imagining yttd characters with a partner pokemon and the image in my head is too cutee.
shin with an espeon because he canonically likes cats. he probably wanted an umbreon to match the cat plush in sou’s room but eevee followed him to work on a day shift and evolved, but he loves his partner anyways :)
sara with umbreon because she wanted a black cat in the manga. the type matchups make sense to me with shin having the weaker matchup.
gin with a growlithe and q-taro with an arcanine would be so cuteee. they’re father and son to me idc 😭
joe with a rockruff omlll. his uniform would always be a little roughed up because he can never resist playing with his partner!!
a zorua would go so well with reko’s color scheme aaaaa. maybe having it use rain dance during live venues to preform with her!!
nao with an altaria because the artbook said she likes fluffy thingss. i could totally see her napping with an altaria. little bit angsty here, but maybe a mishima’s smergle she raises after his death
alice with a zebstrika or furret because he likes striped things. i like to imagine his pokemon would occasionally bicker with reko’s zorua, but get their ass beat every time 😭
kai would have a ghost time to freak the yabusames out like he did in ytts. maybe a sableye or a yamask, but i feel like he would look so cunty with a froslass!!
i have no reason for this one but keiji with a gible makes sense in my head. idk… i can just see him doing his best to calm down a rambunctious gible that’s chasing the other participants around.
anzu with a blacephalon because its clownlike and not as off-putting as mr mime. i don’t like mr. mime, and i also feel like it’d be an uncreative cop-out to give her.
kuramada with a primape or hitmonlee that he spars with from time to time. they have specially tailored boxing gloves :”)
mai with a fidough. no explanation needed. your honor, they have matching bread hats!! she lets her partner help in the kitchen and just prays the fda doesn’t swing by.
i imagine kanna with a sweets themed pokemon bc of her pudding bucket in ytts. maybe a milcery or alcremie. i imagine shin’s espeon has a timid nature and she has to let it slowly warm up to her and her partner pokemon.
i feel like hinako would have a giant terrifying ass pokemon, slightly due to the fact that she’s intimidating and mysterious herself. mostly due to the fact that i think it would be really funny for the shortest character to have a giant scary pokemon lurking behind them.
ranmaru is kinda gloomy, so i feel like he would empathize well with a mimikyu and they would bond in no time. his partner is terrified of sara’s umbreon and every time he tries to approach her, mimikyu panics and he gives up. poor guy :(
hayasaka with a really mischievous rotom that he cannot control is a really cute image in my head, so i’m giving him that
hyper fixation so bad that underwear head-cannons are a thing now. my bf and i have decided that keiji and q-taro wear those white boxers with the hearts that you see in cartoons.
also, following this up but way darker— i was talking w my bf and we realized somehow all 3 of them got groomed in some way. lord, help this mess of a family.
spoilers under the cut: trigger warnings for subjects like abuse, and grooming (the action of attempting to form a relationship with a child or young person, with the intention of sexually assaulting them or inducing them to commit an illegal act such as selling drugs or joining a terrorist organization.)
kanna reveals that kugie was being romanced by a “mature/adult” woman in the original japanese version of your time to shine. sara is still called “underage” by mishima when keiji thinks about drinking with her, so i assume the simulation takes place with everyone at their same ages as in the death game.
shin was groomed by sou, whether you see their relationship as romantic or not. i personally see it with slight “romantic” undertones due to the excess of photos of shin being placed around sou’s house (possibly one sided as shin, at his most affectionate points with sou, states he viewed him as a sibling or an anti-hero) but either way… it was definitely abusive. shin’s ai reveals that sou was not even a student at his school, just a random grown ass man attending.
