ok LORE PLURK... major AAI2 spoilers even though i already kind of spoiled everything
rolls up sleeves this is going to be a monster
so ok first i feel like i need to explain his personal history for context
so this little kid on the right here with the candy chicken is him!
and that is his dad behind him
and then his best friend (knightley) and his dad next to them
so when they were in kindergarten their dads were both competing in this big dessert making contest, and they had an arrangement where they were helping each other for most of the contest, but then knightley's dad betrayed simon's when they got to the finals
simon's dad had gotten some disorder where he'd lost his sense of taste so simon was secretly coming over to his room at the contest venue every day and taste testing his desserts to help him
so to screw him over knightley's dad made him stop simon on his way there and assaulted him and tied him up with a rope and locked him in their car (though knightley also stayed in there with him because he felt really fucking guilty and only did it because he was scared of what his dad would do to him IT WAS VERY SAD)
anyway shit went down and simon's dad killed knightley's but IT WASN'T EVEN FOR KIDNAPPING SIMON, HE DIDN'T EVEN KNOW THAT PART, HE WAS JUST PISSED AT HIM FOR REFUSING TO HELP WITH HIS DESIGN
and after all the investigation shit was over and they'd arrested someone else he just fucked off to another country and didn't bother ever looking for simon because he was like "well my son didn't come help me like he promised to so fuck him who needs him"
IN THE MEANTIME, simon and knightley almost froze to death in this car because it was during a blizzard on christmas eve and they only survived because this old guy walking his dog happened to find them in the car
and since neither of their dads ever looked for them they ended up at an orphanage and they both had traumatic memory loss and didn't remember their actual names or their families or anything
anyway fast forward six years
the lady who runs the orphanage is super shady and in cahoots with SEBASTIAN'S SHITTY DAD who was at the time the chief prosecutor
and they came up with this whole insane plot to assassinate the president of zheng fa and replace him with his body double, and they pretended it was a kidnapping so they could get a shit ton of ransom money
and this assassination happened right on the fucking orphanage grounds in the middle of the night
while it was winter and also snowing again, and simon had snuck out and was hiding in an igloo on the playground and saw everything
plops down in here
and it turned out the assassin they'd hired for this was the old man with the dog who'd rescued them from the freezing car years earlier
after that part was done he overheard roland and blaise talking about the rest of their plan which involved killing the assassin to keep him quiet (which was plausible because he was blind and if they separated him from his dog he'd be fucked)
and simon wanted to save this guy because he'd saved him before, so he set a fire outside the orphanage to distract them and helped the assassin escape out the back way
roland figured out that he'd probably seen it happen and just kept brutally interrogating him about what he saw every day trying to get him to admit it and he wouldn't say anything because he was sure they'd kill him too
since he'd just watched them fucking murder a president and bury him under the flowerbed
eventually he just ran the fuck away
and he apparently still had some contact with the assassin, dogen, by mail over the years, and dogen supposedly had a bunch of guys on the outside after he went to prison so like, maybe he might have helped him with temporary shelter/money at various points? idfk but FOR THE MOST PART
he was just on his own after that and since blaise's whole thing is making evidence and charges and people disappear he was like well they are definitely still looking for me and will absolutely kill me if they ever find me
and he talked about how he barely slept and jumped at every sound all the time for more than a decade always thinking they were going to get him
he presumably dyed his hair to make himself look completely different, since his hair is naturally black
and he explicitly says that he joined the circus just because they traveled a lot and he'd be harder to find without a permanent address
12 years later he finally gets a perfect opportunity to enact this revenge plan where he manipulates things to make everyone who ruined his life kill each other off or do things that will get them arrested and hopefully expose their crimes, which is AAI2, basically the entire game is all a series of events he manipulated
except for one case where it was his dad instead lmao
this also involves playing into roland's paranoia about the assassin being out to get her and getting her to kill knightley because he's never forgiven him for tying him up and that car and making him lose his father
and he just. kept playing the role of his cute supportive best friend for eighteen fucking years while hating him the entire time
tying into this
at some point after running away from the orphanage simon like, did some research to try to figure out what happened that night in the car
and found that there had been a murder at the contest venue on christmas eve that year so he was like oh that must be it
and knightley's dad must have had me tied up because he was going to kill my dad
so this is all their family's fault and knightley should die because his dad took mine away from me
which seems logical but IS NOT WHAT HAPPENED, but since they didn't remember their original names he didn't know he had it mixed up
meanwhile knightley actually probably DID know because at some point the police had identified him as the other guy's son and tracked him down and left his possessions with him
but unlike simon he didn't hold a grudge for shit their stupid fathers had done
anyway
THAT IS THE BACKGROUND
WHICH IS ALL
VERY RELEVANT TO EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED IN THIS FUCKING GAME
simon had a fucking terrible time from the very beginning
because he has valid paranoia about people being out to kill him, which was exactly what the game was about
and because his best friend attacking and kidnapping him just completely broke his ability to trust anyone, so the team concept was also really unsettling
he spent the first few days like desperately trying to appeal to people's sympathies to try to get someone to take him on their team if he thought they seemed either trustworthy or strong
because he also had this fear of like, if he didn't get on a good team he'd just end up on some team that was just all the weak leftovers no one else wanted who'd be immediately picked off
finally got his team and both livio and fukuzawa seemed strong and amelia had the cute factor that would make people not want to kill her so he was like ok thank god
except then it also really quickly became obvious that livio's primary loyalty was to vash and wolfwood's team so he was kind of wary about that
w0 and w1 were kind of like whatever, he was dealing, still trying his best to be nice and likable, didn't give a shit about anyone who died or killed
but pretended to lmao and i still think it's the funniest thing in the world that him being like "it's especially mean to kill someone when their childhood friend from home is also here and i don't think matsui would be that cruel so i don't think it was him" and kazuki just fucking flipped his lid about that for some reason and hated him forever
like. it was such a sympathetic and innocuous statement. so he was just like lmfao ok crazy teenager and hated kazuki forever and kind of deliberately picked at whatever insecurities he thought he could find after that
Simon...
