#and this person genuinely believes this. like this person is fully convinced of this theory. i'm losing my mind

[feluka]

fell down the weirdest rabbit hole the other day

#looked up the name of a comic book artist on tumblr search #who apparently shares a name with a model that a certain member of 1D (the band) dated #(being vague so it doesnt show up in the tags) #and naturally a lot of posts were about their relationship. nothing unexpected. kept scrolling past to find what i was looking for #but one post caught my eye for having some words like 'publicity stunt' and 'she's his beard' #i was like. what is the drama going on here. anyway i foolishly clicked on the blog because curiosity clicked the mina #and this girl HAS A BLOG DEDICATED TO DOCUMENTING EVERY SINGLE RELATIONSHIP THIS GUY HAS EVER BEEN IN #which is like. fans are weird and invasive. ok #BUT #ALL THAT DOCUMENTATION IS FOR THE PURPOSE OF 'PROVING' THE FACT THAT THIS BAND MEMBER IS IN FACT GAY AND DATING A FELLOW BAND MEMBER #AND HOW ALL THESE RELATIONSHIPS WITH WOMEN ARE COVER UPS #and im like this has to be satire this has to be satire #but nooo it's hundreds upon hundreds of posts with INSANE amount of detail like 'he said in this post that he was going on vacation with her #'but she posted an instagram post with the location tagged as another city entirely!' #'meanwhile other bandmember has family in this location so they could possibly have been staying there at the time!' #'conclusion: he said he was going on a vacation with his gf but in fact he was with band member!!!!!!!!!!!' #and it's like. insanely long essays with tons of screenshots and tweets and photos as receipts #i've seen court proceedings less thorough #and this person genuinely believes this. like this person is fully convinced of this theory. i'm losing my mind #and theyve dedicated an unbelievable amount of their time to this. WHAT do they think theyre accomplishing here. i'm going crazy #curiosity killed the mia* not clicked. i should proof read my tags before i've writte too much of them to go back dsjkfsfh

[eroguron0nsense]

Late Night Luffy's Dream Theory

So I've heard a fair amount of speculation about what Luffy's dream is after he becomes Pirate King, and by extension, what Roger's dream was (recall Yamato's flashback confirming that Luffy's dream–which Ace shared with him in their long tipsy conversation/totally not a night of passion–is "the same thing the Pirate King" said.) Fan speculation about Luffy's real dream ranges from things like "host the biggest party in the world", to "go to the moon", "make a country of pirates" etc but I've always found something fundamentally unsatisfactory about these, and I'll throw my hat in the ring to narrow down the possibilities.

To recap, the information we have about Luffy's dream is as follows: -Both times the dream is alluded to, it's at the end of what I and probably a bunch of other people personally conceive of as major sagas pre and post TS that both culminate in a major battle featuring EVERYONE WE'VE SEEN AND MORE –It's something that Roger, battle-hardened and well into his 40s or 50s–shared with Oden, that was documented in Oden's journal and partially inspired Yamato's unshakeable faith in Luffy –The Straw Hats, Ace, and Sabo are all shocked to hear it and ask if he's fully serious, but several of them support it immediately and the others remain protective over it and swear they'll see Luffy's ambition through. Jinbe, Nami, and Usopp are in disbelief, Chopper and Franky are excited, Robin is stunned, but looks hopeful or contemplative rather than derisive or amused, etc. –Ace and Sabo laugh as children, but swear to themselves that they'll protect Luffy's dream and won't let anyone mock it. As he's dying, Ace tells Luffy that he truly, truly believes Luffy will pull it off, and he's only sorry he couldn't see him make that dream a reality. –Shanks found it really funny, but is repeatedly shown stating he thinks that this ridiculous fucking child he met is going to be the future of the next pirate era, implying that he has some degree of faith in this child he (likely) recognizes as the inheritor of Roger's will Luffy's dream is repeatedly referred to as "crazy", or in some cases, "a child's fantasy", but also implied to be something really pure, ambitious, and highly unlikely but theoretically possible.

When I come up with fan theories, I tend to approach them less from a "textual evidence" standpoint than a "what would pack the biggest emotional punch and tie into the message/arc/etc that we've been shown thus far" one, and that tends to inform which popular ones I buy into (e.g. I am about 50-60% convinced that Law death will be a thing because, Chekhov's gun aside, Law's been in fucking crisis and unsure of what he'll do as his own man free of Cora's legacy and tries to emulate him in Wano. And while I think there's still a good chance he'll survive to the end for other reasons, there's also potential for a LOT of bittersweet beauty in him repeating what happened to him in childhood by quite literally passing on his heart and life to someone else). Considering what would be emotionally resonant and feel anywhere near as earned as what it's been built up to over two whole fucking sagas, Luffy's dream has to be something absurdly ambitious and thematically resonant. I do not think, if Luffy's dream were something like "I want to go to the moon", that Yamato would hold faith in him through impossibly oppressive circumstances, or that the audience would care like, at all. So if the dream is tied to something at the core of Luffy's character and the underlying themes of the entire series, what does Luffy represent, and what's the point of One Piece? Luffy is, at this point in the story and honestly long before, the embodiment of this sort of radical, almost anarchic humanism pervading the entire series that seeks to bring genuine freedom, joy, and peace to people everywhere he goes. Even before any divine or joy boy associations, he's a bringer of dawn, a warrior of liberation, and a worker of miracles because he sees injustice happening around him and instantly rejects it. He tears down oppressors everywhere he goes, and he's eventually going to bring that reckoning to the World Government and Blackbeard and every other might-makes-right, brutal, thoughtless hierarchical oppressor stopping their helpless victims from living free, full, happy lives. And critically, he's the inheritor of a crazy, radical dream that'll shake the world because god knows One Piece loves to talk about inherited will/dreams/legacy.

One Piece's broadly radical leftist humanism isn't based in naïveté either; it's very clear that this liberation is preceded by endless failures. Joyboy fails to stop any of what happens and writes letters of apology, Roger dies before he can realize the dream, and all the while countless atrocities are going on with at least 3 Islands we know of and two whole races having their genocides all but done to completion. Kuma suffers immensely waiting for the Dawn, and effectively loses his life and humanity before it can come, still holding on to his belief in Nika. But none of these things will stop the coming of liberation. Every genocide and attempt to purge the politically inconvenient–Ohara, Flevance, the Lunarians, the persecution of the Buccaneers–leaves survivors or inheritors, with Law, Kuma, and Robin in particular playing central roles in saving or aiding Luffy, the bringer of Dawn. The purge of Ohara fails to destroy the records permanently. The fucking biblical infanticides at Baterilla and the end of Roger's bloodline doesn't stop Luffy from inheriting Roger's will and his brother's legacy. Luffy isn't so much a predestined messiah as he is the inheritor of a legacy of resistance and hope that cannot be killed because as long as someone lives, they will dream of the brand of hope and justice that he embodies. No matter how hard you try, or how violently you suppress people, how many legacies or bloodlines or rebels you put to death, people will survive and carry on those legacies or pick up where your victims left off because you can't kill ideas, you can't kill truth, you can't kill dreams, and you can't kill the basic human desire for joy and freedom. I think the "Child's Fantasy" thing we see associated with Luffy's dream is key to this whole mystery. Wano's the arc in which we get the closest, most explicit declarations of Luffy's ideals, in which his core motivation for defeating Kaido–besides helping Momo and his friends seek justice and overthrow an oppressor–is to make sure everyone in the country can eat their fill. It's the kind of thing you wish for as a child–an end to world hunger, world peace, homes for the homeless, an end to prejudice–before a thousand and one adults feed you the lie that it's impossible to redistribute resources, that being crushed by hierarchical oppressive power is natural, or that some people are undeserving of life or basic rights and therefore deserve to be harmed by the powers that be. Before your parents and teachers and other people lecture you on the necessity of Authority and Capitalism and Hegemony or what have you and convince you that a certain number of people simply have to suffer and die to preserve the Proper and Legitimate Hierarchy, that the powerful deserve to be where they are and that victims of these systems deserve it. It'll be something very much like his hopes for Wano in the face of the oppression of Kaidou and Orochi, or the World Government creeping up on them afterward with Ryokugyu loudly announcing that the oppression of the have-nots is the rightful and good state of the world. It'll be a simple, basic hope for good things for him and his friends and all the great people they love, something perfectly possible and right and just and joyful that people have been raised to think of as an impossibility. A place where people can eat their fill, where there's water in parched lands, where people aren't being strangled by heavenly tributes. A world where they can be free. A reality where everyone can be happy, where dreams come true.

#one piece #monkey d luffy #one piece theory #portgas d ace #marineford #nico robin #trafalgar law #final saga #bartholomew kuma #straw hat pirates #straw hat crew #gol d roger #one piece spoilers

[inkskinned]

i sat next to him, dipping chips into the bowl of salsa, thinking about how i couldn't have enjoyed this 5 years ago. something strange: recently it's been about chaos theory for me.

a butterfly makes a tornado. the infinitely small becomes the chaotic whole. the universe bends towards entropy, and yet, chaos theory seems to argue - small motions make big changes.

chip goes into salsa. i eat a little bit. later, the chip is energy. later, the energy is movement. later, the movement is a memory. later, the memory shapes who i am.

i used to pretend i had already eaten. i used to be 30 minutes late so i could say eat without me. i used to say i didn't like chips or salsa. i'd chug my water and pray nobody noticed i was still nibbling the same chip i'd first picked up. i missed a lot of hangouts because i didn't want to grab lunch. i would eat by myself, curled up in the parking lot of a supermarket. hurried, anxious, embarrassed to be overcome.

