Already made it pretty clear in my Hanahaki Sanuso Fic but I've never really especially liked the trope. It is a good idea and I am a huge fan of codependency and angst or, whatever, but it's never-- Realistic? Like, yeah, I do believe a lot of people would keep their mouth shut fearing rejection, but you can't possibly expect that to be the peak of romance, right?
It is romantic in some aspects to not confess because you'd rather die than live in a world where somebody doesn't love you back because, you know, codependency in fiction is marvelous to me. But Usopp???? Like- The second I heard the prompt I knew Usopp would not basically kill himself for this. He fears death way more than he fears rejection because it's just. Logic thinking. Survival instincts. And I think that no matter how much he fears Sanji hating him after confessing, he'd rather do that than die. Then, ofc, he would regret everything right after confessing and would have this moment of "well, actually, dying doesn't seem that bad hahahaha". But it doesn't even last long because Sanji loves him back, after all. And he doesn't consider Usopp's actions to be less romantic or cowardly. Sanji understands that he is afraid of dying like any other normal person would.
And tbh I know Sanji would probably not say anything either and Usopp would have to get it out of him somehow, but I like to think that if this happened at a point in their relationship where they are extremely close, Sanji would end up understanding (with a bit of help ofc) that even if Usopp doesn't like him back, he is not going to hate him. Like-- I prefer thinking they trust each other enough to know unrequited love wouldn't be the end of their friendship.
It doesn't even matter because no matter how I write them it will always be mutual, but I like their POVs assuming it's not, and living for each other anyway instead of dying.
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I have a theory that the reason we as an audience feel like Sibuna in Season 3b are making monumentally stupid choices is because the show doesn’t actually spell out for us that the kids don’t have all the information we have. In fact, they are operating with less than half of our knowledge. (This is gonna be a longgggg post, so read under the cut if you dare)
On my latest rewatch of S3 for fanfic purposes, i found myself really struggling to justify why the hell Eddie couldn’t put two and two together with his vision of Patricia and the “traitor” in Sibuna. I was frustrated with him because to me it was incredibly obvious! Like who else could it possibly be?? But then, I rewatched it again with a closer eye and everything suddenly clicked:
We, the audience, are watching the action from a completely zoomed out angle. We’re not just following Sibuna, but we’re also following Team Evil. We know Robert is capturing Sinners and what a Sinner actually is, before Sibuna is even fully aware that they failed to stop the eclipse ceremony. The kids metaphorically tripped at the starting line.
Furthermore, this is the first time in the show that the Sibunas have not had either the upper hand or were even on equal playing field with the adults. In Season 1, the Society was wholly unprepared for a bunch of adolescents to start foiling in their plans (bc why would they be prepared for that??), and Sibuna basically destroyed them due to adults underestimating their willingness to fuck around and find out. In Season 2, Victor/Vera and Sibuna were on equal ground; no one knew how to solve the tasks and it was a matter of a bunch of separate parties trying to figure it out before each other. They were all just throwing shit at the wall and hoping it stuck.
At the top of Season 3, we play a lot with both the S1 and S2 dynamics. At first, Sibuna is leagues and bounds ahead of the adults, and then they pretty quickly end up on the same footing. Then, in the second half of the season, that entire dynamic is flipped on its head, and it’s Sibuna who are wholly unprepared for the adults. I’ve talked about how the kids, especially our Sibuna veterans, got a little too comfortable with Victor and co’s ineptitude and cocky with their own intelligence… but that’s not even why they were so slow on the uptake.
None of the Sibunas even hear the word “Sinner” until they find that book in the secret room and read it while sitting on the stage. And the book does not explain at all what a Sinner actually is. It tells them that Ammut needs “the souls of five human sinners who embody the greatest flaws on mankind” and once she has five of them she can enter the human realm and cause lots of problems. Absolutely nowhere in the book does it ever say “Also, much like Robert, the soulless body of the Sinner is reawakened in service to the underworld.” The only other hint that could have possibly clued anyone in is “when your friends are not your friends”. But like, that clue was ages ago! Why would they even be thinking about that, when it had absolutely no bearing on their hunt for the secret room/answers up to that point? I cannot stress this enough, THEY HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE WHAT A SINNER IS! (I’m gonna repeat this sentence about 400 times in case you don’t get it now lol) Mind you, that atp in the timeline, this is approximately fifteen or so minutes before Denby captures Patricia.
