assorted thoughts about mouthwashing ('cause this game won't leave my brain)

this masterpiece has been absolutely festering in my mind since i finished it up and i have so many goddamn thoughts that i've been trying to articulate for ages now.

first of all i think that almost nobody fully gets curly as a character. everyone seems to fall into either two camps - either he's an absolute saint who was 'too nice for his own good' and did nothing wrong, ever or he's a fucking demon who deserved every awful thing that happened to him and my god, the ableism the fandom subjects him to is absurd.

curly is not a good man. he is a nice man. there is a difference. a perfectly applicable quote here is 'a friend to everyone is a friend to no-one'. curly is obviously meant to be a commentary on how men will downplay instances of predation and abuse of power because they come from a place of male privilege and can't understand the gravitas - and often don't see the need to try and understand the issue anyways because it doesn't affect them. he sees the merit only in maintaining a happy 'bigger picture' and only thinks about making everyone happy in equal measure.

there's also the fact that curly is undoubtedly a victim of jimmy's manipulation. this does not excuse his inaction, nor his attempt to brush anya's assault under the rug - but it does offer an explanation as to how he got into that position. jimmy, for all of his immaturities - is a highly skilled manipulator and an abusive friend no matter the circumstances. he exploits curly's boundless sympathy and desire to appease everybody because he knows that if curly shelters him, he gets to avoid accountability. i do not doubt that jimmy has lied and cheated his way out of disagreements with curly before - and i also do not doubt that curly was scared of what jimmy may do if he was aggravated. jimmy uses authority and fear as a vehicle to exert his will over others - we see it with anya, we see it with daisuke, and we see it with curly. it's why jimmy despises swansea, and why he's afraid of him. because swansea has absolutely nothing jimmy can use against him, and holds a position of seniority that means he sees right through jim's bullshit.

on the subject of anya, i am imploring people to recognise that she is more than just her assault, and that her portrayal in the game's narrative is undoubtedly inaccurate to her true character because jimmy is explicitly an unreliable narrator. the best glimpses at anya's real characterisation come in the extra-canonical comments by wrong organ and the scenes with her from curly's perspective where she isn't being affected by jimmy's dehumanisation.i

anya is an incredibly strong, capable and perseverant person whose fear response happens to be fawning over fighting or taking flight. this girl was rejected from medical school eight times and still sought to push forwards anyways. she kept a skinless quadriplegic alive for months with no proper medical training, and nothing but bandages and over-the-counter painkillers. the woman is a fucking genius, and she has the patience of a saint to match. depicting anya as a shy, fawning, stuttering mess who cannot take agency for herself is just fuelling the same misogyny and dehumanisation that jimmy gives her.

also, anya did not want to keep the baby. i don't see how it goes over people's heads that anya's suicide was her making the decision to terminate the pregnancy. it was an act of desperation. it is completely laid out in the text that she did not want that fucking kid.

swansea gets a little too much hero worship from the community too, and the funniest part of that is that swansea himself would hate that. swansea was a good man at heart, i think, despite his own perception of himself - but that does not change the fact that he was a deeply flawed man as well. you have to remember, swansea probably wouldn't have just gone and taken an axe to jimmy's face if anya told him. why do i know this? because she did tell him, and he resolved to just keep drinking and partying 'til his days were done.

this is because swansea's character is built around resignation. swansea is the only person aboard that ship with absolutely no hope left for his rescue. he's fully accepted his fate and has no qualms with dying out there on that rock, which is why he elects to let himself go and drink himself to death. he'd rather go out with a bang, reliving 'the best days of his life' - when he was a half-blind drunk with no responsibilities. it's all tied into the game's central theme, responsibility. swansea doesn't want to hold responsibility, but chose to keep himself together and keep wading through the mud until he realised there was no point to it all.

his final speech spells all of this out. the issue is that people don't respect swansea as his own character with his own merits - his fandom perception is limited to just the 'designated dad' of the imaginary tulpar 'found family' dynamic. he's just daisuke's surrogate father, sometimes anya's too. swansea isn't even his own character in fanon's eyes. i'm begging you all to recognise how fucking good of a character he is if you let go of that perception.

finally, daisuke. daisuke suffers so much infantilisation that it's not even funny, and the whitewashing that fanartists subject the poor guy to is so egregious that it makes me wanna pull my hair out.

i will accept that obviously one of the strongest themes with daisuke's character is innocence, and his youth is part of his character and therefore the inherent tragedy that he died so young - with so much potential to boot.

but people take that way too far compared to how it's presented in the source material. perhaps tying into the fact that fandom people are incapable of seeing things as anything other than polar opposites, people take daisuke's naivete and overplay it to its logical conclusion - making him into a fucking toddler.

a character can be immature without you needlessly infantilising them and treating them like a little baby who needs to be wrapped up in cotton wool to fit into your neat little 'found family' box.

that's about all i have to say on the matter for now to be honest, but i fully expect to come back to this later with either an amendment to this blog post or a second one if i think this is getting too long and unwieldy. i have far too many thoughts for my own good and articulating them usually takes me about a century and five quintillion words.

but either way, that's all i have to say about mouthwashing for now - so enjoy this wall of pretention for now, i guess.

'til next time. peace.