perfectmatch | tl;cr meme

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type: meme

tl;cr meme

post your character, people reply, give them the deets. you know how this goes.

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pls yaps pls

Ringo, sweet Ringo ... I feel like I said casually somewhere (a CR chart entry?) that Rom admires Ringo, and I do think it comes down to that, in a strange way. Specifically -- he really admires her genuine confidence and charisma.

Rom as a person is someone who I think has a lot of hangups about being fundamentally different from a normal person. It's shown that he's internalized from a young age that he is 'not like other people,' and that difference has also been the root of a fair bit of strife in his life. He's acclimated to it pretty well by the time he's an adult, but it's not something that came easily to him, and I think it's also at the core of a lot of his unhealthier thought processes. The fact that he's not 'inhuman,' but 'just an absolutely abnormal freak of a human' kind of hangs over his head a lot, and while I don't think he, like, hates himself for it, I think it's also just something he's grimly accepted as a part of his life -- he's grateful for the work it lets him do, but it's always been related to too much baggage for him to feel any sort of positive way about it.

So I think getting to meet Ringo -- an artificial intelligence, thus someone adjacent to humanity while still being fundamentally different from it -- was pretty elucidating for him.

It's not even that Ringo's confident because of what she is, but I think just getting to see how confident she is regardless of what she is that makes Rom feel some sort of way. As far as he's seen, she's always been very bold and straightforward in her thoughts and desires, and all of it has been earnest. A lot of his own exuberance (and, honestly, his annoying behavior) is just a way of hamming it up for the camera, and I think he knows how sharply that contrasts with the much more natural and sincere excitement of someone like Ringo. She's not shy about what she is and how that makes her fundamentally different from people, but she also doesn't let that hamper her at all when it comes to living her life and expressing her thoughts, which is the sort of approach Rom can't imagine for himself. Not to say that he's going to learn from her or anything, he's already set in his ways, but his stubborn mentality won't stop him from admiring the path she's chosen for herself, especially since he knows she's been through her own struggles (with Figue and all) but seemingly hasn't let them dampen her spirits at all.

Not to mention, I think to him, there's something extremely sweet about how much Ringo seems to like trying new things and experiencing things that a person would. Like, he also has his own (much more low-key) anticipation about trying new things, but it obviously can't hold a candle to the more genuine excitement of someone who's only been alive for two months, and I think stuff like Ringo wanting to try everything at the diner seems very charming to Rom ... it's the sort of thing he'd do as part of a bit for the cameras (see his horrible date tormenting Yi Sang ... sorry Yi Sang), but Ringo seems to have genuine excitement about something like that, and I think it's weirdly kind of humbling for him? Gives him a slightly fresh perspective about how maybe enjoying things in a genuine way in front of other people is nice to behold.

This admiration he holds towards her plays a good part in why Ringo was one of the people to most efficiently get through Rom's billion and a half hangups before the third match ceremony! The rest of Ringo's efficacy is thanks to her approach, of course. Rom appreciated her analytical abilities from the start -- he's fairly smart, but he's ultimately a humanities guy, and he knew a hard-science approach like Ringo's would be pivotal in shaving down the sheer number of possibilities -- so he was always going to put a lot of stock in her input re: numbers and data. So when she started from that angle before going digging for genuine emotions regarding his match options, it was honestly way more effective in getting him to consider his feelings than someone just telling that to him straight up.

Rom's conversations with Ringo honestly ended up being hugely pivotal to him. By their discussion at the diner, he already sort of had an inkling that a part of him wanted to try being matched up with Edamura? They'd had a few meaningful conversations by that point and had gelled well, after all. But because Rom is someone who generally holds himself at armslength from people, and is also used to being rejected by people in general, if left to his own devices he probably would have tried to find "logical" reasons not to pick Edamura -- because he couldn't really imagine the game's system deeming him as someone suitable for Edamura, and that rejection would have stung, even if it was expected and meaningless. Better to stick to the safe options that he deemed logical -- Yi Sang, a fellow weirdo, or Luka, a fellow insincere performer ... better primarily as in better for the game, mostly, since they didn't want to blow another chance at guesses, but maybe also better for himself, because even if it's mostly on an unconscious level, he's still human in the end and doesn't want to feel rejected. Truly, it was only because Ringo's conviction regarding the data (and after that, only tenuously, the supposed commonalities) gave him an irrefutable excuse that Rom ended up mentioning how the data turned out to Edamura, and the rest spun out from there.

I had to sit here and think for a moment if Rom would be cognizant of the fact that Ringo was the one who (intentionally? unintentionally?) gave him that final push, and I do think he would be. Not that he's going to acknowledge it to her! I think the question of whether Ringo was speaking purely from a data perspective when thinking he was paired with Edamura, or whether she actually had some stock in emotions and connections, is going to haunt Rom, and he's just going to try not to think about it ... because if it's the latter, then that'd be kind of mortifying for him! He's so used to being considered inscrutable that he'd be genuinely really flustered by the thought that someone else saw through him better than he was even willing to consider for himself. Still, whatever her reasons were for encouraging him to choose Edamura as his match, it does add to his positive feelings towards her.

As they the leave the game, Rom really holds nothing but warm feelings towards Ringo! He genuinely wants her to be happy and living her best life with her new girlfriends, he hopes they get to have all the fun and exciting experiences they could ever want! And while he's not really the type to stay in contact with people just for the sake of it -- yes he's one of the cast's many friendless losers, he mostly contacts people just for work -- I think he'd like to find an excuse to check in on her once in a blue moon, ostensibly to ask her for her advice as a devil summoner, but honestly more because he's curious how she's faring! (But don't call him out on it. That'd be embarrassing.)

Edited 2025-07-04 03:04 (UTC)

holds our exorcists together....

Miss Shoko, our group's idol, where do I begin ... 🥺

Okay, to start -- I think I jokingly said early on in chat that Rom desperately wanted a coworker like Shoko? I don't think that's a joke, actually. I think a part of him really would have done just about anything to have someone like Shoko in his life. Not even, like, in an especially close or chummy (or even romantic) way, but just in his general contact network.

There's a lot that's left nebulous about how spiritualists/exorcists work in Rom's canon, but they largely appear to be a pretty solitary bunch, living their own lives and only contacting each other when a job/incident requires them to cooperate. Another thing to note is that Rom truly doesn't seem to have any peers in his age range. The only meaningful relationships he forged are with the generation above him -- Towako-san who rescued him from his initial abandonment, his Master, and a teacher (who taught him a lot but also scares the shit out of him). Though Towako did set up an orphanage taking in children who had been similarly abandoned due to their spiritual abilities and/or had been orphaned by supernatural occurrences, Rom grew up without much contact with these other children due to his abnormally freak levels of spiritual sensitivity; presumably these other children ended up settling into lives masquerading as normal civilians, or Rom just never established connections with them. Either way -- Rom truly is alone when it comes to people he can consider his equals, and for as resilient and adaptable a person as I think he is, I don't think he's immune to feeling a little lonely. Which makes him getting to meet Shoko at AYTO all the more meaningful.

And what a woman Shoko is! Honestly, if Rom ever came across as a little intimidated by her, it's only because he respected her. Like I said, he's never had a peer that he could consider his equal, and that unfamiliarity in combination with Shoko's pure aura kind of threw him off his element a little bit. Only in a good way!

I think what most impressed him is just how calm but genuine Shoko always comes across as. Rom's always composed and controlled, but his own brand of self-control is something that he knows comes across as pretty uncanny and unnatural -- it's purely a survival mechanism developed in response to the world he lives in, where reacting to the various ghosts and spirits he sees can be fatal-to-dangerous, and so for someone with high spiritual sensitivity like his, the most efficient way to ensure one's survival is to learn to not react at all. In contrast, Shoko always came across as effortlessly cool and charismatic -- a person clearly level-headed and smart and in control of herself, but in a flavor that allows her to blend in flawlessly with the general public and attract people in an extremely natural way. I think that's the sort of thing that Rom knows would be impossible for him; for as well as he's adapted to his circumstances, I don't think that level of casual rizz is something he could ever emulate, given how it seems like the current image he's built for himself is a rather hard-won thing built up with a lot of effort. But that just means he respects Shoko's composure all the more!

And I think he also really respects that, for as put-together and level-headed as Shoko seems, she also never comes across as cold or emotionally distant! I think Rom wouldn't be alone in noting that, for as calm and low-key as Shoko comes across in a lot of her interactions, she never comes across as uncaring, which is such an important distinction. It's something that Rom personally is very conscious of, I think -- he cares a lot about people on principle, but his tendency to distance himself from polite society, as well as the fact that he makes a living by soft-scamming people, means there's an involuntary limit to how genuine he can be when it comes to connections with people. With Shoko, there's none of that, and I think Rom would respect that tremendously. And especially since Rom knows how isolating it can feel to be something 'close to humanity but fundamentally different from it,' I think he'd really put a lot of stock how easily Shoko seems to connect to people while never losing her cool or presenting herself in a false manner. Yes, she has things that she'll hold back at first and only bring up when appropriate, but that's different from his own brand of more showmanship-focused presentation, and I think Rom really admires how well Shoko walks that line between being genuine and keeping certain things hidden until appropriate to talk about.

Which is all to say that Rom really respects Shoko and would be honored if he could call himself her peer.

The only obstacle, really, is what came up when they were talking about their traumas during the final week. For as casually Rom talked about how easy it is for frontliners to be reckless and throw their lives away, I do think this is something that's going to weigh on him a lot going forth when it comes to how much contact he keeps with Shoko.

I'm sure it's not hard to guess, but Rom is not someone who takes very good care of himself. He's not deathseeker levels of reckless, and he does want to keep himself alive, but I think for Rom, the thought of keeping himself safe and living a long life is very low on his priority list; he's pretty fucked up with scars from previous encounters with spirits, his reaction to having an extremely close brush with death is to go "haha, wow, I almost died! :)" and he doesn't even tell anyone about that close shave, because he doesn't want anyone he cares about to get dragged into his mess. For him, the risk of dying is just something that comes as part of his job, and it's unthinkable for him not to do his job -- he'll try to prevent it, but if he dies, he dies. And I think this is a subject that he inevitably ended up thinking about during his talks with Shoko.

Rom’s not so arrogant as to think that it’d deeply affect her in any way if he happened to get thrashed by a ghost, but … he also thinks Shoko isn’t someone so cold that she’d feel nothing if she happened to hear later down the line that he ate shit, especially since she’s someone who’s clearly experienced a lot of loss and grief in her life. That’s actually something that Rom can’t fully empathize with because he didn’t have any of those connections in the first place to lose, but he can at least understand on a theoretical level how much those feelings must have weighed down on Shoko over the years. So he’s not in any rush to add to that burden, even by a small amount.

