#bandit rambles

I ran out of tags on the redemption arc post but.

The tl;dr version was that Regina's arc is hurt by the bad and inconsistent writing in OUAT. It's also hurt by it's unsatisfactory ending. (Her fall into revenge is based on her abusive mother's manipulations and murder to get her into the queen position, but pop off and tell me that what Regina really wanted this entire time was to be the bestest queen ever. Tell me that's a satisfying end for someone who has all of the family trauma in the world BECAUSE of ROYALTY and desires to be there. (Then again. I stopped OUAT in s5 during the Camelot arc. So. I could be wrong.))

And while I love Shadow. he is my nostalgic boy in one of the fandoms that first got me reading fanfic (I'm so sorry, baby me. Sonic fanfic is...exactly what people reading this think, and you did not deserve that as an entry point) and I love him. But the redemption arc in SA2B, while actually fairly good (and ending with heroic sacrifice, which y'all know is one of my tropes), is underwhelmed probably by subsequent Shadow entries, where he. waffles. (Also it's less of a redemption arc and more of oh, this is what Maria really meant, and I'm still doing exactly what Maria wants. His motives didn't change, so I'd argue that he didn't really change.)

Anyway.

Basically, Mikan makes the claim that she knew Ryoko first, in a sense. That she'd seen Ryoko and Matsuda together frequently, and that after Matsuda disappeared and she became Junko's nurse, the change in her was so striking that Mikan wanted to make her better - to make her more like Ryoko again.

I'm still not sure that Mikan is entirely telling the truth here. She might be; Mikan doesn't sense the fact that Ryoko and Junko are different (something both Ryoko and Junko insist is true). She believes that Ryoko and Junko are one and the same. So where she loves Junko, she by nature will also love Ryoko, even if Ryoko never gets her memories back, even if Ryoko chooses to be Ryoko instead of Junko if/when she does. The above is basically Mikan saying I loved you first, before Junko.

And I have a feeling she's lying. I think Mikan would choose Junko over Ryoko, if she was given the choice. I don't think she's lying about seeing them as the same.

But even if she is, I like that this implied that Mikan chose Junko just as much as, if not before, Junko chose her.

That it wasn't just Junko deciding that Mikan was hers.

Mikan chose her, too. She chose her first. That Mikan has always been her nurse trying to get Junko back to the self that could be happy.

Idk. She might be lying. But. I think it's interesting.

(It's also - there are a lot of parallels in the Junko/Mikan relationship and the Junko/Kyoko one. Some of these are intentional on Junko's side. But there very much is a sense of Junko being vulnerable and weak (or feigning it) as a result of losing Yasuke that draws both of them in. It's possible that she picked up on that from her relationship with Mikan and then intentionally used it with Kyoko, even in the moments where she was being truthful.)

Anyway.

Just.