sits

help i immediately got distracted reading unlocks

ok well first off i think it's hilarious that everyone from sprace went into this saying we had to make it better for him than last time and then he had a much worse time this time actually

last time he just had one and a half romantic rejections depending on whether you count ichiban on the epilogue

this time he had two romantic rejections, one partner rejection, and one executioner rejection so it was truly impressive

last game i was like, damn it's so improbable how he ended up on this actual meaningful cr path mostly due to accumulated w0/w1 trauma between his roommate immediately dying and leaving him alone and then him getting fucked up by cyoa on w1, no way lightning would strike twice if i played him again

the way his development went here was in some ways very similar WHICH I DIDN'T EXPECT but also very different in other ways

in sprace it was like-- none of what happened there was SUPPOSED to happen, they were supposed to just be space amazon drivers and w0 was very lighthearted and he was really relaxed! and then the deaths happening in a really unexpected and scary way shook him really badly

it was this unexpected extreme genre shift from comedy to survival horror that he wasn't prepared for and didn't know how to deal with since there was no clear reason for it, and then when everyone stayed dead and things didn't go back to being funny he had an existential crisis realizing that maybe this wasn't fiction anymore and everything wouldn't be ok

and losing his roommate + the cyoa happening right after that where he saw all his brothers die and he had no real reason to think it wasn't real because it was the first cyoa and it was a planned mission made him like, a lot more sensitive to loss than he usually would be

so he latched onto people more easily and had fonder feelings for them than he ever would in any other situation

in scawwy everything was obviously a horror movie parody from the very beginning so he was just like sigh well i guess this is what we're doing... and then even when the ritual stuff got revealed it was still like, they had people in charge of this who knew what was going on, they had a set schedule, even once people started dying there was a set process

and the overseers could give them details about what happened and stuff, so it was like, we knew exactly why everything was happening even if it sucked, so it felt a lot more scripted, and he was just like, ok, i'm just in this shitty horror thing for two months, whatever, i've just got to try not to die

though he wasn't even SUPER concerned about that since he's died plenty of times including one one time that was real enough that he went to hell for a while and their friends still busted them out of there in the end so

it was just kind of a well it'd probably turn out fine but dying still sucks and i don't want to do it and i'm not SURE it would be fine

he had pretty much no emotional investment at all in anything that happened w0 aside from being traumatized by leeches and developing an insane grudge against a middle schooler who he still fully wanted to destroy by game end

oh another thing that was different was that w0 in sprace was thoughtshare so he got doxxed re: having a bunch of brothers and being a neet and all that shit immediately and never had a chance to lie

when he was here without anyone from his world and no one recognized him (except maybe ichiban a little) he was like sweet i can reinvent myself

he still had constraints because of his profile so he just went with a lie that was at least kind of close to the truth and said he was an actor but he hadn't had a lot of roles yet and mostly worked at a coffee shop

when like. it was eight years ago that he worked at the coffee shop, he's worked for maybe a month total in all the years since then and his last job was five years ago

he said absolutely nothing about having any brothers

never told anyone he was from an anime except mumu in the final week

anyway he was basically just being nice and pleasant because there were some pretty girls he wanted to have a chance with, and then after the murders started because he needed to make sure people liked him or at least found him inoffensive enough that they wouldn't pick him to execute if they didn't catch the real killer

also like — theater was just a fucking disaster for housing because he was in there with karma who loved terrorizing him and he was just like No and walked away forever after one night

and then the first murder happened there so then erin also said no thanks and moved out

so while groups like the haunted house were close knit and shared all this info and stuff with each other the theater was just immediately a diaspora and we basically never touched the housing post again

even though totty did like alfyn for being sympathetic and taking care of him after the leech disaster

and the leech thing was a big deal for him specifically because he's canonically scared of the dark and has to have one of his brothers go with him to the bathroom at night, and because he has a history of his brothers ganging up on him a lot, and he's just been in a lot of humiliating social situations so that was like

he was already having a hard time trying to sleep without his brothers next to him in a weird scary place so waking up covered in leeches after the first fucking night just validated those fears, and he also felt like it was a personal attack even though it literally wasn't and he only got the leech blanket because i rolled a 2

and everyone else in the theater rolled higher lmao

but he didn't know that!!!! so he felt like people were out to get him and wanted to humiliate him and it was just bad

plus he was legitimately scared of karma lmao because even if he was a middle schooler he was still taller and stronger than him and he seemed fucking insane and violent even if some of that was exacerbated by curses

so for the rest of w0 he had to really go hard on presenting himself as friendly and sympathetic because he was having to basically plead with people to let him stay in their housing instead and he was just like couch surfing one night at a time between the church and haunted house and stuff trying not to wear out his welcome anywhere

which was also very humiliating lmao

and it made him hate karma even more for, as he saw it, putting him in this situation

