yumemigaoka | and no one tells you where you went wrong [open]

⭐ Who: Connor (

yourattention)
⭐ When: Throughout June
⭐ Where: Most prompts are waking world, but there's a Dream Sphere one too!
⭐ What: June catch-all
⭐ Warnings: Will warn if anything comes up!

1. 'cause i'm tap tap tapping on the glass [social media]

[His near complete radio silence in April did not go over well with the PR agent who works with his unit, so he was given a personal calendar with helpful suggestions about when to post and what. He's mostly been ignoring the calendar, because it always feels inauthentic when he's posting to a regimented schedule and his followers are used to small amounts of radio silence. On June 1st he posts a selfie to Instagram showing off his new manicure: bi flag ombre. It comes with a caption:]

New nails for wrath month. If you're in Yumemigaoka, come find me at Pride next weekend for a little gift!

[The rest of his Instagram posts in June are mostly promoting the videos on his YouTube channel with a few more Pride posts sprinkled in and also a singular thirst trap. You know, to keep his PR agent on her toes. His video uploads for the month to Myosotis are a glowing review of ~~Heartstopper~~ a Netflix show based on a queer graphic novel he previously reviewed, a negative review of an ARC he got off Netgalley about a Hunger Games clone he felt did not have good worldbuilding, a tier list ranking his personal book boyfriends along with some fan suggestions (his current book boyfriend is ~~Ronan Lynch~~ the main character from a YA fantasy series he recently read), and a recap of everything he read in June. Most of it was good, aside from the ARC he did a lengthier review on.]

2. i try to speak but nobody can hear [promised morning]

[School... has never really been Connor's strong suit. It's not that he's not smart. It's that he just doesn't vibe well with structured learning and he finds a lot of topics kind of boring. Literature? Connor gets that. He understands how it works. Math? That's witchcraft and the fact that he's bad at it cascades down into science sometimes. None of that really matters, though.

What matters is that because he arrived at school a little late, Connor was semi-randomly assigned a club. If his transfer hadn't been so sudden, Connor assumes they would have tried to keep a continuity to his extracurriculars and given him a spot on the swim team. He missed try-outs, though, so he was given a list of five clubs that were lacking members and that is how Connor ends up in... ikebana club. It's both not funny at all and hysterical to him that he's spent his whole life pointedly learning nothing about flowers because he hates being Dreamer Forget-Me-Not only to end up here, but nothing about his life is going right so he's trying to find the humor in it. And also learning a lot about ikebana.

Aside from regularly attending ikebana club, he also shows up to tutoring frequently, because if he goes to tutoring then he can avoid questions about why he hasn't been doing Torment Hunts or excursions. He's studying! He's still getting adjusted! No, he is definitely not avoiding doing those things because he's pretty sure everyone thinks he's useless as a Dreamer! Which is why he is also enrolled at Yumemigaoka Language School to improve his Japanese.

Is all the studying in-between his influencer work making his brain feel like mush? A little, but honestly not much more than most of his high school career so he's taking it as a win.

For people in his class, though, Connor might stop them at lunch or just after school toward the middle of the month and produce an envelope.]

Um... June 30th is my birthday, so party on August 1st? For Dreamers.

[He does not seem particularly enthused about this fact, but that might just be a consequence of his struggling to form coherent sentences. Listen, he has had marked improvement in the last few weeks!]

3. so i wait around for an answer to appear [asagi public library]

[By far the place Connor spends the most time, though, is across the river at the library. It's the closest thing to home he has in this foreign city, and he is still feeling homesick. Ostensibly, he's supposed to be planning his birthday party beyond the fact that he hired a DJ and booked the venue—a smaller nightclub in Koubai that were happy to let him take over for a private event and several thousand dollars. There should probably be some sort of catering and he still needs to figure out photo coverage.

So actually he just hired someone and told her to plan him a birthday party, because the one good thing about being a reality TV star is being able to hire people to do stuff for you. It frees up time for him to sit in a quiet corner of the library and struggle through some easier books in Japanese intended for children. It's still sort of studying, but he learned Spanish by brute force in three months the same way to talk to some of his teammates and this is the same thing. These aren't going on his reading tracker, though. Not everything he reads goes on there, even though he thinks his subscribers are probably under the impression that when he shares what he read in the a month it's literally everything he read. He reads a lot for reasons outside his channel, though, and keeps that to himself on purpose. People don't get every aspect of him. They don't.

Occasionally, Connor can be found in the children's section surrounded by two or three younger kids and reading to them in English. They sometimes stop him to ask questions and he answers in Japanese. For whatever reason, he seems much more at ease around the kids than he does when he's talking to people his own age or adults.]

4. when you're falling in a forest and there's nobody around [dream sphere]

[There's no escaping the Dream Sphere, really, but Connor has been trying to stay away from it as much as possible. He's well aware that even among other American Dreamers, who are sometimes not particularly well-respected in the Dreamer Community, The American Dream as a whole is like. Widely not considered to be... good. This is sort of what happens when you're created as a PR thing first and a functional unit second. It doesn't help that his signature move is... uh. Well.

It's like setting off a bomb. He has no control over the way the light bursts out of him, the way it burns across everything and purifies. Does it almost always work to take out a Torment? Yeah, but it also blinds all his teammates which has not historically worked out well. The unit calls it "bringing an atom bomb to a gun fight," which is roughly true. Theoretically, he should be able to do the same thing at a smaller level and refine his control of light, he just hasn't figured out how. He knows how manipulate the amount of light and shadow in a space and to pull the shadows around himself and step out in a different spot. Those are reliable, but even figuring out he could do that was like pulling teeth and for a while everyone was unsure if he had powers. After all, what kind of weapon is a paintbrush?

