#executor (arknights)

I genuinely believe Federico is like 90% of the reason why the central themes of emotion, humanity vs seaborn, and human connection actually work, because it would be so easy to completely ruin the message by making it a vehicle for typical "love is what makes us humans" "if you don't feel love and emotion exactly like everyone else does you're not an ACTUAL human with a SOUL!" nonsense, like to the point I'm also anxious I might end up sounding like that every time I try analyzing the seaborn conflict in any way, but thanks to Fede being written the way he is while having such a central role in Zwillingsturme and being so close with and important to Arturia we know that when she says "it has to include everyone" and when the game falls on praising human qualities and the power of human connection they don't mean "everyone who can feel normal human emotion :)" "everyone but they're gonna need to become human" but simply everyone, no one left behind, no one erased. The focus on destroying the barriers between people exists as an answer to oppression and discrimination, to bring humanity together so they can work as a whole to face adversity, not because not feeling empathy the same way Arturia does is "wrong". Even during the piano scene when Fede is shown as unable to understand why music, why art move people the way it does, despite it being a focal point of everything about Arturia and everything about the humans who stand against the Seaborn, it's never presented as a failing on his part, never presented as him being fundamentally incompatible with humanity - in fact that scene is where he learns how to approach emotion from his own angle in his own way as a form of data and it's when he grows as a person and becomes able to use it to better get Arturia despite his difficulty in conveying and "feeling" emotion. He doesn't get Sankta empathy, he values logical understanding over emotional connection, he's joked about from other characters as being more like a robot than a human, he's deliberately written as being an opposite to Arturia's unrestrained empathy, and yet he is the protagonist to Arturia's antagonist role, he is the one who understood her the most and who could support her in the finale, he's the one outsider who cared the most about fixing things in the Monastery while the "proper" Sankta were all busy dealing with their own problems or actively worsening things (hi Oren). His character arc doesn't have anything to do with him starting to "get" emotions like "real people" do but just about starting to ask questions, to find a way forward when his strict adherence to logical reasoning fails him, to interpret why he does what he does and feel the way he does, to understand why things happens and why people act certain ways, and in quite a few scenes that's precisely why he could reach a conclusion others couldn't.