Squall’s manners is honestly as “mean” as he’ll get. Personally if someone doesn’t want to socialize I wouldn’t consider it mean, I just see it as someone minding their own space and taking ownership of it and just you know let them do their thing but I can ALSO understand why it can be considered as something mean, more rude than anything else. Like I’ve mentioned before Squall wouldn’t deliberately go out of his way to pick on someone or consciously harm their self-esteem because there’s no gain from it lets be real here. All the boy wants is his space, his comfort zone. His mindset is that everybody’s bound to leave, everybody does, and everyone will, there’s no exception to that --- he sees it as a universal law so to spare himself the hardships that follow from getting attached to another and then having to cope with their loss he simply doesn’t let that be an option for him. Alone is best, or so he thinks. That he does it to an extreme, yes that is true, but again he’s not joking around when he makes it obvious that this is how he thinks and that’s how it’ll stay so without a doubt when someone comes along to challenge that of course there’s going to be bouts of defensiveness it’s only human nature to get defensive when your universal view of things get challenged (that’s how people get offended after all). It’s to be human, a normal reaction. His defenses spike so he does get snappy a bit, but not in the way it has been embraced over the years. I’ll use his discussion with Quistis as a perfect example of what I mean along with subtle details to tag along after that.
It’s after the dance and she requires audience with him in after hours of the night where she finds the need to unwind, to vent, to let something pent up in her out (not going into detail just going to give the general gist). When asked to be in her company he’s curious, he wonders, and after a suspicion of his turns out not to be true he agrees to tag along. She begins to let out steam, to let out what has her bothered, and when she does his initial response is what does she want him to do about it, or why did she choose him to let that out to. That he doesn’t need to know, it isn’t his problem, everybody’s to take care of themselves and themselves alone; again Squall isn’t very quiet about how he thinks, he’s very vocal about it hence why Quistis would often say she’s understanding him a bit better over the course of the time she does manage to spend time with him. She tells him she doesn’t need him to do anything, she just wants him to listen, and then his signature quote: Go talk to a wall. I feel like that quote was just blown out of proportion as the years went on --- he didn’t say it to be a smartass, he didn’t say it to be mean, if anything he said it without any irony whatsoever. All she wanted was for someone to listen, so he felt like she might as well just talk to anything else that would be less responsive if that’s all what she wanted. He did tell her that he didn’t want anybody else’s burdens on him, because again remember that Squall’s a very huge critical thinker, so having someone else’s issues be put on him would also mean that it’ll occupy his mind space to someone else that isn’t him, so specks of concern for this person since he has an idea of what’s going on. So he just completely cuts out that possibility even. It’d allow entryway for knowledge of someone else’s state of being which he translates to some closeness. It’s why he cuts her off so rashly in such a heartless manner. And in no way is Quistis in the wrong here for being hurt, perhaps even mad over it, because after he leaves she expresses that perhaps everybody else around her was right.
Like I said in the beginning of this post if anything his manners are as “mean” as he’ll get. Sometimes he won’t even engage in conversation unless he absolutely has to and it’s required of him to do so, and when it does he only says the most minimal things to get the point across. Want to shake his hand? Chances are he isn’t going to want to shake it and will just either stare at it or look the other way. He’s complex, definitely complex, but he doesn’t make it a total mystery as to why. Yes he doesn’t go into detail of the why, but he does express very often what his mentality of things concerning these specific matters are and doesn’t shy away from it if its challenged by another so a clash is only bound to take place. It’s a process of acceptance he has to go through first.
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