im gonna answer this because im bored as fawk rn. ok there’s a specific af25 that lives in my head and it is actually mostly reliant on af25 touya being as weird as he is because i do think af25 akito is like, similar enough to normal akito? meanwhile touya’s mindset is way different (seems like it anyway). i’ve talked about it a few times but i’m also really fond of just normal akito & af25 touya if you want the extra doomed evil flavor. because that starts to become very “you look like my partner but you’re nothing like him” horror stuff.

“ok you haven’t actually explained anything though” i’m gonna do that. what akito repeatedly says he appreciates the most about touya is that touya’s always there and willing to get back up whenever they get knocked down. that he never ever complained about it, just quietly stood up again and kept going. because that was belief in akito too; belief and trust in his dream & his ability to keep pushing toward it, so that some day they could make it come true. to me it’s the singular thing you can point to as what akito truly loves in touya because of how often he brings it up When talking about how much he appreciates touya (mainsto and wl2 come to mind specifically). akito is not someone who wants to be comforted or pitied or told to take a break if it’s too much for him. he’d actually really really really hate that and it’d probably make him even more reckless, thinking he’s being underestimated. especially from touya it’d be a perceived betrayal of that trust. a lapse in the belief akito thought touya had in him.

af2025 touya is on a team of villains whose entire goal is to stop people from working hard. like straight up their tagline is “we won’t let mankind give their all.” touya specifically is someone who carries this out through words (“i’ll reaffirm anything you say”) which. as you will notice. is antithetical to akito’s entire existence. they take the exact trait that akito adored so much in touya and inverted it completely. so it’s like… to akito, touya as zen koutei becomes someone he just can’t get along with at all, frustrated with these constant attempts to get him to “give up” <— how he’d take it anyway. touya… i think he’s still genuinely impressed by both akito/orange eagle for his relentless work ethic but his role on devoted evil kind of dictates he’s meant to put a stop to that. i imagine his worry about akito pushing himself too hard is in part genuine though. because he likes him and doesn’t want him getting hurt. it just (waving hands around vaguely) you know. akito’s whole thing.

they’re pretty much doomed in the secret identity way if they are friends outside of the herovillain thing. i never got into miraculous so don’t say anything about that. but i imagine there’s a possible confrontation of like. touya are you only doing these things and saying stuff like this because of your villain shit or do you actually feel this way? because if you’re doing this as a villain, i’m going to have to stop you since i’m the hero here. something like that.

if you throw normal akito/fuel akito tbh into the mix instead it gets worse (better) because he knows how “his” touya is supposed to be and zen koutei is nothing like him. you get to play with akito’s deeply moralistic thinking in that this version of touya becomes something unforgivable, in that he wears his partner’s face and speaks in his partner’s voice and says things akito would never ever want to hear out of his mouth. such an abject feeling of wrongness that brushes against how much he cares about touya. struggling with whether or not he should actually hear this guy out vs black/white thinking. i mention fuel because akito’s intro verse for it has him literally saying “do not reaffirm my weak points it’d actually make me worse” which again is exactly what zen koutei does.

i dunnooooo. i think it’s wonderfully doomed because zen koutei’s duty is one that is at complete odds with everything that makes akito himself and so i seriously doubt they’d be able to get along in any capacity. at least on akito’s end toward touya. it’s a really awesome flavor that i wish people did more with… hopefully this helps. smiles.

i like it so far! i felt pretty mixed on it up until compfire but after that rotation it started growing on me, esp the new npcs. there's interesting stuff being set up with rush beats that will probably come up again soon, limits/gao is pushing akty in a very curious direction that i hope colopale commits to re: passion and work ethic.

however yeah i agree sometimes it feels like i'm reading a sequel bc of the sheer impact ors had. RW arc had the benefit of needing to introduce us to the characters with the earlier focuses, but now with these the events do a lot less character work than they used to. which isn't to say it's totally absent but it's just different. i'm sure it'll get really good though once we get to rush beats

as for the translations; certainly for vbs i find the early event stories suffered from how ensekai translated them. they've gotten better as of late but i'm still not really huge on it. of course fan tls can have their issues too, so i wouldn't take them as word of god but most times they do capture the character voice better. so tentatively yes i would recommend it ^_^