5 years ago, i started saying yes to one more chip. 4 years ago, i could munch my way casually through a couple dozen. these days i am the one saying - can we have more chips when you get a second?

it didn't start with big changes. i thought it would have to - something was massively wrong with me, so i assumed recovery would take a natural disaster. the only way to fight fire was with an explosion. i would buy organizational journals, angrily clean my house for 10 hours straight, promise myself never again and know - i'd always slip backwards. i'm always going to be this way.

it wasn't big, though. 5 years ago i made a promise to stop it with the i'm going to kill myself jokes. for the sake of additional challenge, i also stopped saying i'm stupid. just two things.

i'm genuinely funnier these days. people laugh more with me. i find more things funny. when i mess up, it doesn't crush me. suicide no longer sits at the front of my brain. it is no longer the first option i picture. i forgive myself so easily. i no longer believe every mistake is emblematic of my personality. i have actually started to believe i am clever and smart - although i still want to add the prefix barely.

i still apologize too much. i still beat myself up. i still agonize over certain choices. i know i am not perfect. recovery is not linear.

but the joy in me is bigger. every time i choose to believe in it, every time i choose to make a little change towards hope - that joy in me grows.

when entropy rises up in my heart and i backslide and everything goes dark: the joy doesn't fully evaporate anymore. i slide just a little less. i bounce back just a little more. i go further this time. learn about myself. crawl up that slope with new skills in tow. i know what i'm doing these days; am getting good at finding handholds. i have started to learn how to catch myself while falling - instead of letting myself go.

a little change. ten years ago i googled depression self-help tips. little butterfly keystrokes. in the moment, nothing really happened.

ten years in the future: my life is full of love and healthy coping mechanisms. i have minimized a great deal of my symptoms. i spend a lot of my time laughing and creating and going out with friends. every time i hit a wall, i convince myself to get up, keep going, if it's hard just be harder, choose hope, choose just a little bit further -

i want to tell that version of myself, stranded in the desert: if you keep walking, all that sand will one day be water.

[venus-is-thinking]

A Narrative Defense of Eden Culprit Theory

Hello everyone! 

As I’m sure many of you know, I, among others (notably @accirax, @1moreff-creator and @thebadjoe) believe Eden to be the culprit of the Chapter 2 murder case. I’ve seen a fair number of people say they aren’t convinced for one reason or another. While I fully understand people who don’t buy all the evidence/the insane contraptions we’ve come up with or people who are in denial, I was a little surprised at how many people I saw say that it would be bad writing for Eden to be the killer here. 

While others are fully entitled to their opinions on who the killer is, I want to address this claim. Personally, whenever I’m reading a fangan, I always believe that I shouldn’t consider any killer to be “bad writing” until I see how it’s actually written. After all, there can always be a key twist you’re not expecting to make it actually make sense. Plus, in Eden’s case, I actually fully believe that all the building blocks of a narratively successful killer are already put into place. So, in this post, I’m going to attempt to back up my claim that Eden being the second killer actually makes narrative sense, and it isn’t bad writing either.

Because fangan writing is subjective and what any given author believes is the right move varies, I’ll be doing my best to support my claims with similar content from the canon game trilogy (given that that’s a pretty standard baseline) and from what we’ve already seen of DRDT thus far. That should (hopefully) give us some fair perspective into the sorts of narrative decisions the creator would want to make.

I’ll be going through various points at which I think something could or could not be bad writing, so hopefully that’ll provide some much needed structure to this theory.

Topic 1: Motive

I want to say this early: I do not think Eden is secretly evil. I think that in the context of killing games, “good” people can end up being killers, and I think that’s where Eden’s headed. I understand why, if some people have only seen Eden killer theories in the context of her being evil, they don’t like it. I don't like it either. I think it completely misinterprets her character.

For now, though, I want to talk about what motive she does have. There’s the fact that Arturo is threatening her, obviously. If she feels there’s a genuine threat to her safety, it would be decently reasonable to decide that, if her priority is her life, she’d rather try to get away with a murder than let herself be taken out by Arturo. 

There’s another potential motive out there for Eden that might be enough to push her over the edge. That being, we know she cares a lot about her friends and relationships outside of the killing game too. 

A lot of people, I think, have seen the theory floating around that goes “Eden is trying to leave to get back to the girl she kissed.” I’ve also seen it mentioned that this could be problematic, given that it could be saying “being gay = becoming a killer,” but I think there are several reasons why that doesn’t hold up.

First of all, we have a lot of canonically LGBT cast members. Nico is nonbinary, Whit is bisexual, and in the most recent Q&A, other characters such as Ace, Veronika and Eden herself were also all confirmed to be LGBT+. Given that Eden isn’t the “token gay character,” I think it’s a lot safer to make her a killer without sending the message “if you’re gay you’re a killer.” 

Secondly, I think that there’s more to Eden’s motive than just whoever that girl is. I think the girl will likely be part of it and be relevant, given that it’s Eden’s motive secret. Because it’s the Chapter 2 motive, the motive secrets should play into things in general. But, it’s not like that girl is the only one from Eden’s past that she cares about, right? 

Eden cares about her family, as we see in the scene where she talks to Levi. We know that Eden cares about her friends, as we clearly see within the killing game. We know that Eden cares about this girl. I think it’s safe to say that, for gay reasons or not, Eden has a lot of people she’d fight to get back to.

Rather than using her motive secret as the only way of justifying the “Eden wants to return to her previous life” motive, why don’t we look at other secret Eden content?

I’m talking about the secret quotes. I assume most people have heard about them by now, but basically, if you go to the characters’ profile pages on the main tumblr account and inspect elements, each character has a secret quote that you can find. Eden’s secret quote is “You can’t go back, no matter how hard you try.”

We haven’t really seen much of Eden trying to go back yet. I guess you could say that when she makes breakfast with Levi, she talks a lot about trying to get the group back together and back to normal, and that isn’t unrelated. Still, I think it makes a lot of sense if Eden is someone who’s focused on the past. After all, Eden’s talent is clockmaking. To the extent her talent influenced her personality/character themes, it seems like time is an important thing with her. Trying to turn back the clock and return to her life before the killing game would make a lot of sense thematically. 

I suspect that Eden’s secret quote relates to the fact that she tries to go back to her previous life by escaping the killing game. “No matter how hard you try” definitely sounds like she goes to pretty extreme lengths, but she still fails in the end. That would be when she’s caught as the blackened and executed; she never gets to go back. It’s precedented for secret quotes to directly relate to how characters died; both Min’s “I wanted to save you” and Arei’s “Because that’s what friends do” tie into the way in which they arrived at their death. I could definitely see it being the same for Eden.

Interestingly, there’s another reason to consider that Eden might be extra-motivated to leave the killing game. That point is that Eden has been shown to be the main person fighting against the killing game. For example, she and Hu brainstormed ways to deal with the Chapter 2 motive. 

That doesn’t really tell us anything though, right? It’s just trying to manage the killing game from within. That’s not it, though. It’s actually a repeated thing that Eden is constantly looking for ways to obstruct the killing game.

Even the plan to bore out the killing game, the one Veronika tells us couldn’t work because she’d get too horribly bored, originally came from Eden. I fully believe that there’s a reason we’re being told every other scene that Eden is working towards ending the killing game is that Eden has extra incentive to want the killing game to end, and that’s to try to return to the life and loved ones she left behind.

I also think it’s worth mentioning that, in the canon games, every single second killer commits their crime due to previous attachments that go beyond the killing game. Mondo kills because of the promise he made to his now-dead brother Daiya, Peko kills because of her allegiance to Fuyuhiko, who wants Mahiru dead due to the death of his sister Natsumi, and Kirumi kills because she’s actually the Prime Minister and needs to get back to her duties. Hell, Ryoma is even Kirumi’s victim because he doesn’t have previous outside attachments, which makes him feel like a more understandable victim for her crime. If you throw in “Eden has a lot of meaningful relationships back home and, here in the killing game, she misses them so badly that she’d kill to go back,” I don’t think it feels out of place. 

This is pretty niche, but there’s also something I want to look at in relation to Xander and Min. Notably, the pinned comments by the official account in their bonus episodes. 

Xander’s is “Someone who wants to hold onto the past.” Min’s is “Someone who wants to move on from the past.” While this trend doesn’t have to keep up, I think it would be interesting if every killer/victim pair had one of each. Arei pretty clearly wants to move on from the past where her sisters and classmates ruthlessly bullied her. Eden wants to hold onto it, hoping to return, but she can’t go back, no matter how hard she tries. Just an interesting thing to point out.

But Eden’s motive isn’t the only thing stopping people from believing she’d be a reasonable killer, right? There are other things to consider, too.

Topic 2: Story Arc

To be clear here, “Story Arc” refers to how Eden fits into the larger narrative and story of DRDT. I’ll be talking about her individual story and growth later on in the section labeled “Character Arc.” 

For the most part, the larger narrative, at present, seems to be relating to Teruko and how she navigates her trust and relationships with everyone else. Eden is certainly a key factor in that, given that Teruko has basically acknowledged that outright. 

Teruko actively tries to avoid being friends with Eden, given the fact that she’s very nice and it’d be easy for Teruko to be friends with her. To Teruko, that means she’d be opening up the door to get hurt to easily when Eden inevitably dies and/or betrays her. Wouldn’t it only be proving Teruko right if Eden were to become a killer?

Yeah. It would. And that’s the point at the story we’re at. 

I don’t think it would make any sense for Teruko’s beliefs to be strongly challenged in Chapter 2. Like, at some point, I’m sure Teruko will figure out why it’s a problem to not trust anyone. After all, her secret quote is “It is an equal failing to trust everybody, and to trust no one at all.” However, at this point in the story, things are going as she expects.

Think about it this way. Teruko believes that trusting people is opening yourself up for betrayal, and those who she gets close to will betray her and die. Let’s go through the people who have died so far, one by one, and see how they match up against that.

Xander: Was Teruko’s closest friend. Betrayed her by trying to kill her, then died. Check. Min: Was Teruko’s biggest supporter after she got stabbed. Betrayed her by actually being the killer, then died. Check. Arei: Previously shared Teruko’s worldview that being nice will just screw you over. Opened up and became friends. Had that friendship used against her to kill her. Check.

It definitely seems like, thus far, we’re validating Teruko’s worldview, basically as much as possible. No killer would validate her worldview more than Eden. That would make Arei an even closer parallel to Teruko (the person who she most tried to befriend was the one who tried to kill her in the end), and it would introduce another would-be friend as a killer.

Eden: Was Teruko’s biggest supporter after the first class trial. Betrayed her by being the second killer, then died. 

It looks an awful lot like Min’s, right?

In a more predictive sense, there’s also the popular theory that Charles will be one of the Chapter 3 victims. If that holds true, it’ll be another example in the same wavelength.

Charles: Was more like Teruko and didn’t trust people, avoiding them to stay safe. After rejoining the group and beginning to trust people, he died.

If that prediction is right, it’d mean that the trend continues past the point of the second victim to the point of a third victim, which would mean that the second killer would likely fit into the pattern.

But that’s a whole lot of my opinion, right? After all, maybe Levi or someone who isn’t particularly related to Teruko is the killer, so Teruko stays mostly the same, too. 

