essay h-hoooo.
THIS IS THE GIANT ROBERT ESSAY. AKA Robert's whole story in the series, his previous time in camp, and his canon update. ... hilariously, a dropped character has a huge effect on my character, and there are a bunch of people in camp with no idea about this! And I've needed to get my thoughts in order, which I can finally do after reviewing, oh, years of threads. good god.
When I say this essay is long, I mean it is long. Lots of tl;dr ahead, and I bet I didn't even cover half of what I wanted to. Never mind the fact that I wrote a lot of it at four in the morning when I couldn't sleep, uh. Ignore any incoherency, if you would!
Robert was originally taken from right after episode 26 in his series. For those who will never watch or read Ueki (which I ... wouldn't blame you. I LOVE THE SERIES but it's kind of retarded crack. amazing retarded cracK! but I digress), here's a semi-nutshell version of Robert's story:
Robert is a tenkaijin - a celestial being. He is not human. When God made clear that he'd eventually have a tournament where several tenkaijin candidates would get to pick a child from Earth to fight for them in it for the chance to become God themselves, Robert's father Margaret took his two year-old son and dropped him down to Earth. Robert spent the next three years growing up in a village where he was hated by most simply because he wasn't human! He was relatively happy anyway because he was in an orphanage with friends and the director of the orphanage seemed quite fond of him.
... until his friends started to question whether he was really human and used him as a scapegoat when they attempted to steal food. The villagers blamed Robert and came after him with the usual mob-type stuff (including guns in the manga, Fukuchi what). The Director tried to hide him in a shack! Except after Robert went in, the Director locked the door and said he was turning Robert in because he wasn't human and was therefore a monster and hey, he could make some good money off of turning him in!
This is Robert's trauma. It's enough that when Rinko (one of his followers who knew of him when she was younger and later leaves him in order to stop him with Ueki) relates the story of Robert's past, Robert stays very, very silent until the end, and actually looks genuinely off balance when Rinko even brings it up.
BASICALLY. He destroyed the town at age five - no clue whether people died or not since it was never specified, but ... probably - and then disappeared for ten years without a word. Canon is unclear on what happened during those ten years, but we know at some point that Margaret showed up and "saved" him. Presumably, he gave Robert a place to live on Earth and helped train him to become a ten-star tenkaijin.
Tenkaijin power levels are based on star rankings, and they can grow stronger through tests and whatnot. The highest is ten, and getting up to it is insanely difficult. Most tenkaijin never reach that level. For Robert to do so before the age of fifteen says something about his power, skill, and intelligence - this is definitely one of the reasons why he's assumed to be a genius.
Anyway, from that point on, Robert hated humans. He was traumatized by the whole incident in the town when he was five and let that completely color his view of humanity. I sort of assume that when Margaret took Robert under his wing, he made a point of showing him all the shitty things humans do to just about everything, and from there, Robert formed his very ... colorful opinion of them. When the tournament finally came about, Margaret chose Robert to be his fighter since the rules only stated that the person must be on Earth, which Robert was hoho loophole. Robert decided to fight because he wanted to win the blank zai - a talent that could become any sort of ability that the winner wanted - and use it to erase the world and humans with it.
THUS STARTS ROBERT'S PATH OF INSANITY.
Seriously, if you even just watch his first episode (6), you get the feel for how bugfuck crazy he is at that point. The boy is unhinged and thinks nothing of taking people three or four miles up into the sky and then dropping them to their deaths. We never see him kill a candidate in canon (he puts one in the hospital and nearly kills Ueki when they first meet), but it's pretty damn clear that he doesn't care if he kills people. They're just humans!
And after his first brush with Robert, Ueki makes defeating Robert his goal. The first half of the series focuses on their conflict! ... when it doesn't have random episodes like that dude with the diamond forehead and whatnot. Robert, meanwhile, does not care. He thinks it's a game, and spends the whole time screwing around with them. And we get a scene or two of him and Margaret, where he's basically all "love meeeeee father I'll kill them all! =D =D =D" When he and Ueki finally get to fight, he's insanely confident and for a good reason - his ability is to make ideals into reality, which means all his jingi (sacred treasures, GODMODE TENKAIJIN ABILITIES) are perfect. And he basically wipes the floor with Ueki.