That’s another subject that I think would weigh heavily on him – the thought of what a fucked up system Shoko seems to be operating from? Of course, Rom only has the scant details that Shoko’s mentioned to work from, but still … While his own way of living is quite lonely and dangerous, he considers himself an anomaly, and knows most people with spiritual sensitivity in his world can just live long safe lives as civilians. So to hear that students are dying in significant numbers in Shoko’s world, and while ostensibly under the protection and guidance of a school no less, really bothers him. He might have originally been a little jealous of the system that Shoko works for, and almost wished to be a part of it, but by the time they’re parting ways I think his opinion is a lot more gray. He’s sure that Shoko’s world isn’t all bad, especially since she mentioned a friend wanting to take down the system and fix things, and he’s not about to assume he knows better when he’s sure there are nuances to why things are the way they are around her. But he does really wish better for Shoko – that she’ll get to live a life without being burdened by any more grief, and that she’ll just get to be a normal doctor helping people get better.

Anyway, as they depart from AYTO, Rom ... has complicated feelings? He does wish well for Shoko, truly! He wants very much for her to be happy, and he especially wants for her to be happy with Poppy -- he genuinely thinks that the two of them will be good for each other, and he very much wants Shoko to have that uncomplicated support structure in Poppy's presence, he wants her to find relief in that! But I think he'd be the type to overthink whether he should stay in contact with her much, how much distance he should keep with her, especially given he expects himself to probably die a messy death before too long ... Even so, I think he'd be rooting for her a bit too much to completely cut ties (especially when he knows that Edamura will probably be friendly enough for the both of them and keep connections with her). Rom's not really the type to stay in contact with people for personal purposes anyway, but I do think given all this complicated overthink-y context, he'd be the type to just, like, abruptly show up in Shoko's world someday and very annoyingly ask if she'd be up for a drink to catch up and "talk shop" (he just wants to see how she's doing) before fucking off without warning. Y'know, like an Enigma.

But seriously, he wants so badly for her to do well.

I WELCOME ANY AND ALL YAPPING. places paws here!!

Edamura … sweet Edamame-chan … where do I even begin with what I already know is going to be a disgustingly long spiel, closes eyes ………

Okay, just gonna start from the top, which is that Rom actually kind of liked Edamura from the word go! Just, in a rather distanced and utilitarian way, of course.

For as generally unflappable as Rom acts, it’s not like he doesn’t have his own comfort zones where he feels more in his element. And given everything about AYTO – from the game’s premise, to the required activities, to the very fact that he was in the company of fellow non-normies – was far out of his regular territory, of course he immediately honed in on something he could use to ground himself back into familiar territory: bullying the resident normies, Edamura and Poppy. The push-and-pull of prodding at normies and being treated with suspicion isn’t necessarily something he enjoys intrinsically, but it is kind of like a comfortable form of enrichment for him? It’s familiar and rote and mildly entertaining for him, while also giving him a chance to play things up for the camera (but, like, without having to do weird romance-y stuff, which was still foreign territory for him), so of course as soon as he cottoned onto the two of them appearing to be normies, he started poking at them for the expected reactions. This adds an admittedly selfish element to the little pep talks and crumbs of encouragement he tried to give them when appropriate – like, yes, he did genuinely hope they’d feel a bit more at ease, but he also hoped they’d stay in good spirits instead of getting discouraged, because otherwise it just wouldn’t be as fun prodding at them.

Anyway, turns out Poppy is kinda hard to bully because she just bullies back preemptively … Which Rom doesn’t, like, mind, but it wasn’t what he was looking for? And that’s how Edamura became his prime enrichment/poking target, tehe! In part because of when he managed to catch Edamura (during his non-participation in spin the bottle), Rom clocked on pretty quick that Edamura was someone smart but maybe a bit too quick to run his mouth, very expressive, and trying charmingly hard to acclimate to unfamiliar surroundings – extremely cute and perfect for poking at, 10/10.

And honestly, I think the fact that Rom got to approach Edamura from an angle that was comfortable for himself (even if it wasn’t necessarily comfortable for Edamura, sorry Edamame-chan) helped a lot in transitioning their relationship from that cat-and-mouse type one-sided toying to something more genuine. Rom’s just not used to connecting meaningfully with people, after all, so I think someone more directly approaching him to try and form a connection would have just had him putting up his usual walls even higher out of unfamiliarity and nerves. Instead, the way that his interactions with Edamura wove sincere-ish discussion in between bouts of the more familiar push-and-pull meant he felt like he was learning more about Edamura on a personal level in a comfortable context, and thus didn’t feel as vulnerable reciprocating with his own tiny glimpses of honesty.

I think in a kind of macabre way, it also helped that they could have a very serious conversation about seeing Edamura’s mother’s “ghost.” While Rom’s certainly capable of being thoughtful or insightful in general, he’s ultimately most experienced dealing with the dead and the many complicated feelings surrounding that subject. It’s within that familiar territory that he felt he could offer genuinely useful counsel to Edamura, and it also helped him get a better glimpse of Edamura, too – the complicated tangle of his emotions, glimpses of what a troubled life he seemed to have led (despite presenting as a pretty milquetoast everyman at first glance), and a touch of something more strong-willed and conniving under that easy-to-provoke fluster. Again, charming and appealing to him, though at the moment, Rom still didn’t give it too much thought beyond a vague comfort and fondness. But maybe it’s because he’d been eased into things to that point that he felt it was permissible to talk about his responsibility for Towako’s death – a subject that’s affected him deeply, which he’s normally loathe to discuss.

And that brings them to the end of week two. It’s so funny to me that you mentioned in the CR chart that Edamura found Rom kind of broody after the second match ceremony, because he really was feeling kind of cornered by that point.

I’ve mentioned it here and there, but just to summarize it more cleanly: Rom fundamentally considers himself a person distanced from most interpersonal relationships, let alone anything even remotely romantic. Thus, he came into AYTO with the expectation that he was recruited to fill up the cast numbers and play a certain role. Specifically, he believed he was expected to play the role of the unappealing oddball weirdo, which is both a staple of reality TV as well as being a role he could believably digest, and he would probably be paired with a fellow ‘outsider’ just to round things out. And though this sort of prolonged playacting isn’t in his wheelhouse, he thought the promise of getting a wish as a reward for four weeks of play-acting was too good of a deal to just turn down.

Thus he committed himself to playing that role, and approached the first two weeks of match discussions under that calculus. It was under this assumption that he chose Messmer for his first week’s match; though it wasn’t completely debunked by any of the group’s math by the second match ceremony, he did start getting the sense that perhaps he and Messmer weren’t on the same page, thus making him doubt his own assumptions. As for the second match ceremony itself – of course it did sting a little for him to not be chosen at all. He’s still human, after all, and even if he’s (mostly voluntarily) accepted his role as ‘not someone appealing to polite society,’ he isn’t immune when faced with a blunt rejection like that, even if he rationally knew it was meaningless and partially decided by luck. But okay! That was fine! Given how Odile had self-professed herself as someone not quite suited to the game’s machinations, he considered her an extremely solid back-up option for his match, so this ceremony could still be useful if it confirmed their – oh, no, it’s a blackout, actually. Womp womp.

And that’s why Edamura probably found Rom kind of broody during the post-ceremony catherd. Rom had had both of his top two matches (guessed under his cynical calculus) basically eliminated and had no idea where to go from there. Going unchosen thus far had only bolstered in his mind that he had to continue approaching the game as an outsider, but it had also been largely fruitless thus far, and he was starting to run low on viable options. Not a good position to be in!

It’s against that rather bleak backdrop that Rom ended up having a lot of shockingly meaningful interactions with Edamura in week 3 – all things that, on their own, might not have been groundbreaking, but in combination really punched through those mental walls of his, especially since they happened when he was feeling kind of lost. Again, here, the fact that these moments were interwoven between playful banter helped Rom digest them without feeling like he was being ‘compromised’ or ‘not playing his role,’ even as he was forced to deal with matters sincerely. But, just things like …

Edamura listened to his explanation about what it’s like to have spiritual vision, and while he was aghast at it, he didn’t treat Rom any differently afterwards – no aversion or pity or disgust. The sort of reaction that Rom knows better than to expect from normal people, because that sort of hard disconnect from ‘normalcy’ is something that most people can’t digest, but Edamura was empathetic and open-minded enough to manage it. Then came Edamura’s confession of his job during the arcade date. (Sorry, skipping to this because on Rom’s end, giving Edamura the omamori was just part of his duty and thus not worth a second thought ekfjnwlefk). The fact that Edamura would trust him – someone actively pretending to be sleazy and suspicious – felt really special, and also established a faint commonality between them as being used to ‘playing roles.’ There was also something intimate about getting to know more about the sides that Edamura usually kept hidden – an unexpected boldness, a thirst for excitement, a surprisingly sly and conniving side when necessary. Even past the enticing, naughty feeling that comes from getting to see someone’s hidden side, Rom really admired that about Edamura, that he really was far more than the everyman he usually presented himself as, someone willing to deviate from the mold of being ‘a normal contributing member of society.’ And then their little discussion at the hot springs, with Edamura voluntarily wanting to help with his work even while knowing the risks – even if Rom would hesitate to actually let that happen, the sentiment alone was extremely novel and charming, simply because he’d always imagined himself working alone. Not to mention the intimacy of Edamura asking to see his hidden eye and still not balking at the sight of it, only showing concern for him. All little things that built up over the days, painting Edamura as a deeply caring and kind person, who he could trust, but wouldn’t pity him or treat him as something different.

Rom’s complete inexperience with romance meant it would’ve been impossible for him to put a word to what he was feeling, but he sure was feeling some sort of way about Edamura by the time the third match ceremony was looming over them.

This was deeply scary for him! Having to deal with actual feelings is fucking scary, as it turns out! You see, while this was going on, Rom had already had a very data-ful date discussion with Ringo about his most likely matches, and a very reasonable conclusion had been offered there: his most likely matches were Edamura, Yi Sang or Luka. And while Rom did immediately clock onto who he kind of wanted it to be … he also didn’t think it would be plausible. To think that Edamura – fussy and anxious, yes, but empathetic and friendly, who seemed to get along with just about everyone – would be matched with him felt like a blatant contradiction to his ‘roles’ approach to the game thus far. It’d be too convenient, too good to be true. Thus, he actually tried to convince himself (and Ringo) otherwise – that his commonality with Yi Sang as a fellow Fucking Weirdo (sorry Yi Sang), or with Luka as a beauty-and-the-beast type role-mismatch between fellow insincere performers, would make them more likely matches than Edamura.

