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1 year ago

Oliver's last conversations with each of Farleigh, Felix, and Venetia are so consistently fascinating to me. Each of Farleigh and Venetia think that they are calling Oliver out, forcing him to face the harsh truths of his own insignificance, while Oliver stands passively by and lets them reveal their own hypocrisy before revealing the true fragility of their positions, the power that he has over their lives.

Farleigh towers over Oliver, belittling him against the backdrop of this party that is supposedly for Oliver and is full of people whose regard for Oliver spans from indifference to outright hostility. Yet while he thinks that he's giving Oliver his victory speech, gloating over the fact that it is Farleigh, not Oliver, who will stay at Saltburn after this summer, he's also admitting to the tenuous nature of his own position there. "I was invited," he tells Oliver, when Oliver questions his presence at the party, along with, "I'll always come back," and, "This is my house."

The contradiction that Farleigh doesn't even realize he's admitted to, however, is that people don't have to be invited back to their house. He's always been as much a guest as Oliver, but he's the one who can't face the possibility of getting kicked out for good. Thus, Farleigh is the one who is really clinging to hope instead of action, the one who will never be fighting quite as hard as Oliver to ensure that possibility doesn't come true.

Farleigh gloats over Oliver's loss and takes Oliver's silence as proof that he is right. When really, Oliver doesn't gloat or bluster or protest. Oliver listens to what people tell him, and then Oliver acts.

It's the same thing we see in Oliver's confrontation with Venetia in the bathtub after Felix's funeral.

Venetia is clearly devestated by her brother's loss, and she is looking for someone to lash out at. And what a convenient, easy target Oliver seems to make. So polite, so soft-spoken, so awkward and innocent and small.

A harmless moth, batting up against the windows. At the same time, a parasite, consuming what wasn't his to take. Eating holes in her family - her family who would have greedily consumed every last drop of the sad, pitiful life he fed them for their own amusement, before casting him aside like a moth-eaten sweater abandoned in the back of a closet.

She calls him out, too, for wearing Felix's aftershave (but not the fact that he's wearing Felix's bathrobe, interestingly enough), while she's the one sprawled in Felix's bathtub. "I bet you're even wearing his underwear," she tells him scornfully, and he kisses her to prove that she'll still kiss him back, that for all her mocking words she's just as desperate as he is to cling to any scraps of Felix left behind. That for all her words to the contrary, he is a scrap of Felix left behind.

And then the harmless moth puts holes in her wrists, puts her in a hole in the ground, and walks away.

In contrast, the confrontations with Farleigh and Venetia make Oliver's confrontation with Felix in the maze all the more devastating in a different way.

With Felix, Oliver isn't quiet. He isn't timid or passive or small, and he is trying desperately not to listen when it's Felix telling him to go away, to stop, to give up, with nothing else he can latch onto for hope of a different outcome. With Felix, Oliver shouts, he protests, he snarls. He loses control of his voice and his body, even pins Felix up against the minotaur statue while he begs Felix to listen to him because he doesn't know what else to do; all he has are these words that he desperately wants to be true, that Felix doesn't want to hear.

It's Felix who is forced into silence while Oliver talks, and it is Felix who finally sees the truth that Oliver can't bear to face in himself.

It's Felix who tells Oliver, "You make my fucking blood run cold."

And he's the only one who gets it right.


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1 year ago

Going through the Saltburn tag, finding new bad takes to block...

Saltburn isn't failed class commentary. It's a good example of a movie with a decently foreshadowed twist ending.

I've seen people come up with some absolutely wild theories about how Oliver must have been lying about everything through the whole movie, but very few of them seem to have noticed the examples we do get of Oliver lying early on.

Maybe because it's easy to miss the first time you watch the movie, and some of it requires understanding just how good Oliver is at listening and retaining information he's heard. However! The concept of, "Oliver's a liar," is set up early in the movie.

