ok so I did some further diving and this isn't so much a new genre as it's just a fairly niche one — 规则怪谈 rules horror, i.e. a horror story told through increasingly bizarre and disturbing rules
I initially came across the online short story 《动物园规则怪谈》, which comes out to something like "Strange Tales of the Zoo Rules." it opens with 15 rules for visitors to follow while visiting the city zoo, beginning innocuously but swiftly veering into inexplicable strangeness:
Rule #1: There are absolutely no problems with the security measures in this zoo. There is no possibility of animals escaping, particularly small herbivores, most of which are kept in closed environments. If you see a rabbit escaping on the roadside, please take your children away and report it to the staff immediately. Do not approach the rabbit or touch it, particularly if the rabbit notices you and begins to approach at high speeds.
[...]
Rule #6: There is no aquarium in this zoo. If a staff member sells you a ticket to the aquarium, refuse them.
Rule #7: If you have already seen the aquarium, please leave immediately and call the phone number marked on the map.
the visitor rules are then followed by the employee rules, which continue to escalate in peculiarity:
Rule #1: If you find an escaped rabbit, do not immediately capture it or approach it. Lead it to the lion enclosure and leave the rest to the white lions.
[...]
Rule #6: There is no aquarium in this park. If your colleague mentions the aquarium to you and seems confident that it exists, stop the conversation immediately. This colleague is no longer
the person you know.
Rule #7: If you see the aquarium, do not enter. Tell yourself that it does not exist and leave immediately.
Soon, the various rules begin to contradict themselves:
NOTICE POSTED AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE AQUARIUM
If you are lucky enough to see this notice, please do not make it public. [...] You have surely noticed from the rules on the map that this zoo is not only unsafe, but also strange and disturbing. We are an undercover government organization determined to protect innocent visitors. Please be sure to abide by the following rules to ensure your safety. This is your only way to escape from this zoo.
Rule #1: Enter the aquarium. There is no one here. Pick up a black uniform at the door and put it on...
versus:
NOTICE POSTED INSIDE THE AQUARIUM
Rule #1: Do not enter the aquarium when there are people. If you are greeted by a staff member after you enter, please find an excuse to leave immediately after reading this notice.
[...]
Rule #7: Our staff wear red uniforms and only conduct daily routine cleaning and inspection of the aquarium after 12:30 A.M. If you meet someone in a black uniform who claims to be a staff member of the aquarium, you can talk to them, or agree to let them serve as a temporary tour guide, but do not give them your map, especially the part torn along the dotted line.
[...]
Rule #9: The aquarium exists and does not serve any organization.
versus:
A note posted in the security room by a security guard working in the elephant enclosure three years ago:
Rule #1: Always remember the color of your clothes. It can be any color: red, blue, or black. Do not change the color of your clothes. It is very important to remain firm in your self-perception. Do
not let "it" find out that you are hesitant and indecisive in your perception of the outside world....
through these found texts, which include official rules, unofficial signage, and torn scraps of notes with frantic, increasingly incoherent scribbles in the margins from people trying to escape, the story builds an unsettling portrait of this zoo through negative space — a zoo that you, the reader, can only catch glimpses of as you try to piece together what's going on through in/consistencies in the found texts
the short story is both puzzle and adventure, horror seeping through the increasingly porous membrane of the mundane. given that various rules contradict themselves, which ones are the rules that will guarantee your safety, and which ones will deliberately sabotage you? which ones were written by someone in their right mind, and which ones were interfered with in order to trap more victims for "its" amusement?
