#a fun fact though is that in 2020 while puzzling out what exactly the trajectory of the balthazar and tristian situation was

[outeremissary]

13 + 53 for Balthazar?

Thank you Nix! I hope this is coherent I should. Perhaps be in bed. But I was Compelled

[Amorous Asks]

13. Does your OC find other people's love lives interesting - or even compelling - to learn about? Or would they really rather not know?

Balthazar is really not interested in other people's love lives, at least not for their own sakes. He doesn't find other people's relationship drama especially gripping most of the time and he finds people's relationship successes absolutely cloying. One might call him a hater. But all things do have their uses, and there's plenty of information worth having about people's love lives. It's useful to know who is connected to whom and how, what predilections others have, how they interact with others and how that affects their self image, how these relationships are perceived... there's a lot that you can pull out of it. It's useful for building a sense of a person and a social setting. And if you're lucky, you can get things that let you exert some real pressure.

And, on occasion, sometimes people do have situations which are incredibly funny. There are so many ways people are willing to humiliate themselves for love. That, at least, is worth hearing.

53. Has your OC had to unlearn any cultural or societal messages about love and relationships as they have got older? Was this difficult for them?

Hm. I feel like one some level it's impossible for this not to happen to a person, but at the same time... I feel like there must be something I'm missing, but I can't think of anything specific. I think he has been situated from pretty much birth in a way that makes him extremely critical of a lot of messages about love. His mother abandoned him and his father when he was far too young to remember anything about her, and a lot of his childhood was shaped by on the one side his father's conviction that one day she was going to come back and she loved them very much and on the other the pity and mockery of every neighbor who had known her and could say with their own certainty that on no level was that true. He didn't have a lot of positive models of romantic love in his life outside his household either- there were a lot of failed or struggling marriages and unequal or ephemeral relationships out there. There was a concept of "love" as a mutually affirming, uplifting thing out there in fiction, but it seemed so distant from reality that the older he got the more cynical he became about it.

I'm not sure that it's a mainstream idea, but what he really internalized was that love was a kind of dangerous delusion people developed because they couldn't cope with the reality that relationships are just about using each other. And of course, anyone who wanted to make themself such a soft target was just asking to be taken for all they were worth. It's a dog eat dog world out there. On the other hand, people with genuine connections and stable relationships...? Those really did make him genuinely uncomfortable.

I feel like there's no way to write a conclusion here that doesn't sound incredibly cheesy, but like. So much of his arc as a person has wound up being about finding worth in genuine connection and stability with other people so. You know. Love is real and all. And that vulnerability really does have something to offer.