I do want to take a moment to acknowledge a bigger critique of this. It’s possible that some people might say that Eden killing here would be too repetitive in regards to Min and Xander. There are some key differences, though. 

Eden was Teruko’s friend after she started being mean and closed off to everyone. Min and Xander never really got the chance to react too much to Teruko’s antagonistic antics because they died before she was really pushing people away. That means it would carry more significance. Teruko has also spent more time with Eden, so their relationship is a little bit more developed. Eden is also someone that Teruko actively tried not to get close to before she killed, which wasn’t true of Xander or Min. 

Plus, I’d argue that it’s also supposed to feel a bit repetitive. This is what happens to Teruko, all the time. This is her life. It makes it feel more real and understandable how she reacts to Xander and Min if we as the audience begin to see and understand, oh, it really is like this every single time. 

Besides all of that, though, there are a few more thoughts that lead me to believe that someone closer to Teruko might be the killer this time around.

One of the biggest points in favor of this interpretation is the MonoCredits. 

MonoCredits are introduced in the scene where MonoTV asks Teruko to caulk the bathrooms. Then, she immediately uses one in the next scene where Charles is confronting her about her more antagonistic ways. At first glance, it seems like MonoCredits may have been introduced solely for that Charles interaction, and as a reason to plausibly get Teruko to help MonoTV out so that she could talk to it, too. However…

MonoTV gave Teruko two MonoCredits. That means she still has one. I wouldn’t blame you at all if you forgot this small detail– and that’s part of why I think the killer will be closer to Teruko. 

MonoCredits, and the fact that Teruko received two instead of one, are a pretty unimportant detail. I wouldn’t expect the creator to necessarily expect the audience to remember that Teruko still has one once we get to, like, the Chapter 4 daily life. I think that, because of that, Teruko will probably end up using this second one sometime soon, so that the audience will have that “oh yeah!” moment when it comes up, rather than an “oh… I kind of remember that…?” moment. 

There’s a very specific scenario in which I think Teruko might use it, too.

It’s pretty specific, but it’s already happened once, right? I think the most plausible situation for Teruko to use the second MonoCredit, if I’m right about it being this chapter, would be if she ends up in a similar situation before the execution again.

I can totally imagine Eden hugging Teruko and apologizing for betraying her trust, and Teruko, in the middle of freaking out, tells MonoTV she’s using a MonoCredit to get Eden away from her, which would then immediately launch into Eden being executed.

I think that could also be the right kind of push on Teruko’s character arc; her desire to get away from Eden led to Eden dying that much faster. It’d be something that could haunt Teruko a little bit and make her start thinking about how she pushes people away and what the potential failings of that are. 

The final reason I have is just, like… overall despair. Chapter 2 is usually a pretty emotionally devastating case for the cast. Taka loses Mondo and Chihiro meets a pretty tragic end; Peko dying launches Fuyuhiko into his grief → survivor arc while Hiyoko mourns Mahiru; Kirumi leaves the group feeling guilty about killing the Prime Minister, plus Ryoma’s death as a result of him loving no one and no one loving him is pretty sad. Chapter 2 is typically a chapter in the canon Danganronpa games where things get worse, not better. 

Then, Chapter 3 is used as a processing point where characters that aren’t in it for the long run are usually killed off, and Chapter 4 prompts the characters to start really moving towards the finale (Sakura’s death spurs people to want to fight and makes Byakuya realize why emotions are important, Gundham’s sacrifice sets the tone for Nagito’s insane Chapter 5 play and Gonta’s mercy kill in Chapter 4 directly leads into all the Kokichi “I’m the mastermind” stuff that happens in Chapter 5). 

I suspect DRDT will follow a roughly similar pattern. Because of that, it would make sense if the creator wants to pick a very emotionally devastating second killer, frequently due to the relationships that character has with the cast. Eden is the perfect pick for this position.

Eden has also gotten A LOT of focus this chapter. Getting focus doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to die right then. After all, Charles, for instance, got a lot of focus in Chapter 1, but he’s still alive. It’s difficult to tell when a character is getting content that impacts their character moving forward and when a character is getting focus because their story is about to end. 

In DRDT’s case specifically, though, the creator seems to heavily emphasize a character shortly before they die. Excluding Teruko, Xander was the most visible character in the Chapter 1 daily life. They focused on Min heavily during the Chapter 1 investigation to make sure that she got enough content in before her death. Between her fight with MonoTV, her heartfelt conversation with David, and the conversations she had post-death confronting David about his secret and defending Eden from Arturo, Arei got a lot of focus just before dying, too. 

Eden is one of the most heavily featured characters, and to me, it feels more like one being set up for immediate payoff rather than long-term. 

For example, David’s personality has shifted in a way that’s very interesting. People will want to see how his relationships with other characters are impacted and get to know the “real him” more before any potential death. Because of that, it makes sense that David’s heel turn is being set up for later, rather than being focus on him before he dies in Chapter 2. 

Eden, on the other hand, has shown us pretty much everything she can with this perspective. If she’s already spent two chapters being nice, happy and supportive, where does she go from there that’s narratively interesting and different? The only answer I can really come up with is “becoming less nice, happy, and/or supportive.” If that’s where her character is heading anyways, then doesn’t it make sense that being a killer could be a succinct way to do it? We already have enough people running around who don’t trust people, and it would feel odd to add Eden to that contingent. 

There’s one more story reason that Eden being the killer would make sense here. Check out the Chapter 2 title screen.

It’s pretty faint, but if you look after the “Glitters,” you can see faint text. It’s easier to see if you crank up the exposure.

You can tell what it is if you squint hard enough. Here’s me tracing it: 

“A Good Person.” 

The original chapter title is “All That Glitters,” which is pretty clearly a play on the saying “All that glitters is not gold” (RIP to anyone who just heard “all that glitters is gold in All Star by Smashmouth and didn’t question it. I was with you there). That seemingly applies a lot to this chapter, with appearances of success not being what they seem. It relates to the fact that J’s celebrity wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and David’s persona was too good to be true. 

The good person interpretation is interesting, too. If you input “A Good Person” into “All That Glitters,” you get “A good person is not gold.” Now, there’ve been a lot of characters who’ve claimed to be or mentioned wanting to be good people over the course of this chapter. However, I think the person most at the center of that is Eden, who’s been called a good or kind person by a lot of people– at the very least, I know Teruko, Arei and Levi do this.

Eden being the killer would be another way to show that people can’t be infallibly good. Again, I don’t think Eden’s gonna pull a 180 and suddenly become evil, I just think she’ll show a little more nuance. Her being suddenly evil does about the same thing for me as her being undeniably good; it reduces her character down to one trait rather than making her a full human. I don’t want her to be a pure cinnamon roll, I want her to be herself. 

Given this chapter title, I honestly think it’d be weirder if Eden didn’t do something notably Not Good this chapter. There could be other options, too, but Eden being the killer seems by far the most likely to me.

Topic 3: Relationships

I want to talk about Eden’s relationships to others in the cast. I’ve already mentioned Teruko a good bit, so I’m not really going to keep going over that. There are two others that I want to touch on.

One, Eden and Hu are known to be friends. They wash dishes together every night, and they generally seem to rely on each other for companionship and mutual help with steering the group in a more positive direction. Hu is someone who hasn’t gotten that much character arc focus, so I think she’ll probably be a bit more of a spotlighted character in the next daily life. Hu has already lost a friend and trusted co-leader in David, but I think it’d be even more interesting for her if she loses both of those people at once. With David in full-on evil theater kid mode and Eden dead as the killer, Hu will be forced to grapple with the fact that both of the people she trusted to help her guide the group not only aren’t helping her anymore, but did so in a way that betrayed her and her trust. 

That’s very speculative, though. The main relationship I’m here to analyze is with Arei, the victim of the case in question.

Arei and Eden have a very complicated relationship. At first, they were pretty neutral. Then, after the cake scene, Arei appeared to be jealous of Eden and her friends for, y’know, having friends. Later, when Eden tries to invite Arei, Arei goes off on Eden and Eden runs out of the room crying. Finally, when Arturo threatens Eden into silence over his secret, Arei shows up and promises to defend Eden and do whatever it takes to assure her that her friendship is real.

This is pretty much the entirety of Arei’s character arc. Because we know that Arei is the second victim, I want to examine that in the context of the canon games’ storylines in Chapter 2.

Chapter 2 frequently deals with the concept of bullying. Kirumi’s kinda doing her own thing here, but if you look at Mondo/Chihiro and especially Peko/Mahiru (and all the lore behind that one), it’s pretty standard. Chihiro is someone who I’m pretty sure has been bullied, and Mondo fits the bully role well enough. SDR2 is the big one, though, with Mahiru being bullied by Natsumi, Sato killing Natsumi because of that, then Peko killing Sato under Fuyuhiko’s command in revenge, and THEN Peko killing Mahiru in the killing game as even more revenge. So, let’s look at bullying in DRDT Chapter 2.

The big and obvious one is Ace and Nico. Ace bullied Nico, and eventually they snapped and tried to kill him in revenge. That means that the creator, at least in this case, opted for a situation where the bullied kills the bully, rather than the other way around.

Arei also bullies Eden notably in Chapter 2, and now she’s dead. I’m not saying that it has to be the same thing, but I think it would be interesting to parallel Ace and Arei and Nico and Eden. Ace, with his fear of death, would have to process just how close he came to being a victim, seeing the same thing play out with Arei, who actually did die. Nico, who’s trying to dodge any actual blame for their crime, would see Eden get executed for doing roughly the same thing. 

That’s something to address, though. What does this all mean for Eden? After all, Eden and Arei were friends now. It seems uncharacteristic of her to kill Arei for any reason. If I’m going to focus in on Eden’s character relationships, I really have to address that part.

Well, my answer is pretty simple. Eden simply didn’t believe her relationship with Arei actually changed. This might seem like an unfair claim at first, but if you look into it, it’s actually quite supported by the game.

Arei certainly thought Eden didn’t believe Arei’s sudden change of heart. She even goes as far as to call Eden out for it in the moment.

That’s not a very good argument though, is it? It disregards everything that happens afterwards, what with Arei explaining more and Eden hugging her and saying that her promise means “more than she knows.” It’s possible Arei convinced Eden during that second segment, so there’s not really any reason to believe that Eden didn’t believe her anymore.

