thru my beilschmidt angst delirium ive been going thru this week ive been thinking about ludwig as a guy who is way more self-destructive than other-destructive when he's in a bad state of mind, mostly in the post-war era and onward, especially regarding gilbert's health decline and eventual death.
ive said it before im a broken record but i'm a proponent of german collective guilt manifesting extremely intensely in ludwig and that kind of leads to him kind of having a thing like a lot of interpretations of matthew do, a state where he keeps his suffering quiet and to himself to not inconvenience others. for him it's more because he wants to be a good example and a good boy and a good country. he wants to be better than his forefathers were and better than he used to be so he holds his outward image up higher than his personal wellbeing. which is not a good thing when gilbert's health gets really bad.
so i think lud is a drink yourself to sleep ponder driving your car off of a cliff and self harm at night in your bathroom type of guy. i know canon is kind of built off of the joke of ludwig being angry and yelling at people, but i really think that's more of a shallow thing, and mostly other people projecting onto him when he's just. autistic. and very german. i think he's really polite, timid, and anxious.
ludwig is such a cerebral character to me! gilbert is too, but there's layers more to ludwig that make him so strange and complicated. out of everyone taking gilbert's death badly he takes it the worst.
surprise, it's sufjan stevens again! The Only Thing sums up this vibe pretty good.
(and gilbert kind of does the same thing - maybe where ludwig learned this from - of hiding his suffering from others, but it's borne from a classical place of hiding weakness to look better to others, to look strong and invulnerable, not to be what you think is considerate. gilbert is loathe to cry in front of anybody, including himself. he's the punch a hole in the wall or in the mirror then go on like normal type. he weeps for his own death and panics about it but where nobody's around to pity him cause he hates pity.)
