tbh my favorite flavor of sylvix is not "we've been in love forever" or "we realized we love each other and now it's a perfect relationship", it's navigating the messiness of falling for your best friend while having a truly broken idea of relationships and love

like.... sylvain's relationship with romantic love is so fundamentally twisted that, despite his actual love for felix, i can't imagine it would be anything but difficult for him to accept those feelings (nevermind express them), ESPECIALLY when he believes that

him loving someone legitimately is a recipe for inevitable heartbreak and pain AND felix is one of the few relationships he has that he really, really needs to be unbreakable.

I don't think there's homophobia as we know it in fodland (im going to ignore jp dub ingrid's comment k) but at the same time sylvain's entire life has been built around inevitably marrying a woman and being a ladies' man/player/A Man Who Pursues Women, so it's also

probably going to cause some level of identity and social role questioning were he to earnestly fall for a man, especially his best friend, when both of them are extremely socially pressured to marry women and produce heirs and a relationship between the two of them would not be

socially advantageous in faerghus, so sylvain especially would most likely initially try to dismiss it as a dead end or at the very least definitely not worth ruining one of his few true friendships over.

Speaking of that, were they to get together, sylvain's.... reputation and all the pain he's caused wouldn't just go away. i really don't see sylvain's broader social reputation really addressed in sylvix works beyond lending angst to his background and yet i think it would REALLY

impact the relationship, especially in the beginning, for as much as you trust your best friend, can you really trust him in a relationship when every single other one he's had has ended in pain because of his own self-sabotage?

felix i could imagine would be suspicious on some level that sylvain doesn't want this to be a serious thing or is inevitably going to break it off and it probably doesn't help that sylvain might continue to flirt with girls or treat the relationship with casualness

to avoid totally breaking the persona he's built up for himself as a defensive wall.

i've written too much tl;dr this shit would be messy and hurtful at the beginning no matter how much they actually love each other maybe i'll add more to it later