w1 execution though was
a thing
because until that point he'd been mostly avoiding rang since he was so vocally murderhappy but the stuff that was going on during that execution made him suddenly be like oh actually this is the most relatable person here what the fuck
the vengeance and abandonment issues and everything
so from that point on he was like lowkey enamored with rang but since he was still pretending to be a cute little scaredy cat he couldn't be obvious about that
w2 was emotionshare!!!! which! lmao!!!!!
i had to be EXTREMELY careful and kind of toe this line so i could be like, technically not dishonest about what he was feeling while also not just fucking revealing everything about what he actually was
and fortunately he was just legitimately Anxious As Fuck at all times by virtue of constantly worrying about getting killed so i could usually at least have that as the forefront emotion that was obscuring everything else
the rest of the time i either said vague stuff like "A SWIRLING DARK ABYSS OF BAD FEELINGS" without really specifying whether those feelings were sadness or fear or DEEP SEATED HATRED
or had him just like consciously suppress his feelings if he thought they were going to be problematic for him in which case i'd just kind of note how dull they seemed
i think the best clues were actually like
the times where he should have been sad or sympathetic or something but just didn't actually give a fuck so those feelings were conspicuously absent
like after finding out buzen died he didn't fucking care lmao and i noted when he was talking to kaveh that he wasn't really projecting any emotions at all
and kaveh was like "oh no what happened is someone suppressing your emotions with a curse"
and he was just like shit and had an anxiety spike
which kaveh then felt and was like oh.... ????? ok
it was funny
w2 was ALSO
OUR FUCKING EGG CYOA
so enjoy that while i go get a drink
and then natalia laid down on my arm for 20 minutes
ok
so egg cyoa brought lots of fun trauma for everyone
things relevant to simon specifically were a dead abandoned child in the back of a car which he just had all kinds of bad thoughts about because of how close that had been to being him
and then more nebulously like, the metaphorical father monster being the one to kill and abandon the kid saying he wouldn't be good enough, like
AT THAT POINT he thought his own father had been murdered but he had previously (correctly...) thought he'd abandoned him for disappointing him so that still kind of opened some old wounds
and then lmao as far as the injuries go
man FUCK that metaphorical father monster
HE SUCKS
so metaphorical father axe hand johnny slashed him across the face with his axe hand at one point and took out his left eye, which stayed gone until he died
which was
exactly the same as his father's scar
but since he didn't remember what his dad looked like he didn't make that connection
and just felt vaguely sick and upset every time he looked at his face in a mirror without understanding why (aside from it just being traumatic to lose an eye....)
if they look at the other side of the lake, they can see the house in the distance, just like they left it. there's a figure looming from the hole of the garage door, watching them. jonathan survives, like trauma tends to, no matter how much you try to squash it down.
