On Canon, Part 2 - November 6th, 2021

Note: This was written in response to a prompt on the Fictionkind Dreamwidth, to discuss how much we align with canon and if it influences us.

This entry includes descriptions of neglect and abuse.

If the “Ivlis situation” is full of rage and a desire to destroy everyone who has ever hurt me, the “Mika situation” is full of fear and just wanting to be good enough to not disappoint others. As Mika Kagehira, member of the unit Valkyrie and expected to always perform at the very peak of artistry, failure was not an option. I was an ordinary bodily-human, in contrast to my otherworldly problems as the Flame Devil Ivlis, but powerlessness was something that I struggled with in both existences.

Canon, compared to my situation, started out seeming quite close. Ensemble Stars is a mobile game with new stories that release every couple weeks, approximately. This means that more information about my canon comes out quite frequently, and when I first started getting the feeling that I might be Mika, it was the latter half of 2016, and I had some feelings towards what “felt right” in the story. Noemata, as I’d call them now; feelings of how things were, so strong that I sometimes assumed they were canon. Memory troubles didn’t always help, as I sometimes mixed up what was confirmed canon and what simply felt so obvious to me that it was probably canon... right?

It went kind of like this:

Mid-2016. It sounds right, for the most part. I didn’t live with my family, nor did I commute, though. I wonder why my canon self would stay there, in that town where everyone hates us. When Itsuki, Oshi-san, picked me up from the dump where I’d been rummaging for plushies, I was younger, and he was younger, and it wasn’t already when I was going to enter highschool. It was a couple years before, when he picked me up, and I went to live with him, and never saw my town again.
Canon describes our difficulty with eating. I can’t remember if it covered our difficulty sleeping and in general taking care of myself. It’s been harder to re-check these things since the company that owns my canon itself swooped down and requested the takedown of our fandom’s translations. Arashi takes me out for cake, and I don’t eat it. Because Oshi-san told me not to eat some things, because my stomach hurts easily with food, because we were running low on funding due to the extravagance of our stages. All of that is true, and all of that is not true, because I cannot untangle how much of each point, to what degree, all of it was spoken about.

Fall 2016. The Halloween event, and my confusion reached its peak. My town was not friendly. My town was full of children who called me a monster for my eyes. I wasn’t human; I was just a monster taking human form. That’s what those mismatched eyes were: the mark of a monster. I was to be chased away with rocks. My house was dark and quiet and I hid in those shadows and breathed the little breaths of a monster.
So why would they say that the children of that town would come to see me at school, so far away from that town? That they love me, admire me, find me incredible? That they would consider me a big brother figure? That I helped take care of them? That I had been adopted?
Ah, I realized. My canon self not only had a kinder town, but that orphanage changed so much. They didn’t stay with the monster-makers, with the loud-voices and rocks and large, dark bags laid around the carpet behind the chairs.
Why do I still feel too large in my body, still like that small monster-child stilling his breath in the dark?
Oh, Magical Halloween. An awakening within an awakening. The event that shook me the most despite its relatively lighthearted content.

Winter 2016. Star Festival, hate and love. Because we yelled at Nazuna-nii for leaving, because he forgave Oshi-san for everything that happened, because Arashi nearly abandoned her own unit to help me, because they’d do anything for me, in the end. Because sometimes, I look upon them and see the people who care for me, each in their own sense, and sometimes, all I can see is the guilt of my own memories, because I abandoned them, in my own time. Because they pointed out that Oshi-san was treating me badly. Because unlike in canon, I couldn’t just laugh it off. Because the more desperate they became to save me from him, the more hateful I became towards their efforts.
My canon self moves forward with his life, with his friends dear to him, showing him different perspectives on life.
I pushed away my friends, leaned closer into Oshi-san’s ideals and plans for me, and only tolerated those who didn’t argue against his actions.
For a time, I hated him for this. My canon self, the one whose life went in a more positive direction. He didn’t drown in his paranoia, cut off his friends.

And for a couple years after that, there were stories, sure, but none as impactful as those, or they contained details I had already known and grown tired of.
In 2018, Human Comedy was released and made me even more bitter about Itsuki’s canonical progression to becoming a more decent person than how he was for me, but it’s in offline limbo and I don’t care to translate parts of it back to check details.

Then, in early 2020, the game released a sequel-of-sorts; the same game, the same account, but a year after the earlier one. This was a pretty big thing for everyone involved; it was pretty accepted that the timeline would never “move forward” and we’d just be stuck in the same looping year forever, with a few events here and there that described small bits of our past and future.
It showed even more about Valkyrie’s progression, how Itsuki was intent on shaping me to a self he felt was better than the other self he had forced me into. And so, after years of considering myself a crow (with pitch black feathers... “his favorite color,” I claimed in canon) and a doll (imperfect, but still crafted by his hands, ever since Nazuna-nii left us), I was now to be... human. Because he told me to be, because he decided that he wanted me to be his successor, and not just a doll dancing by the strings attached to his fingers. Of course my canon self agrees. He is everything to us.
Whether I would agree or not has no actual place here, since the Itsuki I know would never even entertain the idea of me being an equal of his. Everything in this sequel is effectively entirely divergent from my actual situation. I can barely recognize my canonical self nowadays.

There was another detail in canon that played out a bit differently for me, though it wasn’t as drastic as learning the differences in my past or relationships. Itsuki, in canon, has a doll named Mademoiselle. In canon, things are a bit vague in regards to what she is... some things paint him as a ventriloquist who pretends to speak through her when he feels anxious, some things paint her as a part of him that split off in the year before canon takes place. However, while we see her speak even when Itsuki is having trouble doing so, she is always expressed as being tied to her physical doll body, as if she can only speak through Itsuki when he is holding her and present to some extent. In my canon, ventriloquism was like a coverup for them actually being a system, and she didn’t have that limitation; she sometimes had to somewhat pretend to be him (and that “somewhat” is there because she wasn’t very good at it... I could tell it was her rather than him walking down the hall from a mile away. She holds herself entirely differently. But maybe people less attuned to his body language couldn’t tell as much), and was... overall more pleasant to spend time with.

How the source material has affected me... makes me bitter. We still have events, with new art, new stories. I cannot stand to read most of it, nowadays, especially if he happens to be present. Seeing him still makes me afraid. I see his eyes, hear his voice, feel that hazy feeling; velvet walls pressing in around me, and if I’m lucky, Tsumu-chan-senpai will be there with his gentle voice and talk him down. Smelling like old books and dust and a soft-but-scratchy old pullover, cozy clothing. Now, I can stay away from it, for the most part. No one should bother asking me what our last story was called, nor how it went down; I don’t feel the need to know that, anymore. I worked intensely on my canon’s wiki for around 5 years, and though it was helpful to the community, I still have bouts of lashing out at nothing, regretting everything I put in and everything I let hurt me, every time I pushed through dutifully putting up images and pages of him because it was my job, despite that sometimes—oh, I’m several cards forward, but I can’t recall—it doesn’t matter, now. KFF presence and non-kin-who-think-KFF-jokes-are-funny swarming all over the place. Good hecking riddance. Not to mention that every double of me I’ve met still worships the ground beneath his feet.

On a lighter note, my canon self’s favorite things to bring around with him were little round hard candies that we’d suck on often. In this world, we grew up bringing mints with us everywhere, liking their taste and texture, often having one in our mouth... Naturally, since we’ve always done this, it came far before we ever had exposure to my canon. Still, I find it the cutest of our similarities. Who needs exotraumatic memories when you have a sugar habit?