But let’s rewind all the way back to when Team Evil devises a plan to kidnap Eddie. He’s in the crypt, right? It’s pretty evident to him that it was probably Denby, Victor, and/or Robert who trapped him here, but he’s got no real clue as to why. Of course, we all know that they’re planning on turning him into a Sinner, because we saw Victor get turned. But as far as Sibuna knows, Victor has never really been on their side, so all they think is that he’s being meaner than usual but of course he’s opposing them. That’s not strange.
Okay, so Eddie is stuck and distressed, but he’s not as panicked as he needs to be because nowhere in his mind does he think this could potentially end in what is essentially his death. Now, throw in the horrifying vision he has of Patricia getting dragged into a glowing sarcophagus. He still doesn’t know what a Sinner is, but he knows that whatever he just saw was really bad; it’s an incentive from the Osirian spirit (or the house, or the gods, or literally whatever) to actually try to get the hell out of there.
So we’re all sitting here watching going “Oh my god they’re gonna nab Patricia and make her evil! 😰” because we have context; Eddie has absolutely none. It’s also really important for later on that his vision ends when the sarcophagus door shuts. It’s framed as incredibly final, and for all Eddie knows, they’ve just stuffed Patricia in what he knows is a tiny cramped space and locked the door behind her. He thinks that at best they are going to kidnap her or, at worst, straight up kill her. Nothing in that vision indicates she’s walking out of there at all.
When Patricia ran off after the fake messages, Eddie is concerned for a lot of different reasons, but the two primary ones are the obvious “oh my god my girlfriend thinks I cheated on her what do I do???” and the other is “if she’s run off on her own, the adults could fulfill my vision!” But then she turns back up, which should be clear to us by now means that he thinks she’s safe. He’s waiting for her (for any of them) to disappear. But when none of them do, they think it’s fine. It’s not that Eddie doesn’t think Patricia is in danger of becoming a Sinner, he just doesn’t realize what that would actually look like.
Even when they’re all in the hallway morbidly joking about having to give up sinning, the language KT uses is telling of what they think being a Sinner means: “We don’t want to accidentally help out Team Evil [by sinning].” Of course, this statement works with the knowledge the audience has of everything, but if Sibuna actually knew what they were dealing with, KT would have said something more like “We don’t want to get captured/turned by Team Evil.” The jokes they’re making are still morbid, but because they think you just get put in the sarcophagus and that’s the end of it.
Let’s flash forward again to the phonograph getting smashed and Eddie’s second vision that prompts the witch hunt panic in the first place. The vision can be separated into three parts: 1) Eddie sees a hooded figure smash the phonograph (okay Sibuna already knows someone did it on purpose, not too crazy); 2) Robert approaches him creepily and has the mic-drop moment of “it was one of your little friends; you have a viper in your nest” (seriously what a raw line of dialogue… but also now Eddie is being told that there is a traitor. Pretty cut and dry); 3) he turns around and sees every other member of Sibuna mockingly throw up the Sibuna sign (uh oh!)
So here is where people (including me!) always got a little annoyed with Eddie for not doing the math. But upon several rewatches and actually listening to what everyone was saying, never once do any of the kids ever bring up the word “Sinner” during the entirety of this whodunnit arc. And that’s simply because it’s not even a thought that crosses their minds. The language they use is very telling: “traitor” and “betrayal” being the heavy hitters. If any of them actually had context for what was actually going on, the language they would be using would be more like “victim” or literally just “Sinner” as a noun. But they don’t, which is why they’re so hostile toward one another… and why KT was screwed from the moment Eddie had that vision.
Because the fact that they don’t know that a Sinner is an evil version of themselves (not just someone whose soul is being used as a power generator), means that on a subconscious level Fabian, Alfie, and even Eddie already assumed KT was guilty. And Sinner!Patricia knew that, and that’s why she was so easily able to pivot and pin it on her. KT was directly linked to Frobisher, and Fabian and Alfie had already been suspicious of her at the start of the season for other reasons. It’s why Fabian let Patricia help him with the finger printing in the first place: because he doesn’t believe it’s her. And Eddie would have no real reason to suspect Patricia for three reasons: 1) Because he’s in love with her; 2) Because he knows just how long Patricia (and Fabian, and Alfie) have been loyal to Sibuna and to each other; 3) Because he, like everyone else, was looking at this betrayal as a willing capitulation to the Team Evil.
