Just a quick check-in with the mystery twins, to see whether they’re bearing the news of their most recent setback with grace*.
And they do, indeed! It’s only fitting, but still good to see. And, yeah, one of them flies into a bout of rage before falling into utter desperation. But it’s a graceful rage, followed by graceful desperation, so it still counts as with grace. In situations like these, it really helps if you’re a bishounen equipped with implausible amounts of androgynous beauty, plus the usual trappings of culture and elegance, like ancien regime uniforms, roses, fine porcelain, etc.
Plus, the meltdown is not only graceful and refined, it’s also relatively short – because twin B moves in immediately to calm twin A down and turn his mind toward other things. Very supportive of him. And very effective, too – he’s going straight for the romance card, which generally works best in such circumstances, and has the added advantage of counting as fanservice. What’s he doing having a romance card in the first place? Well, beautiful twins in Japanese popular culture… >_> …going back centuries…nearly always have romance cards to use on each other. It’s a bit different from the Western concept of brotherly love, but roughly not totally dissimilar *hectic handwaving* if you squint and hold your head like so. Let’s just say that the streets of Philadelphia are quite the 6-lane highway in manga and anime…
More on Thursday.
* Let’s just not bother with inquiries into how they learned of said setback so quickly. Perhaps they were watching the whole thing, stylishly hidden in the shadows, or perhaps they had some henchman or drone posted on look-out. Or perhaps they just knew – either by some mystic/telepathic bond between their monsters and themselves, or just because they’re familiar enough with the genre.
Frankly, if you throw a powerful monster at the heroes and aren’t expecting it to fail, you’re doing it wrong.
And of course you can still be (gracefully) disappointed. Expecting and hoping are much different, after all!
And even if you’re neither surprised nor disappointed, you still might want to give that impression on the outside… otherwise, your other monsters, still waiting in the wings, might suffer a loss of motivation and morale. XD
My dear brother, I write you in deep melancholy…
Yeah, pretty much the same relationship, just with some added distance necessitating the use of letters. XD