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People often discount someone else’s struggles if they cannot physically see them. For instance, no visible attempt or external “evidence.” So, I want to define a few terms first, just to ensure everyone is on the same page:

Suicidal ideation: thoughts or ideas centered around death or suicide. These can manifest as either active or passive.

Active suicidal ideation: specific thoughts, plans, or intentions to end one’s own life. This may involve detailed planning, acquiring means, or expressing urgency. For example: “I’ve been researching ways to overdose on pills.”

Passive suicidal ideation: a wish for death without a clear plan or intent. This may sound like: “I wish I could just disappear,” or “I don’t see the point in living anymore.” Passive ideation often overlaps with suicidal gestures (a term I personally find problematic, but will use here for clarity), which can include attempted suicide or self-destructive behaviors where the risk of death is low.

Both active and passive ideation indicate a person is at risk for suicide. Neither is more “valid” than the other, they are simply different manifestations of the same underlying struggle.

Aventurine actually exhibits all of these throughout the main story quest. For this essay, I’ve organized my analysis into three parts— attempts, gestures, and ideation— with some bonus observations at the end.

Attempts:

First up on the list of instances where Aventurine displays obvious suicidal behavior, would be the time he literally says it in plain english:

I mean… the guy flat out says he has attempted more than once. It doesn’t really get much clearer than that. The only argument someone could make against this being evidence of suicidal tendencies is to say, “Well, it’s in Penacony, so he wasn’t actually going to die.”

First of all, there would be no way he'd truly know that unless it was tested, which if we assume he already had his plan in place by the time he arrived in Penacony, then “testing” death was already on the table, and with Acheron, no less. Not only would that gamble give him his answer, it would push him into the deepest end of the pool. There was no reason to test it before hand, and he didn’t just test it once. He tested it multiple times. The game literally bolds this statement so players don’t miss it, and yet… 😭

So I beg the question: why test death multiple times? Just to be sure? Because he had nothing better to do? Because he wanted to film a TikTok about it? Let’s be serious. There was no reason to test it once, let alone more than once— and that’s the sinister part. He wasn’t just curious. He wasn’t just gathering data. He was torturing himself, skating the razor-thin line between life and death over and over again.

This is why I brought up those definitions in the last section. Because If someone isn't shown literally hanging from the ceiling, many people will discount their struggle and claim they aren't suicidal. It's terrible, but it's true. Not looking "sick" enough is a legitimate issue that drives people with mental health issues deeper into their suffering, because they're convinced they aren't valid and their issues "aren't bad enough". I know some of yall rn are probably like "rory, it's not that deep," but it is. It is that deep. This is why people like Aventurine skirt under the radar all the time. He can literally say to Ratio’s face, “I’ve attempted several times,” and because he’s charming and put-together, players brush it off as a joke. I’ve watched multiple playthroughs where streamers laugh at this line— at least five, which is five too many. People don’t take you seriously unless they can see the pain.

To be clear, I’ve never actually heard someone argue this, and I’m not saying the person who asked me the question thinks this way. I’m playing devil’s advocate because it’s the only counter-argument I can think of. But to dismiss Aventurine’s “attempts” just because they happened in Penacony would be incredibly ghoulish. It’s the same logic as saying, “If someone jumped off a bridge but it wasn’t high enough, were they really suicidal?” Obviously, yes. The intent is what matters. Writing off an attempt just because it didn’t “work” is how we end up with that toxic idea that suicidal people are just “seeking attention.”

So if Aventurine “tested” death in Penacony, knowing he might survive because of the dreamscape— does that make it any less suicidal? No. He wasn’t testing it just for curiosity’s sake. He was explicitly testing whether it would kill him. That’s suicidal behavior. Point blank. Period. If you want to downplay it, then at minimum it qualifies as a suicidal gesture.

