#either way it would be extremely triggering to focus on my wrongdoings again

[fierysword]

I found a group called Obsessive Compulsive Anonymous and the steps include making a moral inventory of yourself, admitting wrongdoings, making a list of everyone we've harmed, and continuing to take personal inventory 😭😭😭 yeah I pretty much already did that (except it was more like constant mental cycling instead of making a list) and it sent me spiraling into severe depression

and "continuing to take personal inventory" for my OCD has been to walk on eggshells and question even minor and harmless things

[coelasquid]

Honestly gettin’ pretty sick of people coming to me to trash Joseph whenever I say he’s a complicated character with a lot of nuance, so hey, here’s my take on the whole Mary-Robert-Joseph situation.

I’ll put this all under a cut so here are some disclaimers; This is full of spoilers, I’m writing this under the assumption that all the cult end stuff is non-canon, and yes, this is only one possible interpretation of the information we can glean from the character interactions (also, taken from what may later prove to be incomplete information as more endings are unlocked/glitches are fixed/content is released). I like it because I think it’s the most interesting and empathetic for all of the characters involved and because I don’t think it’s the kind of situation that necessarily has to have a “villain”.

I think right now the discussion about this relationship is too focused on making one character “the bad guy” and the other “the good guy” in a binary black-and-white pass-fail one-character-is-at-fault-one-character-is-pure-and blameless dichotomy that can’t ever really apply to real relationships, and I think that focusing on making it about which character has had sex with someone outside of marriage and which has not without looking at any other extenuating factors oversimplifies the issue even moreso.

What we know for fact is that Joseph has cheated on Mary, at least once, specifically by sleeping with Robert. We know for fact that Mary frequently goes out to get excessively drunk and hits on men, to the point of needing to be escorted home by the bar staff, but does not sleep with the men she tries to pick up. We don’t know whether Mary’s statement “you aren’t his usual type” is supposed to mean that Joseph has cheated on her multiple times or whether she’s so bitter about the one time it did happen she continues to needle him about it and bring it up. So “you aren’t his usual type” could just mean “you aren’t as hot as Robert and that makes it harder for me to accept this”.

We can assume that while Mary is out at the bar on a regular basis, leading an active social life, Joseph is the one at home with their four children. It was confirmed by the writer that the eldest is supposed to read as autistic, the twins are shown to be a conspiratory handful who aren’t easy to deal with unless separated, and the youngest is a toddler. This is, in all likelihood, a very demanding group of children to care for, even moreso if you’re trying to do it alone.

Joseph’s first two dates are not particularly “romantic” in nature, and really focus more on doing pretty mundane things that parents-who-are-friends might help each other out with. Baking brownies and wrangling kids for a church bake sale and chaperoning a youth centre dance until you’re relieved and go off to get margaritas. These are not activities a partner should feel threatened by in a healthy relationship. Speaking as a married person myself, these are not things I would feel threatened by if my own husband were doing with a friend. Mary is threatened by them, however. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem trying to divine “is Mary jealous because Joseph has cheated in the past” or “does Joseph cheat because Mary gets jealous when he has friends”, but either way the fact of the matter is that at the point we meet them Joseph can’t have friends without triggering Mary’s jealousy.

So in that sense, Joseph is an extremely isolated person. He’s supposed to be the one people in the community can come to for support, but he himself doesn’t really have a support network of his own while he tries to give his kids happy childhoods and actively ignore the very public knowledge that his wife is out partying and hitting on other men all the time. It’s fairly understandable that he would be so starved for support and affection that he would throw himself into the arms of the first person to reach out to help him with basic domestic tasks. Which is not to say it’s a morally upstanding thing to do, but it’s as understandable as Mary’s jealousy and resentment.

There’s this sort of relationship binge-and-purge problem I’ve been told a number of people who cheat on their partners tend to get stuck in, where an individual feels so trapped in their relationship that they cheat, but then they feel so guilty about cheating that they return to their partner and try to be excessively accommodating and devoted to make up for what they did. Again, this is speculation based on the incomplete information we have, but it would be a pretty realistic situation if Joseph was so desperately unhappy in his relationship he threw himself into the arms of another person who showed him affection and then felt so guilty about it after the fact that he came crawling back to Mary and refused to confront her about any of the issues that drove him away initially. As in, he put the blame for the situation entirely on himself and tried to come back and be the most upstanding, accommodating, understanding, devoted partner to make up for his wrongdoing. 

Of course, that doesn’t solve the issue. It just makes it fester. No one confronts Mary about her self-destructive habits so she becomes more distant and resentful towards him, meanwhile he has more pressure and isolation piled on him until he inevitably acts out again. The problem isn’t “who is the bad guy” it’s “these two people are going to poison each others lives as long as they refuse to either sort this out and both accept their share of the blame or cut it off completely and move on to other relationships.

AND WHILE WE’RE ON THE SUBJECT why not discuss Robert too.

We only really have an account of what went down between Robert and Joseph from Joseph’s side of the story, but if we’re operating under the assumption that Joseph isn’t just outright lying to you, it seems to be the point of contention is Joseph thought it was a one night stand because Robert didn’t give him reason to believe otherwise, and then Robert got resentful that Joseph didn’t clue into his expectation that it was more. Which is, honestly, a pretty relatable problem I’ve seen happen between friends in real life.

We know from playing through Robert’s route that he IS the kind of person who gets kind of distant and aloof and expects the other person to play along with what he wants when he makes up his mind about what that is, so this scenario doesn’t seem out of character for him. We also know he is not above coping with his problems by throwing himself into the arms of someone he respects as a “good person”, expecting they’ll “fix” him. This paints a picture that Robert saw Joseph as exactly the kind of stable upstanding person he thought was going to make him feel good about himself and Joseph saw Robert as a release from his unhappy relationship. The two were both vulnerable people expecting the other to fix their problems and both came out the other side feeling worse about it.

So again, yeah, I completely acknowledge there’s room for other interpretations of the situation, but this is what I mean when I say “Joseph is a cheating scumbag” and “Joseph is an actual demon” are both disappointing ways to explain his actions, because the situation has the potential to be very complicated and nuanced for all three of them without any of them having to be “the bad guy”.