tl;cr meme

[marriagebroker]

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

[phenomerom]

Breaking order to do this one first because I was thinking about their two-way fumbling last night. Sorry Sib, this got really long, and also a lot of this is going to go into explaining Rom's insane 4D chess mental gymnastics because Messmer was unfortunately the most direct recipient of a lot of it. Messmer didn't deserve any of this.

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 …