Read: "If this story isn't perfectly canon compliant Sabah could be a liar, and I despise liars so I will trust the account of a dude who was wearing rose-tinted glasses who later acknowledged he fucked up in the situation, and declare that he did nothing wrong."
It's already kinda been stated, but I don't think you can really trust either recounting. Only when examining both perspectives can you try to piece together what exactly happened.
I don't know who you mean wears rose-tintend glasses.
If it's me then yeah obviously I read upwards to near 1 million words of Joe and People reacting to Joe which made his humility, desire for no confrontation and general desire to not inconvenience most people clear despite being literally godlike in some aspects, while I have not read the entirety of Worm (which IIRC does not even in its Entirety reach 1 Million Words) of which Sabah is quite the Small Part, so it is quite hard to distance myself and view it all with a neutral viewpoint when Joe's Current Action do not at all reflect the caustic behavior Sabah describes in Canon.
If it's Joe you mean then
HOW? He was raised by an abusive female dominated household who treat him like a dog in all but name is an introvert and has been stated to view his past actions as worse than they actually were, so if anything Joe sees Sabah's Action with rose-tinted glasses and disproportionally blames himself for it all especially after Sabah made her Regret clear a few weeks later.
To the latter point I never stated that Joe did nothing wrong. He could have confronted her somewhere more private, explain his situation a bit clearer (as in explain that he was trying to be polite and subtle in asking out before but wants a clear yes or no before they can continue their relationship/friendship) and probably a number of things that I do not want to speculate on given the sparse information on the event itself. What I did note however was that comparing Joe's somewhat more social and impolite Mistakes in accounting for the general Desire for Privacy when People talk about their feelings and other minor inconveniences to the fact that Sabah near definitely
Lied to his Face multiple Times and blows up on
him when he wants a clear answer is not understandable to ME, those are 2 entirely different "classes" of Mistakes. Both could have handled the situation better but that's true in pretty much every Situation ever. Rarely do People make absolutely no mistakes.
Besides that this isn't a court case where you need to hear both sides to approach a somewhat truthful recounting of what happened. Yes people view the past, especially traumatic experiences, differently, but this IS in the End a very good written story, if the author given Information is false everything that was written has to be reevaluated for it's truthfulness and I don't think BCF is that kind of story.
Worth noting; This fic takes place several years after the event between Joe and Sabah, and Joe explicitly recognized that he did wrong there and has been working on improving himself in that time. We also know that Joe only went for the final attempt because a friend talked him into it.
Also: The idea that rejecting some pushy asshole is important enough to put 'serious thought' into for either of those things is a tall order, and the idea that "minimizing fallout" was something that Sabah intentionally thought out in the pushy-asshole-rejection is discredited by her later very public rejection.
As I stated before given his home environment it is unlikely that Joe would view a possibly(?) older female in a worse than they actually are and more likely give himself less Credit than he deserves.
Also: Given the fact that Joe wasn't a pushy asshole but a nice guy who in her eyes connected being nice to something more
and simultaneously was one of her if not the closest contact she had on campus which taught in a language she had severe problems with pushing him away from her would
not be a light decision given the potential of becoming a social outcast (at least in that course) and even destroying her further options for studying. Secondly her very public rejection was 1. Joe's Choice of Location given that
he confronted her and 2. given her later apology was
not something she wanted to do and was simply an emotional outburst.
In terms of Alternative Universe, the closest thing is the Knig of Arms, Joe's original shard, Lord has actually tries to make the story as cannon compliant as possible, though he has stated that years of Fannon may have come in just due to how it's hard to be removed from.
And the story even does a bit of a analysis of how fanon is compared to how the story was originally, as the passager and it's emotional responses are based of it.
On terms of how Sabah and Joe remember things, I am just going to use the Dream House as my example of a story that deals with people having differing memories.
What does exactly constitute as canon compliant as possible? What motivates our Lord and Saviour enough to change it? How much did Fanon affect him (as far as I know Worm has a huge but subtle discrepancy between Fanon and Canon, for example the Dragon of Kyushu was never actually used as a Title for Lung in Canon)?
What is Dream House? That name does not remind me of anything.