The first time Sibuna becomes aware that a Sinner is an entity that they have to actually watch out for walking about (as opposed to just having to watch out becoming), is after KT and Harriet manage to escape Patricia in the Gatehouse. Harriet clearly knows what a Sinner is bc she has the presence of mind to actually explain (vaguely, of course, because she’s drugged to kingdom come) to KT what she’d just narrowly escaped.
And then when she confronts Sibuna and Patricia in the hallway after Miss Crocodile Tears is telling tales about KT trying to kidnap her, KT drops the bomb on the boys: “She was trying to make me a Sinner just like her!” Pause. Record scratch. Okay. Now everything they thought they knew about the situation is completely recontextualized as something much more sinister than what they initially thought. Because I’d always struggled with how cruel they were being to KT, especially if they thought it wasn’t her fault. But everything up until this point deeply suggests or rather expects us to understand that Sibuna only had two pieces of an 100 piece puzzle, and that them being mean to KT was because they thought she actually betrayed them.
With all of this in mind, Eddie is not stupid for not figuring it out right away. In fact, without knowing what a Sinner actually is, it would be an insane leap to assume Patricia had anything to do with the phonograph.
I’ve basically talked myself and all of you in several circles, but the bottom line is the show didn’t do a fabulous job of telling us that Sibuna had no clue what they were up against. It’s easy for us to sit back and go “what the hell is wrong with them are they stupid?” because we have all the knowledge of what’s going on eons before they do. This is a far more charitable read of the characters’ choices and thought process, and the only way any of their actions make any sense. In fact, this is less of a theory and more of what is… literally canon, I guess
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I can't stop thinking of Kyanako's Order of Attack au... there's something so moving to me about how things getting so much worse could be what finally causes Amane to get better -- seeing Fuuta dying may be the final straw of getting her to rethink her rejection of medicine. Been a while since I've attempted something whump-y, this was fun to work with.
Tw for mentions/contemplation of death. I don't go into detail about the cult but the doctrines are implied through it all.
Fuuta was not a big fan of dying.
When he imagined his own death, he always pictured it as something dramatic and fast. Action heroes going out in a show of explosions and gunfire. Fantasy characters meeting the shining end of a blade. Even when he accepted his place in Milgram, it filled his mind with images of gallows and electric chairs.
Whatever this slow, lengthy fever was, it was pissing him off.
He’d lost all sense of time. He could no longer tell which hour the prison bells were marking -- morning and night blended together. Dreaming and waking blended together. His head injury and broken leg and broken bones blended together. It was all just pain at the end of the day. He had nonstop visitors that kept him awake and asked him too many questions and prodded his injuries and made his head spin. Somehow, he was simultaneously alone every time he rolled over to talk to someone. Painfully, suffocatingly alone.
If Kotoko was going to kill him with those ridiculous emo boots of hers, she should have just done it. He was losing his mind here: devoid of all energy, suffering through broken bones and a cracked head, and boiling in an increasingly fiery fever. Maybe that was the reason he stopped commenting when he watched Amane pocket the medicine Shidou had left him. Maybe that was why he’d stopped following Shidou’s instructions himself. Even after losing an eye and taking a beating herself, Amane always looked at peace. He was tired of dealing with all of this. He wanted a bit of that peace.
Regardless of why, it was working. His fever had quickly gone from the biggest pain in his ass to the very thing that dulled his racing thoughts.
He awoke suddenly, or maybe he’d already been awake. He couldn’t feel anything in his limbs. There was only a breathless heat around him. He raised himself into a sitting position, looking for a drink. Moving his head felt like one of those glitching computer windows that leaves a trail of copies behind it. The room swam around him. His eyes moved absently around him.
