#osvitio

[sly-s-n0nfusion]

Osvald and Partitio commission for @/bestgayna on x 🙏📚

[gascon-en-exil]

Art by @sly-s-n0nfusion.

As seen in several of my fanfics including Wooing That Drifting Imagery and 'Tis But the Truth in Masquerade and inspired by a number of early modern queer urban subcultures, here's Partitio crossdressing as Osvald's wife so that they can appear in public as a married couple. Partitio as Mrs. Vanstein is easily the most visually striking development in my fic series, and it's a delight to see her brought to life.

[moresrush]

So @cyrontherogue made a comment about how Osvald would absolutely be the type of person to absorb so many videos of cute animals and I had to stop everything to draw a modern-day situation because it was just too cute.

[broomballkraken]

I comm’d the awesome and wonderfully-talented @zambisartsandcrafts to draw everyone’s favorite murder scholar and sunshine merchant as the Barbie meme, go and check out their work y’all, it’s amazing!! <3 <3 <3

[gascon-en-exil]

The Sundown Kid is Proto-Osvitio

...And by that, I don't mean in the ship sense (but hold that thought). Instead, I mean that if you split Sundown into his constituent parts you'd get the basis for Osvald and Partitio.

The Partitio parallels are obvious on the surface, albeit rather shallow: they both hail from the 19th century US Wild West, or a fantastical analogue of it, and they have the accents to match. Fandom likes to call Partitio a cowboy, but Sundown feels noticeably more authentic in that regard. His look and backing musical tracks are ripped straight out of spaghetti westerns, whereas Partitio dresses like a 1920s businessman and comes with a jazz leitmotif. Also, Sundown is an actual gunslinger, rather than having to exist in a pseudo-Wild West where firearms don't exist.

As for Osvald, both he and Sundown are tall, bearded older men who rarely speak. Sundown is explicitly the oldest character to make it to his game's final chapter, and the irony of his Kid moniker is commented upon in the script. They also both have personal arcs related to being less closed-off to others, and their stories are tied in some way to vengeance: Osvald's dealing it out himself, while Sundown's incarnation of Odio is the "child of vengeance."

And then there's the bits with Mad Dog. I've already more than put in the work to show how Osvitio functions as a ship, but when it comes to Sundown and Mad Dog -

The remake describes their relationship by quoting Romeo and Juliet and likening it to something out of Greek myth...in a period when calling something Greek was a colorful euphemism for gay stuff. Sundown's scene in the game's best ending is riding off with Mad Dog. Also, just look at this official art.

That piece does not tell me that this is a one-sided rivalry where neither of them ever kills the other (unless the player chooses to do so at the end of the story). It tells me that these two men have known each other carnally, probably multiple times over a period of years, and are never going to talk about it. Mad Dog will talk around it, calling them lovers half in jest and dropping the aforementioned literary references; Sundown just won't say anything at all. But they've definitely done some things far out on the lone prairie.

That's not exactly the ship dynamic of Osvitio, outside of a single recent fic of mine that winks at that sort of Wild West-flavored homoeroticism. But now I'm wondering if this Live A Live storyline partially informed the decision to pair up Osvald and Partitio into a Crossed Path, as opposed to pairing Partitio up with Castti both in a story and romantically and leaving Osvald to be a Team Dad with Ochette.

[gascon-en-exil]

I've been watching a full playthrough of the Live A Live remake. Despite that game's massive influence on Octopath Traveler among other titles, I've always avoided it because 1) the gameplay looks rather odd, even now that I've seen substantially more of it, and 2) it picks eight different genres to tell its stories and somehow I'm not interested in a single one of them. And my God, but it is relentlessly heteronormative and often quite misogynistic, even allowing for the fact that it was made in the 90s.

All that said however, I feel now like I could write an essay about how shipping Osvald and Partitio from Octopath Traveler II represents the realization of the subdued homoeroticism of Live A Live's Sundown Kid. That...probably doesn't make a ton of sense, but that's why I'm not currently writing it and am instead focusing on other, more sensible projects.

[gascon-en-exil]

While it's too raunchy to be shared directly on Tumblr, someone made art of my most recent Osvitio fic! Osvald is a very large, very good kitty.

[gascon-en-exil]

My impression is that the popularity of Partikari comes from very popular fanart and some early fics, and like you said that they're the only two conventionally hot guys left after the fandom latched onto Crimenos so hard. They do have potential but tbh I don't see much of it used in fanfics, those look mostly like more or less standard romance scenarios to me

That's usually how fanon gets going. It's really a shame too, because there's just so much more to dig into with Osvitio up to and including the fact that Osvald is hot in a slightly unconventional way. It's not hard to notice that pretty much all of the handful of Osvitio content creators agree that the guy is raw sex, and that Partitio is just right for expressing that when they have that one gay party banter and he's elsewhere got a thing for muscle guys. Partitio would be extremely into Osvald's big fuzzy peaches, no question.

Also, that age difference is a feature, not a bug. Fourteen years is in that sweet spot where you can either ignore it (as the game largely does - note how mom-coded Castti is in her Crossed Path with Ochette in contrast to how the Osvitio story treats them as peers even though they actually have a bigger age gap) or lean hard into it. Partitio's got two dads, one of whom has tried to kill him, so you know he's got some interesting daddy issues to work out. Then you get into the whole multigenerational gay parenting thing with Papp and Roque parenting Partitio who's with Osvald and Elena now and there's a bunch of interesting subversions you can do with Partitio being the sweet sentimental one despite his pseudo-Wild West background juxtaposed with Osvald who's bad at expressing his emotions. It's practically criminal that there's maybe half a dozen dedicated Osvitio writers and artists in the whole fandom, but damned if we don't do our best.