"Ace is '1' in card game terms. Trappola is the name of a classic Italian card game, and means 'trap.'
In English, the '2' in card game terminology is called a 'deuce.' Just like his name, the two of spades can be seen on his dorm uniform.
Trey means '3' in card game terminology. His dorm uniform incorporates the three of clovers. Heartslabyul Dorm has collected students with the names 'one' through 'four.'
- Twisted Wonderland FanBook vol.1 (2020)
Not in Book: The words "Ace," "Deuce" and "Trey" all come up in the original Alice in Wonderland movie, but "Cater" does not.
This is possibly being referenced in the game via how all of Heartslabyul's main cast are from the Queendom of Roses, except for Cater, who is not.
Obey me mc: Has pacts with demons giving them powers, loved by (almost?) Everyone, had dead and came back to life, has money because of there lovers, can demand others with what to do(do to pacts)
Twisted wonderland mc: magic less, cared for by most, hasn't dead but if does probably won't come back, broke asf, can't demand a single boy
OB!MC: ...
TWST!MC: ...
OB!MC: I'm gonna adopt you now.
TWST!MC: What?
OB!MC: Yes.
*OB!MC holding TWST!MC close to them*
*OB!MC looking at all the TWST boys*
OB!MC: If any of you touch my child I will........DIG MY NAILS INTO YOUR SKIN.
《Summary》: The boys have a nasty splinter and you get rid of it.
《Note》: So this will lean towards the fact you have younger siblings in this scenario, or that you at least took care of younger kids back in your world. Also, you carry a medikit around for plot purposes.
Riddle Rosehearts: Honestly it was ridiculous. He had no idea what to do about that giant splinter stuck in his hand. It might be because he wasn't allowed to play outside that often and climbing on trees had been a no go.
He eyes the small wooden piece in his hand, as you suddenly came around the corner. You greet him and immediately notice that something is wrong, as you ask him about it, he shows you the splinter in embarrassment.
You nod, pulling out a small box with plaster on it, before asking him if you could take it out. He nods and you open the box, pulling a tweezers out, using it to pull the splinter out. After that you disinfect it. After Riddle asked you how it came to be that you knew what to do. You just tell him you used to take care of the kids in your hometown and splinters and small scratches were a daily occurrence.
Leona Kingscholar:He had awoken with an incredible pain in his hand and he swore to the great seven, this will be the last time he would lean against a tree. Lucky for him your 6th sense, that was littarly a injury detector, makes you show up with a little bag.
He shows you the nasty splinter in his hand and you sigh, taking a tweezer out of your bag. You ask him if you could get rid of the splinter and he allows it. Surprisingly it turns out he can't handle the pain as well as he wanted to. Given away by the fact his tail agressivly swished around after you had pulled out the splinter.
If you tell that anyone that you are dead though.
Ace Trapola:He is probably the worst at handling the pain from all the people on the list, given by the fact he has been complaining about it loudly ever since he got the splinter.
Being fed up with all his whining you ask him if you could get rid of it and he agrees. Sadly every time you even try to pull the splinter out he flinched pulling his hand away. This goes on for at least two minutes until you use one of your hands to hold his hand in place. Than you pull it out, causing Ace to screech. You still don't know if he is actually bad at handling the pain or if he wanted to make life harder for you.
Jade Leech:It was such a trival thing that Jade could have handled on his own. He had been hiking a bunch of times and yes, occasionally splinters would occur when he held onto a tree, or moved a branch aside to take a look at the mushrooms. Something that was different from all the other hiking trips on the other hand, was the fact you had accompanied him.
You had immediately started to go through your bag when Jade flinched, after moving a small branch, in order to get out that small medicine bag you had. You politely asked for his hand and he complies, despite telling you that he could handle it on his own.
You didn't really care about the fact he could remove the splinter from his hand on his own. It was more like a sense of nostalgia that hit you, seeing the familiar small splinter, that you had so often needed to pull out of someone's hand.
You were kinda glad you didn't have to babysit little children anymore.
Kalim Al-Asim:His cheerful attitude wouldn't give away that the boy had been kidnapped and poisoned multiple times, but his pain tolerance did. The nasty splinter, that was very thick and tall even managed to catch you of guard, and you had seen some nasty shit before.
