Essentially: “Why would you want a girl... when you could have me?”
This make me happy, but it also kinda skeeves me out a little, because my interpretation of The Todd Situation™ has always been that the only reason David was fixated on Todd initially was because he was the last boy of Prentisstown, and him becoming a man and joining his army was a Big Symbolic Deal to him. It was only later, over the course of TAatA as he got to know Todd as a person, that he developed genuine feelings for him.
In this case, there enters the question of just how long he’s been obsessed with Todd--we don’t see it develop, it’s just there at the start. Which makes me worry that they’re trying to play him off as some creepy sexual predator, nothing more to it, which is way different from how Book David’s Todd-based emotions are portrayed. And while he’s obviously using the “I love you”s as manipulation here, in the previous scene I posted, it’s clear that he’s trying to hide them, which suggests that these are his true feelings... he just happens to be multitasking with them.
Also, check out Kaufman understanding that David’s Whole DEAL™ with women stems from the Noise/Silence issue, that he’s come to mistrust anyone without Noise (it seems he only let--and I assume “let” is the correct word--his boyfriends silence their Noise once he learned to use Noise attacks/mind control), and that it’s not plain old Original Flavor Misogyny™ like people always assume and is so en vogue in popular media these days (thanks, whoever decided that there needed to be a Handmaid’s Tale TV show). Like, he used some basic understanding of motherfucking nuance and it’s SUPER EFFECTIVE!