that line just fucking kicked my ass
and i think about it a lot
so yeah THAT WAS FUCKING ROUGH and he was kind of a mess afterward, especially since they had a side effect of feeling something breathing down their necks for the rest of the weekend
almost everyone who texted him on thursday night to "check on him" also made it pretty clear that what they were really interested in was whether he'd gotten a weird message like the previous cyoa, which he hadn't yet, and that kind of pissed him off since it felt so insincere and he was still trying to process shit while also broadcasting his emotions
the first genuine conversation he had with anyone and there was some weird bonding there and he felt closer to him than the rest of the team after that
he DID finally get the message on friday, after the investigation and stuff, but it was a fucking ominous one about losing teams' worlds getting erased and he was like uhhhhh this sounds like a great incentive for more murder and since he still assumed he would also be at the top of everyone's kill lists he did not want that
which he told gerard but everyone was already sharing it with their teams
and he was like
well this is inevitably going to get around anyway since everyone's stupidly spreading it around, but he wanted to at least try to slow the spread a little if he could so he just wasn't going to tell anyone unless they asked in a way where he couldn't honestly say no
which is how he ended up sharing it with fukuzawa and later nahida but not with livio because livio asked if he'd gotten a message "on thursday" and he hadn't because he didn't get it until friday
and even if livio was the person he felt the closest to he was also fully convinced that he'd always prioritize the triguns over his own team and that he'd immediately tell them if he shared it with him
so he was just like no i will take advantage of this loophole, maybe he already knows what it says but i can't fucking ask that
which i guess WAS WHAT TRIGGERED EVERYTHING
because ylfa framed him for lambda's murder because she was mad that he didn't share the message
by making everyone hallucinate this monkey bite on lambda's body that matched money
and everyone was piling on him and questioning him and he legitimately had no fucking clue what had happened
and given his history of people interrogating him waiting for him to slip up so they could kill him!!!! it was traumatic!!!!!!!
he kept protesting his innocence and just being really sad and pathetic and like. lmao he was being extremely manipulative about how he was presenting himself with him and the rest of his team falling all over each other to be the one to take the fall if they got voted for
and being like "i'm still glad i could save you 
" to monika re: when he pulled her into the car during cyoa was lmao
" to monika re: when he pulled her into the car during cyoa was lmao
but also he WAS innocent and was legitimately scared and extremely upset
he fully thought his team was going to be voted for and so did i but then froggystyle felt bad about framing him at the last minute after seeing that and pushed people to vote for hot mess instead and then THEY ended up getting scaped instead, by 2 votes
which like. he voted for them too but he also thought they were the most likely option because gyuhyuk had been acting shady as hell about strip check
and when hot mess got the not guilty result he was just like
fuck
because he'd been like well at least if we get scaped they'll see afterward that we weren't guilty and i'll be vindicated and everyone will feel bad for doing this to us
and also there was no fucking way he'd actually be the one to die because he was always going to guilt trip fukuzawa or livio into getting executed instead lmao
but THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN which meant everyone who'd been on the fence before now was like "oh it was definitely him then" and once trial was over and the evidence was gone he didn't have any way to try to refute it anymore
so he just fucking panicked because he was completely sure that someone was going to kill him that week for revenge if he couldn't prove who it really was
and it got made so much worse by the fact that it was memshare week
so he kept reliving all his memories about knightley betraying him and roland interrogating him and getting arrested and he was just unbelievably on edge all week
and he kept trying to find out what really happened but he had no idea where to even start and no one would tell him anything
and like
ironically
ylfa was the one person he was actually pretty confident would not have done that to him
because she was always nice to money and he didn't think she'd try to get him in trouble, and she'd been nice to him after the trial, and he didn't think she'd be lying to him now because she saw his interrogation memory and had been sympathetic about it, and he'd actually been legitimately sympathetic to the memory he got from her too
so THE SINGLE TIME IN HIS LIFE THAT HE THOUGHT HE COULD PROBABLY TRUST SOMEONE WAS THE TIME HE WAS THE MOST FUCKING WRONG
BUT HE DID NOT KNOW THIS BECAUSE HE GOT NOWHERE WITH HIS INVESTIGATION ATTEMPTS
as soon as the week started he was already like taking precautions thinking he might have to counter or something so he bought two of the same hoodie so he'd be able to switch it out for a fresh one if he got blood on it or something
anyway by mid-week he still knew nothing even though hilariously he had specifically theorized that maybe there was a team psych that could make people hallucinate evidence like the rin hallucinations but never made the connections there
so he was like well guess i have to take drastic action!!!
and made decisions that were simultaneously very carefully calculated and very bad
he bought the psych switch app and switched from ice at the last minute before curfew so if anyone tried to frame him with ice again they'd fail (and also because he'd been reliving his snow trauma memories all week and was just like i've had enough ice)
and he should have switched to drift or something but picked pyro just because burning things tends to be his default solution to handling problems, and he thought like, at least it'd be easier to convincingly argue that someone was faking pyro use since you could obviously just use a lighter or whatever
vs cryo where there was no explanation for lambda's cold wounds that made any sense
he thought based on some theories during trial that lambda's killer had used drift based on the thing with the axes that seemed to be set up like a trap in the ceiling (AND AGAIN DID NOT CONSIDER AERO BECAUSE THAT WAS ONLY YLFA'S TEAM AND HE DID NOT AT ALL SUSPECT HER) and the drift teams were like...
