Does Zyet need all the validation he’s given (against his validator’s wishes)? Or does he simply choose to have it just because he can?
hi, thank you for asking!
I’m assuming you’re talking about the keepers, how Zyet treats them, and how he forces them to treat him.
The short answer is that it’s the first option. The long answer is… A bit more complicated.
Basically. Zyet knows he is a bad person. He knows that the way he treats people, and especially the Keepers, is not okay. Deep down, he knows they deserve better.
He also knows how hard it is to change. He’s tried and, more importantly (in his eyes), he’s failed. He’s tried so hard to change in the past, mostly for Gatekeeper, and he just kept falling back into old habits of cruelty and force and unjust punishment.
The problem is, he won’t acknowledge why. After what he saw as one too many attempts, Zyet gave up. Without really reflecting at all, he decided that he couldn’t be helped or changed, and from that point onwards he looked away from the guilt and shame and decided to wallow in his eternal little pit of self pity.
He decided that he was a bad person at his core without room for anything else, and he embraced that thought. A rotten apple cannot unrot, so what’s the point in trying?
And thus, he stopped trying.
And after so long, after so many aeons of living in the mentality that a bad person cannot change and therefore does not have to try, he began to justify his actions to himself.
Eventually, he settled on using that fact that he’s a "bad person" as his excuse. I mean, he can’t help himself, really - It’s not his fault that they're scared of him, that he hurts and isolates them, that he only treats them as tools. He can’t help it!
If anything, he's the victim here. Why get mad at him, when again, he can’t help it?
...Or, at least, that's how he sees it.
Stewing in that mindset, I think he needs the validation to keep going. I think he needs the keepers there to convince him of so many things. He needs them to convince him that he’s strong enough, has enough power to "earn" the right to that abusive behavior; he needs them to convince him that he’s doing the best he can in the face of everything, that he’s not as bad a person as he knows he is; he needs them to convince him that it’s not his fault that he’s cruel.
And as odd as it may sound, I think he needs them to convince him that he is cruel in the first place.
I think that if Zyet ever gave himself a chance to realize that he's capable of being kinder, I think if he ever found out that he was capable of change, the revelation would break him.
I think he needs the Keepers’ validation that, above all else, he is, has always been, and will always be cruel -
because if that’s the case, if even the Keepers think so, then it’s not his fault if he believes it and leans into it, too.
If the Keepers say he's beyond redemption, who is he to argue?
so, tl;dr, he needs the validation that he is both a good person and a bad person at the same time because the idea that he could be anything other would destroy him.
also ps I'm so sorry I took so long to answer this I forgor 💔
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