of his bag. It must have crossed his mind on the way here that surely, you’re going to somehow magically sway Terapagos to join you – or that it’ll just shun him, because earning a legendary’s respect involves proving one’s strength, and he’s still so weak – such that he felt he might need a way to guarantee it would become his, no matter what.

But even then, I do want to believe that Kieran wouldn’t necessarily have used the Master Ball if he hadn’t felt like he had no other option, and that he wanted to at least try to get Terapagos to join him willingly, like trainers are supposed to do. If he’d won the turtle-coin flip and it had woken up facing him, maybe he’d have been able to do so! But of course he didn’t get to have that.

(It’s kind of a shame that the characters never discuss the dodginess of catching a Pokémon from behind in a Master Ball, how that gave poor Terapagos no choice in the matter like Pokémon are supposed to have when they join a trainer. But then, pointing out that Master Balls are inherently ethically dubious gets awkward considering that the player can freely use them on anything they like, so the game was probably never going to go there. You are too silent-protagonist and Briar is too irresponsible-adult to comment on it, but maybe Carmine could at least have had a brief line questioning this? But, well, at least she does express apprehension about going in to battle with a legendary Pokémon they know almost nothing about, which is also a very valid concern, considering what ends up happening.)

Trying to beat you with Terapagos

So of course, the very next thing Kieran does is challenge you to battle him with Terapagos, so that he can finally beat you. Only… he doesn’t show anywhere near as much of that furious, fervent determination that he had for the Champion match. All that fire of his got snuffed out the moment he lost back then, and it never really came back. This isn’t the battle he’s been psyching himself up for and dedicating everything towards for months; it’s nothing but a desperate grasp at not falling apart completely. He’s kind of just… going through the motions, trying to beat you simply because it’s what he’s been clinging to all this time, and he still doesn’t know what else to do with himself if not this.

And more than anything, Kieran has to know deep down that he doesn’t truly deserve this, not after the way in which he caught Terapagos. After all, trainers are supposed to earn having strong Pokémon in their team, either by training them up from a low level themselves, or by proving their strength to a high-level Pokémon by weakening and catching it in battle. (This is why high-levelled traded Pokémon will disobey you if you don’t have enough badges – you haven’t given them a reason to respect you!) Catching a legendary from behind with a Master Ball is none of those things. Kieran has to be perfectly aware that he has not earned Terapagos’s strength in any way (just like he knew all along he’d never really be able to).

A very revealing line on this matter is that if you say you’re not ready to battle him yet, Kieran tells you, “You’d better not run away from this”. He never once implied you might run away from the Champion battle – that’d be like admitting you couldn’t win, and you’d never do that. But here, it's different, because Terapagos isn’t his strength, so even if he could beat you with it, it wouldn’t really prove anything about him. You’d be well within your rights to just refuse to indulge Kieran in this at all, and on some level, he knows that.

(…With all that said, Terapagos does obey his commands in the battle anyway. It’s sadly difficult to attribute any definitive emotions to it because it’s pretty unexpressive, but perhaps we can imagine that Terapagos is kind of just lost and confused, going along with the orders of the one who threw its ball because it’s not really sure what’s happening and battling is kind of instinctual for all Pokémon. Maybe it’s even more instinctual for Terapagos, thanks to its ability that automatically shifts it into a battle form when there’s an opponent in front of it. It doesn’t really help matters that you just sent something out to battle it without questioning things, either.)

If you manage to hit Terapagos super-effectively during the battle, Kieran scoffs that “it has a weakness? I thought this was the hidden treasure of Area Zero?!” What do you mean his super-special legendary that would let him finally definitely win this time isn’t invincible, that it’s still functionally just a regular Pokémon and it’s still possible – and not even that hard, really – for you to beat him even now.

And if you land a critical hit, oh boy: “How can you get critical hits, even at a time like this… What are you, the hero of this story?” Kieran is clearly raw with bitterness about the turtle-coin flip, about luck choosing you because you’re just so heroic, even when this was finally supposed to be his moment really seriously for real this time. It’s reminiscent of another time he compared you to a hero when you critted him, in his fourth Teal Mask battle – but back then, he said you were like the hero in “a story”, whereas here, you’re the hero of “this story”. Kieran’s realising on some level that if this were a story, you would be the hero of it, you’d deserve to win, and… wouldn’t he be the villain? Because heroes certainly do not go around throwing Master Balls at legendaries from behind.

(For the record, though? Kieran is not a villain. Stop calling him a villain, people. Not a single thing he does is outright villainous; catching Terapagos in this way is wrong, yes, but it’s an act of desperation for which his entire end goal is literally just to win a dang Pokémon battle against you. He’s barely even that much of an antagonist, if we get into that – this isn’t really a you-versus-him conflict so much as a him-versus-himself conflict that you happen to be inextricably wrapped up in.)

Kieran isn’t even that crushed when he loses this battle, just… lost and confused. He insists that “I thought if I had Terapagos, it would make me stronger,” as if catching it in a Master Ball would change anything about his strength – but really, he has to have known that wouldn’t truly be the case. And when Briar remarks that Terapagos isn’t as strong as it should be, Kieran just miserably assumes, “so it isn’t the hidden treasure?” Like, of course this was too good to be true, of course whatever Pokémon he actually managed to get his hands on was just some dud and not the real deal, because he’s never deserved to have anything worthwhile. His expression’s upset, and pleading, as says this was meant to let him beat you, still like that’d somehow fix everything, but his desperation’s become something pitiful compared to how furious it was before. He just doesn’t know what else to do, doesn’t know how else to cope with his crushing sense of inferiority if he can’t hold onto this.

Terapagos goes berserk

The only reason Kieran even Terastallises Terapagos is pretty much because Briar tells him to, and he’s at a loss for what else to do. It’s very possible that if an actual responsible adult had been here to talk him down – or, heck, even just let Carmine talk to him, since she was trying to do so again – then he’d have finally been in a state to listen and none of the ensuing disaster would have needed to happen. But Briar’s gotta see her giant sparkle turtle, because it turns out that basically her entire character exists to facilitate Kieran’s character arc having the most dramatic climax possible, and I for one am 1000% okay with that.

Kieran looks apprehensive and afraid even as he’s just beginning to Terastallise it (no emotionless mask to cover the wince this time), perhaps because he can feel that the power from his Tera Orb is way more than it usually is and isn’t sure this is a good idea. But what else can he do? He has nothing else left – so he throws the orb anyway.

Again, Terapagos is frustratingly unexpressive, such that it’s difficult to get a sense of whether it attacking Kieran once it Terastallises is an instinctive, unconscious defence mechanism, or something more deliberate. But it’s certainly more fun to imagine it’s deliberate – that this is Terapagos lashing out from anger and fear now that it’s been given a terrifying amount of power it can’t fully handle and begins to realise, wait, no, it didn’t want this. That makes this problem distinctly more Kieran’s fault, which is a good thing for his arc. (If Terapagos’s rampage wasn’t based in its emotions in any way, then this kind of wouldn’t be Kieran’s fault at all, not really! It was significantly more on Briar that he Terastallised it, after all. Kieran’s real mistake was catching it without its consent – so it’s more narratively satisfying for this to be, in part, him facing the consequences for that.)

Either way, the important part is that Kieran is bound to feel like this is Terapagos lashing out at him because he shouldn’t have caught it. He always knew deep down that that was wrong, and now here’s the proof, because of course a strong and special legendary like that would never truly acknowledge him. And now it’s so mad at him for trying to act otherwise that it tries to kill him. (This poor kid is already clearly very sensitive to rejection in general, but, ouch, that has to have been like a stab in the gut.) This is all his fault for daring to think he deserved to have any kind of strength at all.

But then you save his life, by sending out your lizardbike friend to shield him! Which on the one hand just makes you even more of a perfect hero – but this time, your heroism is a good thing for Kieran. And, more than that… you wanted to save him. You saw him as someone worth protecting? You, actually, care about him??? (Kieran has been convinced that he’s nothing to you pretty much ever since you lied to him back in Teal Mask, but, oh, hey, maybe not…?)

Not that he has much time to process that in the heat of the moment; he’s too busy freaking out over everything such that Carmine has to be the one to tell him he should recall Terapagos. Maybe on some level he just feels like Terapagos would never listen to him if he tried, because it literally just attempted to kill him – and indeed, it fights back and breaks the Master Ball rather than go back to being his Pokémon (there’s another painful sting of rejection). Of course Kieran should never have caught it or called himself its trainer. He reflexively asks “why?” it wouldn’t come back, but he knows why. It’s because he’s worthless and deserves nothing, and he should never have tried to pretend otherwise.

Facing the gaping pit

At the start of the final battle, Kieran’s just frozen in terror at what he’s accidentally unleashed, not to mention the recent shock of nearly being killed and the knowledge that this is all his fault. (Even though, it isn’t all his fault! Briar deserves at least half the blame for this! But that doesn’t remotely occur to Kieran in the moment, because he is intrinsically the most worthless person ever, so of course all the blame should be on him.) But after a little while, the immediate terror fades, and Kieran’s left with nothing but the overwhelming feeling that he’s useless, that he can’t help anyone. It’s that vast aching pit of inferiority that’s always been there inside him, finally right at the surface.

There’s nothing he can do to run away from it any more. Ogerpon didn’t want him and chose you instead. All of his efforts to make himself stronger meant nothing in the end because he still lost to you. He never should have tried to catch Terapagos, because it never wanted him either and all he’s done is put himself and everyone else in danger. There’s just no way out.

Which means that, for the first time ever, Kieran has no choice but to finally, actually face up to and confront his terrifyingly huge inferiority complex, and begin to fight against it in a genuinely healthy way.

Maybe he wouldn’t have even tried at all if it hadn’t been for the fact that he needed to help with this battle! Shout-outs to the narrative for creating a situation in which Kieran has to help after Carmine’s one remaining Pokémon goes down, because he might otherwise never have done so.

(I love that one of the things the battle camera can do while you’re idling here is cut to Kieran and linger a moment with him, with the look of either frozen terror or miserable inferiority on his face. Even though he’s technically just a background character right now for the mechanical purposes of the battle, this moment is about him, and the devs knew it.)

And of course it takes Kieran a really long time, most of the battle, to actually find the courage to fight back! His inferiority complex is so massive, so all-encompassing, the root cause of all of the desperate, self-destructive, obsessive things he’s done to try and escape it, that of course it’s so, so terrifyingly difficult for him to actually face up to it and find the strength to try and believe that… maybe it’s just wrong.

Crucially, the single thing that does the most to trigger Kieran’s shift into courage is you – you, calling out to him, asking for his help. Hearing that you actually value his strength and need his help is exactly the kind of acknowledgement that Kieran has always desperately craved from you all along. It’s just what he needs to help him believe that, just maybe, he might actually be kinda strong and worth something after all.

But even then! Even with that, his inferiority complex does not magically vanish, because of course it doesn’t work that way! All your words do is give Kieran the courage to fight it, by holding onto the fact that you believe in him and he’s not alone. His animations here are so good; there’s tears in his eyes even as he manages to snap himself into determination, because he is still so scared and just finally being really, really brave about it!

One really lovely subtlety is that the highlight in his eyes, that little visual detail that makes a character really look alive, which was completely not there in Kieran for the entirety of Indigo Disk up until now, finally comes back in the exact moment when he finds the courage to fight. And it's neat how the game manages to re-use the same screaming animation Kieran had for the beginning of the Champion fight, with the only minor differences being the tears and that highlight in his eyes, but in this new context it communicates an entirely different kind of emotion. It’s like he’s fervently psyching himself up into believing that he is capable of doing this.

And hey, Kieran’s contribution to the battle really is pretty helpful! It’s a genuinely tough fight to the point that, no matter your level, there’s a good chance you were struggling on your own for a while, so you’re probably glad he’s here to help even just in a mechanical sense. His Hydrapple’s Supersweet Syrup ability can be useful to you as well as him, and then if it goes down, he switches to Dragonite and – because of the evasiveness drop – begins spamming near-accurate Thunders on a Terapagos who is Water-type for this final phase. Look at him go! (And another thing Hydrapple can do to support you is use Dragon Cheer, which delights me, because it’s Kieran deciding that actually he’s okay with you getting all the critical hits after all. Aww.)