Except…

Charles gets cut off by Whit here and immediately shuts up, which is played off as a joke. It is a joke, but I’ve noticed the DRDT creator is very good at putting in jokes that actually convey important information moving forwards. 

The fact that the creator put in not one, but two references to Eden possibly not believing Arei makes me think there’s more to it than making a joke or moving dialogue along. Whit even phrases it as “you wanna do that later?” which might be a hint that we actually are going to come back to that point of conversation later. 

For the record, I do think it’s also possible that Eden sort of half-believed Arei. She might’ve been committed to a murder plan by that point or something, so even if she thought Arei was being genuine, it’s possible she intentionally tried to convince herself Arei wasn’t genuine. That gets more into character interpretation, though.

Topic 4: Character Arc

This is the biggest one, in my opinion. If Eden is going to die here, what does her story say? Ignoring the big plot beats, Eden should get to have her own character arc, and if this is its conclusion, I want to look at where it went.

In the prologue, Eden is noted to stay positive, but she seems to be the most scared of the killing game itself. Here’s her slide from the official Prologue Recap video: 

In Chapter 1, we honestly didn’t see too much of Eden. What we did see was mostly her being nice and friendly. It was also established that Arei picked on her. Here’s her slide from the Chapter 1 Recap video:

Notably, the creator paired all the characters up for Chapter 1. We already know Arei is going to be important to Eden’s story, whether she’s the killer or not. They did pair up Xander and Min though, so it’s not like it’s impossible that they paired a victim with their killer.

Anyways, that means that, going into Chapter 2, the things the creator wanted us to remember about Eden are that she’s nice, cheerful, and one of the people who defended Teruko. Through Arei’s slide, we’re also encouraged to remember that Arei picked on Eden specifically for baking. (Arei also manipulated Levi in that scene pretty heavily, but Eden is the one they want us to remember.)

Where does Eden’s character arc go from there? Well, I’d say that she basically doubles down. 

Eden basically spends the chapter trying really hard to prevent conflict and stay friends/befriend everyone. She blackmails Teruko for the sole purpose of actually getting to hang out with her, she washes dishes with Hu, she makes breakfast with Levi, and she invites Arei to clockmaking to make sure she isn’t left out again. 

That means that Eden’s story in Chapter 2 is that she’s trying to be the one to get everyone through this hard time.

Because of that, killing seems rather counterproductive. After all, Eden’s been trying to end the killing game on her own terms, right? 

However, it’s possible that the message the creator wants to send us is that the cast isn’t currently capable of being entirely positive and friendly. While David pretended that the point of revealing all their secrets was so that they could get along, that was a lie. Eden being the killer would fit the messaging: with this cast, in this killing game, friendships aren’t a possibility right now. 

Would it be a change in Eden for her to kill now? Yes, of course. That’s how it goes with killers beyond Chapter 1; something changes that prompts them to kill. Like I examined earlier, I believe the motive of getting back to her previous life, in combination with the constant fighting, Arturo's threats against her and her apparent inability to actually make a meaningful change in those around her, would be enough to get her to break and kill in this Chapter 2 position.

I’ve talked about motive, overall narrative, Eden’s relationships and her character arc. That’s pretty much everything, but there’s one more big point I feel I need to touch on.

Topic 5: Eden’s Breakdown

This is what I assume makes people have the biggest problem with Eden culprit theory from a writing standpoint. After all, this is a very emotional moment and feels very important for Eden’s character arc. If she’s the killer, it would all be a lie, and it would invalidate everything we learned about Eden from this moment.

Except, I don’t think that’s fully true. It’s very possible to have a killer have an emotional breakdown moment mid-trial that makes them seem more innocent, but actually very much relates to the fact that they did kill. 

Even if she is a killer, I still believe Eden is a good person. Because of that, I think that she is genuinely haunted by Arei’s death, as well as Min’s. In fact, we know she’s haunted by Min’s death, before any of this Arei trial stuff happened. 

Given the fact that Eden runs out of the room crying after this, I think it’s fair to say that Arei’s words stuck with Eden. Because of that, pairing it with Eden’s breakdown in the trial, we can conclude that Eden feels guilty for both Min’s death and Arei’s death. Because Min’s death wasn’t Eden’s fault, it’s easy to disregard both as her blaming herself for things out of her control. 

It could be genuine this time, though. If Eden is the killer, at least some of that speech has to be fake (ex. When I saw that note, I knew someone must’ve overheard our conversation). However, what’s really interesting to me is what happens after the main part of Eden’s breakdown.

David goes on a little rant about how the victim would have to be incredibly stupid to actually fall for the note– or they’d have to be Arei, who wanted to be friends so desperately that she’d believe anything “Eden” told her. Afterwards, Eden says this: 

This is Eden agreeing with David’s rant. The non-killer interpretation of this is that Eden is just repeating the same thing, saying that Arei died because of her and her weakness. But, if you look at it from a different perspective, the phrasing is… a little odd?

In her speech earlier, what Eden said boiled down to “I couldn’t defend myself, and because Arei was nice to me and tried to defend me, she died.” Then, David says, “Because Arei wanted to be your friend, she died.” That’s basically the same information and logic, right? 

But Eden asks it as a question. Even though she said “it’s all my fault” earlier, this time she asks, “it really is my fault, isn’t it?” That means that there was something Eden didn’t know in David’s rant.

This could be several things, but I think the most likely thing is that, in my opinion, this is the point at which Eden realized that Arei was genuine about wanting to be her friend. Before this, she still wasn’t sure that Arei was being real, and that allowed her to proceed forward with her plan, keeping it together. However, once David, who got to see Arei in her breakdown, confirms that, yeah, Arei did that because she genuinely wanted to be Eden’s friend, Eden realizes that it was her fault. 

Arei wanted to be her friend, but now she’s dead, and it’s all Eden’s fault.

Interestingly, immediately after that last line, Teruko starts talking, bringing us back to mystery-solving mode. However, if you look at Eden while Teruko’s talking, she’s sobbing. 

Most of the time when a character is shown to the side, they’re left in whatever pose they were last in. For example, look at MonoTV making the :| face back there despite it having no relevance to the current point of the trial. In fact, MonoTV has that face for the entirety of Chapter 2, Episode 10. The last time MonoTV talked was in Episode 9, where…

Yeah, same face. It doesn’t change from there. My point is that, switching Eden’s sprite from the face-on, holding her wrist sprite to the sobbing and wiping her tears sprite is a conscious decision. They want to make sure we know that Eden is sobbing after that interaction with David. While that could be prolonged guilt from generally feeling at fault for Arei’s death, I think it makes more sense if it’s her coping with the fact that Arei did want to be her friend, and she killed her. 

Conclusion

Well, that’s my defense of Eden culprit theory from a writing perspective. Hopefully it was fun to read, whether you agree with it or not. Again, my point here isn’t to shame anyone who disagrees or anything, it’s to provide reasoning for why Eden could be the culprit and to defend the creator’s decision if that is the truth of this case. I’d love to hear about any and all other killer theories as well in order to have the greatest chance of catching the real criminal.

#drdt #danganronpa despair time #drdt spoilers #fanganronpa #theory #thh spoilers #sdr2 spoilers #v3 spoilers #eden tobisa #arei nageishi #long post #drdt theory #thanks for actually reading gang #hopefully this gave some better perspective on why i believe eden could be the killer #and those who believe eden did it bc of evidence but not narratively hopefully this helped #i just feel bad if this is what the creator is doing and people call it bad writing #because it isn't and we haven't seen enough yet to deem it bad writing even if it was #but yeah. eden stuff

[sparrowlovesskittles]

Guys you don't understand when I say I like Splashtail I don't mean Splashtail is my pathetic little meow meow covered in blood poor baby forced to lead in a crisis... That's Frostpaw. Frostpaw is the pathetic little meow meow covered in blood poor baby forced to lead in a crisis.

Splashtail is the guy causing the crisis. He's cunning and manipulative and Frostpaw is too naive to see it. Frostpaw was explicitly told to trust no cat and the only cat she has decided to trust is the one leading her astray. And I love this and I think it's so fun to read.

I know I've said this a million times by now, but Splashtail is literally awful. If the theories are to be believed, which I believe they are, then he joined a coup to overthrow RiverClan from the inside, murdered Reedwhisker, planted a false sign for Curlfeather to become the next leader, intentionally planted dogs to kill her, presumably to make it easier to manipulate Frostpaw- and then he did manipulate Frostpaw, who had just lost her mother, by being sweet to her and convincing her to trust him. He is not a good person and I fully believe the narrative intends to treat him as such.

And by the way, when Frostpaw starts getting frustrated with him and refuses to play along with his tricks, his patience begins to snap. His mask begins to slip. He starts being harsher and colder and we begin to see that he finds her company to be an annoyance. This has been consistent right from the very beginning, when she lead the patrol to find Reedwhisker's body.

We don't know why he attacked her at the end of Shadow yet, but I believe that he used it as a way to scare her out of becoming a warrior. He's at his wits end, he doesn't want to be running around playing this game with her anymore. She's not listening and he has run out of patience.

So yeah, Splashtail really doesn't give a shit about Frostpaw. He is using her for his own personal gain, and when it doesn't benefit him, he gets frustrated. I could not disagree more strongly with the notion that the writers are leading up to Frostsplash being the cute happy endgame. With everything that's been set up, that just seems impossible to me. That would be incredibly bad writing, and I genuinely think that Splashtail is the product of good writing so far.

Splashtail is evil. He's an awful awful guy and I hope Frostpaw and/or Mothwing kill him in the end.

#asc #asc spoilers #asc shadow #frostpaw #splashtail #riverclan

[1moreff-creator]

What do you think about Arei/J switch theory?

I’m not entirely familiar, so apologies if I get some stuff wrong. But the basic gist is that Arei and J disguised themselves as each other at some point, mostly so J could avoid Arturo, and so the real victim of this case is J, right? Well… frankly, while I think it's a fascinating and really enjoyable theory, I don’t believe it.

Let’s start with the base assumptions we have to make for this to work. They don’t necessarily disprove anything outright, but they’re still pretty big assumptions.

•Arei and J’s relationship underwent some major changes, for now off-screen.

•This relationship is so strong now, that Arei practically gives up on her friendship with Eden and her whole “I’ll be nicer to everyone” promise, the line which this entire theory is based on, all for J.

•No one noticed the slight changes to eye color and facial structure.