Personally, I think this moment— Aventurine casually admitting he “tested it”— works on two levels. On the surface, he delivers it with the same tone he’d use telling Ratio about last night’s lottery numbers. But underneath, it reads as a cry for help, even if he doesn’t consciously recognize it. He does this a lot: casually dropping alarming statements without ever fully confronting them. People who blurt out their pain like that are often hoping someone will notice, even when they can’t bring themselves to ask outright. And Ratio does notice, ofc. He recognizes Aventurine’s pain and responds with genuine concern (and even advice). But the fact that Aventurine defaults to masking it in jokes or “offhand” comments shows how badly he wants to be seen without ever having to admit how much he’s suffering.

The other attempt we are shown during the main story quest, is the Penacony plan !!

First, let’s get it straight: the IPC’s primary goal in sending Aventurine to Penacony was not to investigate “death” specifically, but to regain control of the planet itself. Investigating death was Aventurine’s idea. Yes, he uses it as a legitimate excuse when negotiating with Robin, and yes, his plan does succeed in that he delivers what he promises. But it would be obtuse to write this off as “he was just there on business.” Clearly, there’s a personal reason for his obsession with death and dying, and it makes sense that he would build his strategy around it.

And by all logic, his plan doesn’t make sense for someone in his role. Remember, his official title is Aventurine of Stratagems, Executive Director of the Strategic Investment Department. He’s a strategist. His role is to manipulate, negotiate, and most importantly, stay alive so he can continue pulling strings. A strategist faced with a theory as big as “death exists in Penacony” would normally test it indirectly— send proxies, gather data, force the Family to reveal contradictions. He would prioritize survival because his leverage and reputation depend on being the one to control the board.

Instead, Aventurine stakes his own life as the litmus test. No control group, no safe experiment, no nothing. He provokes a fight with Acheron, the one opponent he has no chance of defeating, fully aware of what could happen. (Obviously, the irony here is intentional — the man named of Stratagems is also the most reckless man alive. But that irony sharpens the point: his recklessness isn’t a flaw of intelligence, it’s an expression of self-destruction.)

What Aventurine shows in Penacony is that his gamble isn’t really about IPC leverage at all. It’s personal. He wants to be the coin tossed by Death, and he isn’t weighing contingencies at all. His “strategic plan” is really a disguised suicide attempt— one he can frame as genius maneuvering if he lives, but which also conveniently delivers the release he craves if he dies. His shadow-self in the Penacony maze calls him out on this several times, hammering home that Aventurine knows exactly what he’s doing.

He’s also aware of the possible outcomes once Acheron lifts her blade. His options are:

A. Survive the blow (unlikely).

B. “Die” in the dreamscape and discover some unknown truth.

C. Die outright, whether in dream or reality.

D. Something stranger— slipping into Nihility’s void, a kind of purgatory-adjacent realm where he might continue briefly before dissolving anyway.

His alter ego even suggests he might be trying to “slip the leash” of the IPC and finally be free. And while no one takes this literally, the implication is clear: the only escape from a position as high as Aventurine’s is death. Whether that means real death, or an escape into a liminal “nowhere,” both end in the same conclusion: annihilation.

If Acheron had followed through, Aventurine’s death could have played out in several ways, all shaped by Nihility’s mercilessness. The most immediate outcome would be a clean end: one strike, reducing him to nothing before he could reconsider. But Nihility might also unravel him, dissolving his very being into silence— a fitting fate for someone who has fantasized about vanishing without a trace. Or it could have been slower, forcing him to feel his fear and despair as his body and identity came apart. In every possible version, the core is the same: Aventurine embraces erasure, knowing full well he cannot predict what will happen. And crucially, he is planning for death. The entire Penacony maze repeats this message over and over. As he's leaving, his shadow self even tells Aventurine—

From a writing standpoint, hoyo wanted his boss fight to feel like a potential death sentence. That tension—that he might die for real, even in a dream—is what makes the scene dramatic. It's why the fandom was so up in arms about it back when it was happening in real time. Nobody really knew for sure if he was alive or not. The aventurine stone lost its light for a while, not even the other Stonehearts knew if he was alive.

