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perfectmatch2025-06-29 10:17 am
marriagebroker) wrote in perfectmatch2025-06-29 10:17 am
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tl;cr meme
post your character, people reply, give them the deets. you know how this goes.
post your character, people reply, give them the deets. you know how this goes.
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i have truly been fighting the mental gymnastics demons ... 1/2
To lay things out plainly, as I've mentioned elsewhere, Rom came into AYTO with the mindset that he would be participating from an entirely strategic angle. After all, this was a reality TV show -- Rom is always very deliberate about how he presents himself and isn't blind to how most people view him, and so he assumed that he'd been brought onto the cast solely to fill out numbers and play the part of 'cast weirdo that makes for entertaining TV but nobody actually really likes,' which is a staple of any good reality show. In the same vein, he assumed that his "perfect match" (in quotes because he viewed the term from an entirely cynical angle) would be someone picked purely for the purposes of the show -- a match that viewers would deem acceptable, but not take away anything high-value from the more TV-appropriate participants. Thus, he assumed that his match would have to be a fellow Fucking Freak -- two of the show's outliers that could be shuffled aside without feeling like anything was amiss while the hot, sexy, fun folks had a good time genuinely forging connections before the cameras, you know?
So when he first arrived at the estate and ran into "Don't call me Mr. Impaler, call me Lord" Messmer, of course he immediately went ❗
It's not like Rom wasn't a little shook by what he was dealing with. I had him acting extremely calm and casual about Messmer's entire Deal on first encounter because Rom has learned to always play calm, but he ultimately comes from a world populated only by normal human people (and ghosts). Even setting aside Messmer's physical appearance, his spiritual presence definitely would have been horrifying to behold, given Rom's freak prodigy levels of spiritual sensitivity. The only reason Rom would have been able to act like nothing was wrong is because he's basically spent his whole life training himself to stay calm and pretending not to perceive The Horrors around him; in truth, Messmer probably was (and still is) kind of stressful for him to spend too much time around, even if he knew on a rational level that whatever was going on with Messmer's curse(?) probably wasn't going to affect him directly.
I think it helped that as they went through the first week, he got a slightly better understanding of Messmer -- not somebody aggressive, but definitely quite dour and down on himself, seemingly quite grimly resigned and not really intent on engaging with the game on a sincere level. ... in other words, someone that he could definitely see himself being matched with under his cynical 'the game must have paired together the outlier Freaks' calculus.
And honestly for a short while, he considered other matches for that first ceremony where he'd be choosing? But I think it would have mattered to him a lot that, as he listened to other people discuss their choices, nobody else seemed to really float Messmer's name. Which would have fit his internal logic, of course, but also ... for how shrewd and calculated he is with his interpersonal interactions, Rom is also a huge bleeding-heart softie when it comes down to it. And he knows full well how much that sort of rejection stings. He would have thought of himself as acting purely out of logic -- 'I am an outlier, and Lord Messmer also seems to be an outlier, so it makes perfect sense that the show would pair us together' -- but I do think that desire not to let someone else feel so pointedly rejected would have affected his decision. This would have added a more emotional, personal element to his choice, even though I don't think he was conscious of it; this would also later come back to bite him in the ass a little bit.
But come the first match ceremony, he chose Messmer, and in his mind palace, the three key commonalities he thought they shared were:
1. A fundamental disconnect from normal humans
2. Poor compatibility with the game's machinations
3. Self-awareness concerning the above two points
The first one was pretty obvious. The second one too, given Messmer's pointed refusal to engage in activities like spin the bottle that would help facilitate pair-finding. The third one was something that Rom was assuming on his own, though he considered it a pretty safe assumption to make, given Messmer's consistently dour attitude about himself. But at the same time, the latter two points were things that he didn't want to have to say out loud. Even if (in his head) Messmer might have been self-aware of them, hearing such things said out loud by another person still stings more than acknowledging such things to oneself. Thus, Rom basically trapped himself in a weird, completely self-imposed balancing act between his own cynical machinations ("we're probably matched because we're both Freaks (neg)") and the desire not to actually cause any hurt ("letting my logic slip in any way would be terribly cruel, so I need to pretend I'm thinking something else.")
