Hobbies : reading toilet bound Hanako-kun/tbhk (manga) , watching anime , making agere headcanons , photography, researching space {astronomy} & ocean animals , reading up on dog breeds , listening to kids science like : brains on , wow in the world
Hyperfixations : Ouran High school host club , Alien stage/ALNST , Toilet Bound Hanako-Kun\tbhk
Fav music artists : Flavor foley , Yaelokre , Melina Kb , Hatsune Miku , Kagamine Len & Rin , Will Stetson , Blake Roman , Nightcord at 25:00/Niigo , More more jump/MMJ
having their hair played with and styled by someone else
deep tissue massages
hot cocoa nights with their regressor(s)!! setting up a hot chocolate bar can be sooo fun, especially when the caregiver also gets to make a fun hot chocolate too!! or a coffee if hot chocolate isn't your thing
heating pads and heated blankets
really high quality winter gloves to wear
learning about and preventing global warming so we can keep our winters cool and healthy!
paper snowflakes
collecting vintage porcelain plates and other kitchenware
can be over protective of their regression family, regardless of role
likes to braid other peoples' hair
has the energy of a big dog. like you think they might be an adult dog, but they could be a puppy. and they might seem mature when they're sleepy but they also have puppy energy when it's time to play.
reads every sherlock holmes type of book they can get their hands on
is pretty good at waking up to any alarms set in the morning
sleeps easier when alone tbh. whenever other folks are sleeping around them, they try to stay awake and keep an eye on everything
definitely a very.... 'parentified child' style flip if you know what i mean. speaking as a parentified child myself
their favorite type of playdate to plan is a scavenger hunt playdate. its so fun to see the regressors try to find all the clues they've set up. they usually get super excited and end up regressing and joining in the playing. the more the merrier!!!
not very big on rough-housing. will usually only engage in 'rough-housing' style play if doing some very active play pretend or doing some basic self defense practice
likes to walk dogs a lot
if a regressor asks them for a bedtime story, they're probably going to recite a mystery book they've read recently
**This analysis is mainly themed around a pretty frank discussion of heteronormativity and misogyny. Please be mindful of that before reading this!**
Oh boy. What a doozy of a comic. What a radical shift to the way I had been reading this story up until now.
It didn't really change the way I saw Mizi as a character, to be honest. What it changed was my perception of the environment these characters grew up in, lending new context to Mizi's actions and motivations.
To summarize: Mizi being queer is a much bigger deal than I'd thought.
[Long post is long, as usual. Full analysis under the cut.]
The hints were there from the beginning that Mizi wasn't entirely oblivious to the cruel nature of their world.
I'm not going to say that she knew the true deadly end awaiting the losers on Alien Stage, because I really don't think that was the case at all. She didn't know Sua was going to be killed. At the same time, I think it was something of a case of "well, what did I think was going to happen?" after the fact. Mizi simply didn't consider it as a possibility, because she didn't want to see it.
I'll come back to this.
While watching Alien Stage, I always did have a certain thought in my head that intrigued me. Love is one of the central themes of the show, namely, the way the cast try their best to love in the only ways they know how. However, due to the structure of their world, the control they're placed under and how the only way they are allowed to shine is on stage as part of a packaged performance, their only metric for what "love" looks like is idolatry.
It didn't seem like it really mattered that much of our cast was queer. I just shrugged and assumed the aliens didn't really care what their pets got up to, so long as they performed well on stage.
This comic turned that on its head.
The scene with the unnamed Anakt Garden boy establishes something very important.
It does matter, actually, that the love is queer.
Over time, the creators have done a careful job of slowly showing us bit by bit of all the different things they are taught at Anakt - we see the music lessons first (checks out; they're being trained to sing, after all), and their mandatory play for "mental health". They have phys ed type competitions. While there is a disturbing element of all of them being essentially brought up as lambs to the slaughter, compared to the stage and to the horrors some of them faced from their guardians, the garden appears a relative paradise.
