"I would still love to turn Cricket's opinion of me around and get him to like me but it seems like a hopeless prospect at this point, and this might hinder that project rather than help, so plausibly including him would not be ideal, yeah."

Haru leans his head on Jaeha's shoulder. "I take enormous satisfaction in Cricket liking me but not in a way where I think it reflects poorly on anyone for him not to like them." Om nom tteobokki. "Mm, this is good."

"I'm glad you like it." Jaeha kisses Haru's forehead and eats his food, too.

"- you know what would work would be Harry Potter," says Haru, after he has located a literal cookie to present to Jaeha. "It's not short but there's several kinds of mind control in it and I remember it well enough for all that I last read the whole thing through when I was twelve."

He got a LITERAL COOKIE from his Haru it doesn't matter that it's a cookie from his own damn kitchen he is being materially rewarded for being good at communication and he is going to do the most creating positive incentives in his head about this he can.

"Same. Sure, let's hear it."

Haru has OPINIONS about mind control in Harry Potter. The casual references to love potions - the author decided to heavily imply that being conceived under the influence is what made Voldemort so evil but has nothing but amusement in her heart about schoolchildren sneaking doses to other schoolchildren, or the less overtly unpleasant of the Potions teachers possessing Amortentia for some reason and displaying it in the school when the school's security measures for in-universe-taken-very-seriously items of value can and have been bypassed by eleven-year-olds.

The Obliviation, on so thin an excuse for having a masquerade that it would have been better not to bother to try, and where they don't Obliviate it's because they can instead coerce and intimidate, as with Harry's relatives; at no point does any wizard ever try to convince anyone they could instead casually overpower or extort. Particularly egregious in the case of Hermione's parents, who by rights ought to have been convinceable and whose ignorance wasn't even legally mandated, and who instead are replaced with versions of themselves who yearn to move to Australia and don't have a daughter, which, if she'd died, would have completely denied them the opportunity to ever remember and grieve their child - she doesn't even give her allies a way to look them up afterwards for the case where the good guys win their conflict but she herself doesn't happen to survive - and given that she didn't die and one might generously presume she put them right later (it doesn't say), presumably created some dreadful emotional fallout, about the resolution of which absolutely nothing is said.

Comparatively speaking Haru is not that fussed about the Imperius Curse. That is, it's obviously an atrocity, but it's not worse than a memory charm. It commandeers the self, but it doesn't undermine it, though prolonged use obviously has plenty of opportunity to undermine someone's relationships and personal boundaries and life plans. A student learning to throw the curse off who jumps onto the desk when so commanded can still come to terms with this eventuality on their own time without any gaps in their ability to do so. And the exercise seemed to have more of the (ostensibly) intended effect than the Occlumency lessons, which -

Legilimency! Fucking everywhere Legilimency! Good guys doing it, bad guys doing it, everyone acting like it's a neutral skill! If Haru lived in this setting he would fucking LEARN the Occlumency, even if no evil wizards seemed to be specifically after him and even, perhaps especially, if he hated his poorly-thought-out assigned teacher who kept trying to read his mind as an ostensible form of education; it doesn't even sound hard, though, like, obviously whether something that doesn't exist sounds hard to someone reading a book about it is not necessarily indicative.

...okay no that all just sounded 1. correct and 2. incredibly endearing. Kang Jaeha is too much of a 25-year-old Korean man to properly swing his legs back and forth like an American teenage schoolgirl from an 80s movie watching her crush speak but that's very much the emotional tone, here, he's finding it delightful to hear Haru be so opinionated about all of this.

He really, really likes Haru.

Awwww Haru likes him too!

In English or in Korean he's not going to ask Haru to confess, that wouldn't be cool. 

Time to be serious again, though. "I'm glad you have the power you do. As you say, a lot of people are a lot more chill about this kind of thing at least in fiction than they probably ought to be, but I'm glad that you can block it altogether.

"I'm not particularly surprised or dismayed by any of this and I'm not missing the obvious parallels, either. I do agree with every single thing you said, here."

"Still feel like you're missing something?"

"I guess... just...

"...are you angry with me?"

"- no, I've been very deliberately saying 'horrified' and not 'angry', it's not - positioned in a way where I'd be angry about it? I probably would be if you'd done anything to Cricket or my parents."

"Are you horrified at—by—me, personally? As opposed to—I'm not sure what, really. 'My choices, disembodied and devoid of cause' is where I wish that would be, but..."

"I mean, insofar as I've identified a cause it's at least sixty percent your asshole dad. I'm horrified that doing tons of mind control was appealing, I guess? And that there was nothing in place to - bring you up short, before now, that there wasn't enough anti-mind-control in the water to give you any more pause than it took to write up an NDA, and that you hadn't been sold on the value of authentic human relationships, and that nobody was worried about your backlash levels till me - were you actively concealing those from past partners such that they couldn't have told Juno even if they'd wanted to be responsible about it -"

"Not—with my powers or anything. I wasn't actively bringing it up every time we talked but I wasn't hiding it or talking around it, either." He laughs at himself, a bit. "I feel like a story trope when I say this but I'm not entirely sure I've ever had an authentic human relationship. Before you, I mean. Maybe I had some friends as a child or young teenager, but..."

"I didn't have friends when I was a kid basically at all. People I'd talk to, sit with at lunch, sure, but I wasn't the social butterfly type. Ren is, I bootstrapped myself up to my present level of social life with a lot of help from her once I needed a social life."

"I think—if that's all—then there's nothing missing. I am also horrified that the mind control appealed, and the only real explanation was that I just straightforwardly didn't care. ...I wasn't under the impression that the people around me weren't real but maybe drawing on that comparison with that part of your backlash might be enlightening about the extent to which I didn't care."

"I am certainly very rude to people when I don't think they're real. It's sort of weird to me that this coexisted with caring about whether they like you."

"That was always flavoured as a transactional thing, in my head. If they like me, they'll do me favours, help me with things. Networking and connections. But also I'm very—proud and vain. I cared—care—about my image, about saving face, about my dignity. And—not really wanting things doesn't mean that I wasn't scared of losing them. That might be another useful way to look at it, I almost exclusively felt the pain of loss without ever feeling the corresponding joy when I got anything I sought after, so I was obsessed with never losing."

"Yikes. I'm - not really expecting it to make a lot of further qualitative difference, but - looking forward to getting you out of the hole."

"Probably the only things missing are pure joy and the intensity of every other good thing."

"Well, those are good things and you should have them."

"Yeah." Especially if he gets to share them with Haru.

🐚snailmail: who's the bomb, we the bomb

𖣘fan_death: legal beating procurement in the unofficial go tournament is not exactly national news

🇺🇳 glob: it's international news.

🇺🇳 glob: because I told people in 6 other countries so far

𖣘fan_death: because you - yeah that, that doesn't count

🐚snailmail: ur just jelly

🌙moon'n'joon: that's definitely it, uh-huh

yoo-min-max: what's up what happened what'd I miss