tl;cr meme

[marriagebroker]

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

Comments

[nrangel]

I always love a Miru yap

[phenomerom]

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!