Once Terapagos is defeated, if you try to not catch it, Kieran will tell you that you need to do it, that “it has to be you, not me!” It’s so lovely that there’s not a hint of bitterness to him here as he says this, just perfectly comfortably accepting it, because he never really wanted Terapagos anyway and he knows it’ll be happier with you, and that’s all that matters. Even if you don’t get that line, his encouragement of you as you go for a Pokéball is more than enough to communicate the fact that he’s okay with you doing this. And Kieran’s smiling again, cheering you on with that same animation of his from back in Teal Mask when he was super excited to watch you battle his sister! This is the excitable, battle-loving kid he always was and finally is once more! His smile is even more adorable now without his hair obscuring half of it, too.

Letting it go

In the end, Kieran’s finally able to let things go thanks to multiple factors brought about by what happened in Area Zero. There’s the part where he spent the adventure being just a little bit closer to his normal self, letting him realise that he misses being like that and that maybe there was nothing inherently bad or weak about those parts of him at all. There’s the way that Terapagos going berserk served as a very stark representation of how his obsession with strength only ends up hurting himself and everyone around him, which must have helped him see that his behaviour leading up to this was doing the same kind of thing and he can’t go back to that.

And, perhaps most importantly, you acknowledged his strength by calling out for him to help you against Terapagos, which is what Kieran really needed the most all along. By joining you in the battle, he’s finally begun to face his inferiority complex, to shoot down the conviction in his mind that he’s useless and weak and can’t do anything, and prove to himself that he’s capable of confronting scary things after all, even including his own mistakes.

I do have another small writing nitpick about his dialogue in the post-battle scene, in that I don’t quite agree with his progression from “I just don’t have it in me to be like you” straight to “finally I can let it go”. Kieran was always aware of the former, deep down, but knowing that never did anything but make him latch desperately onto trying to prove that wrong no matter how impossible it felt. Meanwhile, the latter implies that he’s always consciously wanted to let it go and just somehow couldn’t despite that, which isn’t quite it either.

Instead, I think it’d work if he first went from how he can’t ever be like you into “I guess I have to just let it go”, and then from there into “Yeah… finally I can let it go”. Feeling like he simply has no choice but to let go at first, and only from there would he reflect and realise that actually, he can now, and maybe a part of him had always kind of wanted to after all.

Delightfully, as Kieran begrudgingly accepts that he can’t ever be like you, you finally get a dialogue option that lets you tell him that he’s strong and cool and worth something as he is!!! It seems like it really did take you hearing his inferiority complex directly from him in order for you to realise that this was something he needed to hear. He reflexively tries to downplay your compliment, like he didn’t really do anything impressive at all just now, because he still instinctively feels that way about himself – again, his inferiority complex has not just magically vanished, because it doesn’t work like that! – but hearing otherwise from you of all people has to be an immense help for him in fighting against it.

And it’s this that sets Kieran off crying, from that overwhelmingly positive emotion that you think he’s really cool, aww. This seems to break something of an emotional dam for him, letting him just have a good long cry about all of it, which, yes, he has so many emotions he’s needed to let out for so long now and it is good and healthy that he’s finally able to do so! (I wish this part was better animated, alas – but believe me, I am imagining him having such a big long cathartic cry even if the game isn’t managing to adequately show it.)

Then there’s the final scene! It’s so brave of Kieran to have resolved to apologise and make amends for everything he did wrong. That is scary as hell and comes with a huge risk of massive painful criticism and rejection, but he’s doing it anyway because he wants to do the right thing. He is such a good kid at heart despite his massive issues having driven him into several big mistakes.

Now that Kieran’s returned to something resembling his old self, his anxious body language from before is back – he’s barely making eye contact with you as he speaks, his head low, instinctively trying to hide his face behind the one bit of hair he still has hanging down. But nonetheless, you can tell that he’s making an effort to fight that and push himself to be just a little bit more assertive than he was able to be before all this. As he asks if you two can be friends again, he’s grimacing, already braced for rejection, hesitating then blurting out all of it in one big go before he changes his mind – there’s still a very significant part of him convinced that you’d just never want that and he doesn’t even have the right to ask. But at least he’s now able to realise that said part is probably wrong and find the courage to ask anyway! Because he wants this, and he deserves to at least try and grasp good things for himself!

And of course you still want to be his friend, because you basically always were anyway from your perspective, and Kieran is so adorably happy to have this second chance, and I am so delighted that the two of you are able to be friends again like you always should have been all along, aaaa. I could not be more proud of my boy.

(Well, I could go into a lot more detail about just how proud of and happy I am for Kieran thanks to all of his scenes in the epilogue and postgame. But that’s enough of its own separate Thing that it ought to get its own post! So hold on for that; I’m not quite done having So Many Feelings about this boy just yet. Aaand here it is!)

#pokemon #pokemon sv #pokemon scarlet and violet #the indigo disk #the hidden treasure of area zero #pokemon kieran #kieran pokemon #trainer kieran #rival kieran #champion kieran #character analysis #ramble #my buttons #friends

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1moreff-creator · 5 months

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Happy Birthday Eden Tobisa!

Turns out our favorite clock girly has her birthday on New Year's Eve! What a nice date for such a nice girl! Let's do a character analysis, fun facts, and songs!

-We know relatively little about Eden's backstory. The most notable thing we know about her life before the killing game, apart from her fascination with clocks, is what is revealed in her chapter 2 secret: "Ever since you kissed her, you were afraid your sexuality would ruin your friendships." Which is pretty straightforward; she's canonically a lesbian and is worried it would negatively affect her friendships.

-Literally the only other thing we know about her backstory is that she lived in Japan for a small period of time when she was younger, before moving back to the US. This was revealed in a Q&A.

(... You know, I made a deranged theory in my Mai post that maybe the girl that Eden kissed was actually Mai. It wasn't very serious, since it was just a silly way to try to explain what the hell Eden's quote in the Mai page could mean. But... we know Teruko was in Japan for a while when she was younger, and it's theorized she knew Mai before being separated from her at some point. Combined with Mai's name being seemingly Japanese, it could imply Mai also lived in Japan at some point. And if that's the case, it's possible she met Eden there? To be clear, that's still an insane possibility, but I do find it a funny possibility, which is why I'm sharing it)

-Apart from that, Eden's defining trait is her optimism and her trust in others. She sticks to Teruko's side even after she starts pushing everyone away in CH 1, and confesses to her that she believes "not caring about others is the worst way to live." She's importantly not naive, she does know their situation is horrible, but still she constantly searches for an exit and tries to build good friendships with the others.

-This includes baking with Min, Rose and Teruko in CH1, inviting Teruko and Arei to make clocks on CH2, etc. Basically, she's awesome and nice and mature.

-Also she loves clocks. Regular Ultimate stuff, she can apparently spend hours and hours working and losing track of time.

-Although for such an optimistic character, her secret quote is quite ominous. "You can't go back, no matter how hard you try." We have zero clue what this means at the moment, but at least it does fit the symbolism of time always moving forward.

-Meanwhile, her quote in the Mai page is "She kept calling the number, even though no one picked it up." This is even more incomprehensible! Eden, what in the world are you talking about?

-Alright, David MV. She doesn't have a color in Color Theory, but her numeral is XII (twelve). Go to 1:48:28 in this video for an explanation. God it's so convenient to have that lol.

Alright fun facts!

-As stated, her birthday (December 31st) lands on New Year's Eve. Maybe representing new beginnings or change, which certainly goes well with her character. How nice!

-Like most of the cast, she's American and right-handed.

-She's one of the only characters with dyed hair. Her hair was originally just brown.

-Her favorite color is daffodil yellow, because it's happy, and her least favorite color is blue, because it's "kind of a downer color." Areden shippers in shambles.

-Her favorite ice cream flavor is honeycomb. I didn't even know that existed but go off queen.

-She enjoys cute fashion, but also enjoys wearing androgynous style clothing.

-She likes food which is fun to make or prepare. How nice!

-She's biracial; her mother is black and her father is Japanese. This is why she spent a bit of time in Japan when she was younger.

-Her name in kanji is 飛佐【とび・さ】楽【いーでん】. Gonna leave any actual meaning as homework, but it's worth noting her name was anglicized. I think that would translate to "Iden", but her mother liked the name "Eden", so they went with that instead.

Finally, songs that remind me of her!

-Positive Parade by DECO*27

-Gone Fishing by Ghost & Pals (friendship!)

-Aura by Ghost & Pals

-In Iolite by Ghost & Pals

-Magnet by minato

-Those Who Carried On by Ghost & Pals

-I'm Glad You're Evil Too by PinocchioP

And Happy Birthday! And a happy new year! Well wishes to all you Tumblr peeps. Take care!

#drdt #eden tobisa #character birthday #danganronpa despair time #i am again sorry for disappearing i swear i’ll return eventually

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prince-liest · 3 months

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YOURE TELLING ME MY DESPERATION FOR TRANS VOX CONTENT INFECTED YOU ????? AND THE NEXT INSTALLMENT IS ABOUT IT AS WELL AS VOX FINALLY GETTING FUCKED? YOURE JOKING. YOURE JOKING. OH MY GODDDDDDDDDDDHHSHSJEHEHRJRE IM SOBBING ON THE FLOOR I PRAYED FOR TIMES LIKE THESE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i’m ready to get sucker punched!!!!!!!!!!! in all seriousness i’ve never been so excited for a fic update in my LIFE. HOORAYYYYYYY!!!!!!! and who wants to bet that alastor at first uses the vox getting fucked event as a balm to his current fractured ego, but then gets genuinely overwhelming fucking fond? nearly ruins the whole thing for him. all i’m SAYING is the there’s wayyyyy to much evidence of alastor getting, in his words, “squishy feelings” about vox when he acts Particularly uhhh….. unfiltered. and something tells me vox is gonna be unfiltered. the possibilities im SO EXCITED!!!! - 🌓

Under a cut for length!

and ANOTHER THING. alastor making a FUCKING DEAL?.????? as you know i was already wrung dry by that point in the story, ready for the cool down from high emotions, then BOOM. LIKE WHAT THE FUCK? I NEEDED TO TAKE A BREAK WITH VOX!!!!!!!! ALASTOR YIU FUCKING MAD MAN. and yes i IMMEDIATELYYYYYYY noticed that vox essentially agreed to nothing while alastor agreed to something WAY more soul binding. im just in shock because i think this is the biggest display of love alastor has portrayed in the whole series so far. even BY far. with the sexual stuff, alastor is/was new to it all and unsure. even with the general intimacy stuff. but this? deals? soul contracts? this is His Domain. so far, vox has been guiding alastor through this relationship, and alastor has almost had a plausible deniability in it all. like clearly, he enjoys it and loves vox, even if he doesnt acknowledge it to himself. but his facade allows him the distance to claim Vox is the one making this relationship happen, and alastor is going along on a whim. we even see it in the last chapter, when alastor says he never trusted vox [hilarious that he said that right after he said that he trusted vox. alastor revealing things he didn’t mean to when scared and angry is my favorite theme in this series], and overall said this whole thing was a mistake and he was Foolish for being TRICKED INTO IT!!! i’m not explaining this well but the idea is that alastor had the plausible deniability that he was the Passive Participant thus far. this deal? CHANGES ALL OF THAT. on a base level, it shows that he’s so serious about this relationship that his FUCKING SOUL IS ON THE LINE. THE THING THAT JUST TRIGGERED HIM INTO HIS FIRST PANIC ATTACK? YEAH THAT. and of course that the contract was wayyyyyy more binding for him than vox. and that he clearly KNEW that. it’s just all a double edged sword. alastor made the deal in order to flex his power and pull one over on vox, which soothed him after the panic attack and vox seeing him that “weak”. but he also did it because vox opened up to him about his experience with domestic violence. and he felt so uncomfortable and guilty (YES guilty im interpreting it like that) about it that, at the very least subconsciously, he immediately made a SOUL CONTRACT that he’d never attack vox again rashly. like oh my fucking god. this, in turn, shows how invested he is, and how much he cares for vox. IN SUM. alastor probably made this deal as a conscious power play, but it really just showed how much he loves and respects vox. LOSER!!!!!!! and is this reminding anyone of anything? seems to be paralleling vox carving himself up for alastor post adam. god these ancient men. sorry for the essay !!!! if you were a college professor and i had to write analytical essays on your work i PROMISE i would tear that shit up. LIFE IS GOOD. -🌓

