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sunbrights · 7 years

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dvd commentary: viewfinder

(For anon, because I also have a special place in my heart for "viewfinder", and I wanted to talk about it more.

This isn't going to go on AO3, for a few reasons that I'll spare you guys from getting into, but I know that Tumblr isn't very kind to long text posts. If this is a pain to read let me know and I'll try to find another alternative!

I hope you guys enjoy!)

I originally wanted to write "viewfinder" as the first of a series of quickfics exploring friendships that have a lot of potential, in my opinion, but don't get a lot of screentime for whatever reason. I really enjoy both Peko and Mahiru as characters, though, and the longer I went the more I wanted to do a deeper dive, which is how it came to be what is now.

(I still want to do something similar to what I was originally planning, though I don't think they'll be quickfics anymore; probably longer oneshots like this one. I do have another fic planned in the same vein that's intended to be a sort of companion to "viewfinder," though that might be a while out.)

Essentially, I was interested first by the fact that Peko mentions Mahiru a few times in her FTEs, which leaves open the possibility for them to be friends even if it's never looked at explicitly in the main game. There are a lot of peppered references to both Peko's and Mahiru's FTEs in here as a result of that (which may or may not have already been obvious). Second, I was interested in the impact on Peko of having to kill her, outside of the consequences for herself and Fuyuhiko in the context of the killing game, especially if the two of them had been friends beforehand. Striking a balance between those two concepts, tonally, was really tough, but in the end I decided I didn't want to leave either one of them out.

Nitty gritty commentary under the cut!

** **

Koizumi has taken at least four photographs of her since they arrived on the island. One was a group photo, taken the first day; the other three were taken covertly, when she thought Peko wasn’t aware. (Peko cannot afford not to be aware.)

I really agonized over how many photos Mahiru would reasonably have taken at this point. I think this number (and the one later, when Mahiru shows Peko all of them) changed at least five or six times. Why?? I have no idea. Weird hang ups in editing hell.

She does the same with the others, with similar frequency; most of them rarely notice, if ever. Peko allows it because she sees no reason not to, but she does consider the possibility of Koizumi having goals beyond a few candid photographs.

(She brings this up to the young master, and he rolls his eyes.

“Koizumi’s a fucking goody-goody,” he says, feet kicked up on the edge of his desk. “She’s not worth worrying about. If it bugs you, tell her to knock it off. Otherwise, I don’t give a shit what she does.”)

The next time Koizumi takes a photo of her, Peko is out splitting coconuts on the beach. It starts out as just her, Mioda, and a handful of others, but once they start shouting about the quality of the coconut juice, it isn’t long before the rest of the class begins to file in.

This section was tough to get right, and a lot of it ended up getting cut; I almost ended up cutting the whole section (I did a couple times, I think), but I'm glad I was eventually able to get it where I wanted it. The coconut special event in particular felt like a good starting place to me because it's the earliest point that we see Peko bonding and socializing with the others, even if she didn't really intend to.

At one point Souda, Hinata, and Mioda hold six coconuts out in a line; Peko slices through all of them in a single swing, and hears the familiar snap of Koizumi’s shutter behind her.

The others all whoop as the tops of the coconuts hit the sand. Koizumi rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling even as she steps back. When they start handing out the remaining shells, Peko brings one over to her.

“I was wondering,” she says, after Koizumi has taken the first sip of her juice, “would it be all right for me to see that photo?”

“The one I just took of you? Sure, if you want.” Koizumi pulls on the strap of her camera to swing it back up towards her. It looks unwieldy to hold in one hand, but she does it without much effort at all. “Don’t worry, you look really cool in it.”

The digital display of the camera is grainy and cluttered with functional symbols, but the most important parts of the image are clear. Peko discovers that she isn’t the subject of the photo, as she’d assumed— instead, she is the dynamic foreground to the actual subjects: Souda, Hinata, and Mioda, their hands held out and their faces lit up in varying degrees of awe, fear, and delight. The line of Peko’s shoulders and the draw of her blade act as a frame for the smiles of her classmates.

(Peko can also tell that her form is off: she’s holding her right shoulder too high, and it caused the cut in the final coconut to be uneven. It’s hardly Koizumi’s fault, but having such laziness immortalized will bother her for days.)

