suzaki ryo & amagai kohei ā how do you separate yourself from love that hurts when it's all you know? how long do you press yourself into the spaces between someone's ribs before your heart beats in tandem with the breaths they take? can the tar that makes their soul sticky and dark feel like a warm embrace if you tell yourself you love the burn in your lungs when you start to get dragged under the waves? when adrenaline melts into panic amidst the thrill ride do you really think you'll notice before the inevitable crash?
tsukasa and fujio balance each other out remarkably well but one way they do particularly is with fujioās unwavering belief in the ability of people to redeem themselves versus tsukasaās skepticism of others and wanting to ensure theyāre good before letting fujio throw himself at them. ie in the worst x where he meets up with mercy on his own to see if rao was someone he thought was worth fujioās time. tldr i think tsukasa is the yin to fujioās yang for many reasons this being one of them
its a little sad, though, the irony of it allāamagai was the one who protected suzaki at first, taking a bat to his bullies and coming back to suzaki when he was crumpled and alone at the docks, making promises to each other to see the sky together. years later, and that previous care has vanished. now itās suzaki returning a childhood favour over and over again while heās left longing for reciprocity. if i pay that mercy back, iāll get it again. and iāll spend another hundred years paying back that kindness, too. all the while amagaiās forgotten the shape of his hands in suzakiās and the way the sun kissed their skin while youthful naivety licked at their heels. just sad. suzakiās left chasing a fever dream with flushed skin and the impression that love is something he has to survive. something has to give eventually.
on my rewatch of high & low the worst x i can solidly conclude that i think suzaki and amagai make each other worse instead of it just being a one-sided thing on amagaiās part.Ā
because on the surface level you have suzaki and his devotion to amagai clearly driving the plot, without suzaki doing most of what he did to help amagai he probably wouldnāt have gotten very far. but i also think that suzaki aids in amagai actively dodging consequences for his own actions.Ā
like at the end of the film, where [spoilers] amagai ended up alone with the rest of his alliance fleeing and no one there willing to help save for suzaki. which, yes, very cool of a friend / mildly homoerotic coded character to do for his friend / childhood crush, but it also highlights my point.Ā
suzaki made this promise to amagai that he would become strong enough to protect him one day, and now he is strong and protects him but also enables amagai in the god complex heās built up by frequently tricking him into believing heās invincible at this point.Ā
from what i was getting, i donāt think amagai has had to lift a finger to fight in his life. mostly due to all the scenes wherein he hangs back unless he knows his opponent is considerably weaker or is armed with a weapon. tsukasa being the leading example, but even then tsukasa was holding his own pretty well and if the roles were reversed i doubt thereād be much of a fight at all.Ā
what iām saying, basically, is that suzaki kind of majorly lets amagai get away with this perception heās built of himself by continuously building up the idea that heās invincible through his mindless devotion, unconsciously or not.Ā
because, iām not like mad at suzaki i know heās just like that because heās gay and sad but i need to point out this is a co-dependent relationship and amagai is much more reliant on suzaki when it comes to building his whole worldview than he realizes
After seeing @akq96618 post their first art with all three of these guys, I loved how they made their jacket colors really pop, and it made me realize some connections between the characters and their most associated colors (an aspect of character design that Iām a big sucker for)!