#(boosting glossaryck's ego in any way is always morally wrong and the only thing worthy of being sent to hell)

[sagesilentfire]

another toffee analysis by sage h silentfire

I've been sitting on this analysis for a while, and I was going to touch on it briefly in a project I'm working on, but a talk with my therapist allowed me to put it into words and in greater detail than before. So here it is:

Why exactly do I like Toffee so much? It's a genuine question. He's the target of many different questionable writing choices, barely focused on, and forgotten within seconds of his death. We know so little about him he's basically a generic doomsday villain. The fandom is worse to him: popular interpretations paint him as cruel, arrogant, spiteful, and even, surprisingly enough, stupid. The word "sociopath" gets thrown around a lot, which, ableist. He's emotionless. He has no empathy. He's unable to connect with people. While liking villains is somewhat acceptable nowadays, it's always with the expectation that you like them because they're evil, not for any deeper reason. And with Toffee, because he's so poorly written, that should be the reason you like him. Because he's evil, and that's awesome.

But that's not why I like Toffee.

See, I am autistic, and that's never going away. I get more stereotypically autistic by the year, as I grow and become more independent, and my newfound independence clashes with my family and the society I live in. I'm weird, I'm moderately smart, I'm quirky. But more critically, I have no close friends because I literally don't know how to make and maintain friendships. I feel painfully aware of the potential emotions of everyone around me, but I don't know how to act on that awareness and communicate effectively with people, leading me to assume the worst. I have had meltdowns in crowded spaces that went completely unnoticed because I was "too subtle". I even worry that I'll die without any of the stories I want to tell – without my story – being told, because no one wanted to learn it.

Sound familiar?

So yes, I like Toffee. Even think he's a halfway decent person morality-wise, not just a villain. He expresses emotions weirdly, but he does express emotions. He is staunchly not willing to sacrifice his plans for others, but he still takes time to be nice to other people regardless. He didn't kill Moon and Marco when he could have, even though they were trying to kill him. He is empathetic enough to manipulate people and smart enough to take control of any situation, and he does it while not expressing emotions in ways others would expect. He's so much like my dream self fr.

And he dies the unquestioned villain, never getting the chance to tell his side of the story. The only perspective that we do get is filtered through the lens of his murderers. 

"But Sage!" you might be saying. "What about Comet?!"

Well. I do count Comet's death as one of the questionable choices the writers made (it makes very little sense with Toffee's character, wouldn't he manipulate her into a better deal? It feels a little like the writers were like "Oh shoot, we haven't made Toffee evil enough to 'deserve' his graphic death, let's... uh, let's make him kill Moon's mother for no reason!"), but I can understand why Toffee did it, again through an autistic lens.

See, autistic people like me aren't taken seriously. Not about our areas of knowledge, not about our views and beliefs, and especially not about matters of our physical and mental health. We're treated like weird baby dolls that are expected not to have meltdowns or criticize their "superiors". Or we're embarrassments, time bombs just waiting to go off and mortify whoever we're with. Growing up, I was never able to be right, or even have a point. Oh, there were minor disagreements my guardians let me "win" and then would weaponize during the more serious arguments, but whenever we got into screaming matches, I was always the one in the wrong. We didn't even apologize or talk it out after arguments; it was always expected that I would realize I was wrong eventually and it was swept under the rug with all the other skeletons of long-dead arguments and left to simmer into resentment. 

But there was one surefire way to make a dent, one I discovered recently and that has actually saved my life.

In the summer of 2022, I was put on a new medication. Long story short, I did not sleep for two weeks. I was in shambles, and I needed my mother to raise hell from me, because she would not let me do it myself – my psychiatry goes through my guardians, and I didn't even have the psychiatrist's number at the time. But she wouldn't do anything. The psychiatrist thought things would level out eventually, and my mother thought what the psychiatrist thought, nevermind that I was actively getting worse and my sleeping pills were getting less effective by the day. I begged her to raise hell like I knew she could, and she sent a mild phone call gently suggesting that things still weren't ideal. I could feel myself slipping away as everyone who was ostensibly taking care of me sat and twiddled their thumbs.

So I got personal. I deliberately started a big blowout. I convinced her that things weren't going well, and this little game of chicken with my health wouldn't result in the perfect, uncritical, angelic autistic daughter she so desperately wanted. I got into a screaming match, I listed everything she had ever done wrong, and I told her to shut up and stop spewing weak justifications on how my pain wasn't her fault, actually. I hit her where it hurts. I hurt her back. I hurt her.

And it worked. Hurting her made her take me seriously and I was back on my old meds before sunset. I slept well that night. And I will never regret it. 

So maybe Toffee's plan to overthrow his colonizers with the death of Comet didn't end in monster victory. But if it weren't for the eleventh-hour dark magic, it would have. And Toffee's people were oppressed and the victims of genocide for ages. They were the small band of rebels fighting an evil colonizing empire. They were ideologically in the right. They kicked and clawed and bit until they found something to hurt, and then they didn't hesitate. Because no one took them seriously, and they still wouldn't have taken them seriously unless they did something damaging. Comet sure didn't; her chapter is a continually escalating series of microaggressions. Moon didn't; she doesn't seem to care about the conflict at all before Comet's death. Who else would take him seriously? Mina? The High Commission? Glossaryck?

So while I don't think he was totally in character in killing Comet, I do understand more than others why he might have done it. 

Because Toffee is like me, for better or for worse. And he could have been great for me and people like me. But he wasn't. He was assumed to be evil and left to die immediately. Because people like me are always the bad guys.

In short,

Exhibits:

Toffee's emotions, courtesy @butterflyeffectiveless:

Comet's continually escalating microaggressions:

Additional source for Toffee being autistic:

because i'm autistic and i like him

the end.