#To clarify yes baptist/protestant beliefs are colonial by definition but the people around me genuinely believed they were spreading good

[stardustedknuckles]

I was gonna put it in the tags of a post aabria made but didn't want to be like "hey also my thing!" on a serious post so like. She's pointed out that people's unwillingness to understand that people in the citadel have been and are being good to Suvi absolutely sucks ass and she's right. I admire Suvi as a character and Aabria as the player so much as someone who grew up in church - not just in it but of it. Dad was a pastor, I was in the choir, I taught classes, the whole shebang.

Almost everything about church was fucked to hell, looking back, and I'll carry damage and guilt from it for a longer time yet. Possibly forever. But the people I learned from, admired, befriended, and surrounded myself with were not evil colonizers looking to eradicate every other religion or force convert people or what have you. They were just people living under an ideology that did a whole lot of harm to people outside of it and demanded, as part of its tenets, that you restrict yourself from mingling too much with the Others lest you be confused and turn away from what is written. Hell the Citadel hasn't shown itself to be even that pervasive. I haven't heard a single person question Suvi's conviction to the work of the citadel because of the company she keeps.

Anyway my point is that there is absolutely no reason for Suvi to turn on or even grossly doubt the Citadel, questions about the spells on her nonwithstanding. Aabria is playing on a level of refusing to meta game that is incredible to watch and which makes her point of view very easy to relate to. Suvi's community is stepping up for her. Her friends love her, AND they are upset for valid reasons and puzzling through their own ways of looking at the world - ways that do not come with a manual/guide the way life at the Citadel does. Nothing has been laid before Suvi at this point that would warrant more than a few concerns, let alone full divestment from the Citadel and everyone else Suvi has ever loved, certainly not in the name of two people she would give her life for but who do not in any way have their shit together.

They're just people. Steel is a good person. She is kind, she is sincere, frighteningly intelligent, and a fierce advocate not only for those who are hers but those outside the citadel who deserve respect for the way they see the world and move through it.

Steel is also the right hand of the empire. That is, in fact, the point.

I'm sorry a lot of y'all can only handle stories that soothe hard choices with "well they were bad/mean to you/bigots anyway" and lay it on thick until the moment the character has had enough. That's not actually how any of this works and the realer view of how someone like Suvi would in fact view the world and her place in it is airtight. The chops on Aabria for sticking to it and on Brennan for refusing to mark citadel citizens as evil across the board (or hardly at all) is incredible and the refusal to entertain those ideas as a fan is in fact a skill issue in nearly every case.