Of course, in the end, when Ringo seemed deeply convinced (data-wise) that Edamura was his match, Rom did buckle and decide to take that thought to him during the pre-ceremony catherd. But to be honest – he was actually pretty scared then. A lifetime of playing calm in front of ghosts means Rom always fakes some level of casual and calm by reflex, but he was genuinely pretty anxious in going to talk to Edamura at that moment. It’s not even that he thought being deemed a ‘perfect match’ by the game would mean anything for them deeply? It was all just a part of the game? It wouldn’t have really meant anything if Edamura decided to say no to him, that he thought someone else would be a better match? But still … Canonically, Rom’s ultimately an extremely soft-hearted and altruistic guy under his creepy presentation. I have a hard time thinking he’d be able to completely divorce his emotions from the process of choosing and being chosen for the game. And especially because Edamura was a unique instance of a normal person he’d allowed close and connected to, the prospect of being told ‘no, I don’t think there’s anything between us’ was pretty nerve-wracking, even as he prepared himself for it. That’s why, when he approached Edamura pre-ceremony and broached the subject of them being a statistical match, he talked about it in an especially clipped and data-driven manner: to give himself the excuse that he was only speaking in terms of numbers, and to couch the matter in a way that he could accept whatever the response might be.

In his mind, the worst case scenario was being told no, and he’d deal with that one way or another. The best case scenario would be Edamura saying ‘sure, that sounds right.’ He never even considered the possibility of Edamura wanting to be the one to choose him.

Rom ended up playing it off pretty casually with just an ‘are you sure?’ but that was actually a pretty loaded question for him – asking at once ‘are you sure that’s the right course of action?’ as well as ‘are you sure you want that?’ I think no matter how much Rom accepts himself as an anomaly that has to be distanced from people, and even plays himself up as a freak for his Schemes, he’s still human in the end – he wants to feel wanted. Especially since he’s experienced pretty brutal abandonment before. So for better or for worse, there was a selfish element to him saying he wanted Edamura to be the one to go up on stage first – he did want to encourage Edamura’s resolve, of course, but he also wanted to bask in that feeling for himself for even a little bit longer. Though honestly, I think after their conversation, it wouldn’t have even mattered to him that much if he ended up being chosen to go first; just seeing Edamura so happy while talking about it, and wanting to do it meant the world to him.

Then everything did work out! I think for Rom, the whole ceremony ended up being a bit of a fever dream – from Edamura actually choosing him, to the sweet things he said, to holding hands while locking in, to the fact that the lights seemed to confirm them as a plausible match … it was all almost too much for him to process. And while Rom wouldn’t be able to use the L-word for a little longer, this is definitely when he properly fell in love with Edamura.

For the record, it’s not that he would have fallen for anyone who happened to choose him. He would have been moderately happy with the sensation, yes, but ‘being chosen’ alone wouldn’t have shaken up his emotions so much. What was special was ‘being chosen’ by someone he already felt so positively towards, who hadn’t balked away despite seeing so much of the ugliness he’s entangled with, who was a genuinely trustworthy person. There was a truly unique synergy between the slow build-up of their relationship and the explosive euphoria of the match ceremony – it’s like everything had a chance to build up like the pressure in a champagne bottle, and then Edamura choosing him popped the metaphorical cork. For Rom, it was just such a perfect encapsulation of Edamura’s empathy and understanding, his kindness, his ability to be proactive and decisive when it matters, the trust they’d managed to build up despite their respectively cagey natures … and finally, the fact that maybe Edamura does like him back. How could he not love the guy.

A lot of week 4 ended up being Rom coasting on that emotional high, as a result. Exploring new territory and coming to terms with the dizzying realization that hey, maybe they have a genuine connection of sorts? This person who he really likes, who accepts him, actually likes him back? Insane. It’s kind of why Rom was so content with doing whatever would make Edamura happy – all that really mattered to him was getting to spend time together, and basking in the knowledge that Edamura also seemed to want that companionship. A reality he could have never imagined for himself going into the game, and yet there they were, even venturing into the BBR. (I’m still backtagging that slowly, but please know that in my heart Rom dozed off afterwards while clutching at Edamura like a hug pillow, and it’s rare for him to voluntarily sleep around other people …. Sorry if he had to be woken up, and so they were slow to make their exit, thus getting them caught by others in the estate, tehe!)

Even more than their little excursion into the BBR, it’s probably Edamura’s mention of them being ‘lovers’ that gave Rom a lot of food for thought. It’s not like he’d thought Edamura would heartlessly cut contact with him once the game was over, but … he also presumed that his life would mostly go back to normal afterwards. They both had jobs to return to, and it was only circumstances within the game that had brought them together. His time at AYTO would be a fondly cherished memory, certainly, but he also sort of passively assumed it wouldn’t become much more than that. Edamura being brave enough to first float that word – ‘lovers’ – is what signaled to Rom that he was allowed to consider their little … thing … as something he could look forward to in the future. Which … was such a strange notion to him.

Rom, I think, isn’t really the type of guy to think about his future much beyond immediate business and job prospects. And while he did, for a long time, have a singular long-term goal in mind, that was avenging Towako’s death … which he actually did get to complete shortly before entering AYTO. Which means he would’ve been left pretty aimless in the large scheme of things, just immersing himself back into his job, until Edamura floated the prospect of them being ‘lovers.' Which just opened up a whole new world for him? Something new that he could look forward to in the long run, something joyful instead of vengeful, something that he’d never thought possible for himself. New, wild, exciting. Rom said he’d ‘try,’ and while I do think a part of his word choice was due to uncertainty about his ability to live up to expectations, in his mind there’s also a positive aspect to ‘trying’ – a sort of forward momentum, the drive to make things better, a goal to attain. He wants to do it right, he wants to make Edamura happy, he wants to make sure Edamura doesn’t regret the choices he made! Rom’s a hard worker, and having that goal to work at really gives him a sense of fulfillment, and doubly so if the goal is to be good to the person who gave him so much.

In summation, as they depart from the game, Rom just … god, he fucking loves Edamura, okay. He genuinely does. I think, even if he’s the type who wouldn’t actually be able to drop an ‘I love you’ for another few months minimum (sorry Edamura ……), it’d come through in bits and pieces in his attitude and actions. Like, Rom isn’t very good at communicating sincere thoughts through texts and such, but I sure hope Edamura is prepared for Rom to show up to his world without warning when Edamura’s con job is winding down so they can spend some time together.

I think for Rom, he wouldn’t think that they were fated to be or anything. He’d be extremely aware that their relationship was able to take off only because the circumstances were just right. If they’d met under any other circumstances, there probably would have been nothing between them; it was only the cast at AYTO and the supernatural occurrences that meant Edamura believed in him instead of writing him off as a third-rate conman, and conversely, Rom believes that if it was any other normie that had been in Edamura’s place, they might have hit it off to some extent, but that explosive spark between them only occurred because it was Edamura, because of Edamura’s deep empathy and sincerity. But is it really so bad that their relationship only happened because of lucky chance? For Rom, that just means he’s exponentially more grateful that the stars aligned to grant him this happiness he never would have pursued for himself.

Anyway, hey, did I ever mention that Rom’s creed of dedicating himself to helping people is mostly just because Towako offered him that helping hand and rescued him when he was little? Which is to say – when someone influences him, he takes it very much to heart. So I hope Edamura is ready for Rom to properly dedicate himself to what he said: he’s really going to try his damndest to make things work for them as ‘lovers.’ Which isn’t to say that I think it’s going to only be smooth sailing for them. I definitely see them as the type to have a slightly rocky time settling into things and needing a while to find a good equilibrium, given both of them working unconventional jobs and not being very experienced with this relationship thing. Rom sure is going to cause his share of troubles, given his bad habit of keeping secrets even from the people closest to him (his long-suffering Master …) and his reckless attitude of wading into dangerous situations on his own. But I think … given he knows how genuine and empathetic and actually caring Edamura is, Rom will try to do better and change, even if it’s slowly and a little bit at a time. He’d want to be more careful so Edamura doesn’t have to be in danger by association, and try to communicate a little better so Edamura isn’t as stressed, and want to be in a good enough position that he can be there for if/whenever Edamura might need the helping hand. Edamura, just by virtue of being who he is and extending him that chance at a normal life, would really guide him into living a better life, and I think Rom would find so much fulfillment in that – this path towards a normal sort of happiness that he never thought possible for himself.

I think it speaks a lot to their compatibility that it’s sooooo easy for me to imagine the shenanigans that the two of them can get up to in a post-AYTO future. Rom showing up when one of Laurent’s schemes are in the late stages and ending up helping out with a con. Edamura being introduced to Rom’s Master, and Rom dropping the news on her without warning that they’re boyfriends and almost giving her a heart attack. The two of them leading one of those ghost tours as Rom promised, but things going a little wrong and them needing to make things work on the fly, while keeping Rom’s fans in the dark the whole way through. And then going for drinks afterward so they can gripe and banter and laugh about who should have done what better, but also how they’re glad things worked out in the end. Going on little trips together between their hectic jobs so they can learn more about each other and just … be happy together. Etc. etc. It just makes me smile so widely to think about how well they’ve ended up meshing, how they ended up connecting right at the moment both of them were feeling kind of lost and aimless, and how their strengths and weaknesses slot together so well. They just …. hrgh, CLENCHES FIST. I think I believe in them, I think they can make it work.

I’d say Rom would die for Edamura, but honestly, that’s not as meaningful as saying that I think Rom would want to live for Edamura. Rom’s not a deathseeker, but he takes on all risks solo and doesn’t take very good care of himself, and before his AYTO run, he had genuinely resigned himself to death before things just happened to work out to save his hide. But after AYTO, after finding this new long-term goal of wanting to making sure Edamura doesn’t regret the choice he made, I think he won’t be so quick to resign himself again. He’d fight more fiercely to try and stay alive, because he wants to spend that time at Edamura’s side and see him happy. That’s how much Edamura means to him.

I cannot believe how fucking long this got aaaaaa don’t look at the word count just know that these two clowns mean SO MUCH to me okay, I had a lot of Thoughts ……… holds them gently together

I always love a Miru yap

Sweet Miss Serpilia!!!! Setting aside the matter of her coffee crimes, which deeply offend me, personally --

Serpilia is ... a curious relationship for Rom, honestly.

It didn't start off that way! Rom's first impression of her was that she was a very charming person? Not even worrying about her halo and wings, because Rom's attitude towards oddities and things he doesn't understand is to just go "well, okay, I guess I'll roll with it" -- a lifetime of having to play blind and calm in front of unspeakable horrors that nobody else can see kinda does that to you. So while he did hold some moderate curiosity about her whole dealio, he didn't really prioritize that so much as just getting a grasp on her personality at first. Which was lovely! She definitely gave the impression of someone fun and flirty, but still very astute with a moderately sharp tongue. Wonderful both as a person, but also for television, no doubt the exact type that the production was looking for!

So honestly, he was kind of surprised by little partnership(?) he ended up forging with her.