anyway, more poking around revealed that rules horror is a whole subgenre of (mostly) short fiction that renders the ordinary uncanny and the mundane horrific through the sharp contrast of something as "dry and boring" as rules conveying bizarre and illogical information. the specific medium of "rules" places the reader in medias res, situating the reader in a lineage of discovery as anonymous forerunners test boundaries, hypothesize rules, die in obscure and disturbing ways, go mad for undisclosed and unknowable reasons. the subgenre also resonates with video game-style storytelling despite being static; there is a sense of the narrative being pushed forward by "actions taken" and an assumed end goal of "clearing the level" (escaping the zoo)
and perhaps this specific overlap with video game logic particularly aligns rules horror with unlimited flow, because hardly a month after I first stumbled across these silly little blind box theaters that the worldbuilding of rules horror showed up in the unlimited flow novel I was reading, so it's been very cool to see the intertextuality manifest right in front of me in real time
I know you mentioned Kavetham in your essay and how ppl mistake them as toxic. I think the issue is that their banter at the start does not sound friendly at all. Kaveh sounded so incensed every time he’s with Alhaitham I wonder how’s his blood pressure. I know Kaveh gives back as good as he got, but most of Kaveh’s jabs doesn’t come close to hitting Alhaitham, whereas Alhaitham’s snipes seems always to hit Kaveh right at the jugular. It’s only until the Parade of Providence event and Cyno story quest 2 did I see any possibility with them.
I'm really sorry to say this, but unfortunately I think this is a case of misreading.
Although Kaveh was definitely more incensed in their early scenes and way more likely to fly off the handle, I think the game went out of its way right from the beginning to make it clear that that's Kaveh's personality.
Kaveh's a sensitive and temperamental person who gets worked up easily, and it's not just at Alhaitham but with virtually everyone, from his own clients to the Traveler. One of the first things he does when meeting the Traveler in Alhaitham's story quest is be such a poor host to them that Paimon of all people starts giving him shit.
Rest under the Read More:
According to Alhaitham's voice line about him, which was available long before Kaveh became playable:
Kaveh gets worked up about everything and is constantly making a fuss. Putting his blood pressure at risk is just what Kaveh does on the daily, whether Alhaitham is involved or not.
Right from the start, we were supposed to understand that Kaveh is a dramatic person. It goes hand-in-hand with his status as an idealist, as someone who pursues his beliefs ardently and believes in beauty and the human spirit, rather than in cold, pragmatic rationality. Just as he's passionate and uncompromising on his ideals, he's passionate when it comes to disagreements too.
From his very first appearance, the point of Kaveh's over-the-top responses to Alhaitham is to establish Kaveh's character as Alhaitham's opposite. Alhaitham is quiet, so of course Kaveh is loud. Alhaitham is discreet, so Kaveh must be conspicuous (charging into the room, arguing publicly). Alhaitham is cool-headed and seemingly unemotional, so Kaveh's first scene will show him as easily worked up, with a quick temper. The whole point of their first scene together was to emphasize these extreme differences in their personalities, so that the "Kaveh is Alhaitham's mirror" plot point would be as obvious to players as it was supposed to be.
Furthermore, we were also given an indication right away that Kaveh and Alhaitham do not fight all the time. In Alhaitham's story quest, the first thing Kaveh does when hearing Alhaitham get home is react happily and ask him to come help with the task he was working on. If they fought all the time and had genuine hatred for each other, would Kaveh have reacted this way to Alhaitham's homecoming at all?
Then, during the follow-up scene to this, Kaveh insists that Alhaitham has to bring him shopping and buy him drinks at the end of the day. If you have a toxic hate-hate relationship where the other person legitimately makes you miserable, would you really be asking to spend a whole day together shopping and going out for drinks, a popular friend activity?
The face of a man who just goaded his "toxic" situationship into taking him on an all-expenses-paid date.
Even the OG message board and NPC interactions for Alhaitham and Kaveh tell us that their relationship isn't one-sided and that Kaveh benefits plenty from being close to Alhaitham. First, we learn that Alhaitham pays Kaveh's tabs regularly, enabling Kaveh to have a lifestyle literally labelled in-game as "like a noble," and then we learn that Alhaitham apologizes to Kaveh by gifting him wine, presumably to make up for times where his comments actually do go too far:
I'll go into the scene where Kaveh is introduced more in a second, but in the meantime, I also strongly push back on the idea that Alhaitham's insults to Kaveh are more hurtful than Kaveh's are to Alhaitham's.
