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thisgirlnamedblusy · 2 months

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Hiiii! You’re my favourite writer!! <33 I have some idea

Maybe G!P Donna with reader who is a very romantic and artistic soul. She reads a lot of romance novels and gets a little lost in this world. Donna has been wanting to do sexual things with the reader for some time now. Each time, the reader tells Donna to stop or runs away. One time, Donna can't stand it anymore and confronts her. It turns out that the reader, because she reads so many romance novels, is afraid that she will not be able to meet Donna's expectations and will disappoint her. She is also afraid of sex because in most romance novels the girl is in pain and how Donna will react to her body :(

Yess!!!! OMG, thank you for your words, your support is very important to me :)))) Thank you for your request too!!! I hope you like it and sorry about the language mistakes!!! :)))))

The love that wasn't in the books

Pairing: Donna Beneviento x Fem!! Reader

Warnings: G!P Donna, smut, Minors DNI, fluff,

Word count: 8,441 (ups, maybe it's too long)

Summary: You were afraid of doing what lovers do in your books...

N/A: Sorry about the language mistakes!!! Requests are open!!! I'm waiting yours!!!I love you all!!!

The backpack you were carrying on your shoulders was heavy, the cold was almost unbearable, but the path you were traveling made you not care about any of that.

After playing to look for love in your books, you finally thought you had found it.

A tall, handsome and kind villager? No

Maybe a shy villager like you? No, not at all.

Any resemblance to a reality you thought you were living was a coincidence. After years feeling maybe that feeling, that impossible romance, was only written in your books, the day arrived. The day you didn't think you were awake, the day love knocked on your door or, well, you actually knocked on its door.

Neither a villager, nor a farmer, nor a forbidden lover nor an impossible love. Just when you thought that maybe you weren't born to be loved in the world you lived in, in that sinister place, reality hit you, thus overcoming the stories you could get lost in for hours.

It was not a reality similar to any of your friends. It was not a marriage proposal to unite two businesses, no... Love appeared in your life unexpectedly, with an unexpected someone.

Donna Beneviento, Lord of the village, a mysterious figure who dangerously bordered on legend. She was waiting behind that door, in that idyllic place, with the incessant sound of that waterfall. You never expected someone to open the door for you. You never thought you would really meet that woman who seemed to give nightmares to your friends.

You didn't believe in ghosts or monsters, how could you in a place populated by werewolves? You never liked fantasy novels. Living in that village, the most impossible thing was love, romance. Maybe that's why you were so hooked on those books, maybe that's why they seemed almost like a fantasy to you, almost more unreal than a legend about a monster.

It could have been precisely your lack of faith in dangerous creatures, more dangerous than those you already knew, that made you smile at her mourning figure, at that dark woman, tormented by her past, sick, dangerous, much more than any ogre or giant.

But, as has already been said, you never believed in those book monsters, you only believed in love, a blind faith in the possibility of experiencing something similar to your novels, in feeling the same as the protagonists of those books. Maybe then you would forget you were born in the wrong place.

Silence, sinister dolls and sighs. That was all you got from the lady in black when your daring pushed you to sell the vegetables you grew beyond the forest. It could be a dream of living those adventures that you refused to read. But, like everything else in the village, they cost money that was increasingly scarce.

But your daring didn’t end in an eternal nightmare, in a terror that could kill you, just as you were warned. The only thing you gained was a quiet afternoon, having tea with what seemed like a ghost, with that woman with a covered face, in the darkness of the mansion.

A poor excuse, the flavor she said was unmatched from vegetables made you come back again, and again, and again...

Oblivious to that strange curiosity the lady in black seemed to feel about you, your fantasies increased without meaning to. The protagonists of your books became little by little deformed in your head. The innocent lady who fell in love with the knight stopped being innocent. Her hair turned brown, and the knight changed his armor for a black dress.

Love had come to your head, to your heart, and you didn't know why, but you imagined that somehow, she felt the same.

That was confirmed when that horrible black veil disappeared on one of those afternoons of tea and few words. It was an unmatched beauty, a wounded but beautiful face. Those knights in black dresses no longer had a helmet. They had a face, lips, a desire to be that innocent lady from a medieval town. You were. You ended up succumbing to what your heart said it felt, just like Donna.

After a few months enjoying true romanticism, feeling everything you read in novels, you took the last step to remind yourself that you were not living in a dream. Living on the Beneviento estate, living with Donna, with your love, living those moments your books always hid after: they lived happily...

Everything was new to you, you couldn't think, or imagine what was to come and that was... Exciting.

“I thought you wouldn't come...” the lady in black murmured, opening the door so you could enter that new life, your new life, your own story.

“Well, I had a lot of things at home,” you said, kissing your lover slowly, just as you had learned in your books. Love was in no hurry, it was slow, intense… It was something so subtle that it left an indelible mark on your memories. You wanted it that way.

She smiled in relief. If your greatest fear was living without being loved, hers was losing you, something she always made clear, something that always made her tremble, made her look shamefully weak.

“I see,” she commented amused, helping you, taking a folder you were holding in your hand. –“What is this?” she asked, browsing its contents.

You smiled and blushed.

“Drawings, sometimes I feel like letting the paintings think for me, you know,” you said nervously, looking next to her at those mediocre landscapes full of castles, ships on the sea, the scenarios that you read over and over again in books.

“You're quite an artist,” Donna murmured, with a tender smile, with the smile that reminded you were loved, she loved you.

“What is that, silly?” a squeaky voice asked, Donna's faithful companion, her inseparable alter ego, the Angie doll. The puppet picked up one of those drawings, looking at them.

You got nervous, blushing even more.

“It's her stuff, Angie, come on, behave,” Donna snapped, taking the drawing from her wooden hands and putting it next to the rest in the folder. The doll laughed, while you left that heavy backpack on the floor.

“You're the one who has to behave, Donna, now that you can finally put that stupid villager in your bed and...” the doll couldn't finish the sentence, since the lady's hands went to her with a scared look, causing her to turn and run away.

“Don't pay attention to her,” she said, shaking her head, with a blush that was also quite evident.

You smiled amused, but with a knot starting to form in your stomach. One of your worries, one that kept you awake at night, came back to spoil the beginning of your new life.

“Yeah, I'm used to it,” you said, with nerves starting to distort your voice. No, it was not the time to think about those things, it was not the time.

“I'm afraid you'll have to get used to it a little more from now on, tesoro,” Donna whispered, gently grabbing your waist, not wasting that small tender moment to kiss your lips, to make you feel those things that you could only imagine months ago.

She smiled at you, sighing pleased at your receptiveness, at how sweet and romantic your kisses were. You smiled back at her, being dazzled by that bright, sincere eye, by that look that said how happy she was because her loneliness was over.

Not wanting to lose yourself in love again, you grabbed your backpack from the floor, making a gesture of effort. Donna laughed, helping you carry that weight, frowning.

“What are you carrying here?” she asked amused. You shrugged as you let the lady snoop around a bit. You didn't care, she was already part of your life, and she would be forever.

“My books,” you explained, amused, while your lover looked at those old covers worn by use, those words you believe one day your eyes would be able to erase.

“Oh, they are many of them, mm?” the lady murmured, reading the titles with curiosity.

“There is no place for them!” Angie screamed from the living room, to which you both smiled knowingly.

“(Y/N), don’t…”

“I don't pay attention to her, I know,” you whispered, finishing her sentence and winking at her, earning you another of her fascinating smiles.

“But, it's a shame...” Donna murmured, with an air of sadness that put all your senses on alert.

“What's wrong? If, if there really isn't a place for the books, I can, I can maybe...” you said, playing with your hands, which were starting to sweat.

You were always cautious, you were afraid of losing what you had worked so hard to get, you were afraid of losing her love.

Donna smiled, shaking her head, searching for something on a piece of furniture in the room, something wrapped up that she extended towards you.

“I say it's a shame, because my gift won't fascinate you as much as I thought,” she whispered romantically, while you took the package with trembling hands and raised eyebrows.

“A gift? For me?” you asked in an almost childish way, excited by those things you only believed happened in books.

“Of course,” she said, amused, looking expectantly at that mysterious package trembling in your hands.

“You, you shouldn't have…” you said, noticing how your heart was beating faster and faster.

“Sciocchezze,” she responded, making a gesture with her hands, downplaying it. “You have given me the happiness of being able to see you wake up every morning.”

Your cheeks were already turning dark red.

You bit your lip as you unwrapped the gift. Not all the romanticism described in your books could overcome the softness of her voice declaring her love for you with phrases like that one. You were totally addicted to her.

“Love in the Time of Cholera,” you read the title of that new book, without marks of having been used, resplendent in your hands. Donna nodded with an excited expression.

“Don't tell me you've read it, because you'd make me buy another one,” she said amused, surrounding you, grabbing your waist from behind and kissing your shoulder. You shook your head, turning the pages, soaking in the smell of that new book, that magnificent gift.

“No, the truth is that it's the first time I've seen it,” you said sincerely, admiring that gift, a successful one. You didn't know when you stopped being a secret to Lady Beneviento. Well, there were still things she didn't know and they were the ones that made you strangely and uncomfortablely nervous.

Donna nodded, kissing you again romantically and pulling away slightly.

“You can start reading it now if you want, I still have one more surprise for you,” she whispered with a slightly dark, but happy look. You didn't see evil in her eyes, you had never seen it.

The stories the villagers told about her were very wrong, or so you liked to think.

“What one?” you asked, making small jumps on the wood, excited by this welcome, by this beginning of your new life.

“If I told you...” she murmured, turning elegantly to look at you, making her dress dance in a hypnotic way.

“It wouldn't be a surprise,” you finished, smiling. Your connection was so strong that you were even able to dare to interrupt her. Donna smiled, gesturing to her doll.

“Angie, do something useful and put those books in the shelves,” the lady ordered, which obviously led to the puppet's comical protest.

“What are you trying to achieve with this, huh?” Angie rebuked, making Donna roll her eye, ignoring those childish squeaks. –“(Y/N) is a fool, do you think she will spread her legs for you just because you prepare a…?”

Luckily, you were already engrossed in your reading. You couldn't know if you had really heard what you had heard.

“Angie! Taci!” Donna said, with a cold, almost furious look. “Stop talking nonsense and put the books in order before I get angry.”

“Stop talking nonsense, blah, blah, blah...” the doll mocked, imitating the voice of its owner in the most mocking way possible. “You forget that you are me and I am you, I know what you’re thinking.”

“Really? What I’m thinking now?” the lady said with her hands on her hips, while you turned page after page, not paying attention, or rather, ignoring that usual argument.

“Okay, okay, I give up,” the doll said, apparently scared. “Don't disable me, I'll be good,” she pleaded in a comical tone.

Donna nodded, looking at you strangely and sighing.

“The books, now,” she murmured, before disappearing down the elevator hallway.

The doll growled, mocking its owner again and prepared to obey.

You didn't know how much time had passed, since whenever you got into a book, it was hard to get out of it. Apparently, tranquility reigned again in the mansion, well, almost. Angie's murmurs and protests while she looked for a place for your books were the only thing separating you from absolute silence.

That promised surprise was a romantic dinner, one that Donna prepared in silence, trying not to disturb you.

The light of the candles, the taste of the food, the bitterness and fruitiness of the wine…

Everything was perfect, even your looks, even that strange shyness that was evident in the lady in black. You wanted to ask what the reason for her nervousness was, but you didn't want to, you didn't want to expose her psychosis, or the fragility of her mind. You wanted everything to be perfect, as perfect as in your books.

But since everything has an end, as uncertain as in most stories, that moment arrived, the time to spend the night with Donna, to sleep next to her. You didn't see anything wrong, you didn't see the brunette's possible intention, and of course, you didn't imagine that was the reason for her strange nervousness.

“Come to bed, my love,” Donna told you tenderly, pointing to the empty spot on the mattress. You, nervous about that step, about your first night sleeping with her, obeyed with your new favorite book in your hand. “Are you comfortable?”

“Yes,” you said with a smile, while she adjusted the pillow, everything she could do to make you comfortable. She was so attentive, so kind. Sometimes it was difficult for you to believe that she was a Lord, that her name was synonymous with pure terror, with fear itself. “Thank you, Donna.”

She nodded, looking away, playing with the sheets, without removing that strange glow in her face she had during dinner.

“You don't mind if I want to read before going to sleep, right?” you asked, opening the book again, with an innocent smile. She looked at you and nodded, blinking nervously.

“Of course I don’t mind, read calmly,” she said, caressing your cheek. You smiled gratefully and immersed yourself again in that tragic and interesting story.

Time passed subtly. You didn't look up from the book, but something made you feel uncomfortable. It would probably be Donna's strange posture, with her gaze lost, as if she was waiting for something, maybe for you to turn off the light so she could sleep.

After a moment of her seeming to think about something, she cleared her throat, moving a little closer to you.

“Do you want to read with me?” you asked innocently, ignoring the soft caresses that ran down your hand. She, confused, nodded with a sinister smile, getting closer and closer.

At first everything seemed to be going well, but soon the kisses reached your neck, the caresses went down the sheets until they reached your legs. Your nerves were on edge, the book started to shake in your hands and your breathing quickened.

“Donna,” you said nervously, closing your eyes when that touch on your skin intensified, when her kiss silenced your protests, lying back on the mattress, without saying a word, but saying everything.

She didn't respond, she continued along your body, continued with her burning kisses, with her increasingly dangerous caresses. Your body could not withstand that pressure, and your hands released the book, stopping that hunger, that anxiety of the brunette with your hands on her chest.

“What's wrong, tesoro?” she asked, surprised, withdrawing from you with a confused look, as if she didn't understand your reaction.

“Oh, nothing, it's just...” you said nervously, moving away a little from her burning body, from the desire that was very evident in her bright eye, from her heavy breathing. “I'm, I'm a bit tired and...”

Donna withdrew as well, with a nervous laugh, lowering her gaze.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered with a sincerely apologetic tone. You caressed her face, turning that sudden rejection over in your head.

“No, nothing's wrong,” you said, also looking away from her. “I'm sleepy, that's all.”

