#be grateful I didn’t make this post even longer akdhksidhs

[boydykedevo]

I think Devo telling Orlean to bring his family is a really underappreciated character growth moment tbh.

For a lot of the show, Devo characterized every person who hurt him as pure evil, especially Guidance and Orlean. And that’s pretty justified from his point of view; they were abusive and manipulative his entire life, and in order to escape that abuse, he kinda had to do a 180 like that. When we get introduced to them, they certainly come across as pure evil.

But there’s moments as the show goes on that prove that neither of them is one-dimensional. At the end of the Infinite Clam, Guidance seems to genuinely care for Devo in a misguided way, although it’s possible that’s purely manipulation. When Orlean appears in Shret’s swamp, he’s crying, and when Devo gets aggressive with him, he just wants to be left alone. At the beginning of the Menagerie, when Devo barges into Guidance’s office, she and Seldom chew him out and they have a point.

Then, when Guidance dies, and her suicide note calls him Devo, he’s sure it can’t be real because she wouldn’t have called him that. (He’s right, but he didn’t know it yet so shhh) Everyone else tries to tell him it’s real, and by the time he confronts Orlean again, he’s had to sit with that for a while, the idea that maybe Guidance did come around at the end and call him by his chosen name. He’s had to question his perception of her.

And then he learns about Orlean’s family, and it humanizes him. Devo definitely doesn’t forgive him, but he starts to realize that although Orlean is a bad person, he’s a person nonetheless, and he’s not a simple cartoon villain.

Orlean is dying, he can’t manage to speak into the past himself, he thinks he’s failed to save them completely, and Devo, a man who’s mainly driven by anger towards the church, who’s vowed to kill Orlean in particular, saves his family.