(side tangent and personal head cannon : i wonder how much coke sou was snorting to be able to balance high school, being a “psychologist”, “prison guard”, cashier at the ice cream shop, shin’s “friend”, a “nurse”, meeting with the yabusames, working for asunaro… like, half of their funding probably goes to his booger sugar because no way you’re doing all that without speed.)
but back to the main point, he specifically picked an emotionally vulnerable teenage boy with no friends, making it easy to groom him with the intention of forcing him into the death game. shin was very uncomfortable throughout the time they shared. during the lantern scene he says they spoke between computer monitors when at his house due to how uncomfortable he felt with him, and became even more disturbed upon seeing sou peek from between them.
when clicking photos of him he claims sara is “making him remember the bad parts”. he shows the most disdain in the chapter when upon inserting the fake id card into the control room several smiling photos of him appear.
i believe one of the most heartbreaking things shin has said is when confesses relief at the sou’s death despite the loneliness of losing his only friend.
i really hate the romanticization of their relationship. it’s sad seeing a complex character have clear grooming overlooked by gooner-fans (chainsaw man fandom is rlly bad with this as well) and the “i love toxic yaoi” crowd. shin is a victim who deserved much better. he was, at best, a kid who was groomed into joining a death game due to the trust he put into his first “friend”. at worst, there’s a possibility he was groomed romantically or sexually as well.
i do like their relationship. i find it incredibly interesting from a psychological perspective— but the romanticization of it genuinely takes away from a well-written character.
upon taking sou’s name, shin also took upon himself the man’s personality. believing that a psychotic, sadistic, and morally dubious demeanor would save him. but upon doing so— he continued the cycle of violence (fortunately ending it out of genuine love for his victim in chapter 2.) he latched onto the weakest of the group, manipulating kanna to his will with the sacrifice card.
i frequently wonder if he did this because he saw some of himself in kanna. that same timid highschool boy that was manipulated by sou hiyori, the man he has “become”.
regardless of his later intentions and affection, he originally sought to groom her into becoming someone he could use, bend to his will, make part of his plans.
but in chapter two, he broke the cycle. he found himself becoming affectionate towards kanna— and her self-sacrifice distressed him to the point that he was willing to die for her.
that’s one of the reasons i find his name reveal so perfect— we learn of shin tsukimi when we first see that true side of himself that he tried to “kill”. sou hiyori would never care for another human being the way shin tsukimi does. sou hioyri would never feel empathy for his playthings and feared death until the end, while shin tsukimi died at peace giving himself up for kanna.
tragically — even if kanna had been the sacrifice, he was prepared to die. he knew she would choose sara to live alongside her as her surrogate sister.
shin tsukimi broke the cycle, and i find it so tragically beautiful.
favorite thing about kugie + greenblings is somehow— despite the biological siblings being separated and kugie not even being related to them… all three of them ended up gay.
shin and kugie are pretty self explanatory, but kanna gives me gay vibes as well. (this is NOT shipping in any way, just general observation) her blushing sprite is only used when sara says she smells nice in 2-2, if i remember correctly. and i don’t even know what to say about the hot springs scene… she’s visually checking her out and nobody knows wtf happens when the screen goes black. kanna in the hot tub cutscene photo always reminds me so much of the feeling of changing in locker rooms in middle school when you first start to question your sexuality— poor girl. also, either intentionally or unintentionally grabbing reko’s ass in the emotion route 😭
like, its not due to influence between them as kanna only recently found out about kugie’s girlfriend pre-death game and neither of them knew shin. it’s not genetics, since kanna and shin aren’t directly related to kugie.
just genuinely blows my mind how ALL OF THEM ended up gay.
