I'm going to try and draw smth about this but just in case I forget or lose motivation or smth:
One of the many things I'm really fixating on in the City Seventeam dynamics is this vibe of like, Gordon constantly running after Stain and trying to teach him how to be in the world while almost without him noticing Xar is doing a very similar thing to him. It's just oriented more towards trying to teach him to chill out and better adapt to the way things work in the gameworld rather than the more straightforward protectiveness Gordon has shown toward Stain.
It's really interesting too, bc you'd think that this would be the kind of dynamic where there might be competition of some kind (especially since Xar seems to want Gordon to think he's cool), but instead Xar seems to find Stain interesting in his own right and just sort of seamlessly adds guiding Gordon's behavior toward Stain to his aloof genius role model repertoire
Tl;dr there's such interesting homoerotic mentorship shit going on with these three and Gordon is getting it in both directions