a study in leather
365 Gay Sharks
Day 239, Word Count: 2503
Theme: August; The Dog Days are Over (Apocalypse)
This post is part of the 365 Gay Sharks project. If you would like to learn more about this project, click here to read more about it. :D
Originally this was going to be a fic, but I couldn't quite make it work as a fic, so I decided to just ramble nonsensically (mostly to myself) instead. I'm sure you're all delighted by this turns of events. Actually, you're probably not because I'm about to spend roughly 2.5k nattering on about Roxas/Neku/Sora as an (im)probable pairing and why they would totally be into leather.
I'm not joking.
See, when I think of leather I think of fucking Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy. Sometimes it feels like those games are nothing more than Nomura's love letter to leather, belts, and zippers, but that's not really what we're here to talk about. No, we're here to talk about some very specific costumes of his and why I feel like if Roxas/Neku/Sora is a awesome candidate for this kink. I mean, other than the fact that I ship it like FedEx, regardless of how improbable and crazy it is in canon.
I mean, you've got Roxas and Sora who are the same person (only they're different parts of the same person and please don't get me started on Xion) and you've got Neku, who doesn't even live in the same universe. The crossover itself isn't that hard to make, though, as the games are published by the same company and The Reaper's Game is pretty easy to cram into any canon. You can futz it a little and voila! You have Sora and Neku in the same place. The harder part is getting Roxas there, although I suppose that since the UG is a weird and mystical place, it could just split them into two people. Or maybe Roxas gets entered into the Reaper's Game so he can gain his own body. You can have a lot of fun with the way they end up in the same place, I think. Or you could just handwave all semblance of logical crossover and make it an AU where Roxas and Sora are two people and have moved to Shibuya from someplace else because that's the kind of thing you can do in fanfiction and no one even bats an eyelash. That could be fun too.
Heck, you could even just screw canon altogether and go with Another Day. Roxas and Sora could be transfer students and they could help Neku get everyone's pins back. Roxas would be very reluctant at first, but Sora would be so gungho for it that Roxas would just have to go along with his ideas. This was actually how I was trying to write the story, but it just wasn't coming together in a way I felt was good, so I abandoned it for other prospects. Namely, this essay. Maybe you'll have better luck where I failed, though-it's entirely possible I just didn't think of that last thing that would have made everything fall into place.
Anyway, so now that we've solved that pesky problem and you've got the OT3 (or rather, my OT3) in place, let's get into the real heart and soul of what I want to talk about here: what makes this pairing a good candidate for a leather kink?
To get at that, you really have to go back to the canons. The connection is, I think, fairly obvious for Kingdom Hearts: the world is full of leather. Roxas' Organization coat is made of it, parts of Sora's costume in Kingdom Hearts 2 could certainly be made of leather, and the material almost seems to denote a level of power in the characters wearing it.
No really. Look for something on the character that could be made of leather in Kingdom Hearts 2. If you can't find any, then that probably means they don't really have any offensive powers (See: Namine, Kairi, most of the residents of Twilight Town). It's not a perfect analogy, especially in the first game, but considering that certain materials are sometimes thought to be more powerful than others-or more magical-it's not a surprising one. Even with the first game, it could always just be that the characters haven't come into their powers yet and therefore haven't earned their leather.
The concept carries over to The World Ends with You as well, being that a large part of the game is centered around what you wear and how popular the pins you're using are. A lot of the leather items wearable are, unsurprisingly, Neku's and they tend to have fairly decent boosts and abilities. You can pretty much dress Neku in leather from head to toe and it would be a good choice to make if you gave him the right pins. There are other, better items to dress him in but since what's popular is such a big component of the game, it's not inconceivable that Neku would gravitate towards leather if Tigre Punks happened to be popular and he thought it would help him out. After spending the week with Shiki, I think Neku's probably come to terms with the fact that brands are actually important and he has to pay attention to that shit no matter how much he doesn't want to.
More importantly, even though Neku isn't much into the trends, I think that he'd still be intrigued by new fashions, because fashion is so integral to his Shibuya. It dictates how powerful you are, in some instances, and even if Roxas was wearing his Twilight Town outfit instead of his Organization 13 coat (But come on the coat looks so much cooler. Also it doesn't exist in whatever semi-dreamworld place Twilight Town actually is. Oh Kingdom Hearts, your canon is so complicated sometimes why do I love you so much.), the look is quite a bit different from what would normally be found in Shibuya in the regular course of the game. That's not even considering the outfit that Sora, who has a look quite his own, might be wearing.
