tenebraecious (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenebraecious) wrote2019-12-18 04:29 pm
tenebraecious) wrote2019-12-18 04:29 pm
(no subject)
Awwright, I'm in the mood for a ~question meme~ for Glacies and John Doe! Let's go back and forth until we're exhausted from words. I will also accept thread planning and CR plotting, because I've been remiss on that front, oops.
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So, I believe I've mentioned something along these lines before, but Amaranth's relationship with John is made up of fine layers of positive and negative emotion, built up over time like sedimentary rock. From their very first meeting in the Hunger Games, he struck her as someone unaccustomed to feeling as though there might be people who unequivocally have his back, and—notwithstanding the fact that she's also just Like This as a person—it made her want to offer some kind of salve to that aura of loneliness he carries around with him like a cloud of fog.
...Too bad they're such wildly different people! womp womp.
I think I want to start off talking about Amaranth's relationship to both respect and to displays of emotion, since they're each so central to her conflicts with John, and clarifying them I think goes a long way to explaining why she responds to him the way that she does.
For all that Amaranth is in a lot of ways a very deliberate person, she's also unapologetically passionate, with (as John has almost certainly noticed) a fierce sense of personal pride. While a lot of this passion is just, you know, her personality, it's also something that has been culturally encouraged. While a lot of Tsubaki Province is just Sengoku-era Japan with the patriarchy tempered a bit and then flipped upside down, a side effect of women being the archetypal warriors has been that emotions aren't stigmatized as weak; to the contrary, ~a warrior's passion~ is, if anything, encouraged.
As such, Amaranth has had a really hard time with how stoic and restrained John is. She wants him to know how she's feeling because she wants to know how he is feeling—she has these big, dramatic reactions to him as a very deliberate display of emotion in the hope that she can spur him into having Big Feelings along with her. Instead, when John reacts with his characteristic constrained responses, it feels essentially like a snub—like she's opening her heart to him, and he's at best failing to reciprocate; at worst, actively treating it as evidence that she's on some level rash or irresponsible. Essentially, whenever John comes off as trying to "manage" her emotions, she interprets it as condescension. (There's a touch of irony in all this, since Amaranth likewise continued to put in effort with John because she respected him and considered it worthwhile.)
The result has been that she's had the niggling impression that he doesn't entirely respect her for quite some time; it's just in GM game where it finally hit levels of being not just low-key irritating to something that made her specifically angry. It was really just a perfect storm of circumstances: amnesia!John arriving on the scene with no context for anything, seeing Camellia being the source of LiliS's strategy without the context that Amaranth had just arrived, herself; the fact that Amaranth still looks like she's just 20; Camellia's "negative trait" card presumably being why her reaction to Amaranth was quite that dramatically self-martyring (I actually don't know for sure and haven't wanted to pester Mika, but I assume it was at least something along those lines); Amaranth having just come back from seeing one of her son-figures brutally murdered, immediately followed by learning some really upsetting things about her world which re-framed one of her memories as her participating in institutionalized murder...
What I'm saying is that it was a lot, and it meant amnesia!John got a front row seat to seeing her at her most fragile—and even though she knew it wasn't really his fault, the fact that this was the basis on which John was judging her, now, just felt like one too many insults to bear. It felt like interacting with a judgmental stranger wearing the face of an old friend, and she just Did Not have the emotional bandwidth to deal with it on top of everything else being so bad. Amaranth is overall a quite resilient person, but the collection of circumstances that took place there finally managed to wear her down.
And now, suddenly John wants to be LiliS dad. Regardless of whether one approves of her parenting style, Amaranth has been more or less solo-parenting LiliS from the start... but she feels as though John hasn't acknowledged that, much less apologized for having, until now, resisted being there for the unit with everything in him. Indeed, Amaranth is absolutely aware that John sees her as a potential loose canon and liability. In their thread before his first aid class (the one shortly after he got his memories back), the question Amaranth considered asking but ultimately didn't was whether John saw her as "brutal," like his old Wild City unitmates who he clearly regards as the source of many of his (former?) issues. It's why she used that word with him in their argument about the duel.
