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i said, "make me love myself so that i might love you"

after just under 2 weeks of locking in, here is the second animatic/pmv i've ever made in my life! but the longest and most involved out of the two so i'm kind of counting it as the first "real" one anyway. enjoy :3

barok knows that's not ryuu's armband originally, and by clutching klint's badge like that, he's obviously empathizing. you get him on his own like this and right away, he's ready to relate to ryuu's feelings.

how does barok know? has he been told ryuu was a substitute for a real law student that died? (i'm pretty sure that up to this point he hasn't been explicitly told that onscreen, but he may know from stronghart.) has he just... deduced it? because the band is too big for ryuu? is he projecting a bit to even arrive at this conclusion?

regardless, i might imagine that ryuu wearing someone else's lawyer armband would delegitimize ryuu further in barok's point of view, even if it's hypocritical. but it doesn't. barok isn't ready to talk about this - he shies away, he's uncomfortable being asked to go there by ryuu - but he can't help but understand ryuu's feelings. without being told a damn thing! he just gets it, and he's kind about it, for the five to six seconds that he can bear to think about it.

Ryunosuke, 33 years old, wearing round glasses and arriving to Britain as an established lawyer. Not just to act as a student of law but also as a professor himself, with the objective of achieving a betterment of both legal systems through knowledge sharing and observation.

Barok, 24 years old, having his first experiences as a prosecutor. Here you can follow the original timeline and say he was still “the darling of the Van Zieks Family” or you can be a little evil and say that it was right after the events related to the Professor and at the beginning of the apparitions of the Reaper. 

In this context you have Barok, at his most vulnerable, living through what might be the worst period of his life, meeting with a more experienced (japanese !) lawyer who wins all of his trials against him. I think he would be way more aggressive than he was even at the start in canon. On the other hand, Ryunosuke would clock even faster that Barok is actually a traumatized and isolated young man and that there is more to his story. 

This opens so many possibilities ! Barok lashing out at Ryunosuke because he sees in him everything that destroyed his life (except… he sees and hopes for other things too, things he really should not even dare to think about) ! Ryunosuke helping Barok when he is at his lowest, when Barok was convinced he would only be here to deal him the killing blow ! Ryunosuke bringing Barok back to his lodgings after a particularly bad incident and cooking a homemade meal for him which is something Barok has not experienced since when he was 9 years old and the old servant taking care of him died. Also Barok still being badass and over the top because being 24 years old will not stop him from doing anything he does in canon (if anything he is worse). 

Something kinda fun is also that while in canon Barok and Ryunosuke are 100% chill about their age gap, in a reversed age AU Barok would absolutely not be normal about it. He would anguish for days about “Is this daddy issues ? Is this a big brother complex ? or am I desperate to have someone take my hand, tell me everything will get better and that I am not fundamentally evil ?”. 

I think it can be a nice way to explore more how Barok could have lived through this period of his life and see how a more experienced version of Ryunosuke would adapt to this situation. 

Usually Baroryuu is kinda “scary wolf x young sheep” but here you can “have young wolf covered in still raw scars x big sheep with a lot of wool that will make sure the wolf doesn't get cold ever”.