Beyond that, though, both canons are rather concerned with power and since leather is generally thought of to symbolize power (even beyond an S&M context as being luxury and therefore power) it kind of makes sense that they would naturally gravitate towards leather as a Thing. That might not be the reason they choose to vocalize, because it's the kind of thing people don't tend to think about but it's still a contributing factor to the reasons why people like things. Owing that Sora comes from an island where leather might not have even existed (or existed in small quantities) and Roxas appears to have shifted from a place where leather is king to a place where there's hardly any at all, I think it's safe to say that they both might have associations with the material that they don't even realize.
Plus leather is just awesome. I mean, yes it is bad for animals and everything, but Neku, Roxas and Sora don't actually display any qualms about eating meat (and I doubt they would, especially since most of Neku's favorite foods involve meat) so I think they'd be okay with leather. Anyway, like I was saying before I interrupted myself, leather is awesome. I can be both buttery smooth and yet nearly indestructible and able to put up with a lot of wear and tear. So yeah, I think some teenage boys that are probably used to torn clothing from fighting would appreciate some leather. It's not impervious, but it can keep you safe and it's got a really awesome history behind it. Sure, the history in the canons presented probably differs from the actual history of leather but since it exists in both canons, I think it's safe to say that it probably still has a rich and varied history. It may not include Moroccan leather or any of the other old traditions we have, but there's gotta be something.
That an interesting idea actually. What would the stories behind leather in Neku's Shibuya, Sora's Destiny Islands or Roxas' Twilight Town be? Would they mirror our own, or would they be based in legends and magic? Maybe I should have just written a story about that, it certainly would have been more useful than this mindless babble. Which. I just realized something that was probably a little foolish of me. I never actually explained why Roxas/Neku/Sora is something I'm so gung-ho for.
A lot of that, not even going to lie, has to do with the fact that I just like the idea of mirrors and doubles, and there's a lot of that going on when you put those three together. They could be twins, or long-lost brothers, and the fact you can look at a person and go you could be me has never not amazed me. It's part of the reason why, I think, character's like Hänsel and Gretel from Black Lagoon are so interesting to me (probably also has to do with incest being the new slash, but that's a topic for another day). Then you have Roxas and Sora who are literally the same person, just different aspects. I've always felt that Sora, after being split into so many different pieces, would have a similar problem as, say, Voldemort where he had a hard time deciding who he was and what he was. I don't think he could be whole, even being reunited with Roxas, because something in him will always be a little broken.
Similarly, being responsible for almost everything in The Wold Ends With You, I get the feeling that Neku would want someone who understand that immense sadness that comes from saving the world and, once it's fixed, not having anyone understand precisely what you've done. Joshua, of course, might be able to fill this role for Neku, but is ultimately different enough from Neku that I don't think they would work out. Neku wants an equal, not a superior, and Joshua will definitely always be superior (even in Another Day).
So you have these two people, both broken in slightly different ways and with the burden of knowing that they've saved the world and now everything is better but they've seen the worst things that the world can offer and faced off against them. And now that the world is saved, they've got nothing to support them. Their friends try, I'm sure their friends try, but in Neku's case they're probably trying to understand him but they're not really like him so it;s a wash. In Sora's case, his friends have their own demons and I don't think Sora would ask them to support him in that way, because they do support him and he knows that it's just that he had a lot of growing up to do in almost no time at all and there's this other person inside him that he talks to sometimes but mostly Sora feels a little bit out-of -sorts. He and Roxas are a unit, and Sora's sensitive to making Roxas happy too but mostly Roxas misses Axel and Sora can't do anything about that.
Because of that, maybe Sora travels to another world called Shibuya and finds a person who looks like him, could be his brother, and he's different (more like Roxas than Sora himself), but Sora finds himself smiling and knowing that everything will be all right again because Roxas seems to be warming up to Neku too. And Neku! Neku, who's so closed off sometimes and his friends worry, finds himself smiling at this strange, kind of Shiki-esque boy with a smile that's brighter than the son and maybe when they're lying on Neku's bed late at night, Sora tells Neku about Roxas, all worried that Neku is going to freak out on him only Neku's all "huh that's cool" instead. Sora should have expected it, maybe, but he's still pleased and so sometimes, after that, Sora will tell Neku when Roxas has said something.