So... the duel. There are... so many factors at play here. Amaranth's decision to pursue the duel in the first place was simultaneously her grasping desperately at atonement (for "causing" ZRAEL to attack them; for the re-contextualized murder in her memories) and her making a very calculated decision to pursue what she considered a peaceful solution.
She's honestly feeling pretty bad all around right now that no one who isn't from Creation seems to really get why a duel would be not just reasonable but an appropriate and even peace-keeping solution, but the fact that John doesn't seem to grasp it hurts more than, say, Nemesis completely not getting it. This goes all the way back to her attempts to be very emotionally open with him. She knows he's brilliant at reading people, but he still treated her actions as coming from a place of recklessness and (seemingly?) bloodthirst. Violence is a fact of life in Creation; I genuinely cannot emphasize enough just how many things are out there slaughtering mortals left and right. In The Hundred Kingdoms in particular, war is also a fact of life. So, for people like Amaranth and Shrike, taking a (perceived) group conflict and boiling it down to a 1v1 fight—that's not violence. That's civility.
Of course, Amaranth knew perfectly well that Camellia would hate it, but due to misinformation etc., she also saw this as being her own personal fuck-up: her own mess to clean up. (She also genuinely assumed ZRAEL lied to Camellia, rather than Requiem misleading her, since Camellia is Soft and literally no one can bear making her feel sad.)
It isn't as though Amaranth still thinks the duel was a good idea—far from it. The cultural divide would have been too much even if she hadn't been misinformed. But she still feels deeply betrayed that John reacted the way he did. The part of their text conversation where she said, "I thought we were better than this" and got the reply, "I am. You aren't" was... whew. That in particular was what really sealed the deal for her on, "John doesn't respect me, and sees me as a child to be disciplined rather than a peer," and the rest of the conversation didn't really disabuse her of that reading.
Her overall impression of Current John is that he sees himself as having come to his senses just in time to ~rescue~ LiliS from her, disregarding not only the work she's done within the unit, but also the fact that she's the origin of some of LiliS's most significant social connections. It's a kind of "what am I, chopped liver?" reaction, except mixed in with a lot of extra hurt, since she really does value John's opinion a great deal, and has finally concluded that he neither wants to understand her, nor likes those parts of her he does understand. It makes him painful to be around, for all that she still cares about him. What's more, John's willingness to threaten her with "outing" the duel is frightening—not because she thinks that knowledge would in and of itself be devastating, but because it introduces the small but significant fear that John's version of responsible parenting could involve "taking" her relationship with the rest of LiliS from her.
...And, as of the Live, Amaranth herself is finally starting to ping to the fact that something about John isn't quite right. A combination of no longer trying to look at him in the best possible light and seeing him just... flip the switch on being congenial to others means that it's at last struck her that, "...oh, he's putting on a Nice John mask." More concerning is that his Nice John mask looks a whole lot like how he's acting with the younger LiliS now and... wow, don't like that!! She wanted him to be happy, but is swapping out his Grumpy John mask for a Nice John mask "happiness"? Amaranth doesn't have the "psychopath" vocabulary to apply to what she's seeing, but it unsettles her.
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If you want to bounce off this response in turn, go for it! But these are So Many words and there is no need whatsoever to match them.
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So, John with emotions is handled heavily in canon. When Jack speaks about Will Graham dealing with massive amounts of fear, he is on the money. The money just happens to be Will fearing who he is and fearing what his abilities says about his own psychology. His emotions are to be kept far from other people for fear of contaminating and staining others. Even when he does share his emotions, he's also swallowing a bitter pill with it, thinking that this action or gesture will be something to be abused later. —He's scared of hurting other people, scared he could easily hurt other people.
When he leans into Nice John it is him leaning into his psychopathy without that fear, he has a level of trust in his self. If he is going to do something awful, then so be it, but he also trusts that he has put enough road blocks in, mastered his self enough not to be beholden to the whims of an innate self that may desire violence or pain for whatever reason, whatever feeble justification. It's telling that this shift somehow leads to him getting married and being willing to be a paternal figure to a child when he struggled with the concept before; he's a little more likely to throw things to the wind, go along with it, even if it is ultimately unwise. It's not his best hour, but there is something to be said about the fact that he had Hannibal on his shoulder waiting . . . And, well, his decision in understanding that he could not shake him was to go off a cliff. But the stakes aren't nearly that high in Imeeji, so he can use it. John knows he can get behind it and drive it, and be a master of himself and those around him if he just allows it.