But Ueki and his team manage to have an effect on Robert throughout the fight. Ueki keeps standing and talking to him, trying to show him that humans aren't entirely what he thought they were and that, well, he's just plain wrong about everything. And as Ueki keeps talking, Robert gets crazier and crazier and more with the denial. blahblah Ueki finds an opening blahblah they both go down and then their fight gets interrupted.
The thing is that after the fight, once Robert's calmed down just a bit and is more sane, he tells Ueki that while he can't accept his viewpoint on humans and the world just yet, he'll recognize that Ueki himself is someone worthwhile and worth his consideration and fighting with his full strength. Which is ... huge, given that for the entire damn series, Robert had just been crazy and completely disregarded those around him.
Aaand then we get a scene with him back home where he appears to be completely different from the persona he's shown for the past 25 episodes. He's quiet! Reflective! And starts questioning what he thought previously about humans, the world, and everything. When Margaret comes to congratulate him on getting to the second round, Robert turns and asks him if it's really okay for him to erase humanity. Cue the worried father! Oh Robert, you should have told me sooner if you were thinking such things! Then your father would've known!
Margaret then informs Robert that's he's no longer useful and will be taken care of promptly. ♥
IT'S THEN SHOWN that everything that happened in Robert's past? Was orchestrated by Margaret. His goal was to make Robert hate humans so he'd have a hell of an incentive to try and win for him. Basically, the father and the only person Robert seemed to really love and trust? Was responsible for his trauma and all his issues. Margaret then tells Robert that he's not really his father - he's just a demon capable of consuming people and then taking their forms and infiltrated the tournament in order to take down the heavens and God himself. And he has his son Anon do the same to Robert. Basically, Anon eats people and takes their abilities and whatnot, so by eating Robert, he can become Margaret's candidate.
This was the point I took Robert from the last time I apped him! He was just having second thoughts about destroying everything, and after Margaret's betrayal, he had a big chip on his shoulder in regards to people in general. He didn't trust anyone! And he was still pretty damn crazy and unstable on some levels, particularly after realizing that he was just a tool for a good ten to twelve years. There's more on his "monster issues" over here!
Something else, though. Like I mentioned, Robert had the ability to turn ideals into reality. He used it to strengthen his jingi, but he could also idealize things. A tea cup, for example, could become a tea cup that would never break or spill. A knife could become an ideal knife that could cut through anything. Robert could idealize anything, as long as it wasn't living. The only thing is that with these powers comes a cost. For Ueki, he needs trash to make his trees. For Sano, he needed to hold his breath to turn towels into steel. Aaaand for Robert, each unique ideal cost him a year of his lifespan. It's assumed that tenkaijin have finite lifespans, since he makes a point of having people fight for him so that he doesn't have to fight as much.
But on the other hand, Robert doesn't ... really show much regard for his own life in the series. He uses his power on a tea cup, man! His sole goal is to erase the world, and he never really specifies if he'll be destroyed along with it or not (""Erase" means "erase," does it not?"). I assume that Robert's very, very driven towards his goal - Anon even states that his power comes from his hatred for humanity - and he really doesn't care what happens to him at the end.
So. Robert in camp initially was somewhat paranoid, a little crazy, insanely confused about the world around him, and didn't have much of a regard for his own life. He was broken! And then he fell in with his canonmates, Colonel Roy Mustang, and Captain Malcolm Reynolds. I owe Roy an essay which I'll get back to after this one, because really, the Roy essay is sort of a supplement to this. I really need to finish this one before doing his, uh.
Canonmates were pretty straight-forward. Ueki continued the trend he started in their battle, and the others eventually joined in in their own ways. What was really strong was, well, Robert's relationship with Mal. The thing is with Robert is that he tends to sort of- get attached to certain people. The Director was one, and then Margaret was another. And somehow or another, he got very, very attached to Mal.
