Hotaru is weird to me, when I first started writing him I thought of him having better parents than most of the people around him. But once I really got into it I realized all of his issues and flaws stem from his parents and their treatment of him.
He want physically abused, but he WAS abused. He was emotionally neglected by his parents, who never really seemed to like him. He was abused mentally by them and their impossible standards. Nothing he did was ever right, he could never meet their standards because their standards didn’t exist. They just resented him.
Due to being rejected at home, he assumed he would be rejected by everyone, and so he isolated. By isolating he othered himself and caused himself to be rejected by his peers, furthering his biased thinking.
I’ll never be accepted < I’ll stay away so I won’t be rejected < I was rejected for being withdrawn < I’ll never be accepted
Hotaru internalized all of his feelings, believing that he is what causes his own problems. That he is the problem. And that nothing he did could change that. He desperately wants to get better, but he doesn’t believe he can change in any meaningful way.
When people are nice to him, it feels less real. It makes him feel like they mentally belittling him. That they hate talking to him. That he’s wearing them down and eventually they’ll get tired of his constant misery and give up on him.
Anger feels more real, when they are mean, when they hurt him and get violent with him. That’s what feels real. That’s how he believes people should feel about him. They should hate him, because he is terrible, and he deserves to be hurt.
He sabotages all of his relationships, intentionally Turing people against him, he antagonizes them, acts selfishly and projects himself as someone who enjoys making people miserable. To get them angry at him, to make them hurt him.
And then he’ll use that to spiral, to self deprecate, to look at himself and say “you are awful and deserve to suffer.”
He believes something is a fact and then makes it a fact.
I’ll talk more about his relationship with Kyosuke in a different post because I HAVE A LOT TO SAY ABOUT THAT OKAY
Theres nothing I love more than aus where subaru’s deaths have some lingering effect on him other than the usual. And I have some ideas if anyone wants to snatch em!
-keepings scars from previous loops (in some way). Maybe flowers under his skin for the dramatic effect lol. They dont show up immediately, and arent lethal. But they are immensely painful. And are also really hard to explain.
-a mental effect? Some issue with his soul through looping can sometimes cause massive lapses of memory. Like he remembers all the loops ofc, but the transfer isnt always perfect. And the more times a transfer occurs in one loop, the more bugs there are. And it should only be nice things he forgets. Subaru gets out of the arc 4 loop and realizes that he cant remember a lot of moments with his parents. He can no longer picture the taste and appearance of ice cream. He cant remember what happened on his date with emilia. He cant remember the street he lived on. Oh how horrifying would that be <3 (inspired by sentenced to be a hero btw)
-subaru acts as walking deja vu to everyone around him. Nobody knows about RBD but moments of past memory slip through the cracks when in his presence. Hes a walking time anomaly
-angel baru au? Can also not be in the traditional sense. Just the idea that the more subaru loops, the more he gets attuned with death. And that manifests with like, angel wings, or just something from whatever beyond you want.
-ive seen this idea as a oneshot b4. All of the agony and pain from death are not erased. Instead the emotions get dumped elsewhere and are eventually concentrated into a beast that terrorizes the world, completely separate from Subaru. Congratulations baru! Your failures created another great mabeast even more horrific than the big three! Its ending the lives of innocent people and YOU made it! (Immense guilt ensues)
gummygunk
kianamaiart
andulkaphoto