But the garden is not free of the aliens' control, far from it. Everything is fashioned to train the pet humans and serve some sort of purpose to satisfy the aliens.
We see experimentation and augmentation. We see a form of religion that emphasizes the great pride one should have in fulfilling the aliens' intended purposes for them. We see cloning.
There is another purpose to training "pets" and selecting ones that have particular desirable traits. After all, if you like a particular breed of dog for their hunting abilities, or a particular beautiful coat pattern, you can breed more like it. Io, Till's mother and a "provider", seems pretty clearly kept for that purpose.
I'm not saying that Anakt was for breeding. It's pretty clearly for the stage itself. But that doesn't change the mindset the aliens have taken to the relative "purposes" of biological females and males, and the way that trickles down into the mentality of the kids we see there.
We've seen a recent comic of the Anakt kids at school together, learning things about biology. I had originally assumed that it was focused on vocal training and anatomy pertaining to singing. Now, I suspect, from this unnamed guy saying "You know what they say", that there's a heavy focus on reproduction as well.
So, now love is corrupted two-fold. "Love" is only acceptable in terms of idolatry, or as a biological imperative to mate.
The Anakt kids are familiar with the concept of crushes. A lot of them were revealed to have crushes and have liked each other, as seen in the notes they left each other after graduation. Some of the names are difficult to discern, gender-wise. But I suspect most of these are male-female.
Till's crush on Mizi is "obvious". But Ivan's crush on Till is never noticed, and people continue to confess to Mizi and Sua despite the two always being together and Mizi directly stating that Sua is her favourite person. The boy in the most recent comic does not think anything of Mizi and Sua hanging out and instead fixates on her and Till. I don't even know if Till fully understands. Mizi tells him her favourite person is Sua, but does it occur to Till that her favouritism is born out of a romantic love for her? Does Till even recognize the possibility that Ivan's "weird" behaviour could be because he has feelings for him? I'm honestly unsure. It's very possible he doesn't know.
Another thing that intrigued me from the start: Mizi and Sua are canonically in love. But, just watching the show without knowledge that the creator, Vivinos, is queer, or without some of the comics' background information, a lot of people watching for the first time mistake them for best friends and nothing more. Even in official in-universe interviews, we see this:
They are best friends, of course! That's not in doubt and that's important too. But it's really interesting that even though the aliens were moved by their connection made obvious in the My Clematis performance, it is not called love.
By contrast, while in-universe the obliviousness is much the same, real-life audiences have no issue picking up on Ivan's feelings for Till. Part of this is gender bias (women are expected to be more affectionate with each other), but part of this is presentation. For awhile, I felt a little uncertain about the canon MiziSua relationship being so... understated compared to IvanTill, who get a full yearning song and an onstage kiss to make it completely unambiguous. It's even strange, because Mizi does nothing but talk about how much she loves Sua. But now, I think that's the point.
The thing is, Mizi has been loud about her love for Sua. It's just that no one understands.
What this comic establishes is that Mizi has near constant feelings of being misunderstood and objectified. She is a pretty woman, who is friendly, with a genuine desire to see people happy. Unfortunately, due to the aliens' emphasis on what a woman's role should be with regards to men, with regards to what is expected of her, her desire for friendship is treated as "leading people on", the way many women are accused of being "temptresses" when in reality it is others who read into her platonic expressions of behaviour. No one bothers to actually get to know her as a person, because hardly anyone cares about her beyond a pretty face. Without other female role models to help her understand that this is not her fault, Mizi internalizes this sudden anger at her as somehow her doing, even though she really doesn't get what she did "wrong".
Unlike Ivan, who at least fashioned his own personality to fit in, Mizi was forced to fill in the cracks on a smiley, cheerful, pretty mask that everyone else had decided on for her - because they could get mad at her if she doesn't.
