Roy Harper can only experience emotional intimacy with people who are willing to hurt him and fuck with his head because otherwise he will maintain the persona forever and ever and they will never learn anything real about him. He is his most himself when he is suffering deeply because he doesn't have a single habit he hasn't curated to protect himself from harm... Even when you get past the initial easygoing recklessness, the huge ugly undercurrent of hatefulness and desire to see other people in pain isn't necessarily vulnerability, it's just another layer of defense! Ultimately he is obsessed with the fact that people keep hurting him and then LEAVING after. If you're focused on the anger you might not notice the sadness. He can stomach being hurt because he's always provoked that in people so it's not abuse, there are no INNOCENTS, maybe he got hurt but while they were hurting him he was special to them. To him love is just when a person fundamentally cannot leave you, and it doesn't matter why, affection and mutually assured destruction have the same outcome: Your existence always implies theirs. A person who never hurts him and especially who never sees him hurt fundamentally cannot entwine themselves into his life, no matter how much mutual affection there is.
This is why his most characterizing romantic relationship is with Dick despite them never explicitly dating btw. Dick is so so so fucking good at hurting him and it's because he's been around for EVERYTHING!!! When Dick wants to hurts his feelings he only says things that are TRUE! He has no reservations about physically fighting Roy if the situation really, truly calls for it, but he doesn't take any joy in this, the harm is never about getting something from Roy, it's ABOUT Roy. It's a big weird entanglement of unhealthy communication and catharsis because the only other thing Roy actually responds to is drugging himself out of existence! And crucially Roy hurts Dick too. Often, Roy hurts Dick first! And for these two freaks this IS implicitly romantic and you are insane if you think it's not, the understanding is that they will always be around to provide that for each other. And they're both so convinced they're the irredeemable monster and so angry at the other for thinking so that they hope they both get worse so they can hit rock bottom and look each other in the eyes and let that be the proof that they're still right fucking there whenever they're ready to start believing each other. But they never will. And also in Outsiders the gun is allegorically cock and they grapple and get really sweaty and make big horny pleading eyes at each other plus obviously they get big crazy boners from getting beat to paste and Roy doesn't "take" the "gun" because he got shot and now bottoming is scarryyyy!!!!!!!!!