Gosh, the feeling of John treating Amaranth as unequal or lesser is kind of interesting, because he would not show as much heat or anger to anyone else. When it comes to the 'kids' of LiliS, that he does treat differently absolutely but not as if they aren't fully capable people on their own, he is a little more willing to wipe away himself. The interaction is not centered on what he has to gain or learn from it, but what they can take from it, so he doesn't include himself in it aside from presenting the self or aspect they are struggling with. When he interacts with Amaranth, he holds onto himself. He knows she wants to be respected, so he doesn't drop down to the level of shifting face that strongly, only modulating his emotional responses because he can't mange to be level with her and also be fully in his own emotions . . . Which still are dangerous, you know . . . I've found it funny, how he doesn't read her and present accordingly fully because he could, and there's largely two reasons to it: 1. She would spot it from a mile off. The kids let him get away with it, because he has his airs about him, and they take what they get, not ask for what they want; and 2. He is affording her that experience. From first meet, he did feel some measure of respect towards her, and he's holding desperately onto that. If she didn't want resistance and push back, then she should have been something else from the start. But he's not going to spit in her face, pretending he can be something so different from his true self and she will be none the wiser to it.
Man, once upon a time, you said Amaranth should be Jack to John, and I'm still so confounded by that. Jack had a moral compass that was impossible to argue with. Jack saw that Will was struggling and told him to put up and shut up while not sharing his own concerns. There's a reason why Will has been ready to betray Jack at multiple times in the series; it's because Jack doesn't understand what Will needs and keeps failing to respond to that while still appealing to his better self. Between Hannibal and Jack, there's no grey, only black and white. And Will/John exists best in that grey area. He is a man with love for monsters and angels, who can appreciate the depth of someone's love for him and at once understand that his beloved ought to be dead, no longer of this world. The women in Will Graham's life appeal more to his grey nature. Alana who understands Will, then even falls in love with the same man as him. Margot who finds direction from Hannibal and then is able to find what she needs in Will. Chiyoh, Abigail, Bedelia . . . Somehow, female characters always straddled the gap between the polar opposites in the series while retaining their own direction and narrative which, sadly, few male characters have managed to accomplish. Don't hold onto too fondly to the idea of Jack and Will, because it never, ever ends well.
oops john mulaney gif, never forget
1/2
—And to be sure, that's not a great thing, in terms of them being able to understand one another. Like Jack, Amaranth can be absolutely unbending in pursuit of the Greater Good—and, particularly if she respects someone as an equal, she expects them to be just as no-holds-barred committed to the cause as she is. "I will lay down my life in this kissing game for my unit or so help me—" is kind of a mini version of that intensity.
However, if there's one thing that might be their relationship's salvation, it's that, unlike Jack, Amaranth wants to be vulnerable around the people she trusts. It's just that it has been hard for her to find people who feel appropriate to open up to—and, for at least a little while, she has taken John off that list.
There's also the fact that she is (eventually; g-d I hate writing OC memories) going to start getting more specific memories about how she grew to be disillusioned with war—and that gradual tilt towards (comparative) pacifism is something that I suspect will narrow the gap between her and John.
That said, while Amaranth is perceptive enough to realize when John is wearing a mask, one thing she really struggles with is realizing when he's actually taking it off. (I believe you've noticed this as well.) Maybe it's an understanding that will continue to develop with time; maybe it's something she'll actually need to be specifically told. ("Stop looking for the 'real me,' idiot; I'm right here.")
In lieu of a John Mulaney gif, this time I raise you a collection of Amaranth + John CR visuals, because in my heart of hearts I'm pinterest trash, and I started collecting these as a way of processing my thoughts on their CR, so... here you go!
#aesthetic