@umbreonic
gOD THAT’S A GOOD POINT
he’s wearing The Suit in the emojis so he had to have planned out his outfit before making them
“i don’t care about mc,” he says, mussing his hair and carefully reapplying his eyeliner to look his best, meticulously designing emojis for her eyes only. “she’s dumb. this is just to taunt her,” he says as he snaps some pics of himself to make sure he’s capturing juuuuust the right amount of edge (especially in that laughing one lmao)
this is the real reason why he was gone so long
he took the elixir early, he spends the remaining hours before midnight perfecting his edgy aesthetic
@namayona @umbreonic shrugs! i'm going back thru the chat history for seven's route, 5 years seems familiar bc i remember thinking that even at age 16 it was kind of childish speech, but the chat says 2 years. i wonder if that's bc my chats are before an update where it was changed to be 5 years, or if they changed it from 5 years to 2? but yeah, the timeline.... really doesn't make sense w/ v and rika as they are. honestly, not only would the timeline make more sense this way, but given the roles they're supposed to have, they SHOULD have been written as older -- give them a decade up on the rest of the RFA, make them be in their early-to-mid twenties when they meet saeran and seven. 11-year-olds meeting 23-year-old rika and 26-year-old v. by the time the game starts, rika would be 33 and v would be 36 and like.... that makes sense to me! they fill the role of older and wiser, they'd be LEGAL ADULTS and it wouldn't be weird for them to live together, they'd be able to actually adopt the boys...
@umbreonic 26-year-old v dating 23-year-old rika is reasonable and has only a small experience gap which seems reasonable. could be accounted for. 16-year-old v dating 13-year-old rika is 🔪🔪🔪 ...in the VN that's supposed to show their first meeting, rika was 15 and v was 18, tho, so even if the timeline is Well And Truly Fucked, cheritz seems somewhat consistent in making that relationship creepy from the start and i just wish i knew if this was intentional or just... somehow overlooked multiple times...?
uhhhh this got a bit long so i’m read-moreing this
making them older would do wonders for the timeline, tbh. the timeline for mint eye is too cramped to fit in meeting the boys, adopting em, beginning construction of mint eye, kidnapping saeran, getting other members -- unless rika started when she was still going thru puberty. and then, where’d she get the money? the land?
...tho if they were in their late twenties/early thirties, their relationship would change to the point that... i don’t think the v route would quite work? rika’s whole thing in that route is that she was abused as a kid, unloved, and he was her focal point, the only one who ever loved him. she moved out of her parents house to be with him and according to yoosung, cut ties with most of her family immediately after moving out. it’s not... good, but her age in canon -- unclear, and ranging from 13-16 depending in various chatrooms and VNs -- goes hand-in-hand with the relationship was described. still growing, hadn’t experienced much of life but tragedy, and latched onto each other with unhealthy ideas of what romance should be and projected those onto each other -- and unhealthy ideas of selfhood, as of course they were v co-dependent, and unhealthy views of mental illness, too, as v and rika were p much their sole source of counsel, so when v said “nah, you don’t need therapy, i love your darkness, take it out on me, this is what love is!” they both thought this was hunky-dory and neither of them were mature enough -- or had enough experience -- to think hey wait............. no. this is bad, actually, we shouldn’t do this.
though, of course, while romanticizing UN-romantic behavior is v common some time within ~13-17, it’s def not exclusive to that, either. with age TENDS to come experience -- yall remember when twilight was the big thing and it was so romantic and then you hit that point where you looked back and thought ‘oh wait, hey, i now (assuming that I was once into it and didn’t think it was unhealthy when i first encountered it) have more experience in life and understand power dynamics and relationships better, even if only conceptually, so i no longer think the behavior in these books is so wonderful?’ -- but if you don’t encounter situations in life where you’d learn these things....... well. can’t really evolve your views on life/love.
given that the inexperience/undeveloped views of love tied in so much with the v route, when i played the route, i ASSUMED that the ages were, at least to some extent, planned? but! there’s still the problem of not knowing! were they meant to seem inexperienced/rife with incorrect assumptions about love because of their age? because of isolation from their peers/family? were they meant to be older, more evenly matched? did cheritz always intend for them to be so young? and if so, did they mean to make rika so young? and if not, why does this appear (though varying slightly) in multiple chatrooms and VNs, and if she was meant to, why is that aspect never brought up? because it was a goof on their part, because it was assumed it didn’t impact the relationship that much???
anyway. i wrote a lot, sorry. what’s your deal, cheritz. why can’t you just tell me how old everyone was supposed to be and i can figure out what to think.
