xx || RELATIONSHIP/QUESTIONS MEME

[rebells]

Swift has logged 1k since I reapped him and exciting things have been happening and I am no longer dying of exchangemodwork so!!

This post is for:
- relationships!! possibly including dots because I love dots
- general questions/SOTU/what ifs/Swift's thoughts on a thing!
- HEART ROOMS I LOVE HEART ROOMS
- whatever else you can think of why not!!

GO WILD I honestly just want to babble.

Comments

[thinkoutsidethebox]

Relationship me!!!

[rebells]

cries

CUSTOMARY DOTS OPENER EXCEPT THIS RELATIONSHIP IS NOT REALLY CONDUCIVE TO DOTS uhh it's sort of simultaneously

and

Their thread in her Good End post was a huge perspective-shift for him--he denied it up and down, but he does empathize with her and he is afraid that he'll get attached to her and she'll hurt him. She seemed to be trying to draw them on opposite sides of a fundamental divide, and he knows that's not wrong, but he ultimately thinks of them as the same type of person--the question of how to trust, when to trust, when to accept faith and idealism and friendship despite your better judgment has been one of Swift's huge struggles, both in canon and (especially) in Aather. He is not a leap of faith kind of person! In his canon, he consistently plays the role of the cynical guy, the voice of reason, the devil's advocate; the one who says "maybe it isn't wrong to want revenge, maybe you shouldn't forgive this guy, maybe we're going to have to kill her." But he gets proven wrong, and he starts to cede to the forces of cheery idealism and unconditional acceptance, less because he doesn't think he has a point and more because that's what the people he loves believe in and he loves them for it.

And that is part because one of the people they've believed in and reached out to regardless of reason has been him. As he sort of intimated to her, he's been saved by that kind of faith and kindness multiple times--and more importantly, Jay in canon starts out as this desperately lonely kid who wants (almost!) more than anything to be loved. Of course he's going to believe in the people who love him. Even more so because he can actually see himself changing in response to that.

So when she hit a chord with him--that thread basically cemented her slow slide from "terrible person whom (more importantly) I can't trust" to "someone who is struggling with the same sorts of things I am"--his instinctive answer is, "well, just accept it." That is the right path and the path to happiness, for him. He does . . . think she should make friends! Or rather, that someone will eventually try to determinedly be friends with her, and that she shouldn't spurn them when that happens. He doesn't think that she needs to be a better or nicer person for that to happen, or for her to keep friends--I mean, he's not exactly a paragon of niceness himself. He thinks that friendship would make her a marginally better person by itself, o-or at least mellow her out??, and he definitely thinks she'd be happier.

He thinks she must be lonely, because he was lonely--and so the obvious answer, the "right" answer by Tales of Legendia laws of the universe, is that he should be her friend. Especially since she seems to . . . actually like him in a non-antagonistic way? And want to have a meaningful relationship with him?

That is, however, the one thing he absolutely can't do, largely for the same reasons that make him sympathize with her in the first place. Swift is someone who has been hurt in the past, and who is still leery of trust and friendship and vulnerability, and he needs any place he puts his heart to be, ultimately, a SAFE place. Not absolutely safe, because he knows that isn't possible! But "I have analyzed this person's character and determined that they are probably not going to fuck me over" safe.

Erika issss . . . not safe . . . (wow understatement of the century gosh). Erika is "logically speaking almost definitely going to fuck me over," actually! And he is not going to touch that! He almost can't touch that, really. He flat-out refuses to be her friend or even knowingly accept any kind of non-surface relationship with her, because, in an unacknowledged and kind of subconscious way, he knows that he is going to get invested and (eventually) attached and that is Not Okay. So he picks and picks and snarks at her and has arguments about the value of friendship, because he can't quite let it go, but he's not willing to go further than that.

He sort of thinks he is a coward (she was right!)--not only because his canon tells him that NO FRIENDSHIP WILL DEFINITELY WIN IN THE END! but because as he also intimated to her, the kind of good and idealistic people he admires just wouldn't care that she might hurt them; they would choose to do it anyway, because it would still seem worth the risk. He honestly believes that if he was a better person, or a braver person, he would choose to do the same. But he won't and can't, not without changing who he is pretty radically.

I . . . hope that makes sense . . . did I miss anything . . . also reverse (you don't have to use this many words, omg) . . . .

[thinkoutsidethebox]

I SEE YOUR WORDS AND RETURN YOU... EVEN MORE WORDS I hope they make sense too, suddenly it is late.

