10:20 working on a painting with a deadline tomorrow morning thinking ohhh i'm so gonna make it i'm so awesome i'm on top of everything. just painted the golden gate bridge in neon pink watercolor it's over i'm done for
Some personal musings about Gilbert's character, very un-structured and opinionated, beware
I interpret a lot of Gilbert's behavior not as rebelliousness, but as him being awarded leniency in what is socially permissable to do and say, because of his consistently high social status. He almost always benefits in some way from whatever social order he's a part of, is only knocked down the ladder when he faces devastating military defeats, and generally acts like someone who feels he's owed a lot.
As a child, he's a Knight and a genociding settler, as a kingdom we see him holding high military ranks and leading armies (as well as sitting in a castle and having tea with his king), during WW2 he runs around in an SS-Uniform and in the modern day, he travels a bunch.
As a Knight in a German settler colony, he essentially has the right to judge and slaughter any Balt under the pretense of the crusade, and the fact that this is something he grew up with colors a lot of his later life.
It affects his more compassionate side, too. The teutonic knights started as a hospital order, and what that means concretely is that they were formed to specifically treat injured, German knights during the crusades in Acre. Taking care of their injured was a core part of their doctrine. Gilbert is perfectly capable of extending warmth, care and love to someone, as well as receiving it, but from his birth, it's been something reserved for only *certain* people, a certain in-group he belongs to. Anyone who opposes him gets the sword instead. If he opposes, he gets the sword, so he doesn't, which means he gets to be part of the cool in-group and do all the cool stuff like murder.
This is what initially sparks his very persistent, apparent need for approval, validation and acknowledgement; he needs to constantly know and be told that he's good, doing good and one of the good ones. I don't think it stems from the Knights ever actually having treated him as an Other, but from the reality of the Baltic Crusades meaning Gilbert has a logical thought for once in his life, concluding that he could fall from grace just as a Balt could convert and gain it. Gilbert being treated like any other Knight is actually something that damages him as well; he is ultimately a kid, but with the Knights, he "gets" to be an adult. He isn't treated like he's some fragile thing in need of special restrictions or rules or protections. *He* thinks this is great, obviously, he's just like all the other cool guys. If you told him this might be traumatising, he'd laugh at you.
And I think, at the latest with the Knights' loss against the Commonwealth and their banishment from Prussia, he becomes very aware that his status as a person and nation is something that's also at risk to outsiders who might take it from him, and something he doesn't just get to enact when approved of but will have to defend and build up.
It's worth noting that he's said he was a monk during his time in the Commonwealth, so it's not like he was reduced to peasantry; it's certainly not the same as priest- or knighthood, but he maintained a position in the clergy. Not to say that it's peaches and rainbows, there's whatever what was going on between him and Poland, and being demilitarised basically means he has to re-adjust his perceived purpose in life, can't lean on the hypothetical Nonbeliever Who Opposes Him to fuel him and provide him with a goal in life, he has to get used to not being able to get his way by force and violence.
Not for long though, luckily?!
His personal union with Brandenburg is where it gets truly dire for him, being bounced around between Poland-Lithuania, Sweden and Brandenburg in some pretty brutal wars and being essentially subjugated by Brandenburg's ruling class. That Gilbert ended up representing the Kingdom was more a stroke of luck than anything, and I think it really worsens his need for acknowledgement and affirmation; he's someone who prides himself on being hard-working, so the fact that it was by no work of his own that he gained the status of Kingdom makes him eager to overcompensate, both my immersing himself in building up his military and becoming a credible threat to other kingdoms and empires, and by blatantly flaunting his status in and outside the army.
One of my favorite little tidbits in the comic is when Gilbert's king sends him to spy on France specifically to copy his fashion, which he pouts about but ultimately obeys upon insistence. And then we see a lot of Gilbert wearing french-inspired military fashion! He pisses and moans about having to do what's essentially a zero-risk task, but then gets so into what he was told to do that it becomes a mainstay of his design.
