straightforwardly (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
straightforwardly) wrote2017-03-12 11:26 am
straightforwardly) wrote2017-03-12 11:26 am
123 | in which I start Jumin's route on Mystic Messenger, and share some of my own writing
► Since my last update, I finally started Jumin’s route in Mystic Messenger. Today I hit Day 5.
I have to admit, the whole prologue… really made me want to romance Seven even more? I still went for Jumin because I want to save the best (of the remaining options) for last, but I can’t say Seven didn’t tempt me. He's… idk, much more affectionate in this route? Not in the same sense as Zen is, but I definitely got the sense that he genuinely really likes the MC (in a romantic sense) in a way I never felt in the Casual Story.
Speaking of the MC: maybe it’s because it’s because, as well as focusing on the Jumin-affection answers, I also focused on answers with no hearts when possible, but I have to say, I found myself not really liking the picture of the MC that formed when playing the lead-up to Jumin’s route. On a similar note, while I’m curious about what’s going on with Jumin, and am certainly sympathetic to any problems he may have, I don’t think it’s comparable with the experiences of people who have problems and also have to worry about money/making a living, and choosing answers that suggested that I/the MC think otherwise really frustrated me.
To my disappointment, I also found that I… like Zen so much less in this path? I already felt vaguely uncomfortable with the fact that he still hits on the MC, because it’s Deep Story and so it’s impossible to romance him— which I realize is a bit ridiculous, since it’s not like the characters realize that— but I still liked him. But then there was this moment where some of the characters were speculating about Jumin’s sexuality, and something about his reaction… ugh. It was really offputting.
Funnily enough, the Deep Story prologue also convinced me that Zen isn’t as straight as he portrays himself? I already vaguely shipped Zen/Jumin, but there were some great moments like when Zen was offended by Jumin not saying good-bye to him, or a phone call where Jumin said he couldn’t get that poster which showed off Zen’s abs out of his mind (which, to be fair, he said it was because he thought it vulgar, but what else am I supposed to think when he opens up a conversation with, “It’s me. I can’t erase Zen’s poster from my head. I called so I could distract myself from it.”), and Zen tentatively offering to be kinder to Jumin if he’s really hurt by Zen’s attitude to him (and Jumin’s immediate rejection, haha.) Then there was Zen being attracted to the picture of Seven-crossdressing-as-a-maid, and his over-the-top reaction when he found out it was Seven… idk, it felt more like an attempt to cover for himself than anything.
I did cheer up on the Zen front (though my opinion of him has definitely been permanently damaged, I think) because we got lots of cute examples of him worrying over the other members of the RFA! And I’m going to share them, because I can.
Context: Zen’s talking about Yoosung & Seven’s bad eating habits:
Zen: “And Seven… I think he needs someone to take care of him by his side.”Definitely narcissistic...but also weirdly sweet? Especially that bit about Seven needing someone to take care of him.
Zen: “They should resemble my looks;;”
Zen: “Not my bad eating habits;;”
And he even worries about Jumin too! I mean, I know from his route that it’s less Jumin and more his-older-brother-that-he-sees-in-Jumin that he dislikes, but I was still very struck by this:
MC: “Elizabeth seems so dear to Jumin. I don’t think he can help himself…”A bit dramatic, but still.
Zen: “But I wish he’d open up to a human more than to a cat.”
Zen: “I feel like he’s on the brink of needing hospitalization.”
On that note...it’s starting to look like my concerns about Jumin basing his emotional stability on his cat might be the case? There’s definitely been focus on his extreme attachment to Elizabeth 3rd. It could go into the people > animals direction, which, ugh, but I hope it doesn’t. I think there are definitely hints that Jumin’s using her as an emotional crutch. Like, he says, “Her existence itself is a blessing.”, and:
Jumin: “but now that I can leave her with Assistant Kang, I feel more relieved.”First, brb, being quietly touched by Jumin trusting Jaehee. Second… I feel like this puts a bit of a different spin on Jumin’s actions in Jaehee’s route? It was obvious that he valued Jaehee, of course— this just builds on that— but his reasons for being so insistent on those cat projects make more sense now— especially if my theory about Elizabeth 3rd being an emotional crutch is right. So when this happens:
Jumin: “I can always trust Assistant Kang.”