... A LOT OF SHIT HAPPENED, I don't feel like summarizing it all. The basic gist is that once upon a time, Robert sold Mal out to a psychopath, and Mal was sort of okay with this because it was his job. They talked a lot, and then said psychopath actually struck, and Robert realized that, shit, he was actually starting to sort of care about a human. Cue several ownings, many, many conversations in which the nature of humanity, monsters, and the like are discussed with a dash of violence and drama, and you get the summary of that.
Over the course of nearly two years, there was this constant presence poking at him. And slowly but surely, Robert started to change. He took a lot of what Mal and the others said to heart - Mal particularly, since he was just there so much. There were even incidents that rattled him like the stuff with Rhode, which I'll touch on a bit later. Although that's really another essay, heh. But, well, there was a problem. And that problem was Anon and Margaret.
Robert knew he had to go back. He couldn't just leave camp and go skipping off with Mal or Roy or any of them. He'd even stated back in 2005 that he couldn't go with them and he had to go back and finish things. And come the drop, Robert knew this still held. He'd used a bunch of years of his life as-is, and also? It was his problem. He'd been the one to fall for Margaret and his plans, and it was a sort of ... matter of pride for him to finish it himself. Pride is one of Robert's many failings, as a side note.
He'd never feel right until he finished it, essentially. It was just something he had to do, even if he knew he had no chance. Robert had been purposely pushing away from people like Mal and Roy and other camp-types for months before his drop because of this. And when he finally got to leave - with Mal, no less - he chose to go back to his own world to finish things. Which meant that he basically ditched Mal without a single word, which is probably the single most terrible thing he could have done to him. :Dd
Only, eh ... they didn't quite end the way he thought they would. He got eaten again, which then lined back up with canon. From that point on in canon, we never see Robert again until the last episode, when Ueki saves him from Anon. And at the very end - presumably a day or two after the final battle - Robert meets up with Ueki and awkwardly tries to talk with him before Ueki interrupts him, saying he's glad to see that Robert's okay. Aaand for the first time, we get a real smile from Robert.
End canon for Robert. Except for the omake stuff, where he apparently dated Rinko but then triggered her, so she beat him and gave him a new phobia, to which I say HAHAHAHA.
I've been saying that Robert spent two months outside of camp (time passes differently, blahblah, etc). One month was spent finishing up canon, and the other month was a lull between end of canon and camp. Former Ueki canon-muns and Tomo and I have many hilarious ideas of exactly what happened during that time, but the nutshell version is that Robert spent his time back home contemplating stuff. There was no more Margaret, he really didn't have anything left back home, and ... God had restored his lifespan to what it originally was, which meant that he wasn't in danger of just croaking it any time soon.
And there were things from camp which never sat right with him - one of which was Rhode Camelot. Long story short! Rhode killed Mal, and Mal was arguably Robert's most important person at that point in time. And yet, he knew that he stood no chance against Rhode because he was so unstable, so he kept from fighting her. But post-canon, Robert is much more stable. Things are finished, he's not constantly watching his back, and he can finally take a deep breath, relax, and focus on who he wants to be rather than constantly fighting.
Something that Robert has said repeatedly to people is that he came back to camp because he has things he must do here. And that's true! There's two reasons: the first and most obvious being to kill Rhode, and the second being to regain a foothold on who exactly he is, interact with more humans, and maybe eventually see if he can make things right.
Robert recognizes that he was pretty damn crazy, and he's not sorry for a lot of it. Shit happens! He does feel bad about certain things, such as his involvement with sending certain people to Hell and whatnot. But at this point, he's very much trying to move on. Ueki basically brushed aside any of their past differences in that final exchange, and it was encouragement for him to move on. What happened happened, but things were different now. He's different!
