There's this post going around about unrequited love rarely being from the POV of the character that's doing the rejecting (https://www.tumblr.com/meteortrails/784682771725647872) and the weird pain that comes from feeling like the way you love someone not being enough or the distance that IS gonna happen because of it, even temporarily, and every time it floats by me I'm like, "this is why Princeliest's fics make me froth at the mouth."
Cuz it's such a unique pain and isolation! The one doing the rejecting often is "the bad guy" of the story, or even if they aren't, they may feel like they're the bad guy. And it's an awkward position to be in cuz the rejected is universally acknowledged as the hurt party and will get all sorts of comfort and condolences, but being the rejecter often just gets an "oof that's awkward." Even when the person you rejected was a very close friend, not just a stranger or acquaintance. It's a very odd position to be in that often deserves its own comfort and condolences, but usually doesn't get it.
So you get like one william bonus points in my book for how often you give me "holy shit two cakes!" stories about it XD
Love that post, have definitely experienced that mood on multiple occasions.
Absolutely delighted that said mood is coming through in my writing!
In my personal life, I've experienced this scenario many times and furthermore have had two different people that I thought were my platonic friends straight up deceive me into going on dates with them. So I do enjoy more freely exploring this anxiety that hangs over my head whenever I am really platonically close to someone and am stressing out that they think I have Intentions, or that they themselves will develop Intentions, and how that's just going to totally fuck up this friendship thing we had going on. It feels like a sword of Damocles that hangs over my head sometimes, though thankfully I haven't felt that way in a while.
Anyway, those are some of the personal experiences that absolutely feed into this aspect of my portrayal of radiostatic. Because you are super right! In media we usually are cued to give sympathy to the person who is rejected, especially if they haven't actually done anything wrong like harass the other party. So when popular media gives me "getting friendzoned," I give back "getting fuckzoned, actually", haha.
It's also why I like to explore this one-sidedness in their relationship without actually destroying the relationship, and like to portray their original mysterious canon breakup as at least partly fueled by this incompatibility of feelings. When I first wrote 666 specifically, a lot of people expressed being genuinely sad for Vox because Alastor would never love him romantically (read: "genuinely"), and I tried really hard to show that what Alastor felt wasn't inferior and that I consider 666 to have a happy endgame. In that respect it is very much a wish-fulfillment fantasy!
Anyway, thank you! >:D <3