"I had no idea Farleigh was your cousin." Wrong! Their shared tutorial professor brings up Farleigh's mom who used to be Frederica Catton in their first tutorial. Oliver absolutely remembered this, he already knew that Felix was Felix Catton by the time of the Bike Incident, and he had definitely put it together by the time he started hanging out with Felix that this meant they were cousins. It seems like such a small thing to lie about, but if I had to guess, I'd bet Oliver was hoping it would get Felix to tell him more about his own family instead of asking questions about Oliver's. (There are a few examples, too, where Oliver asks leading questions or uses smaller lies to try and manipulate a conversation towards giving him information that he can use to make things go his way.)

"Oh! Were you here with friends?" "They've just left, actually." Says Oliver, as he turns away from Michael Gavey's look of betrayal, happily ditching him to hang out with Felix instead.

The whole, stalkery watching through the open curtains as Felix had sex with a girl who clearly looked down on Oliver. I feel like this one doesn't need explanation. Perhaps not outright lying, here, but definitely the actions of a man who is Hiding Things.

There's almost certainly more, but those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head, all of which occur pretty early in the movie, and all of which foreshadow the movie's actual message and the reveal we get about Oliver down the line.


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1 year ago

Saltburn does have an important message that a lot of people seem to miss, which is that having sympathetic motivations or a sympathetic backstory doesn't actually negate cruelty or make it right to make other people bear the burden of your own insecurity and pain.

Oliver is a deeply sympathetic character, in that he's awkward and lonely and gets preyed on by a manipulative rich boy who likes to feel like a savior of friendless losers that he eventually gets bored of. Yet Oliver winds up dealing with this by climbing his way to the top of a pile of awful people, resorting to all their worst behaviors to get himself there, and the harm he causes is wrong regardless of the sympathy of his starting circumstances.

Similarly, Farleigh and Venetia are sympathetic characters who take out their own pain on other people (primarily on Oliver, during the movie).

Farleigh is the half black son of Sir James's wayward sister, both a part of the family and yet also treated like this definitely racist family's longest running charity project at the same time. He's constantly performing for his racist family, constantly feeling like an outsider in his own family, never quite as 'good' as them, never quite as 'worthy'. This does make him a deeply sympathetic character, but it doesn't make him any less of a bully towards Oliver (and, likely, other people we don't see on screen, since it's Oliver's story we're watching). He is deeply yet casually cruel towards total strangers, as a way of covering up for his own insecurities over the way he's treated by the Cattons. He's sympathetic, but he still causes harm in a way that isn't excused by being sympathetic.

Venetia, too, seems to have a very sympathetic background, from what little we see of her. She has a mother who gossips about her eating disorder and low self-esteem to relative strangers. Felix finds it completely believable that she would be wandering around drunk at night trying to kiss his friends, and he only thinks it makes her embarrassing, with no indication that this behavior should actually be worrying, if it had been true. She also doesn't seem to do anything with her life except hang out in her home developing drinking problems. She also hits on her brother's friends even while knowing that he will cut them off as friends if they sleep with her, and she responds to her own pain or rejection by lashing out with cruelty in return. Both times she feels hurt - whether by Oliver directly, when he picks Felix over her, or because she is grieving and Oliver is simply an easy target for her pain - she takes out her own hurt on Oliver by trying to make him feel small and hurt instead. It's sympathetic, sure, but it's not actually okay, either. It's sympathetic, but it's still cruelty for the sake of cruelty, and it's still wrong.

One moral of Saltburn is that returning cruelty with cruelty, whether it's revenge or cruelty turned on random strangers to assuage one's own pain, leads only to more hurt and pain and suffering.

One message of Saltburn that I'd argue is very important is that a person can be sympathetic and also still be wrong.


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1 year ago

Every time I watch Saltburn, I swear I cannot tell that the eggs Oliver is served during that first breakfast are even cooked. Other people have said the eggs are sunny-side-up, though, so I'll assume that's correct.

It still means that Oliver was served the wrong eggs. He asked for over easy, which the eggs he got were definitely not. The whites were still clear on top, which is both a different taste and a different texture than over easy eggs.

It also means that the Cattons' personal cook(s) not only made Oliver the wrong eggs, but that Duncan then brought those eggs out to Oliver with no comment.

The Cattons are absolutely rich enough to hire cooks who know the difference between sunny-side-up eggs and over easy eggs, though. Even if the cook messed it up, Duncan as the family's Butler should have caught it before the plate reached the table.

