riko or jean for the ask game smile :)
hellloo thank you for the ask :3
been trying to finish a kevriko fic so...riko it is
i could not take riko seriously at all for the entirety of the original series. i had him mentally categorized as "tropey super-evil villain mwuahaha" from book one. i was rolling my eyes at riko in trk thinking, "of course you also enjoy torturing people for fun." that's just the sort of characteristic people give to their villains they want the reader to know is definitely super-evil. like, no "good guy" in fiction ever has the "torture people" hobby. at worst, i thought of riko as lazy writing of an antagonist, and at best, i thought he was written to be a cliche intentionally because he really wasn't meant to be the focus of neil and andrew's story.
long-time followers of mine will have witnessed first-hand my descent into liking riko. it's kevin's fault. it really is. i was intrigued by kevin after tkm and i really wanted to know what makes him tick. and somewhere along the way, i got around to thinking about kevin's relationship with riko which led me to thinking more about what kind of person riko is. and. well. here we are. now i can appreciate riko as a character and not just as a narrative device. although in tgr i was starting to miss riko as a narrative device because jeremy's family/hook-ups all suck so much and aren't doing enough to advance the plot.
i have blorbos that i like to put on a shelf and just admire them as they are and then there are blorbos i like to put through the industrial blender of suffering. riko goes right into the blender :)
gotta go with the infamous scene during neil's Christmas Torture Holiday at Evermore. because what the fuck. what even was that. you can always rely on riko to do something unhinged that raises the stakes. neil and riko are both really good at unhinged stake-raising actions. the two of them combined? unparalleled.
every idea i have for a riko-centric story is fucked up and explicit and comes with probably many content warnings. like i know this fandom isn't big on that kind of story but... just to throw a couple ideas out there... perfect court omegaverse - omega riko, alpha everyone else, the nest has a flipped hierarchical structure. pre-canon jeremy/riko - somewhere along the way of trying to draw jeremy's attention away from kevin to make kevin jealous, riko accidentally ends up as one of jeremy's conquests. wymack/riko - brat-taming porn.
not to get too serious but...liking riko is a morally neutral stance.
i'm going to say kevriko right now because that's what i'm writing
ace!riko is near and dear to my heart. i think it would make a lot of sense if riko never thought or realized he was in love with kevin because of the lack of sexual attraction. riko being like, i don't like him, i just want to kill him and wear him like a warm coat - which could mean anything. i think it'd be funny.