In Alhaitham's story quest, Kaveh flat out asks the Traveler and Paimon if they are paid actors because he doesn't believe that Alhaitham can make other friends. That's pretty damn rude by itself, but coupled with what we learned when Kaveh's character stories were released, what Kaveh said to drive the final spike into their original friendship...
Kaveh was Alhaitham's only friend, and the insult he used to get back at Alhaitham was "I regret ever befriending you." Do you know how devastating it would be to hear that from the only friend you've ever made? Frankly, Kaveh is pretty lucky that Alhaitham is a rational person who can grasp that Kaveh was just lashing out, because while Alhaitham's insult to Kaveh during this argument was born out of concern for Kaveh's well-being ("Your altruism is actually self-harm"), Kaveh's was just a straight-up retaliation meant to cause pain after Alhaitham came too close to the truth.
I think this is far from Kaveh never managing to land an insult, especially since Alhaitham--as far as we are shown--went on to never form another friendship throughout his entire youth.
Anyway, regarding their first scene together, which I'm assuming is the basis for people believing they're toxic... I actually think this scene represents the only time we've ever seen Alhaitham genuinely upset. This scene was meant to highlight the differences between the two characters very deliberately--while also establishing that Alhaitham's behavior around Kaveh is enormously different from his behavior around everyone else.
Alhaitham spends the entire Archon Quest completely unbothered. Even when attacked by Cyno, he gives little more than annoyed noises and cold remarks. He keeps so much distance from the others in the group that all the way to the end, the Traveler isn't 100% convinced they can trust Alhaitham. Although he puts on a very convincing act for Azar, that's the most emotion we players see out of him for the entire Sumeru plot line. He is not presented as an immature person nor depicted as someone who would usually stoop to petty arguments.
Then, suddenly... this.
The moment Kaveh appears on the scene, Alhaitham's maturity just goes straight out the window. Suddenly he's full of snappy comebacks and aggressively getting in someone's face--because he can't be objective and aloof around Kaveh. He can't distance himself from the situation where his roommate is involved.
This scene is actually the one example we have of Alhaitham being upset enough for the mask to come off. We have never seen him this worked up ever again in the entire game.
He deliberately provokes this fight because he was worried for Kaveh--worried enough for the most famously unshakeable man in Sumeru to actually get angry.
First, Alhaitham intentionally stalls, riling Kaveh up by refusing to answer his question about what happened in Sumeru, instead going on a tangent about physical books. Kaveh redirects (with an insult claiming that Alhaitham frequently abuses his position of authority, for good measure), which prompts Alhaitham to remark, oddly:
This is actually the first sign that something is wrong. Alhaitham doesn't usually make incorrect logical leaps, so if he's claiming that Kaveh, who just came back that day, should already know the inside story, what he's actually saying is that he expected Kaveh to be much more in-the-know about the situation than Kaveh actually was. Alhaitham is saying here that Kaveh should have known what was going on in Sumeru, and that idea--Kaveh should have known, should have been there--is the turning point of this entire argument.
Alhaitham continues the conversation by complimenting Kaveh. His tone is sarcastic, causing Kaveh to doubt the meaning, but we players know already from Alhaitham's character stories that Alhaitham actually means this compliment honestly--he sees Kaveh as an intelligent and gifted artist who is his equal in every way. This is a genuine statement cloaked in a sarcastic tone to intentionally escalate the situation.
Then Alhaitham uses Kaveh's exaggerated response as a spring-board to actually snap at Kaveh, specifically stating that Kaveh is unkind to him. This is the only time that we've ever seen Alhaitham express direct and serious displeasure with the way Kaveh treats him.
In many of their early scenes, Kaveh would levy an insult at Alhaitham and Alhaitham would return a snappy one-liner ("If humans aren't humans without their humanity, you'll probably evolve into some other species in another decade" -> "What about you, will you devolve into a fungus?"), or Alhaitham will nitpick at Kaveh's bad habits and Kaveh will clap back with a one-liner of his own ("I hope you are aware of your lack of conversational skills" -> "Oh, so the pot's calling the kettle black, is he?"), but the bickering almost never starts with Alhaitham, and in no other scene does their arguing ever rise above the level of sarcastic and petty complaints.
