to be naim is to love ryan and live in fear of those feelings :((
AND ANOTHER THING before i get dragged back to my enclosure
i've seen the sentence "to be ryan is to love naim" said a lot, in reference to entity ryan faltering when naim held its cheek, and i absolutely love that take on the entity, that in emulating this person's traits, they really do start to become that person, which made me think about how entity naim never approaches ryan in public. it always appears in secret at ryan's house, which would explain him saying to "stop coming to my house" and then it walks with ryan, on invitation, to the near-empty roller-rink and presumably to other places, similar to how how naim only started hanging out with ryan after he invites him out to the field. at school, the entity appears in the bathroom after ryan initiates the meeting and even then it's presumably in a cubicle where they absolutely wouldn't be seen. him and entity naim meet up in secret and he just keeps showing up with more bruises and injuries whereas entity ryan appears in secret, but will not hesitate to appear in public. entity ryan has approached hunter and naim even when the barrier between them and other people was clear and they could still be seen, like the windows at the service station where hunter worked or the windows of the bus.
to be ryan is to love naim and have no shame in appearing in public, because "i was never scared of this," and to be naim is to love ryan but still struggle with the shame and fear that real naim feels so it only appears when ryan is not only alone, but also when it was absolutely guaranteed that they wouldn't be seen even though it's invisible to everyone else. entity ryan had the audacity to appear not only in public but at the funeral of the person he killed and lit a cigarette, he was not bothered at all, he talks about naim's mom seeing him and doesnt have a care in the world, it blatantly walks up to naim outside the bus and takes up space even in public, because it was never scared of this, and he gets that trait from real ryan. even in that scene there isn't 100% certainty of which ryan it is, so that is completely believable as what real ryan feels.
ik technically speaking, we dont see entity naim because we're in naim's pov so we mostly see the aftermath of his attackng ryan but i do like this interpretation of the characters.
