#the bad things scara has done do not get cancelled out by his trauma btw!

[yaesaras]

theres been a lot said about ei and scara being parallels to frankenstein and while i can see the reasoning behind that, i think it paints ei in an exaggeratedly bad light simply for the sake of,,, idk skrunkly man woobification? like the difference between ei and scara and frankenstein and the creature is admittedly small, but it matters because the difference between these situations isnt circumstances, its intention. i think we all need to step back for a second and take ourselves out of scara’s perspective, because like it or not he’s a unreliable narrator, and we need to see what ei was thinking when she created him, because ultimately her perspective matters too. the reason she isn’t frankenstein and the reason he isn’t the creature is because the point of frankenstein is to condemn victor for intentionally creating a life that he was unwilling to care for. ei did not intentionally give scara life, at least by her own definition of life. what ei was trying to do was create a glorified nuclear waste container – possibly one with the capacity to move and interact with others, but not alive in the same way robots and computers irl are not alive. she accidentally ended up creating a living being, with the capacity to care about itself and with the capacity to feel emotion, and when she realised this she stopped experimenting on him. i feel like this is often glossed over in discussions of ei and scaramouche, but i want to highlight this because despite how scara feels about it, ei, once she saw that he was alive, did not attempt to harm him. it was miko who wanted him dead, not ei.

and as for her abandoning him, i’d make the argument that there… wasn’t really a better option? like what else did you want her to do? her options were: a) keep him and raise him, b) kill him, c) keep him, but dont bother to raise him, d) don’t seal his power and let him go, or e) what she did in canon – seal his powers and let him go. i think options b and c are both bad for obvious reasons, and i dont think d was viable in a situation where his powers may have allowed him to harm people. the only remaining option, if not e, is then option a. and idk about you but i dont think that giving a god who is struggling with grief and trying to avoid ruling her country a child to raise is remotely a good idea. and thats not even getting into her tendency to make impulse decisions and then stubbornly stick to them even when they cause harm to others. that environment would have been absolutely godawful for scara to grow up in, and thats not even getting into yae miko. further, even if she did raise him – there’s the issue of yk. ei going into the plane of euthymia. we can’t be certain that she would still go but like. she might! she absolutely might!! and i think that would again be fucking awful for scara to have to deal with, and while it might fix some of his abandonment issues,,,,,,, idk how you’re going to deal with all the other issues that would come from ei raising him.

i’d also make the argument that ei’s “abandonment” of scara is absolutely not the same as victor abandoning the creature – the biggest reason why being, once again, intention. i feel like when we get into discussions about fictional creation of life, a fair parallel to draw is the creation of life in the real world. victor intentionally created the creature to be a living being, over the course of several months, and when it came to life, he realised it was a mistake, and abandoned it. to me, at least, it seems aligned to someone who intentionally got pregnant, didn’t bother – for literal months – to think about the fact that they would have to take care of a child after it was born, and then when the child was born, decided that they didn’t like how it looked, and gave it away. ei, on the other hand, unintentionally created scara, and didn’t even realise that scara was alive, after which she decided she didn’t want to raise him, and left him. this is more paralleled to someone who unintentionally got pregnant, didn’t realise they were until they gave birth, and then decided they didn’t want a child and gave it away. the intention behind their actions makes a difference. i’m not going to pretend that ei is somehow not flawed or that she couldnt have handled that whole situation better but she’s not, you know. victor fucking frankenstein.

i understand and relate to the sympathy and empathy that a lot of people feel for scaramouche, and i even understand how he, as a character, sees ei as the villain in his story, but i feel like the genshin fandom really needs to stop and realise that they dont need to demonise one character in order to like another. you don’t need to demonise ei’s actions in relation to scara in order for scara’s emotions towards ei to be real and valid. if you want so badly for ei to be a bad person, there is literally so much you can talk about, including but not limited to: her actions during the archon war, the vision hunt and sakoku decrees, the way she treats the puppet, the way she treated miko post cataclysm, etc. there is no fucking shortage of things that ei has absolutely fucked up. however, getting mad at ei for *checks notes* not raising him when she was in an emotionally fucked up state that she might have compromised her ability to raise him is not remotely the argument you seem to think it is.