Hey anon, I just want you to know that ILY and I love your essays. This is like the most exciting and gratifying pair of asks to wake up to as an author, ehehehe. You are VERY on point and I love reading your analysis! >:))

#ask #personal #half moon anon #t #nsft #these asks are my FAVORITE #I really truly do not have much to add but just know they are my FAVORITE #DEARLY HOPE YOU ENJOY THE NEXT INSTALLMENT <3

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tomwambsgans · 4 months

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i'm ngl it's because i recently read fight club, But i'm thinking a lot lately about castration and the true/deepest implications of it irt nero and sporus and tom and greg. obviously we've got tom's line about greg being "castrated on pay" and some pretty solid analysis on that being a matter of tom keeping greg dependent on him, but tbh even with said meta posts...

like, i'm sorry, but it's a weak line. it feels just as strangely on the nose as shiv falling down the stairs, and in fact like a line that exists specifically to match shiv falling. it almost even seems like a last-minute rush to complete Following Up The Nero And Sporus Thing, like they did the first part and managed to get all the way to the last episode before realizing they'd forgotten to do the second thing, so they had to reach for anything they could relate castration to without having to film a new scene. this feels especially evident/likely in the fact that there is NO way greg's salary is actually getting docked to the degree that tom implied. it's markedly disappointing, too, in the way that setting it up with shiv literally falling down stairs had the audience looking forward to how the rest of the overt symbolism would play out. castration on pay was the most mundane and least expected possible conclusion, lol. and not at all on par with the literal fall. like if that is the castration we were actually waiting for the whole time...

it's also all overkill, for that matter, considering that the s3 finale fit "pushed his wife down the stairs and married sporus" thing perfectly fine and a perfect amount of vague. like tom ALREADY betrayed shiv, symbolically "killing" her, and had an ancient-roman-wedding-handshake agreement with greg about his soul. even tom and greg's initial dynamic in the final season often feels like that of a married couple. which begs the question: why have the stuff in s4 on top of that? it may very well be simply one of the many marks of s4's drop in quality, caused by a myriad of irl factors. or it could possibly be on purpose to specifically bring home something else about the nero and sporus story. maybe it's to reinforce the tomshiv divorce and also tom and greg's marriage after all the rapid shifts in dynamic. who knows.

but what i DO know is that i wanna get to the bottom (lol) of the castration symbolism/motif. so i'm gonna go through everything that could possibly inform the audience's interpretation.

i'll start with the least significant, which i believe is the reality of castration in ancient rome and in the circumstances around the irl nero and sporus. part of why this falls on the bottom rung is the fact that historical accounts of nero especially with sporus are hotly contested. another reason is that the story tom tells is one that not only omits many details in a technically misleading/recontextualizing way, but also adds details that are present in no known accounts.

so: WHY was sporus castrated? there are 2 main possibilities/reasons.

to maintain his youthful [and therefore feminine] beauty. the real sporus was most likely around 16 when nero had him castrated. and the practice of castration to preserve youth had precedence. basically, twinks were REALLY in. it's alleged that sporus may have already been more effeminate (and sexually attractive) than average. but it's also said that sporus bore an uncanny resemblance to poppaea, which nero chose him for specifically and wanted to maintain.

in order to marry him with legal/social sanction. ancient roman society, rather than being built upon the heterosexual, was more built upon the Top/generally masculine. Eunuch was a gender class/category essentially equivalent with Woman, which allowed sporus to specifically be nero's wife. this didn't mean that his marriage to sporus was necessarily seen as good and normal, only technically acceptable.

and i have a ways more to go with the analysis but i'm gonna say right here that i do not think the first reason bears any significance to tom and greg. firstly due to that there is no textual evidence that tom wants greg to be explicitly feminine, even compared to himself, and a LOT to the contrary. tom consistently invites greg to join him in performing masculinity and gaining power through it, case in point the "let's fight like chickens" scene that directly follows the nero and sporus story. secondly, sporus's possible resemblance to poppaea does not track to greg and shiv more than incidentally; greg being shiv's cousin doesn't directly earn tom anything. but more importantly, imo, is the fact that what would have made nero want sporus to look like poppaea is in direct contrast with both the story tom tells AND the way their arc plays out.

so NOW, to demonstrate this, let's look at the irl poppaea's death/murder, which happened during her second pregnancy. different historians (even those alive at the time) have different theories for how it went down. who knows how much truth they're based in, bc there's a clear heavy bias against nero, but they're all we have anyway and therefore all tom would have had. here they are:

nero kicked her in the stomach in a fit of rage, while she was fighting with him about how much time he spent at the races (main theory/rumor)

nero kicked her in the stomach in a casual outburst

nero "leapt upon her belly" either accidentally or on purpose

nero poisoned her (uncommon rumor, most likely bs)

she died through no fault of nero's at all, simply bc of complications with her pregnancy (this has the most evidence, and is believed by many modern historians)

you'll notice a complete lack of stairs-related death theories, and in fact a near total lack of Nero Purposefully Murdered Poppaea theories. the general idea is that nero deeply mourned poppaea's death (and was remorseful, if it was his own fault), and proceeded to replace her with sporus, even calling him by her name.

which feels like a good segue into the more significant story of nero and sporus to analyze: the one that TOM told.

Sporus was a young slave boy. He was Nero's favorite. And, uh... you know what Nero did to him? Well, Nero... pushed his wife... down the stairs. And then he had Sporus castrated and he married him instead. And he gave him a ring. And he made him dress up like his dead wife. ...I'd castrate you and marry you in a heartbeat.

without looking into the actual story, this would sound like nero murdering his wife in order to marry sporus. with bringing up sporus first, it even sounds like nero met sporus and started favoring him prior to killing poppaea. which is also overtly analogous to tom and greg's relationship arc.

despite what tom must have read in his book, and what one could very easily imagine him, a Wife Guy, latching onto in that book... tom isn't telling greg about the tragedy of an emperor who accidentally killed his wife and then had to replace her with a young boy. tom literally invents a method of death that there is NO preexisting source for. furthermore he chooses one that does not sound remotely unintentional. at best he keeps in line with themes that suggest a violent miscarriage. but he removes all notions of an accident. he turns it into an unambiguous, purposeful uxorcide.

so, since all notions of trying to keep sporus looking like poppaea are not only unfitting as potential parallels, but also utterly irrelevant to the version of events that tom tells, and since we know tom twists and omits many other details (like what happens just a year into their marriage) anyway... what reasons DOES tom have for bringing up castration in this story? here's the possibilities i can come up with:

to make it sound less overtly romantic through means of the bizarre. classic diversionary tactic. literally without the castration it would sound undeniably like he's just saying "i read about this ancient roman gay marriage. an emperor murdered his wife so that he could marry a boy. i would like to do that with you also :)"

to make it sound less gay, specifically, because of nero's power in the situation. this of course calls back to that second reason for the actual sporus to be castrated. it's not gay if i've made you a eunuch, greg.

to emphasize the cruelty on nero's end. tom often puts himself in the role of a villain, especially irt his behavior with greg. considering also that this whole scene follows tom talking about how he's going to prison (AND that the next time he calls greg sporus it's in the scripts before the diner scene, where he agrees to sacrifice himself and go down for greg), it would make sense for him to buffer this confession with the caveat of what a bad person he is, like express in SOME way how insane his feelings are and how terrible he knows it is that he feels this way about greg. tom is notoriously unable to make normal apologies either, so. it tracks.

i think all of these are true, and i'm sure most would agree. i'm also sure most who've read this far are in full agreement that tom fixated on the story of nero and sporus in particular because it was a gay relationship with just enough ambiguity that he's able to relate to it without panicking. hell, the "he gave him a ring" line alone doesn't even evoke an ancient roman marriage nearly as much as a modern american one. i can't find even any sources that specifically mention a ring from nero to sporus, so i imagine tom invented that as well.

BUT while i'm here i do still want to mention a couple other queer things about nero to drive home that it's not just incidental gayness but overt homosexual desire being portrayed, as well as to emphasize that second reason that the irl nero may have had to castrate sporus:

prior to knowing sporus, nero had a mock-wedding as part of festive role-reversals during saturnalia. in this wedding he took the role of a bride, marrying a different freedman.

this is apocryphal and practically historical fiction, and may also specifically be due to perceived deviancy in nero, but it's old enough (like 13th century) that it's lowkey in the nero "canon" that he had womb envy and was obsessed with being the one to get pregnant

okay so NOW... how does all this translate into the actual events demanded/foreshadowed/symbolized by this story? if pushing shiv down the stairs is the betrayal that keeps her from being able to block the gojo deal (but also shiv is shown to fall down a couple real stairs)... and marrying sporus is making the "deal with the devil" (AND the sticker on the forehead)... then what's the castration? what was the first, less on-the-nose-and-simultaneously-meaningless castration, at least?

my best answer is that it's tom getting greg to drop his brightstar buffalo plans and follow him instead. because if death is just corporate death, then your testicles/manhood is your independence. tom says you're a joke, you can't function on your own, you need me (i need you). he's insecure that greg will leave if he has the option to do so. fair enough.

......and yet i come back to my initial disappointment, because that is barely different than the pay castration. and it's redefining greg's symbolic testes to something that tom gave him in the first place, thus practically retconning the first castration. but if that's it, does shiv's literal fall also replace her kick out of the company? that would sure be stupid! is the point of rehashing the symbolism to be stupid? to have meaningless stuff follow up the more significant events? even if that was the case, wouldn't you at least be doing it to give a visual element to the symbols? if shiv gets actual stairs, WHERE are greg's actual balls? or ANY balls!!!! greg even started wearing grey suits which he hadn't done before (but shiv had), and got a "ring" in his final scene. where's the FUCKING balls, huh?????

(anyway)

occam's razor, i think, may be that the meaninglessness of the castration specifically is the point. tom's insecurity that greg will leave if he has the option to (that greg would never actually want him but only need him), has been present for basically the duration of the show. it's just a character trait, and thus doesn't even work as foreshadowing when that just means "he's gonna keep doing what he's been doing." then, take that second reason--the purely pragmatic, not based in heterosexual-adjacent desire reason--for nero to castrate sporus. aka the only reason that makes sense for the way tom spins the story.

(it's also a motivation that leaves room for not even actually doing it. sporus wasn't going through rapid masculinization or anything. and they only lived another year. you could get away with just claiming that you did it for a while, probably.)

i should say there IS technically a third reason, postulated by modern scholars, for sporus's castration: to intentionally humiliate a potential rival for the throne. imagine if tom had told greg about nero and sporus upon first meeting. obviously things changed very quickly, but if all castration is here is tom keeping greg on a tight leash, then it works. and if the castration is nothing, then greg nearly tanking tom's plan out of naivety can be a nothing version of sporus wanting revenge. and shiv falling down real stairs can, instead of actually intending to set up a meaningful castration, be a red herring in that regard and simply foreshadow her pregnancy.

and that could be it. but... i've got One More Thing. maybe the most significant of all. lightning round:

who or what, in modern day where tom and greg live, actually IS castrated?

animals

specifically dogs

hmmmmmm

and why are DOGS castrated?

to reduce sexual and territorial aggression

reduce other unwanted behaviors

to keep them from breeding

okay. think greg's newfound sexual confidence in s4 and tom's distaste for it. tom's continued anxiety that greg's independence might lead him to leave him. think greg being tom's attack dog and how that nearly backfires at the very end. greg approaching tom at the end like a begging puppy.

think full circle: who's the rescue pup, i'll take care of you, i've got you...

i feel justified in recontextualizing all of this, and i come back to fight club:

Valley of the Dogs. Where even if they don't kill you, if someone loves you enough to take you home, they still castrate you.

#tomgreg #lion in the meadow #with open eyes #meta #mine

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golden28s · 7 months

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Totally optional, fun Gallavich questions ☀️🌙

thanks for tagging me to the coolest person @callivich 💖

What’s a fic you’ve read more than once? i havent read that many gallavich fanfics since i watched the show in like april BUT im loving Africa and ill probably read it once it's finished

What’s a gifset you always have to reblog? s7 gifsets are really person to me but also maybe s10 and s11 because they reached the peak of softness

What’s a headcanon you can’t stop thinking about? maybe that ian would tell mickey "i told you so" when they become parents and mickey turns out to be an absolute incredible dad that will play, sing, dance anything with his children.

