BBTAG Special Interaction - Decus and Vatista
Annon-Guy: Let's wrap up Under Night In-Birth week with Decus and Vatista.
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Decus: "Time to wake up, my little friend. Our enemy seeks to capture us!
Vatista: *Wakes up, materializes her dress and stretches her body* "Affirmative. I shall assist you in your escape."
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Decus: "Phew! I wonder what drew them toward us? I've hidden ourselves pretty well.
Vatista: "There are other ways to locate a target, including scent."
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Decus: "Hmmmm, maybe if I make myself smell better, they won't find us. Time for another spray of my "Eau De Seduct-. Hey! Why did you destroy that bottle!? It costed me 200 Gald!"
Vatista: "We are trying to avoid detection by any means. I fail to understand why wearing that odoriferous smell would conceal our presence when it does the exact opposite."
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Poor poor Decus. I wonder why he likes that "perfume" so much?
Anyway, hope you liked Under Night In-Birth Week, Darunia.
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GKD Here!
I'm not sure if it was intentional on Bandai Namco's part, but I always got the idea that part of the failure of Eau de Seduction was an overreliance on human pheromone and the Axe Body Spray effect where "If a little smells good, a lot must smell better, right?"
So I think Eau de Seduction is a combination of certain scents smelling too much like body odor or worse and Decus just wearing too much perfume. (Skatole is a notorious yet useful perfume component, for example. It's a major component to the scent of coal tar and literal feces, but in small amounts, it enhances floral notes in delicate fragrances such as jasmine. Lots of perfumes that tout their scents as enticing to other humans claim to use human pheromones extracted from blood, sweat, spit, and even human urine.)
I discovered something recently that I never had an explanation for before. I always hated going into hardware stores. They always smelled like some sort of bitter pungent odor that I always attributed to the smell of motor oil. I discovered recently that the smell is just what certain male sweat smells like to me. My dad smells like that when he's been outside all day. It's a very particular scent. And it doesn't always happen. Some days dad can come home and smell fine, so I'm sure it has to do with which bacteria are currently active. My sandals had the same problem recently. Never an odor before, no matter how often I wore them. But when I walked through the dirt while gardening one day, they started developing a very particular foot-sweat scent they never had before after I would wear them. So I'm fairly certain it's a change in the bacteria that has access to the sweat and thus affect the body odor. So it's very possible that Eau de Seduction contains a bacterial byproduct of sweat completely by accident. After all, Regal described it as a masculine scent pushed too far.
All this to say, I think the reason Decus likes it is a combination of factors. It's often said that you "can't smell your own brand" or, rather, a foul smell that comes off your own body doesn't smell as bad to you as it does to others, partly because your brain ignores the information because of olfactory fatigue or "nose-blindness." The smell is so constant that eventually your brain just stops processing it. That's also why your house doesn't really smell like much to you, even if you have pets, but you can immediately smell the pets in your friend's home. It's a different smell so your brain pays more attention to it. So I think that Decus can't smell the perfume the way others can, partly because he wears it non-stop, and partly because some component of it matches a scent he's already used to. I.e. if it is indeed a perfume that amplifies the scent of sweat and goes overboard and smells of body odor, Decus's natural body odor already smells like that, so even if he can smell it, he isn't bothered by it. But I also think even if he can smell it, he enjoys it because of the branding. He believes in the magic of the Iron Maiden charm (which may or may not have finally worked) so I think he also believes in the branding of Eau de Seduction as an irresistible masculine scent that will attract suitors.
That said, I think this is a great Skit concept and your use of odiferous was perfect! Humans are notoriously bad at tracking things by smell, even though our noses are better than pop culture suggests. But with perfume like Decus's, yeah, I bet anyone can track that.
