u/Nika_35_40

I think both of these moments say a lot about how the series approaches sexuality. Niall didn’t sleep with Mona because he was attracted to women, nor did he do it simply to hurt Ruben. He did it because he felt chosen. Seen. It was that feeling of power that pushed him to sleep with his brother’s wife — the brother he had spent his entire life feeling inferior to.

And that connects strongly with the way Ruben experiences sexuality too. Being chosen and desired in that way makes him feel important, and sexuality is deeply tied to his identity as a man. He sees it as a way of expressing affection, but also as a way of asserting power and control.

Then there’s Ruben saying that Celeste slept with him, and Niall asks, “But didn’t she hate you?” And Ruben simply answers, “Yes, she hated me!”

I think that exchange is very telling. The series seems to suggest that love and hate, sex and violence, desire and power are not really separate concepts. They constantly bleed into each other.

And that idea is ultimately represented in Ruben killing Niall, too — even the murder carries that same sexual and intimate charge. Love, desire, violence and control have become so intertwined in their relationship that, by the end, it’s almost impossible to separate one from the other.

The fact that he didn’t go after Niall as soon as he got out of prison (and I don’t think Niall is surprised at the wedding that Ruben is free) makes me think that he saw the wedding as an opportunity to ruin an important day for Niall. It was such a huge step in Niall’s life, and now Ruben had something he could take away from him. But I don’t think he went there with a set plan of what he was going to do; I think he simply went there to confront him.

I saw an intention to talk at the beginning, when Ruben told Niall that he had to listen to him, but Niall refused because he was incapable of accepting that he had betrayed his brother. That would have taken him out of the victim role he had in front of Ruben, and that wasn’t the dynamic between them.

I saw the entire barn scene as a kind of sequence in which the violence kept escalating. Ruben was fighting to regain dominance and control over Niall, using his body as a weapon to take revenge for what Niall had taken away from him. But eventually, he felt that the only way to control him and regain his power as a man in front of him was to kill him.

I remember reading that Gadd said Ruben entered some kind of psychotic state, and I found his reaction to Niall’s death incredibly contradictory. He looked relieved, but also horrified. And I’m not sure how to interpret that final look. Was he processing what he had done, or did he realize that by killing Niall he hadn’t actually regained his masculinity? Instead, he had destroyed the one thing he still had that gave him validation as a man.

When I first saw the scene in episode one, I interpreted it as Ruben just messing with him, but after finishing the series, I started wondering if he was actually testing him to see whether he would betray Albi by sleeping with him. When they were teenagers, Niall chose Albi over Ruben when he chose to tell the truth in court, and I think Ruben is someone who can’t tolerate not being chosen or being told no.

In episode five, we see how important marriage is to Ruben: “She’s married to me, her body is mine, she belongs to me.” It’s as if Mona becomes an object that belongs exclusively to him because they’re married. And yet, while they’re married, Mona cheats on Ruben with other men and with Niall.

And I don’t mean that literally, as in Ruben actually intended to sleep with Niall. I mean more that he wanted to find out how far Niall would go and whether he would choose him over Albi even though he had just married him—to test just how much influence he had over Niall.

Just a curious question. Personally, I thought there would be an attempted rape or a murder, or both, but that there would be a twist and Niall would be the one to kill Ruben. I mostly thought this because of all the sexual tension in the first episode, and obviously because of the abuse Mona and Ruben subjected Niall to. As the episodes went on, I kept thinking the same thing because of their whole self-destructive dynamic.

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One thing that really caught my attention is how Ruben was able to forgive Mona after finding out that she had cheated on him with Benji, whereas Niall sleeping with Mona was such a huge humiliation for him that he ended up killing him.

I wonder to what extent this could be connected to the way Ruben views women. When he tells Niall, “You let Benji fuck her,” there is something very revealing about the way he talks about Mona. It is almost as if he believes women need to be controlled and that their own will carries less weight than a man’s. As if he places them on a lower level within a structure where the man is the one who decides, possesses and exercises control.

And yet, I was surprised that, despite having such a huge ego and such a rigid idea of masculinity, he was able to go back to Mona after an affair that should, in theory, have deeply wounded his pride as well: she had chosen another man over him.

I wonder if this could be connected to the dynamic between his parents. We know that his father abused him, and we can interpret that his mother was unable to protect him. If Ruben grew up perceiving his father as the person who had absolute control, while his mother was unable to do anything to stop him, perhaps he internalized a deeply distorted idea of relationships between men and women from a very young age: the man as the figure of authority and control, and the woman as someone over whom that control is exercised.

His father hurt him and made him feel vulnerable; his mother, by failing to protect him, may have contributed to making him feel abandoned and unprotected. It is almost as if he learned that a man had to have absolute control over everything and that vulnerability was something that had to be avoided at all costs.

