HEY HEY SO i want to apologize for not responding to this for literal ages but i wanted to finish my dual destinies replay before i did so i had the best memory before responding alright so 

the game makes it pretty clear that aura was in love with metis and there’s a bunch of stuff that leads up to that where the ‘’reveal’’ (i say it like that bc i feel like the game heavily hints at it and then the actual confirmation is after)

some of the little stuff is like this: 

the way she talks about metis… isn’t really the way someone would typically talk about losing a friend or even a very close friend, i feel? it feels very romantic? and like phoenix mentions that she like, changes her demeanor when they start talking about metis and she has that really dreamy sprite (where she’s holding the drill up to her face) on, too 

and below is that ‘confirmation’ i was talking about earlier 

so like, the game really really… really heavily implies that aura was in love with metis which i think sort of is the direct intention? like people that say ‘oh but maybe she wanted to be close friends?’ or the worst interpretation i’ve seen that was ‘i thought aura saw her as a mother figure’ because like, it’s… pretty heavily implied aura loved her and people wanna gloss over it which is lame but you know 

(and for the record @eatingfireflies helped me out on this one so i can only say what they told me which is in the japanese version of the above text, simon sort of implies that metis was very hard to work with? but she chose aura very very purposefully?) 

and i think (this is like me gripping your shoulders and saying ‘i know it doesn’t seem it but HEAR ME OUT’ thing going on here) that metis also loved her back, too? and i think that bc the game gives more evidence for metis reciprocating those feelings than it does against it? so like, take this dialogue with apollo: 

and in addition to that, ponco and clonco call metis and aura ‘mommy metis’ and ‘mama aura’ respectively? which is also very telling? aura later changes this, but it’s out of grief rather than anything else– clonco says it hurt her to be called ‘mama’ after metis’ death, but their robots saw them both as mothers? come on. come on. 

it’s just such purposefully written? apollo’s saying that he can see metis put aura above almost everything in her life (and remember simon said that metis was incredibly devoted to her research + the robots and cared about it immensely so much so that she was difficult to work with because she was very (i’m assuming) serious and intense about her work) aside from her daughter? like in my interpretation, he’s sort of saying that athena and aura were the two most important things in her whole life? plus he uses the word ‘love’ which i know doesn’t really ‘say’ anything on its own but in this specific circumstance it feels very very telling? the game goes out of its way to say this, the phrase ‘almost as much as she loved you’ gets its own text box, like you can really feel the tension they’re building up there? and they didn’t have to include that! it’s not vital to the story progression? 

and like i feel like the game gives way, way more evidence that metis did love aura back than to say she didn’t? i think it would’ve been incredibly easy to confirm that yes, aura did love her (keep all of aura’s dialogue the same) but include something about a father for athena? or some sort of relationship that she was in? at all? but they don’t, they leave it really open ended! 

and like tl;dr i think that it’s entirely plausible (and i know i keep repeating it but i do think that the game gives more for it than against it) for metis to love her back! it all boils down to ‘they don’t say it outright but it would be doing a disservice to the characters to try and knock the relationship down to ‘just friends’’