Essay!
This scene has been on my mind for a while now. It comes from Chapter 34
Italics denote thought.
Ion: I'm Methuselah, and she's Terran. Time passes at different speeds for us. Perhaps... we won't ever meet again.
Esther: [to Ion] Take care, sir.
Ion: Ah. So. It's best not to say anything at all.
Asta: Hey.
Ion: Duchess of Kiev.
Asta: They will age very quickly... and die. No one can guarantee you'll see her again. [Pats Ion on the back.] Tell her what you've been thinking this entire time. I think that's for the best. Don't you agree?
Ion: [looks ... puzzled? bewildered?]
Asta: [smiles] Go.
I've been coming back to this because I'm wondering if Asta is more... emotionally observant? Than I've been giving her credit for being. It's pretty obvious (to the reader, anyway) that Ion has a crush on Esther, but it always surprises me that Asta seems to pick up on that. Not only does she pick up on it, but she... encourages him to speak his mind. Which... wouldn't seem so weird, since Asta is a big believer in speaking her mind (often loudly), but the fact that she's encouraging Ion to ... essentially confess his feelings for a Terran is something that's always stuck out to me.
I've made it clear in previous essays that Asta doesn't... really hate Terran. She doesn't always understand them, and she doesn't always LIKE them, but she doesn't hate them indiscriminately. However, I think she used to dislike them pretty strongly (more a by-product of not knowing anything about the Outer Countries and growing up with anti-Outer propaganda than anything else). I'm sure there was a differentiation between Terran who lived in the Empire and Terran who didn't, but RAM doesn't elaborate much on it.
She does still believe that Methuselah are superior to Terran, but, as I think I've said before, Asta has started to see that the residents of camp are, in many cases, not at all like the Terran from her realm. She still uses the term, because it's what she knows, but she's starting to see that what she knows and what she's familiar with... doesn't always apply. A perfect example is when Rico tells her that he's a mutant, and explains what that means -- the differences between homo sapiens versus homo sapiens superior. Because of that, she... can't really lump him in with regular Terran, which has actually helped her make their relationship easier to ... justify, I think is the word I want here. Possibly also rationalize. Yes, relationships between Terran and Methuselah are taboo, but in her mind, Rico isn't really a Terran, strictly speaking. He's Something Else Entirely.
Asta isn't completely emotionally retarded. On the contrary, she's passionate and quite capable of emotion -- deep emotion, too. And she's not really... poorly-adjusted, in the emotional sense. The way she explains Methuselah attitudes towards death and moving on tells us that much. But given how much of a dork she behaves around Suleyman (pre-betrayal), that tells me she's not immune to the spell of the bishounen. She can get giddy and nervous when she's around someone she's attracted to. And she does get giddy and nervous around Rico sometimes (despite the fact that he's not exactly bishounen-y), but then he does something to make her yell, and the spell is broken.
She likes Ricochet -- very much -- but she's not always sure what to do with that, because she knows and accepts that whatever is going on between them is very, very temporary. She understands, particularly after Tres left, that people can be called away from camp unexpectedly, and at some point she and Rico will return to their respective worlds, and even if they weren't, his life-span still amounts to only a fraction of hers. So, yes, she is going to let herself enjoy whatever this is she and Ricochet have, because there is no telling when it's going to end, and she knows quite firmly that when either of them leave camp, they will never see each other again. And she is not looking forward to that day.
That's not to say that she doesn't have moments of being completely retarded, because he still tops her hard quite a bit, particularly with that annoying out-of-left-field sincerity of his. Damn him.