Out of sheer bad luck, Jamil also wasn't present to help remove the splinter, but hey! You were. To Kalims surprise you take of the bag you always carry and pull out a pair of tweezers asking if you can remove the splinter. Kalim nods and you pull the splinter out.
He doesn't even flinch, not even when you disinfect the wound. It kinda bothers you that he continued to smile ahead, but oh well! You let him decide the band-aid (he chooses the parrot) and than run off to find Grim, cause your 6th sense told you that he was trying to get himself in danger.
Sebek Zigvolt:Sebek, the green haired crocodile that was louder than a airplane start with his praise for waka-sama, was able to handle the splinter like a pro. It didn't really matter that the splinter was super duper nasty and probably hurt like hell.
Well before he can pull it out on his own like he always did, you arrive.He honestly is confused on why you are so persistent on removing the splinter. (The reason might or might not be that you have seen one of these bad boy splinters get infected and that kinda traumatized you.) Well after you tell him that it was a reward for his great work as a guard and a guarantee that he would be able to continue doing such a good job he is putty in your your hands and you can remove the splinter.
Well, this is probably on of the weirdest scenarios known to man! But it was fun. I hope you liked reading it, or had at least a good cringe or laugh! Uni~♡
Sometimes the Wallpaper is Just Yellow: A Heartslabyul Color Analysis
This research was inspired by this post by @mothman-files! I am so sorry for @ing you please let me know if you want me to remove it and I will do so ASAP. Thank you for sending my head into a tail spin, I've learned a lot of stuff.
After reading mothman's musings, you might be thinking to yourself like I did: "hey, there is something familiar about red, blue, yellow, and green color coding." And it is, as mothman correctly points out in the notes of their post it is an extremely common trope in anime. The reason was both exactly and not not at all what I expected after I resurfaced from this little detour I took from fic writing.
How well do you know the colors of your oni? Because that's more important than card suits for this particular trope, but to make it all make sense I am going to go through each of the Heartslabyul boys one by one saving Cater for last. With that being said, pack your bags and grab some beans we are going to learn some meditation techniques.
Setsubun and the Beaning of Life
No seriously. It all relates back to beans. As a refresher for those unaware, Setsubun is a Japanese festival celebrated at the start February, the day before spring starts on the Japanese Lunar calendar. It is typically part of Lunar New Year celebrations today, and if you know anything about it from anime you probably know that it's that holiday where the Japanese throw beans at demons to chase them away so they can start the new year without their evil influences. What kind of evil influences? Well according to Buddhist belief there are five main ones that are referred to as the five hindrances: sensory desire (i.e. greed), ill-will (i.e. anger), disquietude (i.e. anxiety), sloth (i.e. unable to make decisions), and doubt (i.e. self explanatory).
Now why is this all relevant? Well I saw it repeated again and again, on some articles about Setsuban that the oni who appear during the festival are COLOR CODED and fucking finally thanks to this beautiful, beautiful person called Matthew Meyer (the Yokai Guy) on Patreon of all places! I found out why. Because a professor of History named Yagi Tōru said so and I am inclined to believe as he is the president of the World Oni Study Society! Which is a thing! And he has written textbooks?!?! I get that this might be a tangent but it is important to me you understand I am not pulling this out of my ass, there is scholarship on this I am not lying to you. So what are those colors?
Red Oni (Greed) Blue Oni (Anger)
The only reason I even tried looking at this angle was because of these two. Everyone say thank you to Aduece. You might have heard "the Red Oni Who Cried" folktale in an anime or two (My Love Story is the first that comes to mind for me) and it is thought to have spawned a sort of character trope in anime. There's a hot headed red coded character and their intellectual blue bestie, or maybe they're twins (FFXIV and Tokyo Rev jump to mind), one of them jumps first and the other asks all sorts of questions, both now and later. When I first saw Aduece I thought they were a clever twist on that trope because they're both trying to fit those color molds but... aren't really making it.
Ace wants to portray himself as an easygoing guy who doesn't think too much about things, but we know that's not true. He is extremely smart, he just refuses to put in maximum effort unless forced. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to classify him as greedy either, but when you are sharing the stage with Azul it can be easy to forget that greed isn't always accompanied by a great work ethic. Ace cheats at cards, makes a deal for a study guide he doesn't need, and sucks up to his senpai's all to make things easier on himself. What he actually needs to do is work bitch and when he does that and only then will he realize his true potential.