“Okay,” she said, with an amused but confused gasp at the same time.

“Well, we should sleep,” you whispered, camouflaging your shame as you left the book on the nightstand, covering yourself with the sheets, as if they could protect you from one of your fears, from something you hadn't been able to assimilate.

“Yes, it will be the best,” she said, imitating your gesture, lying on her back, still breathing hard.

“Good night, Donna,” you said, kissing her quickly, as if you were afraid that this innocent contact would rekindle her intentions. Luckily, it didn't.

“Good, good night”

Yes, you were a true romantic, an artistic soul with a soft heart, wanting to feel everything you had read in love stories, an inveterate romantic, an expert in confessions, in declarations, in tender and affectionate gestures. But there was something in which you were not an expert, something that you had read countless times in stories, something you feared and looked askance at.

The moment of undressing, of giving way to a different phase, of demonstrating the love that was felt in a much more intense way, the moment of making love.

It didn't matter how many times you read it, you felt some anguish when that moment was close, or you thought it was close. You loved Donna. You really loved her, but your cowardly attitude, so different from the romanticism surrounding you, was something that embarrassed you. You were afraid of many things, you were afraid of not being enough, of being clumsy, you were afraid of loving completely, of giving yourself to her in a way you had only been able to read.

Of course, you never told her, you hoped she wouldn't pressure you and apparently she didn't, until that night. It was an innocent attempt, an approach that had nothing lascivious or rough about it, but it was reason enough for all your worries to come back to you that night, curled up next to the woman you loved, unable to love her the way she wanted, the way you knew she wanted.

Luckily, the tiredness acted as an assistant for sleep to free you from those thoughts and, after tossing and turning a few times, you fell asleep.

You woke up with the sensation of having had nightmares, those nightmares that didn’t talk about monsters, but rather about heartbreak, disappointment. Not even sleep was able to free you from your stupid worries.

Donna was sleeping peacefully next to you. Her soft breathing served as a small comfort to the tribulations of your mind. But, in a moment, she turned, unconsciously grabbing your body, dragging it against hers.

Romantic, yes, but also unexpected.

Your terrified body jumped when it made contact with hers. Something pressed against you, something you knew what it was, that you knew she had. Caprices of the Cadou, as she explained to you a long time ago. But feeling it that way, against you, with your back turned, feeling her arms surrounding you… It was too much for you, and you jumped on the mattress, uncomfortable.

“Donna, hey, Donna...” you said nervously, moving her body with your hand, making her grunt when she was woken up in that abrupt way.

“(Y/N)? What...” she stammered, her voice distorted by sleep. “What’s going on?”

“What’s going on?” you said ironically, sitting on the bed, crossing your arms and turning on the light on the table. You were nervous and not thinking clearly, you thought that Donna had wanted to take what you denied her the night before.

The sleepy, confused look on her face should have told you that you were wrong, but you didn't want to see it.

“What... What's wrong, tesoro?” she asked, rubbing her eye, fighting with the sleep that your cowardice interrupted.

“Don't pretend nothing's wrong, Donna,” you said furiously, crossing your arms. As it could not be otherwise, she shook her head, yawning.

“What are you talking about?” she asked, reassuring you with a hand on your shoulder.

“Aren't you able to wait? Can't you wait until I'm ready? It has to be when you want, right? And since I rejected you last night, you have seen fit to take things into your own hands,” you said without thinking, believing in the worst possible scenario.

Donna blinked with a shocked look, opening her mouth to say something, but not being able to do so due to your baseless accusation.

“I don't know what I've done...” she murmured, shaking her head, with an innocent look of concern. “Last night? What…?”

“Don't play dumb, I know you're not,” you snapped, looking away from her, removing her comforting hand from your shoulder.

“Te, tesoro, I have no idea what...” she whispered, trying to calm herself, being completely sincere, something you should have noticed.

“That, what about that?” you said furiously, pointing to the lump that was between her legs, the one that you considered was harassing you.

She looked at the same spot, covering herself immediately, her cheeks flushed.

“Oh, I... I, I'm sorry...” Donna said nervously, hiding her erection under the sheets with a nervous laugh.

“Was it really necessary to take advantage of me being asleep?” you asked irrationally, making her embarrassed look intensify.

“What have I done?” she asked, calmer, with a sad look.

“You know what you've done, you've... Tightened me against you, against your...” you murmured with the same shyness. She laughed nervously, shaking her head.

“Oh, have I? Well, I didn't realize, I was asleep,” she explained naturally, downplaying the importance.

“Yes, of course,” you said, suspicious.

“Hey, I... I don't know what you think I've done but... I promise you it wasn't my intention,” the doll maker told you, grabbing your shoulders to force you to look at her.

“It was your body’s,” you murmured with a tone of contempt. Donna sighed, shaking her head.

“I, I'm sorry, I...” she whispered, her voice soft, giving away her inner nervousness, desperate to reason with you. “Some, sometimes it gets hard when I sleep and I, well, I can't do anything. It's normal, it happens to me often. I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable, forgive me.”

Your thoughts relaxed at her sincerity, at her worry, one that you caused. You sighed, shaking your head, ashamed of your immature attitude, one that you only showed in situations that were overwhelming you.

“I don't mean to pressure you, amore mio,” Donna whispered, approaching you again, relaxing you with a soft kiss on your cheek, with her subtle caresses, with the soft and melodic tone of her voice. “If you're not ready, I understand. I'll wait as long as it takes, you hear me?”

You nodded, stopping shaking, feeling guilty for that disproportionate reaction to something that you knew was natural, but that your fears and your own worries took on with an attack.

“I'm sorry, Donna, I've been stupid,” you apologized, playing with her hand, staring into her bright eye, at the beauty of her gaze, one that you couldn't stop staring at.

“Don't apologize,” she said, cupping your face in her hands, giving you the warmth that your nervous body needed. “You know I love you, right?”

You nodded, more relaxed, letting yourself be consumed by the tenderness of her kisses, by the softness of her caresses.

Thus, the days passed, that coexistence went well, too well. You and Donna were meant to be together. Everything: the smiles, the kisses, the caresses... Everything became a routine that you no longer wanted to part with.

Afternoons in the workshop, learning to sew, abstract conversations about art, literature, with two steaming cups of tea, with soft words, with looks that said many more things than your words. Everything was perfect, or almost everything.

Donna promised to wait for you and, since that turbulent morning, the subject was not discussed again. It could be lucky, the relief of being understood, but you knew that haven of peace had an expiration date.

Her approaches came again to put you on the ropes. Subtle movements loaded with lust. No matter the place, or the circumstances, any pretext served for Donna to try to corrupt you, for her kisses to become disorderly and her caresses to wander through forbidden places.

You, in a pathetic and cowardly way, rejected the love that she wanted to give you, that display of intimate affection that was so important to her. It could be with a sudden gesture, with your hands stopping hers, scratching her skin so her hands wouldn't go higher than your knee. No matter how many times she tried, you always ran away.

During those two months, tension began to build in the old mansion. The looks began to be harder, with resentment, with ignorance of your thoughts, your fears. You couldn't confess your worries. You were a romantic, that fearful attitude towards sex couldn't be possible in someone like you. The disappointment began to show in her gestures, in the quick kisses that Donna gave you.

Your nervous state prevented you from even enjoying the romantic books that she gave you, from rereading over and over again the stories that you fantasized about so much. Your eyes always went from the words of love, to the romantic gestures, always the chapter you read was the one in which the lovers undressed, enjoying their bodies.

The pressure was getting stronger and the tension was getting more and more unbearable.

Donna's passivity was getting more and more evident. You would drive her crazy, you would drive her crazy.

“Ciao tesoro,” she said, with an elegant smile, when you went back up to the living room after a relaxing bath, one in which you couldn't stop thinking about what to do to solve your fears, your problems.

You smiled tiredly, sighing listlessly, walking slowly towards her desk, where she always worked on things you didn't want to know about, terrible things, according to her, things that an angel like you shouldn't see, or so she told you.

“What are you doing?” you asked, running a hand along her back, causing that smile she always had when she was with you, a smile that was becoming less and less frequent.

“Well, studying my plants, you know,” Donna explained, closing the notebook and looking at you. “Do you want something?”

“Yes, I...” you said, closing your eyes, taking in enough air and confidence, one that faded when you noticed all her attention was focused on you. “I wanted, I wanted to apologize for… Well, for being so distant lately.”

Donna sighed, taking your hand and standing up from the desk, hugging your waist and placing a strand of hair behind your ear with an affectionate look, tender as only she knew how.

“Don't worry, everything is fine, tesoro,” she whispered, kissing you slowly, holding your hands, swinging them together for your relief, for your comfort. “Is there anything I can do to help you?”

You wanted to nod, you wanted to say so many things, talk about your fears, the contradiction that was fearing sex when you lived dreaming of love... A shame that your nerves acted against you again.

“No, well, maybe,” you said stammering, looking for an excuse for that sudden approach.

“I'll do anything,” she said, with an overly pleading tone, revealing she evidently knew that something was happening to you, that something was worrying you.

“Okay, well... That lasagna,” you said, faking a smile, leaving her puzzled.

“Lasagna,” she murmured, blinking, confused and frowning.

“Yes, well, it's just that it's so delicious... I, I'd like you to make it for dinner, you know, like on our first date,” you said, lying, being a coward again.

“Oh, sure. You just have to ask me, (Y/N),” she said amused, but confused at the same time. It wasn't the conversation she was expecting to have.

With a tired sigh, probably due to your reticent attitude, Donna kissed you again, looking into your eyes, smiling wistfully, but also with amusement.

“Please,” you joked, feeling more and more natural in lying. Well, lying for love wasn't bad, right?

“Okay, (Y/N). But I hope you prepare yourself because after eating you are going to want to suck...”

The alert went off again in your confused mind, imagining possible ways to finish that sentence, possible horrible words that would come out of her mouth, insinuations that weren't so horrible.

You believed her patience had ended, that her subtle actions no longer made sense. Just thinking about what she wanted you to suck made you burn with rage, an irrational rage, as always, one that made you act irrationally again.

With a furious growl, you moved your hand, slapping the lady in black hard, who remained glued to the floor, her eye wide open and her hand on her bruised cheek.

“But, but, (Y/N)...” she sighed open-mouthed, rubbing the sore part of it with her hand.

You were burning with rage. Your hand was burning from that unfair slap. Your fears, your problems, had overcome you.

“The subtleties are over, right? Did you really think being a creep was going to work for you, Donna?” you said, angry again, for no reason, making her look even more confused, making her gestures fearful.

Maybe you should have thought about it before, maybe not, sure. In the end, Donna Beneviento was fear itself. Maybe you would die screaming for help.

“Creep? But what the hell is wrong with you? What that was about?” she asked with a broken voice, moving away from you, revealing her red cheek due to your angry slap.

“What was that creepy thing about? What did you want me to suck, Donna?” you asked, approaching her, cornering her against her desk.

The lady in black shook her head, with a nervous laugh and a dangerous look.

“What…? Le, le, le dita, the, the fingers, (Y/N), you're going to suck your fingers... Seriously, what's wrong with you?” she said stuttering, being unable to control her language. Surely at that moment you were fear itself for her.

You, embarrassed, with your face red from shame, from your stupid mistake, were not able to respond. You simply let the tears roll down your cheeks, turning around to cowardly run away again, this time, rightfully so.

“No, no, no, I'm not going to let you leave,” she said, grabbing your wrist with a threatening tone, pulling your body, making you sob, unable to escape. “Hey, come on, what makes you think I would say something like that?”

“I don't know,” you whispered, avoiding her gaze, something impossible, since her fingers lifted your chin to keep your head up.

“You don't know...” she murmured, looking away, releasing you from her grip and crossing her arms.

“You don’t get it!” you screamed, clenching your fists tightly, surrendering to the truth of your thoughts, your fears. “I Can't!”

“You can’t? What you can't do, tesoro?” Donna asked, with a slightly softer tone.

“I've tried, okay? I've tried to get used to the idea, to think that maybe I would... But I can't, I can't, Donna,” you sobbed, throwing yourself into the comfort of her arms, a hug that she returned with an intense sigh, stroking your hair, kissing it understandingly.

“Hey, hey, come on, no, don't cry, it kills me to see you crying...” she whispered, comforting you without having to do it, without having to forgive that slap so unfair, so out of place. Maybe you were right and she wasn't the dangerous Lord that everyone thought she was.

“How can I not cry?” you protested, sinking into her chest, wetting the black fabric of her dress with your tears. “It's exasperating...”

“Okay, okay, listen to me, you're going to calm down and you're going to tell me what's worrying you,” she said, pulling you away, holding your gaze and your head, wiping away the tears that wandered aimlessly down your cheeks.

You nodded, regaining some composure, no longer seeing any reason to hide your concerns.

“I've spent my life reading romantic novels...” you began, playing with the buttons on her dress to calm your nerves. “Reading love stories that always ended in the same way and… No, I'm not able to…”

“Shh, relax... I'm here with you, your problems are mine,” she told you softly, relaxing you with her voice, with her caresses.

“I know, I know you want to make love to me,” you said, looking away from her, embarrassed by just saying it. She looked at you, with a sad look, knowing what the conversation was about.

“Of course I want to... I love you so much...” she whispered to you, studying your gaze, which diverted downwards again, towards the black fabric of the lady's dress.

“I want it too, Donna,” you acknowledged, letting that desire come out of your mouth, a desire that you were unable to verbalize, that fear prevented you from saying.

“Well, what's the problem then?” she asked, with the same calm tone.

“I don't... I can't, I... I just read about it in my books and I think about it and I want to feel the same with you but... But I'm afraid,” you finally admitted, embarrassed, dissolved into tears.

“You are afraid, what are you afraid of?” she asked more delicately, knowing that at any moment you could pathetically run away again.

“Everything, Donna...” you sighed pacing erratically from side to side. “I'm afraid of not fulfilling what you expect of me, I'm afraid that you don't like my body, that you'll reject me, that I'm clumsy and won't be able to make you feel the way you expect...”