SO BASICALLY his w0 cr situation was like exactly the opposite of sprace where he came out of it having bonded with the bathroom curfew crew who went through this scary situation together

and this time he just felt personally victimized and suspicious of everyone

and then he went on a cyoa w1 again lmfao

siz asking me for his closest cr here and i was like uh

literally alfyn is the only person he has any sincere attachment to and he's also on this cyoa. he likes karlach and lavi ok for protecting him from karma and letting him sleep on his floor. he thinks robin and aerith are hot.

so robin ended up being his person in that cyoa based purely on him having this completely surface level shallow ass crush on her

because he really did not care about anyone

he was very relieved to have alfyn there on that cyoa though since he was literally the only person he trusted

he thought geto was kind of shady and he also just like felt threatened by having these modern japanese teenagers there because he was sure they were judging him and shit talking him behind his back

and pickles was a dog who kind of sassed him once and he doesn't like animals much in the first place

anyway here is that cyoa

the first section of it had them all finding someone from home hanging from a tree and i had to just pick one brother (i just picked jyushimatsu since he's the one totty has the least beef with) but it was hilarious because he still hadn't told anyone he had brothers so it probably looked like it was just a clone of himself and i was imagining like

the others seeing these important people from home and then just looking over there to see another todomatsu and assuming damn he's so self centered that the person he saw here was himself

which... would not have been inaccurate

anyway there was a big section after that where they were all split up and in different situations, and in his he was just back at home again like nothing had ever happened getting ready to go to this big social event that his canon frenemy atsushi had invited him to

atsushi, ftr. idk what is going on in their relationship because he keeps hooking totty up with these mixers and stuff even though he's a fucking douchebag to him in person and totty also invites him to things sometimes but then always regrets it and resents him. naturally this is the fandom's biggest ship besides matsucest

anyway he sucks and i love him

so HE WENT TO THIS PARTY which was basically laudna's memory which he had no fucking clue about at the time, so the party was hosted by the briarwoods and he met matilda there and it was literally the exact interaction i put in the AU memory in laudna's execution except what really happened was he was stopped to listen to delilah and then matilda disappeared

and then he got assaulted by vampires and blacked out and it was great

(it was not great and also it was a dude vampire so it wasn't even sexy)

anyway he woke up all disoriented afterward and the party was long over and he was a vampire or at least some kind of undead person though he did not realize that for a while... he went home and his house was empty and after a day or so he was like wtf so he went out looking for his family

the only people he knew who would actually talk to him at all were like uhhh we heard you got in some bad trouble at that party a couple weeks ago and they disappeared.... and everyone else was reacting to him like he was a monster and atsushi wasn't answering his FUCKING TEXTS

so he was kind of freaking out and was getting attacked by these random people, and at this point delilah got in his head to offer to help him, but he remembered her voice from the party and he was like, well, clearly this party was the root of all of my problems, so fuck you, actually???

and he was like well. even if they had to leave town they'll come back eventually. so he went home and waited alone for a month and a half and only stopped at that point because his phone service finally got shut off after the bill wasn't paid

but yeah, so. he was just alone in his house without ever going outside that whole time and was just dissociating and constantly thinking about how bad he fucked up and how he should have listened to matilda's concerns and gotten the hell out of there, and kept wondering if she'd ended up in the same situation or gotten killed or what

and then lmao

he finds out atsushi's fine and has been intentionally ignoring him and profited off this whole situation and he's just like. ok. and goes to murder him.

this was just cracking me up so bad

anyway he just murdered him in the middle of a crowd and it was less cartoony and less satisfying than he expected but he was like eh. no regrets. and obviously got arrested and thrown in jail. delilah in his head was still offering to help with this and he just ignored her completely because he gets so fucking stubborn when he feels like he's been wronged

and was absolutely not going to lower himself to accepting help from the bitch who got him into this even if it meant he was just going to be in jail forever

WHICH ENDED UP SERVING HIM VERY WELL because once they all reunited back at the tree again they had to fight her and each of the others had accepted her help to at least some extent so she had some power over all of them but! not him!!!!

she made geto turn on him and he tried to use the smallpox deity on him which put me in the very funny situation of having to see if smallpox vaccines were still being given when he was a kid in the 50s (they were) and if they'd still be effective after 70 years (probably not????) but anyway between his own rage and pickles helping him he escaped smallpox

anyway they beat her and he stabbed her in the back at the end and they went back to the village and he told people about the delilah fight but he hardly told anyone about his individual section of it and if he did it was very vague

like he'd mention that there was a party and that he was there for two months but he didn't tell anyone about how he just waited in his empty house for his missing family doing nothing for almost that whole time like an abandoned dog which actually fucked him up pretty badly

and he did not tell anyone about how he murdered atsushi lmao though the other cyoaers did see him with a bloody butcher knife when they reunited so they know he killed someone, just not the circumstances

i think everyone else just assumed it was either his blood or delilah's

he didn't know what happened to pickles in his solo section but pickles was also clearly fucked up and angry but he'd still helped save him after all the people back home had been treating him like a monster and trying to get rid of him so he went from like 0 to 100 on pickles immediately

i'm sorry for the excessive detail here but I FELT LIKE I REALLY HAD TO SUMMARIZE THE WHOLE THING BECAUSE IT HAD A LOT OF IMPACT BUT HE ALSO DID NOT TALK ABOUT IT

when he talked to laudna afterward it was obvious that that was her world and that delilah was someone she knew but he was just kind of like huh well that's weird and didn't know she was matilda until memshare