What’s a fanart you love looking at? maybe @gallavichonly @heymrspatel and i accept recommendations btw id love to see more fanart

What’s an idea you’d love to create if you had the time/inspiration? id probably write like a series of one shots based on taylor swift songs

What’s something you’ve discovered since entering this fandom? A new trope you love? A different analysis of the show? Something else? i think that not judging characters, like always be aware of their circumstances and what made them do or say that and that might not justify them but it explains their thought process, it explains why and gives them some sort of humanity to their mistakes idk if this makes sense but yeah that, don't judge a character too soon, try to understand them.

What’s an underrated trope or concept you’d like to see more of? the secret dating, we know they secretly dated and stuff but i feel like it's actually a really fun concept to play with despite their circumstances in the show, it gives you so many possibilities.

What’s your favourite season? And has this changed after multiple rewatches of the show? the early seasons have special place in my heart, so s4-5 and i think gallavich totally saved s7, i love that part of the season

What’s a plot hole you wish had been answered or resolved? i would've loved to see ian healing from the grooming and realizing it was grooming, it would've been nice for the character to heal old wounds and start fresh a new life with mickey in a new neighborhood ready to create new memories

What scene or moment do you feel isn’t discussed enough? the just wondering if we're a couple or not scene, we definitely should discuss more the fact that mickey answered too quickly, he absolutely had been calling ian boyfriend in his head

What line/dialogue/description from something else (a poem, a book, a tv show, a movie, or something else) do you feel describes Ian and Mickey’s relationship? im gonna quote noel fisher and as he said: "Ian's been that kind of guiding angel for Mickey so he's going to have to turn into a pretty much kind of a protective angel for Ian"

What do you think is next for Ian and Mickey post-finale? i think they're gonna learn to communicate even more, they were in really good path already. i think the writers didn't have much faith in them in that aspect but the conversation they have in s11 about going back or not to the new neighborhood made evident that they can communicate, they listen to each other and understand the reasons, each other's feelings. so yeah, i think they're gonna get even better at that and also they're not gonna wait that much to become parents. i think they eventually will find new jobs, ian will have his tomatoes and mickey will adore looking at him doing his thing every sunday morning. i really really think they finally found their peace, their home and are gonna be very very happy and disgustingly in love forever because they're also hopeless romantic and want that so bad.

im gonna tag a few people and as always feel free to do it or not <3 @lupeloto @mikhailoisbaby @mickeysgaymom @redwiccanrobin @lyricailove @energievie @depressedstressedlemonzest @juliakayyy

#gallavich #shameless #tag game fandom

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tearsofthekingdomcountup · 1 year

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28 Days until Tears of the Kingdom Release!!!!!!! I've spent hours talking with several of my friends about yesterday's trailer. I have so many theories and questions but since I can't have any of them answered until the game comes out, I'll share some of them with you. Instead of posting all of the analysis at once, however, I'll do it in smaller chunks over the next few days. Spoilers below if you wanna avoid trailer stuff.

I mean the first thing I noticed was the Chu-chu (my friend said they are called Slimes in German) fighting the construct. I find it fascinating that these constructs fight other mobs. Did the Zonai build them just to fight monsters or all intruders? What do they register Link as? An invader? I wonder if there is a game mechanic that convinces the constructs not to attack Link or maybe only sentry constructs attack Link and all other constructs must be triggered in a combat trial or something.

This robot is chopping down a tree. I noticed that some of the constructs in the gameplay trailer ignored Link. I'm guessing that these are specifically worker constructs. They remind me of the mining robots in Skyward Sword.

After this I enjoyed the music and Link's awesome dive through the air. I don't have much to say about that except my friend wondered why Link isn't constantly cold all the time if he's that high up. I'm chalking it up to Sky Island magic.

Mushrooms in Hateno. I think some of them are real and others are just decorations. Gives me Minish cap vibes. I wonder if their is a specific mushroom shop or maybe there is a festival going on? Idk maybe the towns people just wanted some color.

TENTS. The way I almost screamed because they are rebuilding. It makes me so emotional to see that the people of Hyrule were rebuilding from the Calamity. To see the Guardians and malice gone from the courtyard is just ugh my heart. My friend hopes that Nintendo lets us explore some of rebuilt Hyrule before things go to shit again and Ganondorf wrecks everything and I agree. However, I have a feeling that Nintendo will not let us explore the half built castle as part of a tutorial before waking up the angry mummy in the basement. I can dream though.

Another look at that spiral shrine thing. I really really want to know what those are. Also lmao looks like a sky island fell and got wedged sideways. I guess its something interesting to look at for the people in Kakariko.

Alright so this structure rising out of the ground in the desert is probably in the Arbiters ground area. I'm not gonna say dungeons confirmed but I've absolutely heard other people say it. I thought it might be related to the structures in Twilight Princess (cough maybe the Twili) but my friend suggested the dungeon in Skyward Sword which also rises from the ground. Either way I'm excited to explore it.

We've seen many shots of the castle rising but I really appreciate seeing the Sheikah here reacting to it as well. It makes the world feel more real and the trailer of course did a great job at including NPCs. I do still wonder what exactly the falling rocks are and why they continue to fall throughout the game.

This figure looks so much like Demise. It's tempting to think that this is Ganondorf considering we see him later in the trailer. However, I'm gonna stick to the idea that we might be seeing both characters. Although, maybe Demise will only be in flashbacks/visions of the past. It would be fun if Ganondorf in the final fight morphs into more of a Demise form.

This one was just cruel. Link is gonna be so devastated at having failed to catch/protect Zelda and he tried so hard. I hope he quickly learns that Zelda isn't dead because he's gonna be racked with guilt either way.

For as much as Nintendo loves showing that they dropped Zelda off a cliff, I'm glad that they showed the yellow glow. Since her hand is glowing I'm wondering if her triforce powers saved her which is certainly a possibility. However, there is another possibility. Zelda looks like she's holding something in her hand. I think that she found the little golden recall stone/tear and when she fell it activated. Time travel is looking very possible.

But that's it for today. Thank you for reading.

#totk link #loz totk #botw totk #totk #tears of the kingdom #loz #legend of zelda #loz tears of the kingdom #zelda totk #totk trailer #princess zelda #loz botw2 #botw2 #trailer analysis

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rayshippouuchiha · 2 years

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Ray Ray I need to tell someone about these past few weeks bc it’s has been. A Ride. It’s almost been like a fever dream Ray and I need to tell SOMEONE so that I can stop obsessing over everything in my head. I have to let it out, to document this for posterity, sorry for ranting at you.

Let me set the stage for you. It's early September and the 7th anniversary of Undertale's release, as well as the 1st anniversary of Deltarune Chapter 2, are right around the corner and the UT/DR fandoms are salivating because Toby Fox, the creator, announced that there would be an event of some kind, as there has been for the past few years.

On the 5th one we got a magnificent orchestral concert and some lore tidbits. On the 6th we got an incredibly funny and wholesome stream of Deltarune Ch. 1 starring Toby himself, as well as the release of the aforementioned Ch. 2, so hopes were high

Let's tackle the events that followed in chronological order

First thing that happened, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, was that Sans Undertale becomes the Ultimate Tumblr Sexyman and kills the Queen of England (lol). Toby Fox posts a drabble on twitter to commemorate the occasion. Much fanart ensues

2. Shortly after that, Fangamer announces the release of a highly anticipated plushie for a beloved Deltarune character. Said character is a funny psychotic trash gremlin, and is a personification of spam emails from the late 90s, so of course they're highly popular on tumblr (was even one of the contestants of the mentioned sexyman poll), so of course Fangamer somehow managed to capture their energy with the release trailer, which included: someone finding the plush in a literal garbage can, the plush apparently having a magnetized nose so that it can “sniff out” coins, and the plush being soaked in an entire gallon of milk, slurped on, and thrown against the walls??

Despite the weirdness of the trailer, it seems Toby Fox and Fangamer know their people - The fandom goes WILD

3. On September 17th, Toby Fox announces that there will be a charity event themed after the previously mentioned spam character. Initially, we all think it’s just gonna some auctions or giveaways with a quirky design, but it turns out that Toby turned the website hosting the event into a maze chock-full of hidden links, easter eggs, new lore and teasers for the upcoming chapter 3. Also, new secrets and prizes were unlocked as more money was donated. The fandom goes APESHIT. There were people on watch for the entire 24h+ of the duration of the event, fancontent galore, hundreds of analysis posts, and a group of tumblr users made a 75 page Google doc compiling all the secrets and lore as they were revealed.

Btw the prizes included the gremlin’s “dirty socks”, him “after not surviving”, a body pillow, a “wedding ring”, toilet paper themed after him, and an “ass-scented” candle

(no, I was not kidding about the candle)

I wonder who gets to explain to the kids benefiting from the charity that their lives were made better because over a million people liked this garbage man so much they donated over $320,000 for some of his backstory

4. About halfway through the charity event, we unlocked a Q&A with the gremlin, who had “taken over” Fangamer’s twitter account. Some of the tweets seem to imply the gremlin is bisexual and the ex of a character from Deltarune Ch 1?? Predictably, much fanart and fanfics ensue

5. Near the end of the event, the last item to be unlocked by donations (which wasn't in the initial list of items available and appeared out of nowhere btw) was the gremlin’s “fate”, and we were told fans had to donate either towards “Freedom” or “Silence”. There was tons of speculation as to what this meant exactly for hours before finally “Freedom” won with ~$58,000 in favor

I saw several people among the donations towards Freedom saying stuff along the lines of "noooo he can't die he just came out as bisexual!", it was so funny 😂

Fun fact: out of the ~$29,000 for Silence, apparently around $15,000 were donated by Toby Fox and Fangamer with the caption "he can't get away with this!", which is so freaking funny asfdgfngfd his own creator lmao, top 10 anime betrayals

6. After the charity event was finished, there was an announcement that there would be a commemorative stream. We all thought it would be similar to the stream that happened on last year’s anniversary, especially since the people in the thumbnail were the same ones who participated in the previous one.

Instead, we got an unhinged, extremely cursed video where some guy wearing a costume of the spam character announced the winners of each item and narrated several poems praising the spam character, all in an old glitchy TV style.

It included: the guy putting whole blue eggs in his mouth, infomercials for a fake product which was later said to explode, the assistant eating pasta with a vacant expression on his face, and several segments where they seemed to pray?? as if the gremlin was their god or something.

Near the end of the stream, the people in the thumbnail appeared and said that someone had illegally hijacked their stream and that the FBI were on their way to apprehend him. The guy in the costume then ran away saying that he was not actually the gremlin, and had just been hired to play the part BY the gremlin. The stream ends with the poor guy running away, attempting to call the gremlin, and then being grabbed by… something as ominous music played, leaving the phone hanging off the hook.

So… the gremlin apparently paid a guy to impersonate him on camera so that he could get away scot-free while hosting his highly dubious giveaway?? Therefore, we the fandom gave him his Freedom but “killed” a man in the process adfgnasfgdhfng it’s so freaking funny

So concludes the deranged saga of this year's UT/DR anniversary. I still can't believe it all happened in like the span of 10 days.