…honestly, that could be said for most of the cast though
random rant, but do q-taro fans exist yet or is it just me 😭😭 ? i really like yttd but haven’t been active in fandom since 2019-2020-ish. i started liking him after 2-1 when he finally took the last poison dart for gin in alice lives route and the main game solidified my love for his character. but back in those days, mfs HATED him to death istg 😭
like, no matter how much character development or redemption he got, people (especially on tiktok) only harped on him wanting to vote on the kids/nao in chapter one. fair reason to dislike him, but as reko said…man’s just a realist.
i always felt like it was unrealistic that people didn’t vote the kids off earlier (not that i wanted that). side tangent, but i feel like— in a way, keiji agreed with qtaro on that fact, but gets way less hate for it. despite being adamant about killing shin, he votes for kanna. i don’t know if he was moved by her desire to die for the betterment of the group and for both sara and shin or what his logic behind the vote was, but i could see it going two possible ways: either he casted the vote seeing losing kanna as a “punishment” for shin, or he just found her the least useful.
i thoroughly enjoyed q-taro’s character despite his flaws though. he is not a morally great person, but most of the people in the higher percentiles of survival aren’t. sara, in many circumstances/simulatuons, was the most ruthless out of all of them— hence her survival rate. keiji is cunning and manipulative, even willing to let others die simply to take burdens off his moral conscious. q-taro ranks just below the two.
i feel like some of (not all) the best plot twists in the game relied on q-taro. the token bad ending, the 2-2 card trades, the card placement in chapter 1, the end of the banquet.
and this may be a hot take, but his death was one of the most shattering to me. as soon as he had begun to trust his allies, let his guard down, and shed off some of that willingness to betray and sacrifice others… he was betrayed. and he couldn’t even find it in his heart to resent the person who stabbed him in the back.
and in the end, the man who was willing to sacrifice others willingly let himself be burned alive to save his allies. i think he’s one of the best characters in terms of development.
also, even his ai feeling he would be willing to die for gin :((
speaking of, gin, nao, and kanna really went through so much as the most vulnerable of the group. the shit those three have went through woulda turned any other character into a villian bro.
“my final present…”
their dynamic makes me so ill. 🫶
favorite thing about kugie + greenblings is somehow— despite the biological siblings being separated and kugie not even being related to them… all three of them ended up gay.
shin and kugie are pretty self explanatory, but kanna gives me gay vibes as well. (this is NOT shipping in any way, just general observation) her blushing sprite is only used when sara says she smells nice in 2-2, if i remember correctly. and i don’t even know what to say about the hot springs scene… she’s visually checking her out and nobody knows wtf happens when the screen goes black. kanna in the hot tub cutscene photo always reminds me so much of the feeling of changing in locker rooms in middle school when you first start to question your sexuality— poor girl. also, either intentionally or unintentionally grabbing reko’s ass in the emotion route 😭
like, its not due to influence between them as kanna only recently found out about kugie’s girlfriend pre-death game and neither of them knew shin. it’s not genetics, since kanna and shin aren’t directly related to kugie.
just genuinely blows my mind how ALL OF THEM ended up gay.
…honestly, that could be said for most of the cast though
needed a certain scene from yttd to make a meme and now my search history got me feeling like midori 😭
thinking about the time i made my bf play yttd a few months back
he voted shin EVERY TRIAL. he was trying to kill him from the trial “test” run, all the way up to 2-2. outta nowhere, after clowning shin the ENTIRE trial, he voted kanna. i was really confused and i asked why. i figured maybe he sympathized with his character more after the trial or genuinely believed choosing logic route was better— but i was SO FAR OFF. he just shrugs and said,
“he’s my opp. if my opp dies, i have to open opplications.”
greenblings family soccer game 🫶
first thing i thought of when playing the steam version
found a keisara meme out in the wild and fixed it by not sexualizing minors
shoutout that fuckass pic of ranmaru that flooded my twitter tl. here’s some i lovingly crafted
was replaying yttd and had realized a useless fact.
shin tsukimi has a nearly 6 inch slouch.
so, the greenblings are 5’ and 5’6 but in overworld pixel sprites they are nearly the same size.
i thought it was maybe an oversight, but when seeing the dolls of the participants, that’s not the case.
shin’s doll is standing up straight and is much taller than kanna’s. so, his slouch reduces his height by nearly half a foot. absolute shrimp posture on him. i wanna kick him and take his lunch money.