Deuce, poor ex-delinquent Deuce. He does think about things before he does them and constantly lectures Ace for just doing whatever he wants without thinking, but he is far from naturally intelligent and prone to outbursts of anger. As soon as he looses his temper, he also looses his rational thought, but he accepts that about himself. That's what allows him to discover his unique magic, he knows he has his own sort of intelligence and is determined to work on what he does not.
Green Oni (Sloth)
I don't really think it is revolutionary to say Trey is a bit of a slacker when it comes to addressing interpersonal issues. He finds it easier to try and keep the peace or manage the fallout than directly address the problem at hand, and he is resistant to doing additional work not assigned by his housewarden. Or required by the school, just look at how "excited" he was to be a starsender. If he was any more unhinged he would have started throwing hands. Sloth as a sin isn't strictly just about being lazy. Apathy, a lack of reaction towards something like say, your friend's control freak tendencies that is clearly him acting out his own trauma can qualify as sloth.
I would like to add, though, that I don't really think it was Trey's responsibility to tell Riddle he was going overboard. That should have been Crowley's job, but that's another post. For now just take green as a sign of dodging emotions and let's go.
Yellow Oni (Disquietude)
As pointed out by mothman-files, Cater is supposed to be yellow, but he is more often portrayed with reds and oranges, pinks even, than yellow. Like them, I don't think it is a coincidence he is associated with orange when that's what happens when you mix red and yellow together. Cater is taking on what he perceives to be the identity of his dorm, and he is extremely dissatisfied, disquieted, and anxious because of that.
Something I think should be considered, NRC freshmen are sixteen years old. Cater is a third year, he's spent around two and a half years at NRC, two and a half years that were relatively stable compared to what he tells us about his previous schooling. I think that he has some genuine dissonance in him that is getting harder for him to ignore because he has played this role longer than the ones he has played previously. Cater the Heartslabyul student, the NRC mage, that is who he is now, and I wonder if he knows how he got to this point or if he feels like he just woke up in someone else's body someday and doesn't know if he likes it.
What's worse is I think he does like his friends, and he is suddenly confronted with how little they actually know about him, what could be more anxiety inducing than that.
Black Oni? (Press X to Doubt)
I don't think Riddle is meant to be the black oni, but I do think it's interesting that the color black is associated with doubt and loss of ones convictions when that is essentially both the cause and color of an overblot. Idia and S.T.Y.X. seem to be focused on emotion + extreme magic use to be what's causing the blot... but the more I roll chapter 7 and all the reading I did for this post around in my head it seems to me that overblots like the ones at NRC seem to be tied to a loss of identity and the shattering of one's perceived reality.
I would also like to mention that I have no idea if any of the cited folklore has anything to do with Yana Toboso's mindset when she created these characters. She seems to be someone who does a lot of research and thinks deeply about symbolism, but this color coding and its associated vices can be found in a lot of anime. She could have just picked up on it from that.
I hope you found this descent into madness informative, and if not at least entertaining. Thank you for your time, I am going to go eat a cookie.
Semi Unrelated Fun Facts:
A lot of this brainrot was inspired by Amnesia, as I stated in a post I already made, but I also was thinking about the song YELLOW by Yoh Kamiyama which I don't fully understand the meaning of, but think it is supposedly about being trapped in a false reality from some of the things I've read.
Back to Amnesia, the yellow diamond in that Visual Novel (I haven't watched the anime adaptation because they did my man Kieth dirty) is the yandere route. Which made me start to think about how often yellow is used as a color for characters with identity issues, like Sailor Venus from Sailor Moon and Amu from Sugo Chara! and led to... this mess
According to this thing I found while trying to look for the professor Yagi Tōru he has a son who is a male voice actor???? I don't have time to look this up someone else do it please.
Please check out the Yokai Guy. You can join his patreon for free, his art is lovely and he saved my sanity. I cannot read Japanese so I almost didn't bother saying anything about this because I knew I wouldn't be able to provide an academic source for it, and that's important to me as someone who has a love of history. Also he has a kick-starter up for an illustrated book of folklore, did I mention his art is lovely?
And lastly a lovely hello to @somany-fandoms-solittle-time who kindly asked to be tagged in this post (つ≧▽≦)つ I hope you liked it.