Angelo Lagusa Love Interests Are Nonexistent And That Is The Point

Angelo Lagusa's love interests don't exist. He doesn't have a girlfriend. He doesn't have a boyfriend. He doesn't have a secret wife stashed away in Chicago or a childhood sweetheart he pines for during the quiet moments between murders. The protagonist of 91 Days is a hollowed-out shell of a human being who spent seven years planning revenge and forgot how to feel anything that wasn't hatred or the cold satisfaction of watching his enemies die. Yet if you jump onto Archive of Our Own or scroll through certain corners of Reddit, you'd think he and Nero Vanetti were the star-crossed lovers of the century. They're not. That reading isn't just wrong, it completely misses what makes this anime one of the most brutally honest revenge stories ever animated.

The confusion is understandable on a surface level. Angelo and Nero spend a lot of time together. They save each other's lives multiple times. They share food, guns, and long car rides across state lines while bootlegging illegal hooch. There's a scene where Angelo tends to Nero while he's sick, and the whole thing is shot with this weird intimacy that makes people uncomfortable in that specific way that usually signals romantic tension in other shows. But 91 Days isn't other shows. It's a twelve-episode descent into moral rot set during Prohibition, and Angelo is too busy being a ghost to fall in love.

Why Everyone Thinks Angelo and Nero Are Dating

TheAO3 tag for Angelo Lagusa and Nero Vanetti has thousands of works. I'm not knocking fan fiction here. People can write whatever they want and some of it's probably good. But the sheer volume of romantic interpretations has created this weird feedback loop where new viewers go into the show expecting a slow-burn mafia romance and instead get two men destroying each other because one murdered the other's entire family. That's the actual plot. Angelo infiltrates the Vanetti family under the fake name Avilio Bruno specifically to kill Nero's father, brothers, and eventually Nero himself. The fact that he hesitates at the end doesn't make it a love story. It makes it a tragedy about how revenge consumes everything until you don't even want the thing you sacrificed your soul to get.

Their relationship is built on lies and murder. Angelo manipulates Nero into trusting him by engineering situations where he has to save Nero's life. He kills Nero's best friend Vanno and frames it on a rival family. He convinces Nero to kill his own brother Frate. He tricks him into destroying everything the Vanetti name stood for. If that's romance, then every sociopath who ever conned someone out of their life savings was just being romantic. The chemistry people see isn't sexual or romantic. It's the magnetic pull of two people who recognize they're both trapped in a cycle of violence that neither of them knows how to escape. Nero keeps Angelo alive because he's useful and because he represents something Nero can't admit he needs, which is permission to stop pretending he has a conscience. Angelo keeps Nero alive because killing him too early would ruin the plan, and then later because he's already hollowed himself out so completely that he can't remember why he wanted revenge in the first place.

Some people point to the ending as proof of their bond transcending hate. They drive to the ocean together. Angelo says he didn't kill Nero because he didn't want to. Nero shoots him on the beach, or maybe he doesn't, the screen cuts to black and we see footprints in the sand. Then Nero finds a can of pineapple slices in his car and smiles. That's not a happy ending. That's two men who have lost everything realizing too late that the only person who understands their guilt is the person who caused it. If that's love, it's the most toxic, codependent, mutually assured destruction version of love possible, and calling it a romance is like calling a car crash a dance.

The Only Real Relationship Angelo Had Was With Corteo

If you want to talk about who Angelo actually cared about, look at Corteo. Not in a shipping way. In the way that Corteo was the only person who knew Angelo before the massacre, the only one who saw him cry, the only one who made him laugh. They grew up together in the poor part of Lawless before the Vanettis murdered Angelo's family. Corteo's mom used to give them both soup when Angelo's parents were busy. They shared dreams about getting out of the town and living normal lives. Corteo even invents the moonshine recipe, Lawless Heaven, that becomes the catalyst for the whole plot.

Angelo treats Corteo like garbage for most of the show. He drags him into the mafia world knowing it will probably get him killed. He uses him as a pawn in his revenge scheme. He lies to him constantly. But there's this moment in episode nine where Corteo is being tortured by the Vanettis and Angelo has to listen to his best friend scream because he can't reveal their connection without blowing his cover. The look on Angelo's face isn't the blank mask he wears for everyone else. It's pain. Real, actual human pain that he hasn't felt since he was seven years old watching his brother get shot.

And then Angelo kills him. He has to. Corteo gets caught as a traitor and Angelo is the one who pulls the trigger because letting someone else do it would be even worse. It's the single most human moment in the series because Angelo finally does something that isn't calculated. He cries while he does it. He holds Corteo's body. He loses the only thing tethering him to his humanity, and after that he's just a weapon with nowhere to point except at Nero.

If Angelo could have loved anyone romantically, it would have been before the massacre, maybe some girl from his childhood we never see, or maybe Corteo if you read their friendship as potentially something more in a different life. But by the time the show starts, that capacity is gone. Buried with his family in 1921.

That Weird Episode With Amy Doesn't Count

There's an episode where Angelo and Nero are hiding out in some small town and Angelo meets this girl named Amy. She's nice. She's normal. She works at a diner or something and she talks to Angelo like he's a person instead of a walking corpse. For about fifteen minutes of screen time, the show tricks you into thinking maybe Angelo could have a life outside of revenge. Maybe he could stay in this town, marry this girl, forget about the Vanettis.