ANYWAY then karma died which fucking ruled, cannot express how much relief he felt knowing that little shit couldn't terrorize him anymore

but pickles also died right as he had developed this very strong attachment to him so that put a damper on things!!!!

he opened up to erin a little bit before her execution about how much he thought they actually had in common because he'd mostly been keeping up the cute innocent act but was like no actually i too am a tired and sarcastic straight-man younger sibling who is fueled almost purely by spite

and also he thought it was really hot that she murdered karma

god what happened after that this game was five years long

oh he "officially" moved into the haunted house and got to be in on the housing post interactions after just sleeping on lavi's floor and not knowing anything for a while

he didn't have strong feelings about anyone there at the time but he liked them all okay and he like immediately got included in info stuff which he appreciated because he really hates being out of the loop feeling excluded

and since the theater had just immediately fallen apart this was the first time here that he'd actually been in close quarters with a group that actually interacted with each other for any extended period of time

which like. after his two months alone in the cyoa was something he really needed, and it was a big lively group that had at least a little bit of the feeling of being with his family again

so he got more attached to them than he expected to... like this universe's version of his bathroom crew but More

and i guess that was also memshare week so he actually found out about the matilda thing really soon after he moved in there, which just like. made his relationship with laudna really complicated because he'd spent all that time alone dwelling on what had happened at the party and matilda had come to be like this big symbolic regret

and then finding out that she was her and ALSO that what he'd been through there had had so much in common with her actual experience, he sympathized A LOT and also felt terrible because her version of it had been so much worse than his

and also kind of felt bad that he'd been able to get delilah out of his head by just telling her to fuck off lmao when laudna had been stuck with her and suffering from it for so long

i went into this in the sprace plurk but he's a weird character in that he's like extremely cold and lacking in empathy most of the time but he's also usually the most polite and conscious of when things come across as hurtful and very much not okay with that

so like. i think the fact that he literally had so much of this experience firsthand kind of forced empathy on him in a way that he isn't really used to, so he was more acutely aware of what might be hurtful to her personally and was really careful to always try to be considerate of that

so he was nice and polite to her in a more genuine way than to anyone else whose good side he might have been trying to get on

but he was also more open with her about some of the weirder stuff in his life just because she was also weird lmao and would probably just find that stuff interesting instead of judging him for it

i didn't memshare a lot of serious stuff but his memories WERE the first time a single person in the game found out he was a sextuplet which was always my dream for playing him

to not share the defining trait of his existence AT ALL until it's forcibly taken out of him and put on display

anyway i'm tired i'll come back to this tomorrow

sits

comes back...

ok that weekend was... when everyone knew camille was a monster and she was still just There with everyone like

and we used the theater post for the first time in a million years for a house talk which was her and alfyn and totty just discussing the whole thing very calmly and pragmatically

and where we landed in that talk (though idk if she actually planned to go with it) was that she could ask the overseers to keep her in a barrier thursday night so she couldn't hurt anyone, and she just needed to be public about that being the plan so people wouldn't feel like they needed to kill her in the time in between ( lmao) since iwatooshi had

still been fine during the week after he got possessed and hadn't hurt anyone

and he talked to famine who said that yeah that was possibly something one of the other overseers could do so they could try it if she asked them

but that conversation was the funniest fucking thing because originally he'd just been planning to ask about that and get clarification on how chimeras worked

and he stumbled into the revelation that aside from camille they had also missed the other half of the chimera that week, which most of them hadn't understood because they'd misinterpreted the monster numbers given at the start of the trial as including iwatooshi

and then into the SECOND revelation that they had not in fact caught ichiban's killer and it was someone who wasn't even possessed, they just ripped the dude's heart out on their own

so he's just standing there like trying to process how much worse the situation was than he'd thought when he started the conversation

famine also told him something about paying attention to the sky at that point but he was like bro i don't know what that means and i have more pressing issues now

he didn't know many people actually knew about any of this and at the time he was like well there's no point worrying about ichiban's killer aside from just personally wanting to avoid a crazy heart ripper since they're not possessed and shouldn't have a reason to kill again if they already got their prize

and he didn't want to put the other monster on alert by publicizing its continued existence so he only told the haunted house (NOT KNOWING KATE WAS THE FUCKING MONSTER, HILARIOUS), alfyn and karlach about that