Y'know, despite how crazy it was, I'm really glad I was there for all of it. It really Avengers Assembled the community too, we were all making theories about the new lore, documenting new findings, making art and writing fics shipping the gremlin with his ex 😂

I really do hope you play one or both of the games someday Ray, because even setting aside the fantastic storytelling, music, and characters, if you're careful and find your little niche of creators then the community is fantastic.

this is so much, so so much and I honestly love it

#Undertale #Delta Rune #RayRambles

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nosolaceofastraightanswer · 10 months

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THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY MASS REWATCH EXTRAVAGANZA S3E10 ALGAMATION POST

the final one!!!! ogufhhghrgfhfhfhf. let’s get to it besties i have to write some psychology paragraphs after this still and let me tell you the night is not young 🤠

im totally gonna have an emotional note at the end omg i can’t believe it’s overrerrrr 🥺

i think overall there were so many good character interaction scenes and i wish that the development from those happened ages ago. the characters felt very cartoony and stagnant for a while tbh.

this episode did however remind me of how much i love viktor + allison’s relationship istg they need interaction s4 plssss they’re so fucked up but they lvoe each other so much bro

my wishlist for s4 only grows 😔

glad they brought back five Being Insane this ep. i feel like he didn’t bring this manic energy to the rest of the season but now that it’s here i’m just like yes get it king 👑

i have individual posts to make but i’ll say it here anyway: MURDER HOTEL IS SO FUCJING COOL!!!!

that yellow light was so creepy but OML the bugs?!!??!!?!?!?!? agahhgkgkgkgkgkg it gave me the heebies AND the jeebies.

sloane also deserves to go feral but like. srsly wish she was more developed. when i tell you villain arc sloane is in my heart okay.

dielila enjoyers stay winning ig???? im sorry they’re adorable.

miss stabnley tho :(((( baby

that sigil stuff was cool!!! wish we got more worldbuilding OUHGGHH

in all caps is my literal reaction when allison goes into her apartment (ft return of The Notes bc im just quirky like that)

AAAAAAA okay so analysis and individual posts r done

tysm to anyone who interacted this wild ride!!!! it’s been amazing and i lvoe you guys sm. im so glad the fandom community can come together to appreciate this thing we all lvoe like????? 🥺🥺 i gotta make a psot @ing my fave tuamre posters!!! <3333

to anyone who is an algamation post enjoyer: ily 💪💪 we stay winning

ALSO for the future now that the rewatch is over, i will be staying active in the tua fandom and posting still!! i have some art i made recently and MANY brain animatics that i hope will one day make it to paper/flipaclip. i’ve also got some analysis i’ve been holding off on cus it would be a LARGE undertaking, and i’ve been thinking of writing fanfic on my ao3 sometime!!! i love the tua fandom and i’m having a blast. ^_^

we can only pray for the s4 outcome whenever tf that’s coming out.

i have had so much fun reading everyone’s posts and hanging out. i met so many people through this as well!!!! hiiiiiiii

OUGUGHHFHFGHG u guys r the best :D

also thanks a million years forever to the bug enjoyers HERES THE GUY

look at him Wiggle. anyways have a good night everyone! i have to Go Do Work now. love u guys <33333

#tua #tuamre #s3e10 #writingastraightanswer

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daisydood · 1 year

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I'll ask!! [[Also Thrùd is super cool idk why people dont talk about her more!!]]

HCs for being best friends with Thrùd?? All she's really had to hang out with is her nasty brothers oh GODS.

Ramblings about God of War: Thrùd addition!

A/N: HEY ANON!! you're the first person in my asks ever, so ty!!! Sorry this isn't really what you wanted, but I'll to add some hcs if I come up with anything ❤️❤️

I'm pretty bad at writing HCs/fics and stuff, but I'll definitely do a character analysis and rant abt her!!

(Coming from Someone with a bias cuz my favorite character is Thrúd💀)

In my humble opinon, Thrud got done SO dirty in Ragnorak. She lost both of her siblings, then her father, then lost someone who she thought was good; Odin, THEN she lost the entire realm she's lived in her entire life (Asgard). Which like, fair enough, all of those deaths made sense because it was Ragnorak, and, it would mean that we get some character develpment from her, with all the grief...right? RIGHT-

Nope. Not even a little. After her two brothers died (AS ANON SAID, THE ONLY PEOPLE SHE COULD TALK TO HER AGE IM SCREAMING) all we got was an introduction scene to her character briefly mentioning Modi, then she said we are better off without him. Which, fair enough, if that's what she thinks.

BUT. All we got for Thrúd after her dad dies was a secret scene of her inheriting Thors sword. Which, IS SO COOL, but it wasn't even an obvious part of the game😭 She lost her dad, her dads dad, her entire home, and we got almost nothing from her about it. Same goes with Sif. She was literally just there. Her and Thor had this entire romantic dialogue about like "this isn't you 🥺" then he dies and and Sif- I think Sif had like 2 lines after that? Nothing even mentioning it, too.

Freya's loss of Freyr was treated much better then this. It wasn't really talked about, except for the final dialogue post Ragnorak, when you go up the mountain looking for Kratos. She said stuff like ohhh I'm gonna move on it's fine blah blah blah. That is so much better than anything that happened with Thrúd and Sifs loss.

How did I start ranting about Sif. What.

ANYWAYS (completely different topic on how she wants to be validated 💕)

I think that Thrúd just wants to be validated. She tries so hard to be a Valkyrie, and it's like people don't care. Her dad doesn't care, and her mom thinks it's too dangerous. Odin just sucks, and he probably doesn't care, same with Heimdall.

I think her and Atreus freeing Garm really broke her down. As soon as she realized what she and him had done, she panics. She gets really upset/angry and immediately tries to get out of Jotunheim. THEN HEIMDALL HARRASSED HER. She was completely in her head before Heimdall came and bullied the two, so the things he said obviously made her mad, man. She tried punching him. Knowing Heimdall, it failed pretty bad. She had to feel so belittled and stupid, everything she's work for being thrown away because of the one bad decision that was made.

anywayssssszs

Thrúd is so cool. She is sooo underrated man. She has so much potential for when/if another Ragnorak game comes out. Shes THE ONLY THORDSITTER CHILD LEFTT

note: hahfhfbdhdh once again anon I'm literally so sorry this isn't what you wanted😭 and oh my god my last post got twenty notes what☝🏻😧 okay okay okay what else do I need to say

OH YEAH sorry this take so long for me to post writing these takes foreverrrrrrrvrrvrv

OH YEAH hit up my asks if u want sum written & I'll probably talk about Freya next😱

#me and my opinions #no one cares about this lfmskfkdk #anyways actual tags now #gowr #god of war ragnarok #atreus #god of war thrud #thrud thorsdottir #gow ragnorak #god of war #kratos #freya #freyr #dc ask!!

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takeasadsongandanalyzeit · 2 years

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12 Bar Blues in F

This recording is the second instrumental from the April/May 1960 home recording made at Forthlin Road (also known as the Kirchherr Tape). It's a little long, so be warned. Though, @peaceloveandstarrs did such a fantastic analysis, you'll want to listen to every second so you can follow along.

This seems to be an improvised blues instrumental. We can hear a steady bass, keeping a good rhythm (more evidence that Stu is unfairly maligned as a bass player). Our working theory is that Stu played the bass kind of how Ringo plays the drums, there to serve the song. We both think, had Stu actually tried, he could have become an incredible bassist. Stu was just talented, at everything, so even though he wasn't trying very hard, it's still more than just passable.

There are at least two other guitars, possibly three.

We had some discussion about who was playing lead guitar. We originally thought Paul, but this was 2 years after Paul flubbed the solo in Guitar Boogie, so the likelihood he'd take lead was low. It's therefore likely George. It's interesting hearing him mess with some chords higher up the neck. It shows the beginning of Geo's talent pretty well, we'd say.

But neither of us our instrumentalists, so we're gonna leave the rest of this analysis to someone who is.

@peaceloveandstarrs has been kind enough to write another guest post about this song:

This is definitely improvised going by how rambling the intro is and how it takes them about a minute or so to finally settle into a key signature. As with the last one I listened to, I wish the balance had been better, but again, I get that the technology at the time made sound quality less than great. There’s a lot of really neat lead guitar stuff, like the picking around 1:23 and then the bit around 1:32. I’m not a guitarist, but I know that any technical playing on any instrument takes a lot of skill and practice. So whoever was on lead on this, my kudos! (Not that that means anything 62 years later, ha!)

The bass is definitely keeping a steady tempo, which is what’s expected of a bass player when there’s no percussionist. Stu isn’t the best bass player, but he’s not as bad as people make him out to be. I love all of the chromatic runs from whoever’s playing them, like the one at 3:37. They’re such a good transition between different melodic ideas or the start of a new chord progression. The random bits of dissonance, like the one at around 5:02, are jarring now that the key’s been settled. But hey, it keeps the listener on their toes and attentive.

I love the moments where the whole thing really comes together and the individual lines fit together perfectly, such as around 5:40. And just when that settles in, you get another cool, technical line at around 5:56. Whoever is playing this (Paul? I can’t tell individual playing styles apart yet) made it sound easy. As an instrumentalist myself, technical runs always give me the most difficulty, so I can say pretty confidently that it wasn’t that easy. At least not right off the bat.

There’s a neat little groove at around 7:33 in one of the guitar lines. It’s simple, but the way it’s played (first note accented, slurred into the second part of the line) makes it have a kind of jazzy feel. I listened to that one a couple of times just because I liked it. And we get to more technical bits in the guitar line around 8:24 or so. It’s a repetitive line, but it’s so clean-sounding. Again, not easy to do. I have a hard time articulating quickly and making it sound that clean! (Granted I play clarinet, so I’m not sure if I can really compare it to a guitar…)

It sounds like Stu is trying to bring the chart to an end around 9:20 and the rest of the group didn’t get the memo! That’s a classic ending bass line, descending the scale to the tonic tone (so in this case, he landed on an F since the piece is in F… music theory classes coming in handy finally!) The last 40 seconds or so sounds like they’re trying to figure out how to end the chart. I sort of wish they’d all ended with Stu’s little descending line, but hey, the way they end it works too. Overall, it’s a nice little improvisation with lots of signs of developing talent, especially in whoever played lead guitar.

#april 1960 #the beatles #improvisation #12 bar blues in f #guest post #peaceloveandstarrs #george harrison #stuart sutcliffe #john lennon #paul mccartney #forthlin road tapes #braun tape

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gunsli-01 · 1 year

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Alright, let's get this set up in a somewhat digestible format. While also testing the waters. For people looking for more Mikoto info in particular this has some stuff on him within it but mostly gives a clearer idea on my experience with Milgram so far. Along with me being slightly unhinged. Soooo...woohoo...

Here's the set up. The next post will be the beginning of an in depth analysis of the two Celtic spreads found in MeMe. We will not only be analyzing them but delving into visual spin Mikoto put on the classic tarot cards with some insights his changes to them give us on his character.

There are two sets of ten cards. The first post on this will go over the first five cards in the first spread the second will finish off the first and give an overall interpretation of the reading. Then the same will be done with spread two. After we finish that then I’ll be attempting to break down the series of murders shown throughout MeMe.

Lastly, and my favorite part. We’ll finally be going over Mikoto’s character as a whole. Along with me just generally getting to talk about him without putting him beneath a microscope. Which I haven't gotten to do in weeks and still can't cause I'm stuck in tarot hell.

For those who don't read all of this and skip straight to the tarot I at least want to highlight and reiterate one part from here:

The point of Milgram is testing limits at any point these characters can do something that will make even their most devoted fans turn on them and I think the fandom should be open to having their opinions change and develop over the course of this.

So, here's post 1. I will link the beginning of the tarot interpretation here when it's up.

So, when I started writing what has to be the longest character analysis essay, I've ever written... I remember in December when I was like yeah I can crank out a few pages on Mikoto it won't be that difficult I can get this done by new years. I've already gone through the tarot once too what's a second time typed up gonna do? Maybe even before Mu's song.

I was wrong. But back when I was young, hopeful, well rested, and happier. I wrote something of a Preface. Just to explain all of my biases up front and let people form an opinion on if they wanted to take anything I said on this seriously or not. What comes after this part is that Preface.

Okay, so this is going to probably seem insane, but I might as well get it out of the way just to break in the new year putting my best foot forward. Yes, this is my best foot forward. Now Mikoto has a lot of diehard fans and detractors for some reason…How can such a normal guy be so controversial? Really unlucky… Honestly. Because of his popularity I’m a bit nervous to put out anything on him even though he is my favorite. Believe it or not I can get shy when talking about things I genuinely like a lot because I don’t know how it’ll be perceived, and I can get very, very critical when I like something.

It is not a normal like situation. It doesn’t go I like you; you could do anything, and I wouldn’t care. It goes OH, YOU UNLUCKY BASTARD! YOU’VE CAUGHT MY ATTENTION I SHALL NOW EXPOSE YOU TO THE WORLD! IF ANYTHING, BAD HAPPENS TO YOU IT IS LIABLE TO BE BY MY HAND! I well wade through the façade to find the truth I’m seeking knowledge, I’m seeking your identity, I want to dive deeper.

Don’t misunderstand- It’s just natural to want to know everything about the person you like and get all torn up inside because you never can. That’s just love isn’t it~ Ahh it’s an incredibly damning feeling that love, the idea of soulmates all that trite nonsense. Because when people aggrandize others, they usually end up wanting to pull them down to their level. That sort of sadistic thing is just as much a part of love. The adult world is so cruel that way.

As such I’m going to do my very best to tear this man to shreds lovingly, okay?

