[IT'S MEME TIME AGAIN]

[antreegonist]

I NEED...A DISTRACTION!

Questions meme, you know how it goes! I play Mithos and Firebird, and you can ask about Lark if you want.

I probably won't pick up full steam on answering questions until tonight after class, Persona answers may be vague, etc.

Comments

[antreegonist]

Some constants: Guy is forever a fellow original Sterling! A mutual close bro and close friend and person to trust and depend on and watch out for and talk to and check in with regularly! Someone who is and will always be party in Mithos's head! He quietly ships Guy and Zack and he is worried about Guy what with a lot of his close folks getting Booked or good-ended or...being Van...lately; he's kind of trying to keep an eye on that.

This is all still true and will always be true, but when I take a closer look at it, their CR has somehow slanted over the weeks to more NEG/NEU than POS on Mithos's end, which sort of culminated in Mithos going RRDKJGLKLFDJGLDGGH in Guy's direction in their last thread.

I have mentioned that Mithos feels the killmonger torturecamps memory torpedoed all his relationships and the one with Guy is no exception. Guy avoided Mithos in the immediate fallout and Mithos avoided Guy and – notably -- if they had run into each other back then Mithos would have just pointed Guy in Lloyd's direction and fled. If Mithos ever thinks about why, he'd admit that

a) Guy was in a lot more of a position to get what Lloyd was going through and make Lloyd feel better (though really no one was/could have been in a position to make Mithos feel better or should have tried), and
b) he thinks Guy is probably closer to Lloyd than to him.

It's not a jealousy thing, just a there thing, in that Guy and Mithos have a bit less range in their interactions. They haven't done lighthearted stuff one-on-one for a very long time and the vast majority of their talks overall have been unavoidably heavy and stressful (Guy freaking out over memories, repeated rlkdgj over Van, discussion on quitting the knights, general tension undercurrents in their threads post-torturecamps since they never addressed that whole mess out loud) and they're not really good at mutual...load-lightening. So that is the association that is there right now :|a

Mmmaybe it will change now that the worst bombshell of all is over with, but it has also gotten increasingly difficult for Mithos to be a cheerful teenage boy around Guy OR feel like he helps Guy very much as opposed to stressing him out harder. There is a lot of unconscious frustration around that and not knowing what to do about it! There was even more frustration/apprehension added when Mithos realized that they were on shifting sands after the memory fallout; that he knew he could depend on Guy to condemn his actions and not reject the person he is now, but that he had no idea where they were going beyond that.

There is a THIRD SOURCE of frustration which is not Guy's fault! It's – Guy also fills a particular niche in terms of what Mithos offers and takes from their one-on-one conversations. I am finding it hard to word what Guy's niche is exactly but I think it's that he's someone Mithos is okay with being philosophically unsure at, with bringing up how he straddles the line between Tales protagonist and Tales antagonist mentalities. Things have fallen out so there is a space around Guy where Mithos feels okay letting him know when he doesn't quite have a solid handle on how he works mentally, and also feels okay making certain moves to deal w/ it and figure himself out.

Unfortunately this is also stressy. Both the text and subtext of his conversations with Guy – especially now that they're linking in to his conversations with Van – have contained a pretty intense struggle to let his antagonism and temper speak out in a way that is beneficial rather than damaging. What he's been trying to articulate for a long time is that not only does having both a hero's and a villain's perspective help, but that sometimes crazy antagonist anger keeps him going longer and harder and drives him to better places than saner protagonist anger can. That he got very good at sublimating the antagonist part of himself for a while but for his character to keep shifting and growing in a healthy way it has to come out somehow, some way. That he is sometimes angry at and fearful of the whole process. And he can't SAY any of this, because he doesn't know how yet.

All of these frustrations are mostly why Mithos went RRGHTDSFKIJSKJL in Guy's direction eventually, rather than because he felt like Guy had said something objectionable. Still, it helped a ton; I don't think the shifting relationship sands issue really got fixed yet, since that'll take time, but some stuff has been aired out and shared now that needed to be, and they can go places from there.

. . . thank goodness Mithos doesn't also have a crush on Guy or this might wind up longer than the general SOTU i am doing next

reverse me bro

[intheblueblazes]

I READ IT ALL

I WILL REVERSE WHEN I AM NOT INTROING

ILU MITHOS '-'

[antreegonist]

IT'S COOL TAKE YOUR TIME '-' REINTROS ARE EXCITING