#i guess you could argue that him being kind to tory has been a throughline of the show

[shrinkthisviolet]

I feel like the Kreese reaching out to Amanda on Tory’s behalf was the CK writers realizing after 3x10 that they’d screwed up where they were wanting to go with Kreese. Since the jerk (re: psycho) tried to kill Johnny (for the second or third time) and tried to kill Daniel after manipulating kids to break into a house (to assault Daniel and Johnny’s kids/students). It was like —

“That was cool, right? …Wait does this make Kreese seem too evil… but he loves Johnny and we want make his potential for redemption believable… Hey! I know! Let’s have him go take up for one of the kids he manipulated into committing crimes to show how wonderful he is!! And we’ll have it be Amanda he reaches out to in reference to the alternate take of their scene in 3x05! And then we have Amanda’s story arc for the Season too! We’re freaking geniuses!”

— which is very frustrating. To me, 3x10 is the best episode of the series. It still holds up even after the annoyance of 4B. I just hate how they backtracked a lot of what happened character-wise that Season. Though, I did enjoy the Kenny stuff (whether it was with Robby or Anthony). I like Robby seeing what it’s like to be a mentor to someone younger and unintentionally changing them for the worse (paralleling how he felt with both his dad and with Daniel). As for Anthony, the arc gave him some growth (not much), by confirming what most of us suspected — he feels ignored by his family (especially his parents) and he’s desperate to get any attention he can (doing crappy things like bullying Kenny). Even if it’s negative attention.

You’re probably right and it’s so ridiculous imo. A character can be evil/villainous and still love another character. Not a healthy love, but a love that’s still compelling anyway…because we know it’s not healthy, and the narrative doesn’t treat it as healthy, so it’s interesting to see the interplay of Character A’s toxic love and Character B’s hate (it’s even more interesting when Character B does sort of love Character A a little bit too 😭 the inherent tragedy of it all!)

So Kreese didn’t have to be humanized in s4 any more than he already was. He’s a nutcase, loves Johnny but in ways that are actively harmful to Johnny, doesn’t seem to realize (or doesn’t care) that hurting Johnny won’t earn him love (because love can’t be earned, and also because Kreese has One Specific Image of Johnny in his head that he can’t shake).

This is what I mean when I say the CK writers can’t write complexly…they had a fantastic dynamic with Johnny and Kreese, but in s4, they threw that away and tried to make Kreese more of a good guy 💀