That is why I can understand that there were many things influencing Ruben’s decision to kill Niall, including Baird. But I also think there is something particularly important about Niall’s betrayal.

Niall was probably the person Ruben had come to trust the most. He was the person he allowed himself to share his most painful secret with. For the first time, Ruben lowered his guard and allowed himself to be openly vulnerable with someone. And that very person ended up betraying him.

Maybe that is why Niall’s betrayal could not simply be an act of infidelity for Ruben. It may have represented the confirmation of his worst fear: that he had allowed himself to need and trust someone, only to discover that this person could use that vulnerability against him.

I also think the image Ruben had built of Niall completely shattered at that moment. He had idealized him in some way and placed a level of trust in him that he did not seem to give easily to other people. And if loyalty was such an important virtue to Ruben, discovering that Niall had crossed precisely that line must have felt like an absolute betrayal.

Perhaps that is one of the fundamental differences between Mona and Niall. Ruben could forgive Mona because, despite her infidelity, she still occupied a place that he understood within his family structure and his identity. With Niall, however, something much deeper was at stake: trust, vulnerability, need, and the image Ruben had of himself and of the person he had chosen to trust.

That is why I find it so interesting that he could forgive an affair and yet be unable to forgive Niall’s betrayal. Not necessarily because he loved Niall more than Mona, but because Niall had reached an emotional place that Mona perhaps never had access to.

What do you guys think?

This scene came to mind and I can’t stop thinking about how, for Ruben, a hug seems to be an act that is “almost” as intimate as making love. And Ruben and Niall hug each other a lot, and very tightly, too. I think the hug is almost the highest form of intimacy that exists between them without crossing that “brothers” line.

I wondered if maybe Ruben had never really been hugged before, and that this was something he only shared with Niall because it made him feel close to him.

But then I remembered the scene in the first episode when Ruben’s father appears outside. Ruben looks at him through the window and says:

“Go down and give your father a hug!”

And this is where I think I started putting some pieces together. Obviously, this is just my interpretation, but it makes sense to me.

So, if his father sexually abused him, he probably also hugged him. Maybe as an act of reconciliation, maybe before abusing him, afterwards, or as a way of asking for forgiveness. So Ruben learned from a very young age that there was a very thin line between a hug and sex. Both were “normal” expressions of affection between men, between family members. So: hug → affection → intimacy → sex. It doesn’t have to be a conscious association; rather, something deeply internalized, to the point where he doesn’t know where one begins and the other ends.

The first time Ruben hugs Niall is precisely in that scene when his father comes to their house. Niall is about to go looking for his mother, and Ruben clings to him in a suffocating hug, in an almost sexualized scene, seeking “comfort” from his brother after feeling vulnerable.

The same thing happens in the second episode when he gets high, asks Niall to dance with him, hugs him tightly and tells him that his father is going to have another child. Once again, he is feeling vulnerable and desperately seeks physical contact as a way of finding support and feeling close to his brother.

And I’m not saying that Ruben is incapable of experiencing a hug as a genuine act of love. I simply think that, for him, it was an enormous act of intimacy, whereas for Niall it was something much more “normal,” something he could also share with friends.

And depending on the context of the scene, the hug can be interpreted from a completely different perspective.

I also thought about that barn scene where Ruben asks Niall to confess how he loves him. After Niall refuses to talk about Mona and tells him to put his shirt back on, Ruben simply laughs. And, as Niall’s mother said, he “smiled with his mouth, not his eyes,” which always meant that a storm was coming.

Ruben approaches Niall, hugs him tightly and “smells” him like an animal acting purely on instinct. And after the hug comes that insinuation: if we weren’t family, I’d get under that skirt.

That is sexual harassment. Because the distance between the hug and the abuse is almost… invisible. It’s incredibly easy to cross. The hug and the sexual insinuation aren’t separate moments; they seem to be part of the same progression.

The hug is the last safe territory of intimacy between them, and the label of “brothers” should act as an absolute boundary between those two concepts. But the word brother loses some of its meaning after Niall’s betrayal. The word brothers becomes smaller when Niall proves that he is more of a “man” than Ruben. When Ruben feels smaller.

And in Ruben’s mind, there seems to be something that comes before that label: the need for intimacy.

The boundary between the hug and possession becomes incredibly thin, and Ruben’s need to control Niall was deeply unhealthy.

I think Ruben was traumatized on an enormous level. His sexuality was completely distorted. Hurt people hurt others, and in the end, Ruben did to Niall the same thing his father had done to him. He hated his father for what he had done, and deep down, he also hated himself. That’s how the man who was supposed to care for him and protect him taught him that you assert your dominance over someone else. “If they touch you, they destroy your soul.” Victims can become abusers, and he fed his ego as a man through the fear he inflicted on Niall.