As I'm sure is abundantly obvious by this point, Rom came in approaching AYTO from a rather cynical and strategy-focused angle -- he expected himself to have zero compatibility with the actual romantic conceit of the game, and the only way he had any hope of getting his wish (his main goal, along with doing general PR) would be to figure out what the hell the algorithm (read: the production) was thinking. That's just him, though. Given the nature of everything being a television production in the end, he also assumed that the easy majority of their group would be perfectly open to letting the game play out naturally and finding their romantic partners in that way, which would make it easy for him to pick through the remaining outliers for his own strategic match. Put simply -- Serpilia didn't strike him as the type to need to go through the trouble of dealing with that finicky strategy talk.

But okay! He wasn't about to complain about who he was on the same wavelength with regarding strategy? Partnerships are partnerships, and he genuinely was happy to have Serpilia's alliance promised -- especially after the disaster that was the second week's match ceremony. Honestly, that was a pretty low point for him because it had basically eliminated two of (what he calculated to be) his top two match candidates. At the same time, the blackout kind of reinforced in his mind that trusting in feelings was the wrong approach to the game. Which was good in terms of giving them a direction to think in! But bad for him, personally, because it just made him feel even more like he didn't have any good options left for himself.

Again, though, that is just himself. In general, Rom is someone used to drawing a pretty definitive line between himself -- what he should think, how he should approach any situation, what he expects of himself -- and everyone else. What applies to him generally does not apply to other people. And especially given the context of a dating-focused television show he very much expected that the strategy angle would be something superfluous for Serpilia when it came to her own matches. Given her looks, her charms, the way she presents herself, he kind of just assumed that her match would naturally and effortlessly fall into place and her approach to strategy was purely in order to ensure everyone else's matches could be figured out to secure their wishes?

So when things kinda ... didn't ... turn out that way, he was ... puzzled, mostly? Bemused. But also -- he felt a little bad.

Mind: Rom's brand of feeling bad didn't stem from 'I feel bad that Miss Serpilia hasn't found her match' (though there was an element of that, it wasn't the main root of his sympathy) but rather the sense that 'this doesn't feel fair for the kind of person she is.' He had no doubt that, had the circumstances been slightly different, or if the timeline had been just a bit longer, things would have worked out fabulously for her? She's pretty and smart and outgoing? Of course they would? But somehow luck hadn't been on her side, which didn't feel right. In other words -- rather than pity, what he felt towards her was closer to indignity and the desire to make things right.

Of course, there wasn't much that Rom could do directly, and especially given Rom's own cagey and evasive attitude, I don't think the two of them ever ended up bonding emotionally enough to delve into really intimate talks ... but it does mean that Rom was quietly rooting for things to work out for her, and he genuinely was happy when it looked like things had untangled themselves in the end! He doesn't even need to be privy to all the details to be happy for her! I do think that he'd find some irony in the fact that despite their talks of approaching the matter of pairings from a purely strategic point of view, in the end both of their perfect matches ended up being a bit more sentimental than they were purely utilitarian -- sure, even if Serpilia was matched with Shoko instead of Furina or Ringo, that was still a pairing she obviously wanted more than with, like, say, Luka or Messmer, you know? And his own pairing ended up being very sentimental in the end, despite his disbelief that it would ever be possible for himself, in or out of the game, so. Rom would be a bit too embarrassed to ever actually discuss the matter out loud in those terms -- specifically, he wouldn't mind gently poking fun at Serpilia saying he's very glad things worked out for her without the use of strategy, but he would be mortified the moment she turned it back on him, so no thank you. Still, the irony of the results isn't lost on him!

let's yap gamers

POPPY-CHAN our beloved cast gremlin

Honestly, I think if you mapped out Rom's opinions on Poppy on an XY axis chart, it'd be more uneven than you might expect?!

To start with, Rom found Poppy pretty promising! Not, like, in a romantic way, heavens no. But because Rom was coming into the game so out of his element -- foraging into the completely foreign territory of romance (even if he didn't come in expecting any romantic progress for himself at all), having to be in front of cameras 24/7, and in the company of numerous other non-normie people to boot -- he immediately zeroed in on familiar territory: normies that he could prod at. I mentioned it above for Edamura, but it's not that Rom finds any intrinsic gratification in the routine of being Weird around normies and getting side-eyed/admonished/treated with suspicion in response? But it's a very familiar and rote form of enrichment for him, which is why he was kinda prodding at the two of them on and off for the first week, mixing things up with a bit of genuine encouragement from time to time -- in part because he did genuinely hope they wouldn't be too cowed by all the weirdness around them, but in part to keep their spirits up so he wouldn't feel bad about prodding at them.

Anyway, none of that ended up mattering for long when it comes to Poppy, because Rom was pretty quick to realize that she's definitely not the type to just let herself be bullied ... Not that Rom minds too much! He's pretty flexible when it comes to his interpersonal relationships as long as they stay within familiar parameters (i.e. he gets to keep them at armslength), so he was totally okay with flipping the script and letting Poppy be the one to kinda bully him! No skin off his back, and it's the sort of thing he imagined would do well on television, so thumbs up emoji.

-- although for one hot second it did look like they might go straight into negative CR territory. Specifically, it was when Poppy very decisively said that she never lies and never sees the need to smooth over situations with white lies. And while it's not like Rom pinned her as a bad person or anything for saying that, it did immediately sort of put him on guard.

Because of his intrinsic nature Rom is basically someone who lives or dies by lying. In general, the ghosts of his setting need to be ignored in order to keep oneself safe; direct confrontation is avoided unless you know exactly what you're dealing with and how to ward it off, and otherwise, feigning ignorance no matter what kind of horrific sight you're faced with is the best way of surviving. At the same time, his freak level of spiritual sensitivity means it's extremely rare for others to see the same things he does, so he knows to always play himself up as a showman (i.e. spout the sort of thing most people would write off as obvious lies) or otherwise keep his mouth shut; when he was honest in his youth about the monsters he saw, it got him abandoned by his parents. Thus, Rom has learned to lie to ghosts and humans alike -- his entire life is built on very carefully controlling what he says, to whom, and how. It's also why he's so difficult to fluster -- showing fear in front of ghosts is the same as acknowledging them, thus inviting trouble, and so he's basically learned to always wear that look of uncanny calm no matter the circumstances. Poppy's attitude of 'I'm going to say what's on my mind' is both unthinkable and actually impossible for him.

And so he really meant it when he told Poppy that her way of thinking was 'blessed.' Even setting aside his own very specific circumstances, he knows that most people need the social lubrication in order to go through life -- even mundane social interactions need a little bit of flattery and sweet talking for maximum efficiency, you know? He knows Poppy must have had a relatively fortunate upbringing to have been able to maintain that sort of mindset, because it's the sort of thing that'd cause a lot of unbearable friction under worse circumstances. Which isn't a bad thing! Rom's happy for her (in an abstract, hypothetical way) if she's lived that blessed a life? But his own (admittedly pretty exhausting) approach towards honesty meant that he sort of immediately had his guard up much higher, expecting a lot of potential pushback and friction from her if she ever started cottoning onto just how much of his presentation is carefully managed falsehoods.

Hilariously, none of this ended up mattering much in the end??? Mostly because Rom was pretty quick to learn sort of how to 'manage' Poppy -- keeping things pretty light and snappy, letting himself get bullied a little -- but also because I do think that he ended up finding her company kind of fun on an entirely shallow level. Not a lot of other gamers in the group, after all, and they did have enough in common in terms of nerdy interests that as long as they focused on those things, it was easy enough keeping things with her enjoyable, even as he continued to overthink her whole blunt honesty thing a little bit.

I think what eventually got Rom to finally stop keeping his guard up was when he saw that Poppy and Shoko getting close and staying close. The fundamentals of their worlds and jobs might differ a lot, but Rom respects Shoko a lot as a sort of colleague. And while he had no doubts that Shoko would be able to charm anyone she'd want to given her general cool attitude and attractive presentation, he knows the nature of their shared job means connecting to normal people is always a more tenuous thing; Rom also knew this was a factor weighing on Shoko' mind because she'd brought it up during one of their previous conversations. So when time passed after that second match ceremony (which had disproved Poppy and Shoko as a game-assigned perfect match) and they still seemed close afterwards, it brought Rom a lot of peace of mind regarding Poppy's general attitude -- it signaled to him that she wasn't quite as frivolous or insensitive as she had initially seemed, and was probably pretty steadfast and trustworthy, if Shoko trusted her enough to discuss the matter of ghosts and spirits with her, and Poppy still hadn't balked at it.

In the end, as they depart from the game, Rom generally thinks of Poppy as a friend*!

*As in -- he does like her, and wishes her well, and will keep in contact with her, but I think he never expects their relationship to grow much deeper than playing games together and such. It's no slight against her! Even that's a lot closer than he lets most people get to him! He just gets the impression she isn't very interested in his interiority, and he's okay with that -- he's happy to keep things shallow and simple with her, and just hang out with her online once in a while so they can play co-op games together. And he'd suspect that being in close proximity with Shoko is enough supernatural nonsense for her to acclimate to that he doesn't need to burden her with any of his supernatural nonsense on top of that. (Especially since, see his above blurb to Shoko where he has complicated feelings about getting too close to Shoko because he does not want to potentially add to her big burden of grief ...) Still, he does genuinely wish well for her, and sincerely hopes she and Shoko will be happy going forth -- he'll even bother her on Discord once in a while just to make sure of it! And yes, of course he'll stream her MMO on his gaming channel, just for her.

puts paw on

The yapper cometh ... Sorry Jams, I'm about to whammo you in the face with a big ol' load of Rom's stupid convoluted logic, but at least you get a slightly different flavor of his bullshit!

To get the usual song and dance out of the way first -- Rom came into AYTO assuming that he was here to play the role of the cast's unappealing weirdo clown, and so surely he would have been paired off with another fellow outlier to the cast. Which means that Rom gave zero thought to the possibility of himself being matched with Yingying! In Rom's eyes, Yingying was one of the clear standouts in terms of being just absolutely, perfectly made for television. Beautiful even at a glance, graceful, with a charming personality and a way with words that meant the audiences would surely love her. By his reading of the game -- at its core a reality television production, even if the final prize was unorthodox -- would probably pair like with like(-ish) when it came to a contestant's general level of appeal, because an audience would probably find that most 'fair.' So yeah, no way he'd be paired with Yingying.

Which was a good thing for him! Since he sure had enough other things to worry about when it came to her.

I joked about 70% overlay horrors before, but that really is basically how Rom perceives the world at all times. In canon, he describes it like the way you'd see a window at night, where your own reflection is imposed on top of your view of the outside, with both images distinct but overlapping. So I played Rom as always seeing, as a base, Yingying the way that others saw her -- as the beautiful wisteria fairy. It was this version of her that he made his assessment of concerning perfect matches, since he knew that would be what most of the show's production (and also the audience) would be able to see. Okay, easy part handled!

