Nemo

heavensickness Answer:

(tbh my thoughts are not organized or coherent, it’s just me comparing them to each other while i’m at the bus lol)

I think that instead of just portraying them as polar opposites, their dynamic is used to draw attention to their most noticeable and most important features - their core features if you will. It’s hard to list all the things I’ve noticed right now since I am a forgetful person but the first example that comes to my mind is their families and their ways of upbringing, which has fundamentally shaped both of their characters.

Onion comes from a big family with an openly troubled parental figure (his father) that disturbs the peace within the family. The fights in his house are loud and they are impossible to ignore. On the other hand, nightowl is an only child (small family) whose parents are still together and seemingly uptight, “proper” people where the disturbance comes from deep within the family; quiet, repressed, and ignored.

these are just my headcanons but I believe that onion was brought up to ultimately become the savior of his family; the perfect eldest child who can’t and won’t do any mistakes, who will put his family back together like a broken puzzle, and will give his mother & his siblings the safety and peace they have been deprived of their whole lives. The family is broken, he will be the one to fix it. And when we look at nightowl, he was brought up to be convinced that he is the problem. He is the disturbance staining the perfect family picture, the problem child, the black sheep. The family is right, he is the one breaking it.

As a result, we see two people who were brought up under seemingly opposite environments with one fatal common point: They are both crushed under the weight of the role they were forced to play, and they develop their own coping mechanisms. I think onion is someone who is in utter denial about how he actually feels. It is not that he is not exhausted or worried, it is that he can’t be. He can’t ever look back, he can’t ask for help, he can’t lean on anyone else. That is his cross to bear, even though it is actually not. And nightowl is like an open wound when it comes to feelings. He bleeds and bleeds, his desperation is not something that he can hide - or he doesn’t choose to hide it. He needs to be loved. He needs to be taken care of. He wants to feel that he is worth it. This is why onion thinks that nightowl is over-emotional: They are actually starving in the same ways but onion buries it deep inside whereas nightowl showcases it. In my personal experience; when someone scoffs at specific emotions you display, it is generally because they feel the same thing with you but they like to believe that they can hide it well unlike you so they are above you in that sense. Onion could also vent in the server, right? He could “whine” about his exams, his part-time job, how he needs someone to love him, how he needs to hear someone telling him “good job!” just for once in his entire damn life, telling him that he is not alone and he’s got this yadda yadda, but it is not proper. No one wants to hear him, onion of all people, talk about how weak he feels. He is above it. He is not nightowl, no, never! He wouldn’t can’t do that.

Onion represses it all by throwing himself into schoolwork, part-time jobs, exercising, and studying; because they are the “right” things to do, proper ways to channel his negative feelings into. That’s what he thinks all while denying that he will eventually burn himself out someday. On the other hand, nightowl embraces unhealthy habits, drinking, meaningless and toxic relationships, and god knows what else because unlike onion, he wants to burn. He wants to let everything go, he wants to destroy himself until he can’t feel anything anymore. In conclusion, through polar opposite habits, they are both destroying themselves. One in impenetrable denial, the other one staring at the truth and completely embracing it.

I know that I focus on family backgrounds a lot but I do believe that our families shape our lives from then on, positive or negative. The reason why they clash so much is that they both remind each other of someone. Someone who has shattered something inside them with no way of fixing it. Onion overall has a blunt and judgemental personality, but he becomes downright cruel when he hears that nightowl has been drinking and ignoring his responsibilities again. Like his own father. And nightowl’s infamous lashing out is so sudden and shocking, and it happens right after the night he was berated by his mother and onion just triggers it all with his demeaning, condescending attitude. Which reminds nightowl about his own mother.

In each other, they see mirrors from a parallel universe and they just can’t fucking stand it. Onion, the perfect, polished, self-sacrificing son nightowl’s mother always wanted to have and made nightowl’s life a living hell to mold him into. Carefree, lovable nightowl who is open about his feelings and has the leisure to be silly and to have fun, which is exactly what onion can never have because of the responsibilities he had to bear since he was a child.

In short, they are not opposites. They are distorted mirrors to each other.