How warm do you think Leon would be in a relationship sense? To me, Proust showed that he has a lot of repressed passion in one way or another. His feelings on many different kinds of things are way stronger than he lets on with that guarded Cool Guy act.
So when it comes to relationships, do you think he'd be warm or cold? Let loose and indulge, or still keep a good amount of distance? Would it be because of that Cool Guy act, or because he's feeling uncomfortable from inexperience/lack of exposure?
I mean inexperience/lack of exposure as in the difficulty of acclimating to new things, not being ashamed because one doesn't know what they're doing. Like shying away from kisses not because you don't like kissing or don't want to kiss, but because it's still such a new sensation that it feels like too much and is maybe embarrassing.
Or maybe a lasting subconscious roadblock because something like romance just never seemed like an option in his life aside from Marian (who rejected him). Something inside still screams "You're not allowed to do this" or “Nobody will love you more than Marian does” and the walls go back up.
That’s kind of how I ended up writing him in most of my stuff. But after thinking about it...
All of that is using his interactions with the party during Director’s Cut as the basis and mixing in some from previous continuities. If using Proust only, he’d be... pretty dang warm. How very forward he was during the masquerade. That was with Marian (before rejection had the chance to happen), though, who we could say he’ll always act differently with (his most natural state is probably seen with Chal), but that same personality does seem to come through at the end.
I think I want to try writing a bit based on that. I feel like it’ll come across awkward or even out of character though since the good-boy Leon that he is with Marian isn’t so widely depicted outside of scenes with her.
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I sneer down my nose at the artwork of Leon eating flan and not even looking happy about it
"Rich little brat insists on importing ingredients from all corners of the globe for his stupid flan and he still looks like a sourpuss."
Leon, probably not 16 yet at the time of this artwork, and also clearly from Proust's continuity if the paired art of dancing with Marian is anything to go by—eyes cold and empty as he mumbles quietly, "I just finished murdering the closest thing I would ever have to a loving father figure, at the order of my actual father."
"My Sister's Husband" cutting room floor + way more notes than are reasonable for such a crappy unpolished fic
If it wouldn't pad out the word count, I would have just posted it in the second chapter with the rest of the scraps. Not really room in the start/end notes for it.
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As an addendum to knowing how implausible the getting-lost-for-potentially-years premise is, I want to admit that I kind of combined that ice cream subevent with my own experiences getting lost in various videogames and in real life. I have gotten turned around in a straight corridor and thus gotten lost. I still need directions to places I've been going to for more than 20 years and I still end up lost sometimes. Idiots like me exist. It is not the largest leap to assume he's as bad as I am about sense of direction when he left the city and ended up on the other end of the continent looking for the ice candy stand. The more implausible part is how he managed a round trip in the span of like an hour!
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Leon the terrorist?
You see this tiny ass paragraph? It took me 3 hours to write it. WANNA KNOW WHY?
I originally had Leon being too scared to face Marian because he's done some heinous shit all for her sake, especially in Proust's continuity, and she might not be too happy about that. Like jeez Leon you expect me to still love you when you almost helped genocide the world for my sake even after I tried to kill myself so you wouldn't? The fuck outta here, boy.
But then I started thinking about it and while he'd be relieved to hear she was rescued, he'd probably be too worried about her current wellbeing (since the state of the manor would be a big unknown for him) to let his fear of (even more) rejection keep him from checking on her if nobody can confirm for him that she's fine. So I brainstormed with a friend for like 3 hours on what would happen to the estate and Oberon (I still don't know how things actually turn out in TOD2) and we came up with a bunch of different outcomes... But then I realized I did all that thinking for nothing because realistically Leon would be on the most wanted list.
... You know what, I think I'll have a whole separate post for this one, because while it's directly relevant to this fic, the shipping (which would keep people from seeing it) is irrelevant to the journey I went on here and I think it's interesting to just think about things like this.
Heck, I'll make two.
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On Rutee and Leon bonding
In Proust, Leon has way more feelings about Rutee and feels like he can't ask to be family because he's too tainted. In the end when he's reflecting on his life, he pretty much does a 180 in how he wants to treat Rutee. He becomes a good caring widdle brother who calls her neesan without prompting. Combine that with Tales Ring Archive, where Rutee is willing to frickin' kill herself to bring Leon back so he can have a chance at happiness, and I believe these two really, really want that chance to be a close family. They just don't know how.
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On Leon not noticing Stahn and Rutee are married
Stahn shows no interest in Rutee until after Leon is dead. Players may see their hookup coming because of the sinkhole scene, but I don't think the characters themselves would. Heck, Rutee didn't even intend to say goodbye to anyone in Darilsheid and explicitly told Stahn she didn't expect to ever see him again and not to come see her. With Stahn and Rutee not having any semblance of a close bond when Leon was around to see it, there's no reason for him to assume they got really close. But they're living together in Rutee's hometown…? Well, Leon does tend to get tunnel vision. He hasn't picked up on Marian rejecting his advances in any of the retellings of the story that he's made them. He sees what he wants to see until he's hit with reality.
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On Leon making himself scarce
Since he was originally kinda just couch surfing at their place before I remembered he's a criminal, he was originally going to pick up odd jobs in town to get travel funds and it'd be difficult to avoid Stahn and Rutee since the jobs took him all over town during the day. Now it's even harder to avoid them!
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On the lent clothes
They probably offered to get him some clothes of his own, but he brushed it off because he's still got his own clothes at the manor and a stopgap would be a waste of money (but actually he just doesn't want them to have to spend more of their money on him). So they'd give him free pick of their clothes to wear for now. And he was probably really upset to find that Rutee's clothes fit better and were pretty much his only option for bottoms at least. (Did you know? Based on the towel sprites, Rutee is bulkier than Leon in every visible area.) Stahn's pants are all baggy on Stahn himself, so Leon would look like a little homeless child trying to wear them, and we all know he hates being seen as a child. He's lucky that Rutee mostly does pants.
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On finding the cape
Another that I made a separate post for!
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I almost gave Leon another sad paragraph here about Chal but it broke the pacing too much.
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Before settling on the hiding-out angle, Stahn was originally trying to convince Leon to stay with them, both because he just wanted Leon around, and because he could see that Leon was feeling unwelcome ever since finding out about the marriage, so he was trying his best to show Leon he wasn't unwanted.
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On Marian calling Leon out
I still haven't been able to find the scene in any pachislot footage, but it's on the DVD. The animated rendition of the scene where Marian observes how much Leon enjoyed traveling with Stahn. You know. The one where instead of getting a little flustered, his eyes nearly pop out of his skull, his jaw drops wide open, he blushes, and has to get up and walk away to hide his face. Yeah I'm forever using that version of the scene. I like to think Marian's inner dialogue then was "Oh yeah. This is what the kids call 'being down bad'."
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Oh Stahn. Unintentionally causing so much turmoil. I think he's the type to not think about labels beyond friendship all that much, so he'd probably also call Rutee his best friend after getting married, without the qualifier "She's my wife and my best friend". Or maybe it's subconscious and the foundation of their bond—their friendship—is more immediately important to him, and everything else is just extra. More like "She's my best friend!" "Isn't she your wife?" "Oh, I guess she's my wife, too, yeah."
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I feel like I fucked this paragraph up but I don't know how to make it better.
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Some of the other notes from this are going to get repurposed for a drabble collection because they feel more fitting over there.