A peace emoji which shenhe was part of + the triguns were on that team and he didn't think they'd frame livio's team; TBD, who he thought just fucking sucked and wouldn't be able to do shit to lambda; and yuneyuze, so the last one seemed like the only plausible option based on that theory
so he was like well the odds seem good enough that it was them so fuck it let's kill 'em
and the fukuzawa part was based on his observations from the last trial that
1. no one looked at the teams of either of the victims at all even though there wasn't really any reason to think shenhe couldn't have killed lambda
2. everyone made a big deal out of only voting for one of the teams that still had all 4 people if they weren't sure
1. no one looked at the teams of either of the victims at all even though there wasn't really any reason to think shenhe couldn't have killed lambda
2. everyone made a big deal out of only voting for one of the teams that still had all 4 people if they weren't sure
so he was like, ok, if i kill someone from my team at the same time they won't consider us as killers and they also won't use us a "safe" vote if they don't figure it out because we'll be down a player, and also then everyone should feel bad that we had to suffer through losing our teammate because people were unfairly targeting us
and he went with fukuzawa because he'd been very vocal about standing up for and protecting all of them (and because he still had weird livio feelings and because killing amelia would just come off really badly) so he thought he'd be easy to manipulate into doing this with him
and he was correct!!! everyone seemed to think he used their team psych on him to mind control him but he didn't, he didn't have to
he was just like "oh no if we're both awake that must mean someone's coming after both of us, because they think i did it and they're mad at you for standing up for me :c please protect me i'm really scared"
and that worked, and he DID mind control zelda into coming out near the waterfall where they were and getting into a bubble so his rat could pop it while she was above the big drop, and she and fukuzawa fought and fukuzawa killed her
at some point in the process she animal-controlled his rat to bite him, so he had a rat bite on his ear hidden under his hair for the next few days, and she hit him with some corrosive poison (in the form of purple goop because we were doing this murder at the rainbow waterfall in MLP land and i wanted to make a reference to the smooze from the 80s movie)
so after she was dead he grabbed her sword and just came over and stabbed fukuzawa with it AND THEN THEY JUST BOTH FUCKING MEMSHARED EACH OTHER IN THE WORST WAY
there was this kind of montage of all the people fukuzawa had adopted into his team, which included simon
and then simon's was this repressed memory he lost 18 years ago that suddenly came back and very clearly clarified who his father actually was
so as he's stabbing he's suddenly getting hit with the realizations that
1. his father actually just straight up abandoned him and never looked for him
2. knightley's father was the one that had been killed, probably by his, so most of this grudge he'd been holding all this time and GOTTEN HIM KILLED OVER had just been a big terrible misunderstanding
1. his father actually just straight up abandoned him and never looked for him
2. knightley's father was the one that had been killed, probably by his, so most of this grudge he'd been holding all this time and GOTTEN HIM KILLED OVER had just been a big terrible misunderstanding
it's still locked!!! but yes thank you
so he's like oh wow this is the best father figure i ever had actually and i have now killed two of the only people in my life who consistently stood up for me and cared about me even when i fucked them over, great
and then fukuzawa just??? fully heals his poison??? and hugs him before he dies?????????
WHOOPS there you go unlocked
which he cannot wrap his head around AT ALL and which is actually really distressing given those realizations he just had so he's just like
what the fuck what the fuck
and just kind of panicked and set a few things up in a daze and then shoved him off the cloud because he couldn't deal with feelings
where he just conveniently accidentally landed in an open grave since the outskirts of botham bordered cloudtopia lmao
so anyway it was just like. IT WAS VERY FUCKED UP AND CALCULATED... but he was also extremely emotionally fucked up in the aftermath of it
and just did not show that at all because, again, he managed to be a guy's bff for 18 years without him ever realizing he was acting and actually hated him. HE IS A VERY GOOD ACTOR
and in spite of his feelings he's also always going to prioritize his own safety and he didn't intellectually think there was anything wrong with what he did even if he felt weirdly shitty about it so there was never any chance that he was going to confess to it
anyway it worked out basically as planned so he was like ok maybe this will buy us some breathing room for a week
lmao
he did not realize until getting a note that weekend after he'd already done it that the erased still existed somewhere
and were able to contact them
and by tuesday the graveyard had sent messages to like. every single living person besides him. explicitly saying that he was a threat that needed to be killed
which he had no fucking idea about because no one told him anything
and everyone just kind of iced him out of shit all week and ignored him and he was like ?? DO THEY STILL FUCKING THINK I KILLED LAMBDA
also like. lmao. they knew shenhe was froggystyle after that trial and he'd talked to haru to try to find out if he knew about lambda too, and he just like. didn't think it made any sense to admit to one but not the other and did not consider that both of those murders had been done by the same team separately
haru made it very clear that he did know who killed lambda but he wouldn't tell him anything, or even give him a hint about where he might look for information himself so he didn't have to break his promise by actually revealing anything
so simon was just like ok cool you're dead to me
but anyway even though he did want to kill haru for that he never actually found out who it was that framed him which made it really ironic that the graveyard was warning everyone he was going to kill froggystyle for it
and like. cannot emphasize enough how much people plotting behind his back to harm him is a big trigger for him
and once he actually died and learned what everyone in the graveyard had been doing to him he was so immensely not okay with it lmao
and just got kind of freaked out any time he thought back to what had felt like normal interactions that week now that he knew they'd been secretly hating him and lying to his face
WHICH LIKE, HE DOES... HIMSELF... ALL THE TIME............. but
also he was fucking pissed that jonas was one of the people who killed him since he'd acted nice toward him after the lambda trial and said he believed him and would try to help prove his innocence so he was like lmao wow ok liar
he was like whatever about setsu because they'd never talked but jonas was like a personal insult
AS WAS FUCKING. YLFA. WHEN HE FOUND OUT IN THE GY.
