mimi FY 🪷

artist

[mimi FY 🪷 @ardent_oath]

#Caleb #夏以昼 #恋与深空 #LoveandDeepspace

[momo 🍎🍏 double helix @farspacemomo]

⚠️ our trajectory astray spoilers / ms branch spoilers

as always, opening with the disclaimer that i play with the EN text, which is not well-translated, and so much of this theory rests on interpreting the EN text. the discrepancy i am describing may not exist in the other versions of the game, but there was something i noticed across three different scenes that gave me pause

to start with, the neural chair in caleb's room (silence of the cosmos part 5, ghostly ship)

'"Welcome. Thank you for using the Psychological Healing Apparatus.
This system constructs immersive scenarios in real time based on the user's consciousness...
It's designed to alleviate cognitive fatigue, loneliness, and psychological imbalance during prolonged Deepspace voyages."

[Would you like to load Caleb's most recent experience?]'

so the wording here is already a bit tricky—the "user" at the time of caleb's most recent experience would be caleb, but the user in the scene is us. the first few scenes, though they are reconstructed from caleb's consciousness, proceed seemingly from our point of view. we are watching caleb because we are there beside him, which is indeed an immersive scenario, though if it's all constructed off of his consciousness and not ours and we're just playing back something that's already generated, we should be seeing this from his POV

the place this gets weirdest is during the very brief lab flashback

'In a stark white room, a boy slowly opens his eyes and turns his head toward the opposite wall.
(Is this...the Gaia Research Center? Why is Caleb here?)'

i have a better question. why are we seeing a memory from caleb's childhood, which we are not explicitly stated to have even been present for, from a third person POV? i had initially written this off as just the usual narrative convenience where memories look like they're being played on a TV because that's the easiest way to make it understandable for the viewer, and this is an otome game. the path of least resistance is obviously going to be having things from our POV even when they sometimes shouldn't be

but then we go on to recount this scene in an even more bizarre way in silence of the cosmos part 6, my small everything

'I always thought his "death" dragged me into all of this.
But the gears of this story started turning long before we ever met at the shelter.
Why was he at the Gaia Research Center? Why did he look at me with those eyes?
Why was he thin and small? Why did he have all those scars on his arms...? No child should have to bear them.'

we can assume the opposite wall was maybe some sort of partition where we must have been standing, but we should have no memory to construct this from because we don't remember the gaia days. why are we seeing a memory that only caleb still has, from our own POV, with details that wouldn't even really make sense for him to be describing himself with (why does he have such a strong idea of what he looks like? thin and small i can see him having that impression of himself, scars on arms make sense, but his consciousness would not retain any particular image of his own eyes unless he's looking at a mirror)

then the third instance of narrative "whose fucking POV is it anyway" is in the incubation tube scene, also in silence of the cosmos part 6

'The boy looks down to see his own frail body suspended in fluid, curled up like an unborn life.
Nearby, another incubation pod floats in silence. Clear liquid sways gently inside. A girl sleeps soundly within.
They look alike as if they were born from the same womb.
The girl is the first to open her eyes. Through the thick glass, she gazes at him.'

the sleeping girl did what. how is she the first to open her eyes if caleb was already looking down at his own frail body in the fetal position

this is a theory that's been going around for caleb fans a long, long time now, and i think it's all but true atp—at one time we were absolutely a single being (maybe made of the same non-existent element that comprises the aether core), and i think that being was split in two. it would account for all these strange POV blips, all these references to caleb having a telepathic connection with us, that line from the decoherence event about an extraterrestrial thinking we might be one being, the "primordial chaos where we had yet to be separated" in imperial thronesong (thank you phil for pointing this out omg 💝), and a million other things

but one of the huge things this would answer is something i don't think has been addressed yet: why DID we lose our memories every time we died in the experiments? i am theorizing that our consciousness, having been split into two, was not stable, and that is why our memory constantly failed, and part of why memory rests at the heart of caleb's own story. it reads as if we once shared a mind that could not reconcile being parted, and then went on to follow an eerily similar arc once it was split in two

from WU sealed in dust, ch 3 observation log:
'After her resurrection, her cognition and memory of her previous "life" were erased. To reassess her abilities, I gave her picture books and cards with words. She quickly passed my tests with flying colors, performing better than children at her age. She absorbed and understood information faster and more thoroughly.
If she were in school, she could easily be a fifth-grade student.'

