ABEL: PRINCE OF GAY
Aha. The Abel Essay.
Dietrich is not as afraid of Abel as he probably should be. He has a few experiences with Abel and in each of them Dietrich perceived himself to have the upper hand. He's not afraid of Crusnik 02 (and I assume some of the fear of 03 was his surprise and then inability to move, as the body destroyed wasn't his own). In the first instance, with Esther, Dietrich got away easily. He got most of what he wanted, even if the interruption of the Star of Sorrow was a loss. The next instance of them in conflict was ... I want to say it wasn't until Byzantium. I'm tired, let me make mistakes. Anyway, and then it was Radu's body and Abel's Crusnik thing didn't work out so well. Dietrich is 2/2. So he's fairly confident in his ability to deal with Abel. There's also the vampire blood-Crusnik issue, which he feels gives him a bonus in camp. Since he assumes both Seth and Abel are maintaining and cover they aren't running around drinking the blood of vampires. Yeah. He also views camp itself as an advantage, since it's so small and contained and there are lots of people around. Dietrich doesn't care about collateral damage.
Hoookay. Besides the danger danger~ or lack thereof, Dietrich sees Abel as somewhat in the way. I assume there's some sort of frustration because Abel is close to Esther and Cain. In radiohead Dietrich says that Esther will be mad at him if he kills Abel, but that Father Nightroad is becoming a problem. In chapter 34 Cain chastises Dietrich steps on him and is all yey 02. While Dietrich's not there for this part, I bet that that isn't the first instance of 02 being brought up in a light Dietrich may not be so fond of. There isn't a lot of direct playing with Abel which Dietrich finds interesting. Abel's too good with his own covers and being fairly resilient and the like. He'd rather (like Seth) take Abel apart physically, or remove Abel from the picture since he doesn't have the same negative feelings towards him. Seth is a negative, Abel is an annoyance.
N-now with the recent TBcast dorama that popped up, Dietrich doesn't feel any different about Abel. He's been warned rather blatantly by Seth and some of that actually hit home in his empty head somewhere. However, Abel threatened but then let him go. Which just gives Dietrich more confidence. He's also a bit secretly pleased by the fact that Abel has taken Radu under his protection. There's nothing like hurting those someone else has sworn to protect.
As a player I'm always pretty wary when I get an email notification from 'onthenightroad'. Possibly and probably because when the shit goes down Dietrich's gonna die. It doesn't help that I am moderately terrified of threading with hydr0phobia because I will fuck up like no one's tomorrow. But our threads have been relatively short and painless so far. Which is somewhat foreboding, considering what Dietrich's been fucking with.