I've seen people interpret this scene as Oliver making an early power play with the staff, seeing if he can get away with ordering eggs and then sending it back, but that only works if he was given the right eggs in the first place.

He wasn't.

The staff gave Oliver the wrong food.

Oliver wasn't making a power play with the Saltburn staff.

The eggs scene is the staff testing Oliver, to see if he'll roll over and not make trouble, in order to keep his wealthy hosts happy.

It's the staff treating Oliver like his (supposed) poverty makes him a gold digger who is reaching above his station and needs to be knocked down a peg, all for having the sheer audacity to try and eat breakfast with his friend, at his friend's house that he was invited to, when he wasn't told what to expect in advance and while being treated like a zoo animal by his friend's family without a single peep from his supposed friend while all this happens.

Oliver just wanted to eat some fuckin' breakfast with his friend, though.


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1 year ago

I feel like one conversation that Saltburn wants to have is a warning against measuring one's self-esteem in terms of validation from other people.

The way I see Oliver, he has far more (and more healthy) self-esteem at the start of the movie than he does by the end.

At the start of the movie, Oliver believes that he can and will make friends on his own merit, friends who see and value him for himself.

By the end of the movie, Oliver has Saltburn, but he's now a lonely king of an empty castle, one who isolates himself and no longer seeks out human connection.

He let his self-esteem be measured by the Cattons' approval because it felt good when he thought they were kind people who liked him; when he realized that approval and kindness was all hollow and temporary, it destroyed him.


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1 year ago

It occurs to me that, while Oliver's final "Big Evil Villain" monologue is just him lying to himself to pretend that he won and he's happy, even though in reality he's a lonely, unhappy recluse with a coke addiction to fill his days, he's not the only one who lies to himself this way in the movie.

Both of Farleigh and Venetia's final monologues at Oliver are their own versions of, "I'm a winner, you're a loser, and I'm totally happy about this and for sure not desperately unhappy inside at all."

Even Oliver's final monologue is something he learns from others during the film, only to turn around and do his version, as usual, to The Most extreme.


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1 year ago

It's funny, on the surface, when Oliver tells Elspeth's comatose body that he knows how to work, when he calls people like her lazy dogs who don't know how to work. At this point, we the audience know full well that Oliver grew up comfortably middle class, and then he had presumably enough fuck off money from James Catton after that summer to live comfortably until his return to Saltburn.

That surface level incongruity, however, hides a deeper truth - a truth that I doubt even Oliver, by that point, would have been able to acknowledge.

There was something for which people like the Cattons never had to work; something for which people like Oliver, like Pamela, almost certainly like all of Elspeth's and Felix's poor dear friends over the years, worked desperately hard for the barest scraps of: acceptance, friendship, respect from their peers.

That's what Oliver lacked growing up, what he wanted desperately but didn't know how to achieve, what he got a taste of through Felix; it was that taste of what he'd always wanted that he clung to with such starved and anxious desperation to keep it that it drove him into the obsession which ultimately paved the way for his loss of Felix, too.

Once Elspeth is dead, it is also what Oliver, in a sense, has finally found a way out of, if only by reaching a position in which he effectively has no peers. He's now an obscenely wealthy recluse, set apart from even the other wealthy elite by his made-up backstory and the way he got his wealth.

And thus, by way of having no peers to seek acceptance, respect, or friendship from, Oliver has finally reached a position where he may not be able to get those things which he craved so badly they destroyed him, but at least also can't fail to get those things either, now that there's no one left he needs/wants to seek them from.


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1 year ago

Do you think Oliver would’ve been happy if he could have Felix by force? Suppose he could blackmail or trap Felix into being with him, or if he’d simply chosen to grab Felix in the maze instead of killing him. Would he have preferred an unwilling Felix over no Felix at all?

Personally, I don't think Oliver would have been happy with that situation. He did lie to keep Felix as a friend, but what he wanted most was for someone to like him.

When he was lying about his backstory, he could tell himself that those lies were just details, but as he tells Felix in the maze, "I'm still the same person, yeah?" In other words, he could tell himself that the person Felix liked hanging out with was still the real Oliver, and the fake backstory was just the details that let him get close enought to Felix to get a chance at his friendship. Hanging out with Felix made Oliver feel good, still, because Felix was one of the few/only people Oliver interacted with who seemed consistently pleased to see or talk to him.

