Spade's Issues

[bestamontillado]

The fracture lines he snapped along were probably always there to some extent; Spade grew up in a world of cutthroat politics where being "Nice" would get you used and discarded.

And it's very obvious that he HATED that world, which is likely what led to him actually being fairly ethical when he was younger and more on the progressive-revolutionary side than just going with some of his darker patterns and turning into a monster early; he hated it and took the "Because I hate this and think it's wrong I want to do something about it". It's outright said that part of him meeting Elena was that she was like-minded, and it's entirely likely they met around some of the fringe revolutionary circles and "secret societies" of the day. Still, it was a situation where they were two people dealing with a world where everything was entrenched and against them.

And then Elena met Giotto and introduced them, and encouraged Spade to join the Vongola.

The Vongola were the first chance he had to seriously do something and have a real, visible impact; it didn't hurt that, at the time, between some of his own inclinations towards lashing against the kind of cutthroat politics he'd grown disgusted with and Elena's influence, he actually did share the ethics and believe that those ideals were something that COULD be brought into the world. He was a Mist Guardian, which meant being an underhanded, manipulative, secretive bastard with fingers on all the strings and in everyone's secrets, but all of that was focused on the morals and ideals he shared with Elena and Giotto, and therefore the Vongola's agenda, making him an EXCELLENT intelligence agent.

This is where there's a few big, important pillars of his mentality while he was with the Vongola. Elena had probably been a strong encouraging influence on his sense of morality; the relationship with her, and her ideals, were enough to outweigh any temptations to compromise his morals for pragmatism or cynicism. A second was that he still had faith in the more humanitarian ideals, faith enough to've been with Elena and still picking away at things before he joined the Vongola and was given a good way to do something about it; he wouldn't have joined the Vongola if he didn't believe in the cause strongly enough to stake everything on it. The third is that before Giotto, they hadn't been able to get very far with things; there was probably a lot of political maneuvering that mostly went in circles - the Vongola were the power to actually change things instead of spinning wheels and praying.

While he would've been there for the period when the Vongola were still basically a small group without a stable power base yet, as long as they were managing something and building, that would've still been more than Spade and Elena had managed on their own, and plenty to validate his faith in bettering the world and turning his skills towards being more of the 'hero'. The Vongola were also probably the first people besides Elena to accept him and treat him decently beyond just what they could get out of him, as much as this was something he wasn't used to, and it's implied that he did have a close friendship with Giotto.

By the time the Vongola had gotten powerful, before the attack, pretty much everything above would've been validated probably beyond Spade's wildest dreams before they'd gathered, and it was fairly obvious they'd built something larger than themselves - something that would persist even after their deaths to continue their work. The Rings and likelihood that he understood that being the first Guardian meant that he'd be watching over it after his death, at the time, only reinforced that.

When things settled down, he had enough political savvy and justified paranoia to recognize that just because most of their enemies had backed off didn't mean they were in a stable position yet - the Vongola were still something new in the face of a lot of other groups who also thought they knew best, and a lot of old, entrenched powers that weren't happy with them; they'd managed to earn their peace by being too strong for the other groups to want to fight them, and weren't established enough yet for people to just accept them as an authority as a matter of course. As Giotto got tired of keeping up the push towards fighting and was more inclined to hear out peace treaties and promises of drawing down, Spade saw the other shoe waiting and had been arguing against it - warning that no, these were not Good People who kept their word on things like that, and laying down arms would be asking for the viper's nest to strike; he never did agree with the decision to draw down. In some respects, with his knowledge of politics and history and firsthand experience with the more rotten sort of people with power, the idea of laying down arms would've been risking the end of everything they'd built to him, and a very real and credible thing to be afraid of.

So of course, when the attack came, even if Elena hadn't died, there would've been a HELL of a lot of "I TOLD YOU SO |< " and Spade being more agitated over it, since that attack was something that did a lot of damage to the one thing he'd had that was a chance to actually prove that all those ideals and morals COULD be brought into the world as a real thing.

Elena dying just meant that a lot of fracture points got hit, since they had a very close relationship, and she had been such a support; however good a friendship he'd had with the others, Elena was his other half, his counterbalance, and what'd helped inspire him to aim for the "high road", and not only had he lost her, but lost her due to something that, to him, was entirely avoidable, and something that could've easily destroyed everything else.

The fracture pretty much then got worse this way: Her death and the attack that apparently put the Vongola back in "active open war", possibly even on the run again for a while, was something he'd seen coming a mile away that was avoidable, where he'd warned Giotto.
Giotto, erring more on the side of the humanitarian ideals and dislike of fighting, and a desire to have faith in the goodwill of others, had ignored the warnings and left them vulnerable.
Because they were vulnerable, they'd been hit just as Spade'd expected, and hit hard, and Spade had lost Elena, his fiancee and a big part of his anchor and inspiration; the circumstances compounded the damage that just her death alone would've done, and since it was, to him, entirely avoidable and something that'd come down to Giotto's decision, he blamed Giotto and Giotto's ideals.

And that's where his faith in his own morals and ideals shattered, since those morals and ideals were the ones that he'd shared with Giotto when he joined the Vongola in the first place, and if Giotto holding on to those ideals so strongly had led to Elena's death and nearly destroyed the Vongola once, then holding to them was going to destroy the Vongola, which were the only thing where he'd found anything that actually would keep the Underworld in line.

So as much as he'd heard Elena's last words? Faith in those morals and ideals broken = a Catch 22; he couldn't abandon the Vongola or the "Cause" in the broadest sense, but he'd lost faith in the ideals and morals that'd guided it, as well as that note about blaming Giotto and Giotto's ideals for what'd happened.