And Aventurine himself was fully prepared to let Nihility take him. The only reason he didn’t was because of the wisdom Ratio and Acheron offered him, pulling him back from the brink.

Plus, just as a little bonus, nobody ever really talks about this part, but it was also a massive red flag to me:

He says more after this, but the point is that he starts randomly trauma dumping out of nowhere. This is extremely out of character for Aventurine. You couldn't get this man to tell you how he's feeling if you begged him on your hands and knees. He had to swindle the trailblazer into playing a dice game with him post Penacony just so he had an excuse to mention how poorly he's been doing, and if the trailblazer refuses to play, he just apologizes for being a bother and says nothing at all. He needs to literally plot and scheme just so he has an excuse to tell his friend he's been having nightmares. And before Penacony? Good fucking luck getting this guy to tell you anything genuine about himself. Which is why it's so interesting that he does it here- while it's literally televised, AND he shares one of the most vulnerable parts of his life. Granted, people probably know he was enslaved considering the brand on his neck, but it's still a massive power move to SAY that, publicly, in front of everyone, how much he's suffered. This just reads to me as him knowing full well that he might not make it out of this alive, so he wants to try and set the record straight on how much he suffered just to get here. I personally just can't imagine him telling everybody these intimate details if he was planning on ever seeing them again.

He also already has scheduled messages to send out after the fact, since he doesn't know if he's ever coming back:

All in all, Aventurine’s Penacony gambit can be read as more than a clever strategy; it resembles a disguised suicide attempt. On the surface, he frames the duel with Acheron as a calculated risk, a spectacle where the IPC would benefit no matter the outcome. Yet his choice of method reveals something darker: he deliberately places himself in the most lethal position possible, wagering his life against an Emanator’s blade when safer alternatives existed. In this light, his “test” of whether death exists in the dreamscape becomes a mask for self-destruction. Even if he expected to survive, the fact that death remained a viable outcome suggests that the plan was not only a gamble for control, but also an opportunity to finally stop playing the endless game of survival.

But, someone could argue that Aventurine’s gamble was not truly suicidal, since he would probably survive. A strategist of his caliber would not have risked his life recklessly unless he had calculated his odds of survival to be high. From this perspective, his confrontation with Acheron was simply another display of his confidence and cunning— proof of his ability to manipulate even death into a winning hand. Yet this objection misses the crucial point: suicidality does not always manifest as certainty of death. I've said it 100 times so far, and I'll probably say it 100 more times. This argument is based on the assumption that someone isn't "actually suicidal" unless they have a fool proof plan in place, and this just is not always the case. Often, it appears in the form of reckless indifference, where survival and self-destruction are treated as equally acceptable outcomes. Aventurine may have anticipated living, but he was also prepared— perhaps even quietly hoping— for the alternative. It is this willingness to collapse his survival into a wager that betrays the depressive impulse behind the spectacle.

Gestures:

Here's a question: what's another way to define someone who is not suicidal? I'd argue that it's a person who acts like they want to be alive. You know who doesn't act like they wanna be alive? Mr. Aventurine of Stratagems, everybody !! ^_^

This is one of, if not the very first thing we're told about his character: he's a reckless gambler that uses his life as a poker chip. One example being his first encounter with Jade:

He is literally constantly betting his life or talking about betting his life. We've seen him bet his life more often than he's bet those stupid custom poker chips he had made. He actually bullies himself for this in the Penacony maze (among other things):

From the very beginning, Aventurine’s defining trait is clear: he is a reckless gambler, and his life is the first— and most valuable— stake he’s willing to put on the table. Every plan, every maneuver, every calculated risk carries an undercurrent of self-destruction, because he doesn’t truly value his own survival. His willingness to wager himself first shows just how deeply his obsession with death and nihilism runs, bleeding into every action he takes.