So. Currently, in camp, Robert's finding his foothold, which is why he's out and talking with people. He's not necessarily trying to make friends, and he still finds that difficult - on one level because he knows he's kind of a shitty friend and may not really deserve it, and on another level because he generally sucks with actual social interaction. He wants to be saner as well. Not sane necessarily, because he recognizes that there's some value in his insanity! But he's learning more, about the people around him and about himself.
He does recognize that he's relatively sane now, actually - he had a conversation with Kharg where if it had been a year ago and he hadn't been post-canon, he would have simply snapped and tried to kill Kharg for what he was saying. But instead, Robert kept his cool and didn't draw a weapon once, effectively owning him with his words. Now that he's realized this, he's going to get a bit more cocky and confident, in a way like he was before he lost all his footing in canon, but without the underlying malevolence that he had.
Robert's growing up is what it all sums up to. And he's trusting people a bit more! Which just means that he's being less of an asshole to some people. The Doctor, for example, probably would've gotten a much colder reception if he'd talked with Robert back in 2005-2007, whereas Robert is pretty much enthralled by him now. Haruka wouldn't have gotten him to talk as much, Teito would've been brushed off almost immediately, Kharg would have been KILLED IN THE FACE ... you get the idea. I mean, he interacted with Rabi his first time in camp and didn't care for him at all, but this time around? Robert likes Rabi quite a bit! There are now all these people that Robert is oddly fascinated with (and that's only a few, because I know I'm missing types like Raimei, Emiri, etc) and willing to talk with more. His list of people he'd talk with is now at least five times bigger than it used to be.
HE STILL FULLY INTENDS TO FIGHT RHODE ONE DAY. And kill her if he can. And he's accepted that the choices he's made will have consequences. Robert knows it! He's ... not entirely okay with it, per ce, but he's accepted that what he's done may have consequences, and if he has to deal with them? He'll deal with them.
I never really, mm, bought into the COMPLETE 180 that canon shows us with Robert, like I mentioned briefly in other posts. I don't really think he'll ever be "okay" or anywhere near as stable as he used to be before everything went to hell over ten years ago. I do think, though, that he has the capacity to think for himself and try and shift himself away from how he was, even if it's just bit by bit. It's just that now instead of taking very small, slight steps, he's actually making progress - albeit, ehhh, only a little bit of progress.
When I say this essay is long, I mean it is long. Lots of tl;dr ahead, and I bet I didn't even cover half of what I wanted to. Never mind the fact that I wrote a lot of it at four in the morning when I couldn't sleep, uh. Ignore any incoherency, if you would!
Robert was originally taken from right after episode 26 in his series. For those who will never watch or read Ueki (which I ... wouldn't blame you. I LOVE THE SERIES but it's kind of retarded crack. amazing retarded cracK! but I digress), here's a semi-nutshell version of Robert's story:
Robert is a tenkaijin - a celestial being. He is not human. When God made clear that he'd eventually have a tournament where several tenkaijin candidates would get to pick a child from Earth to fight for them in it for the chance to become God themselves, Robert's father Margaret took his two year-old son and dropped him down to Earth. Robert spent the next three years growing up in a village where he was hated by most simply because he wasn't human! He was relatively happy anyway because he was in an orphanage with friends and the director of the orphanage seemed quite fond of him.
... until his friends started to question whether he was really human and used him as a scapegoat when they attempted to steal food. The villagers blamed Robert and came after him with the usual mob-type stuff (including guns in the manga, Fukuchi what). The Director tried to hide him in a shack! Except after Robert went in, the Director locked the door and said he was turning Robert in because he wasn't human and was therefore a monster and hey, he could make some good money off of turning him in!
This is Robert's trauma. It's enough that when Rinko (one of his followers who knew of him when she was younger and later leaves him in order to stop him with Ueki) relates the story of Robert's past, Robert stays very, very silent until the end, and actually looks genuinely off balance when Rinko even brings it up.
BASICALLY. He destroyed the town at age five - no clue whether people died or not since it was never specified, but ... probably - and then disappeared for ten years without a word. Canon is unclear on what happened during those ten years, but we know at some point that Margaret showed up and "saved" him. Presumably, he gave Robert a place to live on Earth and helped train him to become a ten-star tenkaijin.
