the original universe
playlist
world
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Arai BG
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Jayn BG
their story
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universe media
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playlist analysis
Arai's "original" (air quotes because of. complications, explained below) universe was a Glitterhearts campaign. Glitterhearts is a Powered by the Apocalypse TTRPG that turns the characters into magical girls and focuses more on collective storyteller over dice rolls and mechanics. I had joined my college's TTRPG club looking to repurpose Arai from a previous, failed campaign, and I was randomly assigned to my now good friend Ash's campaign titled Sore Must Be The Storm (or, SMBTS for short). After some vague redesigns and the addition of Jayn, Arai as he currently is known was born!
Technically, this isn't Arai's real original universe, since I made him to play in your standard high-fantasy D&D campaign, which unfortunately fell through the cracks. But, because of that, Arai was able to be incorporated into SMBTS, which to this day remains the best campaign I have ever had the joy of being a part of, even if it was only four months long. The people in that campaign helped shape the way Arai is now, and continue to push my thinking when I talk about him and his future AUs. Degungers, if you're reading this, I love you !!
Sore Must Be The Storm, AKA SMBTS, is a 2023 D&D campaign DMed by Ash, with Arai featured as my PC and Jayn featured as an NPC. The campaign's player characters (designated in italics) belong to their respective players, and not me!
World Rundown
The campaign of SMBTS takes place in your typical high school in suburban Pennsylvania (dubious). Towards the start of their senior year, five kids get flagged down by a dirty, talking pigeon named Poe in the middle of the hallway. Upon humoring the strange creature and moving to the gender neutral bathroom, the group of students learn that they have been chosen to become Magical Girls in order to fight the growing "gunge" in the town. Gunge refers to a parasitic, negative energy that transforms emotions into power, creating a problem and danger for this town's innocent population. With varying levels of reluctancy, the party gets their magical pieces of trash (Arai gets a cat bell, which he ties around his neck. This wins him a fair number of furry allegations), mutter their first "One man's trash is another man's treasure" and transform!
The way that Magical Girls work in this world is akin to the Miraculous Ladybug universe (but that is its own AU) or the Madoka Magica universe where their identities are hidden from the general public (no evil god, Poe isn't Kyubei). However, the Degungers (what the party is soon affectionately called) know each others' identities, which cultivates a sense of community between people who otherwise wouldn't be caught dead speaking with each other.
Arai's Backstory
Arai's story starts with Kionna's, his mother. Growing up, Kionna wanted to be an artist. Her father, however, was partially colorblind, and chastised her for wanting to pursue a career that her family could not "fully appreciate." Forced out of her dream, she made the decision to cultivate a love of art in her future children, allowing her to bond with them through her lost dream. She had a miraculous plan in her head, scenes of her getting to paint and teach her children the importance of values and shapes and colors. She met Theodore Hatzburg in college, a history major who was particularly interested in the evolution of boats and ships. She ironically found herself falling in love at first sight, finding his nerdy obsession charming. Theodore was also quite smitten with Kionna, surprised by the fact that someone so refined and elegant could have taken a liking to him. After graduation, the two take it slowly, eventually getting married after seven years of staying together and being exceptionally happy. Eventually, they have a kid, and Kionna names him Arai.
Excited to finally make her fantasy a reality, she begins to gently encourage art. To her joy, he takes a great liking to it, finger painting his baby food with joy. Kionna and Theodore doted upon their cute, naive son all throughout preschool. However, when he reached kindergarten and was finally learning how to read properly, Kionna found his once-cute incorrect attribution of color names now a little worrying. She decided to test him on different colors, finding that he thought all light colors to be yellow, and all darker colors to be blue or purple. Tentatively, she tested him against yellows and purples of the same value. To her dismay, Arai thought they were the same color. Arai was colorblind, and could only see in grayscale.
Horrified, Kionna felt as if her father was coming back to further smother her dream. The one thing she had been looking forward to and holding on to in order to remain sane had been taken from her. No, she wouldn't let it be taken from her. She kept at her mission to cultivate a love for art in Arai’s life. She painted with him, but as the years went on, she grew more and more frustrated with his inability to paint "properly." How could she paint a portrait of her family with him if he gave her green, sickly skin, or her husband a scarlet glare?
