#not this making me emotional when i have to go to bed
I think Kinn grieves who he was before he was betrayed. The version of himself that felt most like him. A version of him that wasn’t divided, hidden away in pieces and shame.
He never asked for this life but he was living it, and he also had love until he didn’t. Suddenly he wasn’t enough. Suddenly he was weak. Suddenly everything that made him Kinn was what was wrong.
He doesn’t love Tawan in the sense of being in love with him, but he probably loves the idea of who Tawan was before he betrayed him. Tawan is the strongest tie to who Kinn was before. And I doubt he ever got any real closure or a chance to close the door on that part of his life in any real or meaningful way.
Kinn is trying to find his place in the world, balancing his father’s expectations against his own desire to be loved. In some ways it’s easier to want to go back to that simplistic version of yourself, to excuse everything that has happened and plead ignorance. Loving Porsche means accepting the things he doesn’t like about himself because that’s the man Porsche met and fell in love with. Because Porsche doesn’t just love the man in the woods, he’s dirtied and sullied his hands for the man who commands him to “make him talk”.
And Porsche, entirely disastrous in every single way, won’t accept any less than Kinn. I think Kinn needs to go back to that old head space to truly understand the gift of what he found with Porsche is. Porsche was willing to not only look past all of it but embrace it. All of the less savory parts, the bits Kinn doesn’t like, and to take the hand of the person he is truly. Porsche’s love isn’t conditional like Tawan’s was. It makes zero demands on him other than to be honest.
Kinn is very much in his own past, not just Tawan, but his view of himself, and until he can let go of that, he can’t move forward.