•Double on the last one because Rose didn’t notice these changes. The girl who noticed a sixteenth of an inch difference in her height between going to Hope’s Peak and starting the killing game, presumably without even looking too closely (because why would she be looking at a mirror for any significant amount of time in her situation?), and has a photographic memory. It’s true she forgets things, but only things she didn’t see. She did see both J and Arei, so it seems odd her weird superpower became unreliable at exactly this time.

•Both Arei and J can make really good impressions of each other voice-wise, and without getting tired of it. It’s not easy to talk with a voice which isn’t yours for a long time, even if they’re not too dissimilar.

•Both of them are pretty good at keeping their personalities consistent. I didn’t notice any lines which seemed OOC for either of them at any point, so it’s odd. I know the line about Teruko stabbing someone 50 times has been brought up as something only Arei would say, but… I honestly don’t have any issues seeing J saying this, so. Different character readings, I guess.

•The wigs in the dress-up room have similar enough colors. The blue one, I feel, is too light for Arei (and I’m not even sure it’s long enough for her braid thing), and the black one may not be fully perfect under closer scrutiny. By the way, remember, this has to go through Rose.

•There is some way to create the green highlights in J’s hair. There isn’t a green wig, and I don’t believe we’ve ever heard of dye in any room, which is odd. Why not set this up?

•The wigs in the dress-up room were restocked before the BDA. This is because Teruko claims to take a look around the dress-up room and the relax room before the trial, and doesn’t find anything noteworthy.

•Arei has some pretty strong reason to not reveal herself post-BDA.

•MonoTV would allow Arei to stand in J’s spot at the class trial, and put up a death portrait of Arei even though she’s still alive. Keep in mind, MonoTV allows this even though I’m pretty sure most theories state the switch doesn’t have anything to do with the murder, so I have genuinely no idea how you convince that dog to allow this.

•If the victim received that note (which I know is up for debate, but for unrelated reasons), then Arei and J must have switched rooms. After all, the note’s sender wouldn’t have left it in J’s room. This implies they had a reason to do this, which I can’t quite envision. Add to that the assumption J went to the playground disguised as Arei instead of, like, telling the real one.

So, with all these assumptions and possibly more, there must be some pretty compelling evidence pointing to the theory to convince people, right? As per the Sagan Standard, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Well, listen. I’m pretty new to the DRDT fandom, and a lot of this theory has changed continuously over time, so I’m sure I’m missing some things. But as far as my scouring through Tumblr got me, I could only ever spot two pieces of physical evidence being brought up.

One is that “Arei’s” hair is longer in her BDA than it’s meant to be. This is true, and a detail which notates some nice observational skills. It’s a good start, but I feel it can’t be used as conclusive evidence, considering the very real possibility the creators just took some artistic liberty. And maybe her braid was done somewhat sloppily since she may have died only minutes after waking up? Let’s call that a counter argument and move on.

The second is that the switch explains “Arei’s” missing glove in the BDA. If you’ve been reading my back-and-forth with thebadjoe about this murder case, you know I would take practically any explanation for this fucking glove’s disappearance in stride…

Except, I don’t actually know how this explains that missing glove? Even the disguised J (which according to this theory is the one at lunch on the third day of the chapter) has the glove, so I frankly have no idea where it went under this theory.

No matter how much I scoured Tumblr, I couldn't find any other piece of physical evidence beyond some minor lines of dialogue I don't find very convincing. I only ever found narrative arguments. Essentially, arguing that the theory is likely because it's what should happen.

Listen. I dislike narrative arguments in principle. I've been in the FNAF theorizing fandom, and let me tell you, I've seen a lot of people go real nowhere, real fast, just because they tried to argue on narrative. Still, I'll address some of these arguments, though keep in mind narrative logic can only really be countered by narrative logic.

"J should be more important to the chapter because she's in the title screen"

I mean, not necessarily. And especially not with such a vague title screen, which contains a long haired shadow figure who fits neither Arei or J. If anything, you could argue it actually makes sense that J doesn't quite fit the murder, because of the secret title. Behind the "All That Glitters" title, you can read "A Good Person" (inverted in the Deadly Life version). J fits the "All That Glitters" title, as her life as a celebrity isn't as good as it seems ("Not all that glitters is gold"), but she has no direct connection to "A Good Person". So maybe "All That Glitters" is self-referential; just because it appears J will be one of the main characters of the arc, doesn't mean she's going to be important for the murder case.

Is that convoluted as hell? Yes, but so is arguing about this theory based on a title screen IMO, so.

"Killing Arei when she's just starting her redemption arc is wasteful"

Well, so would be killing J before we get anything but a hint of a backstory for her. If anything, one could argue it's the other way around; because Arei was going to die this chapter, she had to speedrun a backstory and the idea of an arc. I personally prefer all the characters in the fangan to be interesting and well-fleshed out, instead of just using some people's deaths as plot points for another's story, but I understand it's Danganronpa. You have to kill someone, you're never going to be able to finish all arcs. Arguably, one of the most tragic parts of this series is the amount of potential lost to the senseless killing; it's why Min's death hurts me so much, even though I think it was written fantastically.

So, yeah. I don't find this very compelling, since I think killing Arei would still be decently good writing in the Danganronpa context.

"[Anything regarding the theme of trust and distrust]"

I lump all these arguments together because, IMO, they all fall to the same problem. Because trust and distrust is the theme of the entire series, you can't possibly know where it's going on chapter 2. We know where we started, where we are, and the general place we're gonna end up on in the end. However, there's no way to know the trajectory the story is going to take on this.

The most common thing I hear is that this disguise idea will end up with Teruko needing to trust someone to solve the crime, to counterbalance the first chapter showing the dangers of excessive trust. However, it's perfectly possible the story's going the complete opposite way. Maybe the events of this chapter will end up with Teruko getting "confirmation" that she's right not to trust anyone, only for chapter 3 to slap her in the face hard for distrusting everyone. Essentially, instead of trust and distrust bouncing along the story, maybe we get one big arc where we start by dwelving into the depths of distrust, only to surface again later on.

Basically; let them cook.

-

Those are the main arguments I've seen. Of course it's possible I've missed stuff (and I don't feel like writing any more thousandths of words), but I hope I covered the most important points. And again, I don't think there's any more significant physical evidence, and I'm not going to be easily convinced by narrative evidence.

With all this in mind, I bring you back to all those assumptions I mentioned in the beginning. Occam's Razor states that the most likely explanation is the one which makes the least amount of assumptions. And frankly, I believe there are many other explanations which do not make even half of the assumptions this theory makes. In fact, the only assumption that the "J and Arei never disguised as each other" theory makes is that the hair in the BDA isn't important. At least, I think that's the only assumption. In this context, I find the "switch" theory extremely unlikely, although I did enjoy reading about it a lot!

Hope that answers your question!

#drdt #danganronpa despair time #fanganronpa #arei nageishi #j rosales #j moreno #drdt theory #arei j switch theory

[voidvoidvoidvoidvo]

crying saint posting (+inv that one time)!! cringey rant about my reading of their character + one bonus drawing below the cut!!

ive always had trouble with saint as a character. at first i couldn't figure out a design for them, then i didn't know what kind of personality they would have. and i used to lean more towards a cold, uncaring saint. maybe even evil perhaps?? but that never really clicked for me i think.

and so i started thinking, specifically after i sketched the first artwork here. hey what if. what if saint was actually painfully empathetic. what if they genuinely loved every part of the word surrounding them. what if ascending creatures pretty much against their will brings saint pain. what if seeing a limp body where a lively creature determined to survive was a second before simply breaks their heart a little.

and you know what i prefer that version of saint a lot more than the uncaring one. i like to think that maybe they were forced to do their job. perhaps by the void worm they tried to ascend, even though believing that would probably be akin to believing in a crack theory. but hey. that's not all. what if actually it is their fully conscious decision. imagine this is the only way they can get out of their cycle. and they tried, they tried hard to avoid that way, but after so long they're just painfully tired. so with a heavy heart they do end up ascending creatures. maybe over time in either of those scenarios they manage to convince themselves that ascension really is the best way out for everyone. or maybe that's a totally separate scenario where this was what motivated them to start doing what they do.

i just find something very compelling about a critter destined to bring death that doesn't actually want to do it because of crushing love they have for everything around them, but that does it anyway because it feels forced to do so for various reasons.

so basically, i just really like crying saint. the end :)

#rain world #rainworld #slugcat #rw spoilers #rw saint #rw godmode #briefly anyway- #i can also very much imagine them hugging iterators and other slugcats. if those even exist besides them still #what the fuck is wrong with this posts formatting on pc???

[sir-yeehaw-paws]

idk this is maybe gonna sound random but i think kaz was involved with the great msf bbq of 74. skull face knows him pretty well and he easily could've pinned everything on huey. there's evidence for him killing strangelove yeah but none for him allowing the attack.

I don't think it sounds all that random, anon. It's a theory I've come across before. I believe either on Youtube, or Reddit. I can't recall particularly which exact place though, so I apologize for that. I can understand to some degree that theory being possible, and I haven't given it enough thought myself to speculate. I've also seen it theorized Kaz is also responsible for the second outbreak, but again, I haven't looked deep enough into that alternative theory personally to give it too much weight.

(And people have pointed out the whole 'he's already working for Cipher too why not do something else' but I don't know personally that I agree there, per se. I don't think the story explores Kaz working for Cipher well enough to where I can build up headcanons about his mindset there-outside of what we are given. But I can't discount why people theorize he's further treacherous as a result).

Personally, as far as Huey goes, he's absolutely guilty for Strangelove, but there's some deliberate (I think anyway) ambiguity as to whether or not he knew 100% for sure that the inspection was a fake. There's evidence to suggest he knew all along, but I am not fully convinced at all times. I imagine he is, but. IDK. I think the story is written for us to ask questions. (Or I'm giving it too much credit, I genuinely cannot say)

I will say though, I personally can't see Kaz having any motivation to facilitate the second outbreak. Even if he did work with Cipher back in the MSF days, Diamond Dogs was largely started by him. He was the one putting in the work to restart Mother Base-he just had a lot of trouble getting any recruits because he didn't have Big Boss's influence, and thus few wanted to follow him (as he tells it). His personal phone call with Zero also implies they are very much not on friendly terms whatsoever. He later describes his relationship with Cipher as 'parasitic'. Now, how reliable a narrator Kaz is I can't tell you, but I really don't think he's a traitor during Diamond Dogs era. Does this add possibility to him being guilty for the original MSF attack? No, but I also struggle to find motivation there. If he was still angry at Big Boss for his less-than-consensual recruitment, there's several other ways he could've gone about it. He was the second in command at MSF too. I feel like it's a pretty hard sell for Skull Face going up to him and say something like 'Hey, work with me to blow up the base and people you've grown attached to.' Skull Face was (I assume anyway) also slowly distancing himself from Zero by this point. Whilst that doesn't happen in full til later, Zero wasn't responsible for the MSF attack. That was all Skull Face, acting alone without Zero's approval. Yes, he's using their banner, XOF, but this was probably the first true sign to Zero that Skull Face had gone rogue (the second being Skull Face attacking Zero with the parasites).

