idk if you've written any head cannons about this before but i'm curious what your thoughts are on arcades previous relationships
I think this is a very interesting question because we can even know if he had previous relationships? I don't know if you want platonic or romantic, so I will answer vague enough to fit both.
Arcade is a man that wants to be reserved and self-assured. When he first vaguely tells you about his past you can 100% tell he is very mournful of something and I really think its partly him not knowing his place in the world and being incredibly lonely. One of the ways you can recruit him is literally just by being gay and showing interest. That's not someone who is used to having deep, long lasting relationships of any kind. He never mentions friends his age growing up or otherwise and he is honest (once he opens up) about how he is considred too young to be taken seriously by the older remanents when enlisting their help (Imagine like trying to be friends with your much older aunts and uncles who like wiped your ass).
He is desperately trying to find a place and I feel like that applies to being among people as well, I mean he does hide himself in a tent with the followers. When I think of his past relationships I think of fleeting hook-ups or abrupt endings with him often being the one to do the skedaddling or walk of shame to wherever he was residing at the time. I say shame becasue I know he'd want to stay and get close but he's just too scared. It's understandable when 75% of the factions would want you dead due to your family lineage... even if you had no part of their actions. He has so much baggage and hang-ups I don't think he thinks it'd be worth it to unpack that with a friend or lover.
But since your asking what I personally think his fleeting, wasteland relationships were like here's my thoughts:
Most of his relationships (friendships and otherwise) started occurring later in his like, likely his early to mid-twenties. He had seen Enclave remnants be hunted and those who survived did so by staying alone...
His first friend was a wasteland girl who liked how well-read he was. It wasn't so much a traditional friendship but like two people who frequent the same places a lot. He provided the closest thing she was getting to an education and she provided pleasant conversation.
They barely knew anything deeper than each other's names or the topics they discussed but Arcade had never had a non-enclave friend before so it meant everything to him.
She was inspired to get a formal education and do something with her life and thanked Arcade before leaving to go do that. Arcade liked the feeling of helping and sought out ways to do that.
His first kiss is actually how he got into the followers in my head. It was the first chance he took to form a relationship outside the remnants and he wanted to follow him (him as in his lover). He wanted to join a diplomatic Follower group in the NCR and Arcade was terrified of being that close.
Following the last point it was a big blowout fight because Arcade refused to explain why he didn't beyond "Aren't we fine here?" and received a very harsh reading about his inability to open up.
His first actual boyfriend was a king gang member that liked to brag about how he was dating the smartest follower on this side of the wasteland. Arcade felt bad cause he knew he was only dating the guy cause he was crushing on The King at the time and the guy made him feel good with all the praise.
He broke it off under the guise that his work made him feel like he was being neglectful to their relationship and due to the kings' strong sense of duty/principles he understood
Gave Arcade his fav hair comb as a token of no hard feelings and Arcade felt extra bad cause it was like the one real and safe feeling relationship he had and he hated it was built on lies and half-truths.
Hence why he only tells the Courier half-truths, both is too much
After that he made a rule to only have FWBs and casual friends.
This worked as well as you think it did for a man like Arcade.
Most of the people he "dated" (weird coy flirting until he shut them out when they asked something deeper) were all people who wanted to go somewhere with him. He has a deep desire to live, experience and find himself but never has the courage to commit
This explains why you can so easily recruit him with flirting and promising to whisk him away into adventure. (Daddy issues much?)
All his "friends" were either the socially weird Followers who never asked much or people who were passing through and wouldn't question the random guy they hung out with for a bit knows too much about energy weapons or power armor or that old defunct faction that almost killed everyone with evil water... twice.
Silly Headcanons is he loves to rag and joke and is a little shit. He has a chip on his shoulder about how smart he is but he's never a direct jerk about
Not a touchy friend but he clings and hovers around partners and people he has a romantic interest in. Hand brushes, pats, standing close, and wanting to be very involved. Sad but he really wants a connection and even a small sign is enough to make him lose his sensibilities.
He hates it but he knows he's touch and emotionally starved so sometimes he allows himself to get a little lost in the love sauce.
Prefers friends and partners that are a little dumber than him. This has nothing to do with anything, dude is just attracted to idiots platonically or romantically.
This post is long just because I need to explain just how I think these characters think. Arcade is a guy who wants to be gay and own a garden and drink a glass of non-irrated wine with his friends while snarking to his partner. But he's also affliated with violent war crimminals and genocidal factins and settles for just trying to give that life to someone else.
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Something else that makes me sympathetic to Pharma's situation is like. Idk if there's an actual term for this or if someone smarter and more academic wrote it about some real life context that actually matters.
