#absolutely insane. probably illegal. i may never recover

[loustyles]

Louis at barricade, Perth 29.07

[poyomon2]

5 ideas for a happier VRAINS universe, go!

Hey! I was at PAX Aus all weekend, so I put this off for a bit.

I’m not sure if I interpreted this properly, but here we go.

1. The most obvious one. Get rid of the Lost Incident. This naturally has far-reaching effects on all of the lost children.

Yusaku would have probably been able to be normal friends with Ryoken, without being kidnapped, and likely would have grown up normally and been a happier person. Perhaps his parents would have still been around, but we know absolutely nothing about them so maybe he was an orphan in the first place.

Takeru would have still had parents. His childhood would have been better, but he still had his grandparents and Kiku in the canon timeline so the extent of his improvement wouldn’t have been as drastic as Yusaku.

Spectre would have stayed in the orphanage, but he more than likely wouldn’t have found a family with Ryoken and the Hanoi group. However, he was thoroughly broken and basically went completely insane because of the incident so I’ll tentatively mark this as a good thing.

Jin, obviously, wouldn’t have broken down and become unresponsive. He would have had a normal childhood, same with Shoichi.

Windy’s origin. Given how little we know about them, all I can say is that they wouldn’t have been horribly injured/killed in the car crash that Windy engineered.

And finally, we don’t know anything about Aqua’s origin (given the assumption that it’s not Aoi), so nothing to look at here.

The rest will be under the cut.

2. Aoi and Akira’s extended family not being absolute scumbags and actually taking care of the newly orphaned children, instead of just seizing their assets and leaving them to rot. I mean, come on, if none of you want to take them in, at least get them to an orphanage.

Aoi would have had a (somewhat) normal childhood. Even if they had been put in an orphanage, she could have actually had a life of sorts instead of being dragged around by her brother doing illegal acts. She probably wouldn’t have been depressed, either.

Akira wouldn’t have had to rely on illegal activities to make a living; he could have finished his education and gotten a proper job, possibly going on to bring the both of them out of the orphanage at some point.

Overall, better lives for both of them.

3. If the Lost Incident were to still happen, perhaps Naoki meeting Yusaku much earlier? As much as I don’t really like Naoki, if his ‘forceful friendship’ thing had started years earlier, Yusaku may have been able to actually start opening up to people, especially if they met before Yusaku was set on his path of revenge. It seems like Yusaku actively didn’t try to make friends because of the incident, but we never know if people tried to make friends with him or not.

Possibly once the Knights of Hanoi came around, if he’d gotten back into dueling he may have decided to take a hand in driving them off, except this time he may have actually accepted help from people when it was offered.

Although, Shoichi in this path may have been screwed over a bit. Or a lot.

4.  I’m… actually running out of ideas here. Perhaps if SOL had actually supported the children that go caught up in the Lost Incident, they could have recovered more easily? From what we know, SOL basically had the incident covered up and then washed their hands of anything to do with it, save for forcing Kogami to finish the Ignis (and subsequently basically murdering him) and then using the Data Material purely for their own ends.

5. The Ignis taking more initiative to leave the Cyberse world and meet up with their origins. Given that the Ignis probably know what their origins went through, they could help all of them recover from the experience. I don’t know how to flesh this one out, though.

That’s five. Anyone else got any other ideas?