#daybit

Man, the things I did to Kadoc! He was the first piñata for me to wreck with my imaginary hammer. I made it a point to always bring the most embarrassing teams into fights against Crypters. -Kadoc and Anastasia? Kintoki Rider whooped Anastasia while my Riri took the field in a bikini! -Ophelia and Sigurd? Bitchy Loli Euryale did unspeakable things to Sigurd while his lady love watched. -Yu Meiren and her horse lord? Bitchy Loli Euryale to the field again. It wasn't easy to use Euryale for this fight but I wanted maximum insult to injury. -Wodime? Got three-turned by Medb in the sexy prison warden outfit. Bitchslapped to death and everything. -Beryl Gut? Hah! So... yeah... over time, my ire at the crypters started to abate, but even so, my general disposition towards them as a whole is 'those ass-on-backward idiots, what did they break now and how are they going to excuse their harebrained ideas this time?' And... well... I'm not saying I gave Daybit and Tezca an easy time (because my Erice in a swimsuit stole their lunch money and dunked their heads in the school toilet bowl for sure), but Daybit... for sure... wasn't what I expected. I mean... it's been a while since the last time I saw a genuine cloudcookulander character in media. A space one at that! I think the last time I saw one was... Clear from Dramatical Murder. Anyway, so... he wasn't what I expected (I don't know what I expected to be honest since the benchmark for Daybit pre LB7 was Wodime peer but more cool and mysterious), and I have a soft spot for cloudcookulander characters... so... I started to be interested. And here's the thing... is it just me or does he sometimes behave kinda childlike? Fandom perception of Daybit via fanarts and doujins tends to portray him as the socially stunted genius who might never have had a normal human interaction in his life kind of character. But the more you pay attention to how he acts, especially around Ritsuka during their final confrontation, the more cracks you start to see.

"Novum Chaldea was it? Not a bad name" or... Daybit, is that your way of saying: “Fujimaru, You’re Actually… Kinda Cool.”?? His whole vibe during that final battle is just weirdly funny... in an exasperating way. He clearly expected Ritsuka to be this powerful, cunning opponent. He sounded like he built her up in his head as this epic Chaldean commander, a lackey of Marisbury—someone truly worthy of facing off with him.

And then he sees her. And she’s just a normal person. The first thing he said to her in the lead-up to Ort awakening was: "The woman who saved the world doesn't look very intimidating." He chalks it up to her Master Authority being stripped away, but you can tell there’s this moment of confusion where the fantasy he built up doesn’t match reality.

And then something kind of hilarious and adorable happens: he starts to like her.

...In this very boyish way. Like a kid who just realized the person he was supposed to hate is actually kind of cool. He literally says so after the fight. I think that might have been the only time he actually smiled in the game! Even before the final battle, his sprite always looked to the side, like he wasn't quite there, like whatever in front of him wasn't worth paying his full attention to. But the fight before Ort, that was when the sprite changed to him facing completely forward, looking into the screen at Ritsuka (and the players).

And when he got his ass whooped in the last battle of the Lostbelt, what was his reaction? He had a straight-up “but why can’t you do the cool thing Riri does?” moment with Tezcatlipoca!!! He lost and then complained to Tezca why couldn't you do that chain summoning some more servant thing she did??!! Hahaha!! Just straight-up pouting because his giant chaos god partner didn’t help him win.

It's giving playground rivalry energy.

Like what is this expression range, sir??!! You are supposed to be inscrutable and unknowable.

Anyway!!!

Time Isn’t Real to This Man (Boy stuck in time??)

And here's my pet theory: I think the reason Daybit acts this way is because, to him, time doesn’t pass like it does for the rest of us.

Yes, we all know by now that Daybit can only remember 5 minutes of every day. He does have a mechanism for choosing which part of the day he gets to remember, but the way he's seen by other characters in LB7 suggests that it's not total control (or he wouldn't act so impatient with Xquic). The game told us that Daybit can still function like normal and that a regular human only needs 5 minutes per day to remember everything important to them... ...Like I still believe the shit this game tells me!!! How many fucking times did Nasu lay down some rules only to later on have some character break them before saying 'yes normally it's like that but you see this one is special and this special circumstances xyzzz'? There's a reason people call it Nasubabble!! I would be a sucker to take Nasu's words at face level! Yes, Daybit is clearly not a completely dysfunctional wreck (his sense of fashion aside), but it's clear the 5 mins per day thing has an effect on him. Humans' memories don't just operate on a conscious, day-to-day, data inscription on the brain meat level. There are aspects and facets of our psyche that are pinned on our perception of time. Put it like this for easy understanding. At the end of LB7, from Tezca and Daybit's conversation, we know that a year in that timeline only amounted to about 30 hours from Daybit’s perspective. A whole year. Experienced in thirty hours. You know what that means? It means that the years between the '5 minute' incident in which Daybit's father was vaporized and he himself was turned into what he is today... to the time when he joined Chaldea at 18 years old... was only 1.5 week in Daybit's experienced perception.

Imagine that. This kid went from abruptly being turned into an orphan (not just by his father but the rest of humanity as everything he was before that moment was erased from the memories of mankind) in the most traumatizing manner possible, having to question even his personhood as he was, in his own words, just a replica of the original boy (via malevolent alien angel space magic no less)... to jumping headfirst into a suicide mission against Marisbury's Chaldea because... in the word of his father's, a human is someone who does good. Take a moment to really let that sink in. One and a half week of experienced and remembered time. And during this time in between, he was only bunking with the worst possible folks to entrust a traumatized child to, the fucking mages of the Clock Tower. You think he got any manner of help or attempt to reconnect him to his own humanity? Hah! And the only thing he has left to him is what his father told him... about what a human is... in a time when he doesn't think of himself as human anymore... I really wonder how much of Daybit as he is is because of the angel relic and how much is from the experience afterwards, when he has little way (and time) to fully process what happened to him and no one to reconnect his humanity to. Keep in mind. We are talking about a 10 years old boy here, not a grown man like he appears to be. Even if physically he’s grown up, mentally and emotionally, he might’ve never really moved much further from where he was when it all started—like age 10.

That would explain a lot about him, actually.

He acts like a precocious kid sometimes. Detached. Observant. Kind of literal, in a high-functioning autistic way. Has no idea how to deal with people. Probably still thinks in very black-and-white “game rules” logic. He fixates on Riri like she’s the final boss in a video game, gets emotionally unmoored when she doesn’t match that image. You know I have this funny idea that if Riri had picked up on it and started treating him like a very clever 10-year-old boy—snacks, headpats, gentle encouragement—Daybit might’ve actually thrived. There’s something tragic and sweet about that. Like all this time, no one’s ever looked at him and thought, “Oh, this guy’s just a kid who never got the chance to grow up.”

So... TLDR...

Daybit Sem Void is a cosmic boy trapped in a man’s body, and the weird way he experiences time has left him emotionally stuck in childhood (or tweenagehood if we want to get technical here). His reaction to Riri in LB7 is one of the only times we see that vulnerable, half-grown side peek through. It’s awkward. It’s endearing. It’s sad. I kinda dig it.

So yeah. That’s my Daybit theory. He’s ten. In space years.