alias_sqbr

Masterlist

Time for the FINAL BOY.

And he was fantastic! The route was a great big rambling rollercoaster tying up all the loose ends and ending with a very sweet romantic happily ever after. The plot was totally ridiculous and some of it made no sense, but I still really enjoyed the ride.

The intense non-homo m/m shippy vibes continue.

This has six chapters, and I had trouble summarising the plot much because I HAD NO IDEA WHAT WAS HAPPENING. So it's gotten super long even for me and I'm dividing it in two.

Asides from having extra chapters, the structure is much like the others, there's just a couple of extra choices added early on to unlock Misyr's route.

Content note (for the whole route): Suicide, coughing up blood, relatively mild consent issues from a villain
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Masterlist
Ignis is a basically well meaning and sweet jock under a grumpy hotheaded tsundere warlord exterior. He gets endearingly blushy but can be a bit Toxic Masculinity.

His character is exactly what it seems, and the structure is very similar to the other routes, but parts got WAY darker (and a bit sexier) than I was expecting. There's also some Dating The Dominant Wolf Man tropes, but I didn't mind them the way I usually do.

The worldbuilding of Bestia makes NO SENSE.

But overall, I enjoyed the route!

Content notes: Violence, including to the heroine from the love interest (for Reasons), suicide, trauma

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Masterlist

So I nearly had to stop playing this because it hit a bad button for me, but I struggled through and overall loved it.

It's very similar to Canus's route in a lot of ways, including some very similar plotting that is either Thematic Parallels or laziness, and the same structure that starts out as fluffy slice of life and ends as fantasy melodrama.

The start of the route hit some VERY UNCOMFORTABLE buttons for me to do with neuroatypicality. Il has poor social skills and tends to accidentally cause trouble doing all sorts of every day things. Now this isn't a real human disability, and is (somewhat inconsistently) explained/dealt with during the Fantasy Melodrama. But there a bunch of scenes early on where some characters condescendingly tell Il it's ok to give up on learning new skills and just stay home and eat candy, and another shouts at him to stop being stupid.

As the route goes on it becomes clear that Il never used to care about learning social skills etc and really was happy to stay home and eat candy. And once he decides he does care he figures things out pretty quickly. Also Kotone handles things the best out of everyone, and always treats him with respect. But the period when he was trying and failing and everyone else was handling it unhelpfully was QUITE UNPLEASANT for me, and it may take me a while to stop being pissed off at Ignis.

And then that stopped happening so much and I liked the rest of the route! I mean if I think about it as a disability metaphor at ALL I still feel kinda gross, but I'm mostly managing not to.

The fantasy melodrama was delightfully batshit Japanese-writers-poke-at-Christianity humanism. And the romance worked for me really well, it was still fairly high concept but I believe them as a real couple and got pretty swoony. There's also a lot of passionate feelings between men that are called friendship but are also paralleled with the het romances, and in general while I did have to handwave some annoying individual heteronormative lines the overall dynamic was mildly subversive of typical otome gender roles. Il may be a powerful immortal who spends a lot of time protecting Kotone, but he's also a delicate woobie who cries very prettily.

I didn't feel up to the bad ends.

Misyr was in this route a lot and not just swooning over Il, and some moderately important questions got answered, it feels like maybe I was meant to play this later.

Content notes: I spoil some Code Realize twists that got re-used. Suicide. Unfortunate treatment of Magical Disability. Violence from the love interest towards the heroine For Reasons. Zero sexual consent issues though!
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Masterlist

Each of these chapters focusses on one of the LIs in turn, with thrills, plot, worldbuilding, heartwarming moments and a little angst etc all leading up to the path split. I spent a chunk of Chapter 8 going ????, but in a good way, I'm curious to see where this is all going!

No content notes for this summary but the chapters themselves have a little blood, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's some death and moderate violence in the actual paths. Also there's some Stuff going on with a character who feels autistic coded, not sure how I feel about that yet.
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