This is the only time we ever see Alhaitham upset enough to confront Kaveh aggressively, to the extent that he actually stands up to get in Kaveh's space, and then makes a statement that he never, ever makes again:
After this point, Alhaitham will continue to tease and annoy Kaveh by bringing up the rent money, but he will never again suggest seriously that Kaveh should leave. If it wasn't clear yet, it should have been clear from this line: Alhaitham is flat out furious in this scene.
And why? What's got his feathers so ruffled that he completely abandons his aloof demeanor and engages in a public argument?
He didn't know where Kaveh was. The world was basically ending in Sumeru, and Alhaitham couldn't find Kaveh.
In fact, Alhaitham probably even had reason to be worried directly for Kaveh's safety (although he later tries to blow it off): Kaveh was sent out into the desert specifically by the Kshahrewar Sage, who was colluding with Azar, possibly to get Kaveh out of the way. As the Scribe who would be the one approving the paperwork for all the scheming that was going on, Alhaitham would have known that Kaveh had been sent out to desert--a favorite tool for the Akademiya to "disappear" other people in the past.
Actually, if you want to say that any element of Alhaitham and Kaveh's relationship is toxic, you would have better luck with the claim that Alhaitham is kind of a stalker. It's not stalking if the other person wants you there. Being all up in Kaveh's business is basically Alhaitham's actual full-time job. Kaveh's in Port Ormos? Well, what do you know, so is Alhaitham! Kaveh is out on a trip in the desert? Dang, what a coincidence that Alhaitham just so happened to want to explore that exact ruin at that exact moment, out of the entire thousand square mile desert...
Whatever reasoning you want to ascribe to this, Alhaitham goes where Kaveh goes. He dips out mid-conversation the moment Kaveh returns home. He serves as an announcer on an event strictly because it relates to Kaveh. He constantly intervenes when Kaveh is in trouble, appearing conveniently the moment Kaveh needs him for anything.
Remember that, at this point in the story, he literally had no one else. At the start of the Archon Quest, Alhaitham had no family. He had no friends. He only, only had Kaveh. So when the entire city started going mad, a plague that was relatively rare suddenly began raging out of control and killing people, the sages started plotting some kind of insane uprising, Forbidden Knowledge was released on the black market, the arts in Sumeru came under serious attack, important people like Tighnari were targeted, Cyno was sent to oppress him, and public figures in Sumeru started actively disappearing...
For Alhaitham to not know where his one person was?
For Alhaitham to have gone from Sumeru City to Port Ormos to the literal wastes of the desert and still not find Kaveh?
Alhaitham actively glosses over a summary of what happened in Sumeru's Archon Quest because it doesn't matter to him in comparison to what he wants to know, the matter of Kaveh's safety.
He has no issue talking to anyone else about what happened with the Sages, and he's plenty talkative about the events and the Akademiya's status the moment the Traveler comes up right after Kaveh. It's only with Kaveh that he downplays and refuses to share the information about what actually occurred, because he was worried and upset that Kaveh disappeared. Kaveh could have been involved and wasn't. He wasn't there when Sumeru needed him--he wasn't there when Alhaitham needed him.
In a situation where disappeared people were turning up dead in the desert, Kaveh wasn't anywhere to be found at all.
Alhaitham provoked this entire fight and the only point he focuses on, harping on it repeatedly, is: Where were you?
This scene hammers home two messages incredibly well:
Kaveh is the polar opposite of Alhaitham.
Alhaitham cannot emotionally distance himself from Kaveh the same way he's able to be disengaged from everyone else.
This is definitely not the most pleasant of scenes, and starting out with the characters in a bad mood with each other was a very specific choice (one fueled mostly by the need to create plausible deniability so that they could get "my god they were roommates" past the censors, if you ask me), but just because two people have a fight does not make them "toxic."
