#mys mes

Rika and V's relationship is built by two broken people finding their wholes with each other. As such, the obsession is born from a self-satisfying need to feel complete. This is illustrated almost entirely in V's route, but the ending of Seven's after ending (or the secret endings) fill the last piece of the puzzle.

For V, you see throughout his route that he is inherently an artist, and an artist creates art. While this wasn't a priority as a kid, he grew to crave a masterpiece just as his mother predicted he would. He has an 'artist's soul disgused with his father and teacher's lessons'. He found his art within Rika. Not just a muse, but the ability to create art itself (or what he thought at the time was true art). She wasn't simply his partner, a person, a human, but the masterpiece that would make him whole. He was obsessed with her, therefore, that obsession manifested clearly into that unbridled devotion you see in other routes (and, for a good portion of it, his own). That is not to say V is faultless. He makes bad choices and places all of the responsibility and blame on himself. He allowed Saeran to go with and be alone with Rika, knowing her mental instability. He lies often in his own stubborn outlook.

Not that his outlook is necessarily wrong, but boy is his way of going about it fucking buckwild.

V believes that he can be all Rika needs--and that theres no purpose for her grandiose plan. While there is nuance to this, V truly is the epicenter of Rika's world. To Rika, her entire set of actions is a continuous attempt to prove her delusions and intrusive thoughts wrong. In V's route, there are many flashback segments in which Rika breaks down--She claims V isnt real. She claims there's no way he could love her as he does. She doubts him and despises herself in a way that she deems utterly unlovable because that is what the world has shown her.

And V reassures her not by encouraging her to seek help, but telling her that irregardless of what she does: he will love her.

Abuse him? Hurt him? Do bad things? Torture people? Drug people?

All of it, she tests. And he does. True to his word, outside of his own route, he does. Not that it's anywhere near healthy, but hey, theres that.

V's devotion is Rika's living proof that she has finally found someone in the world that is capable of loving her. That is what makes her whole. It is knowing V is out there, going blind, and, still, he wants to be with her.

That's what makes her breakdown so poignant in his route. When he reveals that he was just as brokenly obsessed with her as she was with him, she spirals back into the way of thinking that she was struggling with during their relationship years ago.

The wavering devotion caused by MC makes her believe that V never did love her. That she truly is unlovable. It's a horrifying thought, that she will never be whole.

It might've been love, at one point. V says later in the route that it wasn't at all--that their entire relationship was obsession, but I'd claim contrary. The love was there, twisted, and marred by obsession until it was the only thing that remained.

This is so horrifically illustrated in Seven's secret ending when V is killed by Saeran and Rika suffers intense psychological damage, yet, in the end, this is her expression when looking upon V's memorial:

The most beautiful CG in the game, in my opinion.

It's an expression of pure, untainted, geniune happiness. To Rika, V's death is undeniable proof of his love, his words, and that it was all real.