Apparently, Darius is a softboi once he falls, and I love that for him! Also, he’s so devoted to you that he literally almost killed himself on his wedding day😱:
@rjthirsty they put this toward the end of Gilbert’s The Whereabouts of True Love story (both endings bonus).
They’re doing it like rabbits (pun intended), unprotected, every day, because he’s finally tapped into his libido, and he no longer wants his bloodline eradicated:
After thinking this, he goes on to a separate thought about struggling with trust and wanting to spend “the last moments” of his life loving Belle (even if he’s “still afraid” to trust her), and then the story just ends 😭
A story too big to fit within the confines of the structure
I finally have the energy to write out my thoughts about Victor's route in Ikemen Villains, and it turns out it was not my thing.
This will be long and will contain spoilers (under the cut), so proceed at your own discretion. Also, it is not a negative review of Victor as a character, but instead the story points in his route and my belief that the writers executed many aspects poorly that could have otherwise been great additions to IkeVil's two years and counting.
Victor's route from Ikevil is best enjoyed completely removed from the rest of the game. Either go into it knowing nothing, or pretending that you know nothing because the way the story is written will have you questioning if you're even playing the same game.
It's honestly a shame with how many parts of the last two years that Ikevil has existed that were either retconned or ignored in order to tell a story that they wanted that doesn't really line up with everyone else. It isn't a "bad" story, it just isn't the same story.
From the beginning, we're faced with many situations that have the reader questioning whether or not these things have been covered already. It's like we entered some alternate timeline with new rules and different characters. The story plods along as if we all hadn't figured out the big reveals, and when the points come to tell us, "Yes, reader! You figured it out!" It ended up overshadowed by plot that was supposed to be more emotionally engaging than it turned out.
This might be because of the way the story structure is, or how much they wanted/needed to cover with the many new additions to Victor's story and background. But overall it felt like they cut out everything that had made Victor so evocative and grand in story events and other routes and gave us everything that was under the mask in great detail and, unfortunately, very detached.
We can start with the additions to Kate's backstory. She had apparently met Victor when she was a child and he was just shy of 18. This could have been seamlessly added into the narrative, but unfortunately, one meeting wasn't enough, and so they added an additional meeting with Victor only a few years ago. However, because the writers waited until CHAPTER 19 to cover that they had met when she was a child, the two meetings get referred to multiple times without identifying that they were different times, and creates a strange dissonance in how mentally there Kate is.
The first meeting is introduced to us as Kate remembering a music box from a stranger in a church. We find out much later that it was when she was very young. However, she later experiences PTSD from being in close proximity to a bombing that happens in the route, and recalls a bombing she was also in in a church only a few years ago. One where details such as a music box's metal coil was damaged and someone saved her. But she can't remember who it was that saved her.
Since she is likely 26 years old, and this was only a few years ago, her earlier memories of a man with a music box make it seem like she can't remember anything of importance past the most immediate period of her life. It's only later that it's revealed that these two meetings were fifteen years apart, but the writers are trying to let us know that Kate knew they were the same person in her heart, despite these not being important enough to have as character defining moments in other routes.
It does a serious disservice to fated and meeting three times to have Kate never acknowledge these things in the two years she's existed. It's even more of a disservice in having her not remember anything dealing with the bombing in the church and the man who saved her when it supposedly affected her so greatly. Even in the end of one of the branching endings she claims she fell in love with Victor every time she met him, yet she can't recall a single thing about him except that his hand felt safe.
I'm not even going to touch all the complaints I have about Crown Castle being a jaunt through the woods on a dirt path with no guards or escorts between it and Buckingham Palace. We're not acknowledging that.
But! Let's talk about Victor's office being in Buckingham Palace and how Kate can apparently go there without an escort but she needed an escort for leaving Crown Castle... except to go to Victor's office, which is in Buckingham Palace. And she's just allowed to wander around the palace as she likes. Not only that, but apparently several people from Crown visit Victor in his office in Buckingham Palace, despite Crown's supposed secret identity. You're not fooling anyone. Trust. Everyone knows who is in Crown if you're dropping by the office where all the privy council can see you.
It only gets more incongruent the further into the route we get. Kate is, for lack of a better word, naive in this route. Apparently, she is saved from all the murder after her first encounter with Crown, and because of that she acts like nothing of consequence happened that first night. Unlike other routes where she is suspicious and even afraid for her life, she is happy and friendly and has no idea that they all kill people often.
When she discovers this, she addresses her concerns with Victor, and as an apology he over corrects to a degree that is bordering on intentionally manipulative by allowing Kate to pass judgement on the next person. And not just pass judgement, stamp the approval of his own execution.