“Oh, tesoro... What nonsense is that?” she said, with a kind smile, grabbing your waist so you would stop walking senselessly. “You are perfect for me. You will always be perfect for me.”

“That's not true,” you said, darkening your tone of voice. “No, I'm not good for that, besides...”

“Mm?” Donna hummed, letting you talk about what scared you most, what made you most ashamed.

“I'm, I'm afraid of...” you murmured, remembering all the books, remembering the pain those damsels felt when they were loved for the first time. “I, I'm afraid of the pain.”

“Oh,” she sighed, scratching the back of her neck, confused by not knowing how to get those thoughts out of you, knowing that she could comfort you in many ways, but that she couldn't avoid that specific fear. “Well, I…”

“It's stupid, I know, I'm a coward, I know, but, but I'm afraid of hurting myself and... You don't know what it's like to want something you're afraid of.”

“Hey, I would never hurt you, tesoro... Well, I would try not to...” she explained, a bit nervous, knowing that there was no solution for that.

“Leave it be, Donna, I know it wouldn't be your fault,” you said, moving away from her, a difficult task, since her hands clung to your waist.

“I didn't know you were so scared, (Y/N), I'm sorry if I pressured you. I repeat, I will wait as long as it takes, okay?” she said, caressing your cheek, getting rid of the last tears that ran down them.

Your crying was suffocated in a second, that confession moved something inside you, something that, when you felt freed from those chains that were your secrets, suddenly woke up. Looking at her face, at her understanding, at how bad she felt having pressured you like that, you realized that you didn't want to wait anymore.

“Donna,” you said, hugging her again, speaking in her ear as your body swayed with hers. “I want to do it, now.”

“What?” she asked, pulling you away from her and looking at you suspiciously. “But, tesoro, if you just said that…”

“I know what I said,” you interrupted with an angry growl, not letting fear stop you from giving in to your desires, to her desires. “And I also know that if I let this opportunity pass I don't know when I will feel this desire to, to love you....”

Donna nodded, looking around confusedly, taking your hand and walking slowly towards the elevator.

“Are you sure?” she murmured, closing the bedroom door, breaking that tense silence that had accompanied you all the way.

“Yes, I... I want, I want to do it,” you said with false confidence. The lady in black studied your gestures, looking for that insecurity that made you uncomfortable, not seeing it thanks to your art of lying and deception, one that you also learned from your books. She finally nodded, approaching slowly.

“We'll go at your pace, okay? I'm not in any hurry,” she whispered in your ear, making a cold current run through your body. Could it be the desire that had been dormant inside you for so long?

“Okay, I... I guess I have to get naked,” you said confused, nervous again, but wanting to overcome that stupid cowardice. “Surely then you can regret loving me.”

“Stop talking nonsense,” she told you with a stern tone, putting her hands on your shoulders. “You are beautiful, and your body is too.”

“You don't know that,” you whispered, looking down at the floor, hands reaching for the ties of your dress, trembling. Donna laughed, shaking her head, pulling your hand, sitting on the bed, looking at you expectantly.

“Well, I guess there's only one way to find out,” she said amused, caressing your hand, kissing the back of it and leaving you free to act.

You tried to untie your dress, but your hands were shaking too much, your body was shaking too much. Donna noticed it and stood up from the bed, standing behind you, her slender fingers grasping the tie that kept your nakedness safe from onlookers.

“Do you want me to help you, tesoro?” she asked suggestively, speaking in your ear, making the rapid beating of your heart worse.

You, insecure and nervous, nodded slowly, receiving in response a soft kiss on your neck, which distracted you from her rapid movements, from the delicate and skillful way of releasing the ties and letting the dress fall elegantly down your body, rushing to the floor.

You had to suppress the logical impulse to bend down to pick it up, to cover your half-naked body. Once again, her kisses prevented you, dispelling your doubts with her caresses on your body, on your naked skin, with her soft lips admiring, adoring every exposed part of your body.

“Come, let me look how beautiful you are,” she whispered, slowly turning you around.

You, embarrassed, avoided her gaze, just before her lips silenced your fear, kissed yours while her hands calmed the trembling of your body, an involuntary tremor, which was no longer only due to fear, but also to desire, the one that you had read so many times in your books and that now you were feeling.

Slowly, Donna walked towards the bed, bringing your body with hers, kissing you relentlessly, focused on your comfort, on your wanting to continue despite your fears.

Your body fell against the mattress, as did your bra, which her mischievous fingers inadvertently unclasped. Your hands covered your now bare breasts, and she smiled tenderly, bringing her hands to the buttons of her dress.

“You don't have to be embarrassed with me, (Y/N), not anymore,” Donna whispered in a sensual voice, one you had been hearing for too long. “Tell me, do you want me to get naked first?”

“I, it's okay,” you said nervously, nodding, slowly separating your hands from your breasts, letting her look at them while her dress gave in to her movements, falling next to yours. Her eye rose to yours, not making you feel that your breasts were her target, her target was you, all of you.

Stroking your leg, wondering if she was somehow forcing you to give in to her desires, she looked at you again, seeing a shy smile on your face, a blush on your cheeks. Her smile reassured you again as her torso undressed with a loud “click.”

Her beauty was now the center of your thoughts, those pale breasts, with a shape so perfect that it seemed straight out of one of the idealized love stories. You had never stopped to think about what that black dress was hiding; the beauty that was hidden behind that annoying fabric. An almost divine figure, proportioned, some marks on her skin, standing out in the paleness that Donna always carried with her.

A perfect body, a perfect woman.

You couldn't think of anything else. At least until her fingers moved down her body with a sigh, grabbing the last cloth, also black, that hid the rest of her figure, one that you could sense, but that you couldn't see.

Donna sighed, thus revealing her own insecurities, that involuntary change that her eternal servitude to Mother Miranda entailed, a capricious change, but one that didn’t represent the slightest problem for you.

Her underwear went down her legs, thus revealing the last part of her divine figure. Her legs were slender, beautiful, they seemed soft, it seemed like she was made by the black Gods themselves. Between them, the cause of her embarrassment, her erection revealing her impatience, proportionate, like her entire body.

Her eye searched for disgust in your gaze, a sign that it was not what you were looking for, that the fear you felt was aggravated by its size, a little bigger than you imagined, but not enough for you to want to run away.

Proportion was the word, perfection was her body, love was Donna, it was you. It was both of you.

Encouraged by that vision, by that lack of shyness that seemed impossible in Donna, you did the same, breathing nervously, pulling down your panties with your fingers, letting her gaze focus on every detail that the fabric left free.

Two naked bodies, two souls in love. Like a love poem, like a romantic tragedy, two people about to become one. Fear had prevented you from thinking about that artistic way of looking at sex, that way you only believed was an exaggeration by some self-conscious writer.

“Bellisima,” she whispered, not for you, but for herself.

With an admiring sigh of pleasure at seeing your completely naked body, she climbed the bed until she was on top of you, caressing your frightened face. Yes, scared by the perfect beauty of her.

“Kiss me, Donna, please,” you said, feeling the heat of her body, her soft skin burning yours, making it hopelessly addicted. That pale glow, that softness, forced you to move your hands to her back, to her neck, pulling it so your lips met, so your bodies did the same.

Sighs, kisses, caresses... All you could feel was pleasure, desire, her desire and yours mixed in a wet dance of intense, messy, passionate kisses.

Your hips, also impatient, moved to the area of hers. Donna was respectful, circling the places her hands caressed, not wanting to grab your skin like she would like, making you feel comfortable before gently squeezing one of your breasts, eliciting a moan from her lips, from yours.

“Donna,” you said at the pleasure of her grip, of the mischievous play of her fingers on your nipple, of the kisses that slowly descended down your neck.

Your hands, eager for contact, for that perfection that touched you, did the same, exploring, palpating, caressing her skin, causing her to moan, you moaning in response from the pleasure of feeling her body against yours.

Her kisses seemed tireless, especially when, with a frustrated growl, they left your mouth to go down your body, following the path her hands took minutes before. You gasped at that lack of her kisses, but also at the hands that were now traveling up your legs.

Her mouth rested on your breasts, your hands wandered aimlessly along her back, fingers confused, timid, not wanting to give in to the desire to reach other places, to fully explore that perfection.

You moaned again involuntarily, because of the heat that her body transmitted, because of that desire repressed for so long. Her lips caressed your belly, her tongue tested your skin as if it were something delicate, the greatest of delicatessen.

But her desire to kiss you didn’t diminish, nor did her kisses stop going down until they reached that forbidden place, making you sit up scared.

“Hey, calm down, tesoro... I just want to make you feel good, relax,” she said, caressing your belly, your chest, bending down again to fulfill her goal, the humidity that you hadn't noticed between your legs.

The warmth of her kisses on your folds, in uncharted, virgin territory, was so much more than you had imagined. Her saliva mixed with your arousal, her tongue surrounded your most sensitive spot. The pleasure was unimaginable. You hated books at the time. None of them really said how good it felt to be loved that way.

But impatience began to shake your hips. Your hands scratched her perfect skin, marking her, making her moan from your nervousness.

“Donna, please, I need you,” you said, letting your instincts speak for you, letting the game continue, letting your fears disappear. You wanted to be one, you wanted her body inside of yours. You wanted to merge with her in an eternal, hot, humid embrace.

“Yes, if you want me to stop just...” she said, returning to your lips, letting you enjoy your own essence before placing herself right where she wanted, with the tip of her shaft rubbing your entrance, a sensation that made you moan in delight.

“No, do it, please,” you interrupted, when you felt her fingers running through your wetness, when you noticed her erection pressing against it inevitably. The moment had come, and you wanted it to be that way.

“Okay, relax,” she whispered in a soft tone, studying your gestures again, looking for the insecurity in your erratic movements. “Close your eyes and think about how much I love you…”

You obeyed, gripping her sheets tightly, preparing to truly feel her, to feel what you feared that much.

“Ah...” you complained when you noticed that sting, that pain that scared you. Donna entered roughly, but relaxing you with her caresses.

Your body writhed with that intruder, the pain between your legs joined with that unmatched sensation of having her inside of you. Your walls stretched little by little as her erection slid through them.

Donna couldn't help but moan at the strong grip of your body against hers, at that slight resistance that prevented her from moving.

“Do you want me to stop, my love?” she asked, caressing your cheek, stopping that first intrusion, letting your body slowly adjust, to stop feeling that pain.

“No... It, it hurts a bit...” you whispered, shaking your head. A kiss on your lips helped you to stop squirming. It was a subtle delicacy, a kind and loving treatment. You didn't know what you thought of Donna, but it was the complete opposite.

“I know, calm down, tesoro, hold on a bit, it will pass soon, I promise you,” the lady said in your ear, entering further without stopping caressing you, grabbing the hand that was almost tearing the sheets, squeezing it so you could vent that brief discomfort.

Little by little, you stopped feeling bad. A new sensation began to overshadow that pain, the pleasure. Your body quickly adapted to her shaft, feeling waves of pleasure every time she try to move. Once without pain, only with love, only with that overwhelming feeling, you smiled, realizing that you wanted more.

“Mo, move, please,” you asked, biting your lip. Donna looked at you with a smile, controlling the pleasure she felt, worrying about you and not about herself.

She nodded, fulfilling your request slowly, moaning freely now, now that she knew she was only giving you pleasure.

Love, pleasure, desire, you couldn't feel anything else. Your hips stopped being shy and fell in step with her soft movements. The kisses returned from time to time to your lips, the whispers of love bathed your ears, her caresses made you tremble more and more, until you lost control.

With a surprised gasp, due to your body's reaction, to your muscles becoming hopelessly tense, you felt released, you felt your walls tighten, imprisoning Donna between them.

“Donna, Donna...” you repeated over and over again, feeling your legs trembling, your body surrendered to pure pleasure, to the lust that had no comparison.

She didn't respond, focused now on her own release, one that came unexpectedly, with one last thrust, with a high, timid moan.

The heat made you tense again, the sensation of being hers, of her seed conquering your depths was too much for you, stretching you again into a second orgasm, one that intensified the wet caress running through your walls.

“Was it like you imagined it?” Donna asked, after a few minutes of affection, of innocent hugs, of slow kisses. Your head rested on her chest and your mind screamed with regret for having been such a coward, for having deprived yourself of those incredible sensations.

“I think I'm going to write a book,” you commented amused, playing with her hand. Donna laughed confused.

“A book?” she asked, kissing you quickly, frowning.

You nodded, sighing, relaxing and closing your eyes.

“Yes... None of the books I have read can compare to how you have made me feel...”

#donna beneviento #donna beneviento x reader #re8 donna #re8 village #oneshot #requests

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elyvorg · 8 months

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Kieran Part 2: It’s All About YOU

Well, looks like The Indigo Disk didn’t remotely drop the ball – it caught it in incredible style! Pokémon’s best character-writing job yet has been followed up and capped off with, if anything, something even better. Kieran is far and away the most complex and well-written character that mainline Pokémon has ever achieved, and I am here to talk about the second half of why this is, in very great detail. Consider me just, blown away. I have So Many Feelings about this boy.

This is of course a follow-up to my earlier analysis post about Kieran’s character and arc during The Teal Mask, which you can find here. Reading that before this is recommended!

(This will contain a couple of brief references to some post-epilogue lines, so if you haven’t got to that stuff yet and you really care about seeing it completely fresh, you might want to hold off on reading this for now. But there’s no actual spoilers for the epilogue itself in here, because, whoops, I think I’m gonna have to cover all of that in yet another post of its own.)

(Like last time, I will be largely referring to the player character as “you” for convenience, although I may shift into third person occasionally when I’m talking about the vague implications of a personality that they are given, since that’s a little more relevant this time.)

The gaping pit of inferiority

First, though, before getting into The Indigo Disk, I want to re-establish where Kieran’s character ended up at the end of Teal Mask, now that I have a clearer idea of exactly how that relates to where things are headed.

