Thank you all for attending my unpaid and completely unnecessary psychoanalysis of fictional people. I could have been doing something productive with my life. I could have been sleeping. I could have gotten a respectable six hours of rest. Instead, I was under my blanket at 2 AM, turning pages like my life depended on finding out what that asshole was going to do next #－.－)
Omg, I wanna read it! Please, please, can you please share the novel link?:)
Same. I have work later
Psych analysis on point
I just finished the novel and OMG! Matthias is a psychopath!! And he needs to see a psychiatrist or a priest!
unfortunately Layla was the focus of his obsession , and that is where things became terrifyingly complicated.
Here are my thoughts:
Layla and Matthias’s relationship is toxic and intense. Intentionally so. think some readers are approaching this story as though it is supposed to be a blueprint for a healthy relationship. It isn’t. Matthias is manipulative, controlling, possessive, obsessive, emotionally stunted, and genuinely disturbing. Those things can all be true without making the novel itself “bad” or requiring the story to give us a morally perfect male lead. Everything that happened in the story needed to happen so we could understand how emotionally complex the characters are(which was quite beautiful for me tbh) What makes Matthias interesting to me is that he genuinely does not understand his own emotions. He has lived a life where everything was handed to him, where he never had to struggle for anything, and where emotional vulnerability was basically foreign to him. So when he finally experiences something he cannot control, he doesn’t know how to process it. His love comes out as possession, manipulation, jealousy, obsession, and eventually the realization that his version of love is actually hurting the person he loves.
That doesn’t excuse his behavior. At all. Understanding why a character behaves the way he does is not the same as defending it.
And Layla isn’t some helpless character waiting for the “perfect man” to rescue her either she has been emotionally battered since childhood. She knew parental love, lost it, and then spent years being passed from relative to relative, experiencing firsthand how ugly, selfish and conditional human relationships can become. She isn’t emotionally untouched by that. She understands that people can love you and still hurt you. She understands that love doesn’t automatically make someone good.
And I think that’s part of why she was able to see something in Matthias that other people couldn’t. He’s horrifyingly emotionally stunted, but he’s also strangely transparent. He doesn’t even understand what he’s feeling half the time. His love comes out as possession, obsession, manipulation and control because that’s the only language his emotionally underdeveloped ass seems to know. That’s probably why her relationship with him is more complicated than simply, “Why didn’t she choose Kyle? Kyle was nice!”
Kyle represents something much more conventionally healthy and understandable. Matthias represents something damaged that Layla recognizes because she herself is damaged.
That doesn’t make Matthias’s behavior okay. And it doesn’t mean Layla should have chosen him. It’s just an explanation for why her emotional response to him isn’t as simple as we sometimes want it to be. But this doesn’t make it a relationship I would recommend to a single living soul But this is FICTION. The author isn’t handing us Matthias and saying, “Ladies, here’s your relationship goal.” We’re watching two deeply complicated, emotionally damaged people collide and somehow find something that they themselves (or even us) barely understand. Matthias isn’t a red flag or black flag, he’s flag is the colour of satans butt hole deep in hell!