Friends Forever?

[miss_shad]

Okay, this is something that's been bugging me for a while and has stalled progress on my story in a big way

Comments

[twilight2000]

I suspect you could take "male" out of the equation and just look for obsession. Reasons for obsession with another human being in Japanese culture are likely different from Western cultural reasons, but some Western ones I can think of:
1. in the older man's head, the younger became the little brother he never had. He idealized him and wants to protect him from all the eveil he had to go through.
2. Similar (slightly different) - the young man was the one bright spot in an otherwise wretched childhood - he want to "pay that back" and fix the kid.
3. He feels guilty for having lost touch, feels whatever befell the young man to turn him into this current "couldn't care less" guy is *his* fault and owes him reparations for having failed his friend.

[yiskah]

Yeah, I was thinking about a version of #3 - is there any way he might blame himself for the trauma his friend suffered? Guilt can lead to some powerful obsession.

[twilight2000]

Sure - depending on what happened. If it was something that was an outgrowth of something that they a) used to do or b) the older man encouraged the younger man to try - than for sure.

And hell, Guilt is weird anyway - he could blame himself for just being "too absent" - the old "If I'd been there, I could have avoided this" thing ;>

[zolalupin]

i don't know if this will help you or not, but the japanese call each other "sempai" and "kouhai", senior and junior respectively. even if the difference in age is very slight, they are very big on calling each other this, and take it VERY seriously. kouhai look up to their sempai's as teachers. all of twilight2000's suggestions were very good and i think you could do a combination of all those suggestions.

as a starting point, would it be possible for the younger boy's parents to have also divorced, after the boys lost touch? the older has experienced divorce himself, and thus he would feel he could have helped the younger through it if he had been there. but as he was too young to remember his parents divorce, the younger may scoff at this and think he doesn't truly understand what he's going through.

[furnacechant]

That was my thought, too---there's kind of a culture of mentoring that we don't really have an equivalent to. It might not make a whole reason in itself but it would be bound to intensify something that might otherwise seem trivial.

[fenm]

Also, close friends sometimes refer to each other as "brother" or "sister" even if there's no blood relationship.

[twilight2000]

Doesn't even need to have been "deliberate" - but something like "I encouraged him to go into the army, he's got PTSD, it's my fault" or "I encouraged him into a career that would make any woman leave him" and she did - so not "deliberate" in the sense of encouraging him to do something specifically stupid, but something that, as a mentor, he could have helped clean up if he'd been around to do so.

[angelinw8ing13]

In their childhood the younger could have saved the older one's life. My roommate in college was from Japan and when I asked her this question she said Honor still carries a lot of weight there. It's almost like a debate that needs to be repaid. Her words were "old fashion yes but still true today especially if the older's mother raised him in a traditional home." Hope this help.

[emerald_green37]

I was thinking along the same lines, especially if the younger one was hurt in some way while rescuing him and the older one didn't know/realize it. That would give a reason for the younger one to resent him now. The older one is fixated on the debt to be paid, the younger one remembers only the hurt his rescuing caused and the fact that the older one wasn't around to help or care for him afterwards. Especially if the original event happened right before they were separated. That would also explain why the older one didn't know the problems it caused.

[profbutters]

I was thinking possibly the other way around: saving someone's life means you are in some way responsible for that person's life. (Is that wrong? Someone correct me if I'm wrong.) That too might create a bond, and perhaps an expectation of a relationship that the younger man--perhaps because he doesn't want to be reminded of the event, perhaps for other reasons--doesn't reciprocate. Not having that sort of relationship might be confusing to your older guy. It's supposed to be there, so it must be there, causing him to break all kinds of social boundaries. Something like that might spiral out of control.

[angelinw8ing13]

I wouldn't say you're wrong just a different way to look at it. I personally have never heard of it but I can see it. And you are totally right if that's the way it is taken it sounds like that could totally spiral out of control.

[teufelsgebraeu]

I once had a friend like this. She was like: "Why do you have other friends than me? You should spend all your available time with me and none of those other plebeians you call friends or otherwise I'll be disappointed". I think she was obsessed with a side-dish of possessive and super clingy.
Needless to say, it was super creepy, so I soon broke all contact. I don't know if that's the angle you would want to give your story though. xD
But in general I can say that fixated people like this suffer from extremely low self-esteem and think of people as possessions rather than, you know, people.

[lolmac]

fixated people like this suffer from extremely low self-esteem and think of people as possessions rather than, you know, people

Definitely true in many incidents in Western culture, but not a given in Japanese culture, where a person can feel intense responsibility and attachment without regarding the other person as an object or a possession.

However, since it's creepily frequent in Western culture, if the OP doesn't want this to be part of the fixation, s/he might want to clarify that this is not the case. Otherwise, Western readers might assume or project it.