#without outright saying i love you—viago doesn't use them

[invelena]

no viago wouldn't say i love you if you held him at gunpoint but it's not so much because he's personally recalcitrant/squeamish about emotional vulnerability (which he is) as it is primarily a cultural reaction to what is considered a very loaded, almost artificially literary expression in antivan language—not saying that all antivan people have the same stance on the matter seeing as i also hc that there are some stark linguistic differences coexisting in the same country, but viago was raised speaking a variant of the language where verbal expressions of love are unthinkable and unnatural NOT because the language does not have the means to actualize them but because they are so uncommon it feels like straining to move an atrophied muscle