that next week was just a very weird week, in part because of that freaky bleeding tree with the? dead??? person in it, because that was just giving him cyoa flashbacks. he did not have cyoa induced plant trauma like he did in sprace but he was just very mmmmmm no about weird vibe murder trees in particular

he hosted that party with marina and proceeded to have an absolutely miserable time at it

partly because all the games made him realize how much other people were kissing each other and he was like hey???????? and partly because he got BUTTDIAL CURSED WITH A BAD HALLUCINOGENIC TRIP IN THE MIDDLE OF IT which i manifested as just like, a general weird panicky dissociative feeling but also specifically all the drinks looked like blood as a callback

to the vampire party that ruined his life in the cyoa lmao

so he missed a whole game doing that and was very indignant about it!!!!!!! and just added that to his list of grievances that made him feel like half the village was against him and loved humiliating him and thought his suffering was funny!!!

but the funniest thing about the party in retrospect... hang on

when will randomly showed up at the party i was part of the "who the fuck" chorus icly only to realize when he died a week later that that was the guy totty had been seeing like three times a day all game whenever he went to use the npc bathroom

and somehow i never put together that that guy was will even though literally the sample profile is that guy's picture labeled will

so i was dming the mods like WAIT THAT'S WILL???????????

and then i literally went back and edited my comment to the party the week before to retcon his not knowing who it was

very funny

uhhh then the next day was his ill fated attempt to ask robin out, which he very much only did because it was alpha week so he felt like he had a chance for once in his life and also he was kind of acting out in response to being labeled a pillow princess

even though it was also fucking rejection week!!!!!! what did he expect!!!!

but she also indicated that the answer would not change if he tried again next week so he was just like ok i'm done

he truly did go look at all the yaoi in the library afterward like maybe if i just read enough of this i'll start craving dick and then my life will be easier

it didn't happen but he probably would have suggested experimenting to caelus the next week once he was done being a shitty alpha if he didn't MURDER and DIE

tree curfew was that week which was the funniest fucking thing, he never would have purposely ingested that tree blood but we had karlach's dog get into it and shake it everywhere so we could all get blood cursed and everyone got a different insane effect, totty thought he was competing on a reality show

still the funniest fucking thing all game to me

uhhhh after that week's trial he like most people thought robin probably killed tomi though he was a lot less sure of it than laudna was and i feel so bad that he didn't have his upgraded power to be able to confirm she was telling the truth if she said she didn't do it THOUGH SHE ALSO NEVER REALLY EXPLICITLY SAID THAT WHICH WAS PART OF THE PROBLEM

he was thinking about using his stupid compulsive lying power on her the monday after to see if he could like reverse confirm it that way by seeing what she said but he also didn't know if he could guarantee that EVERYTHING she said would be a lie so he didn't know how reliable that would be and just dropped it

OH i got distracted by unlocks and didn't finish talking about camille that week which lmao

despite him very sincerely wanting to try out that barrier idea on her to see if it would work i also saw that it was alpha week and was like OH I COULD USE THIS... since he's a selfish asshole by nature anyway i was like, alpha week could take that up to 11 and i would actually have an excuse to murder without even being possessed

and i turned in a proposal and everything lmao so he would have killed camille because he had this perfect opportunity where if he got caught he could say he thought the monster was coming out again so he had to kill her :c to protect everyone :c it was so hard

and he would have used the lying power he didn't use on robin on whoever was doing strip check to try to get them to say he didn't have any injuries

and then he would have just gone and picked up his infinite money prize lmao

OBVIOUSLY THERE WERE OTHER PLANS SO THAT DID NOT HAPPEN so i never had alpha week actually make him that bad and he didn't do more than vaguely consider it once

but it was very funny to me every time he was mad at the group that killed her after that because i was just like BRO THAT WAS ALMOST YOU

FOR MUCH LESS NOBLE REASONS

anyway SINCE HE DID NOT ACTUALLY DECIDE TO DO THAT IN THAT TIMELINE he did at least have some room to judge and be mad at them for doing that instead of even trying the barrier thing first, so he had very mixed feelings about that

and just kind of felt more negatively about everyone involved after that

i think maybe specifically because of the conspiracy aspect of it, like if it had just been one person doing it on their own i think that honestly would have annoyed him less

because it was just like ok you had this whole fucking group discussion and never talked about possible alternatives that could have feasibly worked?? AND THEN you left her in the forest and i personally had to fight off a giant spider to retrieve her corpse and you still didn't tell me shit????