“What do you think?”

“It’s... surprising.”

“‘Surprising’?” Koizumi draws the word out. It’s the wrong one, going by the way her brows pinch together. She twists the camera back towards herself to squint at the display. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Peko struggles to elaborate. It’s difficult to find the words to describe something when she isn’t certain of what it is in the first place. “It could have simply captured the trick they asked me to perform,” she decides on, “but instead it captures the feelings of everyone involved.” She hesitates, then clarifies: “I like it.”

Peko's much better than Hajime at giving the kind of feedback Mahiru likes to hear. She's a thoughtful character in general, but I also think she'd be familiar with what helpful feedback sounds like, sort of a counterpoint to her own criticism of herself above.

Koizumi looks up at her, eyebrows lifting. “Yeah.” She smiles, and it’s easy and friendly. “Yeah, that’s it exactly, actually. Thank you.”

Mahiru's smiles get mentioned a lot in this story, which is intentional; Peko's hyperawareness of them is meant to play into her own self-consciousness over struggling with smiling herself.

“You’re welcome,” Peko says, even if she doesn’t understand what she has to be thanked for. Koizumi seems pleased regardless, and she leans over to show Peko the other photos she’d taken so far.

There’s no harm in letting her keep taking them, she decides.

They have lunch together, sometimes. Both she and Koizumi tend to eat earlier than the others, so the hotel restaurant is often empty; on the days when neither of them are away doing other things, they sit out on the balcony and Koizumi shows her the photos she’d taken that morning.

“You know, I actually had something I wanted to talk to you about,” Koizumi says one day, dimming a photo of Togami and his spread of breakfast from her camera’s display. She pulls a small, squat album out of her camera bag and lays it out on the table between them. “Here. These are all the pictures I’ve taken of you so far.”

By Peko’s tally, Koizumi has taken six photos of her: the four she’d already been aware of, the one of her slicing the coconuts, and an additional group photo since.

In this album, there are eight.

I feel like a talent like Mahiru's has to be multifaceted; she's creatively and technically talented, obviously, but she also has to be adept enough to physically take photographs in a way that captures moments without imparting an observer effect.

That, and I think it creates a point of commonality between Peko's talent and Mahiru's (Peko being constantly aware of herself and her surroundings vs Mahiru separating herself from her surroundings in order to document them) that helps make them peers, in a backwards sort of way.

“I feel like I must be getting something wrong,” Koizumi says. She leans her chin on one hand, and the puff of her sigh scatters her bangs. “No matter what I do, I can’t seem to get the right shot of you.”

Peko touches the edge of a photo of herself leaning on the hotel restaurant’s railing. She tries to remember when it possibly could have been taken. “I don’t understand.”

“Well… Okay, look at this one.” Koizumi taps her nail against one of the group shots on the page: all eight girls standing together, smudged with chocolate and flour. “You had fun that day, right? At least, I thought you did.”

“Yes,” Peko answers. She studies the photo, trying to understand the flaw. The form is excellent and the colors are bright; it’s everything one would expect from Koizumi’s talent. “I… enjoy baking, sometimes. It was a welcome distraction.”

I like the idea of Peko enjoying cooking, especially baking, in spite of her not liking sweets. (The logic being that it's something fun she can do, and the results can be shared with people she cares about to make them happy, too.) Y'all probably can probably see that cropping up in a few stories of mine.

“But you’re the only one not smiling in the picture.” Koizumi flips the pages of her album back and forth. “See? You’re not smiling in any of them. This one kind of comes close,” she touches an image of Peko sitting together with Tanaka and Mioda while the Four Dark Devas of Destruction explore a sand castle, “but I’m not sure it counts. You look happy, but you’re not really smiling.”

This is the first reference to a FTE, specifically Peko's third one:

PEKO: Mahiru told me that... I'm the only one who doesn't smile for her pictures.

Oh. It’s about that. Peko closes her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “It wasn’t my intention to ruin your photos.” If Koizumi’s goal is to capture moments of positivity in their circumstances, it makes sense that Peko wouldn’t fit into that vision. “If you’d rather I avoid being in them from now on, I understand.”