Both Kaveh and Alhaitham had valid reasons to be worked up in this scene, and considering this is the only scene in which we ever see Alhaitham act so aggressively and with such seemingly genuine anger, it should have been obvious that this was out-of-character for him, highlighting the fact that his relationship with Kaveh is not the same as his dispassionate, cool-tempered reaction to everyone else in the story so far.
Alhaitham got mad and his temper came out, but it turns out that Alhaitham's temper (which Kaveh loves to point out) is connected canonically to his frustrating failures to protect Kaveh--sometimes from Kaveh's own self. Their first fight happened because Alhaitham was too honest and popped off about Kaveh not taking care of himself, and the first fight we get to see from them on-screen is Alhaitham once again genuinely frustrated by Kaveh potentially being in a dangerous situation.
(The humor of this moment is that just like Alhaitham is reluctant to tell Kaveh the truth about what he did in Sumeru, Kaveh conveniently side-steps the reason that he was nowhere to found: He was trapped in a magical bottle fairyland at the time, so Alhaitham couldn't have found him even if he had searched high and low.)
Kaveh, predictably, meets Alhaitham's temper with a full blast of his own over-the-top reactions, including suggesting that he's going to start a rumor that Alhaitham staged a political coup on purpose--something which Kaveh, who knows Alhaitham perfectly well and knows Alhaitham is just flat out too unambitious to ever do, obviously doesn't honestly think. Neither Kaveh's insults nor Alhaitham's hold any particular weight in this conversation, and out of the two of them, Alhaitham actually has far more complimentary things to say about Kaveh than Kaveh ever has to say about him, still to this day.
Personally, I think that seeing Kaveh as the "victim" of Alhaitham's barbs in their early scenes is a misread on Kaveh's character. A massive point of Kaveh's character is that he's literally the architect of his own suffering. He blamed himself for his father's death and his mother's decline, which crippled his ability to form healthy relationships with others in his childhood. His self-sacrificial behavior and--explicitly, in the canon text--his own inability to confront reality led to the collapse of his original friendship with Alhaitham.
He bankrupted himself for the Palace of Alcazarzaray, martyring himself on the altar of his own ideals. He gets into fights with his clients because he isn't good at drawing boundaries, isolates himself from his friends because he feels like a burden (even though they all clearly love him) and then laments feeling lonely, and constantly bickers with Alhaitham even in moments when Alhaitham really hasn't done anything to start a fight, like when Alhaitham brought the Traveler and Paimon home and Kaveh spent half of his first conversation with the Traveler bad-mouthing Alhaitham, who wasn't even in the room to provoke his ire.
While Alhaitham is absolutely not a saint and is a nitpicking champion, the bulk of their bickering comes from Kaveh's tendency to anger easily, his helplessness and lack of control over his financial situation, and from his internalized assumption that Alhaitham is incapable of altruism.
Even realizing that Alhaitham's words in the past came from a place of honest reflection on Kaveh's well-being, at the beginning of their scenes in-game, Kaveh still can't bring himself to let bygones be bygones, still can't accept a freely offered hand, and ultimately ends up taking out a lot of frustration about his personal situation on Alhaitham, the symbolic lightning rod for all of Kaveh's woes. Kaveh isn't comfortable with himself, so he's interpreting every thing Alhaitham says and does in the least charitable way possible--and Alhaitham is, in part, letting him do that (actively encouraging it even), because that's what Kaveh needs. If Kaveh is incensed and railing at Alhaitham for this or that petty disagreement, then he isn't withdrawing into depression and off making rash decisions that will ruin his own life again.
The alternative to Alhaitham taking "snipes" at Kaveh is this:
So I think we can all agree which one is less toxic, lol.
