Im looking at glomegaverse with big wide puppy eyes but….,,, my first love OTT will always pull me in so “pretty boy”?
(Unless someone already picked that one in which case 🥺🐶)
We already covered the glomegaverse, so let's talk about pretty boy!
In case it isn't clear to everyone else reading, this fic is set in the Over the Threshold universe, and it feels so right that you're the one to ask about this, kass! I know you already saw my post about Pretty Boy by P1Harmony back in August, and you created the prettiest pretty boy I ever did see in the wake of it, so I think it's fair to say you contributed to the brainworms for this one!
Everything in that post pretty much sums up what inspired this fic, but especially Keeho's quote about the song. He's essentially talking about reclaiming the term "pretty boy", which is kind of weaponised against male K-pop idols and (especially East Asian) men in general. The implication is that if you're pretty (i.e. "feminine"), you're lesser.
I touched on this idea in an OTT (head)canons post from December where I talked about idol Satoru's "twink death" (imagined in glorious detail by Kou on Bluesky. It's so good I cried). From that post:
Do not under any circumstances think about male idols getting banned from the gym by their companies in order to maintain their tightly controlled, borderline underweight, "pretty boy" looks. and definitely don't think about how bulking up in the gym after a certain point in their careers when they have more freedom is likely actually a way of taking control over their own bodies, their image, their sense of self, and their connection to their masculinity.
In general, I think of both Satoru and Suguru as characters with "masculine" and "feminine" qualities. In most settings, I imagine Suguru has more fun playing with that, mostly because I think Gege's character design for Satoru (practical clothing and haircut with no personal touches, save for his blindfold which is out of necessity) suggests he is primarily economical in how he chooses to present himself to the world, especially compared to Suguru for whom everything is part of the performance.
In this universe, however, it's Satoru. It has to be Satoru if he wants to feel in control of his own narrative in a world where everyone else is writing their own about him. Paradoxically, the best way to take control of your own narrative is to let go of the reins. I think Satoru understands that (in canon, too) but Suguru definitely doesn't.
It isn't a coincidence that I started working on this fic after publishing chapter 15 where we see Suguru wrestling with this, particularly in relation to how people talk about his looks. Throughout the whole story, we see his frustration with the fact that people seem less concerned with the music than they are with everything around it, both for Satoru and for himself.
Suguru doesn't necessarily care about looking "girly" in isolation, he just cares about what that word means when powerful people say it. He cares about the box people in control of his future might put him into because of that assessment, but in practical terms, that still amounts to an aversion towards the "feminine", at least when it's applied to him. Always gender fuckery with Suguru!
If Dolce was Satoru forcing him to deconstruct some of those associations by confronting his own reflection, then pretty boy (probably not the title but we'll see) is Satoru giving him a demonstrative performance of how good it feels to be pretty. Importantly, pretty boy actually comes just before Dolce in the timeline, which suggests he ultimately decided the softer approach wasn't working lmao. Thank god for Dolce.
The E-rated side stories for Over the Threshold really just build on themes explored in the main story with room to dig a little deeper and simply have some fun! Case in point, pretty boy features nerdjo, lip gloss as lube, and Satoru in a pretty little dress. One of these dresses, specifically:
He got it after his collab video with Linkl Planet (a Japanese idol group dedicated to Gunpla, shown in the video above. I'm deadly serious) which he references in 73 Questions. They took him on a tour of the Gunpla factory and did an interview while they worked on models together. Bandai wanted some of that Satoru star power since he'd built and painted enough Gunpla on his livestreams to count as an unofficial ambassador at that point. Nerdjo, like I said.
Anyway, pretty boy starts in the middle of one such livestream during album production, which Satoru films in his brand new dress from Linkl Planet with Suguru at his side. Isn't it amazing how I can write fanfics about my fanfics about my fanfics? This all sounds made up because it is, but the OTT lore goes as deep as I want it to go lmao.
NSFW snippet from a later point in the fic under the cut!
