#bapyposting

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their names are SNIFFLE and WHIMPER and they both JUST FREW UP

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duo is so funny like his brother is his mom and defo dies in front of him on the regs 1000000000 times. and he's just like wat ever -_- (<- going cray-cray). and every day shuichi's like Hi Baby Brother I Love You And Would Die For You Anyways I've Been Going By Cain Recently Do You Want To Talk About Your Feelings and duo's just like no -_-

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hi. do you everthink about how the most commonly cited reason for shuichi's love and trust for duo and duo exclusively is their being related by blood. and it turns out duo knew all of children created in that facility fit that criteria. and he kept that secret from shuichi.

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love when my heart hurts over duo <3 but also do i start talking about the food things. have i already started talking about the food things with das togos.

as you know the most adorable reason for duo mean little guy moments is just because he's a mean little guy and he thinks it's funny, but the thing about Food Hangups and his specific issue being Guilt opened something in my brain. it could be that on some level he feels Guilty/thinks of himself as a burden (awareness of how their caretakers' struggle to care for them can do unfortunate things to a child's developing psyche + bonus points for appealing to the Atlas aesthetic) and maybe even that he's aware of shuichi's subconscious resentment for him to some degree or another, and he's subconsciously testing that boundary. i think alot of duo and shuichi's shared tendency towards deliberately avoiding a conscious awareness of certain things lends itself well to visceral tension this is awful but also it's so funny actually. duo will be incapable of outright asking shuichi 'will you still love me if i make a mistake' as he's on the verge of mental collapse from shuichi putting him up on a pedestal and insisting he's perfect and can't make mistakes. and (much like how he'd sooner compress his brother in atlas than just request a hug) instead will kick him like a puppy to see if he keeps running back. and then shuichi, who has also been on the verge of mental collapse this whole time, flips the fuck out so intensely at the mistreatment duo basically can't bring himself to acknowledge that happened, and is left with an even worse fear that shuichi won't love him if he isn't perfect, and it just happens again

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they literally make me feel ill

🤔 wondering if like. the togos whole thing with knowledge would warrant #posting like it permeates nearly everything they dooooooooo………. you can take the child out of the evil science facility but you can't take the evil science facility out of the child……… you are where you come from i HATE IT when the writing in this game is good […] okay. okay w this specifically i mean like the togos thing with knowledge as violence, how in like contexts involving the togos in any way knowledge is ALWAYS potentially dangerous or actively hostile in some way or another, not just something used to harm or manipulate but also something gathered through manipulative, harmful, sometimes violent-- literally, downright violent-- means. think about how shiro usually approaches learning and the unknown and compare it to The unknown must be conquered by human intellect and converted into knowledge. with their (euphemisms voice) background, it's both appropriate and deeply fucking grim

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would love to put babalon and duo in a room but he wants her dead. remember how he orchestrated her death? that was fucked up right ?

duo and babs in the main story are very similar when you think about it, the main difference being that babs is entirely aware that she's a cornered animal whereas duo is in denial like they both cause immense destruction and horrifically manipulate their loved ones because they're both at the point where they don't feel they have any other options, but babalon can admit that and duo can't yeah like. looking at the way babs manipulates arc and duo manipulates shuichi……… thinking about this still. eye-em-oh babs comes across as more sympathetic than duo on an immediate surface level (bc when you examine it they're both sympathetic despite the downright fucking horrifying things they put their loved ones through), because babalon's vulnerability is plain as day but duo can't admit to any vulnerability. we see babs' affection for arc and how she cherishes being their mother, and even before they die it's explicitly stated that babalon concern for arc outweighs her concern for her plans. so it's evident that babalon loves arc and doesn't want to hurt them and wouldn't be doing so were it not for her being blinded by grief and the circumstances she's in literally driving her insane. but with duo, there's just the barest glimpses of his reluctance (which naturally aren't immediately clear as such), and (not counting his voice lines) his affection for his brother is only shown after he Does All That. so where babs is obviously doing this because she's been pushed to and beyond her limits and even then with a pained conscience and with love still in her heart for the people she's hurting, until you Examine it duo comes across as incredibly callous and uncaring, and very deliberately gives the impression that he just decided to hurt his brother in the most visceral way possible for no particular reason, because if he confronts the fact that he's cornered and out of options, he's just going to mentally implode.