Still. After two months of sulking, it's possible to stumble on him in the Dream Sphere desperately attempting the do something, anything with light. Currently this is taking the form of the nearby area getting abruptly brighter and then darker like someone is incessantly flipping a light switch. Eventually, it ends in Connor sprawled on the ground and staring up at the sky.]

"Just take a little of the light," she says. If it was that simple I would actually be good at this. Fucking... "most potential we've seen" my ass. This is not as fun as I thought it would be when I was a kid.

5. will i ever make a sound? [wildcard]

[i'll match format, if you want to do prose instead of brackets. feel free to just make shit up and toss it at me if you have a different idea. it'll be fun! i'm open to whatever. you can also contact me via plurk/discord (flyingthesky+#0332) to set up something or if you want to talk it out before throwing something at me!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I think people don't understand why we liked the Hunger Games. If I wanted Battle Royale, I would read Battle Royale, we have that already. I need INTRIGUE with my fighting! Drama! Romance! At least I don't have to add another book to my list.

[This username isn't new to Connor's comments, not that Lisa posts often - especially when she feeds her English back through Google Translate to make sure it's at least close to what she wants to say before she posts it.]

[Connor doesn't always reply to comments—frankly, most of his comment section is teenage girls who think he's hot and not necessarily readers. He likes their comments sometimes, because he's aware that it'll probably make their day, but mostly he only bothers to reply to people who comment about the books themselves. Moreso if he recognizes the username.]

This one had romance, but not much else going for it. I literally only gave it a try because it was pitched to me as gay Everlark, and somehow it still managed to be heterosexual nonsense. Can you call it queerbaiting if the characters are technically queer? I'm queer and I feel baited, so I say it counts.

[Oh, she totally understands. She doesn't even reply to all her social media messages herself, and she doesn't have. That. To contend with. But she figures commenting is good for The Algorithm, and besides, it's fun on occasion.]

"Technically" is the worst possible word to read there. I say it counts! I know books that are exactly what they say they are can be boring, but at least make good on the pitch! Why can't publishers take CHANCES anymore? I know books are expensive to print, but that's what ebooks are for, if you really don't trust your audience.

Publishers are still making me pay eleven whole dollars for an ebook, of course they're not taking chances. Which is why I keep getting Technically Bi characters who end up in THE most standard heterosexual romances.

[He has Opinions™ about this, obviously.]

Switch to light novels! Our books are half as long, twice as predictable, have three times longer titles, and they're half the price. Still though, that's really stupid and I'm sorry for your loss. That looks like it took a while to get through, for no good payoff.

[This is not a serious suggestion... actually, there's a lot of options in that field these days, right? Maybe it is a serious suggestion.]

[Unfortunately, he takes the suggestions fans give him seriously... well. Except people asking him to read whatever the latest BookTok trend is. No, he's not going to read any ~~Colleen Hoover~~ weird romance books with abusive heterosexual romances.]

I really do need to work on my Japanese now that I've moved to Yumemigaoka, so if you have any suggestions for light novels then I'll try them out! I don't know what's good because I was never the anime fan in the unit.

And I don't have a unit to be the anime fan in! We kind of match? Still, I guess the question is, do you want to start with the classics, or go deep into your usual stuff? Not that I can recommend the MOST classic of classics. You'd need a dictionary even worse than you would with normal Japanese books for some of that stuff.

[Boy, that old space opera series made her head hurt, which was a shame because she really wanted to read it. Who puts economic, political, and strategic discussions in stuff like that?]

I'm trying to learn modern Japanese, not take the N1 exam! Like if the classic is good I'll put it on the list for later but I want whatever you think I'd like. M is always saying I should get into isekai but I don't know what that is or why he thinks I'd like it so much.

[It's because he likes Alice in Wonderland and Wizard of Oz. Also fantasy in general, but.]

Isekai is when your main character gets dumped into another world and has to figure out how to survive, or how to get home, or how to exploit their new home for fun and profit. Alice in Wonderland is a Western isekai. It's REALLY popular these days. Probably every other light novel and every third anime is that genre. They're great for wish fulfillment stories, though. The one everyone knows these days is Sword Art Online - kid gets stuck in an online game, you die in the game, you die in real life. Turns into a badass, meets and marries his soulmate, leads the group that beats the final boss. When she's not the damsel in distress his wife is a badass too, which is the only reason I can stomach it. It's hard to RECOMMEND, but it's popular.

[Can you hear the long-suffering sigh over the Internet?]

Oh, yeah he made me watch an anime like that. It might even be the one for this series you're describing? Some of that sounds familiar to me, anyway.

But okay, what's the less popular one that's actually not heterosexual nonsense you'd recommend to me? Because this one doesn't sound like it's by speed.

[He has a feeling she had something in mind, but isn't saying it for some reason.]

You have my condolences, then. Half the time it's just so average. The light novels are even worse because there's just SO MUCH garbage to sift through between the bits of actual good stuff. Something like thirty books of it. Please don't ask why I'm still reading it, I think it's just a sunk cost thing by now.

I... you know, I don't actually have anything up your usual alley off the top of my head? I've been following one yuri isekai, actually, but that might be a little too far outside your wheelhouse. Still, MagiRevo is great for actual relationships and also political drama? But anyway. I have like eight series I'm following and you'll enjoy precisely zero of them. Sorry to bring it up and then be no help.

[Lisa and Google are not currently on good terms, she's been struggling to throw specialist terms through the translator.]

and no one tells you where you went wrong [open]

myosotis;

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