Gilbert is often shown and stated to have been very close with and fond of Friedrich II.! We don't see nations' rulers a lot of the time, and when we do, these relationships are often more fraught; even Empress Theresa doesn't appear as close with Austria as Prussia does with Friedrich.
And I could go on at lengths about that relationship and how I think Gilbert was in equal parts praised and hoisted up, and made to feel inadequate and like he had to constantly prove himself not just to outsiders but his own "peers" and people he personally didn't respect, like every French person that's ever visited Potsdam, for example. But my point is that, while having the privilege to speak more freely and act more wildly than most other people at the time, Gilbert still existed in a realm of social expectations and contradictory desires that made his fragile self-image worse and had him constantly jumping from thing to thing to prove himself; he needs to read 5 books a day so he can hang with the scholars and he needs to be able to do poetry and music and he needs to best general that's ever lived ANDDDD he needs to be a cool sociable guy that everyone likes.
And I think a lot of this is self-imposed martyrdom, in a way, right. He doesn't actually *need* to be his King's best friend and he could very well decide to rest on his laurels, so to say, be the accomplished, educated man that he is, but when you're raised as the enforcer of the will of God, and that enforcement looks like deeply traumatic violence, and then that role of Enforcer is taken away from you in arguably the most humiliating defeat of your life, you internalise some ideas of Always Needing To Be On Top Of Everything so nothing can ever ever ever ever threaten you or your status again.
And then France explodes him
And it's a whole fucking thing but the jist of it is that he NEARLY loses it all again and only scrapes by because of a mix of dumb luck, tenacity and politicking, and he convinces himself it was his hard work and genius because otherwise, things might be able to happen outside of his control, and now he REALLY has to hurry and find a way to make himself invincible to all attacks forever and ever and ever! But democracies are vulnerable, cringe and don't grant him ultimate authority and power, so he goes for the Empire instead, hijacks the newly emerged German identity to plaster his monarchy over it and does an Epic Humiliation on France by crowning his Emperor in Versailles.
And this is ultimately why I think Gilbert is so eager on making sure Ludwig considers him not just A brother but His Big Brother and why he's so quick to hype him up and praise him and talk about how proud he is of him, because on some level, Ludwig exists as an extension of that need to be in control and to showcase just how powerful he is; he even took the kid from death!
But with a new Empire and a new *representative* for that Empire, you run into the problem of "things happening outside his control" again, which is why I think Gilbert tried very hard to maintain his proximity to the monarchy and make himself a strong presence in the imperial court. It fuels his brash, loud nature and frankly, it works quite well; just being the loudest guy tends to work *very* well for German politicians.
He tries steering the ship the same way throughout Weimar, it's not as if Prussian nobility wasn't still favored politically, but the longer it goes on and the longer *Germany* exists, the more Gilbert can tell that it's all slipping from him; he's in the SS in Fascist Germany, but (I think) it was a position given to him to appease him, more than anything, and that puts a crack in the idea that having status and respect means he's actually *significant*.
His time in the GDR is interesting in this regard because he obviously doesn't *want* to be made a member of the Soviet Union, we're shown him terrified of and struggling against it, and he doesn't have much love for Russia to say the least, but he seems to adjust quite quickly, and in the end, he's even nostalgic for what he had in the GDR; while still, in the modern day, seeming very glad to be living with his brother.
It shows to me that, for all his rigid, stubborn thinking and desperation to maintain his status quo, Gilbert is very adaptable, can make himself *be* quite a lot of things, and I think that quality is what enabled him to go on such a mad search for power, status and approval in the first place. Times changed around him, quite violently and frequently, but he always weasled his way back into some sort of comfort, not in small parts because he believes his own hype about his success coming from the work he's done; he's not *just* full of hot air when it comes to that, though a lot of his success in life is owed to luck as well. But he can't control that, so it's not true.
Re: acting like he's owed things, I think a lot about how he borderline-stalks Feliciano and just straight-up stalks Austria, in the earlier comics with the explicit intent of sabotaging his relationship. Acting so purely out of bitterness and jealousy while insisting to himself that he's just a jolly cool guy on jollycoolguyadventures is something I wanna make more of lol
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