“What?” Peko feels Koizumi’s hand clasp around her wrist. When she opens her eyes, Koizumi has her other hand splayed out over the open page of the album. “No, no. That’s not what I’m saying at all, Peko-chan. I just thought... maybe there are other times when you’re having more fun, you know? Maybe I should take pictures of you then instead.”

I think ultimately Mahiru's photos celebrate mundane joy in her friends' lives; I don't think she'd want them to be a source of anxiety for anyone, especially not a friend.

Even through Koizumi’s fingers, Peko can see how the photos of her don’t fit in well with the ones on the opposite page. There is a clear interruption in the theme of the collection. Looking again, she doesn’t know how she didn’t notice it the first time.

“It isn’t that,” she says. “Smiling can be… a challenge, for me. It may be more efficient for you to focus on the others.”

“Oh.” Koizumi’s forehead creases in what Peko assumes is a combination of sympathy and confusion. “Well, that’s okay. It’s not really about the smiles themselves, anyway. It’s more… whether or not you’re happy in the moment.” She smiles then, one that’s small and apologetic, and for a moment Peko can’t fathom it ever being that easy. “So don’t worry about it. Okay?”

Peko says, “I’ll try,” and means it.

She still thinks about it for the rest of the afternoon.

Koizumi takes fewer photos in the days after Hanamura’s execution. It’s understandable; there aren’t many causes for any of them to be smiling in that aftermath. She spends most of her mornings and afternoons out away from the others, but when Peko asks to see the photos, she declines. (“I’ve never been proud of my landscapes,” she admits. “It always feels like there’s something missing.”)

Little crossover tidbit: Natsumi preferring to take pictures of nature in "by the claw of dragon" is a reference to my headcanon here that Mahiru doesn't enjoy it much.

The next time she arrives at the hotel restaurant early enough for lunch, she’s the brightest Peko has seen her in days.

“Peko-chan! Look, I have a surprise for you.”

She slides onto the opposite bench and sets her lunch aside, an afterthought. “I was right, I think.” She unzips one of the outside pockets of her camera bag to produce a photo, newly printed. “I just needed to get the right shot of you.”

Having said the above re: Mahiru not wanting her photos to be a source of anxiety for people, I do think that she would keep trying, and that she probably would have been one of the best people (next to Hajime) to help Peko get past her mental blocks.

Peko doesn’t understand. She’d only been practicing with Hinata for a couple days, and his comedic timing leaves much to be desired. “Is that…?”

“It sure is.” Koizumi’s smile is proud and eager. “Here, see for yourself.”

She slides the photo across the table, and Peko draws it toward herself with the tip of her finger, careful not to smudge.

It’s a picture of her from earlier that morning. Her, and the young master.

“What do you know, right? I was so worried he was going to ruin it.” Koizumi sets her chin in both hands, and Peko can see the way her smile flattens out sardonically. “But it turns out even Kuzuryuu can take a nice picture every now and then.”

It is a nice picture. The angle is high, and neither she nor the young master have noticed the camera; Koizumi must have taken it from the restaurant stairs. She vaguely remembers the moment: she’d passed him on her way out of the hotel, and had only paused to say good morning. She remembers him, half turned towards her with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders and his smile relaxed. In Koizumi’s photo, she smiles back.

His singular order from the very first day had been to maintain the illusion that they were only classmates. They look it, in this picture. He’d be satisfied with it, she thinks.

Not sure how obvious this is, but the picture described here is intended to be the one Fuyuhiko mentions during chapter 5, if you talk to him in the hotel restaurant before going to the ruins with Sonia.

FUYUHIKO: It's the first time... I've seen a photo of Peko and me where we look like equals... FUYUHIKO: Tch, Mahiru... When the hell did she even take this photo?

“Sorry,” Koizumi says, after a moment. Her voice is gentler, and when Peko looks up her brows have drawn together, concerned. Oh. She’d misinterpreted Peko’s silence as offense. “I didn’t mean to— just be careful, Peko-chan, okay? I know you’re trying to help him and all, but that guy is bad news. You shouldn’t get involved with him.”

I figure that if anyone would have picked up on the fact that Peko is the one constantly "bumping into" Fuyuhiko and ferrying information back and forth to him, it would be Mahiru.