(the last part was also not an insignificant part of why he was mad)

anyway he was already in a weird mood from that revelation plus that was the day the leech couch happened which was originally funny but then after he learned gale was involved in both of those things it just pissed him off so much and he was a huge asshole to him at the campfire after a couple of beers and that remained awkward for several weeks

though he did eventually apologize

the leech couch thing was like -- leeches in his bedding and by extension other furniture was a specific trauma point after w0 lmao and while he could kind of laugh about it earlier once he realized he was already mad at one of the people who did it he got more upset about the leeches in retrospect and made it way more personal than it was

because he was like wow okay so first i fought a spider and carried back the body of the woman you murdered in the woods and then you just played this shitty targeted prank on me four days later instead of dwelling on your SINS??? when like NONE OF THEM EVEN KNEW HE WAS LIVING IN THE HAUNTED HOUSE AT THAT POINT idk it was a mess he's a mess

and he also would have not have dwelt on his sins but he wouldn't have leeched people's furniture either

oh that week was also the mirror clone event which was sooo good

perfect

that was just a rough week lmao

HOWEVER it was also the week he got the mumu unmask when he went over to talk to her after will turned up dead

and like. truly between canon drugstore girl and rodya in sprace and this i guess tallish women with brown hair and beauty marks are just his type so he was immediately like ohhh my god

and she held his hand and he was just like ???!!!!! DO I HAVE A CHANCE?????

and asked her out on a boardwalk date on sunday assuming he wouldn't be dead by then

so he was looking forward to that all weekend lmao and it really got him through it

GOD that was also-- on sunday immediately after daan's execution he got the WHOOPS YOUR PARTNER DIED pain and was like ok well clearly that means it was daan then since it happened immediately after he died, and he'd only heard about it from laudna before that, and in her case her partner HAD been the one executed so he just assumed that was what the timing

meant

and it seemed plausible because everyone had like a weird personalized take on their monster so with the creepy cat mask shit he was like well a sphinx is literally a cat in a mask so that scans

and then he was like, trying to get more information about it to get a better idea of what this monster he was stuck with was like

he was going to ask camille what daan's monster was just to confirm it (WHICH WOULD HAVE CORRECTED A BIG MISCONCEPTION) but then camille said she was a widow (gazes at lavi) who could still repartner with someone else, which like-- he'd thought her dying before had severed her monster connection entirely and that she was just free from that shit

so talking to her wouldn't matter but then as soon as she said that he was like OH GOD I HAVE TO ABORT THIS CONVERSATION because he knew that you would get autopartnered if you both knew the other's status and he didn't know if he wanted to do it yet and panicked

and also since he thought he had the same monster as daan he was like WOULD THAT BE WEIRD??????

during curfew that week he finally decided to just do it but he'd already passed the max number of people he could tell in a week by copping to it during a house meeting so he just told her to talk to him about the partner thing next week

but then she partnered with lavi before that lmao and he was just like because he didn't know of any other options and that point everyone was doing it and he was kind of starting to freak out about never finding one even though he'd been actively avoiding looking at all up until that week

like when he first realized his was dead he was like ok well there are probably a lot of options but i have a lot of criteria because i want to be sure it's someone i can trust who won't endanger us both-- and by the end of the week he was like SHIT I'M GOING TO DIE ALONE

and his self esteem was just in the fucking toilet at that point lmao

by the end of that week they knew ashlyn was possessed-- and them slowly putting together the tooth thing all of a sudden was so funny because it sounded so insane

clionidae i think you will appreciate this

also he fully intended to kill her that week before thursday, he was not going to do it during actual murder time when her monster would be on guard and strong because he'd fucking die so he was just going to try to get her alone and kill her sometime during the week, which was why he was carrying that scalpel around, but since i couldn't actually

do an off schedule murder i just had the ic justification that he'd never been able to get a good moment alone with her in a reasonable location lmao so i was just imagining this yakety sax scene of him stalking her all week with her never knowing

this was also the week he got assigned the kissing booth which just. gazes. he was absolutely furious about getting that request because he found it so insulting and humiliating since he KNEW he would not get anyone

it was so funny

ahhh

he did it so reluctantly and if anyone asked why he was like I DUNNO JUST FELT COMPELLED TO DO IT THIS MORNING!!!!! trying to pretend it was a curse because he did not want anyone to think he was doing this willingly and in his right mind

and he was so fucking glad the ghosts showed up and all inexplicably came to his stupid booth because there was no other situation in which he ever would have had any kind of a line

and that made it less obvious how pathetic he was

he did get to kiss mumu afterward though... thus continuing his eternal uncertainty about whether they were dating or not... he told geto he'd ask her but then he got too nervous about the answer being no so he kept not asking

anyway yuffie dying was pretty rough, losing people at the house always hit harder because those were the people he was around every day, and it had always been really lively there earlier on, so it was a little like being with his family back home, except everyone here was less shitty. so while he doesn't generally get that attached to most people

he did get kind of attached to everyone there and it always left a big void when one of them died

and then laudna being the killer made it so much worse!!! both because that meant losing another person there and because she was like, the only person whose feelings he cared about that much/was that attuned to

he knew how much she thought of the house as family and how awful she'd have to feel knowing she'd killed yuffie, and he was also just a lot more OOF at the idea of her getting executed, knowing how she'd died before, whereas, like. the other executions usually didn't bother him THAT much unless some dialogue hit home or something looked especially painful

