day 1 of making dandy's world oc: aw man what's the funniest name i can give a chocolate bar...
day 20 of making dandy's world oc: and the grief is endless and forever and they STILL can't look their closest friend in the eye without flinching AND
day 400 of making dandy's world oc: i think i might have to rework their stats.
bonked the shit out of rachel with that hit your mutuals with a cardboard tube post and now the boop mechanic wont let me harass her again. i think this might be karma
Personal clay thoughts? Also thoughts on clayvier 👀
personal clay thoughts is so broad lmao. went on a little bit of a ramble. spoilers for aa5/dual destinies under the cut. it's been a few years since i played the games so someone lmk if i fudged some details
like a lot of people, i think we really could have done with seeing way more of clay in dual destinies! imo there's the roots of a character that could be really interesting there, which is why some people end up rotating him in their brains even though we don't really see much of him (aside from the fact that people just think space is cool, so apollo's space guy friend is cool, of course. no shade. space is very cool)
i think think there's some people who brush clay aside as a fluffy vague concept of an upbeat best friend for apollo, which i won't argue is most of what canon gives us, but it's the details of the HAT-2 crisis that i think give us the fun bits. like yeah, he was a shy crybaby of a kid and because of apollo's friendship and support he grew up to be a really friendly, upbeat guy who's able to support apollo in turn. that's very sweet! that's a perfectly good character on their own, if he'd gotten a little more fleshed out!
but what do you mean he drugged starbuck's coffee to help with the bizarre plan to dodge the phantom. that's insane. why on earth did he think that was a viable strategy. the fingerprints on the lighter/gun being clay's instead of athena's is also like—in the moment, yeah, this is a beat about "fulbright" lying and what the implications of that are. but also: what do you mean clay's fingerprints are on the gun? that means the phantom tried to shoot him point-blank and clay fucking grabbed the gun. a fearless trained assassin/spy/whatever tried to shoot him point-blank—when clay was presumably being ambushed at an already stressful moment, and was potentially even still carrying starbuck—and clay put up enough of a fight that the guy had to fall back on a secondary weapon. what do you mean. that's bonkers.
and it does check out, because apollo is insane so of course his best friend is also going to be insane (*flynn vesperia voice* you thought a friend of yuri's would be normal??), but he's insane in a different and fascinating way. apollo is a guy who will stay in an exploding building to try to resolve his friend's murder, clay is a guy who will drug his friend to try to avoid a known assassination/terrorist plot. they're both nuts. they deserve each other. accordingly i hc and try to write clay with some sharper moments and a protective streak, because one of the few deeper character insights into him we get is that he's willing to get his hands dirty, and even wrong the people he's trying to protect, in the name of keeping them safe.
collection of various other hcs—clay is absurdly young to be an active astronaut, in general but especially to be going on something as serious as a moon mission. i don't think this was really something they put a lot of thought into in the writer's room, since they didn't do any of the fanfare they do for ~*prodigy*~ lawyer characters who passed the bar at 13 or whatever, but if we take it more seriously than just generic "game protags and by extension their friends/party are usually under 25," it means clay has to be pretty fucking smart. i've mentioned before that i hc clay as having a degree in astrophysics. by nature of his job, i think he also has to be more than competent at engineering (in practice/with direction if not in theory/designing) and very physically fit/athletic. i also generally hc clay as a gay man. i have no textual basis for that whatsoever, it's just the sticker i slapped on him. congrats man, i think your best friend is gay so you also get to be gay. i think they dated for like 3 weeks in middle school after they both realized they were gay, and then they decided they were better as friends, potentially because apollo realized clay had a bigger crush on starbuck than him lol. clay grows out of his crush on starbuck though
regarding clayvier:
i've mentioned before that in a claypollovier context, i can see clayvier being a "fwb sharing a bf" situation. not enamored with each other, but not opposed to some mutual fooling around while cheerfully sharing apollo bc they both like apollo getting to have stuff that makes him happy, and they can recognize that they both make apollo happy. i don't think much on clayvier outside of that context, both bc i've got my heart set on klapollo and because i don't really feel like we have enough to go on. i hc and i think it's a sort of fanon that clay is more fluent in pop culture than apollo, and is more aware of/potentially even a fan of the gavinners, but i don't think we get any indication at all of clay's feelings on klavier or the gavinners in canon.
trying to set aside my own klapollo hcs/interpretation of apollo as attracted to klavier—at bare minimum, apollo has very intense feelings about klavier. again, one of the few deeper character insights we have about clay is that he's capable of being intensely protective. this doesn't strictly mean he would dislike klavier/be protective against him, but i would argue it lowers the chances that clay would get romantically/sexually involved with klavier. him doing so would 100% frustrate apollo, regardless of whether there's an aspect of romantic jealousy to that frustration.
i think this is a point where we suffer from the fact that we don't have more of clay and his personality in canon—because that doesn't necessarily mean that clay wouldn't get involved with klavier. we just have no real indication of the finer machinations of apollo and clay's relationship. supportive & protective don't tell us whether clay would, up to a point, still think it was hilarious to frustrate apollo by dating/fucking his obnoxious courtroom rival. we know that clay was apollo's support pillar during the events of aa4, but we don't know how he was responding to individual aspects of the mess. what did he think of klavier patronizing apollo when they first met? what did he think of klavier being unexpectedly helpful and cooperative in court? what did he think about the concert ticket & invoice situation, or klavier being fixated on mistakes the band made during the set over the murder investigation, or him being snippy with apollo about dragging klavier into his "little mysteries"? i think these can all be interesting questions to ask and explore, but we really don't get any hints about it in canon. we're more or less making up the answers wholesale
i do think that if you take "apollo is romantically/sexually attracted to klavier" as a given, it drastically lowers the chance of clay being dtf klavier though lmao. people have hidden depths and all but i don't think the crumbs of characterization we get for clay point to him being the kind of guy to date the guy his friend is into. he would want apollo to be okay with it, and i think within the timeline of canon klapollo interactions we see, apollo would probably not be okay with it. i think there are plausible dynamics for the three of them that you could imagine where all of that is true and it happens anyway, but it would involve clay being shittier to apollo than i'm positing here
(which i don't say to imply that there's anything wrong with the ship—clay being a little shittier and less considerate could be an interesting direction for his character!)
tl;dr i think clay is insane (complimentary) and of the little characterization we get for him, the bits that point to him being a little unhinged are a fun aspect to focus on. i think "would clay date/be dtf klavier" is a question we can't really answer with any textual basis. i lean towards "probably not," but i don't really have anything against the ship
Hi, hope you don't mind me coming into your inbox about the spaceboy again. Me and my sister went to get some drinks this morning before the rain hit and right as we got outside with our coffee and hot chocolate, it started raining really hard. I feel like something like this would happen to Clay and Apollo would laugh about it as Clay walks into the apartment looking like a wet cat.
can u even imagine what all that fluffy hair does when its soaked........ wet cat indeed