[▶] When Arai was in second grade, Kionna decided on a new plan. Picking up the family from their small town in Pennsylvania, she moved them to a larger city in northern New York State to give Arai a "clean slate". She stopped painting with Arai, and instead put more effort into "training" him to see colors. She hired "therapists" to "help" him, to teach him tricks and tips of identifying colors. While she never explicitly told Arai that his inability to see colors made him "broken," Arai internalized the fact that his mom didn’t love him as much once she grew frustrated with his inability to see colors. He learned through this that people wouldn’t want to be his friend once his "secret" got out. He would keep his inability to see colors close to his chest, telling people only as an "experiment" to see if they would stop loving him like his mother did. When some kids inevitably were cruel to him (because kids are cruel), Kionna would move the family away again. Arai began to believe that he would move every time his secret came out because his mother didn't want her family's reputation to be tarnished, but in reality she didn’t want him to be bullied. As more and more moves occurred, she began to not wait for the bullying to happen, and instead arranged to move as soon as she learned that Arai’s secret had gotten out. Soon her own perspective of "helping her son" by moving was distorted as she began to associate the negative stress of moving with Arai’s secret getting out.
[▶] Kionna loved her son, but she found herself viewing him as a physical manifestation of her family's disapproval of her dream to be an artist. Because of this, she continued to pressure him to be a "perfect artist" in order to spite them, and also because she held onto the hope that he loved what he was doing.
[▶] Eventually, after moving around constantly, Arai figured out the best strategy to stay put. When he moved to a small town in Pennsylvania during seventh grade, he talked to no one: when people reached out, he shut them down. He was rude to everyone and held himself with a haughty attitude. He spent his free periods in the art classroom, painting alone. He quickly became known as an asshole, but one who was extremely talented with a paintbrush, which granted him a small population of the school who respected him, but kept their distance. Except for Abigale, who pushed himself into Arai's life nonstop. Even after Arai was a relentless bitch to Abigale, he would not leave him alone. Arai has grown to take Abigale's kindness for granted.
When he reached high school, Arai kept up this personality. His art improved, and he made quite the name for himself in such a small school. He painted murals for the school, and for the town. Everything he painted was unique: he had masterful control over values in his work, but the colors never seemed to line up quite right. While some rumors likely circulated, no one faithfully questioned his sight, believing every choice he made was one of a masterful artist: who could question such a genius?
He witnessed his peers starting to get into romantic relationships but never had the same interest. He felt similarly about sex but slept around when he had something to gain. People who had crushes on him made moves, and he saw this as a way to gain social standings. He saw it as a transaction of sorts and believed others did as well. Eventually, though, people began to view him as shallow and slutty, and the moves made upon him started to peeter out. Never once did he question whether he may be asexual or aromantic, but he most definitely is.
[▶] In junior year, a new kid came to the school. The charismatic Jayn Hyde instantly struck many of the hearts of the students at Arai's school, but he particularly captured Arai's eye. When Arai first looked at Jayn pass by in the hallway, his world was suddenly and inexplicably filled with colors. His colorblindness had vanished. Arai's newfound joy was short lived, however, for as soon as Jayn rounded the corner and disappeared from sight, the color began to seep from Arai's world once more.
[▶] Once he had gotten a taste of what the world had to offer, Arai didn't want to give it up. His entire life, he had believed he was broken: something was wrong with him. He needed to act a charade in order to get people to think he was normal and that he was worth respect. All he had was his art – imagine the adoration he would receive if he could see colors properly, and didn’t have to rely on guesses; a life where he wouldn’t have to act when receiving compliments on his color choices, on how groundbreaking and inspirational his art choices were. Arai quickly developed an unhealthy obsession with Jayn and the "cure" they provided for his color blindness. Infatuated with the idea of them, he took every opportunity he had to come into contact – while still keeping his distance – with the new valedictorian, causing half the school to believe he was in love with them, and the other half to believe there was some secret beef between the two due to the fact that they are never seen talking — Arai makes sure of it.
