el_lu

Understanding the self through the other is such a slippery slope that Ivan just throws himself off of a cliff with. He can't like any part of himself unless he first sees someone else do it and receive some sort of reward for it. His world schema depends almost entirely on external schemas being Taught to him. A lot of people call this autism but I don't really like to use autism as a shorthand for describing people so my running theory is that having to rapidly adapt to a way different type of life (slums -> being kidnapped + sold -> anakt garden) made him try to take in as much information as possible, which gave him a very straight forward view of the world. Good behaviour = Reward, Bad behaviour = Punishment, Rules = unclear, therefore watch others to learn the rules. And him being the only one uncollared shows us that not only did he manage to internalise this so well, he's executing it near perfectly. Anyways,

System crash