#mod silvs

I personally don't believe so, not from visitors. Balan certainly loves positive attention, sure, but I've always imagined it as more of a therapist-patient sort of relationship. So Balan is never truly that close to anyone who comes through the doors, and enacts a healthy set of boundaries with every visitor. This is kind of reinforced in the game/novel as well, due to the fact Balan seems to have a good hands-off approach with a majority of the trials and time spent in Wonderworld. He's there to oversee things, and offer some guidance every so often (albeit, in a very non-helpful, cryptic af manner), but he isn't close with the visitors most of the time.

- We can also kind of see it in his reactions to Leo telling him to buzz off and even be rude to him sometimes. Balan doesn't really react one way or the other to it, his response is to simply shrug it off.

They couldn't be more different, first of all!

Balan: Will get out of bed at 4:30-5am willingly like some kind of madman. Make coffee and read the newspaper or over various reports/visitor profiles he'll have for the day. Then he has his sometimes hours-long self care routine which includes showering, skincare, makeup, haircare, it's a whole ritual that really gets him excited to start the day! He'll inspect his suit and make sure it's in pristine condition. After he'll start his rounds and give people their daily duties, if they don't already have them assigned. He'll also meet with Lance to discuss what kind of visitors they have for the day, and go through the schedule for each of them.

The canon scene for this has always been really interesting to me, and it's somewhat similar to my own AU in what happened.

Grant it, I don't have a lot of my canon perfectly ironed out yet, and a lot of it I may rebuild as time goes on. Admittedly I jumped the gun on all of this because I was so excited for the game, and made up a lot of things from very little information at the time. Can you blame me, I latched onto this hyperfixation so quickly 😂

What I'm thinking right now, is that it was all a show of sorts. Balan and Lance do play their roles and it is usually all an act in my canon, designed specifically to help heal hearts and restore balance, but never upset the balance of their own world and dynamic in the process. Balan and Lance are, in a way, trapped within their roles (or, they assume so at least), so their script is often set to just that. Balan is the benevolent, guiding hand to the visitor, and Lance is the hard-hitting, opposing force which seeks to 'stop' them. They are the support and the villain, the scriptwriter and the complication respectively.

Not surprisingly, this can have a pretty fucked up effect on someone. To constantly be set in a role where they're the villain of the story, and for so long that their role now sort of bleeds into their real character beyond the show. In short, Lance snapped. And in the worst possible ways, because Lance actually had the capacity to hurt real people. Lance attempted to flip the script, mid play, without consulting anyone. They were sick of being cast in Balan's shadow and they wanted to change it, desperately, so in a moment of weakness they manipulated people into a false reality.

As much as I feel Lance is interesting and has the capacity to become a better person, Lance very much did fuck up in the game/novel. There was still heavy manipulation involved, and it's why I think that after the events of the game, it takes a very long while of serious work for Lance to relearn how to treat people. It even becomes a point of contention between Balan and Lance, where Balan has a hard time trusting them for a long while, heck, even all of Wonderworld might too. Especially when it comes to fixing hearts and being around humans in general. It's what leads to the huge spike in tension between them, causes them to fight way more and far more viciously.

So, long story short, what is usually all an act, this time was not. Lance genuinely snapped and went off the rails and hurt people, disrupted the balance, and caused a serious rift to form between themself and Balan. And this in tune demands a long while of working at that to fix it, because it certainly doesn't get better for a long while.

I've always wondered about the idea of visitors who, for whatever reason, cannot physically make it into Wonderworld via regular means. Whether it be disability, stuck in hospital, or for whatever reason its impossible for their situation. I love the idea that Balan can cross into our reality when the veil of this dimension is at the thinnest to work with people who can't leave their homes or rooms, but are in desperate need of rebalancing.

I know a lot of times, fantasy tends to leave things like disability glazed over because "Why would that be a problem? Everything is magic!" But I'd prefer thinking of ways it can be incorporated without completely erasing personal struggles, even for a short time. Balan would work within the limitations of every individual, even those that can't physically find and enter Wonderworld. He would simply bring Wonderworld to them.

This idea always makes me laugh because it IMMEDIATELY makes my mind go to a group of Vacuum Blasters just, cruising around the theatre after hours

After NiGHTS rebels and subsequently finds a place to seek refuge with Owl, I can imagine the first time they actually get sick with something very mundane like a cold, they completely freak out and think they might be dying.

NiGHTS: I'm cold, I can't stop shivering, my head feels like it's filled with cotton, I keep sneezing and my nose is running and I didn't even know we had noses-

Owl: My dear, that's just a cold! A very common illness. You'll be like that for a few days, but some rest will do you good. Would you like me to make you some soup? It'll help you feel better

NiGHTS, still not used to the concept of kindness without obligation: ...

Owl: It has little star shaped noodles in it

NiGHTS:

There's a particular moment I always go back to when I think about these scenes, and that's in the moments between Lance being purified, and ultimately being dragged back to Underworld by the Negati.

It's interesting, simply because Lance doesn't fight.

They don't fight the Negati they obviously see coming, they don't fight them infusing their body with Negativity again, and they don't fight being dragged into the abyss. Surely, if being king of all Negativity is that horrendous, they would have put up some kind of fight in order to not be sent back into it, right?

I think Lance didn't fight because they knew it was no use. Someone has to be the Negati leader, someone has to be Lance. For all the meddling they did, to just let it happen without even flinching? It's an interesting response, and it always gets me wondering. There's a sense of knowing and acceptance of what has to happen in order for Wonderworld to stay as it is.

Personally I don't really think so? It depends on a number of reasons. I assume you're saying that Balan has been married to many humans over the years, and while I do understand the romance and brutally beautiful aspects of that concept, I just don't think Balan has it in him to become that close to someone (or multiple people) he inevitably knows he will outlive, many, many times over.

There's a few sources that state that Balan tries not to become too close to people, even just ones that walk through the theatre for their trials. He loves humans dearly, he thinks they're absolutely fantastic creatures, and he's adored watching humanity grow and change over the many years he's been alive. And perhaps he has thought, in his quiet moments of self reflection, that it would be nice to have someone stay with him as a more permanent force.

But, I think it would just be too hard.

For someone as loving and emotional as Balan is, to know he would outlive every single relationship, it would be too hard for him. It's already hard enough sometimes, to say goodbye to people at the end of their trials, knowing he will have to erase their memories. if he fully gave himself to someone, he would always know deep down that he would one day have to continue on without them. And so, he simply doesn't allow it to go beyond a thought.