Kieran was always gripped by an aching inferiority complex, one too huge and unbearable for him to ever face directly. Prior to Teal Mask, he’d coped with that by clinging to the figure of the ogre as an ideal of strength. He imagined that maybe one day if he managed to grow strong enough to be just like it, the ogre would acknowledge him and be his friend – and that would finally mean that he mattered and he really was strong after all. He finally wouldn’t have to deal with the crushing pain of his inferiority complex any more.

But then, of course, you swept in with your amazingly perfect protagonist strength, ripping away Kieran’s chance of ever befriending Ogerpon and doing so in the most tragically agonising way possible that only seemed to validate and hammer home to him just how hopelessly weak he really is. Left with nothing but an even bigger gaping pit of inferiority inside him, and no longer able to cling to the idea of Ogerpon as a way for him to one day escape it, the only thing Kieran could do in order to cope was find something else to latch onto: you.

You became a greater ideal of strength to Kieran than even Ogerpon ever was during the events of Teal Mask, so now he’s hung everything on the thought of making himself strong enough to prove he’s just as good as you. If he can become strong enough to beat you, surely that of all things will be enough to prove that he matters and isn’t weak at all. It’s the only thing he can conceive of that might just free him from the grip of his terrifyingly massive inferiority complex, and he’s clinging onto it for dear life, striving for it to the point of obsession.

I saw a lot of people talk in the lead-up to this DLC like it was going to be about Kieran wanting revenge on you, but that’s not remotely it. He isn’t even able to comprehend the idea that anything you did to him could be considered wrong in the first place; that’s just how things were meant to go when you’re strong and he’s weak, right? Even though it was you who took everything away from him and made him feel so crushingly inferior, that pales in his mind next to how incredibly strong you are and how badly he needs to be like that himself. This isn’t even about him getting another shot at winning over Ogerpon, either – as much as you having become her trainer is a huge source of pain and jealousy for him, he seems to have pretty much accepted that there’s no changing that now.

What Kieran actually, consciously wants out of all this is… well, it’s extremely vague and nebulous, but that’s precisely the point, because there is no rationality involved in any of it. What is he really hoping to gain from it, when (if) he beats you? For you to decide to be his friend after all? For him to instantly become happy and finally feel strong? For him to magically turn into you and have all the good things you have that he envies about you? Obviously none of those things would necessarily happen, but Kieran is not consciously thinking any of this through to its logical endpoint. He’s not actually hoping to get a specific Thing out of beating you – he just desperately, indescribably feels like he needs to beat you, more than anything else in the world.

What Kieran really needs out of this deep down is for you, this person he’s warped himself into idolising as the Strongest Most Perfect Person Ever, to acknowledge him and his strength. It’s just like he wanted Ogerpon to acknowledge him before, shifted onto a new target of idolisation and grown far more desperately obsessive. If you of all people acknowledged him, then just maybe it might actually be true that he really is strong and worth something after all. At its most fundamental level, Kieran has always just deeply needed to gain a sense of self-worth, and yet his self-esteem is so horribly low that he’s basically incapable of doing so on his own without outside validation. But I really don’t think he’s aware on a conscious level that this is what he needs and what he’s striving to get out of all this.

(And of course there’s no way you’d ever acknowledge him and his worth as a person anyway, right? He thought you’d maybe done that when you called him a friend back in Kitakami, but any fleeting hope of gaining self-worth that way evaporated when you went and lied to him, validating his fears that obviously you’d couldn’t possibly have meant it. After all, why would someone as strong as you ever want to be friends with someone weak like him? The only way you’d ever possibly acknowledge his worth is if he conclusively proved that he’s even stronger than you, by defeating you in battle.)

Blueberry Academy

The other thing I want to do before getting into the events of The Indigo Disk itself is to re-evaluate a few assumptions I made about Blueberry Academy in the previous post, now that we’ve actually seen it for ourselves.

I was assuming that a significant part of the reason for Kieran’s inferiority complex was due to him being bullied at Blueberry, but… there’s absolutely zero indication from any of the NPC dialogue that any such thing happened. If the writers wanted this to be a fact that was relevant to Kieran’s character, they absolutely would have put something in. However, in hindsight, I realise that maybe I was primed to assume a bullying problem at Blueberry due to the Team Star storyline, when actually, Kieran being bullied there doesn’t necessarily fit. His issues about being shunned and his paranoia that people are laughing at him behind his back are so ingrained that they have to have originated from quite a while ago in his childhood – and he’s only a first-year at Blueberry.

So, scratch that part of the previous post: Kieran was not bullied at Blueberry Academy, but he was almost certainly bullied earlier on in his childhood, at whatever school(s) he attended beforehand. It wouldn’t necessarily have needed to be a really overt, physical kind of bullying either – that’s the sort of thing that Carmine would certainly have noticed and protected him from. But even something more low-key like being constantly left out of things and looked down on by others would have left a huge psychological mark on him, and would have probably been too subtle for his socially oblivious sister to do much about. (Or, in some ways, she might just have made such things worse by being so fiercely overprotective of him. Most people wouldn’t want to go near the kid with the Scary Big Sister who’ll bite their head off if they so much as look at him wrong.)

Bullying aside, I was looking for any kind of clues at all from the NPCs as to what Kieran was like at Blueberry Academy before his big change… and there’s almost nothing. Plenty of people comment on Kieran now, because everyone knows who he is as the Champion, but nobody shows surprise that it was this timid kid who rose up and beat Drayton. It seems that as far as most of the students are concerned, he just came out of nowhere. But maybe that’s the point; maybe almost nobody ever even noticed him or thought anything of him at all until he grew stronger. By the time he joined Blueberry Academy, Kieran’s default coping mechanism must have been to make himself as small and invisible as possible, so that basically nobody even really thought twice about him.

Only two whole NPCs actually make any kind of reference to what Kieran was like before he became Champion. (Well, other than Carmine, of course, and also discounting Amarys because she’d have only known Kieran through her friendship with his sister.) One of them is Drayton, who’d noticed him as the incredibly shy kid who nonetheless lit up with joy more than anyone else when watching battles. And then there is one random NPC you can find in the Central Plaza who comments on how Kieran has turned into a completely different person. That’s it. Only two people happened to have noticed this timid kid enough to realise he’s the same guy who suddenly became Champion. (And, while they both seem at least a little concerned, neither of them appear to have outright considered Kieran a friend, because of course not. You really were the first friend he’d ever managed to make, until everything went horribly wrong.)

One thing I was expecting to get from the vibe at Blueberry that it absolutely did deliver, mind you, was the culture around battling. There’s all sorts of talk about battling and getting stronger, double battles as standard to make things more strategic, and even the random NPC trainers can actually be kind of challenging. So I was definitely right that this culture must have contributed to Kieran fixating on getting stronger and proving himself to you through gaining more battling strength in particular. One NPC near the entrance also remarks that “you don’t look strong”, as if people here assume battling strength to be correlated with physical appearance, which… yeah, that explains a bit about why Kieran felt he needed to look different alongside becoming stronger in battle, doesn’t it.

Changing himself

Of course, Kieran’s reasons for changing up his appearance go much deeper than just wanting to superficially “look stronger”. In order to achieve the nigh-impossible feat of managing to match you in strength, he felt like he had to become nothing short of a completely different person. He can’t be anything like that timid, weak, pathetic kid from Kitakami who got walked all over, because there’s no way that kid would ever, ever be able to beat you.

Which means that absolutely everything about who he used to be needed to get thrown away. That hairstyle that practically covered his face and let him hide himself behind it? Gone. His country accent and way of talking due to being raised in Kitakami? That always made him feel different and outcast among the students at Blueberry already, but more than that, it’s a distinctive feature of that kid he used to be and cannot be any more, so he had to cast it away and learn to mask it. Even the unambiguously good parts of him – the way he’d always get so excited and passionate over things he finds cool! – they’re a part of his old self, so they had to go, no exceptions. Far be it from him to ever say “wowzers” any more, for more than one reason. His old hairstyle may have been the one that visually resembled a mask, but now he’s putting on much more of a metaphorical mask than he ever was before. (Putting on a mask to become stronger and hide his reasons to be cast out and shunned – a bit like a certain ogre.)

(And since Kieran’s just on the cusp of puberty, I find it fun to imagine that maybe his voice happened to start breaking in the interim between the two DLCs, so that he doesn’t just talk differently and mask his accent, his voice literally sounds different now compared to how it did before.)

Unfortunately for Kieran, no amount of fervently doing everything in his power to change and grow stronger can make his growth spurt come any sooner. It seems it hasn’t happened quite yet, leaving him awkwardly still the smallest person in the room even as he is trying to project an air of being Strong and Tough now. He gets around this as best he can by adopting a mannerism of taking a step back from people, to give him less of an angle to look up at, and tilting his head far enough back that he can kinda sorta still be looking down on them, in a sense. He is so desperate to not feel small any more.

(Fittingly – or ironically, perhaps – you are the one relevant person who is the same height as Kieran and can face him eye-to-eye. That’s bound to be feeding into his complex about you: all the other people he looked up to and saw as stronger than him were older than him and so they had a good reason to be that strong – but you and he are the same age. You should be his equal, and yet you can already do and have all these things that he could only dream of.)

And his timid demeanour isn’t the only thing from before that Kieran cast away – he also got rid of almost his entire team of Pokémon from those battles back in Kitakami. Nearly all of them went the same way as poor Furret and Cramorant before them, because they weren’t strong enough to win him that vital battle that would definitely have decided who got to become Ogerpon’s partner (right?), so there’s no way they’d ever be able to help him beat you now. The only exception to this is Dipplin, perhaps precisely because Kieran knew it was capable of evolving again and so still had more strength it had yet to show him. The rest of his team got completely overhauled, no doubt informed by his fervent studies in battling strategies to let him put together the strongest and most optimal team he could come up with.

I nearly had a whole spiel here about how excruciating it is that his new team has a Politoed, in that he could almost have kept another of his old partners from his Kitakami team if he hadn’t hastily evolved Poliwhirl into the less strategically-optimal evolution as part of his efforts to prove himself to you during Teal Mask. Except, actually, a postgame line implies that Kieran’s Politoed is also a longtime partner of his, along with his Poliwrath, like they’re a pair. So it’s not that he went and caught a “replacement” Poliwag that he was less attached to – apparently he always had two Poliwag friends from the start and just only ever trained up one of them to use against you in Teal Mask. Then, when that one had failed to be good enough for him, it was the other one’s turn to prove how strong it could really be.

As for his other new team members: Porygon-Z and Incineroar are both available in the Terarium, but Grimmsnarl is only available, to Kieran at least, in Kitakami. So that must be another one he’d caught during the school trip, maybe a candidate he’d considered training up back then but never quite had the time to alongside the rest of his team. And then there’s Dragonite, which is an interesting one, because the Dratini line is nowhere in either Kitakami or the Terarium – meaning, Kieran must have gone out of his way to trade for it in order to get one. Perhaps he was really impressed by the strength of Drayton’s Dragonite and wanted one of his own to match that? (but his has a very different build to Drayton’s, so it’s fine, he’s definitely not just copying Drayton in order to win, okay.) I like to think that maybe he got it from Carmine, who’d apparently been visiting loads of other regions with Briar during Kieran’s obsessive training arc and therefore could have been in a position to catch a Dratini.

More importantly than just catching these new Pokémon, though, would have been training them, which Kieran threw himself into so obsessively that it and studying battling strategies now consume every single moment he has, to a concerningly unhealthy degree. He’s cutting back on sleep, barely eating proper meals, because spending any more time than necessary on even things like basic physical needs is not acceptable to him. You are so overwhelmingly, impossibly strong in his mind that, in order to match your strength, Kieran feels like he has to give everything, no matter the cost to himself.

Being Champion

And, well, his fervent desperate self-destructive training did indeed make him strong enough to become Champion of the BB League. It’s only a stepping stone, a means to an end for his ultimate goal of being strong enough to beat you – but it’s something. As Champion, Kieran’s known to everyone in the school, getting awed murmurs wherever he shows up. People respect him now, because he’s proven that he's strong. (The very converse of how everyone ignored and shunned him back when he was weak. That’s how it goes, right?) And on top of that, he’s earned himself a position of authority over everyone in the League Club.

…Frankly, it’s a very stupid rule the club has to make the Champion be automatically in charge of the whole thing, precisely because of situations like this, in which the trainer who happens to be strongest also happens to be someone nobody else wants bossing them around. But thanks to that stupid rule existing, Kieran’s in charge now, and everyone else has to do what he says whether they like it or not, because he’s the strongest of all of them. Way to validate and perpetuate Kieran’s toxic worldview that having strength (battling strength) means you get to call the shots and walk all over anybody who’s weaker than you, and that’s just how things work.

Our first glimpse of how drastically Kieran’s changed, the interaction we see him having with that one poor club member, is bound to be the epitome of how he’s been treating everyone in the club these days. And he is not simply being a dick for the hell of it just because he can now and he’s turned Edgy or whatever – everything about his behaviour here is agonisingly rooted in his own deeply ingrained worldview about strength and weakness.

It's so tragically telling how he phrases his scathing disapproval of the poor guy as, “So that means you’re just OK being this weak forever? That what I’m hearing?” That’s not at all what the guy was saying, but Kieran hears it that way because he can’t help but see his own former, weaker self everywhere he looks. At the end of Teal Mask, he was trapped in that horrible pit of feeling like there was nothing he could do except be this weak forever, unless he devoted himself obsessively to becoming stronger and stronger and stronger with everything he had. Any tiny sign of weakness in anybody else reminds him of that place, reminds him that the only reason he’s not trapped there himself right now is because he’s spending every waking moment trying to claw his way out.

The guy’s reason for not completing Kieran’s training assignment wasn’t even that he didn’t want to do it. He said he’d had hectic stuff going on at home that meant he didn’t have time, which ought to be a perfectly reasonable excuse! But… not to Kieran, it isn’t. Kieran has sacrificed everything to become as strong as he is, even basic physical self-care; he would have chosen training over busy home-life stuff in a heartbeat. Anyone who isn’t willing to do the same, anyone to whom growing stronger isn’t the most important thing in the world – they’re not good enough. They must obviously just want to stay weak forever, like Kieran himself absolutely could not bear to be. So he kicks the poor guy out of the club, thus dooming him, in Kieran’s view, to really being stuck this weak forever with no chance to improve.

