In my opinion, if the Sakamaki brothers were fairy tales, it would be...
Laito: The Little Mermaid
Kanato: Hansel and Gretel
Subaru: Beauty and the Beast
Feel free to disagree or give your opinion on this. ( ﾉ^ω^)ﾉ
~shu: the princess and the pea~
rather than sleeping beauty implying a passive, elegant slumber, shu is defined by the acute, grinding sensory agony of the princess and the pea. in this version of the tale, the pea is not a test of royal lineage, but a curse of absolute awareness. shu’s legendary lethargy is actually a state of chronic sensory dread; he is the princess who can feel the bruise of a single grain of dust through twenty featherbeds. here, the pea is reiji’s constant, simmering resentment vibrating through the very floorboards of the mansion. shu doesn't merely sleep—he tries to drown out the frequency of a brother who has become his own shadow, a brother he loves with a paralyzing, leaden guilt that makes him want to vanish entirely so reiji can finally breathe
his headphones are his twenty mattresses, a desperate, modern attempt to dampen the sound of his own heavy heart and the echoing, calculated footsteps of a father who only values him as a flawless royal specimen for a grand design. shu is utterly exhausted by the ambivalence of his own existence; he knows reiji wants to kill him, and part of him—the part that still smells the smoke and remembers the fire of edgar’s village—wants to let him do it. he is a prince who has realized that the more mattresses you pile on to block out the world, the more the towering height makes you terrified of the inevitable fall
~reiji: the girl without hands~
rather than the passive vanity of snow white, reiji is the grimms' the girl without hands, a dark narrative where a father sells his own daughter to the devil—the ultimate indifferent architect—and systematically severs her hands to satisfy the contract. reiji is the literal child of karlheinz’s cold, experimental bargain, a son pruned, carved, and bled until he was pure enough to catch his father’s distant notice. he did not just learn etiquette; he surgically amputated his own capacity for spontaneous, uncalculated warmth simply to survive the clinical neglect of his household
he views his silver, prosthetic perfection as his only salvation, yet he carries a deep, festering resentment for shu—the brother who was allowed to keep his hands, to be lazy, unbothered, and human while reiji was forced to become a flawless machine. burning with a desperate need for karlheinz’s approval—a love that feels like a divine punishment—he bitterly resents having to play the villain in his own story just to keep the mansion from collapsing into the chaos of his brothers. this culminated in him burning edgar's village and ruining shu’s violin, desperate to force shu back into the role of the heir he envied, yet internally acknowledging shu’s more natural inclination for it under the right pressure—a pressure reiji ultimately failed to deliver. he is a man of medicine slowly poisoning himself with the realization that no amount of properly tempered tea, rigid order, or meticulous memory of his brothers’ birthdays and favorite foods can ever make his prosthetic soul feel whole
rather than the passive seclusion of rapunzel, ayato embodies the frantic, defensive flight of the norwegian tale the pancake boy—the sentient food that leaps straight from the hot pan and rolls through the world at breakneck speed to avoid being devoured. ayato’s entire psychological framework is a desperate reaction to being handled as ‘food’ by cordelia, a woman who only viewed his chest as a vessel to store her own political ambitions and who literally threw him into a freezing lake the moment his utility faltered. his booming ‘yours truly’ bravado is the frantic, rolling speed of a child who believes that if he stops moving, stops conquering, or stops being the absolute best for even a single second, the world will catch up, pin him down, and empty him out again
he callously projects the moniker ‘pancake; onto you as a psychic displacement of his own primal terror; he must be the predator because he is terrified of being the dish. demanding absolute dominance because he has never known an interaction that wasn't transactional or predatory, he is a boy who has never been held without an unspoken price tag attached. his loud, arrogant rhetoric is designed to drown out the memory of the cold water and the echo of his mother’s laughter as he struggled to surface. he demands to be the king of the plate because he is secretly horrified of the fork; he doesn't actually want to rule the world, he just wants to be the one holding the utensils for once
