#ad ranting

I'll just copy-paste what I said on twitter:

I think many people's arguments about the morality and actions of R1999 characters tend to fall apart because we're looking at this story with a modern lens and like these events are real, rather than it being a story that carries its own level of nuances

And I know someone quote retweeted that saying it's flawed logic because this story is "technically taking place in modern society, and we're meant to look at it with modern lens"

There is a difference between reading the story with the understanding that the setting is different while being almost 1:1 with the historical basis of the world, and reading the story and judging its characters based on today's moral standards as if they're real people. The latter is a huge problem in the community, and it causes people to hold weird double expectations towards their favs. It leads people to grossly misjudge the actions of other characters because they aren't reading the stories and detaching themselves from the narrative itself. And it's not that they're even wrong, it's just that their judgement is heavily misguided because they're not reading into the context enough.

Like yes, Igor by textbook definition is a groomer and is fucked up for choosing to adopt and raise child soldiers and label them as a pseudo-family. But you have to consider that this is normalized in the game's setting—it was clearly stated in the loading messages even—where kids are not only raised to become child soldiers but also killing machines. Manus Vindictae is literally kidnapping arcanist children to turn them into weapons (see: Coppélia) and then there is Zeno and the Foundation benefitting from a convention that lets them train and experiment on kids as young as 5-12. Igor is genuinely a maniac but if anything he has horribly good points about both sides being worse. He is a horrible father but a good commander.

Then there's the one about Ms. Stranger where people keep saying she has to be held accountable for the genocide carried out to the Nukutai. But there is a problem with this: the Nukutai were written to be in a doomed position regardless of Ms. Stranger's choice. If anyone seriously bothered to read 2.4 despite its weird narrative choices, we would know that even if Ms. Stranger chose not to invite the Nukutai from their home, and manipulate them into putting on the Manus mask, they would have still been killed because of the mere fact that they and their home was targeted the whole time. The humans were set on taking their home islands' resources, and Manus Vindictae would've killed them if they (and even Ms. Stranger) refused to comply because the Manus only wanted their arcane shells. The whole thing was a lose-lose situation for them and it would've only been fine if they were just left alone. This is not to defend Ms. Stranger's actions, but people seriously overlook this part when it comes to this specific argument.

And I've seen NUMEROUS takes like these for the past week. I keep thinking to myself that these takes are so weak because of their thought processes to those conclusions. That doesn't even address how people project their own experiences into characters and drawing misplaced conclusions about their story's narrative, making them miss the entire point of the character and equate their story to the wrong allegory (coughs semmelweis).

People are holding and judging the characters to a moral standard that IS NOT APPLICABLE in the setting at all, which is affecting their own experience with the game.

No character is entirely pure of heart in a story like this. If you were expecting this or if you're expecting a character to be above doing morally ambiguous to heinous actions to get what they want then it really isn't going to give you that. Their morally ambiguous actions are just as equally human as they can really get.

Detachment is extremely essential in interpreting a story. I'm not going to heavily judge you if you see yourself in characters and their stories or if you choose to dislike characters for the actions they've carried out, those are part of a story's intended purpose. However, there comes a point where this can be overdone, and you're making this more about yourself than you realize.

Yes this game is alternate historical fiction and thus its content applies cultures, history, ethics, and the like to their stories and characters, that is still important, but it's still a story in the end. Reverse: 1999 NEEDS you to detach yourself from modern morals and ethics because its setting is not a 1:1 reflection of our own world history and ethics. Like the key phrase is "it's not real" (If someone uses this to argue about proships I'm putting them in the meat grinder).

I am begging you to remove yourself and your current mindset where you're expecting R1999's characters and story the same way you judge real people and events. Better yet if you stop heavily projecting your own problems into them to the point of misinterpretation. If you already have then kudos, it's the first step. The next one is actually reading into the story.

Vertin and Schneider are 16 and 18 respectively. They are relatively close to age.

They are characters who are actively employed, and independent of any oversight besides that. This makes their pairing work because there is this balance between them.

If they were, let's say, school students, the dynamic drastically changes. A sophomore and a senior/college freshman. That would create a dynamic imbalance and thus makes their pairing a bit weird. But that's not the case.

In the main story for R1999, they've only gotten to know each other for very little time in one day. They've mainly gotten to know each other through their direct interactions (which was also not that much mind you), and otherwise from information provided out of necessity of their jobs.

And their characters. Both of them are outwardly cold characters with a high passion towards their goals. With Vertin it's to grant freedom and a way out for everyone, and for Schneider it's to survive and guarantee her and her family's lives throughout struggle. They both care towards those around them but put little care for themselves since they're very closed off.

They're very parallel to each other because of those. When together we see that Vertin is very quiet and non-expressive while Schneider takes up most with her flirty and deceitful yet humble personality. When it comes to relationships, they're both very protective, but neither are ones to be incredibly obsessive.

The time is what gets me with their whole ship. They've barely known each other, but a lot of people are very hellbent on their pairing because of their generally heated and somewhat intimate interactions with each other.

Another point that gets me is how greatly mischaracterized both of them end up becoming. Vertin is not a cold-but-obsessive person and Schneider doesn't easily open up. Had they spent more time together, it could have worked so much better. They are in no way problematic, however.

Maintaining the idea that Vertin is stuck in her grief in losing Schneider greatly hurts her character since her whole story is built upon loss. Schneider is one of the many people she did lose in the course of her lifetime, but it can't exactly be treated as one that greatly traumatized Vertin. In comparison to Schneider and her friends in SPDM, the memory of the latter hurts her more.

At the same time, the idea of Schneider falling in love with Vertin so fast is also really iffy. She may be flirty and affectionate, sure, but she still doesn't entirely trust Vertin in the end. Her main goal has always been to survive with her family, and how could she put her entire trust in someone associated with an organization that left her family behind to struggle in poverty?

This is not to say that I hate them as a ship. I don't really mind nor judge when it comes to that. I want to point out that their characters tend to be greatly mischaracterized based on their personalities shown in the first two chapters.

Now that I've settled on this, this is why age, dynamic, time, and character are really important to me in shipping. All four of these make structure for a ship and establish how it can work. I can disregard at least one of these parts (time) when it comes to certain circumstances like crackships or rarepairs.

It's like how I have a polyship in R1999 that I really enjoy exploring the dynamic of despite none of these characters rarely ever spending time together in canon, much less with one of those characters.