And then, gradually, they find that they're good for each other (and Neku maybe finds himself falling for both Sora and this Roxas who talk to him sometimes). Sora and Neku tentatively start edging out a relationship, although Neku knows it's more like he's dating both Sora and Roxas because you can't really have one without the other and Shiki's like "Neku, I'm so happy for you!" and Beat is like "you hurt Phones and I'mma break your face" and Rhyme just smiles. Then, then! Sora (who's been writing to Riku and Kairi because lord knows he could not be away from them for long without communicating, post-KHII) is like "hey, Neku? you wanna come on a trip with me?" and Neku shrugs and says sure so they go back to Destiny Islands and Kairi and Riku are happy that Sora seems to be happier than he was when he left and Neku seems okay. Riku maybe pulls Sora aside and asks how Roxas is, during all of this, and Sora says that Roxas is okay, Roxas likes Neku too.
The whole leather thing happens by degrees, because they're just sort of working themselves out and then, like a lot of the time, maybe Sora spend an overlong time running his fingers over Neku's leather jacket or maybe he stares a little more whenever Neku's wearing Tigre Punks, but the point is that Neku's sort of like "you like leather, don't you?" and Sora's kind of shy about it but yes, yes he does and Roxas likes it even more than Sora does. So they test that out, find out that it's really a way for them to be okay in their own skins again and Roxas is like "maybe that's what we needed" and Sora laughs, relaying what Roxas has said to Neku and they live happily leather after. (Haha, I'm funny except for how I'm not.)
And now, if you're still reading, you're probably like "Reili, why didn't you just write THAT story for your damn leather latex rubber square it would have saved you a lot of pointless meta and I kind of just have to shrug and say, truthfully, that it's because I just thought of it. Also because even if it had occurred to me earlier, this is the kind of story that takes me months and months to write and kink bingo is ending soon so I wouldn't have finished it anyway. Basically, the whole point of this entry has been me brainmusing to myself and I'm just posting it so that I will remember to write this story later because I was metaing and then it turned into me not-ficcing because what is coherent thoughts?
Which is why I told you in the beginning what I was going to babble about and this is probably terribly incoherent at this point but I'm not really that sorry for you if you read it all. The quality of my meta is pretty bad to be honest, I'm sorry you have to deal with it.
This entry originally posted here. Original entry currently has
comments. :D
Day 239, Word Count: 2503
Theme: August; The Dog Days are Over (Apocalypse)
This post is part of the 365 Gay Sharks project. If you would like to learn more about this project, click here to read more about it. :D
Originally this was going to be a fic, but I couldn't quite make it work as a fic, so I decided to just ramble nonsensically (mostly to myself) instead. I'm sure you're all delighted by this turns of events. Actually, you're probably not because I'm about to spend roughly 2.5k nattering on about Roxas/Neku/Sora as an (im)probable pairing and why they would totally be into leather.
I'm not joking.
See, when I think of leather I think of fucking Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy. Sometimes it feels like those games are nothing more than Nomura's love letter to leather, belts, and zippers, but that's not really what we're here to talk about. No, we're here to talk about some very specific costumes of his and why I feel like if Roxas/Neku/Sora is a awesome candidate for this kink. I mean, other than the fact that I ship it like FedEx, regardless of how improbable and crazy it is in canon.
I mean, you've got Roxas and Sora who are the same person (only they're different parts of the same person and please don't get me started on Xion) and you've got Neku, who doesn't even live in the same universe. The crossover itself isn't that hard to make, though, as the games are published by the same company and The Reaper's Game is pretty easy to cram into any canon. You can futz it a little and voila! You have Sora and Neku in the same place. The harder part is getting Roxas there, although I suppose that since the UG is a weird and mystical place, it could just split them into two people. Or maybe Roxas gets entered into the Reaper's Game so he can gain his own body. You can have a lot of fun with the way they end up in the same place, I think. Or you could just handwave all semblance of logical crossover and make it an AU where Roxas and Sora are two people and have moved to Shibuya from someplace else because that's the kind of thing you can do in fanfiction and no one even bats an eyelash. That could be fun too.
Heck, you could even just screw canon altogether and go with Another Day. Roxas and Sora could be transfer students and they could help Neku get everyone's pins back. Roxas would be very reluctant at first, but Sora would be so gungho for it that Roxas would just have to go along with his ideas. This was actually how I was trying to write the story, but it just wasn't coming together in a way I felt was good, so I abandoned it for other prospects. Namely, this essay. Maybe you'll have better luck where I failed, though-it's entirely possible I just didn't think of that last thing that would have made everything fall into place.