anyway he had to like. actively try not to think too hard about what everyone there did to fuck him over or he would have totally snapped, and he very reluctantly cooperated with everyone's plans for the sake of making sure he could get out
after knowing what froggystyle did to him and feeling so personally betrayed by them he spent the rest of the game just despising them and spitballing their name on the scoreboard and desperately wishing for them all to die horribly
but still had to vote to give them their points at the end which made him want to barf
he STILL has really conflicted feelings on ylfa personally which is why i gave her an asterisk in her special hate row on the cr tiermaker, because he did have sympathy for her after seeing her memory and found it kind of relatable, and because he knows he WOULD have done the same thing she did
but he just like
cannot get past the personal betrayal and just gets so fucking upset and angry every time he thinks about it
so i feel like the asterisk is like
he'd kill her but then he'd feel kind of sad about it afterward
whereas the others in the hate row he'd just kill and it'd be great
it's just so tragically funny that practically every action he took in this game was because he was afraid of being targeted and trying to protect himself, and it just led to him getting an entire fucking campaign for his death behind his back that everyone around him was in on
this game so solidly and completely validated all of the extreme trust issues he has
it's like a fucking miracle that he isn't leaving much worse than he was when he came here, which is mostly because fei du and shenhe ended up being legitimately good friends for him in the gy, and because fukuzawa kept standing up for him and has been committed to helping him after this
and also getting that repressed memory back and inferring the truth about knightley like
put him in a weird place and he was stuck thinking about that A Lot and having to come to terms with it
that even though there are still things he can blame him for and even though he still thinks he was an obnoxious jackass and kind of hates him he didn't actually deserve what he did to him and was in fact the only person who ever really loved him
and he's been thinking a lot about like. what was going through his head when roland confronted him with that chisel from the chessboard, knowing simon had deliberately put it there and intended for this to happen
so there's some regret and guilt there that wouldn't have been there under any other circumstances which i think have also made him a little more open to admitting to mistakes and receptive to people who try to reach out to him
like even without knowing that he was already conflicted in canon which hurt me so bad
which is this memory scene, i made up the first few lines to round out the scene better but everything from knightley's 3rd line on is the actual game dialog, including simon's internal "......if only you hadn't stopped me eighteen years ago... it wouldn't have had... to come to this."
which is like. HE DIDN'T EVEN WANT TO DO THIS. HE KNEW HE WAS GOING TO HURT HIMSELF. AND HE WAS JUST SO DRIVEN BY THIS NEED FOR REVENGE THAT HE DID IT ANYWAY.
which made me feel REALLY good about what i did with the fukuzawa plan because that was so similar
that he's willing to kill the few people who stand by him when he doesn't even want to do it because he's just this emotional disaster that can't get over things and whose only approach to problems is to destroy them
oh the whole livio thing
he doesn't even know what to feel about that
so like, he felt that bond with him after their orphanage talk and liked him after that even if shit got awkward with the cyoa message thing
and while he's generally Not That Interested in anyone, i think if he did have a physical type it would probably be. big guys that he can dominate, lmao. so between those two things he ended up kind of weirdly attracted to him
and then like. pressured him into kissing him during confidence week
:eyes:
and THAT WAS ADMITTEDLY ALSO KIND OF A MANIPULATIVE THING because he wanted to try to get him to be solidly on his side and thought that would help... but also... he just wanted to do it...
