Ok very quick Raffy love post before I lock in fr.
I still love Dean and everything Mix is doing with his performance, and Dean and Rome are both like ??????? really great guys ???????????????? who actually think about other people and not just their designated endgame hookup ?????????? So lowkey I feel they should make Raffy jealous together, I think that's what they should do, nobody gets hurt except Raffy which 1. Dean enjoys (wayyyy too much) 2. Rome needs, for his relationship to actually go anywhere you know. Raffy needs to feel like he's winning something. Beating Dean would really lock Raffy down for Rome. Is what I think.
But anyway that's a side note to the main point which is that even though I really love Dean and Rome for being great people, I love Raffy even more for being a beautifully performed fucking mess <3 I came to this series for messes and I have to tell you Dean is really not a mess? His messiest trait is just that he's hung up on Jack DFKDLJFSDJF you know... but Raffy <3 <3 <3 I cannot believe he called Dean a whore (not just an escort by profession but to his core) for drunkenly hugging a guy, and did it with SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS! He really believes (or at least, mostly believes. Is very good at re-convincing himself that) he's the unfairly maligned underdog and Dean is the cruel jezebel who has seduced Raffy's man and Raffy's limelight away from where they rightfully belong.
Idk I love it. It's so important to me to have characters that are at once transparent to us and opaque to themselves (AND performed in a compelling human way that makes us feel for them), so I love that he's pretty readable to the audience but is so out of touch with his own feelings and wants, so focused on what he's decided he deserves or wants to deserve and not on what's happening inside him. He's also out of touch with anything happening outside of him, of course! He has no interiority and neither does anybody else, you see!
The way he's so sure he's allowed to be furious that Rome lightly manipulated him so he could delete the video that could nuke their entire play after Raffy did the same thing not to protect anyone (I mean I'm sure he could claim with his full chest that it was to protect Jack lmao), but to humiliate Dean in front of the entire fucking student body... he's just such a fun little character, this selfish loose canon who believes he's so prim while he's out there having constant one night stands, in public, with a guy who explicitly LIKES HIM for being a jealous manipulative bitch, for who he really is!!!, and yet Raffy won't consistently acknowledge he likes back the second Jack or Dean make him feel threatened.
He's so out-of-touch! He's so self-pitying! He's so cruel and chaotic and pathetic! AND MISERABLEEEEEE, BY HIS OWN HAND <3 I LOVE YOU RAFFY