Now, in his senior year, Arai's obsession does nothing but continue to grow. He arranged his schedule so he was in all the same classes with Jayn, even choosing to give up his art electives in favor of Jayn’s computer science ones. Whenever he's in the presence of Jayn, he does nothing but stare at them. Jayn has long since given up the idea of reasoning with Arai and appears to have grown used to his constant attention. Every time Jayn tried to strike up a conversation, Arai somehow managed to vanish. When cornered, Arai just remains silent.
During free periods, Arai goes to a forgotten supply closet adjacent to the art room and works tirelessly on a painting of Jayn. He tries to get the colors perfectly, and every time he believes he's messed up, he starts over. Each painting's pose is identical, a slight behind profile view of Jayn deep in focus. It’s easy to tell by a glance that this is the image that Arai sees in every single one of his classes with Jayn.
When questioned about his relationship with Jayn by others, Arai brushes the question off with a sour look. The only one who understands even a sliver of how much Arai is crazed about Jayn is Clove, who walked in on Arai's secret closet of Jayn paintings. Clove started the rumor that Arai's behavior is caused by an extreme crush on the valedictorian but kept the details of their encounter a secret.
Jayn's Backstory (if you can call it that... Jayn Blurb)
[▶] Jayn lives alone. Since Jayn's parents are archeologists, they are always abroad on expeditions. When they do come home, it's for a week at a time, and they bring interesting gifts from the places they've gone. Jayn keeps a collection of them in his room in a box under his bed. She looks at them occasionally; not for comfort but to remind her of her resentment for her parents. She sees the presents as a lame attempt to reconcile with her and smooth over the neglect they've had for her. This neglect has hardened Jayn into someone who cares little for others, and is extremely independent. However, they know the importance of human relationships and connections, purely with a practical mindset. They are kind and respectful to people, putting on the facade to upkeep their reputation and remain well liked by people. They work hard in school for this same reason, counterbalancing the natural inclination for people to dislike "try-hards" with just how kind and genuine they appear. By the time he moved to the town the campaign takes place in at the beginning of Junior year, he had perfected his facade. His personality is very meticulously curated to remain on top of their game, the only thing that seems to be affecting his ability to maintain this persona is Arai.
Arai genuinely piques Jayn's curiosity. Since Arai seems to be very interested in Jayn, he's naturally curious as to why that may be. The beginnings of anxiety that he has been found out have begun to grow in Jayn's mind, making him extremely fixated on appealing to Arai, and making sure that whatever the fuck he has going on has nothing to do with Jayn's own secrets. He, for some reason, knows that this fixation is not romantic. He knows something is suspicious, but never approaches Arai directly. This avoidance is slightly out of fear, and slightly out of apathy. Another reason why Jayn is so interested in Arai is the fact that he can physically feel whenever Arai is staring at him, much more poignantly than the typical feeling of being watched, he always seems to be aware of Arai's gaze. Additionally, while Jayn didn't fully notice at first, Arai is completely colorless to Jayn, except for his eyes. She initially thought that he was just pale and lame looking, but later learned that Arai was meant to have a bright periwinkle stripe in his hair and always wore colorful clothes, which confused her. Out of the corner of his eyes, he can sometimes see him in color, but never when he focuses on Arai.
Jayn has walked in on Arai painting once, and wasn't caught. She watched as Arai painted a self-portrait in grayscale, avoiding painting the irises of his eyes. Arai painted himself crying tears of brilliant periwinkle. Before he could stay for longer, Jayn had to leave to avoid the risk of being caught. They tried to find the portrait after Arai had left with Abigale, but couldn't seem to find it. She still doesn't know where it is, and has found herself fixated on it. She knows that Arai painted it in grayscale intentionally, but it represents how Jayn sees Arai, except for the irises. Jayn is obsessed with figuring out if Arai finished painting the eyes, and if he got the color correct. Arai did not in fact finish painting the eyes, and instead felt too overwhelmed with the painting before he could properly finish it, leaving it in a dumpster behind the art building.
Their Story (The Campaign)
[▶] While the campaign starts in senior year, Arai and Jayn's starts in junior year when they first met, though "meet" is a strong word. As explained in Arai's Backstory, Jayn transferred to Arai's school at the beginning of Junior year, winning the heart of many of her classmates immediately. Their shining smile and (apparent) genuine care for those around them, however, is not what drew Arai to them initially.