But on top of that ... I had to sit and think for a second when you first explained Yingying's whole dealio to me, but in summary, here's what I played Rom as seeing imposed on top of Yingying's wisteria fairy self. Her hometown's many, many residents manifested largely as dark, warped, smouldering spirits that were constantly crawling over her; they never hurt her, but did basically swirl around her at all times, sometimes showing brief flashes of more loving faces, but otherwise dwelling on the pain of their deaths and thus mostly looking gnarly. On top of that, Yingying's magical strength just formed a huge cloud around her at all hours. Poking out of that, a sort of 'umbilical cord' would have connected her fairy form to the tree, kind of flickering in and out of view. Rom couldn't see into the tree, but did know that it had something to do with the Yingying walking around the estate. ... yeah.

In Rom's canon, ghosts usually grow aggressive (or if they were already malicious, even more aggressive) when acknowledged by humans, whether through direct eye contact or by a reaction like flinching or screaming; Rom's was born with his insane spiritual sensitivity, and so he has plenty of practice staying calm no matter what he's looking at (or walking through, since sometimes you just gotta plow through a bunch of ghosts while pretending not to perceive). Thus, Rom could mostly interact with and speak to Yingying in normal fashion. But even so, simply being around her was probably always super stressful for him. It also wouldn't have helped that there's still a lot about ghosts that isn't understood back in Rom's world; he didn't really understand what the hell he was looking at when it came to Yingying, other than that she was hella strong and also had some sort of deep connection to a fuckton of people who died horribly. And for as casual and weird as Rom acts, he's actually described as being an excellent student, who was taught to always be cautious before dealing with any unknowns -- so Rom definitely wasn't going to go casually poking at Yingying, especially while stuck in the estate without his full range of protective tools from back home.

Mind you, I think Rom never believed Yingying was malicious per se. He was uneasy about her, yes, but I don't think he would have assigned her actual malice or cruelty. Her interactions with the other members of the cast were consistently pretty innocuous, they never seemed to come away influenced or hurt in any way, and Rom's also developed a really good gut instinct about ghosts and their intentions after decades of interactions -- I think he would have gotten the sense that Yingying wasn't actively looking to cause harm. But at the same time, the ghosts back from his home aren't always so straightforward -- when it comes to unknown entities, you never know what might set them off, or how they might react when disturbed or acknowledged. Yingying herself might have had perfectly harmless intentions, but he couldn't assume the same about the various spirits swirling around her. And if Rom was on his own he might have just fucken gone for it and tried to figure out what was up with her! The risk would have just been a part of his job, and maybe he could just tank any ill effects if he started his investigation slow and careful! But too bad, it was never just them. A being of Yingying's power would probably have a wide area of influence if agitated, and Rom was far too aware of the fact that the estate was always populated with the other cast members (and also, no matter how tired he grew of them, the camera staff).

As a result, whenever Rom interacted with Yingying in early game, he was always extremely on edge, doing his utmost to try and fish for information to figure out her deal, but while causing her as little agitation as possible to minimize the risk of setting her off in any way. (This does mean that I was fighting ten extra levels of the 4D chess demons with every tag, so I flopped real real hard on some threads, please forgive me. It's not you, it's me (and Rom's stupid internal logic). My brain just couldn't keep up with the struggle of figuring out what he'd say to min-max his productivity vs. danger when it came to speaking to her.) No doubt that sort of caution and neuroticism came across in his attitude towards her ... While Rom probably just went with the flow and pretended not to perceive her spiritual mess when it came to light and quick interactions around other people, he was always on high alert whenever they had to interact one on one in any more meaningful way.

I think ... as the days went by, Rom did slowly drop his guard tiny bit by tiny bit. Everyone seemed to like Yingying, after all, and he still couldn't sense her actually spreading any influence or causing any harm. Whatever danger she posed at least wouldn't be easily agitated, which did help him feel slightly more comfortable with her presence. That said -- Rom is also shown in canon to be extremely cautious about working off of half-baked information, because in his line of work, making hasty assumptions can actually be even more dangerous than being completely oblivious. In a way, he actually wasn't too worried about most other people interacting with Yingying because he felt like they were operating completely blind (only seeing Yingying's wisteria fairy self) (except maybe Shoko, but she never said anything) and so their chances of setting off the spirits around her would have been much lower. It was always his own actions he was most cautious about, because he wasn't sure how dangerous it might be to give away that he could sense she wasn't just the wisteria fairy.

-- in other words, he definitely got a stress tummyache after talking to Yingying during the ghosts incident. That's not the sort of risk he'd normally take in such a populated setting, but the presence of the other ghosts kind of set the stage for him, and so he felt that he might be able to get away with a bit more by trying to blur the lines between what he was naturally seeing, and what was being caused by the estate itself. Still not a fun conversation for him! He definitely had a heart palpitation when Yingying asked if she was being interrogated, because he immediately worried if he'd triggered some sort of aggressive meltdown; he probably had to go take a fucking breather outside after that, even if nothing actually happened. (For the record, when it came to the subject of Rom asking Yingying about her mothers, he came across as a little extra clinical ... That was in part because he was being careful! But also in part because that's a subject he just can't speak with as much confidence about. His mother found him so unbearable that he was abandoned quite young, so everything sympathetic he could say about Yingying's own beloved mothers was coming from a purely hypothetical perspective for him. He really was doing his best, but his best was Not Good in that situation, unfortunately.)

I do think though that that interaction did help ease Rom a little further along in accepting that Yingying probably wasn't dangerous. She hadn't lashed out despite his prodding, and more importantly, it sounded like the root of her "haunting"(?) wasn't inherently dangerous, especially since she spoke about her mothers with what sounded like a very pure sort of love (by his assessment). The sheer number of spirits around her was still cause for concern, but at least it sounded like her situation was more just complicated than it was an active threat he'd have to defuse ASAP. Another factor that helped ease his concerns a little bit was seeing Yingying and Yi Sang seeming to forge a special bond between them. Rom was actually moderately surprised that they didn't end up being a perfect match because they seemed to mesh so well during the second match ceremony, and since he could really easily see their cute bond despite their sharp contrasts in many ways (Yingying's exceptional beauty vs. Yi Sang being more bedraggled, her charms vs. his moroseness, etc.) making for a really really good television-worthy storyline. Alas, it didn't work out them, but still ... I think getting to see Yingying seeming to forge genuine connections with people did have him leaning more towards her 'haunting' not being an immediate danger, and he was even rooting for them a little bit.

I think by the fourth week Rom had already dropped his guard towards her a fair bit (though not to zero), and the lore drop kind of gave him the final bit of context to connect everything else he was seeing, explaining a lot about why she looked the way she did to him; her explanation of it fell neatly in line with everything else as well, and finally, he felt like he could actually speak to her with even a modicum of honesty.

Rom, despite his extreme caution towards spirits (which is justified, because they sure can fuck people up), actually also has a lot of sympathy towards them. He'll always lean towards leaving alone ones that aren't hurting people, or trying to get them to pass on peacefully; even if a spirit is harmful, if he gets the sense that it doesn't wish to be malicious and might actually be suffering, he'll try to get to the bottom of that. So of course the moment he got that hard confirmation that Yingying wasn't actually a cause for concern, his main sentiment towards her flipped from caution to a desire to help. Further colored by a slight sense of feeling bad. It wouldn't exactly be guilt since I think Rom wouldn't feel like he'd done anything wrong per se -- he'd acted by the books, and from his point of view, it would have been objectively stupid of him to make hasty assumptions and gamble with everyone's safety. But even if it wasn't his responsibility to offer Yingying his help earlier, that doesn't mean he's exactly happy with the timeline of how things happened -- Rom definitely wished that the lore drop had come earlier so that he could have listened to her and had more time to see if he could do anything for her.

Not that it mattered much in the end, since Yingying's wish was enough to save her! Rom's bad feelings from the final week might linger a bit, but that really doesn't matter anywhere near as much as the fact that she was saved from her plight, for which Rom is genuinely happy! He can only imagine just how much and for how long she's been suffering, given what she explained to him, so he knows her happiness is extremely hard-won and well-deserved. And he's also glad that she'll have the company of Odile and Yi Sang as she enters this new stage in her life -- Rom considers Odile really sensible and reliable, while Yi Sang is extremely kind and empathetic, so between the two of them, he knows Yingying is really in good hands.

I think ... Rom would actually worry about her a little bit as they all depart the game, just because he understands the gravity of what she was through, and it's the sort of thing he's sure would leave scars no matter how much a 'wish' might have given her a new lease on life. But if she was strong enough to retain her mind even through her long suffering, then she'll probably be okay no matter the lingering effects, especially with good company, right? So Rom wouldn't like hover over her or anything, but I think he'd periodically find an excuse to message her -- mostly trying to see how she's doing, with the excuse that wants to upload an old clip of her on his channel or whatever else. And, y'know, it'd be nice to hear if she's doing well! He genuinely is happy for her and wants her to have a good life now.

I will always lend both ears for Miru to yap.

It's time. Cocks my clown cannon and aims it in sweet Yi Sang's direction --

I gotta be honest. I usually start these word dumps with the warning that I'm about go into Rom's stupid 4D chess mental gymnastics, but that actually isn't the case when it comes to Yi Sang. This is mostly thanks to the fact that Rom's much bigger concern regarding Yi Sang was a very simple 'oh, I have no clue what to do with this guy.'

Setting aside the nuances of his mindset when it came the role he thought he was meant to play and what influence that might have on his perfect match, Rom ultimately accepted his invitation to AYTO under the assumption that he would be spending four weeks working -- he would not be 'earnestly looking for romance,' but rather, 'performing as an entertainer for the cameras, which would include puzzling out his game-assigned perfect match under the pretense that he was seeking romance.' And while this definitely affected his approach when it came to trying to figure out who the hell the production had assigned to him as his perfect match, it also meant that, on a base level, he was constantly very aware of how his interactions would look to the show's audience. This came with both upsides and downsides. Pros: he was always very alert to the chances of running PR for his own personal channel and brand, which he considered a huge perk of taking on the job! Con: man, it stressed him out whenever he ran into a situation where he wasn't sure how he was supposed to liven things up for the audience .... which ended up being most of this early experiences with Yi Sang.

Mind you, it's not that Rom necessarily blamed Yi Sang for any of this. I think Rom's immediate first impression when it came to Yi Sang was that he was very ... honest. For better and for worse. When it came to their early encounters, like during spin the bottle and even up to their disastrous ice cream parlor date, Rom was mostly aware of how honest Yi Sang seemed, even if it was to his (Yi Sang's own) detriment. There was no sense of falsehood or showmanship when it came to Yi Sang's dead-eyed, deadpan and almost soulless demeanor; Rom's reading was that it was entirely genuine, cameras be damned. And while as a certified oddball himself, he wasn't going to judge Yi Sang for it, it sure did throw him for a loop in that he had no idea how to play off that sort of empty husk demeanor in order to make for good television. I should clarify here -- Rom isn't inflexible when it comes to how he bounces off most people! He is up for both bullying (Edamura) and being bullied (Poppy), being lowkey (Shoko) and being more bombastic (Messmer), as well as everything in between; he's made his living off of being marketable (in his specific niche) for a good few years by now, and he's pretty good at figuring out how to spin most scenarios in a way that retains views. -- Yi Sang, though? It was a bit like squeezing water out of a stone. Attempts at being courteous (spin the bottle) and being blunt (the latter portion of their ice cream parlor date) seemed equally fruitless, no matter how much he tried to fish for some sort of genuine reaction out of Yi Sang. (Note: this was the main reason he bothered ordering all that ice cream, to try and stir some sort of reaction out of Yi Sang.) So even setting aside all personal feelings, I think Rom mostly just felt low-key stressed when it came to having to spend too much time around Yi Sang during those first two weeks and change.