So, let’s start with some context did I love Mikoto immediately? Was I like innocent he just has to be? He’s just so good looking he can’t fail, lol. Okay, to be honest when I got here, I thought Kazui was so good-looking cause of his broad shoulders that when watching Undercover and seeing the flash throughs with Star I went that’s Kazui I know those shoulders anywhere. Got damn he looks like he gives good hugs those shoulders…

Also, I like sorry cowards my apologies for the disappointment but when I saw Mikoto in MeMe I willfully ignored him. I had a visceral response to his song telling Star I hated it and never wanted to see him or hear it again. While also going he clearly killed three people… in an obviously premeditated way as well. So, yeah guilty. Maybe? I don’t know. I’m just not interested I’ll leave that to the people who are.

I came in around Amane’s first trial… Soooo I very much could’ve voted on Mikoto, but I just did not want to look at him at all. Actually, I still don’t know why that was, but he made me uncomfortable and annoyed. Despite his video involving multiple things I very much love baths, tarot cards, clouds, water, records, baseball bats… Hell even his song was a genre of music I’m partial too. Like jeez in retrospect I really don’t know.

I just did not want to even think about him, so I didn’t. That changed when YouTube recommended me an English cover of his first song, and I was like now hold on… Those Sisters You Know really did a good job on that lyrics wise. Like it just hit different okay. I was listening to that cover every day having first job flashbacks and wondering huh why did I hate this guy again this is a complete mood actually.

After that I fell into an over analyzing loop for several months. Before I had pulled a nothing to see here and once we do that my brain just deletes the information since it’s been deemed irrelevant. Incredibly convenient skill to have. Yet, as it piqued my interest music wise, I was like well hold on…I have to know everything about this specifically now. Something that none of the Milgram characters had managed to achieve at that point.

To an extent I was pretty much like there’s nothing to see here at all when I was dragged into Milgram by Star. She showed me Mahiru’s first trial song like I really just want you to see this one and my immediate response was, “Are you trying to say something about me?!” We’ve been partners for years and this is what you lob at me what are you getting at? To which she had to dryly explain no I just think she’s neat and you love mystery things and putting together stuff so I wanted your opinion on what you think is going on here.

Then I got a rundown of the situation and was like ah okay. Then went through one through six giving all my thoughts on what they did and how I would’ve voted if I was there as she explained the results. I was surprised to hear from Star that none of the things I was saying to her had come up in the fandom as far as she saw.

As Star showed me Milgram my experience was basically

Weakness: Guilty. Committed murder for attention. Next.

Later down the line I asked Star about the reasoning behind Haruka’s trial one Innocent Verdict. It was after we watched Bring It On and she told me about Futa’s verdict. I needed to understand why Haruka was voted Innocent/Forgiven but Futa was not. Weirdly long before Futa asked us that same question in Back Draft. Why did Haruka of all people get a pass when we see him kill directly? That was the first thing that piqued my interest.

However, I was pretty disappointed by the answer Star provided and maybe to some people this will seem like a reduction of the actual reason behind prevailing consensus. Yet, what I gathered from her explanation was that he was voted innocent due to Autism. Particularly, people assuming he had a learning disability the most speculated one being Autism. Now, my response to this information was to go, um…that’s ableist right? Like, just because it’s helpful to him in this circumstance does not mean ableism isn’t present.

That’s just infantilizing and belittling his intelligence. Having a learning disability doesn’t suddenly exempt a person from knowing murder is wrong. It’s the same as using a person’s age as an excuse. Made even funnier that Haruka is treated more like a child than the literal child is. So…it’s not like that interpretation is that far off or difficult to get to. Plus, do people even critically engage with who benefits from these sorts of excuses and when they’re extended?

Because they aren’t applied indiscriminately. A perfect example of this in Japanese media in particular comes from something else Star and I were watching when she recommended Milgram. Higurashi Sotsu and the character Satoko a lot of people in that fandom got angry and found the concept that Satoko would become a villain all because she had a difficult time studying insane. Like she should have just studied harder ignoring everything else that occurred in Gou and Sotsu up until that point.

Even some going as far as creating a completely different reason for her actions. Because having trouble focusing, studying, and being ostracized in a new environment after being taken away from the people and things that brought you comfort weren’t good enough reasons. Ryukushi-07 also has a tendency to write about neurodivergent coded characters like Maria in Umineko and Satoko herself can be considered coded that way through sotsu and gou. The excuse extended to Haruka in trial one was definitely not extended to her by the Higurashi fandom.

So, it’s not surprising that same courtesy was retracted in trial 2. Sorry, to rain on your parade but disabled people of color from any minority group are not extended those same benefits of the doubt and rarely have their impairments or age taken into consideration if they even reach a trial. So, this is when I went oh well people are gonna people glad to see some things still haven’t changed. This is what Milgram’s bias looks like. It’s almost a perfect reflection of the performatively politically correct space we live under today and highlights the pervasive biases that continue to disenfranchise many that go overlooked.

All we’re missing is overt ableism, racism, and sexism disguised as feminism and we’d have everything that’s wrong with performative morality. (Star just informed me one of these things is just Yuno.) So, my interest was piqued around here but mostly from a sociological standpoint.

Yet, I was mostly ticked off. Media is supposed to be a form of escapism for many people and I found a lot of the issues that people usually use media to escape from pulled to the forefront in Milgram through its voting system. I came in and was like this series probably isn’t saying a damn thing special. Reluctantly after telling Star I wouldn’t watch it multiple times because well I was a mad at her and she kept asking. I had every reason to hate this series given what was going on around our relationship at the time she presented it to me and didn’t really think taking something lightly could end up saying a great deal about society as whole.

Umblical: Guilty. It was clear to me from the very first video that she attempted to entrap someone in a relationship through the use of a pregnancy then committed murder when that failed. Possibly multiple times.

Later, Star told me people assumed she got an abortion. Because the woman that was clearly in a sector of sex work knew nothing about contraception. That and she may have had family issues. I said oh so they thought she was stupid. That’s insulting and then people continued to think she was stupid. So, some things never change but my opinion of her did. She’s the only person here with a consistent character and seems to be incredibly considerate but not hesitant to go after the things she wants by any means necessary. I find that endearing and respectable and really wish she’d get a 50/50 since regardless of what she did I respect her want for us not to give our opinion on it.

It’s only polite to shut up and say nothing when no one asked you to speak. Yuno not only never asked us to speak but openly asked us not to. Her character description even states she dislikes being psychoanalyzed. She sort of reminds me of Kotono Kashiwaba from Caligula Effect but I can’t really figure out why yet. I haven’t finished the game at this point and right now we’re only up to Ike-P but I just get that feeling.

Bring It On: Innocent due to lack of information. I haven’t seen a murder. I don’t know what happened here. Having a flop Twitter account and making callouts is not murder or a crime at all. So, innocent. Then Star tells me the actual outcome and the reasoning behind it and this is when I start to get a bit heated.

Basically, went what do you mean guilty on the grounds of his actions allegedly leading to someone taking their own life??? Because they were just involved in someone’s death. It doesn’t say they directly caused them to die which means indirect involvement is on the table. Ha, ha, oh my fucking god that’s rich considering the dude that clearly killed a dog and a child was given a pass. Did that with his whole chest but he’s good. Alright, alright… I literally went back and pointed out all the kills Haruka was directly responsible for in his first mv going but this was passable. At that point don’t even try to justify it just say you don’t like Futa that’s less insulting.

Like I discussed in the part on Weakness I found this way of thinking inherently unfair. The benefit of the doubt and consideration extended to Haruka was completely absent for Futa. A lot of people want to say this is because he didn’t appear sorry. But, what gives others the right to decide when someone is really sorry or not. Futa’s entire voice drama goes into how you can’t tell how someone is feeling or what they’re thinking based on how they behave outwardly alone and that’s all anyone did when it came to him.

Not many people extended that same courtesy or empathy. They didn’t attempt to look deeper because no one cared to and that’s sad. Start didn’t see anyone go hey that’s clearly a kid with anxiety who’s attempting to garner validation through social media possibly due to a lack of external validation in his actual life. Something tackled in the writer’s previous game Caligula Effect Overdose with the character Naruko Morita. Who does the same sort of things Futa does if not worse. Because she literally outs a trans person on social media, takes pictures of people without their knowledge, and looks up someone work application to then go oh they’re not as good looking in real life let’s tell their fans so they no longer like this musician.

Like these are things she does repeatedly throughout the game. She is a terrible person and in the game she’s your teammate. She has a social link and reasons for the way she behaves. She’s obnoxious, annoying, egotistic, inconsiderate, a snoop, has an aversion to criticism, low self-esteem, and is easily dissuaded from doing things she enjoys if it’s not immediately praised or faced with scrutiny.

She goes out to eat popular limited time items at shops just to post food reviews about it after one bite. She doesn’t even post her own opinion on it at times but instead goes by reviews others have left already while giving a little bit of a different perspective but not really. Then if you say no to her being on the team because she basically airs out your entire organization on social media for likes, so everyone now knows who you are, what you look like, your name and all of your teammates information you’re treated like the heartless asshole.

Hm, it’s like she doxed you and it has real life repercussions and makes your life harder. It continues to make the lives of everyone she does this to harder and in instances is retraumatizing for many of them. All I’m saying is if you play this game and end up liking her but still hate Futa then you don’t dislike doxing you just hate men. Point blank. At which point I hope you enjoy Ayana.

After Pain: Guilty, I didn’t and still do not believe she’s sorry. Plus, the person she killed was uninvolved. When Star told me she was voted Innocent. Well, I couldn’t really say I was surprised given certain universal truths but- When she explained it was because people were saying it’s because she’s clearly a lesbian and that person she stabbed told everyone she was which led to her bullying.

I kind of went well isn’t that sort of justifying someone getting murdered or in blunter terms just victim blaming. Even if the victim did do that which I’m doubtful of that does not justify murder. Like people really immediately went we trust Mu she’s a victim now what did this clearly evil girl do to deserve to get stabbed, huh?! I found that kind of odd, I wouldn’t want anyone thinking that about me or anyone I love if they were murdered. Plus, given the circumstances I grew up under it’s very common to see that sort of mindset pushed on specific types of victims of brutal crimes. Just saying; it’s really not interrogated often enough who the whole what did they do to deserve it mentality benefits and hurts.

Ultimately, I found the whole concept kind of cruel. However, I guess as we’ve learned Es is the sort of Guard that abhors a person doing something that may have inadvertently led to someone taking their own life more than very purposefully taking someone else’s life with your own two hands. Taking into consideration the response seen in the English speaking part of the fandom this mindset is showcased twice throughout the first trial with the only noticeable outlier being Kazui.

Throw Down: Guilty he asked to be voted that and I respected it. Also, he was organ harvesting from his patients. Like what? Innocent is this some reverse psychology nonsense well okay at least he already feels bad.

This is how to be in love with you: Innocent due to lack of information. I can’t punish someone for something I do not understand I genuinely don’t know what she did. I assume she poisoned someone since she works as a florist, cooks, and mentioned herbal remedies. However, I just knew too little at the time.

What do you mean they thought she was so clingy her partner committed suicide, so she was voted guilty? I’m sorry so what I’m understanding is stabbing a woman in cold blood is okay but indirectly causing someone to end their life through social error is a irredeemable sin? That last girl stabbed another one purposely and that first guy killed a dog and kid-

Half: Guilty but also- That dudes incredibly good looking and has nice broad shoulders that is certainly an impressive physical build look at him in that uniform- Hears the song oh my god he’s an emotionally unavailable and dishonest coward too just my type! Guilty I know in my heart what he did was fucked up but got damn I’m hoping it’s fucked up at this point- not me literally getting chills at the let’s make it victim and assailant line in Cat like boy howdy don’t say such things oh no. Is this how people feel when Yuno says Come Marco I’ll Polo?

It certainly doesn’t help that Kazui’s demeanor and communication habits remind me a lot of Star and I end up feeling a little bad for him but slightly want to watch him squirm as well. Truly, it’s the emotionally unavailable quiet ones you gotta be careful with. They have such intense emotions but they hold them back to the point they can’t express them and then the right person pushes and boom it’s like a pistol accidentally discharging. People who bottle up their emotions like that for as long as it seems he has well when they blow a gasket it’s like a volcano and I want to be in lava range.

