#i've been trying to write something else like this re: mean-spiritedness

[utilitycaster]

Part of why it’s tough to talk about the most recent episodes is that I feel a lot of people treat party dynamics, culpability vs. victimhood, and overall character focus on the show, based on an idea of a zero sum game, and I find that fallacious.

It’s really valid for everyone to be furious at Ashton, and I don’t think anyone has behaved wildly inappropriately towards them. I don’t think Bells Hells behaved in a therapy-approved manner either, but as is frequently discussed this is fiction and not real life and therapy-approved discussions are so boring and unnatural in, to be honest, either fiction or real life, that this is not a metric anyone whose opinion I respect would use.

It’s also extremely understandable how Ashton got here. As Taliesin said on 4SD, and now in-game and in-character, the fact that nothing good had ever really happened to Ashton means that they jumped at the first sign that they might be special and ran with it. The Ashton and FCG parallels continue; the past week has been a bunch of important people telling him how unique and cool he is. Jumping into the lava even worked out well for them! And so, riding high on that hubris, and with the knowledge that the rest of the party would probably stop them, they deliberately deceived everyone but Fearne. He even admits that the fact that “very smart people” (Evontra’vir, Allura, arguably Percy) advised against it was part of why he made the decision he did. It was perfectly in character, it did come from their trauma, and it still was a choice that was harmful to them, to the rest of the party, and to a vitally important mission. Ashton covers the situation well: they wanted someone else to blame, but in the end it was their fault.

Ashton is both deeply traumatized and also responsible for a number of their own problems. To be honest, I think this can be said to an extent about everyone in the party, but that’s beside the point. Within the fandom, swinging entirely to one side (They are a horrible selfish monster who ruined everything and are lucky the party is still talking to them) or the other (He has had a very hard life and exploding hurt a lot and everyone should be nice to him as a result) is an incomplete picture at best and a realization of the post author’s unexamined bias at worst.

It’s much easier to cover the other kind of zero sum: that of the show’s, and the fandom’s focus. The show is telling a story. In a good story, everyone will get their time in the sun, but if you’re counting how many minutes each person talks you have quite literally lost the plot. If your favorite isn’t getting the time you wish they did, it’s worth considering what sort of actions they take. Rarely do I find a main PC to actually be sidelined; more frequently, they just have a more subtle plot and the actor playing them realizes this. And in the case of the fandom’s focus; I’d be a hypocrite if I said complaining wasn’t valid, but you’ll achieve far more by making good posts about an underrated character than whining that other characters exist. People can enjoy multiple things at once, and frequently do.