[▶] When Arai passed them in the hallway for the first time, his world was engulfed in light and beautify. Jayn's bright orange hair caught Arai by surprise, and it immediately became Arai's favorite feature of Jayn's. He began to seek Jayn out around school, following them to their classes (and ending up late himself), finding them at lunch and sitting a (semi)reasonable distance away. By the time class selection for Senior year came around, Arai had his plans to follow Jayn to the ends of the earth (computer science class).
Jayn has remained cordial to Arai throughout all of Junior year, but going into Senior year, Jayn has decided to simply ignore Arai. Every time that Jayn had tried to strike up a conversation, Arai had disappeared, shut down, or just stared at him silently. Jayn's reputation means more to her than her comfort, so she decides to grit her teeth and smile.
When Arai is recruited as a magical girl, he is reluctant at first. However, upon transforming, he learns that his ability allows him to create a paint whip, which he can see the colors of! While this is a great development, it's nothing like what Jayn allows him to see, so his obsession isn't quite curbed just yet.
Arai begins his job as a magical girl, becoming closer (if you can even call it that) with the other magical girls, particularly Clove, who makes it their goal to take hits for everyone during their fight, and Demetrius, who finds him really weird (and is also fighting Jayn for the valedictorian title). Meanwhile, Jayn is keeping his eye out on Arai and also these new, strange cosplayers? Who are breaking and entering into houses? And harrassing English teachers?
Even if the two aren't interacting, Jayn has far from left Arai's mind. Now with a new group of reluctant comrades, Arai is forced to face the fact that people can see his behavior towards Jayn, but they just don't get it. He never shares his secret, but is under constant harassment from the Degungers over how he has a crush on Jayn (which he calmly denies at any chance he can), or how he's weird and freaky about Jayn (which he can't deny, unfortunately). Up until this point, Arai has never had to deal with people knowing about his obsession with Jayn, and his discomfort in himself begins to grow. He's found a solution to (what he perceives as) his biggest problem, so why is he punished for reaching towards it?
As homecoming draws near, an odd, heavy feeling fills the air. On the day of homecoming, people feel an odd urge to speak truly, and the inability to conceal their true feelings. When Arai arrives at the school's gym, he doesn't quite know what to do. He's never really been one to go to parties. So, he hangs out by the punch bowl, realizes it's spiked, and continues to drink it because he continues to forget.
In the overwhelming sound of the party, Arai starts to feel himself get overstimmulated. It doesn't help that Jayn appears next to him, suddenly filling his world with flashing technicolor party lights. Jayn demands to know what Arai's issue is, their mask slipping ever so slightly to reveal the anger underneath. Bombared with light, Arai can't respond, saying that he simply can't. This does nothing but anger Jayn, who storms off in a rage.
Before Arai can do any major damage control, screams break out as the gunge reveals its next victim. A werewolf appears on the scene, attacking students left and right. Given very little time to try and hide before transforming, the Degungers jump into action, some more subtle than others.
During the fight, the Phantom of the Opera themed attacker unmasks a few of the Degungers, revealing their secret identities to the entire town. Unfortunately for Arai, he is one of these unlucky few. He also suffers a claw strike to the face, winning him a large, ugly looking set of three scars on his left cheek.
The aftermath of the attack isn't pretty. The Degungers run to the gender neutral bathroom (which is quickly becoming their base of opperations while at school) to do first aid on Brant, the unlucky student who had gotten gunged and attacked everyone. There, the Degungers directly ask what it is that Arai likes about Jayn. This is how he responds:
After homecoming, it's clear that tensions are high. People aren't just slipping back into the normal routines, and Arai has a big ass cut on his face that is far from subtle. When he returns home, he has to face his mother at their family dinner. Kionna knows exactly what happened at homecoming thanks to the news, and Arai manages to cobble together a lie about a theatre performance. Kionna is unconvinced, and Arai slips into his old habit of calling her "Ms. Qwynn", something he had grown out of once he moved to Pennsylvania. Feeling small, Arai excuses himself and goes to bed early.