But back to Kaz. the man's as much of an opportunist as the rest of them, but I genuinely don't see what Skull Face could've offered him in that moment to make 'attack your base' appealing to him. Too much loss without enough gain, at least to Kaz. What would be the pull? What would've been appealing enough for Kaz to take a risk like that?

Could be wrong tho! I mean, this is all theories and headcanons after all. I'm not an expert.

#asks #answered asks #kazuhira miller #huey emmerich #headcanons #thoughts posts #mgs #mgsv

[kazeiia]

this is just a lot of rambling, so bear with me for a second. i only got into the social media side of st after s4 when i couldn’t wait to get more of the story, and byler was one of the first ships i ever got into because i was getting edits and theories left-and-right. there were people that had byler theories for every single little thing, including stuff like lighting, the use of color, metaphors, analogies, etc to show how it was going to be cannon, but i took it all with a grain of salt because no matter how much i wanted gay representation (without the kill the gays trope) in one of the biggest shows in the world, the creators are still mostly middle aged white men.

BUT,,,, i recently rewatched s3 and things don’t add up. mike was so adamant about his feelings for el. he said he loved her to the whole extended party, and spend the entire summer trying to tell her that he loved her through his usual rambling, but it took will’s “not possible” to realize will was the only one who wasn’t willing to grow away from their party, even if they were going to be a thousand miles apart. when el finally said i love you back (even if mike never told her that directly btw), he looked confused and shocked—not the catharsis you would expect from someone whose partner finally said the Big Three Words.

there is a part in hopper’s letter to el that talks about not wanting to move on, and the scene focuses only on mike, looking back to the empty byer’s house on his bike. he goes back to his own house and hugs his mom (like he did after the quarry incident) looking just as lost and confused as he did when el kisses him goodbye. then he spends a hundred-and-something days giving will the cold shoulder??? like, why??? it’s not like mike to NOT be glue-trapped to the rest of the party. at this point, he still hasn’t said i love you to el. he can’t even say it when el brings it up directly, and he deflects by asking her what she the hell she was talking about. it might be chalked up to his family ties and how the wheelers don’t seem the type to show affection naturally, but i also think it could be a little bit of his aversion to lying to people he cares about. mike genuinely cares about el, but it’s a little bit like idol-worship, like this ideal in his head of superman el needing her own lois lane.

will is different because, to mike, he isn’t superman. he puts mike on the helm of the ship as the heart of the party. he looks up to him. he believes be understands him and he genuinely needs him. he believes he is smart, strategic and funny. he’s his best friend. so mike has the option to take on this responsibility, or to conform to what everyone around believes he will do—love el and be in love with her like a good boyfriend would be.

the only time mike genuinely smiles around el in s4 is when he gets the chance to help and save her from the whole owens-brenner lab thing. so it’s kind of obvious which choice he prefers. mike wheeler seems like the type of person that desperately wants to be needed because he hates it when people treat him like a good-for-nothing kid (his parents, steve, hopper etc). he even tells will that he’s scared of not being needed in the van scene, and will shuts him down by telling him about his role in the party. he spends all this time missing will (he goes back to dnd), and then when he finally sees him again, he pulls back because he doesn’t want to miss him. he doesn’t want to lie to him by not telling him how much he missed him. in s5, i really hope that the writers realize it makes the most sense plot-wise and theme-wise to get them together, but that’s a whole another theory and lots of people have discoursed about it before me.

anyways, i know no one really cares because i’m just one of many, but i wanted to let it out that now i’m fully convinced that mike wheeler is canonically a little fruity. let the delusions commence!

#byler theory #byler #mike wheeler #no one understands him like i do because he is me

[onigiriico]

so what are your thoughts and theories about mu??? :)

man I wanted to take my time to really put some thought into this & then I just forgot about it instead, go me 😭

I’ve seen people speculate that Mu was the one bullying people at first & I’m kinda leaning in that direction, except I think she probably just? treated people kinda badly without being fully aware of it? just in little ways (e.g. her giving people things she doesn’t need anymore as gifts, which seems to kinda be a pattern with her; also the condescending “poor thing” reaction @ Es not having friends)

People probably didn’t really pay that any mind (or they weren’t aware that it’s. something that happens frequently), but at some point Rei (so. her future victim, based on the Q&A) brought it to people’s attention, and that’s what eventually lead to Mu getting bullied. Mu knew that Rei was the one who turned the tables on her, and so she ended up killing Rei in hopes that it’d improve her own situation again. (I’m… frankly not sure what to make of the “I love you” line from t1 anymore orz)

I feel like this is pretty similar to Fuuta’s situation as well - one person does something wrong, another person sees it and brings it up to others, rage builds up and things just kinda. end in disaster due to a lack of communication. Like most of this could have probably been resolved pretty peacefully in a civil, private conversation, but alas 🥲

Like I can genuinely imagine that Mu didn’t (/ still doesn’t) know that she did anything wrong,, which is probably largely owed to her parents because she really seems to have had that upbringing of “the perfect, precious angel who can do no wrong”. It’s just that most people around her can’t believe / don’t even consider that she might genuinely be convinced of that, because they view things as common sense that Mu never learned as she was growing up(?) I’m not sure how to word it but I hope you get what I mean ww

So like. yeah. TLDR wow this could have potentially been prevented if people just talked to each other

(I’ve got to admit that I’m. not the biggest Mu fan under the sun btw so if things don’t quite add up in that theory, it’s probably just bc I forgot about parts of her MVs & VDs hdsbjshd)

#asks #milgram #speculating about Milgram is hilarious bc you could be right but you could also just be severely clowning yourself #and you'll only find out which one it is in another couple of years #oh good lord I am v nervous about having opinions online LMAO pls be gentle folks

[dankovskaya]

Batman Annual 14 is really the definitive Two-Face origin in my opinion largely because it does the best job of emphasizing the steady barrage of horrific events and general stressors leading to his complete loss of faith in the efficacy of the law and the judicial system down to the most basic assumption of safety from violent assault as an attorney in a goddamn courtroom and it fleshes out the childhood trauma that parallels him with Bruce not as the REASON for him becoming Two-Face but as just another horrible stressor that is dredged up on top of everything else while his coping mechanism and outlet for it crumbles before his eyes. The circumstances make the acid bath a believable “final straw” (rather than the 1:1 acid made him crazy thing 😭) and it doesn’t portray Two-Face as an “inevitability,” but rather the idea that it was inevitable and he never had a choice is something Harvey himself clings onto to rationalize and distance himself from the guilt of his actions and the perceived “badness” of his anger. The emphasis on the unstoppable force-immovable object conflict between his intense desire to do and be good against his anger and despair and disillusionment tempting him to become the “bad” that he’s always feared he fundamentally is and the immense distress that causes him is very central here and I appreciate that. And most importantly it shows GILDA as someone firmly in his corner all throughout and utterly convinced of his “goodness.”

I can’t speak fully on the Loeb version until I’ve re-read Dark Victory too for the whole story but in general I find some issue with that version of Harvey. The psychological/traumatic aspect of Two-Face is minimized which is fine in theory but there’s also a severe minimization of the factors at play that lead to Harvey’s snapping so as a result he’s portrayed as cynical, pessimistic, and a bit bloodthirsty all throughout the story as sort of his default state, which I’m not a big fan of. The distance between this version of Harvey and Two-Face is not very big, which helps with “believability” I guess, but it’s just not how I prefer to interpret Harvey Dent, District Attorney personally. I want him to fall far because that’s what makes the tragedy imo. There doesn’t seem to be a destruction of faith and an ultimate “snapping” here so much as Harvey taking the burning of his face as an excuse to run off and just do exactly what he’d been itching to do the whole time. However this all clearly works well with the central mystery of finding out who the Holiday killer is, because by the time even Bruce and Gordon are nearly convinced it’s Harvey, it makes sense why they feel that way. Harvey had been dropping red flags throughout the whole story Lmao. BUT in terms of him being suspected of serial killing I have more thoughts in the next one 👇

Two Face: Year One is NOT an ideal version of the story either for a few reasons with its biggest sin being the unforgivable complete and utter omission of Gilda but it also adds/emphasizes some things I really like, such as the friendship between Harvey and Bruce from long before Harvey was DA. The most interesting part of this version to me is that Harvey’s history of mental illness is exposed and that is what is used to cast doubt on him (as opposed to like. his personality lmfao) leading to basically the whole city suspecting that he’s become a serial killer and watching everyone up to and including his good friend Bruce Wayne (and not to mention his dedicated therapist who he considers a father figure😭) seemingly turn on him overnight and expect the worst with genuinely NO evidence other than his imagined instability as a human being which becomes a very tragic and unfair sort of self-fulfilling prophecy moment. But I HATE the fact that it completely skips over his recovery period after the attack and goes straight into Two-Face (which is also sort of true of Long Halloween) bc I think the agonizing depressing recovery is vital in making it clear that. Once again. The acid didn’t make him crazy. But the senseless excruciating pain and physical disfigurement that externalizes the part of him that people are scared of certainly would not have helped things.