Even though Mizi is naive in many regards, she actually notices something here that none of the rest of them seem to. Sua and Ivan "steal" these precious moments, resigned to never being able to have or keep them. Till is content to find inspiration from afar. These three have been fighting to physically survive in their awful circumstances, so that they really don't question the existing power structures much at all.
But Mizi, misunderstood and hurt by social factors more than by physical ones at this point, has just enough awareness and just enough innocence to question. She's so close to performing as a woman in the way others expect her to. And yet, there's something about her that is just "wrong" enough in the way that gets people (men) mad at her. And she doesn't get it.
She doesn't return his feelings but she does want to be friends. Why is that not enough?
She's already said she loves Sua. Why is that not enough?
She runs away here, still with a smile on her face to try and appease and placate this boy who got violent with her for a reason she cannot understand, even as she cries, clearly scared. This is a fawn response. And it's this that gets warped into Mizi somehow believing that she has made everyone love her or somehow manipulated them. Yes, it is intended for self-preservation. But not from the aliens.
Mizi runs to Sua, seeking comfort and reassurance. Surely, Sua will understand. And personally, I think Sua probably does to some degree. But in this situation, she had just spent a long time with her alien mother preparing for the stage. What's more, she doesn't trust or like many of the other people at Anakt. Mizi says that the boy wasn't a bad person, while Sua says there was "something off about him".
They had also just come off the tail end of an argument. Mizi is content to just make herself be happy now that Sua is here. But Sua cannot "just be happy", and from her perspective, Mizi's apparent ability to just shrug things off and be carefree is hurtful after the experience she has likely just had. Both girls wanted comfort from each other here and did not find it, but Sua makes the really insensitive move of accidentally echoing the boy's words back at Mizi. I don't think Sua meant this to be mean, really. Her collar is green - if anything, I think Sua is sincere about being glad Mizi doesn't get dragged around the way she does. But all the same, a level of resentment does show through, and it doesn't change the fact that this is the last thing Mizi needed to hear in that moment.
It's not really Sua Mizi wanted to hurt. She's definitely angry with her. But that's the thing: Mizi feels safe enough to get mad at and hit Sua. She did not feel safe enough to do that with the boy.
It makes sense now that Mizi was comfortable enough with Ivan to fall asleep on top of him. He was likely the one boy there she wasn't scared of, with full knowledge that he would never be interested in her that way.
And that's what I think Mizi was truly aware of that she pretended to be ignorant of. Not the full horrors of Alien Stage itself, but the emotions and mindsets of the people around her. She's much more understanding of the way people think and feel than she let on, which allowed her to tailor her reactions so that people hopefully wouldn't get so mad at her. If she's just a ditz, then they can't get too mad, right? People would feel bad for getting mad at someone so oblivious, right? She could keep finding comfort and safety and protection in Sua, right? Right?
She's innocent to many things, but when it comes to human beings, Mizi is almost hyper-aware of the way her perceived womanhood puts her in danger, not just from the aliens but from her peers, and the way her love for Sua is not accepted and would not be understood. And by not understanding that, by not seeing the love that was one of the few things she chose to pursue and cultivate for herself, does anyone really know her at all?
The religion they pray to tells them to be honoured to be selected for Alien Stage, and to carry out the purpose they were created for.
Mizi, armed with knowledge of humanity's god before the aliens, but with a naive and innocent hope in her heart due to being shielded from the horror of physical death, defies this assigned deity and chooses a new god in Sua. Her love for Sua is what she sees as the truest part of her - no matter what anyone tells her about what her's and Sua's "purpose" is, that cannot possibly be wrong. Something that brings them happiness and security like this cannot be wrong. She devotes herself to it because it is the one thing that she refuses to appease others over. She thinks this entitlement to her heart and body is "gross". She states it bluntly, many times. Her favorite person is Sua. Her best friend in the world is Sua. Her god, her universe, is Sua, and she chose her.
This changes the My Clematis performance.
