so when i read people's meta about ivan, i tend to see the two ideas/sentiments commonly expressed:
ivan believes that it is impossible for him to be loved (whether by till specifically or in general).
ivan believes that he is unworthy of being loved (whether by till specifically or in general).
and from what i've seen, in the meta about him, these two ideas are often used interchangeably.
but to me these aren't the same idea at all? these are two different ideas? and one can't just freely swap out one for another without changing the meaning of the rest of their analysis?
let’s move away from ivan and speak more generally for a bit.
“it is impossible for me to be loved" is a simple statement about reality. you can conclude that it is impossible for you to be loved for any number of reasons. maybe you feel alienated from society, maybe you feel you lack the essential human quality that is necessary for you to be loved by others, maybe you have simply come to this conclusion from the observed truth that you in fact are not loved and have never been loved. however, regardless of the reason, the end result is a statement that seeks to objectively describe the current state of the world.
similarly, you can also come to the conclusion that "i am not worthy of being loved" for a wide variety of reasons. however, unlike the former statement and regardless of its origins, the statement "i am not worthy of being loved" also contains within it an aspect of morality. unlike the is-statement that is "it is impossible for me to be loved," the word "worthy" inside this latter statement transforms it into a should-statement: it describes the world as it ought to be, in a sense that can almost be called ethical.
the difference becomes clear when one considers how, under each belief, you might respond to the irrefutable fact that, despite your belief, you still wish to be loved. if you only believe that "it is impossible for me to be loved," then there really isn't anything wrong with wishing to be loved anyways, aside from the fact that such a wish is deeply stupid. no moral violation is committed, and nothing is repulsive about such a desire. wishing to be loved is no different from wishing for gravity to reverse or for the sun to rise in the west - foolish and laughable, a massive waste of time, but ultimately harmless.
if, however, the belief you live under is instead "i am not worthy of be loved," then wishing to be loved anyways becomes vile.
you know you do not deserve to be loved because you were unable to become a human being. you know you do not deserve to be loved because your love is not loving, because you love and resent and hold in contempt all in the same breath, because you are incapable of making another person happy. if you were loved, you would not magically start to care about the suffering of others; if you were loved, you would happily continue to cause your lover pain, so long as doing so satisfied your own desires. you are incapable of agape. you would rather your lover wail in grief over your death for all of eternity than move on from you - and, for that, you do not deserve anything.
you know you do not deserve to be loved, yet you shamelessly wish for it anyways. you know that you have no right to be loved, yet you repulsively desire it anyways. and the fact that your hands keep reaching for that which you have no right to ever touch of is only further proof that there is a fundamental rot at the core of your being. it only proves that you lack the basic humanity and decency held by every real person, that your half-developed soul freely profanes against all that is shining and kind and good - it is only further evidence that you are malformed, because a proper human being would know better. someone who does not deserve to be loved and so dutifully does not wish to be loved is respectable. someone who does not deserve to be loved yet selfishly wishes to be loved anyways is disgusting.
tell me, how would you feel if you saw an extracted tapeworm bleating "love me! love me!" as it writhed and died on the bathroom floor?
anyways, all of the above is my reasoning about the statements "X believes that it is impossible for them to be loved" and "X believes that they do not deserve to be loved" in the abstract. as in, if someone told me there existed a character who hated himself and believed in one or more of those two statements, the above is how i would most immediately expect the character to feel about himself. there are doubtlessly other ways to interpret the beliefs a character who believes that “it is impossible for me to be loved” and/or “i am unworthy of being loved” might hold about himself - these are just the most immediately obvious interpretations for me, from the bias of my own personal perspectives (eg. tropes encountered and other media consumed).
the above has nothing to do with ivan in particular. i don't actually think that ivan is a tapeworm. to me, ivan comes across as a fairly ordinary human being.
