#also lbr ai and oom come as a pair so if oonmay ever have a chance at making it work it's going to involve oommay settling their scores

[finalacts]

something i've been thinking about with pluto is how the core three--ai, oom, and may--all have prescribed "roles" in their tangled mess of a relationship and how that has made it incredibly difficult for each character to see themselves and each other as People outside of those roles. this is where i think their core miscommunication happens, because it's not that the characters don't talk, it's more that they are constantly talking at or past each other, not to.

aioon and oaboom are obvious--aioon's the dutiful older sister, selfless to the point of being self-sacrificial, and oaboom's the overshadowed younger sister, precious only because her "weakness"** requires more attention. for aioon, moving forward is going to look like figuring out how to be a good sister/granddaughter without giving up her sense of self, and learning that these two things are actually one and the same--as we've seen, every time she sacrifices her happiness for what she thinks others want from her, it actually comes back to bite her in the ass. for oaboom, it's unlearning the belief that she is a burden because of her illness and learning that her ability to be loved is innate and does/should not need to be externally validated. for them both, it's going to include forgiving themselves and each other for their parents' deaths and all of the childhood hurts that ensued.

may is a little trickier to figure out, and i think i've settled on hers being that her identity and worldview--her role, literally--is almost entirely defined by that first interaction (one that aioon doesn't even remember, mind you). not only is attaching your entire sense of self to someone else's love for you just unhealthy in general, i actually think she spends quite a significant portion of the series unable to see aioon in her entirety because of it (not to mention how it basically caused the mess that was her relationship with oom). to her, aioon is still that teenage girl who showed her she was worth fighting for and how to fight--she's her savior. may's attachment to aioon is all encompassing, and it is devastating. it's why may keeps making aioon promise to choose her over everything else, not realizing that aioon (as she is now) would never be able to deliver. it's why her manipulations (lovebombing aioon every time she tries to tell her the truth or leave) ultimately don't work--aioon is not driven by love the same way she is. for aioon, that first meeting is inconsequential. it's not her lifeforce the way it is may's.

given all of this and the breakup at the end of ep 11, i think the only way forward for may is to figure out who she is outside of aioon--specifically, outside of this need to be loved by aioon. who is may as a person, an attorney, a cousin, a friend, when she doesn't have aioon guiding her (physically or otherwise)? personally, it's the only way i can see their relationship balancing out: may needs to have other things driving her the way aioon is driven by her family and friends, or else they'll just end up back where they started--with aioon leaving and may devastated.

ideally, their reunion would look something like aioon, the writer, meets metavee, the attorney, rather than aioon, may's first love, (re)meets may, aioon's twin sister's ex. a core theme in pluto is how our fixation on the past makes us unable to move forward, and how we should learn from our mistakes but not be haunted and bogged down by them. what aioon and may need is a fresh start, a chance to build upon new foundation, and i hope the ep 11 >> ep 12 time jump gives them that.

**just a quick aside mostly for myself to say that oaboom being canonically chronically ill is very interesting to me!! and i will be letting the thoughts abt that and how disability in general plays out in pluto percolate some more