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haven't posted my Brothers Togo Ruminations here in a while. gotta sit down and have a good Togo Lament

it's literally like.. the THING about shuichi and duo is that [they] literally want a normal familial relationship but they don't have a good framework for what constitutes a healthy familial relationship because they were raised by a CULT. nobody touch me

just like. sitting down and really looking at how despite the fact they do love each other, the facility warped their relationship at its very foundations and continues to have an incredibly poisonous influence..... and yet despite how deeply entangled their relationship is in the worst parts of their lives and the degree to which the facility's influence is apparent and even deeply rooted there, the core of their relationship is a pure and genuine familial love...........

and it's dangerously close to being a situation where the balm is the wound itself, the relationship is just inherently harmful to the both of them and they'd be better off separated like indefinitely, but they haven't crossed the point of no return yet and the familial love can still be salvaged from where it's entangled in trauma left to fester unprocessed. the good thing about having a fever is that i have an excuse if this is just gibberish

GAH and then like. how much of the problem is the degree to which that love is made to be a balm in the first place. like it's way more obvious with shuichi but it's true for the both of them that their relationship is far too much of what's propping them up to be healthy, which is why shuichi would sooner outright lie to himself than accept that duo has betrayed him, and why duo is so completely unable to accept shuichi's genuine ire with him in the yog loop that the narrative itself blots him out. when you spend years and years propping yourself up on 'it doesn't matter that everyone thinks of me as basically worthless and disposable, since my brother believes in me' or 'my brother would never hurt me even if everyone else would' without ever processing the underlying trauma there it just festers more and more, and if it's all you have you genuinely might [not] be able to bring yourself to acknowledge that support maybe is not actually unconditional, even if it means not bracing yourself for collapse when you go to lean on it and it's not there and you land face-down in all that shit you've been trying not to think about. i want a cookie...........

god there's really something so MUCH about duo going behind shuichi's back and suggesting he's thinking about returning to the facility, being so unable to process shuichi being mad at him for this that the narrative itself follows suit and cuts him out of it... and doing the exact same thing, except far away so shuichi can't see him doing it (and then he's aware of it anyways bc he Literally Raised Him). like duo is LITERALLY a child that is how a child behaves

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the two of them. ms paint pencil. whateverrrrrr

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ONE SEC anyways i remembered the thing i was going to say ha ha ha ha. maybe it's because of how much less openly he expresses it, esp side-by-side with shuichi, but it really is staggering how much duo loves his brother. like i think i said before that the way duo chose to go about Doing All That in chapters 7/8/9 could have been due to resentment towards shuichi, and i stand by there being some resentment between the two of them on some level bc there are just is going to be some complicated feelings what with the EVERYTHING, but like. looking back at how despite no doubt already having planned out his 'betrayal' he tries to get shuichi to play along with the whole Emotionless Genius thing at what is relatively the last second, how he refuses when *se (IN A MAJOR FUCKING CREEP MOVE) offers to tell him exactly how shuichi reacted to what he told him, how he reflects on how he values shuichi's opinion of him over literally everyone elses (STILL SOBBING OVER THIS BTW LIKE........) and how he seems to count shuichi among the 'genius children' despite him not being a Genius and so on...... like he genuinely had no ill will towards his brother in Doing All That... which makes it WORSE. like the amount of faith and admiration for shuichi evident in how much of his plans relied on shuichi being both able and willing to follow through despite the events of chapters 7/8 and generally like how clear it is he loves his big brother... if lw were more competent theyd juxtapose that with shuichi's own faith in duo wavering after being used as a tool

like fr the whole 'my big brother thinks i'm a genius and i don't care what anyone else has to say on the matter' would hit WAY DIFFERENT if we saw shuichi realizing 'Hey I'm Upset About My Brother's Actions. Maybe My View Of My Nine-Year-Old Brother Have Been Unrealistic And Idealized And We Should Discard The Whole Notion Of "Geniushood" Because It's Harmful To Us Actually.'

or even better 'Holy Shit What The Fuck Is He DOING This Is So Dangerous Geniushood Is A Eugenicist Myth Actually, My Baby Brother Is An Idiot And He Is So Grounded'

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shuichi 🤝 duo semi-conscious dissatisfaction with a role they actively identify with because they were groomed to believe [it] was desirable within the facility for shuichi that role is Duo's Tool and for duo that role is Genius. the biggest difference between them in this regard is that the yog loop shows that when pushed to a certain point shuichi will forsake that role, whereas duo (aged little guy) throughout all the loops hasn't yet abandoned Geniushood.

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DUO TOGO LITTLE CUTIE PIE FOREVER

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this is suuuuch a fun question yippee

toji: his entire piglet era was pretty repugnant, but he hurt himself with that first and foremost and he's in recovery now love and light

shuichi: taking advantage of/facilitating the spread of the app, which endangered literally all of tokyo and enabled the machinations of the very people who put him and all the other clones through hell, but also was inevitable so like 🤍 vriska moment + i don't think he should be judged that harshly for it. he's DEFINITELY killed someone though, almost certainly more than one person. also considering he fights with a non-app weapon, he's like, 100% severely injuring other players on a fairly regular basis but 🤍 he's allowed to do that. he gets both a girlboss pass and a 'loves his baby brother' pass, in addition to the neurodivergent and a minor card, which adds up to him being a perfect blameless darling actually 🤍. also outing claude to babs' would have been pretty fucked up if she didn't literally deserve it