If Oliver had to actively force or blackmail Felix into being with him, then every time he saw Felix he would be reminded that Felix didn't like him, that Felix didn't want to be around him, that Felix was only there because he had no other choice.

Given that it was being unambiguously, definitively confronted with the fact that Felix doesn't like him anymore - that Felix was, in fact, afraid of him now - is what drove Oliver to kill Felix in the maze in the first place?

I don't think Oliver would have chosen the option to keep Felix with him by force, even if that option had been available to him. If he did take that option, I don't think it would have made him happy.


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11 months ago

Still obsessed with Saltburn, never gonna stop being obsessed with Saltburn. It feels like there's new things to notice every time I rewatch even part of it, but there's also certain lines that I've loved since the first time I saw the movie. Lines that make me so baffled when people say Saltburn isn't that deep, because even these casual lines pack in so many layers.

For example, there's the one right after Farleigh gets kicked out over the Palissey plates (which none of the Cattons questioned him trying to steal, even though he was actually set up by Oliver), when Venetia says to Felix and Oliver about Farleigh,

"He's more spoiled than we are. He gets everything he asks for."

That line? It is so brutal, like kudos to Emerald Fennell for writing it and to Alison Oliver for delivering it with such casually earnest perfection.

On the one hand, it's a ridiculous claim that, "He gets everything he asks for," when we just watched Oliver overhear an argument between Farleigh and Felix a few scenes earlier in which Farleigh was all but begging for something and getting very much denied what he was asking for.

On the other hand, it's a perfect example of one major way that privilege maintains its power. Even if you take Venetia's statement as hyperbole and assume that Farleigh still gets a lot of what he asks for, then we could turn that around and say Felix and Venetia get everything they want without even having to ask.

And not having to ask means they don't have to outright acknowledge they wanted everything other people just give them, and therefore they're not the ones who go around asking for handouts like someone "more spoiled than they are".

And it's good class commentary, but it's not just about money and class. It's the same reason that Felix gets so defensive in that argument Oliver overheard, when Farleigh brings up race in a roundabout way, and Felix acknowledges that Farleigh was bringing up his race and then turns around anyway and tells Farleigh,

"You're family! We hardly even notice you're... different."

Of course they notice that Farleigh is "different," but Felix can't outright say that the difference in question is Farleigh's black skin, or that the Cattons do absolutely think that makes Farleigh different than they are, because to acknowledge Farleigh's skin color would be to acknowledge their own privilege by proxy.

And if the Cattons acknowledge their privilege, then they might actually have to think a little more deeply about how they use it and how they treat others who are marginalized in ways that they aren't, if they still wanted to think of themselves as good people.


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11 months ago

Another way Saltburn displays some brutally insightful class commentary:

Oliver pretends that he grew up poor, with some poverty porn stereotype of a childhood including mentally ill drug dealer parents, and the Cattons eat that shit up because of course the Poor People have Problems, isn't it just so sad?

And then not one person (except Farleigh, who mostly didn't like Oliver already for personal reasons) even questions when one of the wealthy, spoiled Catton children dies of an overdose and the other one kills herself because she was mentally unwell.

Maybe if that family had spent less time looking for voyeristic poverty porn in the guise of 'friendship' with those less fortunate, and spent more time looking after each other and caring about the problems running rampant in their own home, they might have fared a little better for it.

Unfortunately for them, the mythology of their own importance, their own untouchable perfection, a family with no problems that couldn't be easily fixed or managed or swept under the rug, was crucial to maintaining the myth that they in anyway deserved everything that they had, and thus because they deserved it didn't have to think too deeply about all the ways they used their wealth and power only to benefit themselves.


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11 months ago

Some day, I am going to write a treatise on how Oliver Quick based the logic for every single one of his choices in Saltburn on things he was actively, verbally told by other characters, and how this is a core character trait for Oliver that culminates in his choice to tell himself who he is by the end of the movie in his monologue to Elspeth's comatose body.