Kaveh also believes that Alhaitham is his mirror--but in a negative way, with Alhaitham being the strawman Kaveh repeatedly builds up to fight against in his quest to justify his idealism, even when that idealism brings him pain. If Kaveh's ideals are just and righteous and good, then Alhaitham--who represents the dead opposite of Kaveh's idealism--must automatically be bad. Alhaitham's selfish, he's egotistical, he'd "let people drown" (said without the self-awareness to note that Alhaitham never let Kaveh drown)... At least when we first started seeing them in game, Kaveh has created an image of Alhaitham that has little to do with the actual reality of their situation.
Kaveh could have had peace from Day 1 in Alhaitham's house if he could keep his own temper in check and stop rising to Alhaitham's bait--but that's not who Kaveh is. He isn't actually a peaceful person by nature. He's kind and generous to a fault; he believes in doing right by others and in putting his heart and soul into every project he brings into the world, but he's also just kind of quarrelsome. Even if he doesn't actually like to argue, he can't help himself because he is passionate about the things he feels and believes. He's impulsive, doing what he feels is right in the moment far more than reasoning rationally about his circumstances (another point of opposition with Alhaitham), and, despite having cripplingly low self-esteem, he's also a proud person, trying overly hard to protect his reputation, so that even just being in Alhaitham's house puts him constantly on edge, fearing that people will find out about his bankruptcy.
Kaveh's tense situation with Alhaitham in their early scenes is, in large part, Kaveh's fault, stemming more from his internal issues and wounded principles than from what is actually going on between himself and Alhaitham in that moment. He's carrying so much emotional baggage into their home that nothing Alhaitham is doing could ever be considered more toxic than the weight Kaveh came into the relationship already bearing--and clearly, as we've seen their character development continue, Alhaitham's methods are working.
Kaveh is much better off now than he used to be.
This isn't to say that Alhaitham is the victim instead, just casually bearing the brunt of Kaveh's personal issues--Alhaitham has issues of his own that he's also working through! Alhaitham is a flawed character whose lack of social skills caused him to experience extreme isolation throughout his youth and into adulthood. Alhaitham claims he prefers this isolation, and yet abandons it instantly the moment he actually manages to form friendships during Sumeru's Archon Quest, now going out of his way to attend social gatherings and even feeling attached enough to Paimon to enroll her in school.
Alhaitham did cause Kaveh pain in the past by being too honest. He had to undergo character development to get to the point where he could understand that "being correct isn't the same as being right." He did have to learn to apologize and to rein in his temper, to "save the bickering for later," because he simply wasn't good at--and still clearly struggles with--communicating his actual feelings about a given situation. We're told this is such a ubiquitous flaw of his that basically everyone who has actually met him thinks Alhaitham is a heartless person, despite Alhaitham generally being laid-back, surprisingly nonjudgmental, and respectful of people even when they come from wildly different backgrounds, like his attempts to get Dehya to join the Akademiya.
To this day, it's obvious that Alhaitham still hasn't managed to make his actual care for Kaveh clear to Kaveh--and he seems mostly content to just wait for Kaveh to figure it out, rather than putting himself out there and (hilarious for the character who knows twenty languages) just using his words. Alhaitham is a little allergic to being forthright, and his relationship with Kaveh moves a glacial pace in part because of that.
So no, their banter didn't sound friendly at first because it wasn't friendly at first. It wasn't supposed to be! They're two flawed people whose personal hang-ups are very difficult for them to overcome, making it extremely hard for them to connect and communicate. They both hurt each other badly in the past, and they're still not over that pain because they've never managed to confront and properly address it. Both them are carrying some intense emotional baggage into their house and struggling to make life together work despite those weights they're carrying. They don't really know how to even be friends because the way they were close before was exactly what fell apart on them in the first place.
But making mistakes in the past, even if those mistakes caused pain, doesn't make a relationship toxic--it just makes it human.
