Cater and Friendship

Cater may have complicated feelings about friendship: he says outright that he “doesn’t really do long-term friends,” referencing one specific but unnamed friend that he made and then left within a month, which may have left an impact on him.

Kalim says that the pop music club once had a concert where Cater asked his friends to call for an encore, but Kalim and Cater seem to have different definitions of the word “friend,” with Kalim using it to describe people that Cater repeatedly specifies are acquaintances.

Lilia says that Cater may be the wisest of them all in choosing to not get too close to any one person, but Cater doubts that Lilia “could ever understand how helpless (he) feel(s).”

When Cater refers to himself and others as Jamil’s friends during Firelit Sky he does so using the word “friends” in the katakana alphabet, possibly to symbolize his stance on friendship: in katakana the word becomes just a sound, without any kanji to give it deeper meaning.

Despite this he still referencing friends in other situations, saying that he doesn’t have a single friend from Ignihyde, which may imply that he does have friends in others but he does not name anyone specifically.

Heartslabyul students refer to him as a friend of Riddle’s.

When Ruggie asks if Cater plays video games online with friends he says he actually plays things like puzzle games, for when he wants to clear his head.

Cater is one of the only a few characters to use the word “best friend” in the game, in reference to Trey, but it seems he is still keeping Trey at arm’s length according to his “no long-term friends” rule.

And it seems that Trey may know it:

When Cater refuses to confide in him during the Wish Upon a Star event Trey reflects, “You’d think he’d be open to sharing one of his actual wishes by now. Then again, maybe he is…just not with me.”

In Book 7 it was revealed that Cater might actually have people whom he considers to be friends: he refers to ネットの友だち (“net friends”), saying that he isn’t as close to them as he is to Trey, and cannot talk to them about things like year-one Riddle.