Tenkaijin power levels are based on star rankings, and they can grow stronger through tests and whatnot. The highest is ten, and getting up to it is insanely difficult. Most tenkaijin never reach that level. For Robert to do so before the age of fifteen says something about his power, skill, and intelligence - this is definitely one of the reasons why he's assumed to be a genius.
Anyway, from that point on, Robert hated humans. He was traumatized by the whole incident in the town when he was five and let that completely color his view of humanity. I sort of assume that when Margaret took Robert under his wing, he made a point of showing him all the shitty things humans do to just about everything, and from there, Robert formed his very ... colorful opinion of them. When the tournament finally came about, Margaret chose Robert to be his fighter since the rules only stated that the person must be on Earth, which Robert was hoho loophole. Robert decided to fight because he wanted to win the blank zai - a talent that could become any sort of ability that the winner wanted - and use it to erase the world and humans with it.
THUS STARTS ROBERT'S PATH OF INSANITY.
Seriously, if you even just watch his first episode (6), you get the feel for how bugfuck crazy he is at that point. The boy is unhinged and thinks nothing of taking people three or four miles up into the sky and then dropping them to their deaths. We never see him kill a candidate in canon (he puts one in the hospital and nearly kills Ueki when they first meet), but it's pretty damn clear that he doesn't care if he kills people. They're just humans!
And after his first brush with Robert, Ueki makes defeating Robert his goal. The first half of the series focuses on their conflict! ... when it doesn't have random episodes like that dude with the diamond forehead and whatnot. Robert, meanwhile, does not care. He thinks it's a game, and spends the whole time screwing around with them. And we get a scene or two of him and Margaret, where he's basically all "love meeeeee father I'll kill them all! =D =D =D" When he and Ueki finally get to fight, he's insanely confident and for a good reason - his ability is to make ideals into reality, which means all his jingi (sacred treasures, GODMODE TENKAIJIN ABILITIES) are perfect. And he basically wipes the floor with Ueki.
But Ueki and his team manage to have an effect on Robert throughout the fight. Ueki keeps standing and talking to him, trying to show him that humans aren't entirely what he thought they were and that, well, he's just plain wrong about everything. And as Ueki keeps talking, Robert gets crazier and crazier and more with the denial. blahblah Ueki finds an opening blahblah they both go down and then their fight gets interrupted.
The thing is that after the fight, once Robert's calmed down just a bit and is more sane, he tells Ueki that while he can't accept his viewpoint on humans and the world just yet, he'll recognize that Ueki himself is someone worthwhile and worth his consideration and fighting with his full strength. Which is ... huge, given that for the entire damn series, Robert had just been crazy and completely disregarded those around him.
Aaand then we get a scene with him back home where he appears to be completely different from the persona he's shown for the past 25 episodes. He's quiet! Reflective! And starts questioning what he thought previously about humans, the world, and everything. When Margaret comes to congratulate him on getting to the second round, Robert turns and asks him if it's really okay for him to erase humanity. Cue the worried father! Oh Robert, you should have told me sooner if you were thinking such things! Then your father would've known!
Margaret then informs Robert that's he's no longer useful and will be taken care of promptly. ♥
IT'S THEN SHOWN that everything that happened in Robert's past? Was orchestrated by Margaret. His goal was to make Robert hate humans so he'd have a hell of an incentive to try and win for him. Basically, the father and the only person Robert seemed to really love and trust? Was responsible for his trauma and all his issues. Margaret then tells Robert that he's not really his father - he's just a demon capable of consuming people and then taking their forms and infiltrated the tournament in order to take down the heavens and God himself. And he has his son Anon do the same to Robert. Basically, Anon eats people and takes their abilities and whatnot, so by eating Robert, he can become Margaret's candidate.