It's bound to be just like this for everyone else in the club, too, based on plenty of comments we hear about how Kieran becoming Champion has taken the fun out of everything, and the ridiculously strict rules he’s apparently put in place. He’s projecting his own unhealthily high standards of strength onto everyone else, then shunning them if they don’t manage to live up to that, because that’s just what happens to people who are weak, right? It is agonising to watch Kieran perpetuating the exact same toxicity that he used to always feel like he was on the receiving end of, especially as that isn’t even really why he was ever treated that way.

None of this is the behaviour of someone who is even remotely secure and confident in their strength. Despite being Champion and having the respect of the entire school, Kieran is still constantly terrified that even the slightest thing, even so much as allowing a tiny instance of “weakness” in anyone associated with him, will cause all of the strength he’s worked so hard to build to come crashing down in an instant. (One detail I really love about the scene where he’s telling that one guy off is the way Kieran’s tapping his foot at the beginning. He probably means it as a way to express impatience, but really it comes across as incredibly anxious and insecure. The animators did some excellent stuff with Kieran in this DLC.)

And what’s extra heartbreaking is that Kieran doesn’t need to be doing any of this. He’s the Champion now; he is undeniably strong; he’s able to talk to others; people notice and respect him. He is already in a position to reach out and grasp everything he’s ever wanted: acknowledgement, friendship, fun. He used to love battling – he’s supposed to love battling – so he could be having a great time with all this! If he just dropped this toxic mindset and stopped letting it turn him into a massive jerk, he could make friends with the Elite Four and others in the League Club and not be alone any more!

But he’s not able to see any of that. None of the things he’s already genuinely gained for himself truly feel like they matter, not when they’re all just a means to an end for the one thing that does – proving he can beat you. By desperately hanging his entire self-worth on the idea of becoming strong enough to measure up to you and nobody else, Kieran has blinded himself to the fact that he’s already found a good amount of what he’d always truly wanted in the first place. And it also means that, if he can’t beat you when that day comes, everything he’s done will be for nothing.

Drayton and Carmine

But although nobody is happy with the way things are now (least of all Kieran himself), it seems only a couple of people have been willing to question Kieran’s “authority” enough to try and talk him out of this.

One of them is Drayton, who’s doing this not just out of wanting his club to go back to normal, but also because he’s the almost-only person to have noticed the timid yet battle-loving kid Kieran used to be, and he genuinely wants to help Kieran remember how to have fun like that again. Unfortunately, it seems that any of Drayton’s attempts to tell him this bounced right off Kieran, because fun and excitement were a part of that weak kid he used to be and absolutely cannot be any more.

Plus, with his newfound authority and validation of his toxic worldview, Kieran would easily be able to brush off anything Drayton said to him with the excuse that he doesn’t have to listen to someone who can’t beat him. He actually mentions at one point that Drayton “always loses” to him, implying they’ve battled more than once. Apparently, in an attempt to get Kieran to listen, Drayton actually went and challenged him to a rematch at some point, or maybe even several – a remarkable amount of effort, coming from Drayton – but he still couldn’t win.

(Kieran is bound to be super jealous of the way Drayton appears so effortless in his strength, when Kieran himself had to train and strive so hard to reach this level. But on the flip side, now that Kieran is the stronger one, he can use Drayton’s laziness as another way to paint himself as superior. Obviously the reason Drayton keeps losing to him is because he doesn’t train nearly as hard as Kieran does.)

It also doesn’t help that Drayton’s attitude towards Kieran when he’s not specifically trying to encourage him to have fun again is very sarcastic and condescending, drawing from his deep frustration at Kieran’s attitude. It must be very easy for Kieran to completely overlook the part where Drayton is actually doing this because he cares – he probably feels that Drayton just hates him and wants him gone. (Just like everyone who’d always shun him and treat him like an outcast before, right.)

Then there’s Carmine, who’s been incredibly worried about the change in her brother and is bound to have done her fair share of trying to talk him out of this too, evidently also to no effect. It’s certainly easy for Kieran to remain oblivious to the fact that she’s doing this because she cares about him and isn’t just trying to bring him down, since she has, uh, historically not been very good at showing that.

It seems that Kieran has largely been avoiding Carmine since he overhauled everything about himself. No doubt a lot of that is because, what with her being part of the reason for his inferiority complex in the first place, she’s capable of triggering his insecurities more intensely than anybody else can. But maybe it’s also partly because on some level, he’s aware that she’s got a point now with the things she’s trying to say to him, and that makes him feel bad, and have doubts that he can’t afford to be having. Carmine’s certainly right to be concerned that his behaviour now would be driving any friends of his away – although she is almost definitely wildly wrong to be assuming Kieran even had any friends other than you before all of this.

(For that matter, she’s very wrong to assume that you are still his friend right now in a totally normal way; ha ha ha. But then, based on your options of “yes” and “yes” when Drayton asks you if you're Kieran's friend, it seems that you – the player character – are also somehow completely oblivious to the fact that Kieran just maybe might not consider you a friend any more on his end. Which just makes this whole thing even more excruciating.)

The dynamic between the siblings during the one brief time we see them interact here has notably changed, in that Kieran is finally able to stand up for himself more, telling Carmine to shut up when she tells him off. And yet, he doesn’t do so very forcefully, averting his gaze in a way that suggests he just sort of mumbles it. He probably realises she has a point about what she was saying – that he shouldn’t act so condescending towards you. Which on Carmine’s end, she said because she doesn’t want him to drive away the one friend he still (supposedly) has, but that’s not how it’d read on Kieran’s end, because he doesn’t believe you ever were his friend at all. He must have felt like his sister has a point only because he doesn’t have the right to act that way towards you, not when he still hasn’t proven himself to you yet (and maybe never will).

Unexpected reunion

See, there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on under the surface of Kieran’s reaction to suddenly meeting you here. Literally everything he’s been doing this entire time has been for the sole purpose of defeating you when he sees you again. Which means that you showing up and challenging the BB League should be exactly what he wants and has always been waiting for. And yet.

The first notable thing is that he had nothing to do with inviting you here – the person responsible for that was Carmine. She probably figured that you’d be able to help her brother out, so she recommended you to the director when she heard he was looking for an exchange student to invite from Paldea. As Champion of the school, Kieran should also have had enough influence to make such a recommendation – but he didn’t.

Then, when Kieran comes to the cafeteria, he has plenty of condescending things to say to Drayton (about how taking a lunch break is a waste of time, because who needs to bother with basic physical needs like eating when they could be training instead, right). But the moment he sees you, he’s just shocked at you even being here… and then he’s very quiet for the entire rest of the conversation.

Drayton puts things to a vote among the Elites plus Kieran as to whether you should be allowed to join the BB League, and – despite that this should be exactly what he wants – Kieran is the last to vote. He only does so when he’s forced to break the tie.

(Although, it’s revealing in a different way that the Elite Four all ask each other for their opinions first, with none of them naturally thinking to consult Kieran. Despite his newfound strength and authority, he is still socially excluded – but this time he really has nobody but himself to blame.)

Kieran’s wording of how he casts his vote is so very telling. Just: “It doesn’t matter who I’m facing… I don’t lose.” – and he says nothing else before leaving in a huff. He words this in a generalised way, as if this an overarching principle of his that has nothing to do with you in particular, even though it’s always been about you. Because if he let himself think about how you in particular will be his opponent, then suddenly the statement that he doesn’t lose doesn’t feel so certain. But, put on the spot like this, he cannot show any sign that he’s afraid he might lose to you – that would be like giving up and accepting that all the effort he’s put in for all this time has been for nothing. So he has no choice but to let you join.

(Drayton totally knew he would refuse to lose face like this if put on the spot, of course, and that the Elites would vote 2-2 between them and leave Kieran with the deciding vote, which is precisely why he set things up this way. Kieran’s not unaware of this, either.)

There’s a brief interim here as you head to the front desk to officially sign up for the League. This gives Kieran a moment alone to process the fact that, welp, this really is happening, you’re really here, and, isn’t this supposed to be exactly what he always wanted? Hasn’t everything always been so that he can beat you this time? He manages to twist things around in his head, convince himself that yes, this is it, the chance he’s been waiting for, and he will win when it comes down to it, he will, because that’s what it’s all been for.

As such, when he shows up at the front desk to confirm that he’s allowing you to join, Kieran is able to be a lot more direct about you challenging him than he was in his one whole sentence on the topic in the cafeteria. Even then, he makes a comment to Drayton about how he feels like he was manipulated into this… then immediately insists that he’s fine with it because this is what he wanted anyway. If it was truly 100% what he wanted, he wouldn’t have felt manipulated!

To sum all of this up: it is abundantly, delightfully clear beneath the surface that Kieran does not actually feel ready to face you. He would never have felt ready for this, no matter how long he’d spent training and pushing himself, because your impossible unreachable strength and his own inherent worthlessness are both so deeply ingrained in his mind that he is incapable of truly believing he can match you.

But, well, here you are, and now Drayton’s trapped Kieran in this situation where he has no choice but to keep up the mask of strength and confidence he’s been putting on all this time. So he’s got to act like he’s fine with you challenging him, whether he truly feels ready or not.

Your Elite Four challenge

As you work your way through the Elite Four’s ranks to earn the right to challenge him, Kieran is very insistent that you’d better not dare lose to anybody else before facing him, or to have gotten weaker in any way since he last met you.

You might think that Kieran would be glad if you actually did lose to one of the Elite Four and never manage to make it to him, because, hey, that means he’s already stronger than you! He doesn’t even have to worry about whether he can win his battle against you! But… no, that wouldn’t be how it’s supposed to go. The way Kieran’s been building things up in his head the entire time, his whole life is supposed to magically somehow get better when he beats you. He needs to prove himself and his new strength to you, specifically. It wouldn’t mean anything if someone else beat you first, or if you’re somehow not actually still the impossibly strong person he’s idolised and fixated so hard on becoming equal to. That’d just be the most crushing anticlimax for him, in which he never gets to achieve what he’s been striving so hard for, and in which he’d have to somehow come to terms with the fact that… he’s already stronger than you, and yet he still doesn’t feel better or any less agonisingly inferior than he always did? If that happened, he’d be at a complete loss as to any other way to escape how he feels about himself.

But, fortunately for him (for some value of “fortunate”), you of course still are just as strong as you always were. On hearing you assure him of this, and also on seeing it for himself as he watches one of your Elite Four battles, Kieran gives this awful twisted grin that does not even slightly reach his eyes (because he has completely forgotten how to genuinely smile and no doubt hasn’t ever done so this entire time). Yes, he will still get to have his long-anticipated showdown with you, and winning that will still somehow magically definitely fix everything that was ever wrong in his life. Definitely.

There’s also the part where, because you come with such glowing recommendations, you get to skip working your way up the BB League from the very bottom and can start right at challenging the Elite Four. Kieran has to feel all kinds of ways about this – on the one hand, he’d tell himself he’s glad because this means he has less time to wait until the battle that he’s definitely totally ready for, and he knows full well that you wouldn’t need to waste your time on small fry at the bottom. But on the other hand… he had to painstakingly work his way all the way up from zero in order to get where he is, so it sure is something that you’re so special that you just get to skip doing that. (And if you did have to start at the bottom, then it’d give him more time to train himself, just to make absolutely sure that he really is ready to face you…)

When you’ve beaten the final Elite, Kieran shows up again and scoffs that this was kind of slow for you, wasn’t it? I believe this isn’t just posturing and was his genuine reaction – you’re so impossibly perfect in his mind that he can’t even comprehend the idea that you wouldn’t breeze through this effortlessly without a single hitch. But still, at least he can turn the fact that you fell short of his impossible expectations into condescension that helps him feel above you and definitely capable of beating you. (How long did it take him to beat the Elite Four, I wonder? Probably longer than you – but of course he’s not gonna bring that up.)

Drayton, meanwhile, has now picked up on the fact that Kieran isn’t just obsessed with winning like he’d initially thought – he’s obsessed with you. Maybe he’d have approached things a little differently if he’d been aware in the beginning that you were a lot more to Kieran than just an old friend. But, welp, bit too late to back out of what he’s set up now, whoops.

And on Kieran’s end, he hasn’t let go of the feeling of being manipulated into this, and now feels like you and Drayton are plotting against him. This poor kid’s paranoia and tendency to assume people are laughing at him behind his back has still not gone away, even if it’s taken on a slightly different form now. It’s probably a good thing he doesn’t ever learn that Carmine was the one who called you here, or he’d think she was in on this supposed conspiracy too.

(But, hey, while Kieran could never do anything about it before whenever he was ganged up on and shunned by others, at least now he’s finally strong enough to fight back and hold his own, despite being outnumbered, right? Just like the ogre did.)

THE BATTLE

So now, it’s finally time: the battle that Kieran has absolutely everything riding on. Of course I’ve already made it abundantly clear here that every single thing he’s done has been for the sole goal of beating you right here and now – but it says a lot that he spends his pre-battle speech making sure you know this. He probably feels like you’re such an amazing superstar trainer that challenging someone for their Champion title is basically just another Tuesday for you, like this is nothing on your end – but this battle is everything for him, everything that he’s been spending every single moment of every single day building up towards for all this time, and he needs you to acknowledge this.

And as if that wasn’t enough, as the battle opens, Kieran screams into the sky with the sheer uncontainable emotion of how much this means to him. Everything he’s been feeling, bottling up, clinging to for so long is spilling out of him now that he’s finally here in this one pivotal moment he’s always been waiting for.

It comes spilling out in a lot more than just that scream, too; he has so many things to say throughout the battle as it all reaches fever pitch inside him. While some of his in-battle dialogue during his Teal Mask fights had fun hints at his issues in there, this one battle here absolutely takes the cake. This is quite possibly the most dialogue in any battle in any Pokémon game, and all of it has something interesting and nuanced going on that’s rooted in Kieran’s massive issues. I cannot resist taking this opportunity to talk about every single bit of it.

