#so i am breaking my usual silence on anything tangentially related to shipping to bring it to you all. in case you all also like it.

[theminecraftbee]

if you'll forgive the rare mention of shipping from me. okay. so my brain LOVES generating weird, slightly fucked-up aus. and so. okay. sometimes i think about the joke that jimmy is the oblivious protagonist to a harem anime or a dating game in most of his smps. which is obviously a fandom joke more than anything else but like, he DOES have a bunch of these ships. and then i ALSO think about the sometimes-valid, sometimes-invalid way people complain about shipping warping his and other people's characters. (for the record that's just how fandom works shipping or not shipping i take a neutral stance on this, it's just important for the au idea.)

so my brain came up with: the jimmy dating sim au. in which jimmy suddenly wakes up and his life is a dating sim. and at first he's... very very jimmy about it. he preens. he LOVES the fact the world suddenly seems to revolve around him. it's GREAT. he can see dialogue options and he still somehow sounds like an idiot when he talks to people but that's fine because he still chooses the BEST OPTIONS. he's doing GREAT. this is the BEST THING THAT'S EVER--

although. hm. it's... a little weird the world is revolving around him? grian and joel aren't being mean enough actually, which seems like a silly thing to complain about, but like, look, he likes it when people are mean. and tango is silly and sweet but he's--he's not normally that focused on jimmy. he's a project guy. and scott is--look, it's weird he's not flirting with anyone else, right? like, that's weird? and, and okay, he's... not sure how to name what's going on with fwhip but there's not enough animosity, and whatever martyn is doing is like, look, jimmy's used to being shot down more on this one, and--

and once jimmy starts seeing it he can't stop seeing it. the world's warped around him. he's the main character in a dating game. every time he picks an option that makes one of his friends (his friends!) like him more, it's like another little piece of their personality is chipped off of them. and as much as he loves being the center of attention, he misses being mocked. he misses people paying attention to other things. he misses the bits that are being sanded off. he doesn't want to be the one to break his friends. he misses the relationships they had, sharp edges and all, because goddammit, he likes that kind of relationship.

but he doesn't know how to stop it.

he doesn't know how long he can go down someone's route before the changes get irreversible.

and so jimmy sets out on a journey to figure out how to break the dating simulator he seems to have gotten stuck in and get his friends back to normal. before it's too late.

ANYWAY IF I HAD TIME AND/OR MORE EXPERIENCE WITH VISUAL NOVEL GAME ENGINES IMAGINE--