#and going overboard on the 'their decisions are based on questionable doctrine and living as child soldiers so therefore they are assholes' | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

aroace-number-eight · 1 year ago

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One of my worse fears when I do rereads of the series is that I look at moments where the characters are obscenely rude and/or make offhanded comments and gestures, and they're actually not OOC moments or contradict previous establishing character traits, because the reality is that they're total assholes and we just choose to believe they're nicer than that

#delete later #ernest talks #it's a late night thought and i usually don't trust my own words #but i think about how the narrative leads you away from realizing half the questionable thoughts and actions the characters have #range from 'why would you do this?? at all??“ to 'im starting to think they're assholes'#I'd be horrified if this is frey's idea of crafting a cast of morally gray characters based on trauma and war/abusive environments #and going overboard on the 'their decisions are based on questionable doctrine and living as child soldiers so therefore they are assholes'#'but as the main characters and children of war they are slapped on with the hero label'#'and though their decisions are horrid it makes sense for them and i don't want the readers to hate them'#which i doubt was a reason going forward because the series really pushes you to hate five #who embodies a lot of attributes associated with villainy or the low brow joke so as fat = wealth and power #but also fat and autistic = the weird joke #and is continuously dragged through the series so successfully we have ll fans with a 60/40 chance of going through a five hate phase #was frey trying to do a whole 'show me a complicated man' thing odyssey style when doing this #i doubt the research into references and basing lorien on anything was this deep #but even if it were #the series really dates itself showing a womanizer and an enabler and fatphobia and ableism and racist remarks and poor use of culture and #pushing this really upsetting narrative to its audience #a YA novel series mind you which means middle schoolers seeing this rep and not fully developing critical analysis skills to see what's on

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