Anyway, so now that we've solved that pesky problem and you've got the OT3 (or rather, my OT3) in place, let's get into the real heart and soul of what I want to talk about here: what makes this pairing a good candidate for a leather kink?
To get at that, you really have to go back to the canons. The connection is, I think, fairly obvious for Kingdom Hearts: the world is full of leather. Roxas' Organization coat is made of it, parts of Sora's costume in Kingdom Hearts 2 could certainly be made of leather, and the material almost seems to denote a level of power in the characters wearing it.
No really. Look for something on the character that could be made of leather in Kingdom Hearts 2. If you can't find any, then that probably means they don't really have any offensive powers (See: Namine, Kairi, most of the residents of Twilight Town). It's not a perfect analogy, especially in the first game, but considering that certain materials are sometimes thought to be more powerful than others-or more magical-it's not a surprising one. Even with the first game, it could always just be that the characters haven't come into their powers yet and therefore haven't earned their leather.
The concept carries over to The World Ends with You as well, being that a large part of the game is centered around what you wear and how popular the pins you're using are. A lot of the leather items wearable are, unsurprisingly, Neku's and they tend to have fairly decent boosts and abilities. You can pretty much dress Neku in leather from head to toe and it would be a good choice to make if you gave him the right pins. There are other, better items to dress him in but since what's popular is such a big component of the game, it's not inconceivable that Neku would gravitate towards leather if Tigre Punks happened to be popular and he thought it would help him out. After spending the week with Shiki, I think Neku's probably come to terms with the fact that brands are actually important and he has to pay attention to that shit no matter how much he doesn't want to.
More importantly, even though Neku isn't much into the trends, I think that he'd still be intrigued by new fashions, because fashion is so integral to his Shibuya. It dictates how powerful you are, in some instances, and even if Roxas was wearing his Twilight Town outfit instead of his Organization 13 coat (But come on the coat looks so much cooler. Also it doesn't exist in whatever semi-dreamworld place Twilight Town actually is. Oh Kingdom Hearts, your canon is so complicated sometimes why do I love you so much.), the look is quite a bit different from what would normally be found in Shibuya in the regular course of the game. That's not even considering the outfit that Sora, who has a look quite his own, might be wearing.
Beyond that, though, both canons are rather concerned with power and since leather is generally thought of to symbolize power (even beyond an S&M context as being luxury and therefore power) it kind of makes sense that they would naturally gravitate towards leather as a Thing. That might not be the reason they choose to vocalize, because it's the kind of thing people don't tend to think about but it's still a contributing factor to the reasons why people like things. Owing that Sora comes from an island where leather might not have even existed (or existed in small quantities) and Roxas appears to have shifted from a place where leather is king to a place where there's hardly any at all, I think it's safe to say that they both might have associations with the material that they don't even realize.
Plus leather is just awesome. I mean, yes it is bad for animals and everything, but Neku, Roxas and Sora don't actually display any qualms about eating meat (and I doubt they would, especially since most of Neku's favorite foods involve meat) so I think they'd be okay with leather. Anyway, like I was saying before I interrupted myself, leather is awesome. I can be both buttery smooth and yet nearly indestructible and able to put up with a lot of wear and tear. So yeah, I think some teenage boys that are probably used to torn clothing from fighting would appreciate some leather. It's not impervious, but it can keep you safe and it's got a really awesome history behind it. Sure, the history in the canons presented probably differs from the actual history of leather but since it exists in both canons, I think it's safe to say that it probably still has a rich and varied history. It may not include Moroccan leather or any of the other old traditions we have, but there's gotta be something.
That an interesting idea actually. What would the stories behind leather in Neku's Shibuya, Sora's Destiny Islands or Roxas' Twilight Town be? Would they mirror our own, or would they be based in legends and magic? Maybe I should have just written a story about that, it certainly would have been more useful than this mindless babble. Which. I just realized something that was probably a little foolish of me. I never actually explained why Roxas/Neku/Sora is something I'm so gung-ho for.
A lot of that, not even going to lie, has to do with the fact that I just like the idea of mirrors and doubles, and there's a lot of that going on when you put those three together. They could be twins, or long-lost brothers, and the fact you can look at a person and go you could be me has never not amazed me. It's part of the reason why, I think, character's like Hänsel and Gretel from Black Lagoon are so interesting to me (probably also has to do with incest being the new slash, but that's a topic for another day). Then you have Roxas and Sora who are literally the same person, just different aspects. I've always felt that Sora, after being split into so many different pieces, would have a similar problem as, say, Voldemort where he had a hard time deciding who he was and what he was. I don't think he could be whole, even being reunited with Roxas, because something in him will always be a little broken.