At school, tensions remain high. Some of the Degunger's identities were revealed, giving way for scrutiny and harassment by the school body. Jayn, now unaffected by the previous gunge victim's influence, comes up to Arai to cordially apologize for their behavior. Arai is struck into silence, looking at Jayn as if he's never seen her before. Eventually, he is pushed to apologize as well by some of the other Degungers. Jayn accepts his apology and leaves him at that.
Overwhelmed by the events of the previous few days, Arai decides to take a walk. As he explores the hallways, he can't help but feel lost, and as if he's in an unfamiliar place. Colors seep from the walls, and Arai wanders aimlessly, growing more and more scared. Soon, he doesn't remember where he is at all, or how he got there. He takes his hair out of his ponytail, hiding behind its length for fear of being recognized. When he runs into people, he panics and finds that he can easily get rid of strangers if he just paints them onto the walls of the hallway. Filled with joy at this new discovery, Arai traverses the halls, painting unsuspecting students onto the lockers as he goes.
Eventually, Arai runs into Jayn, who was going to the bathroom at just the wrong time. For what feels like the first time, Arai can see colors, and they're beautiful! Jayn too is beautiful, and they bound over to inspect her. Jayn, of course, is confused, but plays along with Arai's strange act in an attempt to placate him and get away. However, Arai doesn't let this stunning new solution get away, and he drags her to the artroom, where he locks her up into a painted birdcage.
Arai tries his best to appeal to Jayn, painting small animals that come to "life" and move around the room in a strange, unsettling way. When Jayn doesn't seem genuinely interested, however, Arai begins to cry, though only out of one eye. The tears are viscus and periwinkle, and they come out in a continuous stream instead of one drop at a time. Arai is much more timid, yet also talkative at the same time. His aloof, rude nature is gone and instead replaced with one of a kid who is curious with the world around him. However, the selfish and cruel streak is still clear within this cuter persona.
It isn't long before the Degungers arrive. Immediately, they understand that something is wrong with Arai, as he doesn't remember anything about any of them, even Abigale, his best friend. When asked questions, Arai reveals that he is 10 years old, and that he has a secret that nobody can know: he's colorblind! And his mom will move him far away if anyone finds out, so shhh don't tell anyone! The party has to grapple with the fact that their enemy is their friend, which proves itself a difficult scenario to navigate.
Eventually, the Degungers manage to calm Arai down by taking him to a secret art closet, the one that Arai had been keeping his Jayn paintings in. In that moment, Arai has a conversation with his inner-child, who had been taking the reigns during his Gunging. He talks about all that he went through, and realizes that his friends are the ones he needs to put effort into protecting, not Jayn, someone who will never care for him the way he cares for her, and that it's wrong to assume he's entitled to her. Once Arai is Degunged and returns to normal, he apologizes to Jayn, who responds:
Arai is left with the Degungers before deciding to throw away the nearly finished, near perfect painting of Jayn behind the school. He leaves early, claiming a headache, and returns home. He disappears for the rest of the week, not coming into school or answering his texts.
While Arai is at home, the Degungers have more interpersonal drama with the gunging of Clove. Clove's gunging results in a divorce within the group between Clove and Demetrius, causing tensions to rise once more.
The Degungers figure that something has happened to Arai if they weren't able to reach him for so long, so they hatch a plan to (without Demetrius) break Arai out of his own house and take him to Clove's.
At Arai's house, Arai has been in his room in the dark, transforming and detransforming over and over again. He snuck back to the school to grab the painting of Jayn. He rotates whether the painting is in his closet or hanging on his wall, and is filled with guilt every time he takes it out again, and has also given himself a shitty haircut. in order to get rid of the periwinkle portion of his hair, which reminds him too much of what he did to Jayn when he was gunged.
Eventually, he looks over to see a transformed Abigale in his window, beaming at him. Baffled, Arai opens the window and is immediately grabbed. In his confusion, Arai tries to save himself by transforming and latching onto the window with shadow tendrils, which he got after a gunging battle a few weeks prior.
After an unfortunate interlude in his livingroom, Arai is taken away by the Degungers to Clove's house. There, he is given a room to sleep in and enough space to process the essential kidnapping that just occured. Theo, Clove's aunt and guardian, tells Arai that she will take him back to his house to gather his things if he wants, and Arai agrees.