Although ... there was also a personal element here. Because I think I mentioned it somewhere (the CR chart maybe?) before, but Yi Sang actually reminded Rom a lot of back when he was much younger. We don't get to see a ton of Rom back in his childhood, but what we do see is pretty consistent: he was a quiet child with dead eyes, a gloomy disposition and a somewhat stilted way of talking. He's later described as having been quite shy -- an excellent student, and seemingly very astute, but also very introverted and strongly averse to making eye contact. It all sounds a little familiar, no?

This isn't to say that Rom thought of Yi Sang and himself as true equals in any way; he would have considered that an insulting statement, and he never got the impression that Yi Sang held the same potential for duplicity or deceit that he does. But he did end up wondering if maybe Yi Sang was in a similar place mentally that he'd been back in his childhood -- adrift, lost, and in need of someone kind to offer a helping hand. Though he wouldn't have necessarily characterized himself as 'in pain' back in those younger days, Rom does know that it was warmth and kindness that ultimately helped him find his equilibrium as he was growing up; he desperately needed the stabilizing presence of someone like his mentor who was willing to support him. And Rom's never been able to forget the kind helping hand that Towako -- his Master's mentor, the woman who rescued him from his abandonment -- offered him when he was at his lowest. For as much as Rom wants to help people in need, I think he's also sharply aware of his strengths and his weaknesses, his capabilities and his limitations; his area of expertise is handling ghosts, and when it comes to offering people genuine warmth and kindness, he knows there are others who are far more suited to filling that role. Thus, Rom backed off a half-step to keep a little distance between them -- both for his own sake, since he was stressed enough trying to figuring out his match, but also for Yi Sang's, because he didn't want to eat up any precious time that Yi Sang might better spend in the company of their warmer, more genuine castmates.

This was partly why Rom was quietly rooting for Yingying and Yi Sang to work out -- if not as game-assigned perfect matches, then at least a genuine connection outside of the game's system. Yes, Yingying generally unnerved him (see above tl;cr re: Yingying), and yes, he had no idea what to do with Yi Sang when it came to screentime, but YiYi's interactions in general and on stage (during the second match ceremony) seemed genuine and warm -- maybe this could be good for the both of them? But also, just on a more human and personal level, Rom would have liked for Yi Sang to find the same sort of warmth that he'd been blessed with in his own youth. To be lonely and adrift is a terrible feeling, and he would have liked for Yi Sang to find reprieve, if that really was the cause of his odd demeanor.

A small wrench was thrown into this mindset of his only after the second match ceremony when Rom felt like his top match candidates according to his cynical calculus (Messmer, Odile) had both been eliminated, while he'd also been given no indication that he should change his approach towards the game. Which meant that, by Ringo's calculations, his most likely remaining match candidates would be Edamura, Luka and Yi Sang. Rom, struggling with the terrifying prospect of having to deal with Actual Emotions, had promptly crossed out the potential of himself being matched with Edamura, considering it too convenient and good to be true (and would only circle back to it when cornered by The Math). Luka actually served as a decent candidate for him according to his cynical calculus, because Rom figured they're both performers, while Luka's dazzling appearances would contrast "nicely" against his own image in a sort of 'beauty and the beast' appeal that might play well to television audiences. But Rom also knew that he held no fundamental commonalities with Luka, despite 'commonalities' seeming to be key, according to the perfect match between Ringo and Furina (and later, Verso and Nico). Which meant ... he felt like he had to give some serious thought to the possibility of a match with Yi Sang and, if that was the case, how the hell he was going to bring the matter up and sell it to the cameras.

Fortunately for Rom (and honestly, probably Yi Sang as well), week three ended up being extremely fruitful in terms of Rom deepening his genuine connection with Edamura and accepting that maybe, maybe he was allowed to try and take the gamble with Edamura as his game-assigned 'perfect match.' So he didn't end up trying to hunt Yi Sang down and manipulate some sort of scenario to better facilitate them going up on stage as a potential perfect match! But regardless, the notion did weigh on Rom's mind for a hot second, and then lingered afterwards because he felt a little bad about it. While Rom would have considered it a pretty obvious conclusion (from the viewpoint of the show's production and the audience) that himself and Yi Sang were equally strange outliers in the show's cast, and thus potentially suitable as perfect matches just for the purposes of the show, he did always read Yi Sang as someone fundamentally more sincere than himself, so -- he would have felt a little bad about having considered Yi Sang his 'equal' in any way, even briefly.

Either way, entering week four of the game, Rom was a lot more at peace with many things -- with what was expected of him, what his place in the game was, and how he was maybe allowed to feel about his 'perfect match' -- and so I think he was able to drop his guard a little bit and address everything around him in a slightly more sincere manner. It was in this context that the final lore drop occurred, which I think ended up changing Rom's perception of Yi Sang a fair bit.

On a most basic level ... I think that lore drop conversation ended up being a wake-up call to Rom about just how genuinely kind and sincere a person Yi Sang was. He'd already gotten an inkling through observing Yi Sang's general demeanor and interactions with other people, yes, but it was notable to him that Yi Sang would express such a remarkably, almost ludicrously kind sentiment to him -- that he would have been capable of accepting 'a creature' like him in his childhood and showing that child warmth enough to save them. Rom, I think, is far past holding grudges and resentment over what happened to him in his childhood, but that doesn't mean he's necessarily happy with what happened; a small part of him does think it would have been nice, if someone could have shown him that sort of acceptance when he was very young. Though he wouldn't necessarily characterize himself as having 'been in pain,' he does know on a factual level that he was deprived of unconditional love ... speaking objectively, it would have been nice if he could have experienced that, you know? And even setting his own selfish thoughts of what could have been nicer for himself, he does genuinely respect Yi Sang's idealism -- the purity of his intentions.

Sorry, this is a slight tangent where I have to fistfight with Rom's mental gymnastics demons in front of your salad, but I do think it ties into why Rom would hold a special admiration for Yi Sang's idealism, so please bear with me for a hot second. I've been thinking about it ever since you did your thread commentary and I will explode if I can't barf the words out somewhere or the other.

Rom wasn't being particularly self-deprecating or humble when he told Yi Sang that he isn't compassionate -- I think that would be his honest, 100% genuine assessment of himself, given how he views himself and the world around him. (OOCly, I think he is deeply compassionate. Rom is a bleeding-heart softie who will tank any risk himself if it would mean helping someone who needs it, especially someone whose pleas have gone unheard. But that is that, and this is this.) It's not that Rom lacks in self-esteem, per se; I think there are plenty of positive adjectives that he'd apply to himself with zero hesitation (and also zero sarcasm or facetiousness). But he is also just so aware of how othered he is that I think it's something he can never keep out of his calculus. He was very young (probably like six-ish?) when he was taken in after being abandoned, and I think if he was already able to communicate that he 'understood he was different' at that age, then that was something very deeply seeded into his core self-identity, and nothing in his life afterward would have dispelled that notion. As such, I think Rom has a very sharp understanding of how this affects his relation to normal human beings -- in terms of upsides, it gives him leeway and soft permission to take actions that are considered socially unacceptable, because he is performing a public service that normal people are incapable of (thus freeing him from any guilt about soft-scamming people for a living), but on the flipside, it means he will always be distanced from normal human beings. He is human, so he can mentally emulate and hypothesize what they might be thinking and how they might feel, but there is ultimately a hard cap on how deeply he can sympathize with these people that he is othered from.

As such, I think Rom would say that he is nice, but not that he's kind. That he is well-meaning and dutiful, but not that he is altruistic. And I don't know what he'd say instead, but I don't think he'd ever call himself 'compassionate,' because I think that word carries the weight of too much sympathy and sincerity -- Rom is too aware of how calculated and distanced his own mindset is to be able to apply that word to himself. Not to mention, Rom knows what compassion is -- compassion is what Towako showed him when he was young. That completely selfless and genuine desire to help, something which he truly idolizes and admires even now, decades later. It's something he tries to live up to and pay respect to with all his heart, but I think it's a goalpost that he's never felt like he's truly reached, especially given his own 'compassion' is what got Towako killed when he was young, and the guilt of that mistake will always weigh on him. Compassion embodies something that I think he considers fundamentally opposed to his own mindset: purity of intent.

And so we circle back to Yi Sang. What Yi Sang said during their conversation was ridiculously, almost stupidly idealistic ... but I think in a way, Rom likes that more than the sort of platitudes or niceties that most people could have offered him during the same conversation. Words might be cheap, but it's impossible for him to imagine Yi Sang saying something so idealistic as a lie or a farce, given the sort of person Yi Sang had proven himself to be over the weeks. And Yi Sang would have nothing to gain from saying so idealistic about a long-gone hypothetical situation, but he said it anyway. I think Rom would really respect that purity of intent, even if it can't actually do anything for him for him. He'd really like the thought that people like Yi Sang are out there, and might be able to help other people in ways that he can't; he was completely serious in saying that he hopes Yi Sang is able to stay that idealistic going forth, because that sort of idealism isn't always what's necessary, but it's the sort of thing some people might find most helpful ... like himself, when he was young, and how he was saved by Towako's compassion in those dark times.

Anyway!

As they depart from the game, Rom truly wishes Yi Sang nothing but the best! He's very glad to have seen Yi Sang evolve from the sad, non-responsive Yiyore of week one into the sweet weirdo who'll say 'rizz' out loud, who almost certainly has Yingying and Odile's backs, and who just generally has more light in his eyes. Rom's under no illusions that they have any particularly close relationship, but he does harbor a quiet fondness for the guy, and feels really gratified when he thinks about how things have turned out for Yi Sang in the end. And while his general nature -- bad at keeping in touch with people for personal purposes, always kind of evasive and opaque -- means Rom won't exactly be blowing up Yi Sang's phone with well-wishes, I do think he'll show up in Yi Sang's texts sporadically, with no warning, going forth. Ostensibly to pester him for a stream appearance, but also partly just to see how the guy's doing. He wants to know Yi Sang's managing to stay his weird, sweet, idealistic self, you know?

yaps requested

Breaking order to do this one first because I was thinking about their two-way fumbling last night. Sorry Sib, this got really long, and also a lot of this is going to go into explaining Rom's insane 4D chess mental gymnastics because Messmer was unfortunately the most direct recipient of a lot of it. Messmer didn't deserve any of this.