anyway that kind of backfired like everything else because the gy sent out their propaganda messages like two hours later lmfao
after dying when he found out livio killed setsu he was like
"oh he got revenge for me" and was kind of touched by it lmfao NOT KNOWING HE'D ACTUALLY BEEN PLANNING TO KILL HIM IF SETSU HADN'T GOTTEN TO HIM FIRST
which he then felt super fucking betrayed by and kind of did a 180
WHICH IS JUST A RECURRING THEME HERE, any time he has any hint of a meaningful bond with anyone he just gets extremely fucked up about it if that person betrays him
and it led to this really funny mood whiplash between these messages
dkfjghdk those messages are so funny
also just really appreciate livio looking at this weird slutty anonymous message and being like "yeah that's simon"
anyway at least in this case some of the animosity was from misconceptions since he'd just never fucking told anyone anything
imagine how much of this could have been avoided if simon shared the cyoa message with livio before fukuzawa
KNOW
IT IS SO INSANE THAT THAT IS THE ROOT OF EVERYTHING
ALL THESE DEATHS
A FUCKING TEXT MESSAGE
also just the fact that
he would have shown him if he hadn't specified thursday
anyway i'm still not sure where we ended up on that lmao they resolved some things but also have some pretty strongly incompatible views
but also simon's still into him
stares at the ceiling
i think also like
given everything with knightley he is probably pretty experienced in separating his resentful feelings from his thirst
not that that's a good thing lmfao but
amelia and livio both got these long-ass defensive messages from him where he was just like LET ME JUST SPELL OUT EVERYTHING YOU'RE MISUNDERSTANDING BY PROVIDING THE FULL CONTEXT OF MY LIFE AND MY EMOTIONAL STATE AND MY THOUGHT PROCESSES AND CALCULATIONS but neither one actually had the full thing
like amelia's had the calculations that went into why he decided to kill fukuzawa but just skipped over all the details about what actually happened there because he was still feeling weird about it
and livio's specifically had those details since that was more what he'd asked about
also to be perfectly clear THERE WAS NEVER ANY MONKEY DUST
money got thrown into the lava and vaporized or whatever the fuck happens to bodies in lava, the dust was from simon trying to use the dustpan to disintegrate setsu's llama plush before they could use it on him
so they just accidentally used it on shu instead lmao
I DID ACTUALLY THINK MAYBE IT WAS A LLAMA PLUSH while going over things after
YEAH
and then i was like
but why did it get dusted
because simon used it? on an attacker? did a llama power-drill him to death?
but why did it get dusted
because simon used it? on an attacker? did a llama power-drill him to death?
yeah he didn't know what the fuck it was going to do so he just went to destroy it when it looked like they were going to use it on him
oh a game highlight for me was that he got to talk to anthy briefly because that has long been some of my dream cr
OH MY DELETED DRAFTS
ok so
when simon first got to the gy he was just fucking furious at everyone and was going to rage send some aggressively mean and fucked up messages to people
and i had written most of them out already
fhakj got distracted but ok ANYWAY like as he's about to press send the scoreboard updated and he saw justice was actually in the lead
and he was like "oh hm i guess i should probably not piss everyone off so hard that they revenge wipe my team"
so he went back into lying mode and sent much nicer texts than he was originally planning but i left the deleted drafts as strikethroughs on my comment because i thought it was funny
the bug eating pictures are
so funny
LMAO YEAH those were fun
anyway i'm falling asleep but i'm just going to keep coming back here as i think of things
these drafts are so funny
rolls back in I FORGOT TO MENTION THE END OF W2 because i just went from cyoa right into w3 trial
which was like. he still really didn't care about the case at all i'm so sorry buzen but he was still trying to act like a good friend to matsui since they'd been together a lot since getting red-threaded to each other the week before and it would look weird if he didn't pretend to care
but also he stayed on the opposite side of the cathedral from him the entire time they talked to minimize how much his own emotions came through even though matsui's were probably overwhelmingly bad enough that he wouldn't have noticed anyway lmao
anyway he started that conversation out similarly to when he talked to haru after rin died, where he was just like "yeah i understand because my best friend got murdered too, it's really hard :c"
which lmao was obviously bullshit
but then it took this turn into the more general subject of how having feelings sucks that he was actually totally sincere about
which was this part here
and i really loved that conversation because like. it was pretty much the only other sincere exchange he had with anyone before he died At All besides that one with livio a few days earlier and a few memshare things that bordered on it
and i liked getting to be kind of ominous with it with him being like "well since i'm stuck with these painful feelings i'm going to use them rather than letting it be for nothing" which was definitely referring to his channeling all his pain into motivation for revenge
but also the note that he knew it was never going to make him happy because gestures again at that conversation with knightley in the detention center
also he's like
such a fucking abrasive asshole once you get him to take the mask off and he does so much terrible stuff even to people who treat him well that it's really easy to just be like "well he's a crazy vengeful sociopath"
but he really isn't, and so much of what he does is rooted in how he was deeply hurt by people he cared about who betrayed him
and like, he actually did put himself at risk as a kid to save the life of the assassin who'd saved his
so he's still capable of caring about people, he's just extremely wary of them and isn't going to commit to caring until they've proven that they aren't going to hurt him
which is hard to do lmfao like kay and edgeworth were both super supportive of him and nothing but nice to him
but edgeworth was still part of The System so he was never going to trust him
+ he was committing crimes so obviously they were going to end up opposed eventually lmao
and here since everyone was literally out to kill each other it was going to be pretty much impossible for him to get to that point with anyone
and he only kind of did with fukuzawa because he was still willing to forgive and support him after he stabbed him in the back, though it was still kind of rocky for a while once he heard he'd been in on the gy campaign against him
also want to note like. that there are some similarities between fukuzawa and dogen that are pretty funny, in that they're both former assassins who wear traditional japanese clothes and like animals
so simon has A Type for father figures i guess
THE OTHER W2 THING
is that he started letting down his guard a little with rang once emotionshare was already making it obvious that he wasn't actually scared of him anymore and kind of liked him
and then that fucking execution happened and he watched him departicle
which was like WHOOF because he was the person he thought he saw the most of himself in so that was kind of traumatic, making it really obvious that this could happen to him!!! he could unfairly die an angry emotional trainwreck for no fucking reason!!!!