Clove and the rest of the Degungers offer to give Arai a small makeover, as his hair cut was less than ideal. They give him a little trim, keeping the general shape the same. This results in an odd, anime-style hairstyle, but Arai digs it so that's all that matters. He keeps the long portion in the back as a callback to his iconic ponytail, but cuts the front portion shorter, getting rid of the periwinkle segment.
After his makeover, Arai is given more space to do what he wants. Used to living in a room with a closed door and a closed window, leaving the door open is a strange and new experience for him. He spends some time out on the fire escape and marvels in the freedom of it all.
The next day, Arai drives home with Theo to pick up his belongings, and is met with his father arguing with his mother. Arai learns that Theodore (not Theo... names are wough), his father, was filing for divorce and was going to move out. Aunt Theo offers for Theodore to stay with Arai in her house until he finds a place of his own, and he agrees. So, Arai returns to Clove's house with his belongings, his father, and also a fuck ton of model ships.
[▶] Arai returns to school the following week. When he heads to his first class, he is met by the fact that Jayn had shaved their head. After Arai had been gunged, Jayn had recurring nightmares where Arai had painted him into the floor, into the walls, or Arai had trapped him in the birdcage again. He kept feeling Arai's gaze even when it wasn't there, and Jayn needed something to change. So, during the week when Arai was absent, she shaved her head in order to feel in control of something, in order to take back something that Arai had stolen from her.
It is hard to Arai to adjust back to school life, especially when Jayn is no longer acting cordial and instead ignores Arai with a ferocious intensity. Arai tries his hardest, but he can't stop staring at Jayn like he used to, and the Degungers can't stop pestering him in various ways to just stop already.
Despite the stress, the gunging doesn't stop, so the Degungers need to continue their work. Arai continues his job, coming across the unfortunate attacks of a gunge victim (their good friend and fellow Degunger Val) that makes him remember his worst self: when he held Jayn captive. Without much of a break, they are shunted into their worst gunge attack yet.
Arai wakes up to find himself in his old house, with his old haircut. He doesn't have his magical cat bell from Poe, and all of his group chats with the Degungers are gone. The only person's number that he still has is Abigale's, as they were friends before becoming magical girls.
After meeting up with the rest of the magical girls (with much difficulty), the Degungers begin to tackle what's really happening. As they track the gunge, they are led into the cafeteria, where they fight and lose to one of the cafeteria workers. After being hit, they are transported to a new location: a dark box. While they are confused, it doesn't take long for them to break out of the dark space and realize that they had appeared in an Amazon warehouse.
After some investigation, the final boss revealed himself. P. Andora, the antithesis of hope, appears on the balcony and taunts the magical girls. They fight hard, losing some of the Poes along the way. The Degungers help Val close the crack in the wall that was oozing gunge, and Demetrius punches Andora so hard he dies. Everyone suffered some amount of harsh injury, including Clove, who got impaled by a forklift. Once they called 911, things began to calm down.
One of the Poes lost in the fight was Octopode, Arai's personal Poe who had previously trapped himself in a tube of red paint and currently lived in Arai's hair. During the battle, Arai had been grabbed by the gunge, but Octopode had sacrificed himself to save Arai from its clutches. Octopode had evaporated on Arai's head, leaving him with a red coloring on his scalp, looking like a perpetually shitty dye job. This red doesn't grow out with the rest of his hair.
After the warehouse fight, things seem like they might finally be ok. Arai and the rest of the Degungers hang around while everyone heals from their injuries, especially Clove and Demetrius, who got his legs crushed during the fight. Once Clove is released, they need to take things slow, much to their dismay. Arai helps them stay sane by climbing trees and the fire escape. It's nice to have a sibling.
The entire gunge thing only lasted a month, but so much shit happened that it felt much longer. As the rest of the year progresses, things start to return to a new kind of normal. Arai and Jayn rarely interact any more than either of them need to. Arai still can't stop staring, but he's working on it.
At graduation, Arai sits between Demetrius and Jayn, as he changed his last name to Hatzburg for his father. Arai is obviously uncomfortable at this arrangement, and Jayn makes an effort to appear unbothered and collected. Arai doesn't interact with Jayn, but can see that whenever he looks at her, her jaw is clenched. A bonus to his situation is that he can now play mental Crazy 8s through the mind-link with the Poes with the rest of the Degungers! He can see the card colors! He's always wanted to play Crazy 8s and has never been able to. It's truly a dream come true.