His first line as the battle begins is, “I know I’m making the right choice… You’ll understand that soon enough!”, which seems kind of odd on the surface. What “choice” is he even talking about that he feels the need to justify? Accepting a challenge to his Champion position is just what Champions are meant to do. But that’s not what Kieran’s thinking about here – he’s thinking about all of those times that Drayton and Carmine tried to talk him down from the entire way he was acting and pushing himself too hard. Every time they did, he insisted to himself that no, training this insanely hard is the right choice, he needs to do this, and it’ll all be worth it when he beats you. …Somehow. Definitely. You’ll see, you will, you have to…!

On the very first hit he lands on you – it doesn’t even need to be super-effective, any damaging hit will trigger it – he says, “How do you like that? See how hard I’ve trained? Not like that kid you battled in Kitakami, huh?!” In reality, the hit he lands here isn’t necessarily any bigger than the kinds of hits he dealt to you back in Kitakami – but it feels bigger to Kieran. He’s trained so hard that he feels so much stronger and so different from the kid he was back then, and he needs you to see and acknowledge this too.

Meanwhile, your first super-effective attack you land on him manages to pierce through his mask for a moment and get a “wowzers” out of him. It’s not actually any more impressive than any other super-effective hit he might receive from any other trainer – but because it’s coming from you, it feels so much more incredible, triggering his instinctive irrational idolisation of you just for a moment before he collects himself and puts his mask back up.

Then he insists that he’ll still win anyway, even if “the type matchups work out for you”. Which… isn’t how type matchups in battles work? Sure, you landed one super-effective hit, either because one of your Pokémon happened to have a good matchup, or you just had a good coverage move. That doesn’t mean that all of the type matchups in the battle are inherently in your favour. But Kieran apparently feels like they are – because, when it comes to him versus you, he always feels like everything in the world is on your side and he has to claw and grasp to regain the tiniest bit of ground against his inherent overwhelming disadvantage.

Speaking of everything being on your side, when you land your first critical hit on him (and I say “when” here because this battle is long enough that statistically you’re extremely unlikely not to at some point!), his response is delightful, raging that “even luck’s chosen you over me!” and that it’s “not fair!!!” All of his bitterness and jealousy about Ogerpon choosing you over him is still raw, evidently, so even something like you getting a statistically near-inevitable critical hit feels to him like luck itself taking your side against him, because everything always does. And on some level, he may have realised that you befriending Ogerpon was partly due to the sheer luck of you happening to meet her while he wasn’t around, so of course he’s bitter about luck because of that, too. It’s not fair, how you always get everything, so effortlessly, while he has nothing.

(He doesn’t comment at all if and when he lands a critical hit, because of course not. Confirmation bias is one hell of a drug.)

And of course, you bringing out Ogerpon herself gets an extremely strong reaction from Kieran. “You’ve got some nerve,” he snarls among broken mirthless laughter, to bring her out “NOW of all times?!” This, right here and now, was supposed to be his moment, his time to finally shine and show you how strong he is and take the victory. And yet you’re choosing this moment to parade Ogerpon in front of him, a reminder of the painful losses and inferiority he suffered back in Kitakami that he’s tried so hard to forget and overcome by making himself stronger, just rubbing it in his face that you got to have her because you’re so strong and lucky and perfect.

His expression during this line is one hell of a thing as well: shocked and wide-eyed and practically terrified, in stark contrast to all of his other expressions in this fight. He’s not only reeling from the pain of having his inferiority from back then shoved in his face, but also, he’s always believed that Ogerpon is so incredibly strong. If you’re using her against him in this battle, you and her working together… how is he ever going to be able to defeat that combination of impossible strength…?

(Apparently, Kieran’s trainer AI actually has a modification in this fight that makes him prioritise attacking Ogerpon more than an AI trainer otherwise would, which is delightful, I love that that’s a thing devs programmed in there. Of course he’d desperately want to get Ogerpon off the field as fast as he could before she utterly destroys him.)

As his back’s against the wall and he’s sending out his final Pokémon, Kieran’s still raging, with increasing desperation: “Just go down already! How are you still standing after I’ve thrown everything I have at you?!” This battle is not at all going how he’d insistently imagined it would in his head, in which he’d prove himself and win, not even though he’s giving it absolutely everything he has. (And the thought that you still won’t go down even then is terrifying to him. He really has given everything to this, he couldn’t possibly have done more – and yet, what if that still isn’t enough to beat you? That’d mean it’s just impossible for him, no matter what he does, and he’d have absolutely no idea how to cope with that.)

Just before he Terastallises his Hydrapple, he insists that he “doesn’t need the old me”, that he’s changed – here’s the way he felt he had no choice but to throw away everything about his former weaker self in order to get stronger, even the positive parts. But then he adds, “and I’ll show you I can change again!” He’s not just literally referring to the Terastallisation he’s about to do (although it’s thematically fitting that he brings up this topic as he’s doing this – and his Hydrapple’s Fighting Tera-type is a neat link to him having changed himself into being obsessed with strength) – rather, he’s referring to what he’s convinced himself will happen when (if) he wins this fight. That’ll change everything for him, right? That’ll make everything good, finally; he’s going to change for the better once he wins this, he has to…!

And then… Kieran’s animation while he’s Terastallising is an odd one. He’s remarkably expressionless about it, compared to the intensity of his expressions in the entire rest of the fight. But I think the reason for this must be: most trainers wince with the force of it as they begin charging their Tera Orb – and apparently, Kieran doesn’t want to be seen doing that, because that’d make him seem weak. So he’s trained himself to put on an expressionless mask, not even looking at the orb directly, to avoid that. (And one of the few trainers who doesn’t wince, who’s able to stare directly at the dazzling power coming from their Tera Orb without flinching, holding it up for all to see… it’s you, of course. Kieran almost certainly saw this from you a few times back in Kitakami.)

His last possible line in the fight, as he orders an attack from his Hydrapple, at which point he is guaranteed to have only one or two Pokémon left and be desperately fighting to hold on with his back against the wall, includes him saying, “I’m capable of winning too, you know!” Because that is definitely a very normal thing for a reigning Champion to need to say to their challenger. Even with all the victories he’s had on his way here, Kieran still has to fight to convince himself that he is capable of winning, because being up against you and teetering on the brink of defeat like this just reminds him of all his previous agonising losses at your hands, his inferiority complex rising up to overwhelm him with the feeling that he’ll never be able to be strong or win anything at all.

(And, hey… what if he had actually managed to win? Tragically, the game does not let you see any of his reaction if you do happen to lose to him; it just rewinds time like it never happened. But there’s no way that Kieran beating you here would truly have helped or fixed anything about that massive inferiority complex of his. He’d ride the high for a bit, but then he’d go back to the same condescending façade he’d had before and gradually realise that… he doesn’t actually feel any better about himself beneath it like he was supposed to once this happened. Funnily enough, beating you in a Pokémon battle would not have magically turned him into you.)

Everything falls apart

But, of course, because the game refuses to let you not be the Perfect Protagonist (or, perhaps, because the narrative needs to go this way in order for him to actually get better in the long run), Kieran loses. The last time he lost a pivotal battle against you that he’d told himself everything depended on, back in Kitakami, he crumpled immediately in defeat – but this time, his reaction’s a lot more drawn out. Back then, the conviction that he could never ever beat you was right there at the surface to the point that he was basically expecting to lose despite his determination. But here, he’s spent so long insisting to himself over and over that he will win this time, he will, convincing himself that things just have to go that way… that it takes him a moment to even process the fact that they haven’t. He’s just shocked, lost, dumbfounded, not knowing how to react, because this wasn’t supposed to happen…!

But then the spectators around him mutter and begin to leave, apparently because he lost, because he’s no good after all and so there’s no point staying to watch him, and this seems to be what agonisingly drives home the reality to Kieran. All the respect and esteem he’d managed to grasp for himself – in this one awful moment it feels like all of it is crumbling away before his eyes. All of his effort to get here (so much effort) was worthless, all because he couldn’t beat you. He’s gone right back down to being nothing. I adore the blurry effects in the cutscene as Kieran sways and staggers and collapses, giving a visceral sense that the shock of this is hitting him so deep that it's rendered him physically light-headed and dizzy. Guh, this poor kid.

And then Drayton has to come along and rub it in. Kieran winces in agony as he gets smugly called “ex-Champion” – though he was never doing any of this for the Champion title itself, having it meant something and made him matter, and now that’s gone like it was never there at all. It’s bound to sting especially hard coming from Drayton, whom Kieran believed was plotting with you to take him down, take away everything he had, and now that’s exactly what’s happened, because he wasn’t strong enough to stand up for himself after all.

…The fact that Drayton felt the need to be a smug bitch about this first and foremost does not remotely help Kieran actually listen to and internalise the genuinely good advice Drayton gives just a few moments later. He really was doing this because he cares, and because Kieran ought to go back to having fun with things! But of course Kieran isn’t in any state to listen to that, not after all his paranoia about Drayton manipulating him, and then Drayton rubbing his loss in on top of that; he still has no idea that the guy genuinely wants to help him. (Unfortunately, while Drayton cares about the person Kieran should be, he has been deeply frustrated by the person Kieran is being, and that comes out in sarcasm and smuggery first, hence why this completely bombs.)

So instead of taking on board Drayton’s advice, which he probably wasn’t even listening to, Kieran just starts desperately, incoherently mumbling about how he’ll win next time. It’s the only thing he can cling to – the same thing he always has, to escape the all-consuming, unbearable thought of just being achingly inferior forever and ever with no way out. He still can’t see any other way out that isn’t beating you. (But… how is he ever going to win next time, when he’s already given it absolutely everything he had and still couldn’t manage it…?)

Seeing him being so clearly Not Okay, you approach him and (probably) attempt to say something to him, but it seems like even if you try, you barely get any words out before Kieran just shuts down even more. He reacts with slumping, and with an “Aw, man…” – the same words and body language he’d often have back in Teal Mask whenever something (usually his sister) would push back at him and make him feel small. Now that he can no longer cling to his façade that he totally is stronger than you and just hasn’t proven it yet, he’s reverted right back to the state of mind he was always in back then. And it’s you in particular that triggers his inferiority complex harder than anything else right now, even if you just silently approach him, or say a few words that certainly wouldn’t have been anything cruel.

It's a bit of a shame that the game doesn’t actually let us see what you try to say to him, assuming you do. But it most certainly couldn’t have been anything along the lines of “You put up a really tough fight!”, because that kind of thing – acknowledging Kieran’s strength, even though he lost – is exactly what he’d need to hear right now, and he’s clearly not hearing it. Whatever it was you did say, he probably barely even heard it beneath his crushing sense of inferiority at being near you, and you probably trailed off pretty quickly upon seeing his reaction.

(In fact, it might say a lot that your dialogue options here are so non-specific that they’re literally just “Say something/nothing”. This suggests that the player character has no idea what to say to Kieran at seeing him in this absolute state, and they can only choose to either accept that and remain silent, or to fumble for something to try and say anyway. I believe it’s pretty important to “your” role in Kieran’s arc that the player character is extremely socially awkward and just finds themselves utterly lost as to how to deal with him breaking down like this because of them. Someone with better social intelligence would be able to say the right thing here to help him at least begin to feel better! But that someone is emphatically not you, it seems. This apparent social obliviousness also tracks with the fact that you – the player character – agreed with Carmine’s very short-sighted decision to lie to Kieran back in Kitakami, thus unwittingly setting off this whole domino effect of his issues in the first place.)

Sudden legendary hunt

If Kieran had had longer to process his defeat, maybe he’d have realised that there really is no way he can “win next time” when he already gave it his absolute all this time, and he might have begun to approach the fact that there’s nothing he can do but let things go. However, while he’s still reeling, he almost immediately gets dragged into the meeting with Briar about her expedition to Area Zero.

Kieran looks like he’s barely even listening to the conversation at first, just staring miserably into space in front of him, no doubt stuck endlessly thinking how can I ever be stronger than you when everything I had still wasn’t enough??? But then Briar mentions that they’ll get the opportunity to find a legendary Pokémon on this quest – and whoops, now Kieran’s paying attention. Because here’s the answer to his impossible conundrum of how he can beat you next time.

Make no mistake: this is nothing like Ogerpon was to him. He’d been fixated on her and cared about her ever since he was little for deeply personal reasons based on him relating to her situation and projecting onto her. Her strength was part of it, but it wasn’t that he wanted to obtain that strength by catching her; he just admired her strength and wanted to be like her, and if he could, then maybe one day she’d acknowledge that by being his friend (and therefore also incidentally his Pokémon partner). But Terapagos is nothing to Kieran here other than a source of potential strength for him to acquire for himself by capturing it, a tool that will finally let him beat you.

Nonetheless, because this is another legendary Pokémon, Kieran can’t help but draw the surface comparison to Ogerpon anyway and remember the way she chose you over him. He’s probably already imagining that Terapagos might just do the same thing, because you’re so strong and special while he’s nothing – so he tells himself, fervently, that no, he won’t let that happen again, he won’t let this chance go.

He doesn’t ever say as much, but he’s bound to be already having doubts as to if he really could ever capture such an amazing Pokémon. Legendary Pokémon – or really, any Pokémon in general – are supposed to join trainers once they acknowledge their strength; that’s what battles to weaken and capture a wild Pokémon are all about. How is Kieran ever going to get Terapagos to do that for him when he’s so weak? But even so, even if it seems too good to be true, he has to cling to this possibility. It’s the only chance he has left to still just maybe be able to beat you, to continue running away from that gaping pit of inferiority inside him that he doesn’t know how to face.

(A minor nitpick I have with the game’s writing: it’d have been fun here if things had been subtler and Kieran hadn’t outright said that he wants to catch Terapagos at all. His intent would have been very clear regardless for anyone who could read between the lines – I realised what was up the moment he reacted to hearing about a legendary, because Oh No. But nonetheless, it seems like you the player character and also Carmine are both socially oblivious enough to fail to follow Kieran’s stated intent to catch Terapagos through to its obvious conclusion of “he’s still fixated on beating you”. I guess the two of you just assume, oh, hey, he’s found another legendary Pokémon to get excited about, that’s good, that means he must be getting over Ogerpon, right…? Ha. Ha ha ha. If only.)

