#also as an aside: did doffy not know medical knowledge was a requirement?

[mingos]

「 h.c. 」 ー the one about rosinante

　　　　hot take(?): doflamingo loved rosinante a lot.

　one of the few people he would have the emotional capacity to and his worldview would allow him to love, actually.

('but he was planning to sacrifice himー' we will get to that. look, it's complicated.)

to explain what i mean (& prevent from being too long) i want to invite anybody who hasn't seen this to give it a look. here, i talk in more detail about what i mean when i say doflamingo 'loves' somebody & what his limitations are as a neurodivergent person with low empathy.

maybe i'll write a separate post about his cognitive empathy (using logic to determine how someone feels) vs. his emotional empathy (the ability to resonate with someone's emotions and feel what they feel) because it's complicated, and nuanced, and all that junkーbut that's a deep dive for another day. right now let's just talk his emotional empathy.

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　basically, his love functions differently because his empathy (a pretty key component in loving somebody) functions differently. for most people, he 'loves' in the sense he attaches himself to you because you make him feel good & feed his ego, and he wants to keep you around as a result. he recognizes that, in order to do this, he needs to provide you with things in exchange: protection, money, opportunities, etc. but he cannot connect with you on an emotional level, or at least not where it matters: empathizing with you.

　　that's for most people, though; there are some rare exceptions, and even then it's still a bit... off.

he 'empathizes' best with not just people who have experienced the same things as him, but who experienced the same thing with him. ('empathizes' in quotes because, even then, it's more him projecting how the event made him feel onto a person rather than actually knowing how they feel and it just so happens that sometimes those feelings can overlap sometimes but, eh, he's trying his best...).

he lived in garbage dumps with his four executives, he built his pirate crew up from scratch over 25-30 years, and, uh... y'knowーspent two years suffering poverty & unimaginable abuse side-by-side with his little brother. it's a circumstance that allows him to speak in detail, and commiserate, and genuinely come the closet to caring about someone's feelings that his extremely finicky brain will allow.

　but with rosinante specifically, doflamingo's capacity goes even deeper. because he, most likely, was not only the first person he developed a bond with as his brother, but he inherently places a higher social value on him because he's a celestial dragon. so, in a world of humans (people he declares himself as being socially, morally & maybe even genetically superior to) rosinante is the closest person he has to an equal, and that counts for something.

it counts for a lot, actually. it allowed rosinante to get away with a lot:

leaving for 14 years

coming back inexplicably

the frequent accidents

letting him just leave again for another 6 months & also take law

being seen as generally incompetent when doflamingo values people so long as they're useful

we also don't know the extent of how much rosinante masked his caring & compassionate side during his undercover mission before breaking away with law, but i have to assume doflamingo at the very least knew and, despite hating that side of him, overlooked it and allowed him to stay close.

i also genuinely believe vergo when he says doflamingo didn't suspect him and he accepted rosinante back with completely open arms & no strings attached. for my own portrayal of doffy, i've toyed with the idea of him being secretly a little bitter about being 'abandoned' because he's got some issues with that which may or may not have made the decision to sacrifice his brother easierーbut canonically it's probably a bit more cut & dry.

sacrificing him with the op op fruit was never the original plan. he didn't give rosinante the directive to eat it because he wanted to get rid of him for the last 4 yearsーhe wanted to sacrifice him because he was disobedient.

more than that, he wanted to sacrifice him in this specific way because it was a test to reconfirm his loyalty one last time. at the cost of his life, yes (though, all of his 'family' members are held to the same standard) but he gave rosinante something he didn't give his father or anybody else that betrayed him: an option of how he'd like to die.

'you can keep running if you want, prove to me right now you're a traitor, and i'll come & kill you myself. or you can come home & show me you're still my loyal little brother by giving your life to me. i'm giving you a choice.'

rosinante decided to run, and i have to imagine that broke doflamingo's heart a little. or, whatever what was left of it