#he literally rescued thistle from the cage he constructed to keep them both in place and told him he doesn't have to worry about

[roomba-mangga]

That's what I'm saying! Reconnecting in a different way is the whole point.

Repeating what I said in og post, going back to a restrictive and damaging family model where Thistle has never fit and which frankly doesn't make sense beyond labels-for-the-sake-of-labels isn't the happily ever after that it looks like. Yes, I think reconnecting would involve trying to view each other in terms of how they relate to Delgal (Thistle was Delgal's brother in essence and Yaad is Delgal's grandson so sure, they're uncle and nephew on paper)... but in practice? That would just entail reliving a past that held them both hostage in the first place, putting them back in the cage they escaped from (the cage Yaad rescued Thistle from, mind you!)

It's less "they shouldn't be family at all" and more "a familial relationship between them wouldn't (shouldn't) be a rehash of how things used to be". The Demon's influence over Thistle wasn't the only contributing factor to his madness—the Melini family itself is just as responsible, and Yaad knows this. Let something new take its place.

thoughts on thistle and yaad's dynamic that i vomited in the tags of another post but will now try to articulate here: they're not actually family, or at least they shouldn't be. not in a nuclear family sense. framing them as uncle and nephew (even in a non-literal, silly fantasy world way) rides more on technicality than anything concrete.

what i mean by this is yaad calls thistle by name and says he and delgal were raised "like" brothers. he talks about thistle like he's an outsider imposing himself into the melinis' space, and it's clear that thistle was never legitimized as a member of the family. for thistle's part, though we don't know how he would treat yaad pre-demon brainrot, it's safe to assume based on the way he punishes him—turning him into a doll—and how little is shown in the way of any sort of relationship between them that thistle only cares* about yaad as an extension of delgal (otherwise i'd expect something like kabru and milsiril, because it's not like another complicated interspecies family dynamic would be out of place, yet there's next to nothing on them even in bonus content, just their scant interactions in the main story).

in essence, they're strangers to one another. thistle's desperation to preserve the illusion of a family, a model where he doesn't even fit, was the snare they were caught in for the past thousand years of stasis. yaad-as-nephew is a prop to uphold that illusion, and thistle is playing a role he's unfit to play. in the context of post-canon interactions, attempting to reconstruct that facade would only be a reenactment of trauma for them both (in a deeply compelling way i'd love to watch unfold, tbh), as that "uncle and nephew" framing places thistle in an implicit position of power over someone he's already traumatized through misuse of authority in the past, a role which also perpetuates his adultification and yaad's infantilization in turn. it'd mostly be an obstacle to any real connection.

best to burn the melini family bridge, i think, and if there's still anything salvageable left in the rubble, let something different supplant it.