#ilove being fashionably late to the worm fandom. writing posts on things established in worm dialectical canon literal years ago

[lakesbian]

ok i lied about blakeposting i'm still thinking about amy and victoria. the [grits teeth] really unfortunate thing. is that they are interesting. amy is about the horror of the dissonance between what her family believes her to be (& subsequently what She believes herself to be) and what she's pressured into attempting to be instead. her adoptive mother believes her to be some form of immutably rotten, an intrusion on the family whose ontological being is inextricable from the "wrongness" of her heritage--and subsequently amy believes herself to be immutably wrong. she's not really seen as a member of their ideal White American Golden Nuclear Family by her mother, but she's expected to pretend like she is. she fears the day that her immutable wrongness spills out, revealing her for what she truly is, causing those around her to inevitably hate & abandon her.

her feelings towards victoria are the ultimate tragic highlight of this: the dissonance between what she's supposed to be (an ideal sister, the heroic state-licensed cure-all companion to her golden girl counterpart who metes out justice thru state-authorized violence) and between the core she's terrified of having revealed (someone who doesn't internally view victoria as a real sister because she's treated as an intruder upon the family vs. a real member of it, someone who loves victoria very much but not in the way she's supposed to).

which is where her power comes in--it's about the painful irony of feeling that there's smth just Immutably Inherently Wrong With her that those around her will inevitably hate/leave her for, but instead of her power allowing her to change Herself to prevent that from happening, it lets her change Other People so they'll unconditionally accept her--but in the process of changing them, she meets the self-fulfilling prophecy of exactly what she believes 2 be wrong with her (being inherently predatory/an intrusion upon decent nuclear family/society). the one thing she can't fix or change no matter how desperately she wants to is herself.

and of course the whole "change/fix" thing her power does is impacted by her coremost emotions in the first place--part of the horror of it is how awful it would be if your worst split-second impulses & desperate thoughts could be made manifest directly against your own will. which ties very nicely into the underlying fears involved: you're wrong and dangerous and it will spill out everywhere no matter how hard you try to contain it. which it eventually does, because she's been raised with the expectation to fully contain herself within boundaries of a role actively hostile to her, and it's not a role anyone could act at perfectly forever. even the first moment she snaps/spills over is a direct result of an attempt to impose that role on her--victoria refusing to allow her to determine that she needs time away from family to cope w/ her emotional distress and forcing familial affection onto her under the assumption that, if the expected Sisterly Interaction is had, amy will do what victoria thinks is best for her & return to the family.

and of course there's the entire tragedy over there happening for victoria that she genuinely believes in her family, she genuinely thinks playing cop w/ mom and dad well enough will result in fulfillment & success for both her & amy, and she couldn't even fathom the underlying causes of the eventual snap of someone she regards as the purest form of sister. and i imagine she's very prone to retreating into the ideology instilled in her by her parents as emotional reassurance/protection from that betrayal rather than recognizing the ways in which it's hurting her too. girls when their lives suck. their lives Wouldn't suck if they simply were not put in those psychological torture pits. but unfortunately they were.