#(ara rambles.)

the first one is rafayel being ultra codependent of mc, he will be written as complete unable to be far away from her, i’ve even seen people writing him expectating mc to fully abandon her career for him ??????? are we even playing the same game? many of rafayel’s phone/video calls with us are about how both him and mc travel a lot for work and they’re always understandable of eachother duties. you can tell people who think rafayel would make a big thing only reference of him is the nightly stroll bond (or not even the whole scene, only the “jellyfishes are walking naked” quote), one thing is to portrait his as clingy but painting him as a straight up controlling partner is a hard no

the second one is way less problematic than the previous but i’ll complaint anyway: when fans portrait rafayel as being this self-absorbed guy who obsesses about his looks, my personal favorite part of this headcanon is the perception of rafayel being addicted to skincare because he would literally give 0 fucks about it, this is a man who canonically forgets to eat and goes nights without sleeping when he’s too invested with an art project, i think this idea comes from people’s impression of rafayel as the most feminine of the love interests what is bullshit and already complained about here

what i got from the main story introduction is that the anomaly in the deepspace tunnel is what’s allowing the mc to experience her love stories with the LIs at the """"""same time"""""" (but also not), i guess is kinda like she’s jumping from an universe to another each time she’s interacting with one of them

that made me think what are the LIs when they’re not with mc? what is their relationship? i guess xavier’s would be kinda similar since him travelling from philos to earth is an integral part of the story and connected with the chronorift catastrophe

independently of the timeline, xavier would still be our coworker and neighbour, he would still be lumiere, he would still be childhood friends and in love with philos’ mc

about him being in love with main story’s mc, i’m the type who believes your relationship with a character in an otome game is up for the players interpretation, his relationship with your mc is whatever you want to be

going for the ones who have reincarnated is where things get interesting, zayne for example is still our childhood friend but if they never fell in love in a previous life he never got cursed by astra, if he’s not cursed he never lost control of his evol, therefore he never hurt mc when they were kids

maybe the zayne of the other LIs timeline kept contact with the mc throughout their childhoods, he didn’t have to go to med school so young, i guess he would still be a doctor to follow his parents footsteps, he’s physician in akso hospital and him and mc go out to have dinner together after one of her appointments because they still good friends (you know what? this headcanon is actually adorable and this is my canon to my mc’s friendship with zayne now)

now rafayel: they meet in main story’s timeline as children and they promise to meet again because he can feel their connection through the lemurian covenant, rafayel is naturally curious so with or without his connection with mc he wanted to see the world in the surface so maybe their meeting as children could’ve happened without the vow

we know the meeting never happened because mc forgot about everything so without the covenant rafayel would have no reason to look for her, he would have no reason to move from verona to linkon city to begin with, but let’s say he did it anyway and they met by accident again as adults when he caught reddie (their pet fish for the uneducated)

they would meet again while mc was investigating raymond’s death and that’s it, he wouldn’t hire her as his bodyguard because he only did that to keep her close, rafayel would be just this famous guy she met twice by chance, a funny little anecdote for her to tell her friends

sylus i will admit i don’t know a lot about his lore because he has like my least favorite backstory in the game (my bad) but i guess i don’t have to know much because the whole point of this post is the other LIs lore just being canon in their timelines

i know there something about them sealing their souls together in their previous life and them being experimented together, i assume their bond is what caused to them being considered “compatible” for said experiments so i guess in every other timeline sylus is just a criminal guy she made a deal this one time and i was luck enough to gain his sympathy without the need of a soul bond and then just as rafayel, they would never met again

you know can say only “best friend” right?

even people when trying to defend him with come with takes like “it’s ok for men to be feminine” while i’m here asking WHAT about rafayel can be considered feminine??? no offense but are you guys ok? what was the last time you interacted with a real person? online doesn’t count.

he’s not hypermasculine but none of the LIs really are and thank god for that, hypermasculine men fucking suck! that’s the last thing i want in my pretty boy game.

i’ve been playing otome games since ever but no fandom i’d partake in was as bad as lads fandom (and i’m not saying there were no people like that in those fandoms, i’m saying it wasn’t as bad)

if you got to this point you can go, i don’t know how to conclude this through without going on a tangent about gender roles then i would have to talk about our current political situation then i would have to talk about conservatives and fascism i kinda don’t have time for that right now and i’m saving this for my video about booktok i’ve been telling all my friends i wil record since 2022 and i definitely will one day.

for the boys

1. xavier (i love his fit SO MUCH! i love LOVE the coat. love the tie. i really don’t get the people who said they didn’t like this outfit.)

2. rafayel (an absolute banger. the colors. how it fits him. THE EMBROIDERY. 11/10.)