This was the point I took Robert from the last time I apped him! He was just having second thoughts about destroying everything, and after Margaret's betrayal, he had a big chip on his shoulder in regards to people in general. He didn't trust anyone! And he was still pretty damn crazy and unstable on some levels, particularly after realizing that he was just a tool for a good ten to twelve years. There's more on his "monster issues" over here!
Something else, though. Like I mentioned, Robert had the ability to turn ideals into reality. He used it to strengthen his jingi, but he could also idealize things. A tea cup, for example, could become a tea cup that would never break or spill. A knife could become an ideal knife that could cut through anything. Robert could idealize anything, as long as it wasn't living. The only thing is that with these powers comes a cost. For Ueki, he needs trash to make his trees. For Sano, he needed to hold his breath to turn towels into steel. Aaaand for Robert, each unique ideal cost him a year of his lifespan. It's assumed that tenkaijin have finite lifespans, since he makes a point of having people fight for him so that he doesn't have to fight as much.
But on the other hand, Robert doesn't ... really show much regard for his own life in the series. He uses his power on a tea cup, man! His sole goal is to erase the world, and he never really specifies if he'll be destroyed along with it or not (""Erase" means "erase," does it not?"). I assume that Robert's very, very driven towards his goal - Anon even states that his power comes from his hatred for humanity - and he really doesn't care what happens to him at the end.
So. Robert in camp initially was somewhat paranoid, a little crazy, insanely confused about the world around him, and didn't have much of a regard for his own life. He was broken! And then he fell in with his canonmates, Colonel Roy Mustang, and Captain Malcolm Reynolds. I owe Roy an essay which I'll get back to after this one, because really, the Roy essay is sort of a supplement to this. I really need to finish this one before doing his, uh.
Canonmates were pretty straight-forward. Ueki continued the trend he started in their battle, and the others eventually joined in in their own ways. What was really strong was, well, Robert's relationship with Mal. The thing is with Robert is that he tends to sort of- get attached to certain people. The Director was one, and then Margaret was another. And somehow or another, he got very, very attached to Mal.
... A LOT OF SHIT HAPPENED, I don't feel like summarizing it all. The basic gist is that once upon a time, Robert sold Mal out to a psychopath, and Mal was sort of okay with this because it was his job. They talked a lot, and then said psychopath actually struck, and Robert realized that, shit, he was actually starting to sort of care about a human. Cue several ownings, many, many conversations in which the nature of humanity, monsters, and the like are discussed with a dash of violence and drama, and you get the summary of that.
Over the course of nearly two years, there was this constant presence poking at him. And slowly but surely, Robert started to change. He took a lot of what Mal and the others said to heart - Mal particularly, since he was just there so much. There were even incidents that rattled him like the stuff with Rhode, which I'll touch on a bit later. Although that's really another essay, heh. But, well, there was a problem. And that problem was Anon and Margaret.
Robert knew he had to go back. He couldn't just leave camp and go skipping off with Mal or Roy or any of them. He'd even stated back in 2005 that he couldn't go with them and he had to go back and finish things. And come the drop, Robert knew this still held. He'd used a bunch of years of his life as-is, and also? It was his problem. He'd been the one to fall for Margaret and his plans, and it was a sort of ... matter of pride for him to finish it himself. Pride is one of Robert's many failings, as a side note.
He'd never feel right until he finished it, essentially. It was just something he had to do, even if he knew he had no chance. Robert had been purposely pushing away from people like Mal and Roy and other camp-types for months before his drop because of this. And when he finally got to leave - with Mal, no less - he chose to go back to his own world to finish things. Which meant that he basically ditched Mal without a single word, which is probably the single most terrible thing he could have done to him. :Dd
Only, eh ... they didn't quite end the way he thought they would. He got eaten again, which then lined back up with canon. From that point on in canon, we never see Robert again until the last episode, when Ueki saves him from Anon. And at the very end - presumably a day or two after the final battle - Robert meets up with Ueki and awkwardly tries to talk with him before Ueki interrupts him, saying he's glad to see that Robert's okay. Aaand for the first time, we get a real smile from Robert.
