Am I the only one who thinks Snake has a childlike mentality? He's so shy and innocent compared to the others. I also never fully understood his devotion to Joker was Joker like a father figure to him, or was it something else? And in your opinion, who was the person Snake loved or cared about the most?
i think snake simply didn't develop properly because of what happened to him.
in his cinematic record, we see that he'd been kept in a cage for as long as he could remember. he was used to make money and wasn't treated like a human being. we develop through socialization with others, and the lack of it can lead to disorders and an inability to function normally. even if he wasn't physically abused, what happened to him can hardly be called anything other than abuse when a half-naked child is being made to eat mice. even if he spat them back out later, that would leave anyone traumatized.
i don't think he was completely devoted to joker, nor do i think joker was a father figure to him. they were simply the first people who saw him as a person. they took him out of the cage, gave him clothes, fed him, and treated him like a human being. if i remember correctly, it's never stated exactly how long he'd been with the circus, but joker describes him as a recent addition, and in snake's memories the troupe members don't look any different from how they appear in the boc. because of that, i assume only a few months had passed since he joined them.
after seventeen years of life, someone finally rescued him.
in that regard, he reminds me a lot of finny. both of them spent years being used by others, both were rescued, and both ended up following people who commit crimes. whether those crimes are justified is another matter, but ciel has far more deaths on his conscience than joker, and finny is significantly more devoted to ciel than snake ever was to joker. finny is also far more childlike than his age would suggest, and the age difference between them is actually quite small. finny is sixteen, while snake is eighteen.
once snake finally found a family that took him in, he began talking to people. i'm not a psychologist, but i've always felt that speaking through the snakes is his way of coping with social anxiety. it's also interesting because talking to babies is incredibly important for emotional development and attachment. i think that because his mother cared so little about him that she didn't even give him a name, and because the only time people addressed him was when they were abusing him, learning to communicate with others—even in such a limited way—had the same effect of creating emotional bonds.
and then, just as he started opening up, everyone disappeared and he was alone again. so i don't think he left the circus to search for the troupe out of eternal devotion. i think he did it because he was terrified of being alone again. first and one of very limited times when snake speaks in his own voice, without speaking through the snakes, is: "it's lonely being by yourself." they were the only people who had accepted him back then, and they left him behind.
ciel did exactly what the troupe had done. he accepted him, took him in, gave him a job, fed him, clothed him. snake found a new family. that's why he couldn't choose between doll and finny, and why he died protecting a child. on one hand, he couldn't bear to watch someone who had once saved him hurt an innocent child. on the other, he couldn't abandon finny, even knowing that finny had killed people he cared about.
and i don't think there was one single person snake was attached to the most. because of everything he'd been through, i get the impression that he wasn't capable of ranking people into those he loved more and those he loved less. every single person who was kind to him was special. and within the span of a year or two, he met more people who treated him kindly than he had during the previous seventeen years of his life. i think he would have felt guilty that a person accepted him as he was—and he had a massive inferiority complex even after spending time with the circus; you can see it during the ship arc—and guilty that despite that acceptance, he still found himself caring about someone else. maybe if he'd lived longer, more typical human behaviors would have developed. but if yana wanted to keep him realistic, i think snake would always remain somewhat different from everyone else. because it doesn't take just a few people telling you that you're good the way you are to undo trauma. it takes years of therapy, and even then there are no guarantees. some things simply become part of us. some wounds never fully disappear, no matter how much healing happens afterward, and they continue to shape the rest of our lives.
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