forget the romanticized isolation of the sea; laito is the protagonist of andersen’s the red shoes, cursed with enchanted slippers that force her to dance through mud, briars, and graveyard darkness without respite, until she begs an executioner to sever her feet at the ankles just to break the rhythm. laito is trapped in a perpetual, frantic dance of performative hedonism, hyper-sexuality, and amoral perversion. the shoes were his mother’s gift—a forced, rhythmic corruption during his childhood that turned intimacy into a non-consensual exploitation. his dance was witnessed by the eyes of his brothers before he even knew it was a sin; like kanato, laito was a silent spectator to cordelia’s trysts, learning early that love was merely a performance of flesh and pain
his sing-song voice and theatrical smirks are the grimaces of a dancer whose muscles are tearing apart but who cannot stop the music, terrified that if he ever pauses, he will face the crushing, hollow silence of his own soul. his hedonism is a form of spiritual self-mutilation; he makes the corruption his own so it feels less like a violation and more like a choice. as the most intellectually honest brother, he recognizes that their family is a godless void, choosing to dance on the very edge of the abyss to spite the silence. his shoes are red because they are soaked in the shame of being both the victim and the voyeur—a collection of stolen hats and borrowed phrases begging for the executioner's axe because he is tired of being the only one who sees the strings pulling his feet. deeply envious of subaru’s ability to isolate and wall himself off instead of being used as a prop, laito feels he has no true self left underneath the velvet but a pile of old, dusty shadows
~kanato: the juniper tree~
rather than the shared adventure of hansel and gretel, kanato represents the marrow-deep, gothic horror of the juniper tree—the triplet fundamentally separated from ayato’s and laito’s partnered dynamic. in this tale, a child is killed by a manic stepmother, stewed into a meal, and then reborn as a beautiful bird from the clean bones gathered from beneath the floorboards. kanato exists permanently in this post-mortem state of reality, a child psychologically crushed and hollowed out by his mother's unstable, transactional affection. before he became the bird, he was the child forced to sing like a captive songbird for cordelia until his throat bled, his voice treated as a decorative garnish for her affairs while he watched her trysts from the shadows alongside laito. kanato concluded that the only way to never be hurt again is to reject the living entirely
he is the bird singing from the branches, a high-pitched, exquisitely beautiful voice detailing absolute betrayal and cannibalistic consumption. he populates his world with wax dolls, sweets, and teddy because dead things do not rot, change their minds, or walk away. his violent tantrums are the frantic rattling of a skeleton trying to force the living to match his own static stillness; he wants to trap you in his wax museum because he is terrified of the messy, unpredictable fluids of life. his obsession with sweets is a desperate attempt to mask the bitter, stew-like taste of a childhood where a mother loved his voice but utterly hated his self
rather than beauty and the beast's longing for a grand ballroom, subaru is the prince from the grimm tale the iron stove, cursed by an envious witch to live inside a massive, rusted iron casing deep within a silent, forgotten forest. the envious witch in his story is his own mother, christa—her fractured, weeping ghost demanding he be a "good boy" while simultaneously handing him the silver knife to end her life. subaru genuinely believes this rusted iron casing is his true skin, forged from the corrosive rust of his mother's tears. his explosive rage, demolished walls, and jagged defense mechanisms are not born of hatred; he punches the metal to reinforce his cage, viewing his internal warmth as a dangerous, volatile fire that will burn anyone who gets too close
he watches his brothers—most of all laito’s ostentatiousness—and sees them as men who have somehow managed to live and navigate the world despite their wounds, while he feels like a toxic monster that should have been put down long ago. he lives in a self-imposed, solitary confinement, clutching his silver dagger like a key he is too terrified to turn. he stays in his stove to ensure his touch doesn't destroy, waiting in absolute misery for someone brave enough to strike the iron not with a weapon, but with a gentle hand—someone capable of enduring his blistering temper long enough to find the exhausted, shivering child trapped in the dark
