I’ve already slid up in your ask box multiple times today but I’m back bc I could genuinely write an entire powerpoint presentation on genzou and orlam’s situationship, the underlying meanings and implications, and the complications that destroyed it immediately and just how TOXIC it was from day ONE god it is genuinely so masterfully written
bc thinking about it from BOTH their perspectives makes me insanely ILL. get ready bro this is a long ass post. (btw this is what I got personally from their relationship, I could be very wrong. Either way, extremely well written)
imagine bro. you are Orlam Dagwud Brewbacher and you have quite literally never been shown an ounce of affection for MOST of your life besides from your mother, who ends up offing herself while you’re still in GRADE SCHOOL.
you are STUCK with a father who beats you, friends who abuse you, and a school who thinks you’re a freak. Along the lines you discover you’re queer, and the ONLY DUDE who can seemingly sympathize with you on that is the MAIN DUDE WHO ABUSES YOU IN THE GROUP.
What I took from it is that in front of the group, Genzou was still abusive towards Orlam, probably to keep up the toxic masculine appearance he wanted to exert in public and to others, but in private was probably much nicer to Orlam, or at least less hostile and a jackass.
So imagine bro, you’re going from this CONSTANT cycle of being abused, discarded, and made fun of by the very same man who shows you a SHRED of kindness as soon as everyone leaves due to his own closeted homosexuality.
And because of that, you develop an unhealthy attachment bc it is the only affection you can get in a world that despises you for absolutely nothing.
As someone who has been in a cycle exactly like that, it is suffocating. It is damaging. It is life ruining. And you know it’s wrong. You know damn well you’re trapped, but you are so starved for any sort of love or kindness or affection you sink this low and attach yourself to someone who can’t even get their own shit in gear.
Then you got Genzou Ichihara who absorbed every ounce of toxic masculinity and toxic values from a man who couldn’t even stick around to take care of him and his mom, and because of that took that out on the easiest target: the guy everyone was already picking on. Orlam.
You are also a young boy grappling with the fact that boys make you feel fuzzy inside, specifically your best friend. You bury that shit down hard. That is not how men are supposed to act. That is not how YOU are supposed to act. (Add the fact that you are BLIND now because you could not keep it together around your male best friend).
Well, it turns out that scrawny little shit you’ve been taking out all your daddy issues on is going through the same shit you are. A connection is formed. Not a healthy one.
I truly think that Genzou to some capacity did have feelings for Orlam, or at the very least cared a lot about him, but due to the way he was raised and what had been instilled into him since as early as he can remember, he would not LET himself do that. And because of that Genzou ran away. So many times.
Yet kept coming back. Because Orlam was seemingly the only one who knew how he felt, and what it was like to deal with this shit.
You have to remember that these guys weren’t growing up in today’s age. Their teenage years were probably during the early 2000’s (I’ve calculated after-prom happening 2004/2005). America was EXTREMELY Republican at this time and homosexuality was still highly condemned. Being openly gay, especially as a teenager, was a death sentence. Both of these boys were ASHAMED of who they were, and queer resources were not as widely available as they are today. All they had was each other.
(I think this is why Orlam in his adulthood flaunts about how many women he gets, but fails to mention men. I think at his core he is still somewhat ashamed of being bisexual, and I don’t think his situationship with Genzou helped that).
My Roman Empire is literally thinking about the after-prom scene. I do think Genzou had a good time dancing with Orlam in that empty classroom. When you’re a queer kid during that time, closeted or not, that’s all you HAVE.
But not being able to let himself HAVE that moment due to his internalized self hatred and homophobia, plus his added feelings towards Iggy. It was too much for him. He ran. Leaving Orlam, a boy who had been abandoned 1000 times before, once again alone.
It’s why the apology scene in Arc 5 is so satisfying and powerful to me. It doesn’t excuse nor fully forgive Genzou of his past actions (because at the end of the day, internal issues or not, he still mentally fucked up someone immensely due to his indecisiveness and not knowing what he wanted), but it is something Genzou should have said this entire time instead of dragging out an abusive relationship well past when it crumbled and driving his victim deeper into anger, self hatred, and guilt
Because genuinely what the fuck else was Orlam supposed to think? Imagine being constantly shat on WAY past the relationship by the man you were (unknowingly) unhealthily in love with, trauma bonded with, and had such a hot and cold relationship with each time you see him. Orlam didn’t know why Genzou ran away from him during what was probably supposed to be a rare, nice moment between them.
But to Orlam it was yet another abandonment, and I think this one hit harder than the last ones. Not since his mother, I assume.
Their relationship imo is precisely why we need open and available queer and abuse resources, especially to children and those attending school. Because this shit was genuinely so preventable if they had been in a more acceptable time period and living in stable homes with stable families. It’s genuinely what is so tragic about these two.
Genuinely so many of their scenes pre-reset are so hard for me to get through because they feel so needlessly cruel. Genzou literally pissed me off so much a good chunk of the game due to how he would treat Orlam vs how he would treat Iggy (especially using Orlam’s own trauma he was FULLY AWARE OF just to make sure Iggy got out safe).