“It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to someone.” That’s how Ruben described how he felt about his father’s abuse.

And that’s what he wanted from Niall—to keep him bound to him. This isn’t about sexual attraction; it’s about power. Sex was a weapon of control.

The love was real and genuine, but the trauma destroyed everything.

That’s why I like to think that, after killing Niall, Ruben chose to die embracing him.

Because the first intimate approach between them in the first episode was Ruben’s suffocating embrace. The first time he was vulnerable in front of Niall, after seeing his father outside their house. The first time we see Niall frightened, helpless and confused.

The hug as the highest form of intimacy; the suffocation as an act of violence. Both intertwined, together, at the very end.

Ruben carries a horrible trauma that he never addresses, and he builds his identity as a man around it. Providing for his family, money, work, having a child, Mona and Niall all give him validation as a man. But all those masculine aspects of his personality are ultimately what lead him to failure. Sexuality, violence, volatility, and the need for control are some of the characteristics he possesses.

He is the one who beats Albi, and because of that, he goes to prison. He is the one whose need to control Mona's life drives her to be unfaithful with other men. He is the one who threatens his superior at work and loses his job because of it. He is the one who, in his attempt to make Niall feel less like a man, causes his own brother to betray him behind his back. And he is also the one who, in an attempt to control Niall's life, ends up taking it away from him.

He spends his entire life making decisions about Niall's life, and he also decides when he dies.

And only after Niall is dead does he realize that he has just destroyed the one thing he had left that gave him validation as a man, so he destroys himself as well.

And by saying this, I'm not justifying anyone else's actions. I'm simply saying that Ruben justifies his own, because he has too much ego to look in the mirror. And that's exactly how I feel about Niall as well.

I think they both act as mirrors, bringing out each other's flaws because they're incapable of accepting their own. "You look in the mirror and see a king," Ruben tells Niall, but the truth is that that's how Ruben sees himself too. Niall doesn't see a king when he looks in the mirror, because he's incapable of looking at himself.

Neither of them can accept themselves, so they can't accept each other either, despite the fact that they both have suspicions and understand each other on some level. It's as if they have the truth about the other right in front of them and deny it because they're denying their own truth.

Ruben is always suspicious about Niall's sexuality and drops several hints. But Niall either doesn't pick up on them, or simply doesn't want to.

"If they stab you, they hurt your body. If they touch you, they hurt your soul." And Niall never suspects that Ruben might have been sexually abused?

Ruben smells another man's scent on the robe and doesn't suspect that the smell is Niall's? His son with blond hair?

They scream the truth at each other and then deny it. As if Niall couldn't accept that his hyper-masculine, violent brother had been sexually abused. As if Ruben couldn't accept that his gay brother had slept with his wife.

Niall rejects his own homosexuality, so why should Ruben acknowledge it?

"The eyes are the mirrors of the soul." And when they looked at each other, they saw themselves reflected back. They both denied themselves, and they denied each other.

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When Ruben asks Niall to explain the love he feels for him, I feel like he does it to find out how much influence he still has over Niall, even though Niall seems to have taken a huge step forward in his life by accepting his sexuality and marrying a man.

It’s a very toxic confession, loaded with dependency. I thought the reference to chemicals was very fitting as a way of describing his feelings. It’s something that gets you hooked, something you can’t escape from, but you want to escape because it’s dangerous and harmful, because it could kill you. But the danger is exciting, and that duality between pleasure and pain is what keeps Ruben and Niall’s relationship alive.

It isn’t healthy love—the kind they show us in Disney movies and that we all long to find. At first, I thought it wasn’t love, but the truth is that, to find a logical explanation for it, you have to put yourself in the character’s shoes. That is the concept of love Niall has learned. There is no love without hatred, no affection without violence, no protection without danger. These concepts are deeply intertwined, and to me, the title of the series also refers to that. Half Man, half everything.

That is the only concept of love that exists for him, so it was love, even if it doesn’t look like love to us.

Something that really caught my attention was seeing Niall being the active one in his sexual relationships in episode four. It wasn’t because of his physical appearance, but rather because of his more shy and submissive personality. It makes me wonder whether he was genuinely more naturally inclined to be active, or whether he needed to be in control of the situation during sex because he had so little control over other aspects of his life, or perhaps because he needed to compensate for the dynamic he had with Ruben.