This is where Giotto stopped being synonymous with "The Vongola" to Spade; Spade's loyalty to the Vongola as an entity that'd taken on a life of its own larger than them never wavered, but his faith and loyalty towards Giotto had pretty well shattered, and with that faith shattering and the way that battle had gone, Giotto basically parsed as not only a weak point for the Vongola, but a potential threat where Spade wasn't going to risk letting Giotto "weaken" the Vongola again.

Of course, that Catch-22 about losing faith in the morals and ideals but still clinging to the Vongola meant that there was a pretty nasty internal snarl, which ended up resolving in a skewed sort of "Ends Jusitfy the Means" - if being the Good Guys made them victims, then obviously the couldn't be the Good Guys, so the solution that managed to survive all that broken faith and everything else collapsing, as well as his newfound backlash against Giotto, was that the Vongola needed to be the top of the food chain. If they were the biggest predator on the block, preying on the rest of the Underworld, and were so big and vicious of a predator that the other groups in the Underworld didn't dare disobey them, then they could keep the rest of the Underworld in line, they could control things enough to achieve some vague semblance of the goal of not allowing the Underworld and corrupt sorts with power to do as they pleased with impunity.

And on some level, he was well aware that this meant ignoring Elena's actual last request and throwing his personal morality to the wind in ways Elena would've never approved of, which really only made the whole downward spiral worse.

In a way, the way Giotto handled it made things worse, since it only ended up reinforcing the loss of faith and growing belief that Giotto's ideals and insistence on a certain morality were WEAKNESSES; as far as he knew, he got away with massacreing the Simon Family right under Giotto's nose, something that Giotto should've picked up on and stopped, which led to him pushing further, and backing Ricardo's bid for power while Giotto mostly tried to avoid directly confronting him; the "damage control but not confronting" only reinforced to Spade that Giotto wasn't going to actually STOP him, which added a note of hypocrisy to his perception of Giotto, since Giotto WASN'T standing up to stop Spade from his crimes against those morals getting worse and worse. Handing over power to Ricardo was pretty much a last nail in the coffin.

This is where I have to interject that as much as Spade rationalized things, he was still blaming Giotto for Elena's death and angry with him for that; every time something happened like the Simon family where Spade got away with something that went completely against Giotto's morals, it only fanned that seething hatred and made it worse. By the time Giotto left for Japan with Ugetsu, it'd warped and grown into a pretty blinding vendetta.

Sure, Spade could rationalize and probably used as an excuse for going after the others that "leaving them be was risking them coming back and taking power back by force", but really, he was lashing out; both trying to destroy Giotto in a fit of vengeful vindictiveness, and taking the whole thing as the last "Proof" that Giotto's ideals were flawed beyond redemption and he was right.

Considering that he was still, on some level, aware that the worse his atrocities got, the more it was something ELENA would've never wanted a part of, it also just ended up amplifying the self-hatred thing and awareness of what a monster he was becoming, and that same little thread of him that was aware he was going outright against Elena's actual wishes probably also was halfway hoping that pulling something more outrageous and openly direct of an assault would actually provoke Giotto into reverting to what he'd been when they'd started out and fighting back.

Basically, as much as Spade wanted to destroy Giotto and lash out at Giotto, his ideals, and the others for backing that, underneath that he also wanted Giotto to stop him, and the more Giotto DIDN'T stop him, the worse the whole twisted mess got.

This is part of why Tsuna managed to inspire such an open display of viciousness - Tsuna's basically turning into what Giotto used to be, and after a hundred years of convincing himself that those ideals and morals only lead to being a victim and are weaknesses, Tsuna's not only holding to them and earning Giotto's clear approval - another note of spite at Spade's complexes - but WINNING even with the "Weaknesses".

And being jabbed at that someone so much like Giotto, with Giotto's approval on that level, is proving WRONG the rationalizations that he's been functioning under for the last hundred years, that've been his justification to himself for all of his atrocities and destroying all the people he'd once held as friends, kiiiind of hurts. On a "complete breakdown" level. Which ends up feeding back into the vicious cycle; he knows what he's doing is wrong, and that Elena would be horrified if she knew what he'd done to their friends and what he's done in the name of "keeping the Vongola strong", and knows what a monster he's become, but he can't bring himself to have any faith in anything ELSE to change...

It doesn't help that he's found out that, with the Simon incident that'd been another catalyst for him sliding further down that hole, he's only just NOW found out that he DIDN'T succeed and that the same man he'd been hissing at for being weak and "failing to stop him" had actually outwitted and outmaneuvered him without him ever realizing... in a way that left him believing that he'd succeeded and the ideals were lies. Which pretty much ends up being a point of hurt/anger for the surface rationalizations that he got outwitted and beaten by someone "weaker" WITHOUT KNOWING - a MAJOR coup against a Mist user, and a point of hurt/anger for that little thread of self-loathing because leaving him unaware the Simon family had been saved in spite of his efforts was basically a willfully missed chance at hitting him over the head with a wake-up call and leaving him in his delusions.

Having to admit to someone that Elena would be horrified by what he's done and that it's NOT what Elena's last wishes were hasn't really helped there.

And at this point, he's killed Giotto, hunted down and killed the others, and been responsible for a century's worth of atrocities, where he basically has the choice between trying to keep hold to some of his rationalizations and staying a bastard for the most part, or accepting that he's been wrong...

And that he killed most of the people he'd ever cared about, and corrupted what they'd built into something that's a mockery of what it was meant to be, for a pack of self-delusions.

So while it's possible that someone can get through to him and drag him out of the self-delusions into acknowledging and accepting that he's been wrong all this time?

If they do, it'll be one HELL of a total breakdown and shutdown, and he's somewhat aware that it'd break him completely to fully accept that.