“He is… abrasive,” Peko allows. (She has rehearsed this answer in her head many times.) Koizumi’s brows disappear behind her bangs. “We shouldn’t let our guard down. But I think with time he might be open to cooperation.”

“Peko-chan.” Koizumi’s voice is still gentle, but has dropped low enough to not quite be called a whisper; it borderlines on conspiratorial. She chooses every word with careful deliberation. “This is the only picture I’ve been able to take of you smiling, even a little bit. Ever. Okay?”

Peko wills herself not to react, even as she feels her face and fingertips go cold. If she has in any way compromised—

“I’m not going to pretend I get it. Because I swear to every god there is, I don’t.” Her smile turns lopsided and embarrassed, and all at once Peko understands the sort of assumption she’s made. Her cold cheeks suddenly flush warm. “Seriously. That guy? Really?”

She has not rehearsed an answer for this.

Something in her expression must balk, because Koizumi holds both hands up, defensive. “No, it’s okay. I’m not going to ask, just—” She bites her lip, and Peko sees the way she rehearses her words in her head. “A guy like that, the kind of world he comes from? He’s not ever going to change. He’s too wrapped up in himself and his image to bother. Maybe he’s not dangerous yet, but he’s definitely not worth your time. Or anybody else’s, for that matter.”

Combine the above with how aggressively Mahiru and Fuyuhiko butt heads right out of the gate, and I ended up with this conversation. Mahiru wants Peko to be happy, but she also doesn't want her getting caught up with someone she sees as unreliable, self-absorbed, and dangerous. The friction that comes from that in Peko and Mahiru's friendship is inevitable, in my opinion, especially since Mahiru doesn't have all the context.

“We are in a dire situation,” Peko hears herself say. “Our only hope of success is through cooperation.”

Koizumi’s expression twists. “No, no. I know. You’re right.” She turns the photo on the table back toward her, and looks at that instead of at Peko. “But you have to admit, he’s not exactly falling over himself to cooperate with us, either.”

The young master wouldn’t disagree. Peko only shakes her head.

“I’m just saying, as a friend? You don’t need to bend over backwards to help someone who obviously doesn’t want it.” Koizumi picks the photo up by the corner, and is careful not to bend it when she puts it back in her bag. She zips the pocket closed with more force than she needs to. “Let him deal with his own problems.”

And a little dramatic irony, for flavor.

She is wrong, in more ways than she’ll ever understand.

That morning, the young master knocks on her door first.

Not pictured: me grappling with the timeline of chapter 2 to make any of this work, after I realized just how short it is between Fuyuhiko playing Twilight Syndrome and Mahiru's death. Say what you want about his yakuza talents, my boy can crank out a revenge plot like it's a frickin' office memo.

The photos must have been taken in the heat of the moment, but their composition is still stark and harshly beautiful. The framing of Natsumi-sama’s blood-spattered corpse makes excellent use of the rule of thirds.

Peko says, “Koizumi,” before the young master has had a chance to say anything at all.

When he throws the open envelope across the length of her cottage, the rest of the photos spill and scatter across her floor like fallen leaves.

Peko offers to be the one to deliver the message, but the young master insists he do it himself. She watches the mailbox instead, to ensure his message is heard and understood.

By noon, the mailbox is empty.

Koizumi doesn’t respond immediately. It’s understandable; if the young master doesn’t remember the incident, it’s unlikely she does, either. Peko watches for her anyway, and late in the afternoon, Koizumi sits on the deck of her cottage with the largest of her photo albums in her lap.

Peko knows it to be the one with the final prints of her photos, after she’s had time to crop and color balance them. Her face is lined with concentration and stress, less like reminiscing and more like personal critique, but Peko has made enough threats in her lifetime to see the fear around every edge, in the shakiness of Koizumi’s muscles and the tightness of her mouth.

If you've read some of my other stuff, you might have seen that I like to write in very, very close third person. That makes communicating the arcs of characters who aren't the POV character (through the filter of the POV character) a fun challenge for me, and this is a good example of me trying to do that with Mahiru. I wanted to highlight the point after Mahiru has seen the pictures but before she's played Twilight Syndrome, when she must have recognized the pictures as hers but been shocked and afraid by the contents. Peko interprets it a little differently.

The message has both been heard and understood.

