#violeta fantasy

have to start with that note, oh my... dorm manager leaving a specific note for ichinose. and giving him carte blanc on his food... that hits me right in my heart. it's such a natural extension of the whole setting alarms thing, like of course he'd still care about ichinose's health like this... I get why it'd be hard for ichinose to move on. but, like he says, he's got to graduate eventually! what a loaded choice of words. it grounds the whole thing in this idea of him as a student not being able to mature and move on. also of interesting note is ichinose saying that it can be cool to just... give your all, even if it's ultimately not affecting your final grades.

and I think all of this is very reflective of the tensions of his relationship with yanagimoto. ichinose likes him, likes him a lot, but it's also not going anywhere, and at this point it's certainly going to be harder and harder to stay in touch—hirano mentions that the dorm is pretty far away from his place, and ichinose says it's a good workout or not, but good for him or not, it's still effort, isn't it? it takes something out of you.

as you say, where is the "moving on"? ichinose is still here, for the time being. he said he'd spend 10 years in this. but he's also self-described himself as impatient, always rushing for the future. and I think his love of yanagimoto exists in this tension. knowing there is an end of it, wanting and yet not wanting to meet it... getting excited by silly things, like the character in his name... it makes you go red in the face with delight. it makes you hurt. it is so many complicated and conflicting things all at once.

I love ichinose because I have a deep love for love that is unrequited, because I think so much focus is put on that unfulfillment, and I think there is actually something very powerful to it, even when it is "incomplete". this is part of the reason why ichinose has to feature in my dating sim au. but the best way I can describe my feelings on this is actually by talking about the ending of violeta fantasy, so... spoilers!

what's it mean for a game to have the message of moving on, when ichinose clearly doesn't want to? well, I think that tension must exist within the game itself. so, within the game of violeta fantasy, ven is wracked with grief, and believes that being held to memory of his friends is useless, but... it isn't. it's wasted effort to try to bring them back, but it's never wasted effort to love them. it just doesn't mean nothing. it's important to move on, because you can't let it hold you back, but that doesn't mean discarding it, not at all. and I've never seen ichinose falter in his goals, yet. he loves love! of course he'll cherish it the best he can, while he has it. it's all there is to do...

When I first concepted this fic, the base idea was just, “I want to write an Ichinose character study.” And what I really wanted to focus on was the unrequited love, since we’d seen that Ichinose has really strong feelings about the dorm manager. And these feelings are definitely one-sided—I suppose we’ve yet to know if it’s one-sided forever, but I think for now my statement holds. I think that’s nice, because I love unrequited love. it is powerful, and moving, and meaningful to me, even without any eventual happy ending. This is probably why hanahaki as a trope doesn’t agree with me… I don’t care for the idea that you’ll die if love isn’t mutual (though the art / visuals of choking up flowers is pretty sick).

Ichinose also seems pretty closeted, which is. Another thing I wanted to work with, here, when discussing his character. Ichinose is the type of character who feels like he’s living a pretty high-achieving life. he’s got great grades, is working towards his dreams, and he was social enough to be the dorm head. I'm pretty sure that Hirano describes him as a chill type of guy, which is a fascinating description for someone who we’ve seen get stress cramps. It made me think that Ichinose was someone with a pretty good mask. And it’s not that the vibrant, nice Ichinose we see isn’t real—it’s just that it’s an incomplete representation of him. It fit with a lot of things I was thinking about regarding my personal experiences with being closeted.

Ichinose is someone who looks Fine on the outside, but being gay fundamentally makes it impossible for him to have a “normal” life. Suzuki, here, is meant to represent the mundane and the average. that “reassuring smile” that Ichinose likes him for gives him a sense of belonging. It’s something that sets him at ease because it tells him, you’re not weird. Suzuki is one of the most common Japanese surnames ever, which is why I picked it for this character. I’m pretty sure this is also the reason why the love interest in Let’s Love (the fake archetypal shoujo manga in Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun) is named Suzuki Saburou, so it was also a nod to that. This, by all respects, should be an “ordinary” first love. But Ichinose can’t help but be weird, because he’s gay. That fact alone bars him from the side of “normal.” So when Suzuki later disrespects Ichinose’s favorite game, and doesn’t understand how important it is, it’s a drawing of a chasm between the two. The reminder that you’re always, always going to be an outsider.

