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[asogi-clan-appreciator]

Baroaso doodles

⚠️DGS2 spoiler ↓

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Rating: M

Relationship: Kazuma/Barok

Guess I’m writing the weird prickly post-canon asobaro fic after all.

[asogi-clan-appreciator]

I have 8147879157 things to do before the end of the year and my writing options are to:

1. Finish the things I should be writing for work.

2. Finish my fics of the post-canon aso/baro persuasion because I have my own take that no one has written yet

3. Start a new and highly problematic fic, a multichapter AU where

Kazuma’s mom dies early

Klint, who along with Lady Baskerville has been trying for a kid unsuccessfully for years, urges Genshin to bring Kazuma to England rather than leave him with distant relatives, the van Zieks household would be delighted to help raise him! He’ll pull every necessary string!

Kazuma and Barok grow close while the adults are busy

and after the Professor case, Barok looks at the last person he has left, his brother’s murderer’s son, and decides to do what is known as “pulling a Manfred”

Ughhh, the temptation. It will almost certainly bring me more suffering than satisfaction, but fuck if that idea doesn’t haunt my brain attic.

[asogi-clan-appreciator]

死神と にゃめん

[asogi-clan-appreciator]

tw: baroaso

two awesome prosecutors are in love with each other

[asogi-clan-appreciator]

While on the subject of genderbends, I just have a really strong preference for f!Kazuma with short hair for some reason. Like, I’m fine with f!Barok having long hair, and I don’t have strong preference toward f!Ryuu’s hair, but short hair Kazuma just looks right to me and gives her that modern forward-looking vibe.

[asogi-clan-appreciator]

The Chinese Kazuma/Barok fics on AO3: Genderbend Edition

So if you go on AO3 looking for Kazuma/Barok fics, you’ll notice that the vast majority of them are Chinese. And the vast majority of those Chinese fics are written by like two authors who are really good. Like, I’ve read English, Chinese, and Japanese (through machine translation) fics by this time and the Chinese ones are definitely my faves. Their premises can get wild and extremely dark and their ids doesn’t line up completely with mine, but a lot of their fics have made me think and/or otherwise lingered with me after reading.

Apps like deepl.com provide pretty good machine translation these days, and I wanted to summarize + talk a little about the ones I found most memorable. Starting with the genderbend ones--I haven’t actually read them all, because some of them are a lot, but I’ve read a decent number, and there were some super interesting ones

Ordered vaguely from least dead dove to most dead dove; judge for yourself when to stop reading.

情人 

Genderbent Klint and Barok

Klint was married to Stronghart until she died; Barok was then married to him as Klint’s replacement

Barok getting assigned the Masked Apprentice now ends up with the vibes of cheating on your loveless husband with the houseboy (that your husband purposefully put there to fuck with your head)

“Forgive me father I have sinned, I first fell in love with my sister’s lover, and now I’ve fallen in love with his son“

英伦来客       

Genderbent Klint and Barok

If you’re an Iris fan, uh, enter with caution with this one

14-year-old Kazuma has just lost his mother when his father comes back to Japan with an Englishwoman with a sword wound over her heart matching the gunshot wound over his...and the Englishwoman's younger sister

This is my favorite of the set. The indescribable family-drama-with-undercurrents vibes through the eyes of Kazuma who doesn’t know what’s going on but knows that he wants these strangers gone. I don’t actually want to say too much about this fic because it’s more interesting finding out alongside Kazuma’s POV

Genshin hesitating and then telling him, don’t let her near dogs

颐和园 Summer Palace 

Genderbent Kazuma and Susato, contains ryuuaso, susaaso, woruaso, and tbh I think the parts with m!Susato were the most interesting in the whole fic

MEGA DEAD DOVE WARNING

I’m still not sure if I like this one but it was very thought provoking

Stronghart makes Kazuma sell her body for favors. He gives MD to Barok at one point; he fingerbangs her but refuses to fuck her despite her attempt at seduction and she feels weirdly injured pride at that