I'll say it here that nobody did this to him! Messmer has done nothing wrong so far! Rom did this to himself! It's just that one of Rom's big flaws is that he is self-reliant to a fault -- due to his anomalous nature (and probably also a little bit because of his previous familial abandonment), he defaults to keeping secrets and trying to work through things on his own, even as he has fifteen different neurotic schemes battling in his brains at all times. Especially after that first match ceremony yielded a few lights, he genuinely did think there was a good chance that the show had matched him up with Messmer, and that as long as he could keep bluffing and dancing around the issue, he could play it up for the cameras that they were a genuine match and avoid causing Messmer any emotional hurt, even as his mindset remained entirely cynical. (Note: this is also why his early conversations with Wei Wuxian got so cagey at points -- Wei Wuxian's accusation that he not hurt Messmer stung because he was genuinely trying to avoid that, despite it being very possible.)
But I think come their first date, Rom was already getting the sense that his control of the situation was starting to slip. This, I think, is the point where their mutual fumbling started really kicking in. And I think ... to a certain degree, it's not either of their faults, but more a matter of basic incompatibility.
Rom ... I think, is someone who can’t help speaking in a very indirect fashion. There are rare exceptions, but in general, he just can't communicate with most people in a direct way. By default, he's constantly running two different filters in his brain -- 1) how to act like he doesn't see The Horrors, because acknowledging them is dangerous, and 2) how to filter his perception of reality into words meant for normal people (subfilter: is he playing up his influencer exorcist showmanship, or is he pretending to be a normal-ish person?) -- before saying anything. Like, I think given his inherent nature and the lifestyle he's chosen for himself, that's just how he's trained himself to operate, and it's only around a very few chosen exceptions -- mostly people he's confirmed to be on a similar wavelength to regarding spiritual vision -- that he feels it’s permissible to drop one or both of those filters. But otherwise, he's always playing mental chess, trying to wheedle out information and guide people to his points in indirect fashion, because that's always safer (usually for both parties) and keeps him more opaque. Admittedly a fucking exhausting way of existing! But also, it’s really the only way he knows to live.
And I think in front of someone like Messmer who's quite hard to read (both in terms of his more antiquated lingo, but also being more tired and muted in his emotions), there was no way Rom felt comfortable dropping his filters at all. Especially given he was also running the extra filter of 'I want to act like I'm at least somewhat sincere about this match because I don't want to hurt him.' But this was probably really the wrong move when dealing with Messmer? The reading I get is that Messmer is really not the type to do well with that sort of indirect prodding -- he's probably too tired and jaded to deal with any of that, he's not going to take any bait that's dangled before him, and he'd much rather just take what he's given, and otherwise not go prying? A fucking nightmare when it comes to Rom's usual attitude of weaving through implications and inferences, and his general aversion to just asking direct questions or answering honestly. Thus the two-way fumbling that wasn’t even really either party’s fault, but simply a result of how the two of them have adapted to their circumstances in almost diametrically opposed ways …
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I gotta be real, for one second I was violently tempted to have Rom drop the tidbit that he’d been abandoned by his parents for his nature because I, OOCly, knew that Messmer has a lot of mommy abandonment issues? But unfortunately it’s just not in Rom’s nature to make himself vulnerable like that first -- he’d only think it ‘fair’ to expose something like that about himself if the other party was honest first, or if he felt that the other party genuinely cared (unlikely, in his mind, but not impossible). And while he didn’t read Messmer as cold or uncaring, necessarily, Wei Wuxian had told him that Messmer is old beyond the scope of normal humans. Rom was working under the assumption that a mortal of a regular lifespan saying “oh, my parents abandoned me” would have meant nothing to someone working on the scale of centuries of life experiences. A part of me wonders how their CR could have gone, had they been able to bond even marginally over that commonality at that early stage …
But alas, they didn’t! And so came the second match ceremony.
