TL;CR

[cyclists]

TL;CR MEME

1. Comment with your character.
2. Receive comments from others.
3. Reply to their comments with long ballads and explanations of your characters' relationship throughout the game.
4. Endure everyone else reading your comment like the vultures they are.

Comments

[autocatalysis]

i'm going to

preface this by saying that there's a reason everyone in fandom glances at julius and instantly goes 'ah. a puppy.' maybe a hissing kitten at a stretch, but definitely. puppy. dog.

so! i'm sure i've mentioned it at some point before already to everyone, but if you noticed that julius' general behavior with people took a sharp swing after the intro week, well, yeah, that was. on purpose. he's not particularly well socialized but he's not mean spirited despite himself, so it's easy enough to fall into mildly sarcastic casual bitching and snarking about the situation with other people. it's only after the whole 'it's a killing game' thing came out that his attitude did a 180 for... most everyone else here. what, people are going to be expected to die here? well, can't let anyone go and get attached to him now because presumably these count as real people. can't go and get attached to anyone else, either. emotional attachments are super inconvenient!!!

which is

probably why they continued to get along for a while on his end, because they were that kind of not-involved with each other. being polite or frigid to other people takes effort, and their sort of general back and forth banter didn't? being nice to people just feels really fake to him, or: julius only hangs around with people who are bad for him bc that's what he deserves ok siri send discord message. he's not stupid though, he noticed that akane was a little,,, and after her whole attachment thing to minato was made pretty obvious the uh first thing he did was

go to sol and ask about whether certain people could be kept from dying. one key example he used was minato, specifically because of what akane might do if he died.

sol: do you trust her?
julius: fuck no i'm keeping an eye on her for a reason?

haha! and now you know that julius' main concern for a lot of the game was the big picture. and how some people fit into it. or threatened it. anyway their continued threads for a while were partly because a: he wanted to watch her and see exactly how fragile she might or might not have been, b: because it was... easy? a surprising amount of their rapport was like, genuine. haha. doesn't mean he wasn't still keeping an eye on her to see whether or not he'd need to kill her if she threatened their odds of all getting out of here, though, which i'm sure he would have felt mildly bad about, but!

and then she went and started liking him.

please picture a record scratch or a train derailing.

what the fuck why would anyone here like him. was he not a big enough jerk? not icy enough? (yes) how does he kill them now? him not actually being mean ruined him ... especially when the timing of this pretty much coincided with a: love potion, which he fucking volunteered for, b: minato dying, c: shirasu dying (because of him, even, haha!), d: what do you MEAN he's taken minato's place as the emotional support boyfriend,

as it turns out he's kind of bad at actually being mean, especially when people like him, even when those people are sus as heck because something something insecure teenagers who just want validation and for people to like them. it's actually terrible that julius was probably one of the more relatively stable teenagers here and i hate it. ANYWAY he went from being mostly chill around her to being... a lot more careful with her because glances at her cr dying and that is why on his end they got pretty close and never actually did anything with it. what if he says or does something and it's taken wrong, he's overly formal and pretentious and bad with people he knows this!!!

all this makes it sound like he was just disaster management-ing akane after the whole love potion thing and that's horribly ic because he sort of was, but also he really did? care??? he just sucks at actually showing it???? like before that last week or so where he was going "well, i'm pretty sure i was the corrupted, fuck, and wait what happens to akane when i die" what they had was pretty casual and natural, it's when he starts putting effort into things and caring about them that he starts overthinking and oh no

oh no

anyway after they died and hit the gy he just never brought it up because he figured akane would have said something if she wanted to, so he just kept right up with... their usual thing... even though minato was right there.........

and that continued through endgame! since! either they don't see each other again, or they do if akane wants to make it so! figure out what you want from him, akane!!!! he's not starting this conversation!!!