3. sylus (it looks very good, the colors are nice and it fits him well, i don’t have any critique)

4. caleb (no critiques either, i think i just don’t like the style that much)

5. zayne (it looks good but for me it just doesn’t seems as “special” as the others, i think i just was expecting more for a birthday outfit, this one looks like something we would get from the chocolate shop)

for us

1. rafayel bday (10000/10, i need this dress AND the shoes irl)

2. caleb bday (also SUPER pretty, i really love this one, the only reason it’s in 2nd place is because i like the pink one’s skirt better)

3. sylus bday (it looks good but maybe they could have given us some accessories)

4. xavier bday (i actually think it looks great in some mcs but for some reason it looks meh on mine’s, also would benefit from at least earrings)

5. zayne bday (maybe i’m not into winter clothing, i like it way better than zayne’s outfit tho, this one is actually pretty cute)

how much i think they go well together

1. rafayel (i swear to god i’m trying not to be biased 😭 i genuinely think these outfits go together so well together, the blue with the pink looks very harmonious, they look sooo good)

2. sylus (the colors go nice together, also very harmonious without having to explicitly match)

3. xavier (they just kinda look like they’re going to the same place but i’m ok with that, they look good)

4. zayne (i’m just not into the matching outfits thing, i know some people think it’s cute, i don’t. at least they’re not that similar and i actually think these outfits look nicer together than individually)

i don’t like mc’s nightwalker outfit AT ALL, i think it looks so boring next to rafayel’s abysswalker which is so pretty, ours is so bland by comparison

i kinda think it would look a little better if a) they had gave her pants not shorts (wasn’t these clothing designed to protect from the sun in the desert?) and b) they had stylised her hair, i understand they only started doing this after 2.0 update with sylus’ standard myth outfit but i still think mc would look so much better with her hair up and we would be able to see the hoodie

i wouldn’t be against the idea of mc’s having a mask either (we can’t even see her face in battles anyway) but i understand she does not need it like rafayel does since she’s human

rafayel is a free spirit, he’s nonconformitist, he was always like this way before meeting mc, for him lemurian myths are nothing more than that: myths, in both his myth he openly speaks about seeing them as nonsense, made up stories that should not be fully trusted

for him, allowing the tome of the sea to define how he was supposed to behave was never an option so when the moment came, he let mc go (twice! for the 1st time in the sea god’s timeline when he let mc go back to the surface after the ceremony and the 2nd in the abysswalker’s timeline when he erases her memories of him) because he genuinely believes no one’s destiny is supposed to be determined by old tales

for xavier, he’s an idealist, he is supposed to represent the hero archetype, his morals are the ones usually presented by this type of character

xavier is brave, selfless and righteous, he would have turned against his father and the crown independently from whom the person being sacrificed was because he would never be able to go on with his life with this knowledge

i can’t remember rafayel acting impolite to random people unprovoked like i see some fans portraying him, the only characters i remember rafayel acting rude to were that one obnoxious old man in his branch who kept bothering him and mc and the detective guy in his anecdote who accuses him murder without having any proof (and i don’t care that he really killed the man, 1st of all that bitch deserved and 2nd that guy only ““evidence”” was “i think you’re a siren then you probably killed that man with your singing”, for anyone else he would sound insane)

rafayel is usually evasive with people who are after him because of his art, he doesn’t like seeing his work being treated like a product so he’s always avoiding them, besides that he’s very polite with everyone from what we see in his memories and people seem to genuinely appreciate him

i replayed his first myth recently and read his anecdotes and i’m not gonna lie, i didn’t understand shit so i started wondering if the answers could be in memories i don’t own or smtg i didn’t pay attention so i need help

before anything, we know xavier met 3 different versions of mc, let’s call them student!mc for the one in his anecdote, knight!mc for the one in his shooting stars myth and hunter!mc for the one on main story so we don’t get lost

chronologically the first mc he met is hunter!mc, the mc from the main story, who’s on earth since philos didn’t exist yet but since xavier came from the future this is actually the third version of her he met in his lifetime, before her there was the two mc from philos

here is where my doubts are: which version he met first? student!mc or knight!mc? because chronologically i know it was student!mc because of the star tassel but i found it a little weird how he wasn’t even that close of student!mc but he sacrificed himself for her exchanging the control over his powers for the aether core to cure her

but also that mc died before he could cure her, in his anecdote student!mc repeat more than once that because of her protocore syndrome her life span was shorter than most philosians (?) and that she probably won’t make it to her 100

we know knight!mc waited for xavier to come back after his disappearance for 200 years, she also never mentions anything about ever being sick so we can assume this mc doesn’t have protocore syndrome

when did it happen tho? which mc has xavier cured if it wasn’t student!mc?

that made me think, what if that xavier who met student!mc was already time traveling? looking for answers for how to avoid mc’s eminent death. am i saying something everybody already knew or am i sounding stupid?

him coming to earth can’t be his first experience with time traveling, that would be too dangerous and too stupid of him, he also disappeared for 200 years, what was him doing through all those years? and yep, i know that xavier already had the tassel before him first myth even started but that could be because a) he time traveled before the myth started or b) he going to the past caused him already having the tassel in the future (i hope you guys understand what i’m trying to say)

i personally don’t think xavier met student!mc first in his lifetime, i do believe that xavier we met in the beginning of the myth is his “younger version”, idk he just sounds naïve in the beginning of his myth, very different from when he came back after the 200 years for example, that boy saw some shit

also mc talks about how xavier came back changed after the gladius ceremony, when he found out mc could reincarnate and has been chosen to feed philos core but if he had met student!mc first in his lifetime he would already know that knight!mc was a reincarnation

another thing that also made me very confused was his comment to knight!mc about her giving him the tassel and not remembering anything, if he knew she died and was born again why would he say that? that part just confused me so much so i felt like mentioning

i wonder if there was a fourth version of mc we haven’t met yet and that was the one we cured (?), i really don’t know, i probably sounded absolutely stupid since i don’t know a lot about his lore but this is why i’m looking for answers