That confirmed, there is no reason for Peko to interact with her any further, now that she’s been identified as an enemy of the Kuzuryuu Clan. Clearly, Peko has made a grave error in underestimating her as a potential threat; any further mistakes would only exacerbate the damage.

However, since arriving on the island the young master has had only one, singular request.

This is intended to be the first conflict between Peko's duty as a "tool" and the new friendships she's been making -- she uses her duty as an excuse to keep hanging out with Mahiru, right after she points out to herself that she shouldn't.

Peko holds out her hand to get Koizumi’s attention.

“I wasn’t back in time for lunch today,” she explains. “Could I look at your photos with you now instead?”

Koizumi still smiles, even if it’s thin. “Yeah. Here, come sit with me.”

Ordinarily, Koizumi is happy enough to talk through her photographs while Peko observes, the whens and whats more than the hows and whys. (“My work needs to speak for itself,” Koizumi had said, the one time Peko had asked, “If I have to explain it, then I didn’t do my job right.”) Today they sit in silence while she pages through the album, one by one.

Many of these final prints are ones that Peko has yet to see. Owari and Nidai, bloodied and grinning, grasping each other’s forearms. Saionji with two packets of gummy bears flared out in front of her face like twin fans. Souda with a screwdriver in one hand and Nanami’s Gamegirl in the other, and Nanami sitting beside him, reaching for it with both hands. Hanamura in the hotel kitchen, flipping flapjacks in a pan while Mioda cheers in the background.

You might have noticed by now that I had a lot of fun coming up with different scenarios for Mahiru's photos in this fic. I was always a little sad we didn't get to see more of them!

(There is exactly one picture of Koizumi herself, where she isn’t in a group. The photo isn’t candid, but she doesn’t look prepared, and the framing is sloppy. When Koizumi reaches it in the album, she’s quick to turn the page.)

This is intended to be the picture Hajime takes of her in her final FTE:

MAHIRU: So... I was thinking about taking at least one shot of myself while I'm on this island. MAHIRU: The me... who's here like this...

“I know that it’s not the most groundbreaking subject matter ever,” Koizumi says eventually, “but that’s fine. People don’t need their lives to be groundbreaking, or dramatic, or- or tragic for there to be beauty in them. You know?”

She turns the page, and her fingers land on a photograph of Hinata caught mid-sentence, his mouth open too wide and his eyes halfway through blinking. It makes her smile, a real one that isn’t pained or forced. For that moment, the lines of stress and fear on her face smooth out into nothing.

And again, this is intended to be the photo Mahiru takes of Hajime in her first FTE:

MAHIRU: Well, I guess this is good enough. Yep, that sure is a dumb-looking face.

“Yes,” Peko answers. “I think so.”

Koizumi’s allotted time runs out. The young master is not inclined to give her more.

More evidence of me playing fast and loose with said unreal ch 2 timeline.

This whole section actually wasn't in the original draft of this story, and I waffled a lot on whether or not I should include it; I wanted Fuyuhiko's influence to be felt, but I didn't actually want to include him in the story itself too much. In the end I decided I needed it to bridge the arc I wanted for Peko in the story, which I'll get into in a minute.

“I’ll go with you,” Peko tells him, when they’re alone.

“No.” He’s bent over his desk, which is neat and nearly empty now that Koizumi has the photographs. All that’s left are the letters he’s just written, folded and stacked and ready to set a plan in motion. He won’t look at her. “No. Your plans aren’t changing, okay? Go- go do your thing with the girls. I’ll be done before then anyway.”

That is not an option. She can’t agree, so she doesn’t.

“I’m going to talk to her,” he goes on. His voice trembles under the weight of all his anger and anxiety. “And if that bitch has something to answer for, she’ll fucking answer for it. That’s the only thing I can do, right? That’s what Natsumi deserves.”

Peko hears it, the way his resolve doesn’t shore up the way he wants it to. There are fractures in his certainty of what he’s been taught, and every day they get a little wider; his heart is too big and beats too strongly for them not to. He struggles with it, but there is strength in struggle, not shame.

One of the remaining blank sheets of paper crumples under his left hand. He hears the fractures too, but they sound different to him than they do to her.

There is so much weighing him down.