Fuuta picked up the glass that someone had left him. His fingers were clumsy, and it immediately went crashing to the ground. He hardly heard the noise as it broke apart on the concrete below.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed. He’d just go get a drink himself. Shidou told him not to get up without help. But what did he know? Thinking of the man ordering him around only drove Fuuta to step out of bed even quicker. He cried out, pain shooting through his leg. That was right, it was broken…
Fuuta looked down, finding himself on the ground. It was so hot. Maybe this is what she felt, he thought numbly. Was it this slow for her too? Probably not. She had no regrets to fill the time like he did. The heroes got quick, beautiful deaths, and it was the villains who had to suffer the long ones.
He lifted his right palm from where it had caught his fall. The shattered glass on the floor had cut into it. Shattered glass? What had broken? He stared blankly at the blood dripping down.
He didn’t have the strength to raise himself up. He was burning. Why was he on the ground? Was he bleeding? He could barely breathe. What was he doing here, anyway? He just wanted to curl up and sleep. He was so weak... just to lie down... he wouldn't have the strength to get back up again. Was that such a bad thing...?
A voice caught his attention. His eyes struggled to focus on the figure who’d come running into the cell. He couldn’t understand a word of what she was saying, but he was happy when she pressed her cool little hands against his forehead.
He allowed her to prop him up next to the bed. She held onto his hand, squeezing it tight. Why was she holding it like that? That hand was bleeding. When did that happen?
Her arms wrapped tightly around him. He wanted to shove her away -- it was too hot -- but couldn’t. In his ear, he could make out her words. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please, Fuuta. Don’t leave me alone. I’m so sorry...”
As she pulled back, he recognized Amane. Her uninjured eye was filled with tears. Was she upset? He thought he’d been making her happy. He wanted to keep making her happy. He’d never made anyone happy before.
He opened his mouth to say something, but no words would come out. They all scrambled up in his mouth. He felt the cell swirling around him.
Amane raised her voice. She looked desperately upwards. “This can’t be --! This isn’t right!”
Fuuta looked up at the ceiling. There was nothing there.
“I can’t do this anymore.”
She continued talking. Fuuta was too busy studying the ceiling. She was shouting. Or maybe crying. Fuuta didn’t like that she was so upset. Huh, had there been someone there? He surveyed the empty cell. What was he doing on the ground?
He looked down at his hand. The sheet from his bed had been pulled down and wrapped hastily around it. Why? His eyes felt sticky as he blinked. Everything hurt. It was so hot. What was going on? He was so angry. He was so scared. He wanted to cry. Why was he here? Why couldn’t he just hurry up and die already?
The next time she entered, Fuuta recognized Amane instantly. Her one hand pointed to him, the other held onto someone else. The second figure hurried over to him.
Fuuta was not a big fan of dying. Shidou reassured him he wouldn’t.
—
“You’re wearing the eyepatch,” Fuuta observed.
He was playing a dangerous game, drawing attention to it like that. He was too exhausted, and his curiosity won out over his better judgment. If Amane was going to explode with one of her typical speeches, he’d just let her.
She didn’t.
Amane’s hand drifted up to her eye. It had been hastily covered before, but now it was cleaned and wrapped in professional-grade materials. She simply said, “Kajiyama Fuuta. How do you feel?”
“Like shit.”
“But--”
“-- But I’m better, yeah.”
Amane nodded, her shoulders releasing.
“Oi, I haven’t seen you in a while. Not since…” He wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence. Shidou had told him what happened, but it was difficult to believe. He couldn’t quite trust his own memory of the night. No matter how much clearer his mind felt since receiving proper treatment, those days of fever still muddled together. He heard that Amane had up and switched her beliefs overnight -- she was now complacent about all of Shidou's treatments -- but Fuuta knew people didn't just change like that. He wanted to hear it for himself.
She lowered her gaze in shame. “I… I thought you hated me.” Her voice was steady. “As you should. I almost killed you. I accept any ill will you may feel.”
“I -- what? You’re wrong. You… it wasn’t…” He grabbed his head, grunting in frustration.
After standing awkwardly in the entryway the whole time, Amane took a few steps inside. She made it to his bedside when he finally collected his thoughts.
“It was your fucked up family or whatever that caused everything. They did this. And I went along and made things worse.” He looked away. His next words felt stupid to say to a little kid. He felt like the most pathetic, weak, loser. But it was too important not to say.
“They almost killed me. You saved me.”
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