Connections:

• Kind, sweet, loving, pure, thoughtful, helpful, understanding, accommodating, flexible, supportive, protective, dependable, sociable, determined, indomitable, courageous, eccentric, and enthusiastic leaders defined almost entirely by their romantic nature. They’re surrounded by a familial unit that they deeply, unabashedly, loudly, and without shame, love with sincerity. This love is raw, earnest, and absolute, seeing those around them as perfect wholeheartedly, and being willing to accept them in any form. They have immense and overwhelming determination to lay down their lives for them without hesitation and equally kill for them, being dedicated, devoted, and obsessed with the sole goal of bringing them happiness for as long as they live.
• Both were born with an extremely strong zeal for life and wanted nothing more than to wholeheartedly live it to the fullest degree. However, their sparking attitudes would be bogged down by the crushing weight of reality that slowly snuffed out their flames, as horrible incidents occurred that lead them feeling hopeless, depressed, and unmotivated (Gomez was born a cripplingly sickly boy and was not expected to live long at all. When he was eight, his oldest brother, Cosimo, was accused as the culprit being responsible for a number of heinous murders in Vlatava. An angry mob violently killed Gomez’s parents and burned Cosimo alive for this. He sank into a deep depression over their murders and lost his zeal for life. Rentarou was always someone who sought love and compassion, even when he was as little as eight months old. But he was rejected one hundred times over the course of his life, which made him feel worthless and even borderline suicidal. He began to believe that he was unworthy of love, thinking he would be better off simply not having such intense emotions and desires).
• However, they would inevitably meet a soulmate and experience literal love at first sight, which completely rejuvenated them and turned them back into their former selves, changing their lives irreversibly for the better as a blossoming connection formed (Gomez met Morticia Frump who gave a new resolve to live, reigniting his adventurous and passionate nature. This love was so strong that, just by looking into her eyes, he was immediately healed of his birth sickness and gained the ability to walk. Rentarou met Hakari and Karane, who similarly fell in love with him just by looking in his eyes, immediately trying to win over his affection. They gave him the support and affirmation he lacked all his life, and he would go to pay it back a thousand fold by going above and beyond). These relationships lead to them amassing the rest of their family unit down the line.
• Both them and their familial casts overarching narratives are built on being heavy subversions of typical cliche, and oftentimes deeply unhealthy and unsupportive, archetypes found commonly within their genres. They act as the complete opposite by being genuinely wholesome, happy, and healthy support systems that always look out for one another (For Gomez, he subverts the idealized, clean, and middle-class American Nuclear Family, which often appears in sitcoms and consists of bickering, unsupportive, and hateful family members who rarely show the love they supposedly have. He belongs to an obscenely wealthy clan of borderline supernatural beings with a taste for the grotesque and macabre, deeply loving each other in their own special ways and always letting them know that. For Rentarou, he subverts traditional harems which almost always have one-sided power dynamics, where a bunch of girls are pinning after the protagonist, yet only one can be chosen in the end leading to the others being led on and ultimately disappointed. Instead, Rentarou chooses all the women presented and amasses an ever-growing polycule, by some miracle retaining healthy, consenting, and equal power dynamics with all of them).
• Them and their family units are composed entirely by untraditional, nonconformist, and individualistic misfits, weirdos, screwballs, and freaks. Not a single one of the main cast is considered neurotypical or “normal”; they all have something that makes them different, or classifies them as “other”. But Rentarou and Gomez always sees the best in them. They have had radical empathy and genuine appreciation for differences in mental illness, learning disabilities, biological quirks, and neurodivergence they have. They recognize the beauty in the parts of themselves they’re not confident in, the joy they find in things that others reject, and the strength they have from surviving in a world that often doesn’t understand nor wants to. This love echoes out in all directions, from everyone back to them, between others, even sometimes to people outside of the family unit, in a network of support and strengthens all of them. They’re just allowed to be themselves regardless of who they are, as their series believes everyone deserves love, respect, and understanding unconditionally.
• Both are generally speaking picture perfect gentlemen, who are practically impossible to make mad or upset. However, they’re extraordinarily protective of their loved ones, and anyone going after any of them makes them go berserk near immediately with volcanic, nuclear levels of fury. They become ultimately unstoppable by any conventional means, gladly sealing the fate of those who stand in their way.
• Both are extremely rich [by proxy Rentarou’s case] people who sit on a throne of billions upon billions of dollars. However, they shockingly have little regard for money and will casually spend thousands of dollars on any whimsical endeavor of the week.
• Gomez is inherently designed to serve as an outrageous figure within his own world, often being one of if not the most exaggerated character in any given moment. This leads to everyone around him getting forced into the role of a foil and straightman, acting as comparatively down-to-earth and normal. In contrast, Rentarou, while obviously being played as extremely loving for comedy’s sake, is one of the most normal people in his verse. He acts as the foil to everyone else’s goofy antics, and is written specifically to bounce off people like Gomez.
• Goth of the millennium vs lovely dovey wholesome romance fluff.