Innocent I- well I’m fine with this you saw that up there you know why I'm fine with it we don't have to talk about it but like why??? Because they believe he’s gay and was in a very loveless and performative marriage while also assuming his actions just led to his partner committing suicide or an accidental death. Wait why is that okay here but with the other two it’s not… It’s cause he’s hot and seemingly pathetic ain’t it? Lol, that dude is not as weak as he presents but have fun with that when it comes up I suppose. Good liar my ass...

Magic: Guilty even asked Star to vote on it. So, I was made aware of how to vote at this time. This was not because I want her to be punished but I didn’t believe anything could be solved through agreeing with her and I honestly don’t think agreeing with her will solve anything now either, but it will maybe stop her from getting jumped. Maybe? Though I’m unsure about that because Kotoko has jumped people who were pardoned before sooo... That and Amane told us not to treat her like a child.

I believe it’s a bit unfair or shortsighted of her to ask us to respect her agency in her own life, that she chose to make these decisions, and yet at the same time ask to not be held accountable for them if we feel her behavior was wrong because she answers to a higher power. Her mindset on her killing and being considered a murderer highlight her immaturity to me. Those aren’t two separate things but childishly and stubbornly she attests that they are. Being an adult is recognizing that regardless of if you had a good reason, or a higher law you abide by other adults don’t need to care about those things when judging you they can just objectively judge the actions you took. It truly is that simple. To me it just seems like she didn’t really know what she was asking for when she said that. Like she equates being an adult with gaining respect but it's more than just that.

Amane’s situation really reminds me of that song by Maaya Sakamoto More than Words, particularly these lines, “Isn’t freedom painful? I’ve become an adult, haven’t I?” “Isn’t freedom painful? I’m now alone, aren’t I?” “Isn’t freedom painful? Endlessly so…” Because a lot about being an adult is being able to stand on your own by the decisions you choose. The respect you get from others is fickle at best and never really equates to understanding or empathy. In a way as we age, we become more and more emotionally isolated when it comes to social communication and consideration. Because the patience and consideration that is frequently extended to children is not given to adults since they’re meant to know better by then and not need that sort of care.

Adults have the freedom to make their own choices and have that agency recognized. However, many times that agency we yearned for so badly is weaponized against us in small and insidious ways. Causing adults to become more emotionally closed off, socially defensive, or calculating. An adult would never ask to have their choices looked at while taking into account that they chose to do those things they’d simply tell the person accusing them to figure out why they did it or take into consideration their circumstances. Not pull a don’t judge me and I won’t judge you. They would know that their main focus should be endearing themselves by any means necessary like Mu attempts to do or lean on their legal rights.

So, I really feel like Amane was her own worse advocate during trial one and it ended up biting her in the butt. Also, another song that I feel properly exemplifies that feeling of emotional isolation one faces with age but isn’t as somber I think is “Love I need” by The Living Tombstone.

MeMe: Abstained due to a vague sense of hatred. I literally told Star to never show this to me again and not to bring him up I don’t have an opinion, I don’t care, I’m glad that’s over was my immediate reaction to MeMe. [Star: She said that she didn’t like the song, him as a character, and it was obvious that he committed several murders. So, there was nothing left to look into.] Afterwards I promptly deleted the information from memory until finding that cover song.

Harrow: Guilty she literally did the same thing Futa did just in a more direct way. She also seemed to jump people who had already been put on trial and had a decision on their actions handed down. Even openly said apologizing meant nothing. I’d rather give a pass to the person who says just say sorry then the one who goes lol it doesn’t matter if you try to make amends now no second chances ever once a bad guy always a bad guy.

I put all this to show that even before I was actively posting Milgram stuff on here. I did have opinions on all this that have only developed over time. As much as I came out swinging in the oh I really like Mikoto camp. I really did not want to see this dudes face when I first saw him. Like I feel as though I’m being a bit of a broken record. I said the same with Haruka. Yet, with Mikoto there was a bit of hatred there. Like a knee-jerk reaction that I couldn’t even pinpoint and didn’t want to interact with. Something, I still don’t really have an explanation for.

Even still before this I was spending months talking to Star over the phone sifting through the music videos reading the conversations and literally burning out all my investigative skills on it. Something I believe she knew I’d do when she brought it to my attention and asked, “What do you think happened here?”

Now here I am trying to churn out an entire essay on the guy. Certain characters can grow on you. However, with Milgram there’s this feeling that such a fondness like that can be broken. The point is testing limits at any point these characters can do something that will make even their most devoted fans turn on them and I think the fandom should be open to have their opinions change and develop over the course of this.

I feel like being shut off, isolated or just stubborn about one’s own opinion is unfair to the social experiment aspect Milgram is trying to pursue. That’s just me personally. I really hope that by the end of this there is interesting data collected. We can vote any way we want at the end of the day. Not everyone has to take into consideration what the characters did or how bad it is objectively.

Yet, for people to trick themselves into believing the vote doesn’t matter, this is all in good fun, and no one will be held accountable for the outcome in any way is negligent and blatant denial. The verdicts have a direct impact on the sort of place Milgram is currently and could become. It's a direct reflection of the will of the fanbase. If we vote a certain way the creators take that into consideration. They seem to not just take the winning verdict into consideration but pay attention to responses from both sides overall. They’re paying attention. So, it’s incredibly short sighted to assume our collective judgement regardless of how you vote or if you chose not to doesn’t reflect on the entire fanbase in some way.

I’m not saying this to be a Debby Downer or go really interrogate why you’re voting this way. I’m saying all this to get one point across if you’re going to vote seeped in bias the least you can do is express what those biases are in your own unique way. That’s what will make this all the more fun for everyone. I don’t care if you choose to vote guilty, innocent, or abstain, but at least vocalize why that is. Especially for people choosing to abstain since that’s more difficult to gauge since it is just not an option and the closest thing to abstaining would be attempting to get a fifty/fifty.

I know not everyone is willing to be that out there with their feelings and that sort of thing isn’t fun for everyone. Though even just discussing it privately with friends, people you trust and feel comfortable around is enough. All I want personally is for people regardless of how or why they vote to look at these characters for what they are and give them the opportunity to surprise you outside of your personal opinions like with actual people. All these characters will probably disappoint someone at a point but I feel like if you keep a healthy sense of realism and treat them in an unidealized way that will help in not causing resentments towards the series or the people who work on it down the line.

Some of these resentments are already present in the fandom and being used to create a reflection of the writer that could be wholly inaccurate. Personally, I don’t find that sort of approach to be fun or fair. However, it very well could be to some. Yet, at times I find it incredibly disheartening to see. My hopes in writing all of this and thoroughly attempting to analyze my fluctuating feelings on Mikoto may tackle why that is in some way. Even if the problem isn’t firmly rooted within the interpretations around his character but extends to the entire cast.

Though it’s like Jackalope said he certainly did cause a bit of trouble.

I hope this has been a good prelude of what’s to come and helped whoever may have read this far better understand my personal perspective on Milgram. This post didn’t focus on Mikoto as heavily as I would have wished but served to properly build an understanding of what one may be getting into when it comes to my analysis of his character.

I hope by displaying my biases and feelings on all the characters that one can decide whether reading what comes after this is for them or not. Regardless of if you continue to read or go back to this post from the ones that precede it, I appreciate you reading my ramblings.

#milgram #kayano mikoto #yes it's in parts i'm sorry

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agwic · 2 years

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ok. it's time. time for me to post my opinions on the svtfoe finale. and svtfoe as a whole but that's kind of a given considering that it's the finale.

so, where to start? I think I'm gonna start by explaining what svtfoe is. it's an animated disney show which parodies both magical girl and disney princess tropes, as well as being a reverse isekai which is always nice. great premise, though its execution in season 1 is meh at best, but honestly that's just personal taste and season 1 does a great job introducing us to the three core characters so I see no reason to complain. really the only reason to point out that season 1 was kinda meh is to counter people implying that the show declined as it went on, when in fact it was always of ultimately very mixed quality, with most of the worst episodes being in the first half of the show, such as banagic incident, lobster claws, and pizza thing.

anyways, for most of season 1, svtfoe was a thoroughly unremarkable kids show, so who cares. however, throughout seasons 1 and 2, a nice little plot about a genuinely threatening gooey man is the real highlight of the show, rather than the supposed premise of the show, which was a parody isekai. this is irrelevant to my analysis of the finale, but I felt it necessary to point out that centaurworld appears to have stolen svtfoe season 1 and 2's premise. anyways, halfway through season 2, the part of the show I like starts, where the show starts parodizing the fantasy genre in its plot, not just in the mediocre one-off episodes which are more of a magical girl parody than a general parody of the fantasy genre.

this shift completes with the show shifting from reverse isekai to regular isekai, with the show's secondary protagonist, "normal" earth "boy", marco diaz, going to the magical kingdom the show's main protagonist, star comes from. many people mark this as when the show starts getting worse, but like, the show was really not good at doing the reverse isekai stuff, and all of its best episodes function as just a normal isekai, so I feel like this was inevitable. however, another reason people say this is when the show gets worse is that it happens a few episodes after genuinely threatening goo man is defeated, and everyone agrees genuinely threatening goo man is the best villain. I agree that he's the most threatening and well-written, but ultimately all he represents is pure evil, which isn't all that exciting from a thematic perspective, so I actually disagree on this point. the next villain after him is the rightful heir of the monarchy which star is the false heir to, as it is revealed in season 3 that a random peasant was actually placed on the throne a few hundred years ago because some deific entities didn't like the rightful heir being half-monster. I think that this is a very interesting villain thematically, and they manage it well, by portraying her as being more a victim of the MHC(aforementioned deific entities) than as a villain in her own right, and she is defeated by making her into a baby again instead of killing her because she was really only a villain because of her fucked up upbringing. solidly good themes going on here. questioning the validity of the monarchy, showing how many problems bigotry causes, showing the MHC to be just as incompetent as the rest of us, it's good.

the last villain is an actual fascist propped up by the MHC. like, I am not exaggerating, her stated goal in the story is genocide. also she was introduced as a gag character in season 1 where she already showed off her insane authoritarian tendencies so overall I think she was set up very well. I will also note that in this final season, with a a bunch of fascists as the main antagonists, the show had a very rushed production schedule. you may be getting SU flashbacks. anyways, this time they solve the fascism by killing the MHC who are responsible for it, and abolishing the monarchy which allowed it to fester, which sounds to me like exactly what fans would want, considering how they reacted to the SU finale. and, to be fair, I liked both this and the SU finale, because SU is a show about redemption so of course the fascists would get redeemed and also the fascists were just a metaphor for other less reprehensible stuff but this is not a post about the SU finale because the SU finale was actually mediocre and I don't care if people hate it. anyways, the response to the svtfoe finale was actually worse than the SU finale. but to explain why, I need to explain several things which were going on in the background of the show, for context.

so, the elephant in the room is the thing svtfoe was most infamous for prior to the finale. the love polyhedron. some people call it marco's harem, but it technically had two focal points in both star and marco, and polyhedron is a funny word, so I call it the love polyhedron. ever since season 1, it was blatantly obvious that the female lead, star, and the "male" lead, marco, would get together by the end of the show, and acting like this was every possible to not happen is wishful thinking, mainly because disney wouldn't allow it. also, unlike most "take the male lead and female lead and push them together" ships, starco appears to have had some actual chemistry(I can't tell, my criterion for shipping things is if it would spite people I dislike), to the point where it was actually one of the more popular ships for the show. however, because this trope is stupid, they obviously can't just have them mutually fall in love early on and then start dating in season 1 and not have any issues for the rest of the show. no, we need rivals! first rival: tom, star's ex, who is flirting with marco 90% of the time he's on screen and is pretty much the third main character to the show and a romantic rival and potential love interest to both of them. I think this is funny. second rival: jackie, marco's childhood crush who he starts dating, but it doesn't work out and also she is dating a girl in the last season so there are implications there. honestly, I think it was well done, but I do think jackie probably deserved more screen time since she's the most emotionally intelligent character in the show. other rivals: heckapoo, who really isn't treated as a rival and actually belongs in like two other sections of this post so I'll discuss her later. janna, who is also not treated like a rival but she does pretend to have a crush on marco(it actually is canon that her crush on marco is fake) and also flirts with star sometimes so I'm counting her here, and she's not actually that important other than that everyone loves her and is correct to do so. kelly, who marco briefly dates, and also she has an ex of her own and honestly there's not much to say about her other than what the fuck were they thinking when they wrote goblin dogs. I think that's everyone. anyways, the point is, this was stupid.

