#but she's still given more of the Sympathetic But Misguided Layton Antagonist treatment whereas he's MAINLY 'sympathetic but misguided.'

[regallibellbright]

Honestly I think I'd hate Arthur Cantabella less if they'd simply removed the whole "Yeah no this is a government-condoned psychological experiment" aspect.

TESTING WHAT?! No, genuinely, what? Using the contaminated groundwater/weirdass Silver Fainting Allergy and/or the flower ink as a drug? Because uh, if that's the case, then I'm pretty sure using them both in conjunction contaminates your results.

Is it something about mob mentality? In-groups and out-groups with the elaborate tech crew made of convicted witches and victims maintaining the whole illusion? In that case, I think the fact that you're drugging and gaslighting the entire experiment group is also contaminating the results.

Also the whole fantasy setting is probably a confounding variable for Something.

Okay sure parents could consent to taking part in this experiment for their children, but uh, I'm pretty sure some of these kids were born AFTER the experiment began. Given the aforementioned Large Amounts of Drugging From Multiple Origins going on here, I have some concerns!

No seriously. Please. PL vs PW writers. Give me the grant proposal Arthur Cantabella submitted to get anyone to fund this project. I know it's Bill fucking Hawks, but even he's got limits! I don't see how he benefits from half this shit even if he wants to use the other half (I assume the drugs.) Why is he paying for the rest? There's a reason why Clive is established as being a lone schemer with obscene amounts of money who's keeping all his scientists in the dark and/or coerced to keep building, and it's so that we don't have anyone there questioning why he's building an elaborate fake town populated by actors in addition to his Underground Vengeance Mecha!

The fact that you somehow managed to get this cleared as a psychological experiment establishes that you know the field of psychology exists. Why in the name of all that is holy did you think building an elaborate fake fantasy town with an elaborate magic system which you make real through the power of drugging people, knocking the ENTIRE TOWN out every time a spell is used, changing things around them to simulate "magic" using the most ridiculous Renn Faire stage crew ever, and manipulating the clocks so no one's aware time is passing, with a system that prosecutes witches and burns them so that they can join the Renn Faire Stage Crew along with their victims, and positioning yourself as the all-powerful Storyteller who writes their reality into being would be a better solution than therapy?

Honestly I'd respect "I had a god complex, lol" more. Especially for that last one, but like. In general. Descole's out there living his worst life, he KNOWS he's an asshole supervillain agent of chaos, and I respect this because he has clearly CHOSEN to be Like This. You do you, man. Ditto for Don Paolo but like, less effectively.

This is not how any of this works.

Okay, setting... ALL OF THAT aside, you're doing this because your and your best friend's young daughters are understandably incredibly traumatized because they wanted to ring the bell early and the Weirdass Groundwater-Induced "Allergy" That Makes You Faint When You Hear Silver Ringing caused them and everyone else to pass out, and as everyone in the square below was having a fire festival, this caused a massive tragic conflagration. Okay. Yeah, this is bad. (I have. MANY questions about how this bell was made, excavated, and mounted in the square without anyone ever ringing it and realizing something had happened, but we're going to gloss over those for now, it's Professor Layton and I would otherwise be all over this incredible bullshit. It's great up until it asks us to think THIS was ever a remotely reasonable idea.) One of your daughters is all but catatonic because a story you told her earlier has convinced her she either is or will be taken by The Great Witch Bezella. Sure. (You suck.) Why the FUCK is your solution based on the other one unpersoning herself to her best friend and doing all the work to make the magic real? Yeah, sure, she agreed to it. SHE'S LIKE EIGHT TO TEN. HER BEST FRIEND THINKS SHE'S AN AWFUL MONSTER AND WON'T REACT OTHERWISE. OF COURSE Eve's gonna help, but that doesn't mean you should put the entire burden on her! She is ALSO horribly traumatized to the point of repressing what happened. Get her help too. The fact that the game seems to put their actions on remotely even footing when one of them has been treated like shit since she was TEN and one of them was an adult who PURPOSEFULLY AND INTENTIONALLY set up a system that would put her in this shitty situation means that yeah, no, they fundamentally are not. Of course her decisionmaking is misguided and terrible! She's a twenty-year-old who's been horribly mistreated for more than half her life! HER DAD JUST COMMITTED SUICIDE OUT OF GUILT FOR HIS ACTIONS IN SETTING UP THIS SYSTEM.