To lay things out plainly, as I've mentioned elsewhere, Rom came into AYTO with the mindset that he would be participating from an entirely strategic angle. After all, this was a reality TV show -- Rom is always very deliberate about how he presents himself and isn't blind to how most people view him, and so he assumed that he'd been brought onto the cast solely to fill out numbers and play the part of 'cast weirdo that makes for entertaining TV but nobody actually really likes,' which is a staple of any good reality show. In the same vein, he assumed that his "perfect match" (in quotes because he viewed the term from an entirely cynical angle) would be someone picked purely for the purposes of the show -- a match that viewers would deem acceptable, but not take away anything high-value from the more TV-appropriate participants. Thus, he assumed that his match would have to be a fellow Fucking Freak -- two of the show's outliers that could be shuffled aside without feeling like anything was amiss while the hot, sexy, fun folks had a good time genuinely forging connections before the cameras, you know?

So when he first arrived at the estate and ran into "Don't call me Mr. Impaler, call me Lord" Messmer, of course he immediately went ❗

It's not like Rom wasn't a little shook by what he was dealing with. I had him acting extremely calm and casual about Messmer's entire Deal on first encounter because Rom has learned to always play calm, but he ultimately comes from a world populated only by normal human people (and ghosts). Even setting aside Messmer's physical appearance, his spiritual presence definitely would have been horrifying to behold, given Rom's freak prodigy levels of spiritual sensitivity. The only reason Rom would have been able to act like nothing was wrong is because he's basically spent his whole life training himself to stay calm and pretending not to perceive The Horrors around him; in truth, Messmer probably was (and still is) kind of stressful for him to spend too much time around, even if he knew on a rational level that whatever was going on with Messmer's curse(?) probably wasn't going to affect him directly.

I think it helped that as they went through the first week, he got a slightly better understanding of Messmer -- not somebody aggressive, but definitely quite dour and down on himself, seemingly quite grimly resigned and not really intent on engaging with the game on a sincere level. ... in other words, someone that he could definitely see himself being matched with under his cynical 'the game must have paired together the outlier Freaks' calculus.

And honestly for a short while, he considered other matches for that first ceremony where he'd be choosing? But I think it would have mattered to him a lot that, as he listened to other people discuss their choices, nobody else seemed to really float Messmer's name. Which would have fit his internal logic, of course, but also ... for how shrewd and calculated he is with his interpersonal interactions, Rom is also a huge bleeding-heart softie when it comes down to it. And he knows full well how much that sort of rejection stings. He would have thought of himself as acting purely out of logic -- 'I am an outlier, and Lord Messmer also seems to be an outlier, so it makes perfect sense that the show would pair us together' -- but I do think that desire not to let someone else feel so pointedly rejected would have affected his decision. This would have added a more emotional, personal element to his choice, even though I don't think he was conscious of it; this would also later come back to bite him in the ass a little bit.

But come the first match ceremony, he chose Messmer, and in his mind palace, the three key commonalities he thought they shared were:

1. A fundamental disconnect from normal humans
2. Poor compatibility with the game's machinations
3. Self-awareness concerning the above two points

The first one was pretty obvious. The second one too, given Messmer's pointed refusal to engage in activities like spin the bottle that would help facilitate pair-finding. The third one was something that Rom was assuming on his own, though he considered it a pretty safe assumption to make, given Messmer's consistently dour attitude about himself. But at the same time, the latter two points were things that he didn't want to have to say out loud. Even if (in his head) Messmer might have been self-aware of them, hearing such things said out loud by another person still stings more than acknowledging such things to oneself. Thus, Rom basically trapped himself in a weird, completely self-imposed balancing act between his own cynical machinations ("we're probably matched because we're both Freaks (neg)") and the desire not to actually cause any hurt ("letting my logic slip in any way would be terribly cruel, so I need to pretend I'm thinking something else.")

I'll say it here that nobody did this to him! Messmer has done nothing wrong so far! Rom did this to himself! It's just that one of Rom's big flaws is that he is self-reliant to a fault -- due to his anomalous nature (and probably also a little bit because of his previous familial abandonment), he defaults to keeping secrets and trying to work through things on his own, even as he has fifteen different neurotic schemes battling in his brains at all times. Especially after that first match ceremony yielded a few lights, he genuinely did think there was a good chance that the show had matched him up with Messmer, and that as long as he could keep bluffing and dancing around the issue, he could play it up for the cameras that they were a genuine match and avoid causing Messmer any emotional hurt, even as his mindset remained entirely cynical. (Note: this is also why his early conversations with Wei Wuxian got so cagey at points -- Wei Wuxian's accusation that he not hurt Messmer stung because he was genuinely trying to avoid that, despite it being very possible.)

But I think come their first date, Rom was already getting the sense that his control of the situation was starting to slip. This, I think, is the point where their mutual fumbling started really kicking in. And I think ... to a certain degree, it's not either of their faults, but more a matter of basic incompatibility.

Rom ... I think, is someone who can’t help speaking in a very indirect fashion. There are rare exceptions, but in general, he just can't communicate with most people in a direct way. By default, he's constantly running two different filters in his brain -- 1) how to act like he doesn't see The Horrors, because acknowledging them is dangerous, and 2) how to filter his perception of reality into words meant for normal people (subfilter: is he playing up his influencer exorcist showmanship, or is he pretending to be a normal-ish person?) -- before saying anything. Like, I think given his inherent nature and the lifestyle he's chosen for himself, that's just how he's trained himself to operate, and it's only around a very few chosen exceptions -- mostly people he's confirmed to be on a similar wavelength to regarding spiritual vision -- that he feels it’s permissible to drop one or both of those filters. But otherwise, he's always playing mental chess, trying to wheedle out information and guide people to his points in indirect fashion, because that's always safer (usually for both parties) and keeps him more opaque. Admittedly a fucking exhausting way of existing! But also, it’s really the only way he knows to live.

And I think in front of someone like Messmer who's quite hard to read (both in terms of his more antiquated lingo, but also being more tired and muted in his emotions), there was no way Rom felt comfortable dropping his filters at all. Especially given he was also running the extra filter of 'I want to act like I'm at least somewhat sincere about this match because I don't want to hurt him.' But this was probably really the wrong move when dealing with Messmer? The reading I get is that Messmer is really not the type to do well with that sort of indirect prodding -- he's probably too tired and jaded to deal with any of that, he's not going to take any bait that's dangled before him, and he'd much rather just take what he's given, and otherwise not go prying? A fucking nightmare when it comes to Rom's usual attitude of weaving through implications and inferences, and his general aversion to just asking direct questions or answering honestly. Thus the two-way fumbling that wasn’t even really either party’s fault, but simply a result of how the two of them have adapted to their circumstances in almost diametrically opposed ways …

This fundamental disconnect is what I think started coming through on their first date, where Messmer was demanding answers that Rom just didn’t feel comfortable enough to give directly, which Messmer thus interpreted as deliberate attempts at being evasive (which wasn’t an incorrect read, mind you, but perhaps assigned ill intent where there wasn't any) but also didn’t bother pursuing for any further clarification. And for Rom, Messmer’s refusal to sort of ‘play ball’ -- a refusal to engage in banter or the gentle push-and-pull of addressing matters in a more roundabout fashion, the gentler probing from both sides to show equal stakes -- read to him like stonewalling, when from Messmer’s end it was no doubt more akin to him going “I’m too tired and old for this, just say what you want or don't bother.”

I gotta be real, for one second I was violently tempted to have Rom drop the tidbit that he’d been abandoned by his parents for his nature because I, OOCly, knew that Messmer has a lot of mommy abandonment issues? But unfortunately it’s just not in Rom’s nature to make himself vulnerable like that first -- he’d only think it ‘fair’ to expose something like that about himself if the other party was honest first, or if he felt that the other party genuinely cared (unlikely, in his mind, but not impossible). And while he didn’t read Messmer as cold or uncaring, necessarily, Wei Wuxian had told him that Messmer is old beyond the scope of normal humans. Rom was working under the assumption that a mortal of a regular lifespan saying “oh, my parents abandoned me” would have meant nothing to someone working on the scale of centuries of life experiences. A part of me wonders how their CR could have gone, had they been able to bond even marginally over that commonality at that early stage …

But alas, they didn’t! And so came the second match ceremony.

As Rom later ended up saying to Messmer, his upset about Messmer’s decision during the second match ceremony really came down to feeling like Messmer has completely betrayed his previous statements of ‘only caring about winning the game.’ In Rom’s mind, Verso was clearly one of the stars of the show, not only in terms of looks, but also in terms of personality -- charming, gentle, empathetic, kind. He himself had also been briefly charmed by Verso and then had immediately placed a mental block there deciding that that was a useless venue to pursue -- it just seemed so much more likely in his mind that the show’s management would have paired Verso with someone more ‘suitable’ like Nico, as the rest of the cast had floated more than once. And while this seemed like a terribly obvious conclusion in his mind, he also never would have voiced it out loud at that point -- like he later said to Messmer, it would have been a terribly cruel sentiment to put into words, and at the end of the day, he didn’t want to risk causing Messmer any harm. Furthermore, if Messmer and Verso were hitting it off well outside of the production’s machinations, then that truly wasn’t any of his business, and he really didn’t want to interfere with it in any way. It’s not that he necessarily doubted Messmer’s ability to compartmentalize between the game’s machinations vs. his own personal relationships, but Rom didn’t feel that was a gamble that he had any right to take, since he had no stakes in it.

That said, for as generally detached as Rom acts from normal human behavior ... I don't think he's immune to the full gamut of normal human emotions, either. He's just accepted his role as 'the other' and trained himself to fit it, he wasn't inherently born with that disposition, and I think his extremely soft-hearted nature and his much shyer personality in childhood indicates he's pretty sensitive at the end of the day. It might not have been the driving force behind his poor reaction after the second match ceremony, but there was an element of personal hurt that influenced his actions there.

For the record, this is how Messmer’s choice ended up affecting Rom’s mental list of their ‘commonalities’:

1. A fundamental disconnect from normal humans -- Still true!
2. Poor compatibility with the game's machinations -- Questionable, if Messmer felt comfortable enough choosing Verso during the match ceremony.
3. Self-awareness concerning the above two points -- Decidedly no longer true.

