#//lola as a case study in how extremist groups target the vulnerable got me like 💔

[paleontaxi]

Thoughts on Lola aka The Lola Giga Post™

➭ Lola never looked much like Jarod at all, the spitting image of her mother, with slightly wavy caramel brown hair and green eyes.  Jarod never resented her for looking too much like her mother, though.  She was his little girl, and he thought she was beautiful and perfect at every point in her life.

➭ She was taller than Jarod by the end, standing at 5′7″, getting her height from her mother as well.

➭ Lola was very competitive, about a lot of things, to a fault.  Anytime there was even a perceived competition, she wanted to win.  When she was 4 or 5, she cheated at board games, and Jarod would let her because she was adorable when she thought she was being slick.  Eventually, she tired of the lack of challenge, though, and started playing games right.

She even came to despise cheating in others, especially when it resulted in her losing something, and she was extremely vocal in calling it out.  One year, at her school’s book fair, there was a book about dinosaurs that she wanted, and when she dragged Jarod in to buy it for her, she found it missing.  Not a moment too late, she spotted a boy from her class bringing it up to the desk to buy it and peered over his shoulder, only to see that he had swapped the price tag with one from a cheaper book so that the teachers would think he could afford it.  And she did not take that one lying down, screaming that he had cheated and stomping through the book fair to find the book with the dinosaur price tag on it.

This early competitive spirit and subsequent obsession with fairness and justice is a small part of what drew her into the Brigades.  Tyrak had been winning elections by intimidating voters, and once she thought about it for too long, that method of cheating started to get under her skin.

➭ Her favorite dinosaur when she was very little, around 4-6, was the Iguanodon, which she liked for its funny little thumb spikes.  Instead of doing the T-Rex arms when she played dinosaur, she went through a phase where she would walk around with two thumbs up, pretending to be the Iguanodon.  The thumb spikes were used to ward off predators, and as such, she would make Jarod play the T-Rex and “stab” him with her thumbs in order to “defend” herself.

As she aged, her love of the Iguanodon specifically started to wane a little, but only because her love of other dinosaurs grew.  By the time she was 10 or so, she stopped even trying to tell people what her favorite dinosaur was because she liked so many of them.

The Iguanodon is the dinosaur in Jarod’s icon border on this blog.

➭ I mentioned in this post that Lola basically held Jarod at gunpoint and forced him to learn how to dance with her, but the truth is that she liked dancing well before that, anyway.  Both before and after the competition, chores would always take her a little bit longer to do because she would dance her way through them instead of doing them in the most efficient way possible.  They didn’t have a lot of money for formal lessons, especially since the costumes for dance lessons rack up pretty quickly, and they were a one-income household.  So, both she and Jarod are self-taught through things like music videos, improv, and a lot of determination.

Although Lola is very competitive and wanted to win the father-daughter dance competition against the girl she didn’t like, she might have eventually lost steam if she didn’t already have some interest in the art to begin with.

➭ Lola was in karate lessons from the ages of 7-9, and she had a fat little dinosaur plushie that served as her karate buddy, which would get a new ribbon of a matching color tied around its stomach every time she earned a new belt.

She did lose a lot of her karate / self-defense knowledge once the lessons stopped, but she was retrained how to fight a little by some of the Brigades, who also taught her how to fire a gun.  However, she was still a very novice shooter by the time they sent her to the wall in 1986.

➭ She knew how to cook fairly well.  Jarod did hire a lot of sitters in the earliest years of her life, of course, since he worked such weird hours.  But he also wanted to make sure that she learned how to cook early on in her life in the event that she did find herself home alone.  And going into her late childhood / early teenage years, she didn’t have the sitters anymore, so it did help her, being able to feed herself.

She would often cook and leave dinner out for Jarod when he came home from working late.  He did cook for Lola as often as possible because he felt bad leaving her on her own, but she didn’t actually mind it too much.  She came to enjoy cooking to some extent, especially after she made it a goal to get better at it than he was and force him to admit to it, too.  She rather liked coming up with new combinations and fancy-ish ways of presenting things.

She never did have any qualms leaving Jarod with the dishes afterwards, though, regardless of which one of them cooked.

➭ She was a fan of movies, a bunch of different ones, including - maybe even especially - campy, cheesy, silly, over-the-top horror movies.  Jarod would put them on for himself after she went to bed, but she would hear the screaming and get curious and come out of her room to see what he was watching.  She scared him more than once, standing behind him in silence, not alerting him to her presence, until something happened, and she would let out a quiet ‘oh no!’ and make him jump out of his skin.

After she sneaked out of her room to join him enough, he started openly inviting her to watch them with him.  When she would bury her face in his chest, he would ask if she wanted to go to bed while he finished it by himself, and she would immediately protest and pull her head back up, determined to tough it out and stay up late.

Because of this, she acclimated to gore and other creepy morbid shit at a young age, and she was at least moderately more difficult to gross out than a lot of her other peers.

➭ She did well in school, averaging As and Bs, because of course - what was the point if she couldn’t outdo her classmates just a little bit?  However, she did struggle more with algebra and basically anything that was math just for the sake of math.  She did love applied math, like the math involved in science, such as in chemistry and physics, for example.  When she could see the use for the math, she was decent at it.  But when solving for x for “no reason,” she floundered a little bit.

