#oh and their in wartwood because i said so haha

[kiwibirb1]

Fuck I wanna make a sasharcy animatic to Heather on the Hill yknow the one by Nathan Evans but literally all it would be is just them dance and doing fun twirls and laughing while anne drinks out of a red solo cup in the corner and sprig is like "bet you wish that was you" and Anne is like "shut up dude their happy" and then it's actually bt but only in my head because then I can use their canon designs in the amimatic but not those because they would be more idk gangly? Kinda like wait lemme find them kami's designs but specifically how they draw marcy because I love that um what was the topic again oh right animatic man I wish I could draw

FULL PERMISSION TO USE THIS IDEA BTW SEND ME THE LINK

[maldito-arbol]

Hey i've been curious about something.

In IBYBF you mentioned that Sasha doesn't lie.

And I wanted to know how you got that idea, bc I can't say its true but I can't say its false either

Interesting question!! While I will admit that in canon Sasha is quite the liar, her development in my fics is a little bit different. So we’ll talk about where it started and where it’s going!

What struck me first when I was studying her character is that during Reunion, Sasha takes Anne in private and promptly explains everything about her plan with Grime. She prefaces it with ‘promise not to freak out’, and even after Anne makes an excuse and flees the room it’s apparent from the get-go that Sasha knows Anne isn’t on board—she has that little moment where she goes ���oh she’s totally freaking out’ to clue us as the audience in on the fact that Sasha hasn’t been fooled in the slightest.

I find it very interesting Sasha knows from the start Anne isn’t going to agree to the plan and yet tells her in explicit detail in spite of that. It seems to me like Sasha doesn’t want to keep this from Anne and figures that with enough of the good ol’ Sasha convincing, she’ll be able to essentially force Anne to change her mind. She believes enough in her own skill at manipulating that on occasions like these she doesn’t even have to resort to outright lying. It then led me to speculate sort of as a rule of thumb, that Sasha doesn’t like lying to her close friends, but she has no problem doing so to complete strangers (ie the banquet trick). While this isn’t the thing that started my whole train of Sasha Doesn’t Lie, I did take note of it!

What did start it off was Toadcatcher. If you remember, PMIT begins just after A Day At The Aquarium and involves Marcy meeting up with Sasha much before Anne even gets back to Wartwood, so with having to estimate timelines (because GOD are Amphibia’s timelines inconsistent), I decided to use ADATA and Toadcatcher as my starting point, and I was watching those two episodes religiously as I went along. And I wanted to take into consideration Sasha’s development during Toadcatcher, specifically these scenes.

The first where Grime snaps and practically demands she admit her true feelings on the fight at Toad Tower, that she’s upset about losing Anne and that nothing will ever be the same between them again. She tries to run from him again, which leads into the second scene where she finally stops and allows herself to be honest with Grime—that she cares about him, that she doesn’t want to lose him either, and that she’ll fight by his side. This, to me, represents an important Turning Point (haha get it) in her character. A moment where she finally understands that she and Grime are true friends now, that she can’t just lie and manipulate her way out of everything because he knows her now, and more than that, she doesn’t want to do that to him. He’s effectively entered her circle of ‘the people I want to be true to’. And from here, gradually, her perspective and choices begin to shift.

It first impacts her manipulation techniques in my fic, as now she turns to focus primarily on using hyperbolic emotion to sway Marcy to her side, which is like lying but it’s a bit of a step away from it.

“That she met three months ago,” Sasha said, shaking her head. Her hand came to rest on the crook of Marcy’s neck. “Me, you, and Anne go back years and years. As close as I am to Grime and those two knuckleheads, next to you, they’re nothing . That’s how important you are.”

Note how it’s not necessarily untrue that Marcy and Anne mean infinitely more to Sasha than anyone else, but she specifically uses extreme language to highlight her care for Marcy, to make her feel special. She isn’t being honest, and yet she isn’t lying either. And it works.