Demetrius manages to grab the valedictorian title from Jayn, who looks like they're barely holding it together. It doesn't help that Jayn's parents, despite promising, weren't able to make it to graduation. After the ceremony, Arai tries to speak with Jayn.
He attempts to give her a painting he's been working on for a long time, saying that she can do whatever she wants with it. Jayn refuses it, glaring at Arai with an intensity he's never seen from them before.
After that, Arai doesn't seen Jayn for a very long time. Instead, he goes home with Clove and his father. Soon, Mr. Hatzburg moves into an apartment within the same building, and Arai joins him. Deciding against going to college, Arai begins to work at the orphanage he had been volunteering at, before also becoming an art teacher for the local middle school.
Jayn goes to Harvard Law, and meets a lovely individual named Tyler. Jayn begins their regular scripted cycle for a relationship, but soon realizes that Tyler is different. Through gentle time spent together, Jayn begins to heal from their life-long masking. While it's a long and strenuous journey, filled with nightmares of being 2D, Jayn is able to find happiness with Tyler. Many years down the line, they get married, and begin to look into adoption.
[▶] Ten years after their high school graduation, Jayn returns to the town of their high school to investigate the adoption scene. There, he runs into Arai, who still volunteers there. It's a tense interaction, but one that refreshes the fears deeply rooted inside Jayn. They realize that they never fully healed from what Arai put them through when he was gunged, and decide to do something about it.
A few weeks later, Arai receives a very sternly written letter in the mail from none other than Jayn. After toiling for weeks over how to respond, eventually he cobbles something together. An awkward pen-pal correspondence begins, opening the door to a route of Jayn's healing possible only through Arai. Despite how much Jayn hates Arai, it's clear that nobody other than the perpetrator would understand exactly what he went through. Over the next few years, occasional letters appear in the two's mailboxes, though no further communication ever occurs between the two.
The original (and I suppose canon) timeline for JayRai is likely what is best for them. While toxic yaoi is fun, it still is toxic. I love having them in fucked up situations in other universes, but I'm happy that their canon universe allowed them to get what they actually needed. Arai didn't need a romantic relationship: he needed a community. Friends and (chosen) family who actually cared for him. Luckily, he was able to find that in Clove and his father, who finally grew a pair to deal with Kionna. Jayn needed someone to see him for who he was and not who he wanted to be. He needed someone who said "I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. I'll wait for you to be ready to be you." And luckily, he found Tyler.
The pen-pal situation is the best that JayRai are able to have in this universe. Who knows, maybe in the future Jayn will reach out to meet up again. It's really beyond me (and if I, the creator, don't know, who's really to say?).
media of the universe
While there are some pictures that I sprinkled into the rundown of their story, there are wayyy more drawings and art pieces of Arai and of Jayn, as I was very normal throughout the semester where this campaign occurred. JayRai were essentially the only things I drew during the entire four month period, so I have many pieces to share! They will be organized in order of when I drew them, and will be shittily titled. I hope you enjoy!
standalone art pieces
first meeting comic
post canon adoption comic
post canon adoption comic (pt.2ish)
post canon arai comic
playlist analysis
link
This endeavor is going to take a while, as I haven't updated my existing playlist analysis in a loooong while and the SBMTS playlist (which mostly is Arai songs, though there are a few and a lot of Arai's songs are about Jayn) is around 66 songs, 15 more than when I originally did my analysis... For now, just enjoy the playlist and interpret it how you wish!
When I do get around to the playlist, it will be in no ways expansive, and I'll likely just pick my favorite songs/most important to discuss. It will be sporatic updates but! Will remain in chronological order.
Well, that's all folks! I may come back to add more doo-dads and if I draw any more SMBTS JayRai work, it will come here first and foremost! If I add to the playlist (which I do OFTEN), it may take a while for an updated analysis to appear. I hope you enjoyed the crazy word dump that is this entire segment. Now you're a little more educated on the JayRai origins than you were before! Congrats! *confetti*