#but i do like to think that codependent coworkers kind of covers it lmao

[immobiliter]

there's so much to say about this conversation between furina & neuvillette in 4.2 and i think a lot of people try to use this line in particular to push them as a ship ( which is fine, you do you ), but personally? not how i feel about them at all and i want to take this in another direction for a minute. i don't think furina is implying anything about neuvillette here ( whether it's as a deflection or not ) and is in fact kinda insinuating the exact opposite lmao, but more on that in a moment. imo, she's not necessarily talking about "watching" her in a lurid or sexually charged way, she is talking about the act of being looked at. over five hundred years of pseudo-godhood, furina has literally made herself to be looked at — there are certainly sexual implications you could take from this more generally, especially with the marilyn monroe influences in her character, although i won't really be talking about this here, i feel like that is a topic all of its own — by others. she is the leading lady of fontaine, she must be centre stage, she must draw the audience's gaze and she must keep up the facade. i think, when this line is paired with this one from her SQ, too, it makes more sense in context~

in turning herself into something ( i say something instead of someone, because she doesn't really have a personhood and that is her greatest problem going forward following the AQ ) to be gazed at and marvelled at, she has also turned that gaze into her ultimate fear. she knows that people must look in order to believe in her apparent divinity but, as i've talked about before, furina is acutely aware of how fragile that facade still is and is obsessed with controlling how others perceive her, even all these centuries later, especially in the wake of the impending prophecy that she seemingly cannot stop. she cannot get close to people, she cannot allow people in, she cannot develop any meaningful relationships out of fear that the role of the divine starlet on high will shatter. as she says~

plenty is made in her character stories of how difficult she is to work with in a professional capacity as an actress over the years lmao, but there is one exception to this: neuvillette. she has had no choice but to work with him for four hundred years and, while i don't doubt that she is still a complete nuisance to work with at times ( thank you for your service, neuvillette ), the two of them still made it work. there's no way that furina could have worked alongside neuvillette for that long and not given him a glimpse behind the curtain — as he points out in the line before hers in the AQ, he knows that she has never been as superficial as she claims to be. but the point that i think furina is getting at here is that neuvillette has never weaponised that knowledge of her character against her like he does here. neuvillette knows her better than anyone ever could, he never needed to look or marvel at her from a safe distance as regular fontainians did, he would express a certain amount of impatience and tut at her i'm sure but — and this is the important thing — would still quietly fall back into their routine of running fontaine together. i think furina found a great deal of comfort in that relationship, as close to an equal partnership as she was capable of having. convincing him that she was focalors was a very different task to convincing fontaine that she was focalors ( given that he is the hydro sovereign ), and yet he had never verbally expressed any doubt to her until this moment — which is also why i think she becomes so defensive to him afterwards.

and as a small sidenote, i also just find it oddly poetic that the one character who was never that preoccupied with looking at her over all those years as everyone else was, is the one most glad to see furina's return to the stage in her SQ ( where, as we know, she receives her vision ).