Off-Model Human

misato's simultaneous growth and stunted development fascinates me. so i made an edit about it!

Imagine, if you will, you are a nine-year-old boy and you are to be sent to school now. You will move away from your family, and the people you know best and who have actively raised you will no longer do so. Your parents will still be your parents, but they are somewhat more distant figures - or if they aren't, you will become aware that this is somehow Unusual and Strange at school. At school, you will be thoroughly brutalized in various ways, and then when you go home, there is suddenly a Gap. It is no longer quite proper for you to run around with the footmen. You are still permitted into the kitchens as a guest, but you are now the young gentleman. Some of the housemaids are already getting nervous about you, because soon you will be A Young Gentleman with all the dangers that involves for them.

You go back to school. You are further brutalized. Perhaps you have a homosexual relationship, and perhaps if you are fortunate it is one of mutual consideration and gentleness, but more likely it is one of awkward power imbalances with an older boy. If you are particularly unlucky, it is outright abuse, sometimes vicious. You of course cannot speak of this relationship when you go home, one way or another. But then when you go home, you discover also that is is no longer proper for you to visit the kitchens at all. You can no longer play with the footmen except as assistants in Gentlemanly Pursuits.

You will continue this escalation for several years. You are systematically alienated from the servants and taught Your Place and Their Place. You are taught to look back on your formative relationships as now inappropriate, and that you must take these people you thought of as friends - or as slaves if you were a little shit - and Rule Them.

An aristocrat who still goes down to take tea with the servants after all that is being very odd from everyone's perspective, and also a little tragic and sad because it's an arrested development, a state of painful regression, a refusal to let go of an innocence that society has demanded be discarded. They're not just the awkward boss, they're the awkward boss who is being super weird about it, even if they're not trying to.

Plus some more^^

i saw kinda lots of ppl get ritsuko the highest. logically

Curie expresses her desire for a Synth body as part of expanding her ability to think, feel, and process information - but I've always wondered if there isn't something else going on, since by every metric Curie as a robot is a fine researcher and probably better equipped than as a synth.

Curie spent the better part of two centuries completely alone in a Vault after burying her only friends. She watched them grow old and die and leave her all alone in the dark to carry out the work, and when she finished, she just... stayed alone, with nothing but a specimen population she kept alive for companionship.

Imagine the tremendous loneliness she must have felt in there. Then someone comes and frees her from her prison, and over time, becomes a friend - maybe even someone she's already developed romantic feelings for, even before the Synth sidegrade. She develops other friendships with their other companions and settlers. And suddenly she's aware that it's going to happen again. They're all going to grow old and die while she has to watch, and that will happen again, and again, and again, until she finally breaks down beyond repair or is destroyed.

Maybe becoming a synth is her way out. Synth aging is ambiguous, but I'm inclined to think they do unless its deliberately turned off (or turned on for surface infiltrators, maybe - default off). Maybe Curie thinks she can find a way to flip her switch to age, so she doesn't have to experience that grief again and again. Maybe she just can't bring herself to tell anyone that her ultimate goal is to die with her friends, old and happy, and not be left again to bury them and mourn them and wait for centuries in the dark for someone else.