Journey through Area Zero

As you make your way into and through the depths of Area Zero, Kieran seems to have largely lost hold of the condescendingly superior façade he’d been putting up all this time (after all, he doesn’t have the right to act that way towards you when he’s still weaker than you). This allows a few little hints of his true self to begin to rise to the surface and shine through again, at least a little bit.

He lets slip a “wowzers” on seeing the sheer alien beauty of the place for the first time, and later at the lab he’s so excited at the technology reminding him of a spy movie that he even forgets to mask his accent for a whole sentence. But both times, he’s quick to catch himself and brush it off and act aloof. That excitableness was part of who he used to be, that kid who was weak, and he's still convinced that he can’t afford to be that person any more. But, hey, getting these little reminders that he actually enjoys being his true self and has missed it, at least certain parts of it, has to help! Plus, Carmine seems happy at these moments of him being the little brother she knows and loves again; they have a bit of regular healthy sibling banter; she notices him being considerate about Briar reading someone’s private diary…

These are all good signs that Kieran’s starting to get back to normal, maybe just a little… but, not completely. The spark still isn’t there in his eyes, even when he’s smiling about the cool spy vibe of the lab. Despite the distractions, he’s largely very intent on just getting to the legendary Pokémon and nothing else. And perhaps most relevant of all, he barely says anything of substance to you, even if you try and talk to him.

He does have a notable reaction near the beginning when you mention that you came here last time with some friends of yours. Kieran had probably never quite considered the idea of you having other friends before – Ogerpon did not exactly prime him to imagine that about his idols, after all – but, now that he’s hearing it… of course you’ve got friends. Why wouldn’t you? You have everything, everything he’s always wanted so badly for himself but could never, ever have.

Then, of course, you’re the one who does all the hard work in the Underdepths to deal with the sparkling Pokémon that are blocking the way forwards. For the first one, Carmine almost asks Kieran to take care of it before changing her mind and asking you, which, ouch, that’s got to have stung. (I don’t think she did that to deliberately be unkind, though; it’s probably that she still feels a little weird and uncomfortable about her brother battling, because of the way he’s been, so she’d rather just watch you battle it instead.)

Because of all this, later on Kieran bitterly comments that he feels like everyone’s relying on you too much. Really, the only reason this is the case is because you just happen to be the one who has the lizardbike buddy that can navigate you to the Pokémon you need to defeat… but then, that in itself is another sign of how special and favoured by legendaries you are, isn’t it.

And actually, you’re not necessarily the only one who can reach the sparkling Pokémon! Kieran has a Dragonite, which must have been what he rode on for the flying Elite Four trial, so, in theory, he could go and deal with those sparkling Pokémon himself. But he doesn’t, because you’re already doing it anyway, and he doesn’t feel worthy of taking the spotlight from you. (Or, he could ask to join you on your lizard buddy as you head over there, but ha, even less chance he’s about to do that.)

One bit of optional dialogue Kieran has during this part is insisting that he could totally make quick work of those sparkling Pokémon if only they weren’t so far away. This is very true… but the fact that he never tries to do so despite actually having the ability to reach them himself tells us that his words are just desperate posturing that he doesn’t truly believe. He can’t even register the part where he genuinely has a really strong team of Pokémon that he worked hard to train, because he did all of that for the sole purpose of beating you, and since he couldn’t manage that, that means that none of it matters and he’s just useless.

Then there’s the moment near the end where Carmine tells Kieran it’s his turn to call out to you to let you know the path opened up, but Kieran miserably assumes you’d prefer to hear it from her instead. (As if who tells you that even makes any difference!) Carmine did this to try and begin bridging the gap between you, and she forces him to do it anyway despite his protest, but then when she asks if he’s got anything more to say to you, he just says no. He still doesn’t feel like he’s worthy of even interacting with you in any way at all, still convinced he must be nothing to you.

There’s a heartbreaking hypocrisy to this, too, since he knows you’re perfectly okay interacting with Carmine, and it’s not like she’s ever been able to beat you in battle either. But… but that’s different, right, because she’s already someone who’s strong and cool and worthy of your friendship. In Kieran’s head, he is the single person in the world who is so automatically, inherently worthless that he needs to prove his strength before he is allowed to Matter to you or to anybody.

Outburst at the crystal

As the group reaches the final chamber, Kieran rushes ahead into it and begins pulling at the crystal the moment he figures it even might be Terapagos, because he is so desperate not to lose this chance to anybody else (meaning you). In his urgency, completely oblivious to how messed-up this sentiment is, he blurts out that this’ll mean he can finally beat you, at which Carmine, who failed to realise this was still the reason he was doing all this until now, tries to call him out on it—

—And Kieran can’t stand that; he can’t let her try and take this away from him too on top of everything else, because this feels like the one remaining chance he’ll ever get to still have something and matter next to you. So in a kneejerk attempt to defend why he needs this, everything comes tumbling out. All of those feelings about how you have everything he’s ever wanted, and he has nothing, how he trained so so hard but even that ended up worthless because he still lost to you in the end, so this is all he has left.

(Well, it’s not quite everything that comes spilling out of Kieran here. He doesn’t say anything about why he feels he needs to beat you, and how that’ll totally magically solve everything for him – because there is no actual logic behind that part. There’s nothing he can say to make that make sense, and on some level he must be aware of that, must know it doesn’t, really. But if he admits that, admits that there really isn’t any way at all to escape from his crushing inferiority, then he’ll have nothing left whatsoever, which he cannot bear.)

Hearing Kieran’s outburst about how worthless he feels, Carmine tries to put in a good word for him about how he’s tried his best too – which is good! That’s exactly the kind of thing he needs to hear; she’s finally getting it! But unfortunately, because she herself is one of Kieran’s sore points, in regards to how you magically went and befriended her, he doesn’t properly register what she’s saying. Hearing her speak at all just triggers that thought and spurs him into venting about that, too.

His hang-ups with you befriending Carmine are interestingly reversed from how they appeared to be in Teal Mask. Back then, he seemed more low-key jealous that she might have been trying to take you, his first ever friend, away from him. But now (now that he’s convinced that you were never really his friend in the first place), it’s all twisted around into yet another sign of how perfect you are, because you managed to win over even someone as prickly and abrasive as his sister so remarkably fast. (Which, of course, has less to do with you than it has to do with the fact that Carmine’s actually a lot softer at heart than Kieran realises.)

He’s also maybe thinking about Drayton here, about the one time Drayton claimed in the cafeteria that you and he were “already tight”. That was a massive exaggeration, but no doubt Kieran filed that away as another person – someone else he finds infuriating and impossible to get along with – that you instantly won over with your magical friendship powers because of course you did. And on top of that, he’s bound to be thinking about his recent realisation that you came to Area Zero last time with your friends, plural, because of course you’d already got a bunch of friends, you’re perfect, you can do anything you want, you can be friends with anyone!

And yet – even as Kieran says this, it is objectively not true. Because you’re not friends with him right now! No amount of your amazing protagonist powers has been able to cut through his pile of issues and properly befriend him, even though you want to, because you are in fact not perfect in the slightest and have no idea what to say to get through to him and help him! But of course Kieran doesn’t realise this contradiction in what he’s saying – he's worthless, so the fact that you’re not friends with him is obviously just because you never wanted to be.

Speaking of you not being perfect, this moment here in which Kieran outright voices his jealousy and sense of inferiority compared to you is bound to be the first moment in which you, the player character, actually begin to realise that this has been his problem this whole time. (And, to be fair to your poor socially-oblivious avatar, it really wasn’t very apparent from their perspective until now! The only time Kieran ever gave any real explicit indication of his issues around you before was in Teal Mask, after the third battle when he lamented that “it’s because I’m weak” – but at the time, the player character wasn’t aware (like we the players were) that he knew they’d lied to him, so they couldn’t have known he was thinking about that. They probably just chalked his reaction down to him taking the lost battle particularly hard. The lie reveal was messy but seemed to work itself out; he was obviously upset when you caught Ogerpon but appeared to accept it well enough in the moment – then all of a sudden he showed up later being really determined to beat you for some reason??? Why.)

Another thing I love about this moment is the animation of Kieran desperately pulling at Terapagos’s crystal, the way he has to pause to catch his breath in between each huge tug, which really gets across that he is giving this every ounce of his strength. And that still isn’t enough, because it never is – he’s always too weak to be able to grasp even one thing for himself, but he is never ever going to stop trying no matter how impossible it seems.

(And I wonder if it’s going through his mind as he does this that surely this wouldn’t be nearly so hard for you. Like this is a sword-in-the-stone kind of thing, in which Terapagos would slide out smoothly like butter for someone who’s truly worthy of it, while a weakling like him is stuck hopelessly yanking on it with everything he has and just making himself look pathetic, because of course he doesn’t deserve this.)

Catching Terapagos

Except it turns out Kieran can manage to pull out the crystal after all, doing so with such force that he accidentally flings it halfway across the cavern to land between you and him. He rushes to pick it up before anyone else can, because this is his and he can’t let anyone take it from him, he can’t—

But then Terapagos wakes up, pops out of the crystal that serves as its shell… and it’s facing you. It doesn’t even see or acknowledge Kieran at all. It looks up at you adorably, like a baby imprinting on the first thing it sees, taking a few steps towards its new friend…?

(this has to be such an aching reminder of the way Ogerpon so quickly came to adore you and didn’t care about him, all compressed into one single agonising moment, ouch)

…This was not Terapagos choosing you over Kieran in any meaningful way. Kieran was behind it, such that it literally couldn’t see him and didn’t even know he existed. All it was doing was latching onto the first person it saw, which was you, because – completely by chance – it happened to wake up facing you and not him. If it’d woken up facing Kieran, it’d have seen and approached him in exactly the same way. Terapagos’s dormant crystal form is symmetrical; Kieran had no way to know which end was the head and which was the tail until it popped out.

This was, almost literally, a fucking coin flip. Only the coin was a magical crystal turtle and the winner was whoever “heads” landed facing towards.

(But then, luck has always chosen you over Kieran, too, hasn’t it?)

And so, seeing this happen to him yet again, seeing his one last chance of maybe finally having something and mattering about to be casually snatched away by you, like always, because the universe always gives you everything he wants… Kieran makes an awful, desperate split-second decision and throws the Master Ball. Because of course he does. It’s not right; it’s not fair on Terapagos – but it is so achingly understandable why Kieran would be driven to do this in this moment. The whole thing was so cruelly, rudely unfortunate. This poor kid just wants so badly to have something, to have anything at all where he’s not immediately overshadowed and upstaged by you.

(Also, shout-outs to the narrative cleverness of quietly establishing that BB Champions get given Master Balls, by the game giving you one when you beat Kieran, such that you think nothing of it at the time but can realise right away in this moment where Kieran got his from.)

Still, it’s notable how quickly Kieran was able to pull out the Master Ball, which suggests he’d had it ready near the top of his bag. It must have crossed his mind on the way here that surely, you’re going to somehow magically sway Terapagos to join you – or that it’ll just shun him, because earning a legendary’s respect involves proving one’s strength, and he’s still so weak – such that he felt he might need a way to guarantee it would become his, no matter what.

But even then, I do want to believe that Kieran wouldn’t necessarily have used the Master Ball if he hadn’t felt like he had no other option, and that he wanted to at least try to get Terapagos to join him willingly, like trainers are supposed to do. If he’d won the turtle-coin flip and it had woken up facing him, maybe he’d have been able to do so! But of course he didn’t get to have that.

(It’s kind of a shame that the characters never discuss the dodginess of catching a Pokémon from behind in a Master Ball, how that gave poor Terapagos no choice in the matter like Pokémon are supposed to have when they join a trainer. But then, pointing out that Master Balls are inherently ethically dubious gets awkward considering that the player can freely use them on anything they like, so the game was probably never going to go there. You are too silent-protagonist and Briar is too irresponsible-adult to comment on it, but maybe Carmine could at least have had a brief line questioning this? But, well, at least she does express apprehension about going in to battle with a legendary Pokémon they know almost nothing about, which is also a very valid concern, considering what ends up happening.)

Trying to beat you with Terapagos

So of course, the very next thing Kieran does is challenge you to battle him with Terapagos, so that he can finally beat you. Only… he doesn’t show anywhere near as much of that furious, fervent determination that he had for the Champion match. All that fire of his got snuffed out the moment he lost back then, and it never really came back. This isn’t the battle he’s been psyching himself up for and dedicating everything towards for months; it’s nothing but a desperate grasp at not falling apart completely. He’s kind of just… going through the motions, trying to beat you simply because it’s what he’s been clinging to all this time, and he still doesn’t know what else to do with himself if not this.

And more than anything, Kieran has to know deep down that he doesn’t truly deserve this, not after the way in which he caught Terapagos. After all, trainers are supposed to earn having strong Pokémon in their team, either by training them up from a low level themselves, or by proving their strength to a high-level Pokémon by weakening and catching it in battle. (This is why high-levelled traded Pokémon will disobey you if you don’t have enough badges – you haven’t given them a reason to respect you!) Catching a legendary from behind with a Master Ball is none of those things. Kieran has to be perfectly aware that he has not earned Terapagos’s strength in any way (just like he knew all along he’d never really be able to).

A very revealing line on this matter is that if you say you’re not ready to battle him yet, Kieran tells you, “You’d better not run away from this”. He never once implied you might run away from the Champion battle – that’d be like admitting you couldn’t win, and you’d never do that. But here, it's different, because Terapagos isn’t his strength, so even if he could beat you with it, it wouldn’t really prove anything about him. You’d be well within your rights to just refuse to indulge Kieran in this at all, and on some level, he knows that.

(…With all that said, Terapagos does obey his commands in the battle anyway. It’s sadly difficult to attribute any definitive emotions to it because it’s pretty unexpressive, but perhaps we can imagine that Terapagos is kind of just lost and confused, going along with the orders of the one who threw its ball because it’s not really sure what’s happening and battling is kind of instinctual for all Pokémon. Maybe it’s even more instinctual for Terapagos, thanks to its ability that automatically shifts it into a battle form when there’s an opponent in front of it. It doesn’t really help matters that you just sent something out to battle it without questioning things, either.)