But, so we've already established among Pharma stans that the circumstances at Delphi were blackmail/torture with no real way out that wouldn't involve Pharma being responsible for people getting killed (either killing patients for the deal or having everyone die bc he failed his end of the deal).
And I feel like while "he's still in the wrong because he killed people" is part of it, another sort of implicit part is the idea that Pharma should've been willing to take more personal risk, maybe even risk dying? I mean, Ratchet does ask "why didn't you just detonate it near the DJD" (to which Pharma responds that he did try to get Sonic and Boom to do it, but they refused) so like
Idk I feel like we do have this social notion of martyrs as a very romantic ideal, people you can praise for being so brave and strong and righteous that they ended their own lives for their cause, while you can also coo about how sad and tragic it is that dying is what it took for them to do the right thing. But at the same time I feel like in reality, having an expectation that people become martyrs is kind of a toxic social norm bc like. It's very easy to demand that others sacrifice their lives for some Ultimate Moral Good when you yourself aren't experiencing the same hardships as they are. And ultimately it is kind of fucked up to tell someone "the moral thing you should've done was risk your life/kill yourself" because asking someone to pay their life to do the right thing is no small request. And sure, the typical response would be to call them a "coward" for caring more about saving their own skin instead of doing the right thing... but again, death is a really scary thing and self-preservation is a really strong instinct, so it kind of feels like having this binary view of "you're either a Brave Hero who sacrifices your life for everyone else or a Dirty Coward who's too scared of dying to do what's right" is kind of fucked up?
I guess the best way to describe it is that if someone willingly gives up their life as a sacrifice to others, it can be a noble thing because it's a choice they made willingly, but if it becomes a Moral Standard that in order to be a Good Person you have to be unafraid of throwing your life away and if you aren't willing to die you're a Cowardly Bad Person, that's when it becomes toxic.
Idk, I guess how this ties back to Pharma is that he was never in a position where he expected to make these kinds of moral decisions/ultimatums. He's a doctor who doesn't even get into combat, his job is to heal and not to kill, he's behind the front lines in a hospital that's supposed to be a safe, neutral place for him to heal people. So in the face of suddenly having a "murder people on behalf of me, or I murder everyone you swore to protect" ultimatum thrust upon him, I understand why Pharma wasn't """"""""""brave enough"""""""""" to "do the right thing" (whatever that would've been in the case of Delphi). You could argue that maybe a frontliner soldier accepted the burden of possibly dying for their cause and they've become used to it as someone who lives that reality every single day, but I feel like for Pharma, who's a doctor and a protected non-combatant (from what we can tell), that sort of risking of his life/living with the fact his life could be snuffed out any day isn't something he would've been prepared for at all.
And for me personally, from an outsider's perspective, it strikes me as kind of unethical to go "oh well he should've just detonated the bomb himself even if it killed him" bc again, there's a difference between witnessing a moral conundrum as a bystander versus being the person living with it and being under time pressure where it's do-or-die. Just as part of my personal standards, I feel like death is such a huge consequence/burden of someone's actions (literally you are no longer alive, any potential you had left is cut short, you cease to exist on this plane) that it feels rather callous to go "Well you should've just been willing to die for your beliefs if you really cared that much!!!"
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I hope you don’t mind me asking, but what’s the deal with Mitch and his dad? Last night prompted a lot of Mitch Daddy Issues Marner comments and I was kinda lost. I know he started hockey like. Ridiculously young and there was one video I saw where he mentioned something about like a hockey deal with his dad where he was like yeah I won’t get into that and it had iffy vibes but?
i don't know like. full full details either tbh. but there is this vid from when mitch was little and he and his dad were in a local news story and that's one of the first things i ever saw about mitch. i think his dad's just been a pretty extreme helicoptor parent and made disparaging comments about how ppl dont take mitch seriously bc of his personality and involved himself in mitch's contract negotiations w the leafs to a degree that reflected badly on mitch. i think you can tell how there are definitely problems with their relationship in the way he talks about his dad to the media and how his "father" knows not to mention hockey around him bc he doesn't want to hear it... the evolution of that relationship where mitch now no longer wants him involved. to me......... he just kind of seems like a guy that was like way too heavily invested in his young kid getting into this sport and there's definitely something fractured there bc mitch has a lot of warmth for his mom and his brother when he talks about his family, but sometimes his dad is excluded from that. (AND as a purely speculative section to this, it's interesting that mitch finds himself very attached to dad figures on the team like patrick marleau, matt martin, jumbo, muzz, bogo, etc... like clearly there are some Feelings there and potentially a paternal void that he likes to fill by glomming on to men who aren't afraid to give him affection praise and love that he definitely craves.... there's an essay to be written abt this but i'll save it for someone funnier)
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