(Okay, just a real world side note here that you can entirely skip if you don't want to hear me rambling... Maybe this is coming from the fact that I'm old, your local fandom mom for real for real, but I sometimes find myself genuinely concerned that younger people seem to really struggle with the concept of conflict. There seems to be this sentiment that relationships should be entirely free of fights, that you shouldn't have to reason with and critically examine your stances on conflicting moral perspectives, that you shouldn't be confronted with criticism--I think this extreme avoidance of conflict is at the heart of a lot of issues we're facing in fandom today, such as fans' inability to handle characters who do bad things or the war over whether shipping reflects people's morality. We operate on black-and-white instead of seeking dialogue and accepting nuance.
Embracing conflict as a core part of life involves recognizing the person facing you on the other side of the conflict, accepting that others' perspectives may differ from your own, making peace with the idea that people may say things you don't want to hear...
Somewhat hilariously, I think that the inclination to view Alhaitham and Kaveh's early relationship as toxic perfectly aligns with the core issue that Alhaitham and Kaveh themselves had--neither one of them could tolerate the discomfort brought on by an opposing ideology, the same way many people nowadays struggle to accept situations that are not perfect from the start, where mistakes are made and truths are sometimes spoken too harshly.
I love that the only two Fukuzawa ships I ever really see are with Mori and Fukuchi, because that suggests that his type is evil military man who enjoys mercilessly making fun of him and manipulating kids.
Poor Fukuzawa, so many divorces, so few actual relationships…
Kouyou and Mori’s relationship is so interesting actually. Like, he killed the man who was presumably her abuser, and now she’s his right hand man. And I think there are so many interesting implications there. Does she think of him as some sort of savior? Is he just the better of two evils? I personally think she’s fond of him, because she does act like she’s fond of him. I wonder how much she knows about the old boss’s death. Because if Hirotsu knows Mori killed him and was just going along with because it was best for the organization, I’m sure the girl who the old boss was personally invested in enough to murder someone to keep her there but not her would know. But real question is does Mori know she knows? I wonder if she had any involvement in it or if she was secretly cheering it on from the sidelines. Or maybe she did care for the old boss and that’s why she relates her relationship with him to her relationship with Kyouka. Perhaps he was a parental figure to her.
It’s also really interesting when you add Dazai into the mix. I wonder when exactly they met. I have three potential answers here, because they already knew each other by the time Chuuya joined the mafia, and even Hirotsu had just met him at that point. Dazai and the old boss seemed familiar with each other, so either Mori had him in that room enough times that they kind of got to know each other, or Dazai was allowed in that room so freely because they already knew each other. So, 1. Kouyou met Dazai pre-Mori through the boss, 2. She met him after he met Mori when she went to go visit the old boss while he was sick, 3. She met him through Mori after he took over the position. All three of these are really interesting to me. Because if she him before Mori, like that’s a lot of history and potentially shared trauma, if she met him after Mori but before the boss died there’s probably some weird tension, if she met him after the boss’s death that means she was one of the few people Mori trusted enough to let close to Dazai.
(I wonder when she became an executive? I forgot if she was one already in stormbringer or not, but I’d like to think she was. She was 18 when she met Mori, so it’s possible the old boss made her an exec, because that’s still two years older than Dazai was when he became the youngest one ever, but I feel like it’s more likely that Mori took a liking to her and promoted her.)
I can just imagine all three of them sitting in that room knowing that man was about to die and knowing that each other know, but all pretending they didn’t. Oh god, imagine the funeral. In fifteen it’s mentioned that Mori threw an elaborate funeral for old boss, and the sheer potential for drama there. Just everyone dancing around the subject. The drama, the secrecy, the mafia politics. If I could write, I’d write that fic.
Also the drama of Mori, Dazai, Kouyou, and Hirotsu being the only characters who remember the mafia before Mori? So interesting. Because the turnover rate in the mafia seems to be fucking insane, so it is possible that only a few members from the old days are still alive. Probably more than those four, but those are the only four who are prominent characters, so… intrigue. Kind of an implied bond, don’t you think?
Dazai knows parkour. With all the shit he gets himself into, he of course knows the best way to run away. No he can't drive well, which would be an excellent way to escape, but he can scale the side of a building like a cat. It's how he's just barely kept up with Chuuya all these years.
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