You know, I’d never considered that of course ‘Lute’s’ Adam is the same as ‘Lilith’s’ Adam. For some reason I’d never made that link of the past wife versus wannabe girlfriend relationship, but this absolutely makes sense.
Both Eve and Lilith were created expressly for Adam and he cast them aside - we assume in the case of Eve, given Adam talks about shagging other women and there’s no mention of Eve in the show just yet.
(I’m assuming any marriage would be on the rocks when one of you dooms all of mankind. Bit awkward with the next candlelit dinner.)
I wonder if, for Lute, there was something in the idea that, although she wasn’t made for Adam in the same way, she works harder than any other woman, past or present in his life, to act as if she were created for him - that she made an active choice to become what Lilith and Eve had no choice in being. And all the time she was waiting for Adam to notice that she was being more attentive, more supportive, just overall present for him (in both meanings of the word) because, hey, Lute doesn’t HAVE to be his companion but WANTS to be.
What intrigues me is that Lute’s version of Adam in her head is very close to how we see him with Charlie. So we have no reason to doubt her interpretation of Adam - her version is pretty on the money. This means that when ‘her’ Adam seems fairly bored with the concept of Lute professing her love…
Ouch. That she doesn’t even tolerate a version of Adam that loves her back - that’s a fantasy most people would bend their image of the person they loved for, even if it didn’t make sense in the way they truly acted. But Lute’s steadfast idea of the truth is so deeply engrained, and I imagine there’s a decent amount of self hatred in there too, that she couldn’t ever bear that.
She wants Adam back - exactly the way he was, even if that version doesn’t want her.
There’s a strange form of integrity there, to the memory of the man she lost rather than the love she never had. Her grief remains rooted in what was rather than what could have been. And still she prefers being in a form of emotional agony and unreciprocated feelings - because that’s better than being without him entirely.
It’s an interesting issue regarding fate, too: more specifically, Lute decided to look at what presumably God decided, thought about it, and went, ‘Nah. He’s my man instead.’ It’s ballsy and also incredibly tragic, in a way. It’s very old-school, ‘let’s defy the prophecy’ logic like in a Greek tragedy. And naturally it ends in a similar fashion.
It also serves to underpin the whole idea of questioning who deserves to be where and what is ‘meant’ to happen that we see elsewhere in the show. As OP says, Lute probably ranted to herself during her ‘creepy-in-the-dark-time’ - as Abel called it - that she wouldn’t have left Adam for Lucifer, or wouldn’t have eaten the apple. But of course that’s with foreknowledge of everything that’s going to happen. It’s easy to be wise after the event.
It almost makes me want to write a fic about an Eden!Lute, because while she is servile to the one she loves, she has a huge defiance thing that would have also come into play at the Garden. Basically: would Lute have gone the same way as Eve if not Lilith? For that matter, would she have ended up railing against Adam (and not in a wink-wink nudge-nudge say-no-more way) exactly as Lilith did?
Lute, Lilith and Eve are in this trifecta around Adam, and it’s all very, very anti-feminist, it’s all highly focused on The Man. But it’s ultimately the women’s choices that actually define Hazbin’s storylines. It’s what the women choose to do and the fallout of those decisions which create the plot. Meanwhile, the men generally get tugged along by the whims of women (Alastor by Rosie, Lucifer by Lilith and then Charlie, Vox and Val by Vel, Carmilla and the Overlords).
On a rp server I once helped to run and was the main lore person for, the endgame plot of ‘series one’ was the idea of a chauvinistic God being banished by a sister- and nonbinary-hood of characters who were decidedly not male and were deciding to push back against the patriarchal regime (with male characters in supporting roles to their nb and lady friends, naturally). And we chose that plot primarily because of the way that women do hold power in the Hazbin universe.
Anyway, I digress. Overall, Lute’s whole arc is very similar to the whole Tumblr knight idea of ‘I carry your burdens,’ ‘I live to serve my lord,’ ‘I’ll avenge him’ sort of thing of a highly dangerous individual who chooses to follow another with doglike devotion. It’s one of the great tragedies that the person she decided to follow isn’t worth her efforts.
But equally, can’t that be said for everyone who chooses to follow someone else? No one is the hero we paint them to be; we’re all human. The person you lionise will usually look daft or stupid or not that attractive anyway to most other people, just as their heroes look strange to you.
Eh. Adam’s still a dick, either way.
Anyway, those are my thoughts, all written in one go after breakfast.
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