#to 'pharma did it bc he's egotistical/selfish/cowardly'
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Answering that ask is a good reminder for me to remind everyone else that Pharma actually did nothing wrong in the way that he handled Tarn/the DJD and the t-cog blackmail, and the only reason he's villainized and seen as irredeemable scum is because the narrative wanted to have Pharma as a villain.
Literally every other time the DJD are shown attacking people on the page (or the aftermath of their attacks) it's constantly hammered in how brutal and unstoppable they are and how traumatizing it is to suffer even as a survivor who merely witnessed their methods so like LITERALLY THE ONLY REASON Pharma got singled out as selfish and cowardly is because JRO wanted him to be a villain.
And it sucks too because it's not like making the DJD terrifying was some retcon that happened 30 issues down the line. The DJD made their first on-page appearance in MTMTE #7, during which there's a whole page dedicated to the Scavengers describing every reason why it's impossible to stop the DJD-- including one person outright describing fighting the DJD as "suicide with delusions of survival."
There's no way JRO didn't know what he was going to write for #7 while he was writing the Delphi arc (#4-5, so only two issues beforehand more or less) so like. I'm sorry but there's no actual in-universe reason why Pharma should be considered evil for how he handled the DJD when every other person got to be seen as a victim/underdog hero defending themselves from horrible death. JRO just wanted there to be a mad doctor evil Autobot villain and that was that lmao
#squiggposting#pharma apologism#he even downgraded pharma's motivations from the outline to the final version!#in the outline per the mtmte diaries pharma explains his reasoning as more or less#'because you can't fight the djd and if you run they kill you and that's that'#and then in canon he wrote in pharma just saying that he didn't want to be implicated in killing patients#EVEN THOUGH THE ELEMENT OF THE DJD BEING UNFIGHTABLE AND UNFLEEABLE WAS STILL THERE#bro literally switched the narrative scope from 'pharma did it bc he had no choice'#to 'pharma did it bc he's egotistical/selfish/cowardly'#even to the point that ratchet (the protagonist and the more well established mainline hero character)#never even gave pharma a single chance and even while pharma was explaining the djd thing#ratchet was threatening him and saying he wanted to punch the smile off his traitorous face and all this other shit#like i get that pharma lied and then tried to deflect blame but that was literally the only thing he did wrong in that scenario#trying to blame ambulon and then shooting life support and running away? bad#but the whole killing patients to fend off the DJD and making a plague to get away? 100000% justified and tragic#pharma was just doomed by the narrative to be condemned as some like stereotypical mentally ill villain#who's crazy and psychopathic or whatever and when he does bad things it's bc he's crazy and evil or something
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