Another iconic gesture would ofc be the Final Victor lightcone:

This is just wild. Imagine meeting someone for the first time and you're like "oh I know, let's play Russian roulette." Mind you, he's not JUST playing Russian roulette: he's playing alone, and taking back to back to back turns. He fires it three times!

Now, at a certain point you just have to start looking at situations like this a bit deeper. Could we write it off as "he's just a crazy man who's extremely lucky and he did this just to show ratio how lucky he is and how he's always in control?" Sure, if we want a lukewarm analysis. Personally, I'm not interested in those, and I don't think the people who wrote this character are, either. Literally in any situation on earth, firing a loaded gun into your chest three times is a suicidal gesture at the VERY least. But, sure, Aventurine is lucky. He know's he'll never lose a gamble.

Right?

That's why his hands shake every time he makes one? That's why he's always clutching onto his last chip under the table? That's why the game went so far to bring attention to the fact that he perpetually views himself as a loser? Aventurine is so, so much more than a crazy man who bumbles around and bets his life over and over again just as a fun party trick to flex his luck.

Then, of course, we have: the smashing of his cornerstone-

I absolutely consider this to be a suicidal gesture. It is reiterated over and over again that for the Stonehearts, their cornerstones are the most valuable thing they have. Their entire being is incapsulated in that stone—it's their core identity, manifested into an object that is literally a piece of themselves. They honor to respect and value it more than they would their lives. Which, Aventurine does, to be fair. He doesn't value himself or his life at all, which is why he had no issue smashing it.

Upon mentioning the cornerstone, his alter ego says:

Aventurine "has an impulse for self destruction," which we of course know. He then continues to belittle himself by saying:

Again, bullying himself for not valuing his own life. There really is no other conclusion that can be drawn here—nobody in their right mind would EVER think to break a cornerstone, idk if that has ever even happened before. Ofc Aventurine frames this as a strategic act, saying its just a part of his plan and framing it as this smart and heroic plan, but his alter ego is literally roasting him for this bc its not true !! Aventurine knows there's more to it than that, and anybody who can't see that is literally falling for his bluff !! That’s the gambler’s excuse for what is, essentially, self-harm.

The consistency of this pattern is telling. A man who truly feared death would not stake his life so casually, so often. Aventurine’s eagerness to use his body as collateral shows a deeper yearning to be rid of it, masked as strategy or bravado. His obsession with high-stakes risk is not simply thrill-seeking, but an ongoing rehearsal of self-destruction. Each gamble is an invitation to death: a test of whether this time his luck will finally run out.

Ideation:

Aventurine’s story in Penacony cannot be understood without addressing his suicidal ideation. It is one of the most consistent undercurrents in his arc, woven not only into his dialogue but into the very structure of his encounters.

This remark, “Good luck makes one powerful, but destiny? Inherently unjust,” reveals a core truth about how he views his life: he sees himself as trapped in a pattern of inevitable suffering. Good luck can be claimed, leveraged, and manipulated. Destiny, however, is beyond his control— and to him, it is cruel. This belief underpins much of his reckless behavior and obsession with death. If the universe is rigged against him, then survival, success, and happiness feel like illusions; the only certainty is that suffering awaits.

That sense of injustice fuels his suicidal ideation. Aventurine doesn’t just flirt with death for thrill— he flirts with it because, in his mind, it might be the only way to escape the relentless unfairness of his existence. He approaches life as a series of tests, experiments, and gambles, but there’s always an undertone of resignation: no matter what he wins, no matter what he accomplishes, destiny will eventually punish him. He's been obsessed with this since he was a child:

He always questioned the concept of suffering, the concept of "luck", the point of being born into a world when all that was waiting for him was, eventually, death (even in this section, when he went back to retrieve his sister's necklace and made a bet, the bet being "who will die first, me or this bird", meaning he spent god even knows how long just staring at this bird waiting for it to die tragically).