As Rom later ended up saying to Messmer, his upset about Messmer’s decision during the second match ceremony really came down to feeling like Messmer has completely betrayed his previous statements of ‘only caring about winning the game.’ In Rom’s mind, Verso was clearly one of the stars of the show, not only in terms of looks, but also in terms of personality -- charming, gentle, empathetic, kind. He himself had also been briefly charmed by Verso and then had immediately placed a mental block there deciding that that was a useless venue to pursue -- it just seemed so much more likely in his mind that the show’s management would have paired Verso with someone more ‘suitable’ like Nico, as the rest of the cast had floated more than once. And while this seemed like a terribly obvious conclusion in his mind, he also never would have voiced it out loud at that point -- like he later said to Messmer, it would have been a terribly cruel sentiment to put into words, and at the end of the day, he didn’t want to risk causing Messmer any harm. Furthermore, if Messmer and Verso were hitting it off well outside of the production’s machinations, then that truly wasn’t any of his business, and he really didn’t want to interfere with it in any way. It’s not that he necessarily doubted Messmer’s ability to compartmentalize between the game’s machinations vs. his own personal relationships, but Rom didn’t feel that was a gamble that he had any right to take, since he had no stakes in it.
That said, for as generally detached as Rom acts from normal human behavior ... I don't think he's immune to the full gamut of normal human emotions, either. He's just accepted his role as 'the other' and trained himself to fit it, he wasn't inherently born with that disposition, and I think his extremely soft-hearted nature and his much shyer personality in childhood indicates he's pretty sensitive at the end of the day. It might not have been the driving force behind his poor reaction after the second match ceremony, but there was an element of personal hurt that influenced his actions there.
For the record, this is how Messmer’s choice ended up affecting Rom’s mental list of their ‘commonalities’:
1. A fundamental disconnect from normal humans -- Still true!
2. Poor compatibility with the game's machinations -- Questionable, if Messmer felt comfortable enough choosing Verso during the match ceremony.
3. Self-awareness concerning the above two points -- Decidedly no longer true.
Which is to say, this action kind of scuppered Rom's assumption that the show would have deemed them an obvious match. This match ceremony also signaled to him that his most obvious back-up option under his cynical calculus, Odile (self-professed as feeling ill-suited to the game), wasn't correct. It also also suggested that his attitude of pursuing logic and game mechanics over any emotions was correct, given the blackout despite many choices that week being made in very emotion-ful ways (Shoko and Poppy, Yi Sang and Yingying, Messmer and Verso). At the same time, the fact that nobody had chosen him left Rom with few leads to pursue when it came to logical matches. (And, y'know, there was the very slight element of "wow, you really hung me out to dry when I tried to have your back last time" aimed at Messmer, though that would have been only a very minor factor in the general scheme of things.) This multi-hit-combo of conclusions in combination with the loredump during the week (which affected Rom badly in ways completely unrelated to Messmer) meant he was feeling pretty exhausted and cornered after the match ceremony.
Which still isn't to say that personal feelings were the driving force behind Rom pretending not to perceive Messmer after the second match ceremony! His reactions were ultimately couched in the sense that he'd been completely uprooted in his planned path of action, with his personal hurt only being an additional factor on top of that. But it is why he reacted a even more evasively, with a touch of bite, when Messmer came to question him after the ceremony -- Messmer doubting his dedication to the game ("So quickly thou hast forgotten the nature of this place") really felt like a personal swing when in his internal logic, Messmer was the one who'd first taken a wild swing out of personal feelings and then struck out, all while he (Rom) was really, really doing his best to continue acting in a logical and game-driven manner. I think Messmer then not even pursuing his questioning very far afterwards, not even asking what Rom had assumed their commonalities were, was what sort of had Rom quietly closing off that entire path as a viable option going forth -- he felt tired and lost, and while a part of him did feel there was still a slight chance (5%?) that he and Messmer were a match according to the show's machinations, it no longer felt like the most productive option to pursue if Messmer didn't even care enough to ask what felt like an obvious question.
