Ruinene

Ruinene is the het ship between Rui Kamishiro and Nene Kusanagi from the Project SEKAI fandom.

Canon
Rui Kamishiro and Nene Kusanagi are childhood friends and neighbors. They're both parts of the group called Wonderlands x Showtime. In their first appearance in the story, they're shown to be hanging out in the same place.

Since she was a child, Nene has had a lot of difficulties speaking to people. Noticing that, Rui builds a robot that has the face of her friends, and gives her its control. Through it, she's able to communicate with people. That's how she first meets the other groupmates of Wonderlands x Showtime, performing whilst controlling Robo-Nene. Rui is the one who recommended Nene to Tsukasa Tenma, so she could join the group. He stated that he wouldn't agree on joining if she couldn't be in.

At one point of the story, Nene stays behind to practice her performance. Rui also stays and interrupts her by saying he knew she'd be here, making her embarrassed. He says that he wanted to make sure she isn't overexerting herself for the show, showing his care towards her. He offers to help her perform, which she accepts. After practicing, he tells her that everything is perfect, and that she shouldn't worry about anything, seemingly making her happy.

The next day, the show is ruined due to Robo-Nene's battery running out, and Tsukasa becomes furious about that. He claims that his show was ruined all because Nene forgot to charge the robot. Rui takes her defense, saying it's also his fault for not checking the batteries. When Tsukasa crosses the line, Rui coldly asks him to stop. After Nene runs away while crying, Rui tells Tsukasa he was wrong for telling her all that. He goes as far as to tell him that he doesn't have what it takes to be a star, because of how he treats team work. After those events, Rui catches up to Nene and says that he's sorry for making her join the troupe and forgetting to charge the robot.

Nene describes her friends with a lot of negative adjectives, like "idiot" and "weird", but is still shown to deeply care about them. She sees Rui as nosy, but still worries about his mental wellbeing. Rui, on the other hand, wants to help her with her communication problem, Robo-Nene being one of the things he did for her. Rui is said to have a particular personality and a strange sense of humor, and that usually made people avoid him. It's stated that it's just a misunderstanding, but Nene does say that his strange behavior includes using people as test dummies for his ideas and waterboarding them in swimming pools. Though, that does not stop her of staying friends with him. Their personalities might not exactly match, but it doesn't stop them from being very good friends.

Fanon
Ruinene is one of the most appreciated and most popular het ships in the Project SEKAI western fandom. However, both Nene and Rui are shipped with other people instead, like RuiKasa and Emunene. Both are more popular than Ruinene, RuiKasa having more than 200 fics on Archive of Our Own, and EmuNene having around 70 fics. It doesn't stop the fandom of shipping Rui and Nene together. Additionally, it is not rare to see the fandom shipping everyone in the Wonderlands X Showtime group together, and that includes Ruinene. The trope that they follow is the childhood friends to lovers one, which is usually appreciated in most fandom. Some people could also say that they follow the opposite attracts trope.

They have around 50 fics on AO3, and a fairly amount of fanart.

Fandom
FAN FICTION

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Trivia

 * Their kizuna rank titles include: "Neighbours", "What We Wanted To Be", and "Alchemist and Mermaid Princess".
 * They have a height difference of 24cm, Nene being 156 cm and Rui being 180 cm.
 * They sing "Nijiro Stories" together with MEIKO and KAITO.
 * They both got inspired to perform after seeing the same play.