More Warframe shenanigans, featuring Fascinating Arthur Dynamics: Why Does Everyone Write This Guy As A Top
Or: "Look at you, prowling around your lair. Like you're protecting what's yours." -- "... Oh. Huh."
(disclaimer: I think everyone should write whatever they damn well please. Primarily, I think everyone should write. Feed me. please. There's not enough warframe fic out there.)
Okay, okay. So. Arthur. Looks like a pretty "gruff leader with a heart of gold" archetype at first glance*, and it'd be easy to assume that this assertiveness carries over into the Backrooms -- but that's not really what we actually get from him, huh.
I think the line up there -- "protecting what's yours" -- was what initially made me go "wait what" and kicked off a bunch of sex and relationship dynamic ponderings, but it's there in a bunch of other lines, too. "My body is in your hands", anyone? No? "Your weapons need to be stripped down and cleaned regularly, including me"? Heck, to some extent even "Standing there in your arms amid all the insanity, I was finally home".
If you ask me, he's been barely holding it together for a long, long time, and the one thing he needs to hear more than anything is "I've got you", from someone he actually thinks is up to the task of keeping him safe**. To me, he reads as someone who wants to hand over control to someone he trusts so badly.
... And then you get the fun mildly fucked up shades of Living Weapon Syndrome mixed in with whatever his deal is, and there's this little nagging voice in the back of my brain asking if that's the only way Arthur can make sense of all of this. As an actual human person, as a man, he's been taught he needs to be strong -- don't cry, be stoic, be self-sufficient, keep a stiff upper lip. As a person, he has to keep his shit together and be the pillar everyone leans on -- or at least that's what he thinks. All that Hero Virus stuff Eleanor is so repulsed by.
A tool, however? A tool is something you have to take care of. Something that everyone knows you have to maintain well or it won't work. A tool isn't selfish or weak for asking to be taken care of. You see the vision here?
Anyway this got extremely off-track but tl;dr I think Arthur probably thinks it's his solemn duty to top, but turns into an absolute puddle of a man if he doesn't have to and I wish more fic would explore that in depth. In a lot of depth. Just absolutely take that man apart. Let the Drifter be competent about it in return. Man, that could be so goddamn soft and/or hot.
*Mostly because that's the framework he thinks he has to fit into, I think. There's an entirely different essay somewhere in there about the ways Arthur's a terrible people pleaser under all the abrasiveness, who's nearly killing himself trying to shape himself into what he thinks he should be, but that's for a different time...
**There is also another essay about Arthur and fear somewhere in there, because the man's an absolute poster boy for Doing It Scared, and the game even says as much. And so does the webcomic. And I think that's fascinating.
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