So there are obviously the basics: Josh likes Edmund a lot, considers him a close friend, wants to cheer him up and see him happy, etc, etc; but those are kind of assumed at this point. I would say that he and Mithos are basically the knights he's closest to and among the people he's closest to. But I am mostly going to talk about trust here.
So Josh and trust is...kind of a complicated relationship. He befriends people easily, and trusts them with certain things depending on how they relate to him -- in Aather, that generally ends up being a fairly broad and fairly similar circle of things, but it's not everything. It's not really designed in levels, either; it's more a set of things of more or less importance. (Ferris is a good example of this: he trusts her to fight at his back but not with anything related to, say, romance, or to tell him stuff he needs to know. It's pretty conceivable that there could people he trusts in the reverse way, too, and in other combinations of various things.)
One of the things it's hardest to get Josh to trust you with is leadership. He's hugely unlikely to instinctively follow anyone's lead; he may decide to ally with people, but he'll argue or backtalk when he doesn't agree, or just ignore them and do his own thing. He spent ten millennia doing this in canon. But for Edmund (and Ven, because Ven gets every kind of trust he has, but that's less likely to come up for a number of reasons), Josh trust him to lead him; to give orders in battle, to decide objectives outside of battle that are worth pursuing, and to not abuse either privileges. It is kind of a blurred monarch/retainer relationship, in a few very specific ways; Josh obviously doesn't feel that he's beneath Edmund at all, he absolutely sees them as equals consciously. But if there's a question of command and they're both there, he will back Edmund taking command rather than asserting his own authority, as he's done a few times in Aather, and he'll do that without really thinking about it.
Other than that, a lot of what applies to Edmund applies in reverse, except for some of the Pevensie-specific stuff. They are shield brothers, basically, and Josh has the same feeling that he can come into a situation where Edmund is and things will mostly be done the way he'd have done them, and that they can work together instinctively. But yeah. That leadership trust is something very rare.
Talk to me about Edmund and romance, since that's going around.
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So Josh and trust is...kind of a complicated relationship. He befriends people easily, and trusts them with certain things depending on how they relate to him -- in Aather, that generally ends up being a fairly broad and fairly similar circle of things, but it's not everything. It's not really designed in levels, either; it's more a set of things of more or less importance. (Ferris is a good example of this: he trusts her to fight at his back but not with anything related to, say, romance, or to tell him stuff he needs to know. It's pretty conceivable that there could people he trusts in the reverse way, too, and in other combinations of various things.)
One of the things it's hardest to get Josh to trust you with is leadership. He's hugely unlikely to instinctively follow anyone's lead; he may decide to ally with people, but he'll argue or backtalk when he doesn't agree, or just ignore them and do his own thing. He spent ten millennia doing this in canon. But for Edmund (and Ven, because Ven gets every kind of trust he has, but that's less likely to come up for a number of reasons), Josh trust him to lead him; to give orders in battle, to decide objectives outside of battle that are worth pursuing, and to not abuse either privileges. It is kind of a blurred monarch/retainer relationship, in a few very specific ways; Josh obviously doesn't feel that he's beneath Edmund at all, he absolutely sees them as equals consciously. But if there's a question of command and they're both there, he will back Edmund taking command rather than asserting his own authority, as he's done a few times in Aather, and he'll do that without really thinking about it.
Other than that, a lot of what applies to Edmund applies in reverse, except for some of the Pevensie-specific stuff. They are shield brothers, basically, and Josh has the same feeling that he can come into a situation where Edmund is and things will mostly be done the way he'd have done them, and that they can work together instinctively. But yeah. That leadership trust is something very rare.
Talk to me about Edmund and romance, since that's going around.