tl;cr meme

[marriagebroker]

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

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[phenomerom]

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.