Now, I don't believe the writers wanted Victor to be manipulative, and I don't think that was the intention, but holy fuck is this not at all how her life had gone with anyone else. This is ridiculously involving her beyond his claims and plans and it makes very little sense to include her so deeply. What then, is the point of giving her a choice after the month to return home? He has indoctrinated her into Crown by giving her the responsibility to judge someone and demand his execution. Like... that's fucked.
Later, Victor gives her even more responsibility way beyond her knowledge and experience level in handling security for THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND. Not just Crown's secret detail, but literal Royal Guards. She pulls it off effortlessly, which is surprising because she barely even understood the royal line of succession two days earlier, but now she can plan a large scale security detail in a few hours along with many, many other jobs she was never trained in.
Like, I do enjoy that Kate is such a big part in this story, but it doesn't fit with the Kate we know, or knew for that matter. I love Kate being capable, but this is not my Kate. She could get to this point, but she wouldn't be there in less than a day. It almost cheapens her struggles in everyone else's route with how quickly she took to being even more capable in this one, and that sucks, because that Kate is a lovely woman and relatable. This Kate is so out of reach in all directions.
While we're on the subject of cheapening matters, Victor's 15 years of being in love with Kate gets hand waved into the story with their meetings (multiple) and is also unrelatable. He claims to have fallen in love with her on their first meeting, and later she claims it as well, but they somehow never ran into each other again until the bombing incident.
Due to this, we don't get to see what it is that Victor loves about Kate. He just fell in love with some girl who cried about her cat and said he could talk to her if he needed it. I can't honestly believe that that was all it took for a grown man (yes, he was an adult) to fall in love with someone, especially a child, especially one who is likely ten years his junior. Like, even if it was an innocent love, his first real experience with genuine kindness, the writers don't explain how or when that changed to romantic love, and so we are told that Victor has loved Kate since she was 8 with no reason or rhyme to it.
I'm here for the romance in a romance game, and while the route had lovely romantic moments, the falling in love didn't happen in this story because it supposedly already happened to both of them. That's a low blow.
And lastly, probably my smallest complaint and the biggest reason I can't let this route go: Victor being nonbinary.
He says in chapter 19 or 20 that gender doesn't matter to him in regards to himself, and he wanted to become the ruler of England as someone different than his previous self, which is why he took up being a woman instead of a man as the Queen instead of King. And while I love this idea that Victor is nonbinary, the way the writers portrayed it seems like they aren't speaking from experience and comes across almost insensitive.
Victor's big reveal that he is Queen Victoria happens in chapter ten with one of the assailants yelling "The Queen is a man!" And the matter is left at that. It takes ten more chapters before he says he's nonbinary (not in those words), leaving us to conceptualize that the queen is a man in a dress and not a person in a dress, not a not-man in a dress. There was no reason to call Victor a man in that moment unless the writers wanted us to see Victor as a man.
See, that's not handled well. In Ikemen Sengoku, there is a side character in Yoshimoto's route who is also nonbinary, and while Mai is from the future where those words exist, the character explains that they are not a man nor a woman right after meeting. From then on, Mai thinks about them as they/them. Even after Victor says he doesn't care about his gender, Kate never sees him as anything besides a man. A man that pretends to be a woman to rule England. And like, that's super uncool.
I'm not asking for a change in pronouns, or for Victor to come out to everyone, or any of that. But there's a way to not dismiss him being nonbinary and what the writers did was not it. Even in the end of the route, Kate doesn't squish Victor and Victoria together as one person, she is still claiming that Victor and Victoria are two distinct people, since she talks about Victor being the him he throws away so Victoria can exist. And man, that's shit. Especially when it comes to gender. Especially when it comes to someone who doesn't believe in the gender binary like that.
I also have feelings about both endings being unsatisfying, but this has turned into a novel and I'm not sure how much more I should go on about.
I appreciated the Blind Love more because of the additional information in it. We had basically an expose on the terrorist group and more of Victor's past, but it left me feeling like it concluded so neatly and this was supposed to be a messy affair.
The Mad Love ended up more dramatic, but had the writers shooting themselves in their own foot by invalidating any danger throughout the whole of the story because Victoria's life was never in danger, supposedly. It also had Kate doing some weird preaching to what was the most comical villain the game has created as of yet, and that also didn't sit right with me.
tl;dr: There were a lot of good ideas with this story, but there were also so many, many poorly chosen ways to express those ideas. If I can remove this route from Ikevil, I can see it as a neat story with some flaws. If I try to include it in the game we have been shown, so many things make little sense that it's really just a fairy-tale that feels like it never happened.
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