zero escape spoilers //// something I don't see talked about very often is how sigma and diana's relationship is fucking weird, sigma knows before ever seeing her that he'll fall in love with and marry diana someday. like, that sounds unhealthy...

I like that writing-wise. It's just a doomed romance in so many ways...

And this is why the "woman D" conversation is perhaps the only scene from Zero Time Dilemma I completely, unequivocally love. Old Sigma probably knows by experience that he doesn't tell Diana about how they're literally fated to fall in love, at least not in D-com.

So it's not even about whether he deliberately lied-by-omission or not. Maybe he *can't* be honest with her. So he just... has to talk circles around how HE'S SEEING THE LOVE OF HIS LIFE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN LIKE, 60 YEARS, AND SHE DOESN'T EVEN FUCKING KNOW, AND SHE CAN'T.

A lot of time travel stories pull this "act like you don't know this person you love" card, but I don't think I've ever seen it driven home so ruthlessly elsewhere, it's a tragedy within a tragedy within a tragedy. He has to keep up the illusion, and if we assume that

Sigma matures beyond his cucumber jokes in B. Garden, he will perhaps ponder if it was ever a consensual relationship, if he knew their fate and she didn't. Perhaps he'll feel like she never knew the real Sigma. Does he hate himself for it? How much did Diana know, in the end?

Sigma loved Diana so much he fucking invented new robotics to recreate a semblance of her. And yet, perhaps, he feels like that love -which defined him in a way- was always manipulative, or one-sided, or not real-- and even if it was true love, it ended early. He never knew.

And that is fucking tragic.