#that jorge 2010 adjustment was the 'jorge is great because he unites everyone in their dislike of lorenzo' quote doing good work

[batsplat]

a valentino-centered question—setting aside the track rivalries and drama, who do you think valentino actually likes the most among the other aliens? based on their personalities, or just the vibe when they’re together—

nyhh unfortunately there's an easy answer here, which makes it kinda boring. but it's also unambiguously correct - it's dani. I guess this kind of depends on what you mean 'like' and... if it's even possible to separate that out from on-track rivalries... I'm very much a sports supremacist in that I believe the interpersonal relationship is always first and foremost determined by competitive circumstance. it's not the ONLY factor and I suppose we could imagine a theoretical world in which they were all like... idk, bakers... but, well, they're not

decided to kill ten minutes of my life I'm never getting back by providing a rough chart of how valentino's feelings towards each of the aliens developed over time

[hopefully you should be able to figure this out without a key, but if not: dani - orange; casey - lilac (?); jorge - blue; marc - red. the lil loops reflect events/complexities tough to capture; the zigzags represent 'well you people are all over the place'; the question marks are 'too little information but this was probably where valentino was at'; and the dashes similarly are... this range makes sense. science]

so as you can see, dani has the highest average. valentino knew him when he was still a teenager and got teenage dani drunk, which means dani gets an instant leg up by having an established dynamic pre-competition AND by not having quite the same idolisation weirdness going on with him as the other three. helps give them a more normal relationship... dani never seemed quite so weird about valentino. 2006 dani came in as the Next Big Thing and we have circumstantial evidence to suggest valentino did respond at least a little to that, but then in 2007 casey decided to be the Next Big Thing instead. this is extremely vibes-based - but in the latter bit of the og alien era you do feel like dani was Winning Here because valentino had a way more toxic relationship with the other two aliens and needed someone to reliably yap to, before ever so slightly doing less of that when the marc relationship was its best. afterwards it's a reversion to the mean - you still get an isolated bit of faff like the aragon 2017 overtake dispute, but broadly we're just in nebulously fond territory

casey, jorge and marc's rivalries with valentino really don't need to recapped again at this stage. the point is they obviously took them all quite firmly out of the nebulously fond territory at one point or another. between casey and jorge... idk I do feel like putting 'meh' over 'I hate you (fun)' is a bit kind to jorge for the 2008-9 period, where valentino's 'meh' towards jorge really was a proper meh. they weren't enemies, but valentino wasn't interested in engaging with jorge as a person At All in a way that was not true of casey. and even when casey existed in the 'I hate you (fun)' range, they were still pretty warm with each other in-person. I've had casey and jorge end up roughly in the same territory as dani - I think gun to his head, valentino would still prefer dani, but there is a certain 'gosh we sure did try to kill each other fifty times' fondness he shares with casey and jorge more than with anyone else. doesn't mean they're FRIENDS, none of these tiers are friends, but... nebulously fond

the main aberration is obviously jorge's starting point. again we only have gossip and jorge's impressions to go off, but jorge does seem to have been the only alien where valentino just... did not vibe with him from basically day zero. like, already didn't like him before jorge entered the premier class, quite probably before yamaha even chose him as valentino's prospective teammate. yes, the internal competition thing will have played into valentino's refusal to engage with jorge in any way whatsoever for as long as he possibly could, but... idk man, clearly there was something else going on there too. fundamentally there was nothing wrong with the interpersonal chemistry between valentino and any one of dani, casey or marc - it's just everything else that was a problem. jorge is in the weird position where every time they feuded, after maybe a year they recovered to a higher point than their previous baseline. in a way it brought them closer together. so maybe the basic interpersonal chemistry was SHIT but the situation was saved by several mutual murder attempts

anyway. idk. I find this really tough to disentangle from on-track rivalries because that was... the whole reason these people know each other. like,, sure, valentino may have picked up on some superficial resemblance between himself and marc that helped the, get on well at the start, but those similarities were also why that relationship was always going to get worse if they spent any length of time properly competing with each other. so very much a 'stuff that united them also divided them' situation, which ends up being kinda a net neutral as far as vibes are concerned. the similarities between casey and valentino were actively not a good thing for that relationship, since it's all stuff like 'unrivalled ability to hold grudges' and 'pettiness' and 'paranoia' and 'willingness to escalate' and 'dispositional nastiness'... so to the extent that they vibed with each other, it was in spite of all that stuff. those two had an occasionally bizarre mismatch between their rhetoric versus 'the evidence of my own eyes' that is pretty unique within the genre of valentino rivalries, but also is a result of the context in which that relationship existed. casey coming into that rivalry with a lot of baggage (some related to valentino) and valentino's penchant for mind games with his direct competitors made that relationship deeply messy. my guess is that valentino really did find jorge kinda annoying and grating, but also that can't be separated from how jorge was positioned from day one of their actual rival as both an external and an internal threat. and yeah, with dani, obviously it does HELP that both times they were in a title fight-adjacent situation, 2006 and 2008, there was always Another Guy valentino had reason to be more worried about

idk I feel like this is kind of an annoying answer... my personal bugbear is fans forgetting this is a Sport and these people are Competing for Titles, like I WANT that to be more important than how much they vibe personally lol. and luckily you'd have to say valentino agrees with me on this... fundamentally he was there to Win. which, good. from 'basic personality compatibility', jorge was in a worse situation than the other three imo - though you have to suspect that's partly because jorge was the one who was copying valentino most closely. idk if it's necessarily a PROPRIETARY thing like there's no reason to believe valentino had any issue with other riders doing celebrations, but... the whole effect. jorge establishing himself as A Character. the flamboyance situation in the yamaha garage. jorge being awkward and try-hard and arrogant in a way that isn't in truth a million miles away from valentino himself, but valentino finds grating from jorge specifically. that's just a guess! we have way more to go on for the jorge side of the equation, and first and foremost valentino was just 'withdrawn' towards jorge for much of their early partnership. not actively unpleasant. but yeah. my guess is jorge is the main outlier in the negative sense in that his relationship started out significantly worse than you'd expect from their competitive situation, whereas with the other three it's... about where you'd think early on. but, well. at least valentino and jorge eventually made it work. kind of