How Max Earned Ash’s Trust
So I wanted to write a little something up for Ash’s birthday today and the timing perfectly coincided with a conversation I was having with @topcatnikki about the start of Ash and Max’s relationship. This meta will be anime-watcher friendly so everyone is welcome to give it a read! I will not be mentioning anything that happens past the current point of episode release (episode 6).
I am going to be covering this topic in chronological order with 6 main points to cover: their introduction, when Ash found out that Max’s kindness was in large part due to Charlie asking him to be, when Ash and Max discover their connection through Griffin, how Max distanced himself from Ash for no other reason than to save Ash future pain, their interactions in the workshop, and how they grieved together over Griffin after hearing about his death.
The first time the two ever interact, it’s when Max introduces himself to Ash – the important point here being that Max initiates the contact with completely open body language (leaning forward, sitting down and looking up, hands outs, legs opened). In contrast, Ash’s body language is very closed off (leaning away just slightly, looking down, hand in pocket, limbs close to his body). Max is presenting Ash with an open demeanour, something that Ash is instantly distrustful of. In Ash’s experience, no one is nice to him without wanting something from him (Eiji being the sole exception to this rule).
Overall, this is all a positive thing. Max is presenting himself as a non-threat. It may confuse Ash, but he doesn’t get the vibe that Max is trying to get something from him, which is something that’s really important to Ash.
Finding out that Max was sent by Charlie
But Ash gets his question answered soon enough, as it turns out Max did have a reason to be kind to Ash. He was asked to by Charlie. This is both a good and bad thing at the same time. It’s good because Max is coming clean. Ash is able to figure out where the lines are between Max’s kindness towards him for him and where it spawned from the favour Charlie called in. Ash knows that Charlie is ultimately on his side. The negative, however, is that Ash now knows that Max wasn’t coming from a completely genuine place of wanting to help Ash – that, in a backwards way, he did want something from him, even if that “something” is what Charlie wants and not Max.
Discovering their shared connection (Griffin)
Somehow, through a mixture of Max’s unfiltered blurting out of information and Ash’s mind that’s constantly trying to put together the pieces, they discover their connection of Ash’s older brother and Max’s best friend Griffin. This would have been the first time Ash had ever talked face to face with someone who had actually been there. “There” I mean as in the moment Griffin was shot and lost his legs. Here, Ash gets to learn the real story about what happened.
Now, this presents Ash with two things. He’s found a person that he can connect with over how much they both love the same person, someone who knew Griff personally and knows what truly happened with him (because before now he’d probably never have known, he’d only know how Griff was before he left, the things Griff told him in his letters, and the state he was in when he returned). He’s also immediately confronted with his anger over everything to do with Griffin – the drugs that messed him up, the fact that his experiences while overseas caused Griff to not even recognize him, and Griff’s inability to walk due to being shot in the legs. Some of these due to the actions of the man in front of him (or so he thinks). All of this combined is what leads Ash’s make the declaration that he would kill Max, yet not immediately taking action to do it.
Max distancing himself from Ash
Interestingly, Max distancing himself from Ash ended up being the best thing for them, and not because of the distance itself, but because of the reason for and action of it. Ash knows, as much as he hounds Max about it, that Max feels tremendous guilt over what he had to do to Griffin. Max didn’t do it because he wanted to, although at this point Ash doesn’t trust Max enough to feel he’s being entirely sincere and not trying to just shift the blame.
That said, the reason Max leaves is not for himself… it’s for Ash. He leaves because he knows that them staying in the same cell, with Ash continually faced with the man he’s assigning blame to for Griffin’s state and Max’s PTSD and flashbacks surrounding the same event, that they’d just be exacerbating the issue the longer they spend in each other’s’ presence. And Ash knows, through the existence of Max’s guilt, that Max isn’t just doing this for a selfish reason (which is a big plus for Ash).
So Max takes action and separates them. The taking action is important because it separates Max from being a person who only talks but does nothing to help and someone who is actually willing to do what’s needed even if he doesn’t like it.
Two important things happen in this workshop. The first is when Max tells Ash about Griffin. This may have thrown Ash into a rage enough to want to break out of jail on the spot, but it also showed that Max was not willing to withhold important information from him. Max was completely honest, didn’t mince words, and told him the full truth. Of course this doesn’t stop Ash from trying to break out, but it goes a long way in building up his trust for Max.
Of course Max isn’t the kind of person to just roll over when the going gets tough. Max realizes that leaving Ash alone is just going to end with Ash getting in even more trouble and that the biggest person at risk is Ash himself. So Ash consequently gets another taste of Max willing to take action when he needs to, even if it the method or end results aren’t pleasant.
For Ash, being with Max right after finding out about Griff is probably the best place he could have been. He’s with the single person who remembers Griffin from before he got drugged, the only person who he can actually talk to about his brother and have them really understand. But this is also the person who pulled the trigger on Griff’s legs at the same time.
So Ash crawls down from the bunk with the intent to finally act on those feelings – and then doesn’t. The reason being that Max, through his acceptance of Ash’s hatred, validates all of those negative feelings that have been swamping Ash since he discovered their shared connection. Max lets Ash see that these feelings that have him in turmoil aren’t wrong. That it’s a shit world out there and that grieving his losses doesn’t make him weak – it makes him human.
And the thing that finally pushes Ash to go from wary and distrustful to trusting Max at least as far as he can throw him is the whiskey. Ash rejects the drink Max offers him at the start of the scene, yet at the end he accepts it. The key to that acceptance of drink, and thus of Max’s sincerity, is when Ash accuses Max of pitying him and Max clarifies that that wasn’t his intention at all.
So, as we’ve now seen, it’s not easy to earn Ash’s trust – especially if you’re an adult. We know that Ash has a historical distrust of adults, most especially men, so Max’s earning of his trust was not a simple task. It took a shared connection to both their pasts, a will on both sides, and a necessary progression of events to reach the middle ground that they ended up finding between them.
So overall, you could say that Ash gained more by being sent to prison on false charges than he lost – in Max he found an ally whose motivations align with his own, and an adult who is not only willing to meet him at an intellectual level as equals but that Ash can also trust to assist in achieving his goals.
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