Jumin: “But if I start a cat related business and use her as a model,”
Jumin: “I can be with her at work as well.”
Jumin gets stressed -> Jumin starts a new cat project (-> Jaehee dies a bit inside)
It’s because of this:
Jumin gets stressed -> Jumin can’t handle it & needs Elizabeth 3rd -> Jumin starts plotting cat projects as a way/excuse to get near to her again -> Jumin relaxes
Some other moments relating to Jumin’s attachment to Elizabeth 3rd:
MC: “Do you really think Jumin has no chance of finding someone he loves?”and
Jaehee: “I can’t say that it’s impossible.”
Jaehee: “But…”
Jaehee: “I think…”
Jaehee: “Mr. Han’s lover”
Jaehee: “has always been”
Jaehee: “Elizabeth the 3rd.”
Jumin: “So you’re saying I should include others in my life because I’m lonely.”On a more amusing note, these texts from Jaehee were golden:
MC: “Jumin, don’t you get lonely if you only meet people for work?”
Jumin: “I have Elizabeth 3rd.”
Jumin: “I am too busy to feel loneliness,”
Jumin: “so she is all I need in my life.”
MC: “Jumin’s not interested?”That was so beautifully underhanded of her. ♥ I loved it.
Jaehee: “He seems so obsessed with Elizabeth… I don’t know… He seems to be nice to you but…”
Jaehee: “Another chief assistant I met during a meeting with client the other day approached me to ask about Mr. Han’s taste in women…”
Jaehee: “I told her that he likes white hair and blue eyes, and she muttered about bleaching her hair.”
Jaehee: “I wasn’t lying. I only forgot to tell her that I was not referring to people.”
Moving on… We also got more of Seven’s low opinion of his own worth (as first seen in Yoosung’s route, iirc). More quotes coming up.
Seven: “I hope you don’t eat too many snacks. Lol”Clearly Yoosung’s the one who’s “lost”. He might be the “stupid” one too, or maybe it’s both of them. But I don’t think it’s unlikely that, in Seven’s view, he himself is the one who has “no reason to live”. =/
Seven: “I recommend snacks to people like me and Yoosung”
Seven: “who are stupid or lost or have no reason to live. Lol”
Then:
Seven: “While I’m gone,”(I went with the Zen answer because I was trying to save all of the +Seven affection answers for when I do his route…) Anyways, it’s not quite as blatant here, but his talking so easily of Zen “replacing” him reminded me of his attitude with Yoosung at the end of Yoosung’s route.
Seven: “Zen,”
Seven: “you can replace me,”
Seven: “and enjoy all the light in this world!!”
MC: “Zen, getting all the spotlight in the world! It’ll be so cool!”
Seven: “Well,”
Seven: “Zen would deserve it. lol”
Then, in a phone call, Seven also said, “Nothing’s better than work in pulling myself together. I think every time I felt depressed after waking up, I just started working…”
Which, considering how much he’s always working...and how more than once he’s woken up after not getting enough sleep and started working instead… well, it says nothing good.
There’s also been some possible hints to Seven’s backstory? I think that I’ve said before, after Yoosung’s ending, that I suspect that Seven and Unknown might be related. They do look similar, and there was obviously a connection between them… I wouldn’t be surprised if they turned out to be brothers or something like that. I mention that because it ties into what I found so interesting about the following quotes.