#dc #SHould I start tagging for him. Am I this dedicated. Fine. #harvey

[valkyrieblogs]

continuing my second playthrough of 13 sentinels: aegis rim in an attempt to do more analysis and character study. also thank you to everyone who has been replying to me about my liveblog so far!! it’s been really nice and i’m so delighted to talk about this game with people.

this time i’m yelling about:

natsuno minami (0% - 12%)

destruction mode tutorial 004 (in which i still find ways to talk about hijiyama and okino, but also miura)

megumi yakushiji (0% - 14%)

destruction mode tutorial 005

natsuno minami (0% - 12%):

i really like natsuno, and really enjoyed her route, so i'm excited to play it again. unfortunately, i have both never seen a single movie in my entire life AND have extremely poor retention for movies regardless, so a lot of the references in her route do go totally over my head.

small thing at the start of natsuno's route when she's talking with kurabe and fuyusaka. she talks about working for NASA one day, and fuyusaka comments that she needs to get better grades in science, then. but in the japanese, she actually talks about her grades in english. with how obsessed she is with all of this, being bad at science doesn't really make much sense!

i love that everyone knows about natsuno's alien/sci-fi obsession, but after she comes up with her conspiracy theory about the men in black, she immediately shows she's still grounded in reality when she talks about it just being a story, or a joke.

i have some mixed feelings about this moment with nenji busting in to the locker room, mostly for the fact that while i do believe he was genuinely trying to help, he's still disappointed when he finds natsuno fully-clothed. outside of that though, i do appreciate how he's actually a pretty observant character? noticing the men in black everywhere, already feeling wary of them... also too when he catches yakushiji later on, knowing full-well that she's done something to kisaragi, even if he doesn't know exactly what.

also, going back to what i said before about natsuno showing she's still grounded in reality: i like how when she does find BJ, she has no reservations accepting what she's seeing and trying to figure out what's going on, and is immediately convinced she needs to help him. there's something i really enjoy about her being genre-savvy in all of this, even if she's still not exactly right. i feel the same way about kurabe with his kaiju/mech obsession.

destruction mode tutorial 004:

something about rewatching this scene at the beginning with natsuno, where she talks about how no. 17 is BJ's last gift to her!!

miura is talking about how he was taught that "my primary tactic should be long-distance annihilation", and it makes me think about how back in sector 5, it sounded like it would be either him or hijiyama using no. 19—with it originally intended for hijiyama, and miura only considered as a backup in case something happens to hijiyama. hijiyama is decidedly not a character i can see being content with doing everything from a distance, although i know in the cut content his AI was apparently piloting it. with the way hijiyama is, though... i’m sure that regardless of this sentinel’s skillset, he would’ve still done anything he could’ve to protect his country. no. 12 just seems more appropriate for him, matching with his personality and that hot-tempered nature of his, where he isn’t afraid to get into a fight. (or to sacrifice himself, if it comes down to it.)

i appreciate how miura is paired with natsuno here in this scene. both because of the relationship they have, but also because of miura having a lot more experience (not that he's really piloted it) with the sentinels, and being able to explain this to natsuno.

no. 19 is definitely the right choice for miura, who feels so calm and measured when he's placed in battle like this. he's able to sit back and think more strategically about what's going on, which definitely lends itself well to the G3's skillsets. it's especially hard, again, to imagine hijiyama being in a position where he might have to pilot this sentinel. which in turn makes me wonder about the choice to have okino in no. 12 for close combat, when he even talks about how it's suicidal to get inside a mech cockpit. not to mention his personality, which i feel is more suited to a support or strategy position. (while i feel he develops the attitude of needing to work alone, and not being able to trust others, it’s not really until after the sector 4 infection incident. but despite this, i feel like he does look at himself as being the only one who can carry out certain things, so that might be part of it, too.) i wonder if it's just because no. 12 was still a first generation sentinel, and one of the first ones he designed, rather than anything else.

megumi yakushiji (0% - 14%):

yakushiji is a character that i've really struggled to be invested in. i actually like her most when she's at her most selfish and cognizant of that fact, like when she shoots fuyusaka. but in this playthrough, she's definitely a character i'm trying to get myself to like more.

that said, there's something about starting her route by placing her next to kisaragi, who has so much personality and the most distinctive voice, right from the get-go. even kisaragi's umbrella choice has personality. i know that's so much of what kisaragi addresses, too—that yakushiji has difficulty opening up and talking to others, and that's what's resulted in her being isolated. with that in mind, it makes sense that the character she has an established friendship with is kisaragi, who balances her out and also sees what she's really like at her core. (and, as always, is so forward about it in a way that yakushiji could not be!) their friendship is something that makes a lot of sense to me, even if we don't see very much of it.

god, yakushiji's route is another one of those that has such a strong opening. i love the banality of this conversation only to have a sentinel drop from the sky right in front of them. kisaragi is the most realistic character for seeing this happen and immediately being like oh i HAVE to record this. i love her so much.

rewatching this part helped confirm some things about the timeline for me. i thought juro (or at least no. 13) had also gotten infected with DD-426 at the time it was forcibly shifted to sector 3, but obviously this isn't the case since he stays with megumi for a time, and that's when she falls in love with him. i had also attributed his memory loss to DD-426, but rather than that, i guess it was just pushing himself past his limits in the sentinel, since he talks about it being the only sentinel that can still fight—meaning the others are still infected, and are unable to be piloted. (until okino figures it out, anyway.)

i do at least feel a little more sympathetic to yakushiji, watching this again. i'm still just not particularly interested in her romance with kurabe, since it feels both selfish and like she's completely disregarding kurabe's agency in all of this by getting 426 to tamper with his memories on her behalf.

i'm glad i'm paying a little more attention to the timeline in this, this time around. i didn't realize how long it took her to even make contact with 426, but obviously now i'm aware she couldn't have spoken to him until he started riding around in juro's head—no wonder he appears for the first time right as juro walks past yakushiji. understanding that she's also waited a number of months also makes me see that she's actually been pretty respectful in the meantime—just not after this point.

when 426 talks to her here, and says that yakushiji is the one that called him... in japanese, he says that he was called by her inner voice/the voice of her heart... i feel like the japanese feels more in-line with this narrative he tries to sell to her of this magical girl genre gone wrong.

oh, when i originally played through this, i said no when 426 initially makes his offer. i didn't realize that if you said yes, yakushiji even directly references this, asking if he's going to turn her into a magical girl or something. although it's interesting to me that regardless of what you answer, yakushiji is still skeptical, and 426 still gives her time to think it over. i feel like with what's established about her, especially as someone who is also meant to be more intelligent, turning him down initially feels like the right choice, at least to me.

i do, at least, really appreciate yakushiji's determination. especially her resolve at the end where she talks about how she would make a deal with the devil if she had to if it meant getting juro izumi back.

destruction mode tutorial 005:

once again, i love kisaragi so incredibly much. i love how she says the only thing she wants an apology for is where yakushiji put the switch, because it's way too difficult to access on her back.

god i love kisaragi and ogata's dynamic. they're so much fun together. i feel like there's a handful of ships i have some misgivings about in this game (mostly just because i like more build-up than anything else) but kisaragi/ogata is good.

i wonder if the reason that yakushiji seems to know a little more about the sentinels is just because of her previous relationship with izumi. although, when gouto shows up at the end of this, he seems familiar with her. so i guess she's had more exposure to him, too.

once again really enjoying yakushiji and her friendship with kisaragi in this scene.

#valkyrie plays 13 sentinels: aegis rim #13 sentinels: aegis rim

[the-sappho-of-lesbos]

I think I partly struggle so much wit the desire to be in a relationship just because of how much a relationship is tied to something I’ve had to fight for.

I’m a woman and there isn’t anything I need to do for that. I’ll just face sexism regardless.

But my lesbianism has isolated me and rifted friendships and impacted the way I interact with the world. Yet I don’t have anything to go along with it. I’m still a lesbian regardless, but literally if you mention lesbian to ANYONE the first thought people will have is woman dating another woman. That relationship statues is what makes up so much of the sexuality for so many people. And I fall into that too.

I know I joke about that meme of being gay in theory and not in practice but that’s how it feels sometimes. Like I’m being punished for something I am ~ theoretically ~ but I don’t actually have the physical aspect of it. So it almost feels like I’m going through all this for nothing.

And I love love. Or at the very least I love the idea of love I’ve built up and the love I’ve read about and the love I write about what I think love is. I love what little experiences I’ve felt as though I’ve had with love.

But at the same time, be it my mental illnesses, personality, expectations, all three or something else , I’m just good with people. It so often feels like I’m trapped looking for something that doesn’t exist and that I’ve just made up. I have massive hole of loneliness in my chest. I’m so unbelievably touch starved. I crave physical and romantic and sexual contact with someone I love. But also I get so drained being around people. I don’t have the energy for people. Whenever I talk to anyone I work myself up into a frenzy over starting to feel trapped in a situation just two seconds ago I genuinely felt like I would trade anything for. And I don’t understand it. I feel so different and broken and maybe like I’m just not ever meant to be around others, despite how much I want it. I feel like I get people fine, I just don’t get them the way others do. Or that I understand people too much. But I think that just sounds egotistical.

There was a guy who used to be utterly convinced there was fairies living under a hill. I feel like him. I think sometimes I’ve fully tricked myself into believing something that doesn’t exist and I’m just going to walk through the rest of life perpetually lonely and unfulfilled because I’ve set all my hopes on something I can just never have.

#I’m such a mess #being a human is so hard #coping with fiction is hard #being so lonely is hard #being isolated for so long is had #being a lesbian is hard #being mentally ill is hard #not feeling normal is hard

[jinmalos]

id love to hear your thoughts on the teaser for wave 4

OK OK OK OK. I MEANT TO GET TO THIS SOONER BUT THEN I GOT CARRIED AWAY WITH SOME ZINES AND SOME OTHER PROJECTS. BUT, I just finished speedrunning the game for my sibling to catch them up, Future Redeemed comes out tomorrow, I am Not A Normal Person About This Game.

Spoilers below, not particularly thought out bc i've given myself a headache from finishing the game and sobbing my eyes out again as of 3 hours ago

I. Genuinely have a lot of thoughts and they've changed a bit since it was announced and the subsequent trailers we've had, as well as refreshing myself on XBC1 and XBC2 lore since then. I will start with my joke theory, For the longest time I had a joke that boiled down to "Alvis is Riku and he's really enjoying larping as a nopon rn." Why the fuck would that nopon know so much. NOW, I'm more in the "give me the name of your god you nopon piece of shit." who is this fucker loyal to. IS IT MELIA? IM P SURE ITS MELIA. BUT LIKE. STILL WHO TF IS HE. WHY DOES HE KNOW SO MUCH. WHAT HAS HE BEEN UP TO.

Also! I'm not actually sure how I'm feeling on this game being a prequel! I'm not fully convinced it is yet even though thats EXACTLY what it looks like. Part of me really wants an epilogue to the base game's story or at MOST something that is running concurrently. It's not that I dislike prequels, I LOVED torna i've genuinely played torna all the way through upwards of 6 times by now. It's just really enjoyable. I just kinda wanna know what happens...AFTER the plot. But I'm not gonna be DISAPPOINTED if it genuinely turns out to be a prequel.