He can't. He uses her to steal a car or get information or something equally transactional. I don't even remember the specifics because it's so forgettable. The point of Amy isn't to be a love interest. She's a mirror showing Angelo what he could have been if he hadn't spent seven years planning murders. She represents the normal life, the boring happiness, the future that was stolen from him when he was a kid. And he walks away from it without looking back because he's already too far gone.

That's the only time in the entire series where Angelo interacts with a woman who isn't trying to kill him or related to someone he's trying to kill. There's no romantic subplot. No will-they-won't-they. Just a stark reminder that Angelo Lagusa died seven years ago and Avilio Bruno is just a costume he's wearing until the revenge is finished.

Revenge Is A Disease That Eats Love First

There's a line in the show where Angelo says revenge is a disease that eats away at you from the inside. He wasn't being metaphorical. The anime shows us exactly how this works. When we see Angelo as a kid, he's smiling. He's playing with his brother Luce. He's happy. Then the Vanettis come and shoot his father Testa, his mother Elena, and his little brother right in front of him while he hides in a closet.

The next time we see him, he's been living under a fake name for seven years. He doesn't smile. He doesn't make friends. He doesn't have hobbies unless you count staring at walls and planning intricate murders. The only thing that brings him any pleasure is sweet food, which is this weird character tic that the show uses to remind you he was once a child who liked candy. But even that isn't about joy. It's just muscle memory.

You can't love someone when you're in that state. Love requires vulnerability. It requires opening yourself up to the possibility of loss, of caring about someone else's wellbeing more than your own. Angelo can't do that. He cut out that part of himself so he wouldn't flinch when he had to kill Don Vincent Vanetti or manipulate Frate into a death trap. By the time he meets Nero, he's not a person anymore. He's a vector for vengeance.

That's why reading romance into his relationships is so frustrating. It suggests that love can fix him, that Nero's friendship or hypothetical romantic interest could heal the trauma and make him whole again. The show explicitly rejects this idea. The closer Angelo gets to Nero, the more he destroys him. The more he destroys himself. There's no healing. There's only the slow realization that once you've killed everyone on your list, you're still empty because the people you actually loved are still dead.

Why The Ending Proves There Was Never Romance

Let's talk about that ending again because people really seem to struggle with it. Angelo and Nero drive to the ocean. It's beautiful. The animation budget went crazy on the waves. Angelo admits that his revenge left him with no reason to live. Nero beats him up and demands to know why Angelo didn't kill him seven years ago during the massacre. Angelo says Nero should have killed him instead. Then they get to the beach, Angelo says he didn't kill Nero because he didn't want to, and he starts walking away.

Nero shoots him. We hear the gunshot. We see Angelo fall, or maybe we don't, it's ambiguous. Then Nero drives away and sees a can of pineapple slices that Angelo bought earlier, and he smiles. Some people think this means Nero spared him because he smiled. Some people think the footprints in the sand at the very end mean Angelo survived. Others think Nero killed him and the smile is just Nero remembering their weird horrible friendship before he drives off to be alone forever.

None of these interpretations involve romance. If Nero loved Angelo romantically, shooting him or leaving him to bleed out on a beach is a terrible way to show it. If Angelo loved Nero, he wouldn't have spent twelve episodes destroying his life. The pineapple can isn't a love token. It's a reminder of the one time they weren't trying to kill each other, when they were just two guys eating canned fruit in a car. It's nostalgia for a friendship that was always fake on Angelo's part and doomed on Nero's.

The ambiguity isn't romantic. It's existential. It's two men who committed so many sins that they can't tell if they're forgiving each other or just confirming that nothing matters anymore. That's not a relationship goal. That's a cautionary tale.

Stop Trying To Fix Him With Shipping

I get it. People like shipping. People especially like shipping two attractive men with complicated dynamics. But Angelo Lagusa isn't a tsundere who needs the right partner to thaw his cold heart. He's a trauma victim who spent his entire adolescence planning a massacre. He doesn't need a boyfriend. He needs therapy and a witness protection program. He doesn't need Nero to kiss him on the beach. He needs to not have seen his family murdered.

When you write fan fiction where they're secretly in love and running away together to live happily ever after, you're ignoring the entire point of the show. 91 Days isn't a romance. It's a tragedy about how violence begets violence and revenge leaves you with nothing. Angelo doesn't get a happy ending because he didn't do anything to earn one. He killed innocent people. He destroyed a family. He got his best friend tortured to death. Even if he felt bad about it later, that doesn't erase the blood on his hands.

The lack of romantic relationships in Angelo's life isn't a plot hole. It's the point. He gave up his humanity to get revenge. He traded love for hate, intimacy for calculation, connection for manipulation. By the end of the series, he's not capable of loving Nero or anyone else because he's not capable of loving himself. He's just a ghost who doesn't know he's supposed to be dead yet.

So no, Angelo Lagusa doesn't have love interests. He has targets. He has obstacles. He has one dead friend and one living enemy who might have been a friend in another life. But he doesn't have romance. He doesn't get that luxury. And the show is better, darker, and more honest because of it.