i'm stewing in the quote "the capacity to love cannot be built in isolation" cuz i can only thing of lee yut-lung. the point isn't that yut-lung LACKS something ash lynx possesses, it's that he was DEPRIVED of something ash lynx received.

i don't like this idea that yut-lung should have put more effort into learning to love others... ash was allotted the opportunity to divide that labor between himself and others, while yut-lung was already buckling under the solo endeavor of keeping himself alive.

yut-lung didn't do anything "wrong" by not having learned to open himself to the vulnerabilities of loving other people, in a world where he had been loved once & only once & where that love ended in tragedy & torturous grief.

ash succumbing to the love of others despite the fear & harm involved with that makes sense cuz he knows the love EXISTS. he knows it's there & he knows what the reward of it would be if, against all odds, love managed to prevail.

yut-lung totally has no scope of understanding for that cuz he wasn't exposed to the potential of love in the same ways ash was. it's totally reasonable for him to operate under the assumption that the world is devoid of love toward him. because... it has been

yut-lung & ash started out with the same building blocks for the capacity to love, & ash was robbed & left with very few of those blocks remaining to him, & struggled greatly to understand what he should do with the rest... where yut-lung was robbed of just about all of them.

tl;dr it's not yut-lung's fault that ash is ~more capable~ of love than him, he was left with no exposure to love so of course he wasn't able to cultivate a greater capacity for it. ash lynx's life sucked but he had different resources available to him.

RRRR how can i express this in the way i want to? maybe i ought to say...
a lowered capacity for love isn't something yut-lung has DONE or COMMITTED; it's not an action he's taking. it's something that was done TO him.
in that same way, ash's capacity for love was IMPARTED to him

ash's capacity for love isn't a virtue he was especially born with, and yut-lung's diminished capacity for love isn't a vice he was born with. that's really what i want to say. lmfao. okay! off my soap box now, thanks for your time