Madly in love with A's design, I think someone may have transed their gender =w=

Jokes/wishful thinkin aside, I wonder if Ontos will be playing a role in this. Alvis claims to be from a long line of seers, I wondered if maybe the Processor that is Ontos has just been spitting out random entities and A + the mystery White Alvis are just consequences. I wanna know how Z ties into that. I also wanna know where everyone..IS. Like, where is Fiora or Reyn, or Pyra and Mythra, or even fucking Morag or Tora. No mention of them, so i'm curious to know...why. Shulk is clearly Shulk here, and Rex is clearly Rex, If they aren't part of the cycle there HAS to be an explanation as to how they're in Aionios and what happened to everyone else, right?

I'm excited to see what's up on that front though. I refuse to believe that Alvis has become evil, not because I think it's implausible, but just because i dont want that evil Alvis to be Alvis because his concept art is WHITE. My opinions on Alvis being DIRECTLY Ontos have shifted to being a bit more..flexible on the concept because of A and the revealed mystery character, but in my heart he's still directly Ontos and I hope the Shalvis Divorce Arc ends happily.

Wishful thinking, of course, is that i'd like to see the Trinity Processors reunited in some way, shape, or form. I love joking about Aegis Sibling Family Reunions/Learning Where tf Ontos is, but I'll admit the ending of xbc2 is a bit ambiguous on what exactly happens with Logos and Pneuma and how that relates to Ontos OR the continued existence of Pyra and Mythra. I'll actually be really sad if there's no way they can be reunited/bummed if something's happened to Pyra and Mythra as of a result of the ending of xbc2. I just kinda want Malos to get a minor redemption arc or st least know if the Logos and Pneuma cores of the Trinity Processor was relevant at all.

BUT YEAH. IM SO EXCITED. VERY, VERY EXCITED. I'm sad this is the end of the Klaus arc of Xenoblade/the Xeno series, but I'm excited to see where we go next! If this wave 4 dlc is even remotely as good as base xbc3, it'll be an excellent ending to such a good series!

#xenoblade chronicles 3 #xbc3 #xenoblade chronicles #xbc3 spoilers #xenoblade chronicles 3 future redeemed #this is incomprehensible but im so so sorry if its way too incomprehensible

[will80sbyers]

What are your thoughts on a bi mike theory that combines elements of the gay mike theory as well? Like one that sees Mike as bi (with a male lean), believes he absolutely had a crush/liked El romantically in season 1 and 2 but ALSO believes Mike’s overpowering feelings for boys/Will in season 3 also added in an element of subtle internalized homophobia in the rain right (even if he wasn’t fully “aware” or conscious of his feelings yet ) AND he was ~subconsciously~ overcompensating/performing heterosexuality in season 3? The gay mike theory puts emphasis on him consciously doing it, while your bi theory states that Mike enjoyed kissing El completely in season 3. But what if the chaos of puberty, his growing attraction to Will, and the bi-cycle caused Mike’s attraction to El specifically to be more turbulent rather than steadfast? Like what if, as a bi person, he finds girls and guys attractive generally speaking, but only understands/accepts his attraction to girls, but specifically, he is more physically attracted to Will (and definitely more emotionally attracted), but since Will is his best friend, he doesn’t understand what he’s feeling so he hams it up with El and tries to play the role of heteronormativity he’s been taught even though he’s slowly losing romantic feelings for El? But since he does like girls generally, liked El in season 1 and 2, and she’s a superhero, he convinces himself he still likes her. After all, he’s an awkward nerd, and if he isn’t in love with a beautiful superhero, who IS he in love with?

maybe he was subconsciously doing that, I don't know, they didn't show it enough for me to believe this unfortunately :(

Also I genuinely don't think Mike was being homophobic in the rain fight...

I think he's not 100% aware of his own feelings yet, he is thinking that what he feels for Will MUST be platonic love as a best friend... he realizes that he kind of likes him in a different way in s4 but doesn't want to risk it/explore it and I think he's unsure of himself too and the speech Will made in the van just confused Mike more because he thought that came from El!

I think this because I was in the same situation in high school tbh, I was literally in love with my best friend, I was jealous of her, I thought she was beautiful and had moments of awkwardness with her but I did not realize that that was me having feelings that were not platonic until years later, I thought I was straight because I liked guys too and so I dismissed myself and my feelings constantly...

I was not conscious of what was happening but I knew I felt weird with her and the relationship between us was different, it was deeper and I have only felt jealousy for my romantic partners, never for my friends... I was attracted to her but didn't realize it (and I was also in a relationship in some of the years we knew each other and so was she...)

#byler #will byers #mike wheeler #ask

[kinnsporsche]

i was so ready for the pool scene but I got this episode instead :/ I don’t even know what to say. is kinn really this stupid?? falling for tawan’s lies again? tell me he’s not this stupid. I honestly don’t know what to think. I’ve seen some people theorize that he believes Porsche is innocent and he’ just acting like he’s falling for it but idk I would like to believe this theory but I feel like he genuinely doesn’t trust Porsche. which is so absurd?? he literally didn’t do anything? 1/8

why would eavesdropping on t prove he’s a mole? I seriously dont understand. god his facial expressions when k said to lock him up. the way he was confused at first and rightfully so like he just wanted to help?? and the second time he tried to reason with him because this is nonsense and how does k not see it?? by the third time he just completely gives up and it’s so heartbreaking. apo’s acting was so good in this scene I can’t even put into words the multitude of emotions he goes through. and at the end when he thought k was coming to get him and said ‘I knew you’d trust me’ GOD the angst in this show.I swear to god tankhun is the only one with the braincells in this show.he likes to act “crazy” but he’s far from it. everyone can see from a mile away that tawan is lying. I cannot believe that kinn can’t. when he said he’ll clear things up with p that gave me hope. he must be acting like he’s falling for tawan’s lies right? this is all part of his plan to catch him. there’s only a few episodes left it wouldn’t make sense if k still didn’t fully trust him. but in that shoot-out scene from the mv p says Im on your side so like? its still not clear? p still has to convince him? vikki I’m genuinely losing my mind over these gays. okay the things I loved: THE MILK!! metaphor of the damn century. out of all the things they could have chosen for this they chose milk.. I love that for them. and kimchay!! after the last ep I was ready for angst but we got a kiss. they are so cute idk what happens to them in the novel but I hope they get a happy ending in this. although I’m sure some shit is about to go down first. and vegas my boy. idk how you feel about him but personally I’m a weak hoe. I see a sexy villain and I simply have to simp for him. I’ve been dying to see some vegaspete and it’s finally happening!! I know about some stuff he does in the novel but I have no idea what they’ll do in the show and it’s just so exciting. will he genuinely like pete or just use him? I’m dying to find out. and he’s so good at playing Porsche. I mean it’s good to watch but p is not falling for it at all. after that pool scene part of me is convinced this is all just an act and he doesn’t give a fuck about p but another part of me is like what if he was just planning on using him against kinn but started to genuinely like him at some point?? I really don’t know. I mean he’s probably just using him but still I like to be a little delulu and imagine things. and the ending?? run away with me Porsche?? I was screaming!!! there’s no way p would go with him but the possibility of p tricking vegas and using him to get out of jail? chefs kiss. so yeah I think I’ve screamed about everything I wanted. I make theories in my head what could happen next episode but I’m always wrong lmao. and I just wanted to say I hope you’re doing better now and everything is well i'm genuinley so thankful that i can come here and talk about kp with you

my kp anon!!!!!

the way we were baited with that pool scene 💀💀 and during the first week of pride month? kp cancelled for being homophobic against me personally actually. the way i was watching the timer tick down the whole episode like "oh boy haha 30 minutes left i wonder when the pool scene will happen. oh boy only 15 minutes now................haha only five more minutes guys..........." im not a clown im the whole circus

i genuinley don't think kinn trusts tawan in the slightest but im a kinn defender at heart. kinn knows that tawan never loved him, he made that clear at the end of episode 8 during that conversation with porsche when he crumpled up his picture. kinn is very much aware of the fact that he was in love with tawan, but tawan used him and played him and was never in love with him. i think it's easy for us to sit here and say that porsche hasn't done anything but we have the benefit of hindsight we know what he was doing when he bugged tawan's room, kinn doesn't. from his perspective it just looks like porsche was spying on him and following him around without permission, and that scene with vegas by the pool probably didn't help either since he thinks the information is being passed along to the minor family of course everything starts to look kinda sus.

there are a few emotions kinn doesn't deal well with, two of the big ones being jealousy and betrayal. it's less about him not trusting porsche (because he does trust him imo, just in his own way. why else would he continiously let himself be alone around porsche, let himself be vulnerable around porsche, if he didn't trust him ykwim?) and more about him not trusting himself and his emotions. he was burned so visciously by tawan and he has genuine trauma from it that i think a lot of people don't want to see, it's not as easy as telling kinn to just get over it now he has porsche, he has a lot of trust issues and when you couple that with his identity crisis his actions start to make a lot more sense.

the "i knew you'd trust me" genuinley broke a little piece of my soul because kinn does trust him!! and porsche has enough faith in him to know that he does!! again it all comes right back to the fact that these two have problems with communicating their emotions - they have sex and they think it solves the majority of their problems but it doesn't.

i swear to god i've rewatched the trailer at least 12 times this week to try and piece all the scenes we haven't got yet together. where does the scene with his uncle and the "you shagged him for this" come in, why are they laughing together at the back of yok's bar, when is kim going to beat the shit out of someone i need answers five episodes is not enough time for all the answers that i need!!!!! and we still have to get that scene of porchay crying when he's looking at his phone kimchay is gonna go up in flames soon i know it is and im not prepared to see him cry

listen bible is SO pretty but i want to spin vegas' jaw right now like im gonna feel bad about bruising all his pretty but im still gonna DO it get a job stay away from porsche. i heard that they toned a lot of the vegaspete arc down from the novel which im obviously happy about because oh boy...... vegaspete novel arc is just not it babes novel vegas im sharpening my knives as we speak

my kp anon my beloved im always here for u to scream at i love getting your asks sm!!! throughout the week when im thinking of my reply im just thinking of the meta i should write out honestly u give me braincells and i

#answered #anonymous #kp anon