It didn’t seem like a selfless act to me first time playing. It felt cruel. Yaoi goodness aside, it felt so incredibly cruel. Maybe it’s because I see a lot of myself in Orlam, and I’ve been through a lot of the shit he has.
But to be honest, I love that. I love how conflicted I felt about Genzou throughout the whole game. I love how my opinion of him constantly flipflopped because it means he is human. These characters feel human. Genzou and Orlam and everyone in that cast feels human, and Genzou and Orlam’s complicated, tumultuous relationship feels human.
And it genuinely awes me how a FREE GAME ON ITCH.IO WITH NO MERCH could have this level of WRITING and DEPTH, and it genuinely makes me wonder how long you had these guys simmering in the pot for. Because it’s absolutely insane, especially the subtle shit too.
I’m genuinely happy that these two got their good endings in the post-timeline reset. I’m glad they bicker but still begrudgingly care about each other. I’m glad they’re friends and have a pretty normal, although bickery relationship.
Because that’s how it SHOULD’VE BEEN. They both deserved better lives and tbh both were screwed from the start.
DON’T TRAUMABOND DURING BUSH’S PRESIDENCY, KIDS!!!!!!!!!! THAT SHIT WILL NOT END WELL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! aka my new title for their situationship
there is so much shit I didn’t touch on but this shit getting kinda long and just know I think about these two so much and they are so amazingly well written, and it is so refreshing to see actual representation on what unhealthy attachments look like bc I am so sick of them being commercialized and overplayed to be more palatable or “shocking” to audiences.
Sometimes it’s just two queer kids who depended on each other hard during a time where their attractions were shamed, one taking it out on another and the other internalizing it, and the messy, awful, complicated afterblow years after it’s climax
yeah i have also mostly thought that genzou acted nicer out of sight of the others, hence the line in arc 2 where he mentioned sharing his ice cream with orlam after daring him to go up on the wall
i don't like to talk too much on main about my exact intentions when writing these two (or any of the chars too much) because there is a lot i'd rather leave up to people to interpret or figure things out for themselves, so i don't ever want to come out and say "this is that way and that's that, no other interpretations, etc." because i don't like that, i'd much rather people take away things from the characters and their dynamics for themselves (particularly i never want to say "that's wrong" to someone just because they interpreted something differently than i intended it to)
i will say that a lot of what you've written here though is indeed very close to what i had in my head when i was writing them
in my head, orlam's feelings (both for genzou and anyone else) were never romantic. after all, he was still in the middle of figuring out his aromanticism as well as his bisexuality as he grew up. but kinda as you said, this very intense attachment to the only other person who seemed to be able to relate somewhat to what he was going through (since no one else at the time realized what gidget and iggy were figuring out about themselves) though i do think that young orlam probably thought it was romantic and less a trauma bond
meanwhile genzou hated himself and felt like he'd been abandoned by everyone, especially iggy, so he would escape to orlam even more, particularly in the time after the accident, being more nice to him and agreeing to hang out and let orlam help him, etc., even though he knew it could hurt orlam in the end. i don't see genzou's feeling as romantic either as i don't honestly think either orlam and genzou are attracted to one another (hence why even in the better timeline i could never see them together) but genzou did feel safe and supported by orlam when no one else seemed to give a damn about him. but also the closer he got to orlam the guiltier he felt -- both about what he was doing to orlam, his feelings about iggy, and his general hatred for himself feeling that he always messes things up/ruins people's lives (because yeah, as you mentioned too, he blames himself and his feelings for what caused the accident). i particularly think that whenever something happened with iggy, or whenever genzou's feelings for iggy flared up, his treatment of orlam would either worsen in front of people or he'd hang out with him more in private, because it became genzou's subconscious way of dealing with it
so it was really just a ticking time-bomb that sucked both of them in that all went off at after-prom where both of them hit their ultimate worsts at the worst of times, triggered further by the actions of their friends to send them both spiraling hahaha
ahhhh... and now i feel like i've said too much again LOL but that is at least what was going through my head as their dynamic formed and i worked on their scenes and build-up
at any rate... i really love that you've written this up in so much detail and with so much heart; i really loved reading your interpretation of everything, and i also really love that you appreciate (? if that is the word for it) their dynamic so much, they really form such a crucial part of the overall story and i cried so much working on their final scenes because of what they mean to me. i think it's also part of why i love writing their dynamic so much in the non-main timeline stuff -- whether in OC or in BT. like. this is how i want to write them. as these stupid friends that care about each other a lot but because they're so opposite in everything and their values they're constantly bickering, but in a way that is just very silly and funny and enjoyable for me to write. like. this is what they could have been!!!! if it wasn't for the horrible situation they found themselves in, both because of external factors and because of their own internal factors and being scared kids that made tons of mistakes
anyway, yeah... hahaha
(i like that you also emphasize the time period that this all went down as that was a big thing that contributed not only to them, but to the entire group, because back then it just... it just wasn't something talked about openly. like. at all. and that's a big part of why i also took so so long and went through a lot of pain and struggles to figure myself out, too)
