#edgar is out of mike's league and better than him in every conceivable way

[orchidbreezefc]

edgar woe.begone: low empathy, high masking

THESIS: my reading of edgar woe.begone is that he's a low empathy autistic who has no innate intuition for social cues and has had to teach himself everything about social interaction from scratch, which is an interpretation that i think explains a lot about him.

now, i am very critical of edgar as a person. i think he's a less than good person and a bad boyfriend. but let me be VERY clear right off the bat: these symptoms don't make anyone a bad person. these symptoms aren't even bad per se. theyre all disabling symptoms that make social interaction more difficult for the person who has them. like any symptom, they have to be managed and compensated for.

some people under the neurodivergent/mentally ill umbrella, as with any group of people, are bad people. being a bad person flavors one's approach to their mental illness, and mental illness in turn flavors the manner in which they're a bad person. the mental illness isn't what makes you bad, but it does affect how your shittiness manifests.

disclaimers done, a good place to start is the way edgar speaks, especially with jeremy's performance. edgar always sounds very reasonable, approachable, and agreeable, and there is never an ounce of genuine emotion in his voice. he talks like an autistic person with zero innate intuition for social interaction who has taught himself to speak in the way that he's learned will get the best response.

edgar's customer service voice is the only one we hear and likely the only one he uses if he can help it. we know edgar's a tactician, a persuader. why use any other voice than the one he's carefully fine-tuned to make people like him and be receptive to what he's saying? this isn't even necessarily cynical: what do you want him to do, talk in a more uncontrolled, emotional way--that he's not used to managing--that will make people like him less?? what good would that do?

edgar likes control. he's more comfortable when things are in his hands, and only his. propagation definitely factors in here--if [link: my theory] that propagation is what solidified the certainty of edgar's death is true, it's no wonder he wants to control and limit the spread of information. edgar prefers to be in charge of making the plans, ideally alone.

this is part of why mike is perpetually out of the loop, even regarding decisions that concern him--which is pretty damn paternalistic. but there's a more wholesome aspect as well: edgar genuinely thinks he's doing mike a favor.

edgar knows mike has undergone and is undergoing a lot, and that he's terrible with plans and a major blabbermouth. if edgar can take care of a problem without mike having to worry his pretty head and perfect eyebrows about what to do, without knowing it ever existed, isn't that so much better? that's edgar being a good boyfriend, actually. he's helping!

it probably doesn't even occur to edgar how much this limits mike's agency, how much it hurts mike that edgar refuses to let him in, how this puts them on unequal footing, how fucking patronizing it is to not let your boyfriend make his own decisions about his own life. oh, how the tables have tabled since him originally telling mike that keeping the story of woe.begone from him didn't protect him, it impeded his ability to make informed choices.

here's where the low empathy creates problems--edgar doesn't have that innate intuition for how mike's feeling, and he doesn't (effectively) manage or compensate for it, and he definitely doesn't communicate with mike enough to know how he's affected by this shit (avoiding too much information sharing is good, remember?)

and mike certainly isn't going to tell him! mike is a goddamn simp. he's not going to establish boundaries. he's not going to put his foot down and demand better treatment. as if he fucking deserves that in the first place, pshaw. the only time he pushes back is in season 10 when he doesn't remember their relationship, and edgar is deeply shaken.

edgar is devastated to learn he hurt mikey, because he does genuinely adore that man. he would get lasso lessons from michael and rope him the moon if he could. his low empathy and efforts to manage everything himself keep him from realizing that mikey, a hyperempathetic mess who gets sentimental about pens, seriously suffers from being shut out like this.

edgar's thought process must be equally inscrutable to mikey, who just figures it would be asking too much to be an active and equal participant in his own relationship and life. edgar's perfect and great, so if mikey deserved that, he would already be giving it to him. if mikey's unhappy with any part of their relationship, no he isn't. he's lucky he has edgar at all. he's lucky he has anyone.

recall michael's agonized admission that "everything is about rugby, dammit" 10(++++) years and edgar's literal death later. we can only guess at how bad his rugby was, but we do know michael never talked it through with edgar. he tells mike this was him 'letting it go' actually, when the fact that theyre having this conversation at all is proof that he extremely hasn't. this is what 'letting it go' looks like to michael: burying an issue forever and giving up on ever getting closure.

so yes, edgar does authentically deeply love his mikey-bear. unfortunately, if you never establish the communication to bridge the differences between your own methods of operating and that of your partner, love will only get you so far. and the first time around, where it got them was michael fighting back tears in an apartment in latvia over a wound from edgar that he suffered in silence until the day he died.