If you manage to hit Terapagos super-effectively during the battle, Kieran scoffs that “it has a weakness? I thought this was the hidden treasure of Area Zero?!” What do you mean his super-special legendary that would let him finally definitely win this time isn’t invincible, that it’s still functionally just a regular Pokémon and it’s still possible – and not even that hard, really – for you to beat him even now.

And if you land a critical hit, oh boy: “How can you get critical hits, even at a time like this… What are you, the hero of this story?” Kieran is clearly raw with bitterness about the turtle-coin flip, about luck choosing you because you’re just so heroic, even when this was finally supposed to be his moment really seriously for real this time. It’s reminiscent of another time he compared you to a hero when you critted him, in his fourth Teal Mask battle – but back then, he said you were like the hero in “a story”, whereas here, you’re the hero of “this story”. Kieran’s realising on some level that if this were a story, you would be the hero of it, you’d deserve to win, and… wouldn’t he be the villain? Because heroes certainly do not go around throwing Master Balls at legendaries from behind.

(For the record, though? Kieran is not a villain. Stop calling him a villain, people. Not a single thing he does is outright villainous; catching Terapagos in this way is wrong, yes, but it’s an act of desperation for which his entire end goal is literally just to win a dang Pokémon battle against you. He’s barely even that much of an antagonist, if we get into that – this isn’t really a you-versus-him conflict so much as a him-versus-himself conflict that you happen to be inextricably wrapped up in.)

Kieran isn’t even that crushed when he loses this battle, just… lost and confused. He insists that “I thought if I had Terapagos, it would make me stronger,” as if catching it in a Master Ball would change anything about his strength – but really, he has to have known that wouldn’t truly be the case. And when Briar remarks that Terapagos isn’t as strong as it should be, Kieran just miserably assumes, “so it isn’t the hidden treasure?” Like, of course this was too good to be true, of course whatever Pokémon he actually managed to get his hands on was just some dud and not the real deal, because he’s never deserved to have anything worthwhile. His expression’s upset, and pleading, as he says this was meant to let him beat you, still like that’d somehow fix everything, but his desperation’s become something pitiful compared to how furious it was before. He just doesn’t know what else to do, doesn’t know how else to cope with his crushing sense of inferiority if he can’t hold onto this.

Terapagos goes berserk

The only reason Kieran even Terastallises Terapagos is pretty much because Briar tells him to, and he’s at a loss for what else to do. It’s very possible that if an actual responsible adult had been here to talk him down – or, heck, even just let Carmine talk to him, since she was trying to do so again – then he’d have finally been in a state to listen and none of the ensuing disaster would have needed to happen. But Briar’s gotta see her giant sparkle turtle, because it turns out that basically her entire character exists to facilitate Kieran’s character arc having the most dramatic climax possible, and I for one am 1000% okay with that.

Kieran looks apprehensive and afraid even as he’s just beginning to Terastallise it (no emotionless mask to cover the wince this time), perhaps because he can feel that the power from his Tera Orb is way more than it usually is and isn’t sure this is a good idea. But what else can he do? He has nothing else left – so he throws the orb anyway.

Again, Terapagos is frustratingly unexpressive, such that it’s difficult to get a sense of whether it attacking Kieran once it Terastallises is an instinctive, unconscious defence mechanism, or something more deliberate. But it’s certainly more fun to imagine it’s deliberate – that this is Terapagos lashing out from anger and fear now that it’s been given a terrifying amount of power it can’t fully handle and begins to realise, wait, no, it didn’t want this. That makes this problem distinctly more Kieran’s fault, which is a good thing for his arc. (If Terapagos’s rampage wasn’t based in its emotions in any way, then this kind of wouldn’t be Kieran’s fault at all, not really! It was significantly more on Briar that he Terastallised it, after all. Kieran’s real mistake was catching it without its consent – so it’s more narratively satisfying for this to be, in part, him facing the consequences for that.)

Either way, the important part is that Kieran is bound to feel like this is Terapagos lashing out at him because he shouldn’t have caught it. He always knew deep down that that was wrong, and now here’s the proof, because of course a strong and special legendary like that would never truly acknowledge him. And now it’s so mad at him for trying to act otherwise that it tries to kill him. (This poor kid is already clearly very sensitive to rejection in general, but, ouch, that has to have been like a stab in the gut.) This is all his fault for daring to think he deserved to have any kind of strength at all.

But then you save his life, by sending out your lizardbike friend to shield him! Which on the one hand just makes you even more of a perfect hero – but this time, your heroism is a good thing for Kieran. And, more than that… you wanted to save him. You saw him as someone worth protecting? You, actually, care about him??? (Kieran has been convinced that he’s nothing to you pretty much ever since you lied to him back in Teal Mask, but, oh, hey, maybe not…?)

Not that he has much time to process that in the heat of the moment; he’s too busy freaking out over everything such that Carmine has to be the one to tell him he should recall Terapagos. Maybe on some level he just feels like Terapagos would never listen to him if he tried, because it literally just attempted to kill him – and indeed, it fights back and breaks the Master Ball rather than go back to being his Pokémon (there’s another painful sting of rejection). Of course Kieran should never have caught it or called himself its trainer. He reflexively asks “why?” it wouldn’t come back, but he knows why. It’s because he’s worthless and deserves nothing, and he should never have tried to pretend otherwise.

Facing the gaping pit

At the start of the final battle, Kieran’s just frozen in terror at what he’s accidentally unleashed, not to mention the recent shock of nearly being killed and the knowledge that this is all his fault. (Even though, it isn’t all his fault! Briar deserves at least half the blame for this! But that doesn’t remotely occur to Kieran in the moment, because he is intrinsically the most worthless person ever, so of course all the blame should be on him.) But after a little while, the immediate terror fades, and Kieran’s left with nothing but the overwhelming feeling that he’s useless, that he can’t help anyone. It’s that vast aching pit of inferiority that’s always been there inside him, finally right at the surface.

There’s nothing he can do to run away from it any more. Ogerpon didn’t want him and chose you instead. All of his efforts to make himself stronger meant nothing in the end because he still lost to you. He never should have tried to catch Terapagos, because it never wanted him either and all he’s done is put himself and everyone else in danger. There’s just no way out.

Which means that, for the first time ever, Kieran has no choice but to finally, actually face up to and confront his terrifyingly huge inferiority complex, and begin to fight against it in a genuinely healthy way.

Maybe he wouldn’t have even tried at all if it hadn’t been for the fact that he needed to help with this battle! Shout-outs to the narrative for creating a situation in which Kieran has to help after Carmine’s one remaining Pokémon goes down, because he might otherwise never have done so.

(I love that one of the things the battle camera can do while you’re idling here is cut to Kieran and linger a moment with him, with the look of either frozen terror or miserable inferiority on his face. Even though he’s technically just a background character right now for the mechanical purposes of the battle, this moment is about him, and the devs knew it.)

And of course it takes Kieran a really long time, most of the battle, to actually find the courage to fight back! His inferiority complex is so massive, so all-encompassing, the root cause of all of the desperate, self-destructive, obsessive things he’s done to try and escape it, that of course it’s so, so terrifyingly difficult for him to actually face up to it and find the strength to try and believe that… maybe it’s just wrong.

Crucially, the single thing that does the most to trigger Kieran’s shift into courage is you – you, calling out to him, asking for his help. Hearing that you actually value his strength and need his help is exactly the kind of acknowledgement that Kieran has always desperately craved from you all along. It’s just what he needs to help him believe that, just maybe, he might actually be kinda strong and worth something after all.

But even then! Even with that, his inferiority complex does not magically vanish, because of course it doesn’t work that way! All your words do is give Kieran the courage to fight it, by holding onto the fact that you believe in him and he’s not alone. His animations here are so good; there’s tears in his eyes even as he manages to snap himself into determination, because he is still so scared and just finally being really, really brave about it!

One really lovely subtlety is that the highlight in his eyes, that little visual detail that makes a character really look alive, which was completely not there in Kieran for the entirety of Indigo Disk up until now, finally comes back in the exact moment when he finds the courage to fight. And it's neat how the game manages to re-use the same screaming animation Kieran had for the beginning of the Champion fight, with the only minor differences being the tears and that highlight in his eyes, but in this new context it communicates an entirely different kind of emotion. It’s like he’s fervently psyching himself up into believing that he is capable of doing this.

And hey, Kieran’s contribution to the battle really is pretty helpful! It’s a genuinely tough fight to the point that, no matter your level, there’s a good chance you were struggling on your own for a while, so you’re probably glad he’s here to help even just in a mechanical sense. His Hydrapple’s Supersweet Syrup ability can be useful to you as well as him, and then if it goes down, he switches to Dragonite and – because of the evasiveness drop – begins spamming near-accurate Thunders on a Terapagos who is Water-type for this final phase. Look at him go! (And another thing Hydrapple can do to support you is use Dragon Cheer, which delights me, because it’s Kieran deciding that actually he’s okay with you getting all the critical hits after all. Aww.)

Once Terapagos is defeated, if you try to not catch it, Kieran will tell you that you need to do it, that “it has to be you, not me!” It’s so lovely that there’s not a hint of bitterness to him here as he says this, just perfectly comfortably accepting it, because he never really wanted Terapagos anyway and he knows it’ll be happier with you, and that’s all that matters. Even if you don’t get that line, his encouragement of you as you go for a Pokéball is more than enough to communicate the fact that he’s okay with you doing this. And Kieran’s smiling again, cheering you on with that same animation of his from back in Teal Mask when he was super excited to watch you battle his sister! This is the excitable, battle-loving kid he always was and finally is once more! His smile is even more adorable now without his hair obscuring half of it, too.

Letting it go

In the end, Kieran’s finally able to let things go thanks to multiple factors brought about by what happened in Area Zero. There’s the part where he spent the adventure being just a little bit closer to his normal self, letting him realise that he misses being like that and that maybe there was nothing inherently bad or weak about those parts of him at all. There’s the way that Terapagos going berserk served as a very stark representation of how his obsession with strength only ends up hurting himself and everyone around him, which must have helped him see that his behaviour leading up to this was doing the same kind of thing and he can’t go back to that.

And, perhaps most importantly, you acknowledged his strength by calling out for him to help you against Terapagos, which is what Kieran really needed the most all along. By joining you in the battle, he’s finally begun to face his inferiority complex, to shoot down the conviction in his mind that he’s useless and weak and can’t do anything, and prove to himself that he’s capable of confronting scary things after all, even including his own mistakes.

I do have another small writing nitpick about his dialogue in the post-battle scene, in that I don’t quite agree with his progression from “I just don’t have it in me to be like you” straight to “finally I can let it go”. Kieran was always aware of the former, deep down, but knowing that never did anything but make him latch desperately onto trying to prove that wrong no matter how impossible it felt. Meanwhile, the latter implies that he’s always consciously wanted to let it go and just somehow couldn’t despite that, which isn’t quite it either.

Instead, I think it’d work if he first went from how he can’t ever be like you into “I guess I have to just let it go”, and then from there into “Yeah… finally I can let it go”. Feeling like he simply has no choice but to let go at first, and only from there would he reflect and realise that actually, he can now, and maybe a part of him had always kind of wanted to after all.

Delightfully, as Kieran begrudgingly accepts that he can’t ever be like you, you finally get a dialogue option that lets you tell him that he’s strong and cool and worth something as he is!!! It seems like it really did take you hearing his inferiority complex directly from him in order for you to realise that this was something he needed to hear. He reflexively tries to downplay your compliment, like he didn’t really do anything impressive at all just now, because he still instinctively feels that way about himself – again, his inferiority complex has not just magically vanished, because it doesn’t work like that! – but hearing otherwise from you of all people has to be an immense help for him in fighting against it.

And it’s this that sets Kieran off crying, from that overwhelmingly positive emotion that you think he’s really cool, aww. This seems to break something of an emotional dam for him, letting him just have a good long cry about all of it, which, yes, he has so many emotions he’s needed to let out for so long now and it is good and healthy that he’s finally able to do so! (I wish this part was better animated, alas – but believe me, I am imagining him having such a big long cathartic cry even if the game isn’t managing to adequately show it.)

Then there’s the final scene! It’s so brave of Kieran to have resolved to apologise and make amends for everything he did wrong. That is scary as hell and comes with a huge risk of massive painful criticism and rejection, but he’s doing it anyway because he wants to do the right thing. He is such a good kid at heart despite his massive issues having driven him into several big mistakes.

Now that Kieran’s returned to something resembling his old self, his anxious body language from before is back – he’s barely making eye contact with you as he speaks, his head low, instinctively trying to hide his face behind the one bit of hair he still has hanging down. But nonetheless, you can tell that he’s making an effort to fight that and push himself to be just a little bit more assertive than he was able to be before all this. As he asks if you two can be friends again, he’s grimacing, already braced for rejection, hesitating then blurting out all of it in one big go before he changes his mind – there’s still a very significant part of him convinced that you’d just never want that and he doesn’t even have the right to ask. But at least he’s now able to realise that said part is probably wrong and find the courage to ask anyway! Because he wants this, and he deserves to at least try and grasp good things for himself!

And of course you still want to be his friend, because you basically always were anyway from your perspective, and Kieran is so adorably happy to have this second chance, and I am so delighted that the two of you are able to be friends again like you always should have been all along, aaaa. I could not be more proud of my boy.

(Well, I could go into a lot more detail about just how proud of and happy I am for Kieran thanks to all of his scenes in the epilogue and postgame. But that’s enough of its own separate Thing that it ought to get its own post! So hold on for that; I’m not quite done having So Many Feelings about this boy just yet. Aaand here it is!)

#pokemon #pokemon sv #pokemon scarlet and violet #the indigo disk #the hidden treasure of area zero #pokemon kieran #kieran pokemon #trainer kieran #rival kieran #champion kieran #character analysis #ramble #my buttons #friends

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