We know that Mizi, unlike the rest, was not forced to participate in Alien Stage; instead, it was a choice she made because she wanted to perform with Sua. What initially seemed like a naive desire to share a special moment with her soulmate becomes something much more motivated by Mizi's own desires to have people see her love for Sua in a way that cannot be denied. She wants people to see them together.
Mizi is oblivious to the Stage's true nature, but she is not oblivious to the emotions of her friends. She knows something is wrong with the way Sua is acting about it. She knows the stage carries tension they can all feel. On some level, she knows the two of them are destined to be torn apart.
But she doesn't want to see it, because much like Sua needed her bubble of innocence to survive, Mizi needed her hope that their love could be enough some day. That they won't be torn apart and forced to fulfill some coldly practical or biological prerogative. It's the first duet in Alien Stage history; a brilliant, almost rebellious demonstration that Mizi has just about deluded herself into thinking might actually work to spare them from their fate she sticks her head in the sand about and refuses to acknowledge.
They are going to wear their most beautiful dresses. They are going to sing the most beautiful song for them, a testament to their love and connection. Look, see, aren't we beautiful?
Mizi: "Still, I want to sing and perform with SUA for as long as possible, so I want to win with her, together! I heard that there’s never been a tie in all of ALIEN STAGE’s history… But if we get that tie, then I bet everyone will call us the most fantastic duo to exist in history, right?!"
After this comic, all I can read in this is: acknowledge us.
But then Sua is shot dead in front of her.
Her blood splashes that same cheek where the boy slapped her. Mizi's final hopes are shattered. Worse yet, because she still can't understand why this happened and why everyone keeps getting violent, because her desire to display their love openly got Sua killed, Mizi internalizes the idea that she is the one with something horribly wrong with her - blaming herself for being too frightened to face reality when the rest of her friends had, and feeling like her desperate attempts to people please and hold onto an ignorant hope forced people into dying to protect her. In actuality though, Mizi is not responsible for the way people try to force her to fit an image, and she did not manipulate people into liking her - she's just friendly, and many of the guys read into it, feeling entitled to her because they're boys and she's a girl, and in the face of that, Mizi's established love for another girl is inconsequential.
This adds another layer to Mizi's violent breakdown in round 5. The boy from this comic bears quite the resemblance to Luka. This comic recontextualizes Luka's interactions with Mizi and Hyuna in a really intriguing way.
Luka is a victim. I want to make that clear off the bat. He's heavily implied to be a clone with the least amount of understanding on love and human connection. Off the stage, he is micromanaged to the point of complete and utter obedience - the perfect idol. But on stage, the performance is his to control, and he does so by asserting dominance over his performing partner and emotionally destabilizing them.
Fascinatingly, while everyone else appears somewhat oblivious to the queer love of many of our main characters, Luka appears stunningly aware of it, and is able to weaponize it. Round 5 looks like a wedding. He grabs Mizi and forces her to participate in a distorted version of a partner dance. It was really the perfect way to break her.
In addition to mocking her over Sua's death, in addition to her anger that Sua lied to her and enabled her ignorance, Mizi looks up at Luka and sees what she always feared: a man replacing her beloved Sua and forcing her into a kind of relationship she doesn't want, because "that is the way things are meant to be".
She no longer has anything to lose, nor fear for her own life, so she finally lets all her anger out on him.
Again, Luka is obedient. He's internalized many things: win at all costs being one of them. Do what you were designed to do. It's not really a surprise that he probably internalized these biological notions of what is "natural" too. Whatever his audience wants to see.
This also lends context to this scene. Hyuna is in distress. We know and she knows that Luka's feelings are genuine, but for as long as he acts out the aliens' methods of control, his "love" will only be a prison for Hyuna. He forces himself on her here, likely because... "it's only natural". That entitlement tainting what were genuine feelings between them would be unbearable for Hyuna, who values her freedom more than anything (and this is before even getting into what happened to Hyunwoo).
