yotha faifa and mom thoughts (this is a bit long)
i'm late to the convo but i feel like i've seen a lot of strong emotions abt them that i'm not sure i agree with. (disclaimer: i know they made changes from the novel that clearly didn't need to be made)
for one, their mother separated them at a young age, taking faifa away from what was already familiar to condition him in a new environment with a new family, becoming attached to his mom as a result (when he wasn't before). she does all this only to upend his life once more, where he has to recondition himself in an environment that had already become unfamiliar. so faifa's "survival instincts" kick in where he has to adapt to others in order to feel like he's seen and belongs. so repression becomes second nature, as he doesn't want to come across as selfish or unlikeable by expressing how he actually feels (bc to him, his true feelings abt his mom and yotha would hurt someone's feelings)
faifa's dilemma is complicated because there's a thin line between being friendly and people pleasing, but wine is the one who teaches him how to separate the two. yotha, who could've done more of an intervention for faifa considering he was aware of this dilemma, was also still affected by their separation as kids. when he asks faifa in ep 9 abt whether their mom's decision hurt him, faifa lies his way out of the convo.
this core problem of avoiding the problem isn't faifa's fault, nor is it particularly yotha's. faifa tends to subconsciously protect his mother's feelings even when he feels hurt by her. it's dealing with the grating paradox of wanting your inner feelings to be "figured out" by someone, but not wanting to express them bc you're afraid of how you'll be seen once you do. more so if you're used to being the person people turn to.
regarding yothagun, faifa's sacrifices are still his own decisions, but it's all a product of his conditioning. i feel once you've made it a habit, it's easy to turn yourself into a martyr for others when you think you're doing something good for them. especially if others take your habit for granted, which is what his mother does. yotha's problem is that he also takes it for granted, even while he tries to warn faifa abt it at the same time. and it's this martyr habit that makes it look like he doesn't know love, that makes yotha worried he'd hurt wine--which, kinda did happen, but it wasn't as crazy as yotha described; faifa didn't "hurt" wine so much as make him afraid he'd lost him.
so yotha is kiinda right and wrong abt faifa's understanding of himself and his feelings. yotha saying faifa doesn't know how to love isn't him saying that he knew from the start either. like, it's true that faifa doesn't know love at first, just not in the same way yotha "doesn't know," and by the time yotha says this faifa is already confronting himself.
while yotha isn't ready to face what loving someone looks like on a fundamental level, faifa "doesn't know what love is" because he doesn't know how to direct certain feelings/actions towards someone rather than people as a whole. yotha learns to be selfless and faifa learns to be a bit more selfish. those are two different problems, and the script kinda made it seem like they were on the same level. i think this is where they missed the mark on the delivery, bc it's unnecessary to have yotha say this more than once while faifa is being a green flag.
it's clear that at the start, yotha is lost. but while faifa is just as lost, two things happen simultaneously: he doesn't express that he's lost, and people don't notice. this is something yotha learns, i guess--that he has to kinda fight back against faifa's own words if he wants to know his true feelings and help just as much as faifa has to understand it's okay for him to express himself. both things can happen together.
(but apparently faifa is too nice and too satisfied with his relationship to say any of this in detail to yotha or their mom lmao. love him tho <3)