From there we jump to Chapter 3, in which it becomes increasingly apparent Sasha holds a distaste for lying to Marcy—first in which she tells her about the events of Toad Tower, she’s surprisingly honest here. She doesn’t twist details, she doesn’t make anything up, she simply gives her the full truth. It’s almost like she’s suddenly discovered that she wants to be honest with Marcy. The second detail is when Grime announces the toad meeting and includes Marcy, Sasha shows a brief flash of guilt at even having kept the whole Rebellion a secret from Marcy. She didn’t actually lie here because the topic simply never came up, but she’s viewing it as a mislead anyways.

From here on out she also dips more and more into spilling her feelings, which may partially have to do with the fact that she receives positive reactions from Marcy, but you’ll notice sometimes she even tells her things she really does not have to, and it’s indicative of her simply enjoying being more open with her girlfriend.

“I know that.” She sighed, letting a small, sheepish smile cross her face. “And I know you can do this. I’m just being possessive, ‘cause I’ll miss you while you’re gone. I wanna be by your side.”

Sasha Becomes A Sap practically overnight because she played herself by asking Marcy out expecting there to be no feelings attached when there were already very much feelings attached. It’s a process that takes many steps forward over the course of chapters 1-3, but eventually Sasha’s just an open book with her girlfriend.

But this is only one of the catalysts to her adamant refusal to lie—the second lies in trauma-related reasons. And by that I mean Marcy lying and thereby instigating her own death for a few minutes has mentally damaged Sasha to a point that she’s physically repulsed by the idea of lying. The first indication here comes in the Fwagon scene, when she’s talking to Anne:

“ Anne, don’t lie to me ,” she snapped harshly, and Anne shut up immediately.

No more lies. I can’t take this anymore. Not from Marcy, and especially not from you.

She’s sick and tired of being lied to already, and it only gets worse from there—

(I should also note the positive reinforcement she receives from Anne for being honest about the Toad Tower incident, because that certainly helped)

BUT ANYWAY Sasha finally reaches a breaking point when Marcy breaks down. There’s the confrontation in which Sasha demands answers from Marcy, now knowing about her lies, and then later there’s the more quiet moment in which Sasha is perhaps at the most honest she’s ever been thus far, which is this:

Sasha moved her hands to the sides of Marcy’s head, trembling, fragile. “You don’t deserve that. You never have,” she spoke, and it almost sounded like she could cry. Sasha? On the verge of tears? Preposterous. “If you wanted so badly for us to stay alive, how do you think we feel about you trying to die?” Her voice broke, and Sasha Waybright burst into tears. Marcy felt the world come to a standstill, like the earth had just stopped rotating on its axis, like it had ceased orbiting the sun. “You’re our favorite person, Marcy. It’s not easy seeing you like this.” And she had to pause to cry. To hiccup through a sudden sob and figure out how to breathe again. “You—you told me that you wouldn’t let go ever. You promised…”

And Sasha’s essentially reached her second Turning Point, here and now where she embraces honesty and completely rejects her previous neutrality on lying.

I know Sasha’s arc is less apparent in PMIT and IBYBF considering PMIT is largely focused on Marcy and IBYBF is largely focused on Anne, but she does indeed develop little by little over the course of both of these and between fics, and this little arc of her essentially Acquiring Pure and Unfiltered Honesty with Trauma is her own mini arc of PMIT and it then carries on into IBYBF. Where she finally cements this streak of Not Lying into a full aspect of herself:

Sasha is a lot of things—a manipulator, a schemer, and a control freak to name a few. But the one thing she’s not is a liar. When she says something, she means it. She doesn’t waste time spinning stories that aren’t true, nor does she care to listen to them. Where Marcy can spit out a fib with practiced ease, Sasha simply won’t open her mouth in the first place. Scarce is it that she actually does slip up, but it’s always a poorly-constructed deflection that gets exposed immediately. She knows better now than to hide behind lies both in the face of the toads and her girlfriends.

Pretty much yeah, she knows better now.

TL;DR Canon depictions of Sasha prompted me to write a Sasha that has never really been into lying in the first place, but now is completely repulsed by it due to her PMIT arc.