tl;cr meme

[marriagebroker]

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

Comments

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

[phenomerom]

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.