Ukarimo

Oh, boy, have I got Herman analysis.

I want to be really clear up front that I have two caveats to any Herman analysis that I could do that readers must keep in mind. The first is my strong bias here—I don’t care for Herman as a character as he presented in both Luca and Alva’s narratives. The second is that with that, I exclusively ship Halva as a thing that happened in the past. I do not have thoughts or feelings on Halva as an evolving ship or thing I actively enjoy; all my halva thoughts are part of my Alva character analyses and color the way Alva thinks about his current story relationships (which for me usually means alvaluca, platonically or romantically).

That said, the most important thing in my read of Herman is that he was a very selfish man. The kind of selfish where you are incredibly self-involved, and have no idea that you are. He didn’t think he was a bad person, he wasn’t trying to be cruel or malicious, and he genuinely thought his work was going to change the world and that’s why he sacrificed everything to it. But it cost him every relationship he had, all his money and time, and eventually his life.

Herman, I think in his own perspective, always thought he was doing good, or at least doing what was expected, but didn’t concern himself with the people around him or how they were feeling about his actions. You can see that in Alva’s story, about how he doesn’t bother to tell Alva about his family, or where the money for their research is coming from, or about his more dangerous experiments. He valued Alva as a research companion, and calls him the only one who understands him, but doesn’t let him in—largely, I think, because he never thought to. I think it never occurred to Herman to let Alva further into his life, because he was so focused on his own work and desires to pay attention to Alva’s.

And we see this more with Luca, from how Herman treated his son and his wife. From everything we have, Herman was a neglectful father—he doesn’t seem to be around, and her certainly doesn’t seem to be providing for his family. Neglect is a form of abuse, and Luca’s story and reactions to his father in both the main narrative and events make a lot of sense looking at him through the lens of abuse survivor. And here too, I don’t think Herman ever intended to abuse his son, because he didn’t consider himself a bad person. But he didn’t care about his son or his wife and their lives as much as he cared about his desires and his work. He wasn’t around to care about them, and didn’t think of how spending all of their family’s money would affect them, because they were always secondary considerations.