twitter has a fundamental misunderstanding of raf and i fear i may go to my grave defending him like he is NOT boring and lacking in personality he is someone who’s spent his life running back and forth between two countries and is painfully shy and as such has never been able to know who he is so he obsesses over people who he thinks will make him someone special and maybe elevate him and his family out of a financial situation which they never understood and seth gets his claws in straight away and lovebombs him in an already stressful situation.
i accidentally just deleted three entire paragraphs of this post i’m gonna die
n e ways he tries to make friends with kirin with his little dick joke and kirin goes bananas and scares him into the woods like a little animal and then he nearly makes friends with josh despite josh putting his foot in his mouth at EVERY opportunity but then The Event happens and raf makes the obviously wrong decision of defending seth even though he never actually attacks josh and only directs his anger at kirin and ivan and THEN seth comes back and he finally gets the backbone to tell him to stop bothering josh and the following situation culminates in him eventually beating seth to death on a boat for a guy who has continuously called him the wrong name and been a hot mess
and THEN!!! he meets leah and tries to make another Little Joke and she starts yelling in his face about experiments and now is where I point out he was never supposed to be Boy Leah he’s just her foil to show their different outputs but I’m sure they both love ben folds and highbrow literature and probably also terrible men. in my mind they’re weird best friends in s3 and everyone is slightly unnerved
and he’s trying really hard to be a better person but he’s excruciatingly shy and he won’t even use the name rafa so he doesn’t ‘have to fight’ some other kid on the soccer team for it (field notes) even on an island with a bunch of kids who have never met the other rafa. also he and josh go to a private catholic school and i know they are both weighed down by Religious Guilt. also if I hadn’t accidentally deleted this post it would have been a lot longer and better written but this is what you’re getting