This fic is pretty hard on Ryuu. Kazuma and Ryuu were lovers before her “death” and her changed gender definitely affects the dynamic. He’s always been supportive of her dreams despite her gender, but when they reunite it hits him hard that they’re not people who can become husband and wife like he wanted anymore

Kazuma is straight-up adopted into the Mikotoba family, since as a girl she can’t become head of her birth clan. Susato kinks on “she has my surname as if we were married“

Kazuma/Susato hits really different with genderbending--a dude dedicating everything to becoming a woman’s judicial assistant

m!Susato has kind of a jealous rivalry vibe with Ryuu with them both dudes, and he’s the one who wears Karuma for most of the game before finally considering Ryuu deserving

One of the sequels 仙女棒棒哒 is femdom with Kazuma pushing Barok into hard kink and him going along as a form of penance/restitution

[asogi-clan-appreciator]

Sorry for the late reply! I had this in my drafts but somehow never posted it.

I feel like the words Barok talks about could just be the ones we see Kazuma say to him. Kazuma’s the one who shows him the “brighter future” of continuing his work and moving out from under the Reaper’s shadow where Barok only saw the end of his prosecuting career. So that maps pretty well.

Looking at that 2-4 scene with Barok in prison (thank god for Youtube playthrough videos, I did not make good saves)...I think his surprise is at Kazuma being his prosecutor, rather than the name itself? But I definitely don’t think he could’ve known the Apprentice was an Asogi before the end of 2-3; if he’s this hostile to Japanese people in general, I doubt he could’ve knowingly worked with an Asogi.

(And omg, I’m a little jealous that you can read the artbook captions! It sounds like there’s a lot of interesting info that didn’t make it to the in-game gallery. I'd be very interested in hearing any other juicy bits!)

At least part of Barok’s schedule between 2-3 and 2-4 would be dedicated to Albert. At the end of 2-3 he mentions that Albert is still going to be in custody for a few days, and after that he’s personally seeing him off to Dover in the hopes that he’ll stay safe from the Reaper’s curse. He might have spent that time while Albert was still in custody on catching up? In addition, Kazuma might be out on his own investigations on the Professor case; I don’t think Stronghart mentions where Kazuma disappeared from. Because otherwise, yeah, that would be an amazingly awkward time at the office for both sides involved.

[DGS2 ENDING SPOILERS]

I initially assumed the part in the DGS2 credits where Barok brings up his “foreign friend” was referring to Ryunosuke, but on further thought I’m pretty sure he’s talking about Kazuma.

Kazuma’s the one who tells him to forge onward, that his work’s only begun, and aside from that it also sets up a really nice callback to 2-4. If you examine Klint’s portrait then, Kazuma tells you he never learned who it’s of, he was Barok’s apprentice, not his friend. And now Barok is telling Klint’s portrait about his friend…

My most fervent wish is to see how those two got to that stage.

[asogi-clan-appreciator]

Thinking about the batshit year that Kazuma had, largely offscreen:

Father’s friend tells him to assassinate a dude while dangling his dream in front of him

Spends two weeks on half rations due to splitting with Ryuu (back of the envelope math suggests they would’ve lost 10-15 pounds apiece by the time they arrived in Britain if everything went as planned--survivable, but you’d think that someone would notice something at that rate)

Gets put into a coma by a ballerina

Spends six months working his way across the world as a shiphand under circa 1900 no-OSHA conditions alone, penniless, weaponless, paperless, and with brain damage

Falls straight into the hands of the mastermind responsible for his father’s death

Gets assigned to a boss who hates Japanese people and regularly runs into armed attackers on the streets

(Also, since Barok says the Apprentice has been with him for three months in October, that implies he arrived in July, how did he not die of heatstroke with that cloak he had to wear)

Discovers his dad is a museum attraction

Discovers he’s been opening wine bottles for his blood feud enemy

Whoops he still owes somebody an assassination

Like, if you didn’t have issues before all that, you’d have issues after all that. And dude had issues before all that.