I was also really interested in the game message that Ichinose liked so much: “If you never move on, it’s all been a waste.” I thought that concept fit really well with moving on from unrequited love, so it was a natural thing to focus on within the fic. When I thought about highlighting that, I thought it’d be neat to just… talk about the game itself, and have that somehow parallel or echo themes in Ichinose’s life, which is exactly what happened. It was a fun framing device—I got to say a lot of things about Ichinose without necessarily saying them directly, which was cool.

And the message is so interesting, because it’s Ichinose’s explanation. That’s colored by his own experiences. I was kind of vague as to whether Ichinose actually moves on at the end, and that’s in part because I myself wasn’t sure. I’m glad now that I did that, considering Ichinose moved out of the dorm and is still hanging out with the dorm manager. It’s nice to see Ichinose like that, without being a nervous wreck. My interpretation, keeping canon in mind, is that internally, Ichinose has revisited the idea of “moving on” and decided to value his in-the-moment feelings more. Violeta Fantasy (the game) doesn’t suggest that Ven’s feelings about his friends were wrong. Instead it (through Astra) says that they matter, but they can’t control him. So, the Ichinose that obsesses over the futility of his love and the need to move on… he’s actually Defining himself by that relationship, isn’t he? He's letting that anguish of it, whether it's the experience of unrequital, or the desperate need to move on, control him.

So a lot of his final conclusion rests on the idea of like… he has to accept that love DOES feel this way. That it DOES suck. (When YOU fall in love, YOU fall.) That he’s going to feel like this, and one day he won’t feel like this, but that day is not today. (...Not yet.) And that's... fine. For someone who self-describes himself as “impatient,” I thought it would be really good for him to learn to live in the moment. (Close YOUR eyes. Feel the wind. YOU are not yet flying.)

Speaking of… contrasts with Kagiura and Hirano! As you say, I think looking at Kagiura and Ichinose’s relationship to hunger is a fun way of looking at their relationship to desire. Kagiura is insatiable, and he doesn’t ignore it—he’s always snacking and he uses dinnertime as an excuse to stop studying. On the other hand, Ichinose gets so into studying that he’s liable to ignore his hunger and skip entire meals. I see this as a denial of his own desire, which is reflected in my fic with how he’s really insistent about the idea of moving on. As for Ichinose’s friendship with Hirano, one of my headcanons is that Ichinose was kind of a chill and relaxed roommate, despite being the dorm head, because his personal experiences with anxiety have him trying to set everyone else at ease. It’s this feeling of like, don’t look at me and see what’s wrong with me. I’m normal! Nothing to see here. This is a feeling that, in my fic, stems from his experience with Suzuki and being in the closet. Hirano is really good at living his life in his way, and I think seeing someone who’s just so unapologetically Himself would make Ichinose feel like he, too, could be a little weird, and it’d be fine. (This is, after all, the guy who would later google the definition of “normal” because he wasn’t sure what a romantic relationship was meant to be like.) I’m honestly very proud of this because like… Ichinose kind of gives him the allowance to be Weird later on in ch 29, so like… I was picking up on themes! (I think?)  

Hanzawa’s so fun to me because it is very like… hello, Ichinose. That’s you. They’re not the exact same, but Hanzawa definitely has his own set of masks, and I think he’s said before that he keeps busy so he doesn’t get too in his head? Which feels very much like Ichinose. Also I feel like Hanzawa has his own complications with being closeted and stuff, too, which is really fun because Ichinose doesn’t actually know that about him, so he thinks he’s doing fine even though they have the same issue of “outside fine, inside Not Fine.” I think Ichinose would also be disconcerted because of Hanzawa’s Alleged Homophobia (NOT REAL. sorry I just. don’t like homophobic hanzawa statements even as jokes). Ichinose sidesteps Hanzawa really well in ch 28, actually—navigates the situation so he’s kept in the dark about the Hirano and Kagiura hugging situation. So, I think I was correct to write him as a little wary and sensitive to Hanzawa.