so that just upset him and put him more on edge than he already had been which did not improve ever
which was also why there was absolutely no way in hell he would have ever killed a second teammate
bringing it down to three was very carefully calculated but taking it down to two and putting him at immediate risk of that same fate would have never happened in a million years because the memory of that execution was just really deeply ingrained in him
oh also circling back to the part about him potentially being able to care about people if they proved themselves, that was why he actually could kind of legitimately care about amelia a little even if he was still iffy on the justice thing
ON THAT NOTE his being on a team called justice was just so deliciously ironic in multiple ways
and the fact that he was a two faced murdering asshole is like, the least of them
he has this huuuuuuge vendetta against the justice system in his world because of people like blaise and thinks the whole thing is totally corrupt to the core
and when he first met amelia actually and she started talking about justice he was extremely 
about it
about it
and also his entire canon is basically just like
his big vigilante justice plot
so it was pretty amazing
and when he left them that note that was like "if you really want justice to prevail you have to be a little ruthless" that was definitely intended to have a double meaning where he was half talking about the team winning
and half like
commenting on what he saw as the reality of justice in the world and how it's always skewed and you have to get your hands dirty sometimes to set things right
hdfjk also as i'm stalking maple's lore plurk and seeing "He keeps everyone in line if they start being too crazy." i'm just laughing because of how true that was in this game too
me to pom the week after he died lmfao
the bomb thread is still like my favorite thing in the game
I actually felt so bad bc i made you help me buy it and i was like ok i will put it in the warehouse
(Livio finds out simongate)
Takes the bomb away
just the oh ok!
I WAS SAD BECAUSE I WAS GONNA USE IT
AND SIMON WAS FUCKING PISSED ABOUT IT LMAO
like I CONTRIBUTED TO THIS FUND DON'T TAKE MY BOMB AWAY
Also how hysterical it was that amelia is like ITS OK TO BLOW PPL UP IF ITS FOR JUSTICE
simon: oh ok
my favorite tag i did all game
Yes im sorry livio was like makes you pay 15 dollars and you never get to use the bomb
he died with $2 to his name
this was my second favorite tag
which was to rang when they were ironically talking about blimps exploding on weekend 0
ok PROBABLY LAST BIG THING TO ADD is where he is at the end of all this
fukuzawa had invited him to come back to his world with him a while back before he knew that was a thing and he was like well i still have this revenge to finish first in my own world but that might not be bad after that
and then on endgame day he finally gets around to asking an npc if he can go back to his own world first to wrap things up or if it's just a one way ticket deal where you have to make a permanent choice right then
and it was the latter so he was like
oh
and was like really fucking depressed through the last party and everything trying to decide what the fuck to do
because on one hand... he doesn't trust fucking sebastian to not fuck things up and thinks he has to be there to keep things in line and ensure that roland and blaise get convicted, which, like, is fair
and since he actually got his canonically late game revelation earlier here and had time to dwell on things and actually feel some remorse he's like, if i just leave this half done and it falls through then what the fuck did i get knightley and jill crane killed for
which tbf is more of a "i don't want to have to deal with feeling bad" thing than actually feeling obligated to make anything up to them but still
and also there's still the body double to take care of
but on the other hand he fucking hates his world and his only attachment to it outside of his revenge mission now is dogen, who's like, 90 and isn't exactly a long term reason to stay
where he's kind of like well i think i'm going to just be unhappy and unsatisfied either way actually
but he DID finally decide to go with fukuzawa, which was kind of for part of the same reason he went along with the froggystyle plan despite hating it, which is that he doesn't want to keep letting things he hates have so much power over him that he fucks himself over and ruins his own life
plus his canon point lmfao
was
while he was in a hot air balloon getting shot at by the body double
so he's like NOT 100% SURE THAT HE WON'T JUST IMMEDIATELY GET SHOT AND DIE IF HE GOES BACK
SO he's going to go start a new life and hopefully shenhe can figure out how to go murder sebastian's dad for him
so somehow he actually managed to get a kind of ok ending out of this still despite how bad things got
