I realized there's a lot of young dgs fans who ship Ryuu with Barok and Holmes and as easy as it is for me to say "what the fuck" and leave it at that, I also realized that most young fans just don't understand why those ships are at best questionable and at worst unhealthy

"I ship ryuuzieks and/or ryuuholmes and people are mean to me about it!" you say. I probably should have opened with an explanation rather than "dude what the fuck" given that most of you are minors, but there's a reason me (and others) react with disgust

let's break it down this way. Ryuu is a 23 year old college student who just entered the legal field, with a small student stipend as his main income. he's in London with effectively zero people he can immediately rely on if he's in trouble, other than Holmes.

meanwhile, Barok is a 32 year old prosecutor well-established in the British courts and a famous noble with possible royal ties. Holmes is a 34 year old detective with a highly successful consulting business and a name known by every person in London (and beyond).

not only are Barok and Holmes about 10 years older than Ryuu (and the age difference here is an issue because Ryuu is young, not just because the age gap is big), both are in inherently much higher positions than Ryuu. There is a deeply unbalanced power dynamic against Ryuu.

Holmes is very much a mentor figure to Ryuu, and Ryuu relies on Holmes for housing and food. It's easy to say "Holmes would never exploit Ryuu like that" but the problem isn't whether he would. relationships can become abusive and/or unhealthy unintentionally

meanwhile with Barok there's the racism against Japanese people being 90% of his characterization for most of the duology, on top of the unhealthy power dynamic. frankly I don't know why a racist white man would be a good romantic partner for the victim of that racism

for those of you who have played dgs2, I know you're going to say "but Barok [redacted for spoilers]!" and all I have to say to that is do you really think that's all it takes to stop being an intense racist? is racism controlled by some sort of on-off switch in our brains?

"but this is fiction!" you might say, and we as a collective internet have had this discussion a million times before and will have it a million times more, but if fiction has no effect on reality, then representation of marginalized people in fiction would be unnecessary

I would talk about how Ryuu's depiction in these ships is generally fetishistic, racist, and infantilizing, but I'm running out of space and this thread is already really long and that's its own can of worms (that I have covered before, just not in this specific context)

(rt's would be nice, especially since I don't let anyone under 16 follow my acct and this really is aimed at young fans so it's already not great at reaching its intended audience. I'm smart, I know)