hi! re: https://www.tumblr.com/getvalentined/818883363388669952/i-got-this-comment-on-rtgt-a-bit-back-and-because
I'm Moogle (Guest) - I'm GreyRose24 on a03 but I was either being lazy or shy at the time by not signing in to leave a comment. I've been trying to get in the habit of leaving more comments since I know I always appreciate them on my own work
anyway, I'm glad you liked the comment! I wanted to comment somewhere but just ended up trying to sum up my thoughts on the whole thing since I was rereading it again. Vincent is such an excellent study for the unreliable narrator trope with how self hating he is & he doesn't realize that's what makes people worry about him more, not less. the other thing that really got me in RTGT which I don't think I mentioned in the comment was how often he expresses some variant of the thought that he needs to make the gang move on and forget about him, as if his being their friend that they worry about somehow holds them all back from really living life
Yeah Vincent has this whole thing where he sees himself as a kind of waste of effort because he's never going to die, he's not human, and even if he were still technically human he never considered himself the kind of person who was particularly fun to be around in general anyway. This means that whenever someone focuses on him, it feels like he's stealing that focus away from someone or something else. Every second spent thinking about him, talking to him, worrying about him, is a second that should be awarded to something else.
A person's time has value because it's finite—but Vincent's time isn't finite, so he considers his time to be worthless. A person's effort is worth appreciation not only because it uses the finite resource of their time, but because it takes energy they'll struggle to regain—but Vincent's body will continue to function regardless of the strain he puts it through, thereby making his effort equally worthless.
When people decide to make a life together, it's so they can share milestones, so they can experience the nature of human existence together—but Vincent's body isn't human, he'll never experience another of those milestones, so anyone delusional enough to attempt making a life with him would be giving all those things up forever. He doesn't deserve that kind of sacrifice; his nature renders his time and effort worthless, so he has nothing of value to give in return.
No matter how much Vincent cares about other people, them caring back is nothing but a waste, because he's a planetary constant whether he likes it or not. Would you worry that the tide is going to stop if you don't acknowledge its existence? Would you worry that the sun won't rise if you aren't there to see it? Of course not. What would be the point? These are constants that don't warrant questioning or concern—and Vincent (due in part to a plot point that has been indicated and loosely referred to a couple times in the fic so far, but won't be stated outright for a while) sees himself the same way. As long as those people are alive, he'll be there when they need him, because he can't be anything else.
At the beginning of RTGT, Vincent had been trying to prove this for years, going through the motions and sticking close and maintaining a schedule, making sure everyone could see that he's always there and always all right and always available—and for some reason, that just made everyone more focused on his wellbeing, more likely to acknowledge his presence, more aware of how poorly he fit into the world. This was literally the exact opposite of what he wanted, so he had to do something about it.
(He'll learn how wrong he is eventually, I promise.)