so he started figuring out it was her a few hours in and was just like mmmmmmmmmmmm fuck

but he didn't have any intention of letting her get through the weekend alive either, both because he didn't want her to keep dealing with that monster and because, well, almost everyone was going to have to die in the next few days anyway, especially all the possessed people, so there wouldn't be any point to drag it out anyway

i liked their conversations both during this and after the trial a lot, because he didn't try to lie or sugarcoat, he just very calmly and gently refuted some of the things she was saying and explained why things had to happen this way

which like-- that fucking dayon tribe scene in canon where choromatsu's kind of having this quarter life crisis and crying how the only option for someone as pathetic as him is to become a dayon, todomatsu's just very calmly like, "yeah, that isn't your only choice. and that was a little rude to the dayons too."

was what made me appreciate him a lot as a character in the first place beyond the bitch in sheep's clothing stuff, and he doesn't get to do that often so i like when those opportunities arise...

i think a lot of the execution was kind of self explanatory lmao but i think we're starting the midsommar stream in a few so i'll get back to that later

OUR TOTTY ARC the au of you having murderhands would've been incredible help me

honestly i considered AU memsharing that but i was like no camille has been through enough

oh also he partnered with anis finally halfway through that week which was funny because she'd just missed the fact that her partner had died the week before and was still looking for her original one until an npc told her

so earlier in the week when she'd put up that note on the board he was like hey do me a solid and if anyone with a dead partner comes to you can you like arrange to meet them somewhere and tell me so i can come spy on who it is because i'm dying here

and then wednesday she came back like oh apparently mine is dead after all and he was like .........WELL I HOPE YOU'RE OKAY PARTNERING WITH ME BECAUSE I'M PRETTY SURE THAT JUST HAPPENED

the first time he asked her about it he was like if you don't want one don't even answer the question i'm going to ask

so yeah! execution!! there were so few people left at that point and gale and lavi had both already gone so he was like well realistically it's probably going to be me

which he thought was probably the best option at that point anyway

so like i said in the first comment, he just prepared as much as he could, which wasn't much but at least he was mentally prepared for it

and aside from getting blindsided by very targeted AU memshares a few times he really didn't hesitate much at all

it was still rougher than it would have been if she was anyone else because she really was the only one he felt both sympathy and guilt over to that extent. so he felt really bad when he unintentionally pushed her into the fire, and he pulled her back out and tried to kind of put out her dress as much as he could before killing her

because even if she was going to die right then he didn't want it to be in a horribly painful way. which he would like, usually not feel that strongly about, or at least definitely not enough to put himself at risk to pull her out, so he was more fucked up afterward by his own thoughts and feelings during that than what he actually did

anyway i'm falling asleep, i'll finish tomorrow

oh the other thing here was how he didn't actually have any problem voting for ashlyn but yuffie had been really adamant about not wanting to put her through an execution which he wouldn't generally give a shit about but because yuffie was dead and possibly watching from the graveyard when it got to the weekend he took that into account when voting

and said that was what she'd asked for before

and tbf he would not have bothered with that if he didn't know she'd find out about it and he'd have to see all the dead people again at the end lmfao so it was kind of less that he cared about her wishes that much than about worrying he'd look like an asshole

but he was still kind of weirded out by the fact that he'd included that as a significant factor in his considerations, and between that and pulling laudna out of the fire and people genuinely saying he was a good person they could trust he was just like

what the fuck is happening how did i get this out of character

and had really complicated feelings about it

because he was like well i know im a backstabbing asshole and i've been lying to almost everyone here this entire time and he was starting to feel kind of bad about it at that point, but at the same time the fact that he was feeling bad about it at all meant he was probably kind of becoming the mask to some extent

and he talked to mumu about this, she was the only one he ever actually told he was an anime character even though he slipped up a little bit with anis once by talking about something happening x times per season

and he was just like. not sure how he could go home after this if he actually had changed that much, because the two possibilities were basically either all his character development gets immediately undone and he goes back to being a shitty asshole neet again, like what happens at the end of almost every season, or

he does keep these changes and doesn't fit in there at all anymore, which is kind of a big fear since he alone got kicked out of his family and replaced once before for not being pathetic enough, so it's like. character development is not allowed either by the writers or by his brothers.

and the other half of it was that he didn't know if he WANTED to have changed, it's a lot less stressful just being the lazy asshole and he and his brothers can probably just keep going the way they are forever as long as the writers have ideas

but he's also very aware of how pointless his life back home is right now — again, my favorite clip ever from the most recent movie, which was his canon point this time:no.

