garroth ro'meave will suffer

not to freaking mention:

"W-wait, what about Aaron?!" "Laurance I can't lose him [Aaron]!!" what in the SHITE do you MEAN?!?!?! YOU DONT EVEN KNOW THIS MAN?? YOUVE LEARNED BITS AND PIECES AND YOU KNOW HE LITERALLY DOESNT GAFREAK ABOUT YOU?!?! WHAT DO YOU MEAN "i cant lose him" LIKE????????????????? WHAT??????? WHAT IN THE HUH???

you CANT lose.. Aaron? as in Aaron the grown ass man who is only tagging along because he cant kill Zane right now.

as in Aaron the guy who only defended Phoenix Drop because of Nekoette, not Aphmau.

as in Aaron the dude who revealed his "handsome lucious face" to you so you would SHUT UP and STOP asking him personal questions he didnt want to answer.

as in Aaron the man who ABANDONED METELI AND YOU AND ALL OF THE VILLAGERS THERE AND FLED TO PHOENIX DROP, NOT FOR YOU, OR FOR ANY OF THE VILLAGERS, BUT FOR NEKOETTE and MAYBE the other kids.

as in Aaron the guy who split off from your group to mourn his ruined village, mourn his mistakes, and who OPENLY STATED THAT ONCE ZANE WAS GONE, AARON WOULD BE CONTENT WITH NOT LIVING ANY LONGER. and he LITERALLY FREAKING DIES ONCE HE "defeats" ZANE LATER.

HIS WHOLE GOAL WAS KILLING ZANE, ITS ALL HE CARES ABOUT. HE. DOES NOT. GIVE. A SINGLE. SHIT. ABOUT. YOU. APHMAU.

i am thoroughly frustrated by this. so deeply thoroughly frustrated.

side note: i've seen people in the comments/reblogs say aphmau's care for aaron might come from their link to irene and shad, and i do understand where they're coming from with that, but i don't think that's the case. maybe there was some pull there, but as a disliker of soulmates and anything that says the characters have to "follow fate", i'm going to disregard that theory

argument one: aphmau caring about aaron is just who she is. she's always grown easily attached to people (look how quickly she grew attached to levin and malachi! and zenix who we don't see her spend much time with all things considered), it's just who she is! aph is a very caring character, largely empathetic and a people's person. that's why she works so well as a lord.

argument two: in season two, you have to take their environment and the trauma they've just faced into account. aphmau is slowly adapting to this new world she's been thrown into, trying to grapple with the fact she's missed out on *fifteen years* (of her children's lives specifically). any link she has to the past -- to the time before everything changed, however small -- she's going to cling on to. katelyn is barely their ally for much longer than aaron is *and* had more of an antagonistic presense than aaron when she's introduced, and aphmau quickly befriends her and becomes attached. vylad is another link to her past that she grows easily attached to even though she saw him *once*. aaron is another one of these links, however small of an impact he had on her. she uses that group as an anchor (especially laurance, while he does the same with her) while she tries to wrap her head around everything. so aph saying she can't lose aaron is the same, in her mind, as saying she can't lose katelyn or, arguably, laurance. she needs them.

added onto that, she's just lost garroth. for most of season one he's the closest person she has, her protector and her confidant and her rock when things are tough. she had to leave him behind, she *lost him*. as well, laurance slowly pulls away from her throughout the season, so she's slowly losing another sense of stability. there's a hole in her heart she needs to fill with other people to make up for those losses. she adds katelyn and travis and vylad and chad and celestia and whoever else she collects along the way to that hole, and aaron gets thrown in too.

he's supportive in his own closed-off way. learning about him gives her a sense of control about her life she's been missing since Before the end of season one, and aaron gives her more of that control by reminding her of what it means to be lord. he's another rock she doesn't want to lose, and i think his lack of care for himself makes her more worried for his safety.

argument three: a lot of aarmau's progress happens off screen. this is why i think it confused me a lot as a kid because it's hard to read between the lines of a mature relationship the way jess wanted us to. we're shown bits and bats of it, but the majority of it is off-screen. just as an example, it reminds me of lilith's manipulation of garroth: we see a few scenes of the two of them talking, or ways that she shows garroth what aphmau is doing "behind his back", but there's no scene where she actively says all the things garroth comes to say later on. as an audience we're the ones that have to fill in the blanks of how he came to believe those things and why he fell for zane's lies.

this isn't always the best way of storytelling since it's difficult to know what you need to show about any given story without revealing too much, but will giving the audience enough substance to form their own understanding. whether or not you believe jess handled this well, this is what she was trying to do with aarmau:

"prior to this, i was building up, subtly -- very subtly -- aphmau and aaron's relationship. laurance and garroth had more screentime in terms of-- and this is where i feel like as a writer and as a producer, i made a mistake. because i did not show romantic interest from aaron to aphmau in a way that was more romanticised. i showed a more mature kind of relationship ... if you remember back when we had the isabelle arc, aaron was buying aphmau clothes and things like that; small little gestures from time to time where it was supposed to be implied, and this is more a, kind of, behind-the-scenes ... relationship kinda forming." "one of the things aaron knew (because as you guys know, aaron was a lord) ... is that he understood the pressure aphmau was going under as a lord. he had a lot in common with her in terms of having guards, having the responsibility of everyone in the village ... on your shoulders ...he understood what aphmau was going through and knew that he should not try to put any pressure on her. and i don't think many people, in this world of diaries, understood that, unless you were a lord." "at the time, i was super set on eventually aphmau and aaron having a relationship, and i wanted it to be a ... kind of lustful ... relationship that had a mature understanding ... like, 'hey, we're lords, and we have to kind of keep this between us'."