This treatise will also conclusively demonstrate that Oliver Quick is an impatient bitch who only gets more impulsive in his choices as the story goes on, up until he kills Felix and finally can wait as long as it takes to getback to Saltburn, because he finally knows for sure that the one friend he ever had will still be there in the same place and same state Oliver left him in no matter how long he takes to return.

For now, though, I have too many other things to finish and will not let myself be distracted by a project that will definitely take longer than the brainworms try to tell me.

But yes. It is one of my favorite details of Saltburn. If you listen like Oliver does, his logic may be a little mad, but it's not nonexistent. Every single choice he makes can be traced back to something someone says to him, because ultimately that poor lil' gremlin boy just desperately wanted to fit in and had no idea how to do that.


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10 months ago

Oliver Quick wanted friends. He struggled to make friends, and his mom told him it was because he was so clever, and so he threw himself into academics and got into Oxford and discovered that even in a place that was supposed to value Clever People he still didn't fit in.

But Oliver wanted friends. He wanted friends who wanted to be around him, and he didn't want to be around people who took pleasure in tearing him down or people who were determined to label him as a friendless loner who should give up on wanting anyone else to like him for him.

He wanted to connect with other people who wanted him to be happy, and who he could make happy in turn.

And too many people seem to think the message there is that a person who wants friendship but struggles to find it must be inherently creepy. That Oliver deserved to be made fun of, deserved to be looked at with suspicion or labeled a creep who all the Cattons should have been more wary of from the start, just because he was a weird kid whose social skills lagged well behind his peers.

That is not, in fact, the message of Saltburn. Oliver does not represent the inherent creepiness of the average weirdo loner who dreams of being liked instead of loudly proclaiming their pride in not fitting in, anymore than Farleigh or Venetia are meant to send the message that being mixed race or a woman turns people into bullies or predisposes them to cruelty in response to rejection or their own personal pain.

The message is that hurt people often wind up hurting other people, no matter who they are or where they come from. That hurt in any form can lead anyone to lash out as a way to cope with feeling small and angry, but all that does is perpetuate a cycle of further violence and make more people hurt.

That no matter how real and unfair the source of your pain, no matter how valid you are to be angry at something or someone who hurt you, there is no pain or valid anger that grants anyone immunity from lashing out too hard or at the wrong people and becoming one more cruel person who just wants to drag others down too.

That wanting friends, wanting connection and community and enough social power that no one else can make you feel small or afraid, aren't inherently terrible things. That if you don't own your own choices anyway and take responsibility for the outlets you find for your anger no matter how unfairly you've been treated by the people around you, these things can very easily turn into justifications for doing some pretty terrible things of your own.


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10 months ago

So... Saltburn is not a romcom and Emerald Fennell has explicitly said that we're meant to read Felix as an awful person, yet there's so much talk about Oliver's frankly shoddy manipulation that worked 99% only through luck and Catton hubris, and so little talk about Felix's sketchy as hell behavior.

By which I mean, how Felix Catton displays a number of deliberate emotionally manipulative tactics towards Oliver and waves massive red flags all over the screen throughout the movie.

He love bombs Oliver in their first meeting, which is a deliberate manipulation tactic designed to overwhelm the victim with affection and positive attention early on - with out of the gate love declarations and overly effusive praise among the hallmark love bombing examples - and often is a precursur to nastier manipulative tactics down the line such as extreme withdrawal of affection when angered even by minor things (like when Felix ghosts Oliver after Oliver pretty accurately calls him spoiled for letting his room get so disgusting), and attempting to control the victim's appearance and behavior (the first that come immediately to mind include things Felix does when Oliver first arrives in Saltburn, such as: failing to inform Oliver in advance that the staff would go through his suitcase while he was occupied elsewhere and inform Felix's mother of anything they found noteworthy without Oliver's knowledge or consent; failing to inform Oliver that he would need dressy atire for dinners at Saltburn, and thus locking Oliver into wearing Felix's old clothes; even the razor Felix gets Oliver without any advance warning, under the excuse that Elspeth requires all the men in the house to be clean shaven).