and they're all pretty obviously depressed to some extent, and he especially is like, aware that he's capable of doing more and just isn't

so he's like well i guess getting forced out of that life by accidental character development isn't a bad thing probably, but then he's still got to deal with his brothers who he's pretty sure will resent him a whole lot for it except maybe jyushi and kara, and he also like — even though the first season was full of cases of him doing things without them

and trying to be the first to improve himself and move up in society he actually did want them to eventually follow him

at this canon point they at least went through the kirakira fruit movie already, where they were searching for this legendary fruit that basically gives you the vibes of a happy successful person without having to put in any effort, and they ironically went to extreme lengths to try to get this fruit, including basically being fruit farmers in this

little village in the middle of nowhere for months where they had to build their own house and catch their own food and all this stuff

so he knows that they CAN be convinced to put in effort if the potential rewards seem good enough

which at the time he thought maybe he'd have a girlfriend but he doesn't lol :face_holding_back_tears: so idk what he thinks he's going to use as incentive now when he's just a different flavor of depressed and still a virgin but now with a chunk of his ear missing, but

SHRUGS...

i'll come back to this tonight

ok... god where was i

the living all had that meeting after the last trial to discuss who was going to die and everything and he was immediately like "i'd really prefer to stay on this side... but if it's really important to someone else or if my dying would hurt anis then i don't have to..." which lmao he had no intention of giving that slot up for anyone and was just saying

shit to make himself sound like less of an asshole so people wouldn't want him to die out of spite

thankfully he did not actually have a ton of competition

i feel like it's extra shitty in his case because he's died so many times back home and always came back so it's like... he had nothing to be afraid of and while the idea of dying was this heavy difficult thing for other people it really wasn't for him, he just didn't want to do it lmao

his reasons were basically
1. muelsyse was on this side and he still thought maybe he was dating her
2. karma was on the other side and he did not want to be on the same plane of existence as him again
3. he's just very driven by spite and stubbornness so he wanted his "i lived, bitch" moment
4. dying hurts
5. maybe he can get a curio via consensual murder

he felt kind of bad about how the anonymous vote turned out because it seemed fucked up that other people who'd said they wanted to live still didn't get voted for and people who hadn't even been in the running ended up there instead

but not bad enough to do anything about it because he was fine!!

the last week sucked but there was just kind of a dour mood to the whole place in general... he didn't feel that strongly about people dying, but he did dislike the house getting emptier and getting below 6 specifically was lol since! he's a sextuplet! he's pretty much never stayed anywhere with less than 6 people!!

and the other part was that he was stressing out over whether he was going to fuck something up at the last minute and people saying they believed in him was just putting a lot of pressure on him and he's not good with that

so he was having a fucking time the night before the ritual second guessing all their theories

the night before anis was supposed to die she said she was planning to just kill herself instead because she didn't want to burden anyone and he was like hold up, if you do that you're preventing whoever would otherwise be doing it from getting one of those prizes that might be a big help against the cult, so actually if you do that it's not helping anyone

and he volunteered since it would literally not be a burden on him at all and because he wanted one of those fucking prizes!!!!! and he felt like as her partner he was kind of entitled to it!!!

and she eventually agreed but asked gojo to do it instead lmfao even though he was like, look, if you were opposed to this purely because you didn't want to weigh anyone down emotionally, i can guarantee you i am 100% the best person to do that because this stuff literally barely affects me like it does the rest of you.

though he did concede that it was fair not to want someone who cared so little to be the one to do it

anyway she didn't pick him and he was so fucking bitter about it for the rest of the game because he was the ONLY ONE of the final five who didn't get a curio when he was the one who would have been least emotionally scarred by doing what it took to get one

and that was just kind of the straw that broke the camel's back since he's had his paranoia that people were out to get him and didn't like him all game and he never stopped being in a bad mood after that lmao even though it's stupid since at the same time he was also worrying about the people who liked him and trusted him TOO MUCH

but also mumu had already turned him down a couple of days before that and. idk. he's just been upset about not getting to have what normal people get to have all game so it felt like a slap in the face to be the one outlier that no one chose

and he was just spiraling in self loathing every time he made a suggestion about the ritual that it didn't seem like anyone else was going to agree with... he just had a bad time for these reasons that had nothing to do with the responsibility he had as one of the last five that he was totally fine with lmao

and that kind of carried over into endgame where he was still in a shit mood but was also like fuck it i'm doing it what i need to do and nothing's getting in my way even though i'm soooo sick of myself right now

THE ONE THING THAT MAKES HIS FEELINGS ABOUT THE CURIO THING A LITTLE MORE VALID is that he'd also learned some of what mumu was dealing with at home during the same conversation where he got rejected and after that he'd pretty much made up his mind that he was going to use his wish to help her with that and just had to think of a way to phrase it that

she'd be able to accept, and he did end up using it for that. she hadn't wanted him to use it to save only her and it wasn't powerful for him to save her whole race so he ended up just using it to guarantee that she'd find the solution to save all of them on her own within a set time frame

he never had any great ideas of what to wish for for himself and it seemed highly likely that either whatever he wished for would just get undone by his world for the next episode as always or that he'd just find a way to squander it himself even if that didn't happen because he sucks and will probably just fall back into the same rut again

and he just would have felt really shitty if that happened knowing he could have used it for something so much more useful for her