Even in the Penacony maze, this belief colors his choices. By courting Acheron and engaging with Nihility, he is actively engaging with a force that represents the ultimate expression of destiny’s cruelty: erasure, nothingness, and the finality he has long imagined. He doesn’t fully expect a “fair” outcome— he expects the universe to follow its inherent injustice. And yet, the very act of pushing toward it is evidence of how deeply this philosophy saturates his thoughts. His life is a constant negotiation between chance, luck, and the inevitability of suffering, and his obsession with death is both a reflection of and a response to that perceived injustice.

Let me, for one second, draw attention to what he says once you beat him in his boss fight:

This is one of my favorite lines of his. “Everybody’s like that down to the last player, so why can’t I be happy too? Why can’t I feel that free?” UGH its so good !!! He sees others around him living, succeeding, and finding joy in the game of life, while he feels perpetually bound by circumstances, expectations, and the weight of his own fate. To Aventurine, life feels inherently unfair— destiny, as he often says, is “inherently unjust.”

This line demonstrates why his obsession with death isn’t just reckless thrill-seeking; it’s a direct response to the despair of feeling trapped in a life that refuses to grant him the freedom and happiness he observes in others. Despite how much he tries and how much he has succeeded thus far, he feels literally imprisoned by life. The tension between observing others’ liberation and experiencing his own confinement drives both his mental preoccupation with death and the extreme gambles he takes with his life.

Next, I want to focus on Nihility: From his earliest interactions with Acheron, Aventurine positions himself in relation to Nihility, the Path that promises nothingness, release, and an end to suffering. And his fixation on death doesn’t just appear in the moments where he courts it directly. It seeps into nearly everything he does. His mind circles the idea constantly. Death is not just an outcome to him, but a concept he keeps testing and rehearsing in his thoughts until it bleeds into his actions.

The duel with Acheron is where this becomes impossible to ignore. She embodies the Path of Nihility, and Aventurine all but begs her to erase him. He frames it as an experiment— a “strategic” move to test whether death exists in Penacony— but the truth is plainer: Aventurine wants to see if she can finally give him the release he has been circling for so long. Even his role as “Aventurine of Stratagems” folds into this; the great gambler of the IPC, master of survival, deliberately engineers a scenario where survival is almost impossible.

Speaking of Acheron, let's look at their convo in Nihility for a second:

First, as they discuss, she mentions even if Aventurine wishes to be rid of life, she can't promise one way or another, since now he's clearly in limbo. But, before she leaves, Aventurine asks the question he's been dwelling on this entire time:

There's his obsession again with the meaning of life / inherently cruel justice that's out of his control. This further underscores his fixation on death and his ambivalence toward survival. When he tells Acheron that he sometimes wonders if it would be better to simply disappear, it echoes the very structure of suicidal ideation— not always a decisive desire for death, but a weariness, a constant consideration of whether continued existence is worth the effort. His hesitation in the Nihility shows that his obsession with death is not theoretical or symbolic alone, but deeply personal, a depressive calculus he rehearses privately long before he ever steps onto the stage to test it with Acheron’s blade.

And, of course, I have to mention Doctor's Advice, because I'm an aventio truther who needs to push their agenda:

Before he reads Ratio’s note, Aventurine has nothing anchoring him in the Nihility except the bleakness of his own thoughts. His dialogue circles the same depressive contradictions that mark suicidal ideation: an exhaustion with life’s endless repetition, a longing for release, and the haunting uncertainty of what lies beyond. In fact, the conversation with Acheron crystallizes his ambivalence— he cannot say for sure that he wants to die, but he also cannot say with conviction that he wants to live.

I can't find the screenshot rn, but when Aventurine says, “Every night is practice for the end. … And ‘Death’ … will surface in our dreams,” he reveals how he conceptualizes life itself as a rehearsal for dying. To him, sleep is not rest or renewal, but a nightly simulation of annihilation. This perspective is the purest articulation of his suicidal ideation: he is so accustomed to longing for oblivion that he reinterprets the most universal human experience of rest as practice for disappearing. His entire worldview is structured around waiting for Death to finally arrive, and every gamble with his life becomes another spin of the wheel to see if this time his luck has run out.