For Hyuna to rescue Mizi immediately after she lashed out, and for Mizi to temporarily see a woman who embodies freedom in how and who she loves, who is unabashedly loud and courageous while no less damaged, is a huge deal coming on the tail end of Round 5. It's really such a shame the time they had together was so short.
I, for one, am really hoping that Mizi can find her strength in love again, much like Hyuna did, instead of continuing to punish herself through Sua's memory.
something that someone or many may have realized and pointed out but i think is really cool in alien stage/anakt garden. a somewhat analysis/essay on alien stage, continued in reblogs (full version will be linked in the replies once this thing is finished) because of tumblr image limit </3
(warnings for blood and character death as usual in alnst!!)
to start, i did NOT notice this before but wiege really solidified/pointed out that the garden the human children were raised in is completely fake.
this seemed like a really obvious fact but it's REALLY noticeable in wiege. you can see the edges of the sky, bright and constantly blue. the "trees" are geometrical in shape and dont vary in size. the clouds aren't even real, they are just painted on the walls of the sky.
it's almost like a stage play, an environment created for the purpose of convincing people. all of it is artificial, a fake environment to stimulate human growth.
and theyre happy, the children are happy because they are with their friends and are having fun. they dont realize that the place that they are spending the most time in is just a mock reality of how their world would have been if humanity wasnt enslaved by aliens.
and in this fake environment we can see how REAL the characters are. in this world, they arent being seen through the eyes of an alien owner. we can see that they laugh and play, they worry and get jealous. we as the audience can see how HUMANE they are. they arent just pets to be used and disposed of.
this contrast highlights the fact that they are just children, pit against each other for the entertainment of aliens. the exact opposite of what humans naturally do, group up, advance together.
we can see that they DID enjoy being together, but once they grew up and passed to the competition, it was an isolated environment. in rare cases (mizisua, maybe ivantill) the bonds forged were strong enough to withstand years of training and mistreatment. but we also saw that these bonds are forcibly broken, even if the people who were connected never fell out.
it is only when they are outside of the fake environment is when those bonds can actually grow stronger.
sua is shown to be sensitive about her appearance regardless of the intention or content of the comments directed at her. in official material, she becomes depressed and self-conscious when a classmate compliments her on her small face
the way the compliment is phrased bothers sua, because its intended effect occurs by way of comparison. generosity to the recipient depends on the speaker's self-criticism. the compliment elevates sua while sinking the speaker's status, which reminds sua of her relationship with her sisters—in a competitive environment where nigeh's favor was currency used to purchase social standing and to avoid punishment, positive feedback incurred their jealousy. sua apologizes to her classmate and takes responsibility for her perceived negative feelings about her own failure (having a large face), which echoes the ways she was made responsible for her sisters' "shortcomings" and resultant anger. sua's success threatened their standing, and they made her the subject of abuse in both anticipation and retaliation of their displacement.
i took sua's classmate's comment "i was trying to cheer you up" as her predicting that sua would be upset by the photo due to her sensitivty about her appearance. her compliment is an attempt to accommodate sua's emotional needs. however, it falls short because sua is tight-lipped about her relationships with her sisters and with nigeh and the breadth of the damage it does to her psyche. even positive comments dredge up memories of her sisters' harsh criticisms. there is no way for her to anticipate sua's true needs because she doesn't share them. this is a pattern seen also in her relationship with mizi; even when she's jealous over till and ivan taking mizi's attention, she refuses to admit it, and mizi has to guess what she's done to upset her. while it's almost certain sua never explicitly divulged her sensitivity (especially to someone outside the main group), i do find it plausible that it was readily observed by her classmates in a school wherein everyone is constantly together.