➭ Just like she liked to dance, she liked to sing, although she wasn’t very good at that, just a little bit tone-deaf in that regard.

She liked music in general, really, and was able to connect with her peers about that, when she wasn’t being kind of morbidly weird or annoyingly showy.  She listened to a bunch of different stuff, with a special fondness for pop and jazz, although she would never admit to the latter.

The jazz was picked up from Jarod who played it often because it helped him relax, and she was far too fond of ripping on him for his “bad / boring taste,” unwilling to admit that she enjoyed it, liking it especially because it made her think of him.

➭ Lola did ask Jarod about her mom a handful of times since she was too young to remember her.  He tried his best to answer her questions patiently, but she could tell that they got under his skin, regardless.  She did ask him at one point why her mother had left them.  And at another point, whether or not her mother loved her, and if not, then why not?

Jarod did not have a good answer for any of those, not one that he could think of that wouldn’t hurt Lola’s feelings in some way, so he gave her a somewhat noncommittal response and then assured her that she still had him and that he loved her and that was what mattered.  And it worked a little bit.

However, despite his efforts, Lola’s feelings were hurt.  Because Jarod could not articulate Lola’s mother’s reasons for leaving, Lola started to feel like there weren’t any reasons, that she and her father had done nothing wrong to warrant the abandonment.  And whatever curiosity she had about her mother dissolved into a bitter resentment, a deep hatred of the woman, although she never mentioned this more than a few times.  She kept her hatred of her mother close to her chest and resolved, simply, to stop talking about her altogether, to spare her father from any more questions that might rip open old wounds.

➭ When she turned 15, Lola started to struggle with her identity, developing new insecurities and no longer feeling wholly comfortable in her own skin.�� Had they lived a while longer, they would have found that this disconnect between their perceived self and their current body was an issue of gender identity.  Lola would have, at some point, ended up identifying as either nonbinary or a trans man.

However, because Petria does not really have any easily accessible LGBT+ resources, she never had the terminology to express it.  They never would have been able to pinpoint why they were feeling bad, not without trying on a lot more things, over the course of the next several years, which they never got to live to see.

I will be referring to Lola using both she/her and they/them pronouns interchangeably from now on.  I do not consider referring to Lola with she/her pronouns to be misgendering them because at the time of their death, they still identified as a girl.  In her mind, she was still fully a girl, a confused one who felt bad about herself, but a girl nonetheless, nowhere even close to thinking of identifying as trans as an option.

➭ Lola’s internal struggles with their identity did cause them to pull away from Jarod, feeling exhausted and repulsed by the notion that they had to live up to the expectation of being “daddy’s little girl.”  This was almost completely subconscious on Lola’s part.  They had no idea where their sudden lack of interest in interacting with their father came from, just that they felt he “no longer understood” them, but they could not put a finger on what they wanted him to understand.

This is yet another thing, a big thing, that drew her into the Brigades - the desire for a sense of belonging that her home life no longer provided for her.  Bob was able to take her and her complaints that her father “didn’t understand” and make her believe that he did understand, even if she was unable to articulate anything to him as well.  He was incredibly charismatic and someone Lola looked up to as a role model and as someone who would accept them as a person rather than a daughter.

So, she joined the Brigades and latched onto that as an identity and a community, to try to work her way through her confusion.

➭ Lola had a tendency to externalize her problems, to project outward and find other causes for them that she could latch onto, instead of turning inward and reflecting, which is a trait that she picked up from her father.  (See: him going on a revenge quest instead of sitting down with himself, working through his problems, and healing properly.)  As such, their displeasure with themself was easily twisted into a hatred for Petria’s government.  All that they knew was that Something Felt Wrong, and seeing few other options, they pointed at President Tyrak - with some guidance from Bob - and assumed that that must be The Thing That Is Wrong.

Externalizing problems in this way made her feel less confused, at least temporarily, because she had a clear path forward to solving what she perceived to be The Problem.  In reality, even if Brigades succeeded in dismantling Petria’s government entirely, Lola never would have been fully satisfied until they came to terms with who they actually were, which, as mentioned, would have taken a lot more years.

➭ Their codename with the Brigades was Fossil, obviously alluding to their interest in paleontology.  It was, of course, used so that the Brigades could talk to and about her without the authorities finding out her real identity.  Pretty much all Brigades use codenames with each other, such as John going by the name Ursus or Mr. U.

However, Lola’s codename, which they picked for themself, served another purpose in that it helped them start to explore some of their identity issues.  “Fossil” allowed them to shed “Lola” and some of the baggage that came with it.  They never acknowledged “Fossil” as their real or even preferred name consciously, knowing that it was just code, but it did give them a rush, being able to be known as somebody else.

They spent a lot of time with the Brigades, more comfortable living as Fossil than as Lola, although they filled up a lot of time with training and plotting, too much so to really sit down and examine what their Fossil identity meant to them.

➭ Lola got her hair cropped short about a week or two before her death, as part of her experimenting (even if she didn’t call it experimenting).  Jarod never got a picture of her with her new short hair, so the picture on the tribute he set up for her depicts her with long hair, a little bit past her shoulder blades.

➭ To be added to, as I feel like it.