Even with Albi when they were teenagers, we see him taking the initiative, but I feel that, in some way, he both felt comfortable with and rejected the dynamic that had developed in his relationship with Ruben. He was comfortable being protected and looked after, and even felt entitled to all the money he owed Ruben, but at the same time he resented being “in his shadow” and hated feeling like “his bitch,” as he put it when he found out Ruben was paying for things or making him do the housework.

It was very contradictory. So that makes me think that perhaps he was actually more submissive by nature, but needed to take on the active role in his sexual relationships in order to compensate for that lack of power and feel more like a man.

Then there’s all the abuse from Ruben, where he was clearly helpless and completely bewildered by what was happening to him. What do you think about that?

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For the first three episodes, you could think that Ruben shows up at the wedding as a jilted lover, but in the last three episodes the script takes a turn, and we learn that the betrayal is what ultimately pushes him to commit the crime. But what if it was actually a mixture of both?

The way Ruben talked about marriage seemed to suggest that, once someone gets married, they become someone else’s “property,” or at least that’s how he seemed to see it with Mona: “Her body belongs to me because we’re married.” He had this need to control the people he loved, as if they were objects. The fact that Niall marries Albi means that he is stepping out of Ruben’s orbit and becoming someone else’s “property,” and I don’t mean that in a romantic sense.

The fact that Ruben shows up at the wedding, and we don’t know how long he had been out of prison, makes me think that he hadn’t gone looking for Niall before because he didn’t want to scare him off. Maybe he was waiting to catch him at the right moment. He told Niall at the hospital that Niall hadn’t given him anything to take away from him, and the wedding was a huge step in Niall’s life.

I also got the impression that Ruben was kind of trying to flirt with Niall, as if he was testing whether Niall would betray Albi and willingly sleep with him on his wedding day. Almost as if he wanted to find out whether Niall would give in to him in that way too, right after getting Niall to confess that he loved him. But maybe he was simply trying to humiliate and dominate him.

Either way, it would make sense to me considering the two main conflicts they had. Niall betrayed Ruben when they were teenagers by choosing Albi over him during the trial. So it wouldn’t surprise me if Ruben wanted to test whether Niall would be capable of choosing him this time, just to see how attached Niall really was to him.

And then there’s Mona, who was married to Ruben and betrayed him with Niall.

So I feel like the betrayal with Mona and Baird was the main reason, but the wedding also played a part because it represented Niall breaking free from Ruben’s control. He no longer had any control over Niall’s life, so the only way he could exert control was by taking his life.

What do you guys think?

To begin with, I got the feeling that what terrified Niall most about Ruben being at his wedding wasn’t the possibility that he might physically attack him, but that he might expose his betrayal with Mona and his secret son. That becomes pretty clear during Ruben’s speech.

I mean, Niall’s face is one of absolute terror. It shows just how much other people’s opinions still matter to him, and how, despite having achieved all those things he dreamed of, he’s still unable to completely detach himself from his past.

When they’re in the barn and Ruben tells him how long it took him to take away what was his, Niall refuses to talk about it. Even when Ruben tells him that all he has to do is listen, he responds, “You choose my wedding day?”

There are two things to notice here. First, Niall is incapable of confronting what he’s done because he would have to look himself in the mirror. That would mean admitting that he betrayed Ruben, and this time he doesn’t have the justification he had with Albi’s trial. What he did during the trial was the right thing to do, but this time it wasn’t. He would have to admit that what he did was wrong, and he would have to step outside the victim role he’s still trapped in.

When he asks Ruben why he chose his wedding day, Niall is essentially turning the situation around and giving more importance to “his special day” than to what he did to Ruben, prioritising his own discomfort over his brother’s pain. Once again, he slips back into the role of the victim.

Deep down, I think he does feel guilty about what he did, but he struggles to admit the truth and the intentions behind his actions.

The whole situation also makes me wonder whether Ruben actually went there intending to kill him, or whether it was something that developed in the moment. Because Ruben was willing to talk, and we already know that when anger took over, it blinded him, and once he started, it was almost as if he couldn’t find his way back out of it.

Then Ruben laughs, and well, as Lori said in episode four, he laughed with his mouth, not with his eyes. And he was already doing that before things spiralled out of control… and we all know what came next.

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The scene of Niall having sex in a car with a guy who is apparently quite younger than him and looks like him, asking him to call him "daddy".

Seriously, that scene within the context of the series felt very disturbing and disgusting to me, and I must say I was surprised to see Niall being the dominant one. I don't know if it was his way of being in control, of imitating Ruben, or if he really was the top.

I mean, Ruben being abused by his father, Ruben always calling Niall by the nickname "bambi", and on a few occasions "son"—never stopping to see him as a child—and sexually assaulting him. Ava pregnant, saying goodbye to Niall and calling him "daddy".

There are certainly visually very violent and disturbing scenes, but this one takes the prize.