from an open window ch 3, a small victory:
Emryn: "You're a fast learner, huh? When you first got here, you could barely read. But within a month, you were picking up books on your own."

so if we were one being, with one mind, one consciousness, one perception, split into two...maybe the two halves are still transmitting a signal to each other, trying their best to be whole again. if we were one, there are still vestiges of this, and they are all over our brother's story

[july_jo @JULY__jo]

🍎
#Caleb #夏以昼 #マヒル #하우주 #LoveandDeepspace #恋与深空

[ウォーアイニー @yumekai67]

唉夏以昼就是脆弱的时候最色情啊

[mimi FY 🪷 @ardent_oath]

@vernerrrrrr спасибо!😍

[mimi FY 🪷 @ardent_oath]

@gegefever @watermelon Спасибо!😘

[mimi FY 🪷 @ardent_oath]

@kittenrella Спасибо!🥰

[🍎 𝚛𝚎𝚊 ༄ ✈︎ @reaparadise]

Violet-eyed leopard.

[mimi FY 🪷 @ardent_oath]

как же мне нравится этот костюм! вставка на спине невероятно красивая

[mimi FY 🪷 @ardent_oath]

punkleb

[mimi FY 🪷 @ardent_oath]

@ColonelKatari все такие кексики🥰

[Mrs. Apple 🍎 @ColonelKatari]

Hatched out of big brother’s jacket together with the other cute baby sisters.

Template by: https://t.co/1uAfva8SqM

Girls, thank you! I got to relive the old days and once again felt like I was part of a shared effort among those who love gege 💓

[饱饱家的小画家 @36Ohbehphuqoz83]

🍰🍴
#LoveandDeepspace #恋と深空 #Rafayel #祁煜

[🍎 @xyz_home]

FROM THE SAME WOMB
FROM THE SAME SOURCE
FROM THE SAME STEM

[bea. @applesoda047]

⚠️ // Caleb anecdote spoilers, analysis

When it comes to MC, he knows he'll always be the one to carry the burden of memory. Which is why, despite how heavy it weighs, preserving them only becomes one of his biggest priorities. Vivid Strokes played around with this idea of Caleb fearing that loss himself - losing their memories because the camcorder broke, ruining their memories because their vacation didn't go as he'd planned - which then made me think about his Toring chip, and how that must contribute to his fear of loss too. After all, who if not him will preserve their memories should hers be taken away again?

What he doesn't know is that, no matter how many times she loses her memories or whether he loses his, they'll always be drawn to each other like gravity in spite of the external forces (memory loss, adult intervention/fate, cosmic contradiction) keeping them apart. The universe demands it, so it shall be.

It makes me think of YYS and how cruel a fate it is to be cosmically drawn to each other by nature, only for their very union to mean the world's undoing. It makes me think of Decoherence too, and how cruel a fate it is to be designed for each other yet each other's undoing all the same. I almost wonder if this could be why Josephine hesitated to bring him in... what if she believed to some extent that their being together would spell disaster (for them, for MC, for the world).... what if present day CalebMC are on a similar trajectory as their cosmic echoes, inevitable tragedy their only possible conclusion.......

[𝓇𝑒𝒾 ✈︎ ⋆°•☁︎ lessons with colonel 🐆🫦 @watermelon]

// spoilers

Caleb isn't a people-pleaser and I love it. Doesn't answer roll call, doesn't respond to authority. He'll please people, sure — but only when it gets him something (power, favors, goodwill). Never for approval. And he only gets better at weaponizing it over the years