Some differences between the two are more distinctive, while others harder to distinguish or perpetuated/caused by the other but I thought it could be neat to sit down and try to differentiate them.
Thanks very much u/PoorPrawn88 for making it look so nice 😊
This is just my take-
In shots and such, you have two people who are failing to meet each other's needs, have awful recent trauma and do not trust each other and the whole thing is just a mess.
One day, Ashley comes home to a drunk Andrew which is now a part of life, but she tries some alcohol too this time and gets drunk. Andrew with his guard down tells her how attractive he thinks she is, Ashley with *her* guard down is moved by that then she comes onto him and they have a very passionate night only for her to blow up on him the morning after as soon as he greets her warmly.
Why though? Why did she get so upset?
While it seems like Andrew has a lot of difficulty distinguishing sex from love/romance, Ashley since their teen years always believed that love/romance with him would simply *entail* sex. (Not that she would want to or not want to, just that it would have to happen) while their relationship was good, it was framed by her as something that would come along with love, marriage, devotion, etc. but later, it was considered just something that Andrew wanted to do, not out of love, but shallow lust which kind of does hurt, but she at the very least could someday use to keep him around if she had to.
She believes that he doesn’t love her, that he doesn’t even like her so why would he ever consider a romantic relationship with her? That must mean that when he hugs and cuddles her, it’s because he’s just trying to get off.
The fact that he often does get turned on while cuddling and stuff (because lust and love are intertwined to him) more or less confirms this suspicion. She might feel romantic love over this, but she doesn’t believe Andrew does at all.
He fakes being all lovey dovey to have sex with Julia, so why wouldn’t he do the same with her?
She doesn’t want to ‘fall’ for this ‘tactic’. She doesn’t want to get her hopes up that he feels the same way only for him to just use her. If sex has to be involved, it’d be much better if she could use it as leverage rather than let it break her heart.
So in Shots and Such, they try to be in a purely transactional relationship while both knowing that they’re unable to detach enough to actually do that. She doesn’t trust him, so she doesn’t want to be ‘stupid’ enough to let him trick her into thinking he loves her. He needs to be the one wrapped around her finger, not the other way around.
“Don’t think that last night changed ANYTHING!”
I felt like these words were more for her than him at that time. She swooned so heavily that night and then he hugs her from behind the next morning (I mean that’s what the sprites looked like?) and she’s sober now and back in a more defensive mode and she thinks that she fell for his ‘trick’ last night and by being all lovey dovey the morning after, he’s using it again and is very certain that it’ll work.
I think some people, and Andrew especially misunderstood what she was trying to convey when she said,
“Sex isn’t the end all be all it is for you to me.”
She doesn’t need sex to feel love for him. She feels close enough already by spending time with him and being non-sexually affectionate.
Andrew though, seems to need sex to feel close to her and she can’t wrap her head around why that is or what sex has to do with love or even trust that he’s being genuine about how he feels about sex/love and not just bullshitting her to get laid.
She’s also super upset that he can’t just feel close or ‘love’ or whatever it is *without* sex and because of that, thinks that he doesn’t actually love her. If he loved her, he wouldn’t ‘need’ sex.
“You made a whore out of me!“
It’s one thing to use this sex as ‘leverage’ (not really good or effective leverage at this point imo), but another thing to just be happy to be the sex doll of someone she thinks only wants her for that.
She feels tricked into enjoying it if that even makes sense. He told her she was pretty, etc. and it actually made her want to do it with him and she’s really ashamed over this as well as angry at him for ‘making her want to’ and herself for ‘falling for it’.
It kind of is hard to explain honestly. It has to do with her ego and sense of self worth.
She doesn’t want to derive pleasure and self worth from her ability to please Andrew. To her, that’s just kind of pathetic. She also doesn’t want to be turned into someone who enjoys being degraded because she thinks he loves her.
Basically what Julia was.
“Is that his sister? She looks easy.”
To refer to someone as ‘easy’ is pretty adjacent to just calling them a ho.
Ashley at first glance, does come off very ‘easy’ for lack of a better word. People generally pick up on this when they see a lonely, as well as ‘dumb’, insecure girl who craves attention and validation. It means she’s willing to or maybe even *desperate* for sex to fulfill these insecurities. The fandom picked up on this vibe VERY early on.
Being perceived as an ‘easy’ girl might have contributed to this complex/insecurity over being a whore.
You can see that Andrew also has this impression of her from the day-nightmare he had about her date. In his imagination, she didn’t want to but was so insecure that she was easily charmed into it.
“I don’t want to prey on my baby sister.”
He really doesn’t want to take advantage of this ‘easiness’.
Ashley somewhere down the line became pretty self conscious over this perception/impression that people, Andrew included, had of her.
She doesn’t want to actually turn out to be someone who has self worth low enough to have sex and derive pleasure from validation. A whore.
All in all, she just doesn’t understand, therefore struggles to believe that Andrew considers sex to be as deep and romantic as he does and that his affections are purely derived from lust and wishes that he could love her without sex. The night she got drunk, she wanted to do it after he told her she was pretty, captivating, etc. which makes her think she was dumb enough to ‘let him make a whore out of her’ because to her, a whore derives pleasure from sexual validation.
Thanks for reading my tangent.
Long time no see! Here’s an audio fanfic about Julia (me) revealing to Ashley (Hibikivaa) that she’s dating Andrew