She wants to take it away from him, or at least help him shoulder the burden. But Koizumi’s philosophies, Hinata’s advice and encouragement— all of it fails her in the moment, when it matters the most. She remembers when they were small and cold and lost in the mountains, how his face had pinched with fear and tears, how she’d failed him then, too.

Like I mentioned earlier, I was interested in Peko and Mahiru's FTEs, especially in the larger context of the main plot. If you WERE to finish Peko's FTEs before the, uh, cutoff point, for example, her later ones would necessarily need to fall around/during all the behind-the-scenes fuckery happening in chapter 2. So, with that in mind, here's this from her fourth FTE:

PEKO: Mahiru showed me her photos the other day. They were filled with images of smiling faces. PEKO: I don't know how else to say this, but... they were very nice photos. I learned that smiles give people power. [ ... ] PEKO: If I had been able to smile and tell him that everything was going to be okay, even if it was a lie... PEKO: I might've been able to take away his fear.

The other piece of this is the fact that Peko wants to protect Fuyuhiko, but she doesn't do it by stopping him from killing Mahiru, which would protect everyone. In this story, I wanted to open the door to the possibility that Peko may have wanted to try and convince him away from it, through her interactions with Mahiru and Hajime and the others, but struggled with it because of the nature of her "role." In my mind, this is the point where that door shuts again, and she falls back on what she knows.

She says, “Young master—” but he’s already standing.

“Don’t call me that. Just- go, all right? I don’t have a lot of time.” He tucks the letters into the inside pocket of his jacket. “We’ll talk when it’s done.”

"I don't have a lot of time" was an inside joke with myself about how dumb the timeline of ch 2 is. That shit really got to me, y'all.

Koizumi is pale that morning. It makes her concealer too dark against her skin, and when she lowers her head shadows still steal into the bags under her eyes. Her hands shake when she waves at Peko from across the pool.

“Morning, Peko-chan.” Koizumi breathes in deeply, for no reason Peko can see except to steady her voice. “You’re still going to the beach with everyone today, right?”

Peko nods.

“That’s good.” Koizumi nods, too. She keeps nodding, and looks down at her hands. “I’m glad. It sounds like it’ll be a lot of fun.”

Mahiru is in a pretty dark place at this point, but her priority (like it is with Mikan and Ibuki) is still that her friends are happy and have fun. There's always tomorrow, right?

“You won’t be coming with us?”

Peko knows the answer. She asks the question anyway, because she must. Because as much as she feels for Koizumi’s position, the young master’s safety comes first, and his will comes second. There is no choice to be made.

Again: she wants to protect him, but going against his wishes to do that isn't an option. The rest of this is intended to be Peko turning to fully embrace the "tool" mentality she thinks she's supposed to have after slipping from it.

“No. I’m sorry, I wish I could.” She is hugging her arms close to herself. Her fingers tighten around her elbows until the skin under her nails turns white. “I just... I have something I need to take care of. But you should go have fun, okay?”

“You’ll be missed,” Peko tells her. It isn’t a lie, except by omission, but she still feels like something has been wedged deep beneath her sternum. “We’ll take photos. For your record.”

Peko's not talking about the beach trip. In case anybody wasn't sure.

“I’d like that. Thanks.” Even now, even with all this, Koizumi is still able to smile. For all her practicing, Peko is sure she’s learned nothing at all. “Have you seen Ibuki-chan anywhere?”

In the end, Koizumi never sees her approach. It’s a stroke of luck Peko doesn’t deserve, but the outcome would not have changed regardless. She will protect who she must protect. Kill who she must kill. If she can do nothing else, she can do that.

The young master reaches for his weapon, and she is there.

There was originally a transitive verb in the second clause of this sentence (I forget exactly how I phrased it) that didn't get changed to what it is now ("she is there") until the final edit. Ultimately I changed it because I wanted to emphasize Peko's attempt to take agency away from herself, especially in the context of the narrative she pushes in the trial later.

#this was actually quicker to do than i expected #so i think i'll also do one for shelf sea #since that got requested too #it feels a little like drawing back the curtain to show you guys the patchwork mess underneath tho #nerve wracking!!#i hope this is sort of what you were looking for anon!#dvd commentaries #meta thoughts #not a fic

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