next elephant in the room is the fact that marco is written with a lot of subtext implying he's trans(which was intentional, one of the storyboards features him wearing a trans flag dress which uh couldn't actually be more intentional). like, he regularly dresses up as a girl, and likes doing so, which means nothing. however, when dressed as a girl, he uses she/her pronouns most of the time, and also refers to himself as a girl, and also, once again, likes doing this. personally I headcanon him has genderfluid, because of the neverzone, a dimension where he is in his 30s and looks like an over-the-top action movie protagonist and is dating hekapoo. like, you could argue that was overcompensating, but he seems genuinely distraught when he loses his abs and genuinely enjoys it whenever he goes to the neverzone so I think he also likes the idea of being a manly man so genderfluid it is. and like, I'm pretty sure they could not have included more subtext implying that he's trans without disney striking it down. like disney would not allow the male lead of one of their shows have his gender transed. so, I count this as a win.

next up, back to the love polyhedron, focusing on the non-stupid parts of it: star, marco, and tom. well also jackie wasn't stupid, but not relevant to this subject. first, let's talk about marco and tom. they're constantly flirting, and their relationship is consistently framed as romantic. I could provide evidence for this, but I don't need to, because if you've watched the show, you know this to be the case. next, let's talk about star and tom. tom is introduced as star's ex, and kind of a jerk. however, for stupid reasons, they start dating again in early season 3. he goes through a character arc, and stops being a jerk, and ultimately his relationship with star is perfectly fine, with him just being a bit clingy at times. when they break up, it's on perfectly amiable terms, and the reason is basically because tom knows that starco is inevitable and star obviously can't have two boyfriends. now I shall present the following screenshot from the show, which takes place while star and tom are dating:

next up, we need to talk about starco. like, there is more to their relationship than "she's a girl, disney is somehow under the impression that he's a boy, so they kinda have to get together". to start off with, the two have really good chemistry in season 1, and do start to develop feelings for each other, and honestly it works perfectly fine. then tom shows up, and tries to use some ancient magic thing to make him and star fated to fall in love, but marco ends up making the magic target him and star instead. this, if never addressed again, would make this ship the stupidest thing imaginable. however, it is addressed again. after three seasons of love polyhedron shenanigans, they finally realize that this whole stupid disaster of a situation is because they're both in love, and in fact that all their previous relationships may have in fact been ruined by that stupid ancient magic making them fated to fall in love. so, naturally, the find a way to undo the magic, and it works. tada! no longer fated to fall in love in-universe. this is actually very good thematically, as it makes clear that being "fated to fall in love", if it were real, would be a bad thing and a very stupid reason to start dating. of course, they still both had mutual feelings for each other, and at this point have already dated and broken up with all other potential partners(well tom's still there but he's chill and breaks up so that star can have her disney-enforced maximum of one boyfriend), so in the finale, star and marco start dating, and it's chill, and everyone liked it.

just kidding, this is probably the most objectional part of the finale! like, people have worse complaints, but this is the worst complaint people have about the finale which actually makes sense, which is why I devoted so much time to it, and also am addressing it first. like yeah, in a perfect world, tom, marco, and star would all be dating, and marco would be even more canonically trans than he already is, but we don't live in a perfect world so unfortunately we're just left with a giant pile of subtext, which we're gonna have to settle with. though honestly, I think that if svtfoe had aired a few years later, stomco would be treated as canon, similar to how sashannarcy is in the amphibia fandom. but alas, the svtfoe finale killed the fandom a couple years too early for polyamorous ships to become mainstream. so, anyways, the point is, sure it was annoying to have canon starco in the finale, but starco was fine, and tom is still there so he can just pop in as soon as canon ends and solve the issue. so, overall, biggest issue with the finale, but not that big of an issue. now let's get into with the issues with the finale which caused the fandom to die, and are all incredibly stupid.

so, I know that implied I wouldn't get into another tangent, but I would like to establish something important before I get into the next part: star's spells don't count as people. because if they did, star would have major moral issues long before the finale. like, at absolute best, star would be doing the moral equivalent of harry potter's house elves, if her spells are people, and I think most people here can agree that is not a morally enviable position. there are two ways to think of the spell episodes then, that are consistent with this premise. the first is that they are non-canon, which is fine, other episodes are also probably non-canon. the second explanation is that the spells are just extensions of star, which also works, considering that she created them, and they all kind of act like her. both of these make significantly more sense than the spells being people who deserve to be treated fairly by star, since she does not ever treat them fairly, and is never implied to have to treat them fairly.

now it's time to get back to the finale, and explain what happened in it, specifically. star destroyed "the magic". this very obviously is not all magic in the multiverse, as pony head is still floating, tom is still a demon, dragoncycles still exist, etc. this refers specifically to the magic of glossaryck, and his creations, the MHC, and the royal magic wand. also, a few horses that were lying around in the realm of magic. anyways, in this show, magic is very clearly a metaphor for authoritarianism. the royal magic wand is the sign of the monarchy, and the MHC prop up a fascist for basically no reason. glossaryck is harder to fit into this metaphor, but he does cooperate with toffee so I don't think it's reasonable to call him morally righteous. so, when star destroys the magic, she kills like half a dozen people, most of whom were actively supporting a genocide, and a few horses. and yet, most fans of svtfoe call this a magic genocide, and cite it as the main reason the finale is awful. they argue that all magical creatures are dead, which is provably false, pony head is alive and well. they argue that star killed the spells, but star was already using the spells as living weapons so if you care about the rights of spells, there were issues before this. the horses dying is sad, but the horses were already dying because the evil horse was killing them, and also I think that we can all agree that killing a few horses to stop a literal genocide is acceptable. and sure, people argue that star could have defeated mina(the fascist propped up the MHC) and her solarian warriors without destroying the magic, but the show does all but say "no, the only way to stop her is to destroy the magic". like, literally the entire supporting cast of the show get an uncurable death curse in an attempt to defeat just one solarian warrior, and mina has hundreds of them. and even if you do think that it would be worth waging a hopeless war to stop them, it wouldn't even stop the genocide, becuase the show went and said "hey, the solarian warriors have all the monsters right here. they are currently pushing them off a cliff. if you do not stop them in the next 10 minutes they are going to commit genocide" which was kind of blunt but apparently necessary since some people still don't get that destroying the magic was clearly set up as the only solution to this.

furthermore, destroying the magic was a thematically appropriate way to resolve an antagonist who represented fascism. like, the alternative would probably have been dealing with all the solarians somehow, and sticking marco and star as king and queen since moon obviously fucked up, or alternatively eclipsa and globgor since they're the rightful rulers and also represent unity between monsters and mewmans, the former of which is obviously stupid, and the latter of which is literally what caused this mess and also it would imply the monarchy is legitimate, which is literally the same argument the solarian warriors were making, and one which has been thoroughly disproven by the show. like, I feel like we can all agree that the solution to fascism is not removing the "bad guys" in charge of the authoritarian system and replacing them with "good guys"(also something refuted by svtfoe with moon, the supposed "good guy" also helping prop up the fascist), it's to dismantle the authoritarian system entirely. and magic is a metaphor for that system in svtfoe. so yeah, svtfoe did good on that front. and some people do argue that moon didn't face enough consequences for her actions, but firstly, she did in fact get deposed from the throne and lost what little respect her daughter had for her, which is solidly something, and secondly, a kids tv show can't have the main character kill her own mother. honestly killing the rest of the MHC, many of whom were likable characters, was already kinda pushing it. oh, and thirdly, retributive justice is bad actually. the MHC had to die because they were actively causing genocide. the genocide attempt has been thwarted now, so no need to kill anyone else. not to mention that moon wasn't really on board with genocide, she just thought the people calling for genocide wouldn't really do genocide, which sounds stupid until you look into literally any real-world politics. many people argue that the show should have actually shown the consequences of all this instead of just showing the fascists running off and then ending the show, but like, that wouldn't be interesting, even if done correctly, and significantly more likely than doing it correctly would be them propping up a consitutional monarchy with star/marco or eclipsa/globgor as the rulers and that would be really stupid.

now, there's one last thing which the svtfoe finale does that people have problems with. you see, svtfoe takes place in a multiverse. and the only way of travelling between dimensions is through dimensional scissors, which work via hekapoo, a member of MHC, and thus would stop working with the destruction of magic. this is an issue for obvious reasons. sure, they could have just said "haha fuck you none of the characters can ever see each other again" like most isekais do when they end, but that sucks, even when thematically appropriate, and this is not a case where that is thematically appropriate. so, there are several solutions to this. one is to just have the scissors keep working. this would have been stupid, as it contradicts pre-established lore, but ultimately would have been fine. another is to have hekapoo live, since she was solidly the most sympathetic member of the MHC, and neverzone-marco's girlfriend. however, that would both contradict the pre-established lore, and also soften the blow of everything, since even if hekapoo may have been the nicest of the MHC, and wasn't fully on board with plan "prop up a fascist for no reason", she also didn't really try to stop that plan, and also she was fully on board with dying, since she was there when star came up with the plan to destroy the magic. however, they instead did a solution I think is actually good. they made it so when magic was destroyed, all the dimensions got cleaved together, merging into one super-dimension. I know WoG says it was just earth and mewni, but the dragoncycles actively disprove this. WoG also says it was the power of love that did this, and it's implied that it was, and honestly that's a fine solution even if the power of love hasn't existed in this magic system thus far since 1. starco's love for each other was pretty well established and 2. there were presumably other people in love who would have been separated across dimensions. like, it's a perfectly workable solution when the magic system dug the show into a corner regarding this. people often are like "oh no but merging all the dimensions would cause so much chaos and so many people would die" but like, once again, there was not a better solution here. and not that many people would die, pretty much all dimensions we've been shown except earth are very used to having contact to other dimensions, and could handle it. as for earth, well, I'm sure they can adapt to the new circumstances. like, yeah, I wish they could have had a nice little epilogue showing society adapting to the new circumstances, but the production of the last season was very rushed, so I'm fine with them leaving that up to audience interpretation, especially since, once again, they would have done that badly considering that disney has opinions on the monarchy. and the only reason leaving what they didn't have time to put in the show to the audience's interpretation didn't work out is because the audience went ahead and assumed the worst at every possible junction.

now, while I am done defending the finale itself, I feel like it would be remiss for me not to use this as an opportunity to express my theory as to how the cosmology of the svtfoe universe works. so, let's circle back to how the power of love was a stupid explanation for the dimensions getting cleaved together. because you see, "cleave" is a funny word. you can cleave something together, but you can also cleave something apart. this is something pointed out by glossaryck, the most powerful character in svtfoe, a while before the events of the finale, which is, by the way, titled "Cleaved". now, glossaryck is implied to have created magic, and canonically stated to have created hekapoo, who allows for travel between dimensions. this means that prior to glossaryck, there was no travel between dimensions. however, as previously mentioned, most dimensions not only are used to multiversal travel, but rely on it. like, quest buy is an entire dimension which is just a store, that obviously can't work unless there's people coming from outside the store to buy stuff. same basic idea for the bounce lounge, and other party dimensions. now, one explanation is obviously that these dimensions were empty, or otherwise had something else in them, until they were made into what they now are after the advent of dimensional scissors, but my theory feels more elegant than that. before I reveal my theory, I would like to give one more piece of evidence. the realm of magic, which was created by glossaryck, seems to have a portal to every dimension. my theory is that when glossaryck created magic, there was only one dimension, which he cleaved apart, creating the realm of magic in the gaps between the dimensions. and thus, of course all the dimensions would be cleaved back together when magic is destroyed.

oh one last thing, shout out to @xidnaf's anarchist reading of the finale, which is what got me to consider that maybe the reddit hivemind was wrong about the finale being bad, and also where I borrowed a lot of my stuff about how destroying magic is cool and good thematically from, and also this one random youtube video which I found on accident which also makes some bad points but it is where I got a lot of stuff on how the show presents destroying magic as being the only solution from.

ok i think that's everything

#svtfoe #now that my opinions are out in the world i can finally be freeeeeee #i should post this on the svtfoe reddit and see how they take it #i was afraid that this post would not be long enough to convey how much my opinions on svtfoe consume me but it was in fact long enough

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