here's another like thousand words about super supportive
right, the thing is that there have been a lot of mentions that the artonans are still very shady, going from the subtle to the extremely overt. what is up with u-type affixations? there's the implication that picking a bad first skill might permanently hamstring your authority development! we still don't really know what the deal is with chaos, and it's been implied that no human really knows what the deal is with chaos. who was really behind the matadero attack, b/c it seems like the guy on the submerged boat was swayed into committing the attack precisely when the boat went into the system's dead zone, which implies whoever swayed him knew exactly how to keep things out of sight of the system. so there's all these things that are rife for elaboration that could totally upend our understanding of the dynamics at play. but...
okay so like the narrative makes a big deal about that one object shaper whose name alden can't remember, right? ha ha they're just a background character. except there are also like ten other students in his class that have literally never been mentioned at all, except in team totals (grouped as sets of like, "+5 other As" in the gym class notes). likewise with alden's psychologist appointments: he has apparently been meeting with psychologists his whole life and especially now after returning to earth and the matadero attack, but these are all just kinda offhand mentions that we never see on-screen. now, with the mind healer, some of alden's ptsd stuff has come into narrative focus, but there are all these bits of worldbuilding like, "this is some worldbuilding that was never really fully elaborated on and is only there in the margins as vague gestures towards a more fleshed-out world that the author never got around to writing b/c it's not really critical for the story they're telling," and that makes me wonder how many of the things above that i see as looming conflicts were actually written more as miscellaneous worldbuilding and minor threads that have been dropped.
at this point i'm really hoping that the secondary and tertiary are huge dicks, b/c that's kind of the only thing that would really make the political position of the knights make sense? the primary and quaternary are so nice and sweet and honorable, and alis-art'h explicitly had a bit about how she's not involved in politics (getting the thegund mission specifically because it was long and remote and she hates dealing with the grand council). but like. these are the people who have the most effective power in the entire known universe. it doesn't seem like they take orders from anybody? that's the whole point of the english 'general' translation. but it's very unclear how they fit into the artonan political landscape.
stu-art'h was even like 'it would be very easy for me to unlock your system and give you better skill choice options', and it's like, okay so if that doesn't even rise to the level of a special knight-only privilege, are we supposed to read that statement as saying that the situation for avowed being what it is on earth is solely b/c no interested knight (or wizard!!) has decided to instruct humans on how the system and skills actually work? or that the knights don't really care about resource worlds as such? or that instruction of a single human about skill construction would be political, but it might be overlooked for the son of the primary? b/c that's sure how i read that bit.
like there's definitely a reading of the story where alden is this hugely traumatized kid who's only getting special information from the system b/c it knows he's now too terrified of system collapse to try telling anybody that the system is kind of shady -- e.g., jeffy's level-ups almost certainly being timed to reinforce that doing jobs and obeying orders gets him power-ups, even though he presumably had some amount of that authority growth already banked for a while prior to the disaster. like, why not tell somebody that you know what a level is? b/c it sure seems like that's something humans in general don't know. but! i don't actually think that's an angle the story is going to take.
or like, something else that has been weighing on me: max is explicitly mentioned as being from south africa. the artonans landed in 1960, prior to the dissolution of aparthied. presumably the fact that 1. max is black, 2. he's from south africa, and 3. he still ended up on anesidora is intended to signify that yes, south africa got rid of aparthied. there's some gesturing that maybe racism itself doesn't exist any more? alden mentions it when they're watching the old video about alien contact, and boe is immediately like "but there's still anti-avowed sentiment", but he notably doesn't say "sure but there is still racism". but we actually have very little knowledge of what the entire world's political and social organization is. there's a part where a superhero blithely mentions that most non-supervillian work people do on earth has to do with guarding things and quelling riots, and it's like, oh are you gonna elaborate on that?? no???
all that is to say, i've found super supportive to be compelling in part b/c it does keep gesturing at all these subjects in a way that's way more involved than the usual "there's a system and it gives people superpowers" setup you usually see in litrpg/progression fantasy stories. (like, i mentioned it in that other post, but the thing where wordchains interact differently with the system compared to all other kinds of magic being because... the special-interest group supporting the chainer class has ideosyncratic ideas about how magic ought to be used is great imo. like oh yeah this is all a constructed system, with limitations due to politics. stuff like that is how i want to see the 'the system was made by a series of compromises where everybody/nobody really got what they wanted' worldbuilding fleshed out) but i have absolutely no clue if it's actually gonna hit all the bits of the story that caught my attention. almost certainly some of the above is just misc. minor worldbuilding details my brain just latched on to that will never really be followed up on meaningfully in the text.
(i have kinda been thinking about the story from a perspective 20 years in the future, where alden is some superhero-knight on multiversal adventures, and boe is probably an infamous supervillian involved with superhumans at large, and also jeremy is just some guy with a job who was childhood friends with both of them. but who knows if the story will ever really get there.)
re: gayness, i'm pretty sure alden is canonically asexual, on account of everything with natalie. him completely not understanding why the super-secret privacy booths all come with a giant bed was pretty funny. but wow that does not stop him from having a lot of intense emotionally-fraught interactions with other guys. boe, lute, stu-art'h... actually i kinda suspect this might be the kind of story when alden and stu end up as queerplatonic lifepartners. i'm not even sure what that would mean, but their friendship is so emotionally charged and is clearly being built up towards something. in the original draft of the sleepover chapter alden interrupts stu-art'h by saying 'hush' and it's like, wowwww okay i see why you changed that b/c that makes the entire scene read way more romantically
(there's also a lot of speculation about boe maybe having a one-sided crush on alden? i could see it. there's, again, like one mention of boe going 'natalie is hot' and then nothing else, & it's hard to say if that's just the author not wanting to dip into relationship and romance stuff or what.)
anyway i ship max/jeffy that would be a very cute pairing. max would be the tsunedere.