to elaborate more on the "embodiment of gadget's fear/infinite's weakness" thing: they're written (insofar as gadget is "written" at all) to be parallels right, two sides of the same coin, and i like to think of them both as creatures ruled by fear. gadget is scared of the world, of the ways it falls apart and how despite his best attempts (or, worse, because of them) bad things still happen to the people he cares about. but infinite is more scared of himself, of his own weakness that paints a target on his back and prevents him from becoming the master of his (and everyone else's) reality. gadget's fear makes him disengage or cower or run away and make himself as small as possible, and infinite's fear makes him lash out, overcompensate for his own perceived failings and make himself appear bigger than he really is. to gadget, infinite represents something terrible and inevitable that he's helpless to stop, something so much bigger and stronger than him that fighting would be pointless so why even try. to infinite, gadget represents the quivering, whimpering, pathetic thing inside him that he can never completely kill no matter how many times he tries. by the end of forces gadget has learned how to find strength in other people and through those bonds create something better than the sum of its parts, but that's something that infinite can never do, because he can't see other people as anything other than tools to be used, props to elevate his own status, or threats that need to be eliminated. gadget's safety is with other people, infinite's safety is the absence of people. which i guess is kinda the premise of the au? their situation isolates gadget from everyone else (because they can't understand or help him anyway) and forces infinite to be completely at someone else's mercy? so they're both out of step and making each other miserable? anyway let's pretend that i didn't just type all that about sonic the hedgehog and instead that i said something else