End canon for Robert. Except for the omake stuff, where he apparently dated Rinko but then triggered her, so she beat him and gave him a new phobia, to which I say HAHAHAHA.
I've been saying that Robert spent two months outside of camp (time passes differently, blahblah, etc). One month was spent finishing up canon, and the other month was a lull between end of canon and camp. Former Ueki canon-muns and Tomo and I have many hilarious ideas of exactly what happened during that time, but the nutshell version is that Robert spent his time back home contemplating stuff. There was no more Margaret, he really didn't have anything left back home, and ... God had restored his lifespan to what it originally was, which meant that he wasn't in danger of just croaking it any time soon.
And there were things from camp which never sat right with him - one of which was Rhode Camelot. Long story short! Rhode killed Mal, and Mal was arguably Robert's most important person at that point in time. And yet, he knew that he stood no chance against Rhode because he was so unstable, so he kept from fighting her. But post-canon, Robert is much more stable. Things are finished, he's not constantly watching his back, and he can finally take a deep breath, relax, and focus on who he wants to be rather than constantly fighting.
Something that Robert has said repeatedly to people is that he came back to camp because he has things he must do here. And that's true! There's two reasons: the first and most obvious being to kill Rhode, and the second being to regain a foothold on who exactly he is, interact with more humans, and maybe eventually see if he can make things right.
Robert recognizes that he was pretty damn crazy, and he's not sorry for a lot of it. Shit happens! He does feel bad about certain things, such as his involvement with sending certain people to Hell and whatnot. But at this point, he's very much trying to move on. Ueki basically brushed aside any of their past differences in that final exchange, and it was encouragement for him to move on. What happened happened, but things were different now. He's different!
So. Currently, in camp, Robert's finding his foothold, which is why he's out and talking with people. He's not necessarily trying to make friends, and he still finds that difficult - on one level because he knows he's kind of a shitty friend and may not really deserve it, and on another level because he generally sucks with actual social interaction. He wants to be saner as well. Not sane necessarily, because he recognizes that there's some value in his insanity! But he's learning more, about the people around him and about himself.
He does recognize that he's relatively sane now, actually - he had a conversation with Kharg where if it had been a year ago and he hadn't been post-canon, he would have simply snapped and tried to kill Kharg for what he was saying. But instead, Robert kept his cool and didn't draw a weapon once, effectively owning him with his words. Now that he's realized this, he's going to get a bit more cocky and confident, in a way like he was before he lost all his footing in canon, but without the underlying malevolence that he had.
Robert's growing up is what it all sums up to. And he's trusting people a bit more! Which just means that he's being less of an asshole to some people. The Doctor, for example, probably would've gotten a much colder reception if he'd talked with Robert back in 2005-2007, whereas Robert is pretty much enthralled by him now. Haruka wouldn't have gotten him to talk as much, Teito would've been brushed off almost immediately, Kharg would have been KILLED IN THE FACE ... you get the idea. I mean, he interacted with Rabi his first time in camp and didn't care for him at all, but this time around? Robert likes Rabi quite a bit! There are now all these people that Robert is oddly fascinated with (and that's only a few, because I know I'm missing types like Raimei, Emiri, etc) and willing to talk with more. His list of people he'd talk with is now at least five times bigger than it used to be.
HE STILL FULLY INTENDS TO FIGHT RHODE ONE DAY. And kill her if he can. And he's accepted that the choices he's made will have consequences. Robert knows it! He's ... not entirely okay with it, per ce, but he's accepted that what he's done may have consequences, and if he has to deal with them? He'll deal with them.
I never really, mm, bought into the COMPLETE 180 that canon shows us with Robert, like I mentioned briefly in other posts. I don't really think he'll ever be "okay" or anywhere near as stable as he used to be before everything went to hell over ten years ago. I do think, though, that he has the capacity to think for himself and try and shift himself away from how he was, even if it's just bit by bit. It's just that now instead of taking very small, slight steps, he's actually making progress - albeit, ehhh, only a little bit of progress.