I think the thing that is most unfortunately ironic is how much Erika and Swift's attitudes are... precisely opposite... of what would make this work out... Let me see if I can explain this at all coherently.

Right now Erika is essentially caught between two things. On the one hand, she has acknowledged that she doesn't get satisfaction from being an unfeeling sadist, and that she misses things that way, and that she's lonely and wants to make connections with people. On the other hand, she absolutely does not think she's someone who is... worthy of friendship? Putting it that way sounds more self-deprecating than she really feels it, but she is absolutely aware that she is a terrible person and pathetic in a lot of ways and that's not... an appealing candidate for friendship. But she also absolutely doesn't want to soften up and become trusting and full of idealism and friendship because that is not. . . who she is. Like she said in their good end thread, she's still ~the detective~ and that's not ever going to change! She has to be able to work alone and she has to be able to look for the true evils of the world, she can't just happily ignore those things. And she doesn't want to even pretend to be nicer/friendlier because that would be a lie.

So her main question for self-reflection right now is whether she can actually... do both of those things. Have true companionship and still be true to herself!

Unfortunately that means she rejects the sort of person Swift is thinking of, the person who will ~determinedly try to be friends~, pretty much immediately. She rejected both Mitsuki and Star making overtures like that. If someone is idealistic and will be her friend no matter what, what does that even mean...? Even if they're "friendly" with her, if they don't really understand what she stands for, that's not a relationship of any value to her. First of all she thinks it's stupid for people to treat her well when she's awful. Second of all what she wants isn't just someone being nice to her, it's someone who understands her to a certain extent and still wants to spend time with her, who she can have real conversations with.

Her one canon friend, Dlanor, was her subordinate who she abused thoroughly, but then when Erika was getting beaten badly, Dlanor decided she was worth protecting even though she was intensely pathetic at the time. And later she opens up to Dlanor about her feelings, and even makes an offer that they could play together forever, making mysteries and solving them. But then Erika loses and dies instead! And when she comes back she ends up fighting against Dlanor again, which hurts her more than she expects it to. But then later they're penpals. Dlanor describes her as "evil, but the type of evil that can be sympathized with." So she does believe it's... theoretically possible to have a friend like that!

Unfortunately nearly everyone in Aather tends to fall to either side of the divide, for Erika—either they're so naive that she doesn't like them at all and they have no hope of understanding her, or they understand her and think she's irredeemably evil. Like I mentioned in my plurk earlier Battler is heavy on that latter side - the main theme of Umineko is that you need love to solve Beatrice's mystery, and that's why Battler was able to solve it when Erika couldn't, and why Erika ended up the self-declared villain and Beatrice (and Battler) ultimately killed her. Battler in Aather has pretty often been like "you will never be able to understand it because you have no love." A lot of the time she ends up angry/despairing because a) "love and friendship" looks so little like what she wants or can do, and b) she keeps being told that it is impossible for her.

That was a lot of words already only tangentially about Swift, I'm sorry.

Swift is someone she feels like might be able to be in the hard middle ground! She likes him and thinks he's fairly smart. He clearly understands how terrible she is but also apparently doesn't think she's irredeemable. So she stretched herself really far in her good-end post to admit that she did actually want a relationship with him, if he would talk to her. SHE WOULD ACTUALLY LIKE TO BE FRIENDS WITH HIM, which she didn't say in that thread but didn't explicitly deny either—she said "I didn't ask that!!" I think. Even if he doesn't like her at all (good! he shouldn't like her! that's a sign of good judgment!) she would still like... to keep in touch. Because he's special to her! And maybe at some point she will figure out how to do friendship in a way that doesn't compromise her principles and they can be friends. In a way that is not about idealism and unconditional love. Because they're similar people in some ways.

That's also why she got so deeply mad at him and stormed away in the most recent thread, though, because she was essentially questioning him on this in a really obtuse way. "Do you think I'm like you, just making very tiny steps towards interacting with people, or do you think I'm fundamentally different, completely evil and incapable of love or friendship?" And he said yes to that second one. So she was just like /TABLEFLIP!! IF YOU THINK IT'S IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TOO THEN WHY AM I EVEN TRYING!!

She would have taken it as an even deeper blow if not for the fact that she does... actually have other friends... in particular Ling is visiting and Ling is happy to see her and wants her around (and even invited her to his world). It's not quite the same though.


Sob okay question. Will Swift tell her he didn't mean it. . .