Seven: “I wanna be born as a cat…”And, during a phone call: “I just had a really strange dream where I was a real cat. Meow~ But mommy cat didn’t give me food so brother kittie and I escaped. We passed through walls, rivers, mountains, oceans, and then landed in a pirate ship! That’s when I woke up meow~”
Seven: “Making a living with my sibling cats”
Seven: “and just live a happy life”
Seven: “without getting help from the mother cat!!! lol”
There was also that whole bit about him considering his baptismal name his real name… Which I’m going to use to segue into my next topic, which is that I feel like Zen, Yoosung, and Jaehee’s respective issues are shown more clearly in this prologue. This means, more quotes, because I like them.
First, something with Zen worrying again:
Zen: “Seven changed his name to his baptismal one”(Maybe I’m wrong, but I think that might be the first time Zen mentioned why he always uses his stage name with his friends rather than his birth name? I certainly don’t remember that explanation coming up in his route...)
Zen: “because he doesn’t want to remember the past?”
Zen: “I have bad memories with my family…”
Zen: “so that’s why I use this name more than my real one.”
Zen: “I mean,”
Zen: “I hope it’s nothing like that but…”
Yoosung:
Yoosung: “To be honest,”(That last line might not be perfectly accurate, because I accidentally deleted the screenshot that had it on there, but that was the general jist of it.)
Yoosung: “I don’t feel like eating proper meals when I get stressed.”
Yoosung: “I was supposed to play in teams with my internet friends right now.”
Yoosung: “I got through the whole day just waiting for this.”
Yoosung: “I feel so empty.”
And Jaehee:
Jaehee: “I must go now to finish work.”To be honest, that one struck me the least on a character level, but hit the most on a personal level. So true, Jaehee. So true. ._.
Jaehee: “I suppose I can’t leave to the world of equality.”
Jaehee: “I’ll have to try my best in the world of inequality.”
But I really did like this moment where Jumin was kind to Yoosung:
Yoosung: “Jumin… Seven…”There was also this creepy VN segment with Rika in her apartment, talking about how she needs “a device that can take everything, that can delete everything.”
Yoosung: “Both of you guys live in a different world.”
Yoosung: “I’m just living a normal life…”
MC: “Everyone is special.”
Jumin: “Yes. Everyone’s life is special in their own way.”
Jumin: “I hope you don’t belittle yourself too much.”
On the sweeter side of the scale, there was a phone call which made me really like Jumin more. It was about how he came to work and found a stray cat in the parking lot, and started worrying about it. Some choice quotes:
“I think humans and animals must live in harmony as equals but not everyone thinks that.”From a later phone call:
“Yes… There’s a saying that says people who like animals are never bad people.”
“I think that plants, animals, humans, whatever should all equally share the Earth’s resources.”
“Why can’t people understand that nature gives back if you give as well? For example… wine. Wine is a beautiful gift from nature.”
“It takes different according to the region and it also depends on that year’s weather. So a glass of wine holds the history of its birth region.”
”If you just go one step further from your busy life, you can see nature’s beauty laid out in front of your eyes. I knew it was a good idea to buy this winery.”(And then he got the idea of making a wine cats could drink, ahahaha.)
“Seeing this beautiful landscape keeps reminding me of Elizabeth 3rd. Watching her softly tread amongst this grass while drinking wine will be the best.”
New information: I knew Seven was Catholic (or at least Christian), but I’m surprised by how much of the cast are Christian as well! Jumin is, and Jaehee is Catholic (I had to laugh at how Jumin knew that— “I heard her muttering prayers on payday”).
I’ve mostly been talking about the serious things, but there were also some moments which amused me that I wanted to share!
In regards to an exterminator:
Yoosung: “can’t you send them to my place first before Seven’s?”To be honest, my first reaction was wtf, Yoosung— what state is his home in if he could think there’s chocolate just laying about on the floor????— after that initial shock passed I was amused by it.
Yoosung: “I saw a couple cockroaches.”