sua's older sister implements her knowledge of sua's sensitivty as a tool to foster her dependence on her (sua says, "back then, you were all i had. and that's why you scared me"). i won't get into it now but i really believe that it was, in some part, because she wanted to protect her sister from the horrors of the garden (though this love is complicated by jealousy, possessiveness, and deep resentment). she understand that sua relies on her, and specifically remarks on her appearance and physical habits when she mentions mizi to remind sua of that reliance. she comments that sua is "stupid" and "unkempt," disorderly and poorly groomed. she points out one of sua's nervous habits and implies that it diminishes her value—that her truest, most natural self is a blight to be masked or erased. sua becomes aware of herself here, and further constructs her persona by carefully regulating her self-expression. by forcing an association between hope (sua's aspiration to meet mizi, her view of their mother as "happy" or pleased) and fear (criticism of her appearance, reminders of death), sua's sister sets the groundwork for sua's habits of being closed-off, withholding, and possessive of her few joys
by the comic's end, sua insists that anakt garden wasn't the hell her sister proposed it was, because mizi loved her there. sua pities her sister because she never experienced the warmth real love gave her, even if sua herself met a violent demise. tamsyn muir's "it's finished, it's done. you can't take loved away," etc etc
i love angel sua because of the myriad things going on here. the stars represent sweet dream. her pupils are expanded unnaturally wide like a corpse. everything is light blue, even when her real hair is tinted green and her eyes are purple. this is because light blue represents her show persona, a single, flat image of her idealised idol self.
light blue is employed in sweet dream, and with mizi's light projector. "that blue night under the splendid lighting" refers to the stage, which means both the actual stage, and in this enclosed room with mizi. under the spotlight, and with mizi, she has to perform and project a dream, as it's the job of being an idol.
this is all symbolised by the blue star. the light projector was used in mizi's childhood to get her to fall asleep easier while at anakt (information from the anakt garden kit), a vestige of childhood they've carried all the way into the present. in essence, that's what their dream ultimately is, an acting out of what childhood innocence should've been for two people that never truly had the chance to experience it. to dream so fervidly is childish, and the dream itself is a wish for an idealised childishness. but even if you act it out, it's no more real or true to reality than the projection of five pointed stars on the walls that close them in.
ALNST headcanon: Ivan's favorite musical would be Hadestown because orpheus looking back at eurydice and her having to then leave would remind him of him and Till almost escaping ANAKT Garden in that one flashback in black sorrow.
....and Till's favorite musicals would be Heathers and Six, and he would be so embarrassed by it.
All this when they're in the highschool AU, hanging out, and only Ivan has the memories of their alternate lives in the ALNST universe. Ivan has to annoy Till so much to get him to tell Ivan his favorite musicals. Till doesn't understand the significance of Ivan's, because he has no memory of ANAKT Garden.
I finished a drawing for the first time in forever
them in their anakt garden outfits
I love them
im gonna yap quite A LOT about their designs so bear with me please...
theyre like maybe 13-ish years old here
Jason is wearing the turtleneck thing that Ivan does in canon because, well, Jason is based off of Ivan here and so he listens to the guardians, yay
Till’s flower crown from canon makes an appearance!!
i here imagine leo making it and putting it on jason because valgrace
also because Valgrace is based off of ivantill, they will be fighting a lot, in like fist fighting sort of way, physical…and Jason’s going to enjoy it (like ivan does), because he’s a little weird like that :DDD
jason's hair is inspired by luka in canon (specifically ruler of my heart), because the aliens look more for "angelic" features and jasons canon one felt a little too...rough iykwim (also i cant draw his canon hair soooo yea, anything to avoid actually doing it :D)
so having this hair might like soften him out a little more and so he gets more of a fanbase
if you zoom into their eyes, leo's is more shiny/sparkly because jason's been in the industry longer and, so its kinda like hes losing his spark
the ahoge, maybe its my inner gacha kid or wtv speaking from me, but no one can ever take my ahoge away from me
their ahoge is based on their powers from canon, so yea jason = lightning and leo = flame/fire
and yay, jason has his glasses!!
gave him his gold ones instead of his black pair, because idk i just like it better and i feel like having black would be too rough
it looks kinda weird with my style buts its wtvvv (i havent drawn a pair of glasses in like months...)
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