The θ values of 1-fc and 1-as vary significantly (95 ° and 74 °, respectively) to relieve the pseudo anti-aromaticity of 1 at S1-FC. The trajectories are redirected around this relatively highenergy region of the PES and skew towards asynchronous hopping points. This energetic preference leads to most trajectories (82%) going through asynchronous hopping points. This hopping point preference for 1 was nearly double that of 2 (42%). This is in line with our MEP results, which suggested a direct path to an asynchronous S 1 /S 0 hopping point (one broken 𝜎 CC bond in the cyclopropenone ring). There is an overwhelming preference for a non-productive reaction outcome from hopping points in the FC-region (96% and 97% for 1 and 2, respectively). While the photochemical mechanism is still dynamically concerted, we classify it as being an asynchronous process where one C-C bond will break along the S 1 , and the other will break after hopping to the S 0 . While the gas-phase results provide valuable insights into the photochemical mechanism of 1 and 2, our interest in bioorthogonal chemistry applications drove us to understand how these reactions will behave in solvent. To accomplish this, we generated solvated systems with our chromophores of interest (1 and 2) and ran 250 fs NAMD simulations from the S 1 FCregion for both.