Yoosung: “I thought there was just a piece of chocolate on the floor”
Yoosung: “but it moved;;;;”
Some texts with Zen:
Zen: “They say that fairies live on the moon, right? But I live on Earth…”And then, best of all, this chat:
Zen: “What do I do if the fairies see me and want to come to Earth?”
Zen: “Will I become the man who changes legends?”
MC: “Are you drunk, Zen?”
Zen: “Not at all…”
Zen: “If I am… I’d be drunk on my face.
MC: “Jumin’s so cute looking at his smartphone, haha.”There was also that phone call which I didn’t screencap much of, where Yoosung asks the MC what an “M” is, since people have been calling him that, then goes on to say something about how “They say no one can defeat a person who enjoys pain, right? I’m gonna go enjoy it a bit today.”
(enter a very long pause— to the extent that I had stopped wondering whether or not the game had froze, and moved on to considering how I might best go about fixing it)
Jaehee: “You must find many things cute, then.”
Zen: “Yeah;;; You’re not the average girl, [MC].”
And another amusing Seven moment:
Seven: “Maybe if I do this…”It then quickly led to a moment that was, imo, bittersweet. When talking about the party:
Seven: “Accio V!”
Chat Room Text: V has entered the chatroom.
Seven: “He’ll come up?”
V: “Luciel.”
Seven: “Wow!”
Seven: “We finally got everything together.”I’m not sure if I can explain why I found that so sad? Something about how clearly enthusiastic Seven was— and when I think about how isolated he seems to be— it seemed almost desperate? Idk, that doesn’t feel quite right, but I don’t know how to explain it.
Seven: “Everyone has to be there.”
Seven: “I’m even gonna invite Rika’s ghost, haha.”
Seven: “Everyone!”
Seven: “Everyone will!”
Seven: “be there!”
I did get chills down my spine when Seven exited the chat and Unknown immediately entered. There was a lot of mostly incomprehensible text (along the lines of “ted_so” *long” and HOLY SHIT I just realized that most of that text was variations on “waited so long” holy shit holy shit how did I not see that before now???) and THEN HE ENDED WITH
Unknown: “I am”which, even without the helpfully creepy music, disturbs me twice as much now when I contrast it to how painfully excited Seven was about the party.
Unknown: “going to”
Unknown: “corrupt you”
As of this morning the plot has thickened further! Not with the hacker— so far it’s been following the same beats as the other routes, though there was a promising hint at Zen’s psychic abilities when he mentions that ever since the MC’s joined, he’s had the strange feeling that “someone’s watching us”— but with the arrival of Sarah. Hopefully this doesn’t end up too much like the Echo Girl thing. We’ll see.
It also turns out that the game doesn’t automatically change over when Daylight’s Saving Time does— it was first behind, then, when I exited and re-entered the app, it noticed it, but saw it as being in a different time zone;;; Still, as long as it works, I suppose I shouldn’t complain.
► Oh, I nearly forgot! Some years ago, I briefly posted links to what I’d written lately in my dw updates, in an attempt to counterbalance my habit of hiding my writing by posting most non-exchange fics to my fic journal exclusively and never sharing it anywhere. TO BE FAIR, I mostly do this when something’s really short, or if I’m not entirely happy with some aspect of it but feel too shy to go through the whole process of finding a beta (once I have a beta, everything’s good— I liked constructive crit; it’s just the finding part that’s a problem), but still.
My point in mentioning all of this is that I’m going to try start doing that again, starting now:
- A Practical Proposal (Fire Emblem: Awakening, Chrom & Maribelle | implied Maribelle/Lissa, 1.1K)
- New Beginnings (Fire Emblem: Awakening, Donnel/Maribelle | Maribelle & Donnel’s Mother, 1.6K)
- Uncertainty (Shall We Date? Wizardess, Liz/Amelia, <1K)
► I also wanted to do an update on my Fire Emblem: Awakening replay, but I’ve a fair amount to say about it and this entry’s REALLY LONG already, so I’ll save it for another time. Soon, hopefully.
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