Insipid slavishness, and self-serving opportunism passes for loyalty to fools.
Loyalty is much over-emphasized in human relations so it's understandable it gets thorny.
Let me clarify what I mean by this:
It's not about how
consistent his loyalty is (it's not) but how he
handles it which is by attacking people. Loyalty is probably the wrong word, i think it's more a strict sense of
"duty" to his friends . You see this in a lot of SJWs.
>I have a friend named James
>Somebody said something that James might interpret as being hateful to him
>James must be hurting so much...
>I must constantly attack the person who attacked James to make this right so he knows he has friends... No thinking about nuance, no holding back, no confirming
whether or not james was even offended to begin with! Attack the bad person to comfort my friend and maintain the friendship so he doesn't get mad at me later!
It's half selfish half caring, both "i don't want them to hate me for not standing up for them" and also "i don't want them to feel hurt".
This mentality is core to wokeism. It's how you highjack a white person's good intentions and turn them into this
Replace James with black people, trans people, foreigners, friends of a sports team, literally any group that complains a lot... and then combine it with the identity politics SJWs love (everyone in a group is exactly the same and reacts to everything exactly the same) and you get a person like Ethan. Somebody who wants to comfort his Mexican friend by viscously attacking the guy who said immigration is bad
without even asking said Mexican friend how he feels about immigration.
Maybe i'm overanalyzing and he is just a snake (not unlikely whatsoever) but the constant putting his foot in his mouth, the over speaking, the look of disappointment and depression, the confusion as to when he gets in trouble, it all reminds me of this type of person.
(god he looked like shit)
To get back to the thread theme, i think Ian and Anisa also do this but are 400 times more narcissistic about it. They care about the "do people like me" half and not at all about the "is my friend hurting" half which is why they never come across as genuinely depressed but just confused, awkward, and retarded, and also why ian had to take classes for empathy.

The faces of these people say so much. To me that picture of Ethan says
"life sucks" while these of ian and anus say
"why don't people like me yet?"