[asogi-clan-appreciator]

Ryuunosuke, softly: ,,, Barok

Barok Van Zieks yes right him he who scares London criminals since forever: *heart attack

[asogi-clan-appreciator]

Reply under cut!

I believe the best match for a foreign friend’s words about moving forward is what Kazuma tells Barok after the final trial about how he shouldn’t resign, because his battle is just beginning now that he’s no longer known as the Reaper.

And I’ve seen someone in Chinese fandom theorize that Kazuma knew the man in the portrait was Klint. I don’t have the scene on hand, so I don’t have the exact dialogue. I can see it either way myself. I don’t think Barok would have told him--he doesn’t tell Ryuu and Iris either when they’re in his office, he just gets offended that they think the portrait is his. I think Kazuma could’ve had enough information to deduce the man in the portrait, but with how much he hates Barok at that stage, he could be refusing to see Barok’s own familial love, whether consciously or unconsciously.

I really do wonder at the relationship between Barok and the Masked Apprentice. We don’t get to see much of them together, but we still see that Barok is unfailingly polite to the Apprentice, thanking him for his work, and that they fought together against attackers, and that they work in sync. Did Barok know that the Apprentice was Japanese? (Given the presence of the low desk in the office he must have..) Given Barok’s reactions in the next case when you talk to him in jail, he didn’t know the Apprentice was Genshin’s son, but his dialogue at the end of 2-3 suggests he suspected some kind of connection--one wonders how much he suspected. How much non-professional care did Barok take of the Apprentice? Did the Apprentice retain any of Kazuma’s considerable personality at all? I just have...so many questions, and the game refuses to answer any of them. But it does leave a lot of room for theorizing!

[DGS2 ENDING SPOILERS]

I initially assumed the part in the DGS2 credits where Barok brings up his “foreign friend” was referring to Ryunosuke, but on further thought I’m pretty sure he’s talking about Kazuma.

Kazuma’s the one who tells him to forge onward, that his work’s only begun, and aside from that it also sets up a really nice callback to 2-4. If you examine Klint’s portrait then, Kazuma tells you he never learned who it’s of, he was Barok’s apprentice, not his friend. And now Barok is telling Klint’s portrait about his friend…

My most fervent wish is to see how those two got to that stage.

[asogi-clan-appreciator]

It’s a somewhat chillier fandom experience going from mainly shipping ryuuaso to mainly shipping asobaro, but it can’t rival my friend whose OTP ended up being ryuubaro with Ryuu as dom...

[asogi-clan-appreciator]

[DGS2 ENDING SPOILERS]

I initially assumed the part in the DGS2 credits where Barok brings up his “foreign friend” was referring to Ryunosuke, but on further thought I’m pretty sure he’s talking about Kazuma.

Kazuma’s the one who tells him to forge onward, that his work’s only begun, and aside from that it also sets up a really nice callback to 2-4. If you examine Klint’s portrait then, Kazuma tells you he never learned who it’s of, he was Barok’s apprentice, not his friend. And now Barok is telling Klint’s portrait about his friend...

My most fervent wish is to see how those two got to that stage.

[asogi-clan-appreciator]

It’s obvious from the game that the creators really really loved the OG Sherlock Holmes stories. The character name references. Sholmes’s flat with the VR in bullet holes and the jackknife and Persian slipper of tobacco on the mantlepiece. The cases that are direct shoutouts to specific stories.

But my favorite shoutout is in 1-4 when Mrs. Garrideb flips out over that love note addressed to James from Mary even though John Garrideb protests that it’s not even his name...referencing the time the author forgot John Watson’s first name and had his wife Mary Morstan address him as James.

[asogi-clan-appreciator]

Thinking now about the parallels to the original Sherlock Holmes stories, where the narrator’s brilliant best friend dies from a fall and later comes back in a case involving a wax statue...

[asogi-clan-appreciator]

2017.10.17

お祭り

[asogi-clan-appreciator]

Barok: ok man just

Barok: just try to be friendly

Also Barok: