#PGSm dogs on that idea pretty fucking hard

[docholligay]

PGSM and Parents--Motivation

(I had Ami and then Rei but so much of it was contrasting that I did TOPICS instead of just Ami, then Rei) 

Something that always makes me squeal with delight in these episodes is the way it sets up the idea that these things Ami and Rei are known for may not be their own motivations, but instead born from the circumstances of their lives. We almost take it for granted at this point: Ami wants to be a doctor. Rei is a shrine maiden. 

But PGSM doesn’t allow for things to exist in those easy spaces. In these episodes, when we deal with Ami and her mother about her future, it’s AMi’s mother badgering her about having missed cram school, and it’s not so much that she’s worried about Ami’s emotions or feelings as she is that AMi’s grades are going to slip. She’s so out of touch with AMi that she didn’t even realize Ami has FRIENDS now (More on this in another post.) 

Not only does she suggest that AMi switch school,s but it comes out that it’s not even really a suggestion. She’s already made the interview appointment, and all AMi has to do is come along and her mother will guide more of her life. 

When we go back to Ami, writing on the message board, so small she has to use a stepladder to reach the board*, we see her promising her mother that she will study hard and become a doctor. She’s a tiny thing, and much is made of the watershed moment in Rei’s life at that age, seeing her mother die but I think more than one grand event, a thousand tiny events can add up. Throughout the episodes, Ami talks about how she has never disobeyed or argued with her mother, ever. Her mother is a doctor, her motivation for that role comes out of little more than a life long reaching for her mother.** 

If medicine, if doctoring, is what her mother has time for, and truly loves, than AMi will become that, and that to me is so much more interesting than “I am smart and smart people become doctors” 

And Rei, God do I love this with Rei, because with Ami I don’t want to say I expected it, but I wasn’t as surprised. PGSM did so much for Ami in my eyes that I was already thinking of her with different frameworks, which though I love PGSm Rei, it wasn’t as different from the concept I already had of her in my head, so I wasn’t looking. 

This moment: 

Rocked me in the best way possible. The idea that Rei had no intrinsic motivation for the shrine, that it’s simply that she was GIVEN to it, is the thing I had no idea that I wanted but absolutely did. The shrine, then, is a just another one of the complex relationships that she’s learned to live with, instead of something she sought out. It’s her relationship with Minako, with the other, with being a sneshi in general. It’s the memory of her mother, it’s her hatred of her father, even this thing, this being a shrine maiden, is not allowed to be simple for Rei. In many ways, Rei is Usagi’s foil, and for me this is just another way. Usagi’s home life is easy, her relationship with her duty, her relationship with Mamaoru, all of it is, minus tiny hiccups very easy for her to engage with and come to to terms with, adn Rei doesn’t get that. Nothing gets to be easy for Rei, ever. 

*Let’s just say for a moment that you have communicate with your kid this way--how fucking terrible a parent do you have to be not to put it on THEIR level? Like YOU are reaching THEM? I would say that PGSM is making that exact point here, that Ami has always reached FOR her mother, and not the other way around, but I don’t know that it’s accurate to say that or if I’m just bringing that TO the text

**This whole THING is why I utterly reject the canon-but-terrible fact that Mercy became doctor because both her parents were doctors it’s so boring and disrespectful to Mercy’s own character, INTO THE CANON REFUSE PILE WITH YOU ALONG WITH SO MANY OTHER DUMBASS FACTS AND ASSPULLS.