The irony about that is that it was MAYA saying she loved Harry.
That...doesn't mean she ACTUALLY loved him. That is something I like to stress, but I don't think any of those characters EVER loved someone.
They might be attracted or obsessed, but love? I don't think so.
Anyway, that did traumatized Harry, in a sense in which he could become like Luca but he didn't, in a self delusion sense. That...well, let's be honest, just because Harry folded over Mary in williful ignorance is not an excuse to grant Luca a carte blanche on it. Those two were technically traumatized.
Sure, Luca was worse, but using quantification for that is...trite. It miss the point.
On the matter of love, it's complicated. Love is often complicated and multifaceted. It's one of the hardest emotions to define, especially since it overlaps at times with lust, obsession and affection in general. You could say that Maya had some kind of general affection for Harry, or that she was in love with him. Luca, at least, definitely thought she felt something romantic about Harry based on his observations of her.
It was definitely a shallow kind of love at best, which, to be fair, is pretty normal for someone in high-school. For teenagers, lust often trumps just about everything because of how hormones work during that period of time.
As for Luca, his trauma doesn't excuse anything at all. Just because it explains WHY he's the way he is and makes it understandable, it doesn't really change that he's a monster... and he's a monster because he chooses to be one.
Actually? Good Ending has him disgusted with Laura and Harry, down to the end in which he just leaves to get himself shitfaced because 'THAT CAN'T BE POSSIBLE FUCK!'
He is...willifully ignorant like Harry. It is sad and pathetic, he is what he hates. I should feel like he deserved a rest, but...he is shortsighted on his own bullshit that he can't see that he could easily find the love and kill his own beliefs, but alas, it is far more important to prove that you are right than eating your pride.
Laura is also faulty on Pride, but on that, another time.
Luca's reaction during that scene didn't seem quite that simple and his tone, so to speak, felt to flippant, for lack of a better word. Was he actually disgusted? Or was he oddly pleased that he managed to drag Harry down to the point of becoming a manwhore like him to win Laura back? (+Aya in that other ending... but let's face it, it'd be 6 months at most before Harry and Laura both were Aya's bitches and loving it.... I seriously doubt that she didn't plan for Harry to find them with that double-ended dildo stuffed in their cunts.)
In any case, it just feels like the author REALLY didn't want to write that ending at all, which is why it feels like it just switches off very fast.
There is a reason why I say that Harry is the weirdest Harem Protag I ever saw. One of the endings he is...being weird with Harry...for some reason. Harry lives rent free in his head. Why fuck those bitches? Harry. Why work in that company? Harry.
Why do all what you do? HARRY!
If someone told me that his hate is about how he can't get that love Harry exudes for himself...I would believe it. After all he dropped Maya the moment she lost his use to him. He can't live without Harry.
Luca, you are gay, and Harry must run away. Then he gets Purple Insane Bitch who would willingly get him intoxicated to fuck him, an insane Yakuza Princess who wants to own Harry by any means and an Insane Blonde Bastard Mafioso who can't get what he wants really.
Harry must have the sweetest face in that place for those three nutsos have their lives, breathes and minds spinning around him.
Would be fun an ending in which they all think that they got what they wanted from Harry and...they lose him in the same moral corruption aspects that involved Laura and Luca...
Hm...blackmailing Harry and turning him into a sex slave? He is cute...
Hm...
In Luca's case, I don't think he has any attraction for Harry. It's just that he genuinely hates Harry. Most people don't understand what it means to
really hate. To genuinely, utterly, completely hate something. It's said that hatred is the other side of the coin to love, the negative to its positive. When you hate, genuinely hate... it's not enough to destroy something. It's not enough to get it out of your life. No. You want it close. You want it near. You want to taint it, to rip it to make it suffer, to make it experience more and more horrible things. When you hate a person, genuinely hate them, killing them is not enough, hitting them directly or the like is not enough. Only true suffering will ever bring satisfaction to true hatred, and it never ends, it's never enough, it's a vicious cycle.
Because hatred is much like love. Like how when you love someone, you want to spend time with them. You want to know about them. You want them to be happy. Hatred is the opposite of that, and it's honestly impressive how well the artist managed to capture the feel of that emotion in Luca. Not just anger. Not just dislike. But genuine, irrational hatred that's rarely natural.
Most people can't feel that kind of hate, not easily at least. Whether you believe that humans have a soul that's inherently good, or whether you lean on the fact that humans are social animals and that kind of behavior and thinking is damaging to the group as a whole in the long run. The fact of the matter is that true, deep hatred is a pretty unnatural emotion, unlike love. Some might say it's normal to hate the things that hurt you or whatnot, but that's often not what happens. The fact that Luca does feel this deep hatred just showcases how insane he genuinely is.
Not runaway, she still seems to have her contacts, not sure why she is there, I think she saw Harry one time, smelled him and went cray. She is cray. If you wanna get her brutally killing you, just take Harry, rape him and proceed to let everyone see the guy not letting anyone touch him and being grumpy/depressed over it.
You get Aya on a warpath on your ass, be careful. Chainsaws, guns, brutal murders or even knives might be used. You can run, but she won't rest until you are dead.
But no issues if you do all that with Laura, she will even find it fun!
Nah, she's definitely a runaway. Her path makes it clear that she was trying to escape that world originally. It's why she doesn't immediately rely on her family right after Luca proposes the stupid game and is forced to let Luca rape her at all. It's why in all of the endings she only acts at the last possible moment. Because at the end of the day, she's in the US working a dumb job at a company that has no relation to her home because she's trying to change from the monster she was being made into.
She also mentions that there's one other person that she loves, someone that was there before Harry. A girl or a woman. A sister maybe? We don't know yet.
In all of the endings that she has to rely on her Yakuza heritage, it's pretty obvious that she's basically making some kind of sacrifice to make it happen. It's also likely why she does NOT call on those contacts in the one ending where she runs away with Laura and Harry and both she and Laura are pregnant in the back-seat while they're driving over to Canada. They're also never mentioned in the alternate good ending. I don't think they appeared in the ending where she murders Luca for Harry and pins the murder on Laura.
The Fallen Hero Aya ending has Harry basically being trained to become yakuza himself, to become a heir basically... and it happens because in that specific ending, she clearly had to lean very hard on her family to the point where she had to do what they said. It's not something she wants, because it means dragging her beloved senpai with her into becoming a monster... but it's better to be a monster with him, than to completely lose him, I suppose.
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I still think that Aya's the biggest monster in this entire VN, even after reading all the paths and all the endings. She's not the most loathsome one, that remains Luca's schtick, but she's definitely the biggest one. Because at the end of the day, when she gets vindictive, she makes Luca's hatred of Harry look like a schoolyard grudge with some of the shit she does to Laura...
