love your blog and your art!! and realised ive been following you for almost ten years so thank you for the quality posts

have you got any thoughts on ralsei and noelle in terms of both of them taking on “the girl” role in the game? or i guess rather ralsei trying to be the girl in his own meta and sorta weird way. i know youve drawn them together a couple times but would love to hear any analysis if you have thoughts (if youve already posted about this and i missed it my bad! feel free to ignore)

well damn that's flattering. wish I had some kind of membership program so I could give you a little gift, haha

anyway. this is something I've touched on before but only really spelled out once so you're good. I think there's several factors at play with ralsei's metatextual femininity: his status as the party squishy mage/healer, his status as kris's (and by extension, the player's) love interest, his obsession with roles and subservience, and the fact that ralsei is probably meant to be as appealing to the player as possible. none of those things are INHERENTLY feminine of course, but they are in the context of a story with an audience. we don't know for sure yet how ralsei feels about all that, but I'd wager he either thinks he wants it or thinks it has to be his purpose and he wants to do a good job at it. ralsei is like..... the wife. he's the perfect wife. and he's really good at it! the audience LOVES ralsei! whenever my art gets reposted on reddit, there are way more romantically charged or even sexually explicit comments about ralsei than any other character. when I posted my "choose your bride" illustration, most of the people commenting said they would choose ralsei over noelle, with some even saying that it's because noelle "already belongs to susie".

and that leads into his parallels with noelle. like ralsei, noelle is a fragile magic user, is generally more shy and demure (though both of them can break out of that easily), is shown as pining for the object of her affections, and she's slotted into the role of "the love interest" for susie (or for kris/the player, but I'm gonna focus on normal route here). the ferris wheel scene also directly parallels the acid tunnel of love- both forcing the two "couples" to be alone together in a deliberately romantic setting with nothing to do but talk. I've already talked plenty about noelle's roles as the girl, the bride, the damsel, etc. so I won't get into it again, but I think the connections made between kralsei and suselle are worth keeping an eye on. there's nothing to indicate that susie and noelle's budding romance is anything but sweet and genuine, but at the same time you have to wonder what it means that the game is pushing them together in a way so similar to kris and ralsei.

to reference classic jrpg dragon quest v: hand of the heavenly bride, nera comes out of nowhere and was tailor-made to be a wife, while bianca is a childhood friend you have an actual prior connection with. but it doesn't really matter who you choose to marry. in the end they both get kidnapped and sidelined as soon as they're done having your babies.