In the end ... I think it's for the best that Messmer and Rom both sort of ended up drifting away and having their little development arcs away from each other. :') Messmer's more closed off nature did absolutely nothing to keep Rom from keeping his cards close to his chest in usual fashion, and Rom's evasive attitude did nothing to draw out Messmer's feelings, either. Truly a matter of incompatibility! I genuinely don't think it's either of their faults, but I also do think they're hilariously, almost catastrophically bad for each other when it comes to mutual communication. Fumble kings. In the end, Rom only circled back to try and talk to Messmer again before the final match ceremony when he'd come to peace with things enough that he was able to be more honest -- he finally felt comfortable enough to come clean about what he'd been thinking, and he was hoping that honesty would springboard his way into a more productive conversation to try and help figure out who Messmer's match might be, since at that point Messmer was one of the final pieces to their overall puzzle.
This didn't end up mattering during the run of the game, but just for the record, Rom holds no particular feelings about Messmer's war crimes. He thinks they're bad in an objective sense, of course, but he also has just enough interactions with very aged spirits to know that morality and ethics tend to get warped when working on the scale of decades and centuries. Since Messmer hardly seems the type to be a cackling sadist about murder and genocide, he assumes that the Messmer just works on a completely different scale of reality, where killing several hundred people simply doesn't hold the same gravitas, because what do the lives of mortal matter when those same mortals would have died of old age just in the time that you've been alive anyway?
As they depart the game, I think Rom mostly just feels neutral about Messmer ... ? He'll still prod and poke and bully in the way he acts towards most people, but I do think he gets that they're not really well-suited to communicating with each other in any sort of deeper/meaningful way, and by his readings, he also assumes that Messmer actively dislikes him. Like, not hates, but he thinks that Messmer probably dislikes him in the same way that most normal humans dislike him ............. Nothing notable, nothing special, same old, same old. Which is fine! He doesn't take it personally or anything. And he does also feel a little bad that he let his own personal feelings leak into how he treated Messmer at all -- that's not in his usual fashion, and he'd like to think he's generally above that kind of thing. So he's okay with how things have fallen, where he's wishing the best for Messmer (and Verso!) both but from a vague distance. He hopes they're happy and well!
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you are correct about messmer just being tired and jaded!! He *was* curious about Rom and whatever Rom saw in him, but he simply didn't have the drive to pursue it beyond the walls Rom put up. Despite how aloof and crabby he can be, he's actually fairly shy and polite by nature - he essentially grew up the bastard child of royalty, and he's used to trying to be unobtrusive - so his instinct when someone doesn't want to talk to him is to leave them alone...!! Especially since he generally considers his presence undesirable. Prying into other people's personal business would be way overstepping his bounds, and for as much as Rom thought of himself as an outsider in a separate class from the other contestants, Messmer never saw him any differently from anyone else here. Part of that might be due to him being unfamiliar with reality TV in general, but there's a lot of evidence in canon that he's just... an open-minded guy. Despite the ethnic cleansing. Anyway, he thus afforded Rom the same exact courtesy he gave everyone else - and in his mind, the nicest thing he could do for anyone here was to keep his distance. If Rom didn't want to open up to him, far be it from him to try and force him to share anything.
like you said, this really means they were just a poor match for each other on a pure communication level... messmer doesn't want to engage with someone unless they approach him directly, and rom doesn't want to approach anyone directly unless he really has to LMFAO. SAD...
messmer doesn't actually dislike rom, though!! he still feels that he hurt rom personally in some way (no matter how much rom denies it or tries to explain it away). while some part of him IS annoyed that rom's holding him accountable for not adhering to his internal logic, he's also lived his life for the past 1000+ years assuming that most people outside of his circle of followers hate him or have been hurt by him... so he's just sort of sadly accepted that as part of life, and his ego is too small to fight back against it or try to make amends (because he Deserves It and it's also kind of his job to be hated.) fumbling their communications to the end......
also he really did pick verso just because he liked talking to him and didn't think the outcome of any of the votes mattered until the end - it was all just data collection. there was literally no strategy beyond that, he didn't think anyone here was really suited to be his match in the first place JLDKFGJ IM SORRY ROM...
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