i love it when people write to me about matthias and we get to talk about him but sometimes i get asks or comments like āiāve never considered this side of matthias beforeā and honestly, i think we all know why that happens, we just donāt say it directly.
just take a step back and look at the most common fandom readings of him: 1. the dad of the group, 2. the token straight friend, 3. ninaās bf the boring pet himbo.
all of them are cheap versions of the text. at some point people let easy, wrong fandom readings of canon do the work for them, and then start reading canon itself through those opinions, even when the text is telling you something else very directly. and once you do that, it affects how you read matthias on a fundamental level.
because no one really wants to acknowledge that what happened to him wasnāt some simple brainwashing. he was groomed into that ideology. he was raised into it. his entire arc in the duology is tied to identity collapse, dependency, grief, loyalty, and trying to figure out who he is outside of the structures that made him. he struggles with brum, he struggles with nina, he struggles with what devotion even means for him. and then people come under my posts saying they never thought about any of this, when none of it is even deep subtext. a lot of it is just the text.
yes, he is soft. yes, he is gentle. yes, he wants to be good. that doesnāt make him the dad of the group. yes, he can seem sheltered or simplistic in the way he sees things but thatās directly tied to how he was raised, so no, reading him as boring is not canon either. and while weāre at it, the token straight friend reading is also not something the text supports when he literally has lines showing he was affected by jesper too, to the point that when heās conflicted about nina, jesper is part of that same emotional shift in his head.
and if youāre going to talk about matthias as a character, not just as ninaās extension, because that is its own bad and lazy reading, and if youāre going to act like you care about him as much as the others, then maybe sit down and actually read whatās there. because you donāt need someone to spoon feed you information when the book is already doing it.