duo: holy SHIT. what he puts shuichi through in faking his kidnapping through chapters 7/8, then The Confrontation & staged abandonment in 8, and then by chapter 9 exposing him as a clone to CLAUDE of all people. just like, the way he treats shuichi in the main story (and likely other loops as well if the yog dungeon loop is any indication), very deliberately manipulating his emotions, is... disturbing. all to maneuver him into actions THAT SHUICHI GLADLY WOULD HAVE DONE IF HE'D JUST ASKED. like, you examine it and you can understand where he's coming from! but the fact that he genuinely loves his brother & Does All That to Help and doesn't seem to be acting out of resentment for him at all just makes it more disturbing imo, even if it does arguably make it slightly less Morally fucked intentions-wise. like there's something about a patronizing sort of callousness, especially to that extreme, that's just like Worse to me than a callousness borne from plain old resentment. (you have to wonder who he's even modeling this behaviour from 😶). but then you think about the Genius role he's trying to emulate, and why he's trying to emulate that role and it's like... what other way was there for this to unfold lol. cainbaiting aside, there's also his tendency to set off Exceptions in populated areas, which i think would literally be a war crime, but he gets a baby pass for that one 💛. (ADDING THIS AS I WRITE BABS' SECTION) hey actually how much of what went down in chapter 8 did duo deliberately engineer

cullen: creating life frankenstein-wise alongside bertro & aisaac i GUESS 🙄. f to breke or w/e but she was literally playing house with her brothers, baby pass 💙. also she wasn't especially nice to him i GUESS, but like... from WHOM exactly is she supposed to learn the value of life lol? let alone treating the life you create with the consideration it deserves? it's obvious where she's modeling that behaviour from! baby pass, and if you say anything bad about her i kill you in real life 💙

bertro: having a frankenstein moment as well 🙄. also dropping the moon on tokyo in an attempt to permanently kill literally everyone, but like. it's quite likely memphis tennesse manipulated him into doing that, and even if not you LITERALLY cannot blame him.

avi/aisaac: frankenstein again, but aside from that. complicated question. at the very end of chapter moon, it was set up that aisaac has been like... enforcing the facility's continued control over the other Geniuses, but to my understanding, that was dropped in his debut chapter. it's still true in my heart though. but another thing that's true in my heart is that the aisaac that would have acted as the facility's enforcer isn't the same ai that the original isaac (avi) created. aside from that, he seems to have like... SERIOUSLY fucked some people up mentally? tenuous baby pass until further notice

arc: straight up war crimes! but their mom asked them to really niceys and they feel reallyyyy bad about it sooooo.... they still are willing to literally torture people outside of those circumstances but it's REALLY funny. to me. the neurodivergent and a minor card does not excuse them being catholic however :/

babalon: another holy SHIT, in much the same vein as duo's. the sheer destruction wrought on the walled-in wards aside, bc it's not clear how much of that the finishers were directly responsible for & moreover because it was inevitable/deliberately engineered by the people actually holding the cards. 😬 (edits duo's section). and also because she was right! but her manipulation of the protag and especially arc, who she had to have known wouldn't be able to bear being responsible for the destruction she was planning in addition to the destruction she had outright asked them to cause- the fact that she manipulates them for that reason, specifically to absolve them of responsibility. going so far as sacrifice azathoth- one of her other children, more helpless than either arc or the protag- specifically to unbalance them. the scene where she STABS HERSELF ON BOUNDLESS TAIL... if the protag were an actual character that probably would have been one of the MOST traumatizing things to happen to them. babs was the MOST impactful antag in the game to me, and she was horrifying as she was sympathetic. very interesting compare/contrast to duo now that i think about it.

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duo and shuichi's shared habit of COMPLETE DENIAL of what they can't reconcile themselves to...

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the different ways duo and cullen respond to their need for support and those needs not being met. no thoughts on this yet just rotating them in my mind

like. shuichi can't support duo through the loops to the extent that he needs (or strictly regarding canon, duo decides he can't accept help if he's going to grow and develop) and he's like 'okay i'm doing everything on my own forever.' (and then relies on others all the time because Total Independence is utterly untenable but as a Leader so it doesn't count). whereas cullen like. is very attached to the idea of hers and the others Collaborative Relationship and committed to teamwork even when the others aren't supporting her, she's cleaning up bertro's mess and aisaac isn't responding to her calls at all and the both of them are breaking the rules and she's still holding out for them to go back to working together, despite IMMEDIATELY deciding she should kill duo at the first hint he's stepping out of line. i don't really know what i'm getting at here these are just two unconnected dots i guess

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top tier thing that i haven't stopped feeling unwell about in the literal years since i realized: when shuichi calls himself duo's big brother in his victory line ('I won! Little bro, your big bro won!!' iirc) he says nii-chan, which denotes closeness/affection, but duo himself calls him big brother as in onii-chan, which is still affectionate but also denotes respect/admiration like 🤯. like 💀

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work doods