Similarly, being responsible for almost everything in The Wold Ends With You, I get the feeling that Neku would want someone who understand that immense sadness that comes from saving the world and, once it's fixed, not having anyone understand precisely what you've done. Joshua, of course, might be able to fill this role for Neku, but is ultimately different enough from Neku that I don't think they would work out. Neku wants an equal, not a superior, and Joshua will definitely always be superior (even in Another Day).
So you have these two people, both broken in slightly different ways and with the burden of knowing that they've saved the world and now everything is better but they've seen the worst things that the world can offer and faced off against them. And now that the world is saved, they've got nothing to support them. Their friends try, I'm sure their friends try, but in Neku's case they're probably trying to understand him but they're not really like him so it;s a wash. In Sora's case, his friends have their own demons and I don't think Sora would ask them to support him in that way, because they do support him and he knows that it's just that he had a lot of growing up to do in almost no time at all and there's this other person inside him that he talks to sometimes but mostly Sora feels a little bit out-of -sorts. He and Roxas are a unit, and Sora's sensitive to making Roxas happy too but mostly Roxas misses Axel and Sora can't do anything about that.
Because of that, maybe Sora travels to another world called Shibuya and finds a person who looks like him, could be his brother, and he's different (more like Roxas than Sora himself), but Sora finds himself smiling and knowing that everything will be all right again because Roxas seems to be warming up to Neku too. And Neku! Neku, who's so closed off sometimes and his friends worry, finds himself smiling at this strange, kind of Shiki-esque boy with a smile that's brighter than the son and maybe when they're lying on Neku's bed late at night, Sora tells Neku about Roxas, all worried that Neku is going to freak out on him only Neku's all "huh that's cool" instead. Sora should have expected it, maybe, but he's still pleased and so sometimes, after that, Sora will tell Neku when Roxas has said something.
And then, gradually, they find that they're good for each other (and Neku maybe finds himself falling for both Sora and this Roxas who talk to him sometimes). Sora and Neku tentatively start edging out a relationship, although Neku knows it's more like he's dating both Sora and Roxas because you can't really have one without the other and Shiki's like "Neku, I'm so happy for you!" and Beat is like "you hurt Phones and I'mma break your face" and Rhyme just smiles. Then, then! Sora (who's been writing to Riku and Kairi because lord knows he could not be away from them for long without communicating, post-KHII) is like "hey, Neku? you wanna come on a trip with me?" and Neku shrugs and says sure so they go back to Destiny Islands and Kairi and Riku are happy that Sora seems to be happier than he was when he left and Neku seems okay. Riku maybe pulls Sora aside and asks how Roxas is, during all of this, and Sora says that Roxas is okay, Roxas likes Neku too.
The whole leather thing happens by degrees, because they're just sort of working themselves out and then, like a lot of the time, maybe Sora spend an overlong time running his fingers over Neku's leather jacket or maybe he stares a little more whenever Neku's wearing Tigre Punks, but the point is that Neku's sort of like "you like leather, don't you?" and Sora's kind of shy about it but yes, yes he does and Roxas likes it even more than Sora does. So they test that out, find out that it's really a way for them to be okay in their own skins again and Roxas is like "maybe that's what we needed" and Sora laughs, relaying what Roxas has said to Neku and they live happily leather after. (Haha, I'm funny except for how I'm not.)
And now, if you're still reading, you're probably like "Reili, why didn't you just write THAT story for your damn leather latex rubber square it would have saved you a lot of pointless meta and I kind of just have to shrug and say, truthfully, that it's because I just thought of it. Also because even if it had occurred to me earlier, this is the kind of story that takes me months and months to write and kink bingo is ending soon so I wouldn't have finished it anyway. Basically, the whole point of this entry has been me brainmusing to myself and I'm just posting it so that I will remember to write this story later because I was metaing and then it turned into me not-ficcing because what is coherent thoughts?
Which is why I told you in the beginning what I was going to babble about and this is probably terribly incoherent at this point but I'm not really that sorry for you if you read it all. The quality of my meta is pretty bad to be honest, I'm sorry you have to deal with it.
This entry originally posted here. Original entry currently has
comments. :D