No one's going to hold them responsible for the deaths. This was a sequence of events so thoroughly unforeseeable that literally no one could have predicted it. It won't even reflect poorly on you and Belduke, because you two somehow managed to find the bell, excavate it, and mount it without ever ringing it and realizing it knocked you out and you all had an environmentally-induced silver "allergy" and at that point this goes into "acts of a cruel and malicious Writer-God" territory.

Also it was totally predictable that this elaborate system of misogyny would not actually help Espella in the long term as she instead repressed her memories and further internalized the whole witches = evil thing so that when those memories inevitably came back she would be in EVEN WORSE shape, this is why you should have gotten an actual psychologist who could have told you this whole thing was a terrible plan to write your grant.

No like does he drug all his requests to whoever he reports to (it has to be directly to the person signing checks) in the mind-control ink? This is my only explanation here.

Why. In God's name why. Did you not. Simply. DESTROY THE FUCKING BELL TOWER. You have a crane here! What possessed ANYONE to think just covering it up with Vantablack and gaslighting so people couldn't see it was a reasonable solution to the Trauma Tower? (There may be an explanation for this, it has been ten years, but this man's problem solving has been established to be so poor I award him no points.)

And if you were going to do this, why didn't you tell Newton? Or was it just that the lightning strike burning up the Vantablack was itself a reminder to him that you can't repress the past away and he was suddenly aware of how overwhelmingly POINTLESS all this suffering was? (Edit: I think it was this. No but seriously you could’ve just taken a fucking wrecking ball to that thing while you were rebuilding the town.)

Seriously why the fuck did Newton Belduke go along with letting you use his traumatized daughter like this? What the hell, man. What an asshole.

Also. Your problem was that you had two severely traumatized little girls (even if you only acknowledged one of them was traumatized.) Your solution was... to traumatize a shitload more young girls?

TO THE POINT WHERE AT LEAST ONE OF THEM ATTEMPTED SUICIDE?!

And then your best friend actually committed suicide?!

Like. Seriously. If these are the actions of a single, seriously traumatized person, the fact that you are making Literally The Worst And Most Inexplicable Decisions Ever Which Make The Problem Worse For Literally Everyone Involved is more... well, conceivable. I buy a traumatized eighteen-year-old with an obscene amount of money building an elaborate fake London that is allegedly London ten years in the future, hiring actors to populate it, kidnapping scientists, making them build an Underground Vengeance Mecha to destroy the city, and then kidnapping the Prime Minister who is the source of that trauma and hooking the engine of the mecha up to his heart. And then roping in the one guy who could conceivably solve the whole problem and stop him and Clive would let it. It's a bad idea on EVERY conceivable level, don't get me wrong, on an UNPRECEDENTEDLY terrible scale, but it's a bad idea in which it is very clear no one at any point has asked the person what the fuck they think they're doing here, what they are trying to accomplish, and why they are doing so with this objectively absurd method. Because they have not let anyone in close enough to key them to The Full Absurd Terribleness. It's either this or become Batman.

But Arthur? Apparently his decisions have been vetted by OTHER PEOPLE, and this just boggles my mind. I refuse to believe this. I refuse to believe NO ONE went "have we considered this is like eight hundred terrible ideas bundled up into The Worst Idea Ever?" And I refuse to believe he's anything but a massive asshole when his plan had so many awful consequences for literally everyone BUT himself!

Like, don't get me wrong. There are SO MANY examples of unethical experimentation on human subjects in the real world, psychological and otherwise. But most of them are not this incredibly convoluted, implicitly expensive, and we all generally recognize these days that they were bad.

Also, none of them were enacted as an elaborate setup to (incompetently) handle the trauma of the experimenter's daughter after he told her if she was bad a scary evil witch would possess her and then she and her friend accidentally enacted a tragedy whose scale and fundamental absurdity rival the Boston Molasses Flood, but without corporate greed. There were solutions to this that were so much easier, less convoluted, less EXPENSIVE, and less harmful to... well, everyone else involved, except Arthur Cantabella.