Felix is also the one to initiate the oversharing of personal information during their first real conversation, in which he shares a bunch of very personal and likely traumatic details from Farleigh's past (in spite of knowing already that Farleigh and Oliver already know each other and don't get along), after which he badgers Oliver into divulging private details of his own past. Oliver even initially tries to offer a more true but less satisfying answer that, "there's not much really to say," about his life, which is a perfectly reasonable way to answer personal questions from someone you barely know. People are allowed boundaries around when and to whom they divulge personal information, whether or not that information involves trauma, but Felix keeps pushing until Oliver gives him an answer he finds more satisfying, at which point he rewards Oliver with more love bomb-y praise and attention.

And then Felix promptly turns around and proves exactly how right Oliver was not to trust him with anything private and true, by sharing Oliver's private confessions with all of his friends - including Farleigh, who, as Felix is still aware, already knows Oliver and doesn't like him.

(It's not unreasonable, either, to read this as part of his isolating Oliver, when he shares all of Oliver's private 'confessions' with his friends at Oxford, classist kids who wind up looking down on Oliver for his supposed poverty, only to then get mad at Farleigh for sharing the same information with Felix's family - specifically Felix's mother, from whom we can infer Felix gets his voyeuristic interest in lonely people with troubled pasts - and prove with his comment to Farleigh of, "that's private!" that he knew the whole time that he was sharing information that should have been private behind Oliver's back.)

Then Felix takes this shiny new friend of his, a guy who supposedly grew up in a house full of drug and alcohol problems that destroyed his parents' lives, promptly invites him to all sorts of parties and bars and clubs full of rampant alcohol and drug abuse, and convinces him to develop an addiction of his own when he gets him to start smoking.

And of course, to top off the big red flag behaviors of a controlling manipulator, there's Felix's massive boundary violations when he feels entitled not only to answer Oliver's phone without even telling him about it, but then plans a surprise visit to Oliver's mother in spite of knowing, at that point in time, only that Oliver supposedly did not get along with his mother and viewed her only as a toxic and traumatic part of his childhood that he wants nothing to do with anymore. In terms of Felix's behavior there, it does not matter that Oliver was lying, because Felix did not know that Oliver was lying. He simply saw no issue with forcing Oliver into what he only had cause to believe would be a stressful and traumatic experience, one that Oliver had explicitly stated he did not want before even getting to Saltburn and then repeatedly asked Felix not to do on the drive to Prescot, because Felix does what Felix wants even when his supposed best mate is literally terrified and begging him to turn around in the car next to him.

Oliver displays his share of toxic behavior and makes a series of increasingly terrible choices culminating in murder, but Felix is very far from an innocent victim.

Oliver thought Felix genuinely liked him, and he wanted to give Felix what he wanted in return. The problem with that, and one of the big reasons things went so badly for them both (in, honestly, such a narratively satisfying way!), is that the things Felix wanted from a 'friend' were unhealthy things from the start.


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10 months ago

For everyone who finds Oliver's behavior confusing or illogical or just plain weird in Saltburn: that's likely how Oliver felt all the time about most other people around him.

Being neurodivergent in a world that expects everyone to think and act and engage with others in the same way (but never quite spells out what that way *is*) doesn't just mean that you act in a way that other people find weird and confusing. It means that you often find the way other people act and interact with the world to be weird and confusing right back.

Unlike Michael Gavey, who decided everyone else's weird confusing behavior was a them problem that he didn't care to understand, Oliver wanted to understand his "normal" peers and fit in with them.

Unfortunately, Oliver fixated on a guy who was popular because of his money and good looks but was also so privileged that he only had incredibly warped and unhealthy relationships of his own with his peers, so Oliver's best attempts to learn how to fit in and get other people to like him by pleasing and emulating Felix wound up with him murdering his way into lonely castle ownership and a coke addiction, instead of making any actual friends.

Meanwhile, said rich guy and his family never "saw through" Oliver's actions, because Oliver had fed them a story where all his socially awkward traits could be explained by a background of external trauma sources rather than an inherently neurodivergent view of social interactions, so they expected him to be a neurotypical kid with Trauma and thus neatly explained away any unexpected behavior while still assuming that his behavior in general would be mostly normal by the standards they were used to.


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