WHICH IS ALSO KIND OF REFLECTIVE OF CANON, where even though he was still going to prison he also had dogen coming to find him and protect him and it was really sweet 
being like "come on, prison can be our home together, we'll be fine"
being like "come on, prison can be our home together, we'll be fine"
i really appreciate AAI2 for a million reasons because it's just fucking fantastic but especially because they do a really good job presenting him as morally grey and making it really clear that even though he's an asshole that did inexcusable things and needs to pay for it he was also only like that because the people around him and the system just
kept screwing him over every step of the way
shenhe serial dad murderer
and edgeworth ends up deciding to stay a prosecutor specifically because he wants to make the system better so that there aren't more victims like simon
shenhe's the best
so THAT'S BASICALLY IT I THINK... FINALLY... AT ALMOST 350 COMMENTS
Fukuzawa just tucks Simon under his arm and runs off to Yokohama
oh j/k another note was the fact that the gy was the first time in 12 years that he didn't have to actively worry that someone was going to murder him BECAUSE THEY ALREADY HAD so he finally got to like. sleep and relax some. which i think also helped keep him from going off the deep end out of rage lmao
and made it easier for him to have some positive interactions
between not having to fear for his life (aside from if they lost the game but that seemed pretty locked in already by the time he was dead) and not having to keep playing a character and being able to just say whatever he actually felt for the most part
he was just infinitely more relaxed in the gy than at any point in the last 18 years of his existence
ALSO
i had him get drilled through the neck so it would be in exactly the same place where knightley got stabbed with the chisel
i had him get drilled through the neck so it would be in exactly the same place where knightley got stabbed with the chisel
and had him bleed from his eye so that it was like a clown makeup tear lmao
character development...
HE GOT A LOT OF IT, SURPRISINGLY..........
just like... almost all after he died lmfao
im glad he decided to go with fukuzawa
i need to hibernate a bit before i think about threads but livio would have told him to go with fukuzawa and forget his revenge plot
yes please hibernate
OH LET ME ALSO... explain my username... which is not that complex but i just like it
unsweeten is on the obvious surface level a reference to the fact that he doesn't like sweets, but also to like
the way he lost his pastry chef dad, and to the way he used to be a sweet kid who just turned hard and bitter over time
unsweetened would have been better but a ciel account has it so rip
it's still so fucking funny how many nice things just have traumatic associations for him
with both sweets and christmas being intimately linked to being abandoned and almost freezing to death
people kept offering him ice cream and milkshakes when they were trying to be nice and he was just like .................thanks..... 
and he was kind of relieved that he died before christmastown happened because he would have been soooo miserable there
watching the gingerbread house contest minievent from the gy that week like "ah a christmas dessert contest........... cool...................."
he could bond with estelle over that i guess
yeah!
the hate of sweets is one point against simon though it is an understandable one "what about the everything else" eh
TO BE FAIR HE LOVED THEM ORIGINALLY
but i'm glad that's the closest thing to being a deal breaker lmao
in other news i'm reading through some pcs and i'm crying bloodthirstiest villainous THIS ONE WHERE YLFA TOLD NAHIDA TO TELL SIMON SHE WAS SORRY
THAT DID NOT HAPPEN
AND HE WOULD HAVE BEEN SIGNIFICANTLY LESS MAD IF IT HAD
THAT WAS MAINLY BC
OOCLY I KEPT
NOT BEING ABLE TO CATCH PEOPLE covers face
IT'S FINE LMAO IT'S JUST SO FUNNY
because the fact that she never said anything to him and he had to learn it from lambda is part of what pissed him off so much
this game is truly incredible in how many miniscule things affected things so hugely
its like
oops i hit enter too fast
yeah listen its the trauma crossover
he doesn't like small animals because of trauma, simon doesnt like sweets because of trauma, we handshake we move on
honestly simon doesn't actually feel that strongly about animals he's just good at making them do things lmao
but i guess he's leaving this game with two rats and a red duck in addition to a monkey
maybe he can bring the rainbow welcome mat from the warehouse too, that thing ruled
and i guess
whatever he got from bad dragon
this is so much
this is fair
HIS BAD DRJEKYHJR
HELPPP I LOVE YOU SIMON
sisi fyi i'm still writing your tlcr i keep getting tired and stopping lmao but IT'S IN PROCESS, i have more to say than i thought i would