#loveberg

my fave d1 haters <3

I've been a Heiffel truther since I first listened to w359 (the stripping scene really sold me on it too) but I've only started to get into Loveberg in the last couple days, so I haven't had the time to consider parallels between them yet

the tldr is that i think the personality similarities between Lovelace and Eiffel make for an interesting experience for Hilbert. Lovelace dies on the old mission and oh sad but it had to happen but then he meets his next crew and Eiffel reminds him just enough about Lovelace to make him squirm.

HOWEVER. I never get prompted to talk about my loveberg agenda or my loveberg to heiffel pipeline so im going to use this as an opportunity to go insane for a few paragraphs. Ok? Ok.

so maybe parallels isnt the best wording for it bc like . It is definitely kind of about the dynamic parallels i think they base-level play out very similarly due to Lovelace and Eiffel being similar in the ways they are. But also i think it’s just about. The coexistence of both relationships in the same timeline. The way they could bleed into each other.

so like. The personality parallels between Lovelace and Eiffel are pretty obvious in the beginning, right? When Eiffel and Minkowski first find her voice recordings and she sounds exactly like someone Eiffel would get along with and exactly like someone Minkowski would despise working with. You see that when Lovelace shows up, too, but she’s also an authority figure and also at the moment going through sooo much fucking trauma right now that it kind of puts a damper on that part of her personality, i feel. She’s a little busy surviving rn.

that is to say, i feel like a pre-canon Captain Lovelace would have been the most like Eiffel, personality wise. Which i think is important.

I enjoy Hilbert’s relationships with characters without any romance behind them. I think they stand really well as their own strange, convoluted narratives. However, when I am applying a lense of potential romance, a lot of the appeal to me comes from Hilbert fighting a losing battle against himself and the decades he’s spent devaluing human life. The way he talks about his relationship with the things he’s done and the people he hurts fascinates me. How conscious he is that he’s hurt people. Something something ‘Do not think this was easy for me. None of it was easy. None of it was nice.’ Some sort of implication that he still feels, he just doesn’t acknowledge it. There’s no space for that. Log it, move on, don’t dwell on it.

With Lovelace, I think it was just accidental. I think he doesn’t realize that he cares about her, values her, until it’s too late and he’s tripped and fell and gotten himself into a weird situationship with his commanding officer. The difference in their first meeting as shown in the final episode vs their relationship shown in Change of Mind is just so… ugh. He’s a part of her routine. He meets her at her room when she wakes up to update her when he was actively avoiding interacting with her during their first meetings. Something happened there. They fall into a routine, a dynamic, he respects her, she goes to him for advice, or to rant about her idiot subordinates. I’m just ranting about why i like them in this era atp ANYWAYS.

The point is. He stumbles into accidentally giving a fuck but then, obviously, everything that happens, happens. He respects her but only enough to think she’d be smart enough to see his perspective, never enough to change his mind on his life’s work.

and then the Alexander Hilbert grieving processes (and lack thereof) commences. He acknowledges that the loss of Isabel Lovelace is objectively unfortunate but that’s as far as it goes, as far as it’s ever gone for anyone since he was a child.

and then he meets his next crew, on the same ship he had just been on for years, and there’s Eiffel. And he’s… not Lovelace, obviously. He’s not even got a modicum of the competence she did, even if they’re both equally as obnoxious. But I still think there’s a level of that parallel between the two of them that kind of haunts him.

And it’s like, whatever, it doesn’t matter, he’s a better man than this. He’s killed before, experimented before, and he’s going to do it again. But what are the consequences of never grieving? What happens when you accidentally have some semblance of feelings for your old captain and then she dies and you just kind of go okay. And then try your best to move onto the next task.

i think it leaves him vulnerable to just having it happen all over again is what I’m saying. I think he has to monitor Eiffel and constantly keep an eye on him to observe the decima project in action and despite everything he’s doing to distance himself from this team (everything about his whole act in season 1. You know. The playing the mad scientist bit up to eleven.) he develops some kind of infatuation for Eiffel. Study your lab rat for too long you accidentally become bisexual. Whatever.