despite rgadd clearly not wanting half man to be a straightforward victim narrative thats kind of how the story ended up reading to me anyway. which is not a bad thing imo its just interesting. like throughout the show he clearly wanted to create this looming sense that niall mustve done something truly heinous to deserve ruben coming for him like revenge personified (the ominous "he knows what he wants and he takes it" before we find out what it is he took etc) but even with the full picture revealed i feel like nothing niall did ever came within light years of the kind of physical, verbal, and sexual violence ruben inflicted on the people around him, niall most of all. the fact that niall stole and lied and was addicted to drugs and sex and said yes to fatherhood for all the wrong reasons and acted like a selfish dick and kept returning to ruben despite everything and kept loving him and hating him and wanting to hurt him back – to me none of that really changed the fact that he was ultimately just a guy who fell in love with a controlling man when he was very young and was raped and murdered for it like so many women have before him. niall being a flawed person with the capacity to hurt people made him a more interesting protagonist but it did nothing to negate his status as ruben's victim in my mind

Everyone talking about how Ruben is going to lie down next to or on top of Niall's body as he waits for his own death or kills himself and them being found in each other's embrace and so on, but i think it's actually really significant that at least onscreen he doesn't do anything like that. When he realizes Niall is dead he moves away from him. He goes to where he can sit up and look down on his body. It's like even after Niall's death they cannot meet at the same level and Ruben needs to maintain a position of power. And the full meaning of their bond can't be expressed even then. If there was an embrace there would be some sort of catharsis and there can't be catharsis. By killing Niall and taking away his voice Ruben destroyed any possibility of either of them ever achieving it. There is nothing left. Only eternal silence devoid of any meaning