Ratio’s note interrupts that logic with a radically different framing. In it, Ratio writes that sleep isn’t a rehearsal for death, but a chance to keep living: a pause that allows the body to repair, and the mind to dream. Where Aventurine sees only endings, Ratio insists there are beginnings hidden inside the very same act. The note becomes a reminder that even the smallest continuations, like closing one’s eyes and waking again, matter. This is why the note inspires him to keep living. Aventurine has spent his entire life treating luck as his only anchor, but Ratio gives him something more enduring: a reason to wake, not just a reprieve from dying. (it's one of the many reasons they fit together so well, you've got a guy who has no will to live who cannot see the value in his life, and a guy whose life mission is to value life. i wanna fuckin MUSH THEMMMMM I WANNA PUT THEM IN A BLENDER)

Nods and Bonuses:

If you needed more canon evidence, here's some fun bonus bits to chew on bc i have several english degrees and clearly was the kid in AP english who got too excited to read old dusty poems:

The words that pop up in Aventurine's Penacony maze are not just random words, they are stanzas from T.S Eliot's "The Waste Land." It's a poem which famously depicts a sterile, dying world, haunted by characters who long for an end, whether through death, apocalyptic fire, or drowning. The poem fixates on the idea that modern existence is a kind of half-death, a walking corpse state. Eliot’s poem is deliberately fragmented, chaotic, and bleak—just like Aventurine’s worldview, where life is reduced to random chance and unjust destiny. There's also some achievements in-game that are from this poem as well:

I mean...getting an achievement called "She Replied, I Want to Die" after you defeat Aventurine + right before Acheron slices him is pretttyyy on the nose lol but I'm including it anyway

There's also an achievement during Aventurine and Ratio's side quest called Waiting for Godot—

—named after a very famous play by Samuel Beckett that tells of two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly for a figure named Godot, who never arrives. While waiting, they pass the time with repetitive conversations, absurd actions, and reflections on suffering. Godot, of course, represents salvation, purpose, or death— anything that would “end” their endless uncertainty. The characters talk about hanging themselves to escape their misery, but can’t bring themselves to act. Each day repeats; nothing changes. The suffering continues, and Godot never comes.

This ties in absolutely perfectly into not only the Penacony quest, but Aventurine's character as a whole. Much like Vladimir and Estragon long for release yet remain trapped in absurd repetition, Aventurine waits for death while remaining trapped in a role he cant get out of. He sits in his 'unjust destiny', searching for a release in his gambles and reckless self-endangerment, waiting for a "Godot" who may never come.

In Conclusion:

In the end, Aventurine is not merely a reckless and dramatic man— he is someone whose thoughts, fears, and obsessions with death shape every move he makes. Aventurine has always been suicidal, from the second his character was introduced. From his constant mental rehearsals of mortality to his deliberate gambles in Penacony, his life is a careful negotiation with the inevitable, a test of whether the void will claim him or spare him once again. His ideology is that destiny is inherently unjust, that survival is dictated by chance rather than fairness. He flaunts risk and confidence to hide the truth: that he is a man drowning in envy, sadness, and a deep rooted obsession with ending his own suffering.

Aventurine’s story reminds us that suicidal ideation is not always loud or dramatic (despite his own flashy appearance). It often lives quietly in thoughts, plans, and the relentless weighing of life against the pull of death. To watch him navigate Penacony is to witness the tension between the desire to vanish and the will to persist, and ultimately, to see how even the most self-destructive minds can be pulled back from the edge by understanding, care, and the quiet insistence that life, however unfair, is worth living.

This Suicide Awareness Week, we can take these lessons to heart: noticing the quiet signs of struggle, validating someone’s pain even when it’s not visible, and offering care without judgment can make the difference between isolation and hope. Just as Aventurine needed someone to recognize the depth of his suffering, the people around us can help anchor those silently battling their own darkness.