BUT BECAUSE HE'S STILL A SELFISH ASSHOLE AT HIS CORE he was kind of like i'm being a good person for once and not even using my wish for myself so i think i deserve at least SOME reward after all this and it's fucking bullshit that i'm excluded from that because now i'm going home with NOTHING!!!

he could have gotten the money one to buy a bigger house so he didn't have to share a tiny bedroom with five other guys!!!!

anyway................

i really liked the part in my individual thread during endgame where he was kind of juxtaposing the running scene there with the one from the climax of the movie and noting how the fact that what was happening here was like an inversion of that was fitting because he was supposed to be learning basically the opposite lesson this time

and then in my next tag he was like wait why was i even trying to make this into some poetic bullshit a minute ago, this isn't some scripted scene deliberately written to promote a specific line of character growth or whatever, it's just some shit that's happening

his character arc this game was just way more about breaking free of the constraints of his world and growing even though he isn't supposed to, and just like, recalibrating how he sees the world now that he

isn't in an anime anymore

and then he just passive aggressively roasted the god until it wanted to die... the end

it is so fucking funny to me that we were all blaming the god being a horny creep on the national enquirer when it was actually the iron spike that totty personally put in there

so he really was responsible for both how dumb it looked and how horny it was

what else...... he's very ambivalent about the worldhopping but overall glad for it because maybe he can get a second date someday??? and there are some people he'd like to see again sometime, but also he's not inviting anyone to his world unless they specifically ask and seem very set on it because he does not want anyone to see how pathetic his life is

or how fucking weird his world and most of their friends are...

but maybe that will change eventually

he's at least going back with the intention of holding onto his character growth for once, and is thinking that this time things might have changed too much and for too long for him to go back to his old life the way it was

he's not sure if he's more afraid of things going back to how they were or NOT going back to how they were, but. we'll see, i guess.

i think it's interesting how this time he simultaneously had more character growth but also remained more of a closed-off selfish asshole for the whole game compared to sprace

anyway i'll probably think of more things i want to add later but we're basically done here

oh since i don't remember if i mentioned it he hated his original monster power and never used it once lmao it was making someone else lie compulsively for up to 24 hours and he was just like?? why the fuck would i want that, the only person i want lying is me

he had a few ideas for it that i mentioned earlier but there was no guarantee that it would even work the way he wanted it to since he couldn't make them lie about something specific and didn't know if they'd lie about EVERYTHING so he was always jealous of the more useful powers he heard about... or even just the more fun ones

so when he partnered with anis they went with hers instead (glawackus) since at least that basic power could be useful... the sphinx upgraded power would have been great for trials but they were already on the last one at that point so it seemed like a waste and the other one seemed more useful for endgame... even though they did not, in fact, use it

he also still doesn't know his original partner was rondo and not daan lmfao rip

me: man i feel bad for flubbing partnering with totty
reads this: i feel less bad

but SJDJDJDHFH AAAAH AU WHERE YOU DID GET TO MURDER I WAS REALLY HOPING YOU COULD THIS GAME ERIC I WANT

TOTTY TO GO APESHIT

imagine....

i do think it's great that he's deciding to keep his development, that's a really interesting angle esp since it's not completely a positive thing or experience

I'm sad he wound up so lonely too why did we do this to our muppet

yeah tbh if his memory erasing power was permanent he might have just tried to erase this whole experience lmao but since he's going to be stuck remembering it anyway it'd be hard to even go back to how things were

since taking the cyoa into account this was like 4 months for him... that's a whole cour rather than one episode

it really was impressive though i didn't think there was any way he'd be more miserable than sprace but boy he sure was

oh other thing i wanted to mention was his shower privileges lmao he sent a crow to pesto like as soon as the intro meeting was over and was like "ok i'm asking in private now so give me access to your bathroom"

and he got it! except he still had to send a crow every time and will would let him in at first and then mumu did it after will died but he was getting a nice shower every day except for i guess fridays when the crows ignored everyone, and he just used the toilet there too so like lmao even after he moved into the haunted house he did not use theirs aside

from the sink

unless it was an emergency

the fact that he has to get one of his brothers to take him to the bathroom at night in canon is like. this is not a guy who can deal with cursed toilets.

he wasn't allowed to tell anyone about this (and didn't want to anyway) so it was just always funny to me every time i noted how nice and fresh he smelled and he really got away with "yeah it's just my natural cuteness keeping me smelling nice"

everyone who was like "as clean as anyone can get in this place" and he's like lmao speak for yourself

this was also the first in a line of instances where just being stubborn and demanding and yelling worked out great for him so i feel like the other big lesson he learned here was that he should just keep doing that