Which is to say, this action kind of scuppered Rom's assumption that the show would have deemed them an obvious match. This match ceremony also signaled to him that his most obvious back-up option under his cynical calculus, Odile (self-professed as feeling ill-suited to the game), wasn't correct. It also also suggested that his attitude of pursuing logic and game mechanics over any emotions was correct, given the blackout despite many choices that week being made in very emotion-ful ways (Shoko and Poppy, Yi Sang and Yingying, Messmer and Verso). At the same time, the fact that nobody had chosen him left Rom with few leads to pursue when it came to logical matches. (And, y'know, there was the very slight element of "wow, you really hung me out to dry when I tried to have your back last time" aimed at Messmer, though that would have been only a very minor factor in the general scheme of things.) This multi-hit-combo of conclusions in combination with the loredump during the week (which affected Rom badly in ways completely unrelated to Messmer) meant he was feeling pretty exhausted and cornered after the match ceremony.

Which still isn't to say that personal feelings were the driving force behind Rom pretending not to perceive Messmer after the second match ceremony! His reactions were ultimately couched in the sense that he'd been completely uprooted in his planned path of action, with his personal hurt only being an additional factor on top of that. But it is why he reacted a even more evasively, with a touch of bite, when Messmer came to question him after the ceremony -- Messmer doubting his dedication to the game ("So quickly thou hast forgotten the nature of this place") really felt like a personal swing when in his internal logic, Messmer was the one who'd first taken a wild swing out of personal feelings and then struck out, all while he (Rom) was really, really doing his best to continue acting in a logical and game-driven manner. I think Messmer then not even pursuing his questioning very far afterwards, not even asking what Rom had assumed their commonalities were, was what sort of had Rom quietly closing off that entire path as a viable option going forth -- he felt tired and lost, and while a part of him did feel there was still a slight chance (5%?) that he and Messmer were a match according to the show's machinations, it no longer felt like the most productive option to pursue if Messmer didn't even care enough to ask what felt like an obvious question.

In the end ... I think it's for the best that Messmer and Rom both sort of ended up drifting away and having their little development arcs away from each other. :') Messmer's more closed off nature did absolutely nothing to keep Rom from keeping his cards close to his chest in usual fashion, and Rom's evasive attitude did nothing to draw out Messmer's feelings, either. Truly a matter of incompatibility! I genuinely don't think it's either of their faults, but I also do think they're hilariously, almost catastrophically bad for each other when it comes to mutual communication. Fumble kings. In the end, Rom only circled back to try and talk to Messmer again before the final match ceremony when he'd come to peace with things enough that he was able to be more honest -- he finally felt comfortable enough to come clean about what he'd been thinking, and he was hoping that honesty would springboard his way into a more productive conversation to try and help figure out who Messmer's match might be, since at that point Messmer was one of the final pieces to their overall puzzle.

This didn't end up mattering during the run of the game, but just for the record, Rom holds no particular feelings about Messmer's war crimes. He thinks they're bad in an objective sense, of course, but he also has just enough interactions with very aged spirits to know that morality and ethics tend to get warped when working on the scale of decades and centuries. Since Messmer hardly seems the type to be a cackling sadist about murder and genocide, he assumes that the Messmer just works on a completely different scale of reality, where killing several hundred people simply doesn't hold the same gravitas, because what do the lives of mortal matter when those same mortals would have died of old age just in the time that you've been alive anyway?

As they depart the game, I think Rom mostly just feels neutral about Messmer ... ? He'll still prod and poke and bully in the way he acts towards most people, but I do think he gets that they're not really well-suited to communicating with each other in any sort of deeper/meaningful way, and by his readings, he also assumes that Messmer actively dislikes him. Like, not hates, but he thinks that Messmer probably dislikes him in the same way that most normal humans dislike him ............. Nothing notable, nothing special, same old, same old. Which is fine! He doesn't take it personally or anything. And he does also feel a little bad that he let his own personal feelings leak into how he treated Messmer at all -- that's not in his usual fashion, and he'd like to think he's generally above that kind of thing. So he's okay with how things have fallen, where he's wishing the best for Messmer (and Verso!) both but from a vague distance. He hopes they're happy and well!

Edited 2025-07-13 00:49 (UTC)

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anathemaw - 2025-07-13 01:52 (UTC) - Expand

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phenomerom - 2025-07-13 02:02 (UTC) - Expand

go ahead then

Since my brain is still chugging through the remainders of Rom's stupid 4d chess logic, here I am to yap about his thoughts on lovely Miss Odile.

To start with -- Rom really did like Odile from the start! And not just because her being a no-nonsense older lady made him think of his Master back home. Yes, the semblance did put him a bit more at ease than a lot of other people did, because Mitsue is basically the singular loved one he's managed to retain in his life -- despite some previous strife and conflict driving a rift between them for a while, Rom loves and cares for her a lot! But even setting aside that semblance, I think they settled into a pattern of conversation that Rom found quite comfortable. When it comes to interpersonal interactions, Rom's most accustomed to things like banter and the gentle push-and-pull of him being his usual self and getting side-eyed or rebuked; while he doesn't find any intrinsic gratification in people treating him with suspicion, he does find satisfaction in that very rote sort of interaction, it's basically his usual form of enrichment! Odile really hit the perfect balance of being a little dubious and stern towards him, but never turning him away completely, making her a great target for enrichment. Not to mention -- she raised some subjects that Rom found genuinely fascinating, like her complete disbelief in ghosts and spirits. Truly a wonderful conversation partner!

But that was that, and the game was the game. And this where I need to don my clown makeup as usual.

To reiterate the usual song and dance as succinctly as possible: Rom's approach coming into AYTO was entirely cynical and strategic, as he was working under the assumption there was a zero percent chance he was meant to find any sort of normal, organic romance. Thus, Rom immediately got to work trying to figure out which fellow outliers in the group the production must have matched him with in very 'pair the spares' fashion while the more television-friendly ones got to enjoy the spotlight. For the record, he had no negative feelings about taking this approach for himself, because Rom is very aware of what he is and how he presents himself; he knows full well that he's not really the sort of person palatable to the wider public as 'a person you'd want to root for in a romantic context,' and simply considered his approach the most efficient way of playing his part in winning them the game and getting those wishes fulfilled.

However, that doesn't mean Rom is equally callous about applying that same mindset to the other players he'd have to consider his match candidates. Rom is shown to have been painfully conscious from a very young age that he is someone 'other.' So I think he always tends to draw a very sharp line between what is meant to happen for him, and what is meant to happen for others. And while he is perfectly fine with making relatively cold, and sometimes almost cruel conclusions about what is fitting for him, he's also extremely soft-hearted and empathetic by nature -- he would balk at coming to those same cold conclusions for people other than himself, because they are not 'other' like he is.

One of the reasons Messmer was his immediate top candidate was because he felt that cynically evaluating Messmer as someone 'the production might have considered worthy of pairing off with me' was less cruel than it would be if he applied the same thought to other people. Like, no, he still wasn't in any rush to say out loud that he thought Messmer was as incompatible with the game as he was, on as generally ill-suited to deeper human connections as he is. But he at least felt that Messmer's obviously inhuman appearance and his dour personality would have made it an obvious conclusion (see: Poppy's "they match each other's freak" comment validating him), thus not something he needed to feel as bad about thinking. Everyone other than Messmer, though ... that'd be a whole 'nother ballpark.

This sets the stage for the second match ceremony.

On the most surface level, Rom meant his 'sorry' upon going up on stage with Odile as a 'sorry you had to be paired up as a leftover.' Nobody likes feeling unwanted, after all. And while he knew on a rational level that not being chosen wasn't necessarily any reflection of one's desirability and charm (see: both Luka and Serpilia going unchosen during that first ceremony when Rom would have evaluated them both as objectively extremely desirable people) ... it still feels bad, you know? Rom's spent most of his life being rejected by people (his family, then polite society) to varying degrees; it's not something he'd wish upon other people to any degree.

But honestly, what Rom meant more was that he thought there was probably a really good chance that they'd be a match up on stage ... a notion he harbored with some guilt, because he would have considered it an unkind conclusion to draw about Odile. Though he did think there was a very good chance production might have labeled Odile as an outlier like him, I think in his mind, that categorization would have happened for very different reasons. For himself, it would have been obvious -- he presents himself as a Freak, and so he is obviously an outlier, it is only logical for the production to categorize him as such. But for Odile, it seemed much more a result of happenstance -- Odile is generally charming and easy to get along with, and if she happened to get shuffled into the outlier category, it would have been more as a result of her personal discomfort with the game setting (given she'd self-professed to feeling a bit out of sorts, e.g. really hesitating to participate in spin the bottle, etc.) and bad luck (not stumbling onto good chemistry with others yet.) In other words, he thought it would have been a very plausible but also unfair reality, if Odile was put on the same level as him.

Hence, 'My apologies.' It was basically him preemptively apologizing in case he happened to be right, because he would have thought she didn't deserve that treatment.

Of course, that didn't end up happening in the end! And while the blackout of that round sure did put Rom into a bit of a bad mental state by completely throwing him off-course, I do think a part of him was a little relieved. The blackout confirmed to him that Odile hadn't been treated that cruelly by the game's algorithm. It admittedly put him a lot more at ease being around her after that. And even if a little bit of the guilt lingers from how he thinks he'd drawn a rather cold conclusion about her in the beginning, I think Rom was able to let go of a lot of that entering the later weeks of the game, when he was made to realize that wow, hey, maybe his cynical approach to the game wasn't correct in the first place.

So, setting aside all of his 4d chess -- Rom really did end up liking Odile a lot as they neared the end of the game! Without having to worry about his cynical game-focused calculus, he could better just appreciate her company like he enjoyed in the first place, which is nice! Admittedly, he doesn't really know how to handle it when Odile puts him on the spot -- things like ambush compliments, or calling him adorable(????????????????) -- but that's okay. Feeling flustered and awkward is very unfamiliar to him given people generally just can't get him on the back foot like that, so he has to respect Odile's ability to do it, ad he also knows that she doesn't mean it cruelly, so. He can endure it just for her! Worth it to get to pick her brain! And while I think a part of him does wish that Odile's match had turned out a little differently for her, he also gets the sense that she got something quite gratifying out of the game in the end, so who is he to say anything about it? So long as Odile is satisfied with the conclusion, he's happy for her!

As they depart the game, I do think that Odile is someone Rom will pester now and again through texts -- she really hit a comfortable cadence of conversation for him, and I think he'd really value her input when it comes to certain subjects (incl. maybe how to 'court' Edamura ... maybe ....) And of course, he'd want to make sure she's doing well out there -- he can't imagine it'd be easy on her watching over both Yingying and Yi Sang. Whenever her visit to his world does happen he'll do his utmost to make it a nice, relaxing, indulgent vacation for her!

Edited (eepy typos ...) 2025-07-14 05:24 (UTC)

so how bad is it gonna be

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phenomerom - 2025-06-30 03:45 (UTC) - Expand

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suibian - 2025-06-30 16:36 (UTC) - Expand

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

tl;cr meme

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holds head in hands .............. 1/3

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puts on my clown wig ............. 1/2

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tiredly honks my clown nose .............. 1/2

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i have truly been fighting the mental gymnastics demons ... 1/2

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