now that i’m a little more awake i’m just thinking about this and like. please take this all with a grain of salt because i’m fucking stupid and also, not sure if this 10000% makes sense in canon just, work with me here.
i think that c!beeduo both care about each other. and i’m going to talk about this in terms of a middle ground between a close friendship and a romantic relationship, because that is how i think of their dynamic most of the time. but yeah, i think they both care about each other. obviously.
but i wonder, like. how their views on marriage specifically differ.
because i feel like to c!tubbo, marriage is just... a thing. some decision they made, and it doesn’t hold much weight to him. because he doesn’t sign his name as tubbo_beloved, and he still thinks of it as a tax cut marriage. you can tell just from looking at it that tubbo isn’t exactly the most familial sort, though i do think he’s pretty sentimental, and like initially that can sort of counteract the previous point.
but i think that’s because tubbo’s relationship with c!ranboo didn’t change with the marriage. because it was a spur of the moment decision, and, like, think about how things kind of work on this server. the two of them would have gone to save michael if they weren’t married, and the two of them would have stuck together if they weren’t married. their relationship didn’t fundamentally change, for tubbo at least, with that confirmation.
that doesn’t mean that ranboo doesn’t matter to him. tubbo’s just more of a logical thinker than anything, and the technicalities of a marriage don’t matter to him. that doesn’t equate to ranboo.
but i think ranboo believes that those two ideas are the same.
because ranboo, though i imagine he still had this care for tubbo pre-marriage, had those feelings almost heightened and solidified with the marriage. i mean, he’s very emotionally-driven, and he’s protective and loving to a fault. i think his urge to protect people no matter what is one of his most defining faults overall, and he’s a very flawed character but that one specifically stands out so much. ranboo still cared about tubbo before, but the idea of marriage means something. because it means a family, it means two husbands and a child and a house in a town and a cookie outpost and everything.
this is one of the reasons i think that the argument of “tubbo doesn’t love ranboo” is kind of... just not... it just falls flat, you know? because i think it’s a pretty accurate statement to say “the beeduo marriage means more to ranboo than it does to tubbo”, but that’s not because tubbo doesn’t love ranboo! tubbo doesn’t love the marriage, but he can still love the person within it!
though i will note that i think tubbo still does like, care for the marriage in the sense of, he does look at ranboo as his husband. i mean, one of the earliest things he asked in their conversation yesterday is why ranboo hadn’t brought the marriage up. there’s no mental neglect of the marriage to tubbo; he just doesn’t see how it’s important. maybe doesn’t even think of how it could be used against them by wilbur/quackity, because to tubbo, the two of them being husbands looks the exact same as the two of them being best friends who love each other.
anyway. i hope this makes sense. and i hope these two do talk it out, because there’s a lot of pain at the fact that i think ranboo genuinely thinks that tubbo’s indifference to this marriage means an indifference to ranboo, and that there’s a litany of sentiments that ranboo holds that tubbo is out of the loop for. and like, tubbo still holds some secrets from ranboo, but ranboo is holding a lot, lot, lot of secrets from tubbo.
so i really hope they talk it out. because i do believe they still love each other.
it’s just the context of the thing that’s the issue.