- Location
- Illinois
I do have one standing issue with this, which is that I fully expect Kyouko to react to it with "Oh my god, she's too attached to me to be separated from me despite her grandparents existing? What have I done?"
Kyouko has made her opinion of herself very clear:
Kyouko believes that she belongs in Hell.
That Yuma doesn't.
And that we should help Yuma, not Kyouko.
But -- I'm just going to point us all straight back to TDS, okay?
"[Mami] can find better friends than me."
"If trying to save someone can leave them worse off than if they'd died, why should we try to save anyone?"
What we have here isn't something Kyouko wants.
"If trying to save someone can leave them worse off than if they'd died, why should we try to save anyone?"
"You can find better friends than me."
This isn't something Kyouko wants... because this is her worst. Fucking. Nightmare.
Kyouko saved Yuma. Because of that: Yuma made a contract, Yuma became attached to Kyouko, Yuma cares about Kyouko. None of these are good things from Kyouko's point of view. On the contrary, they are extremely bad, because Kyouko is -- according to her -- a horrible person who belongs in hell, and pure innocent Yuma should not care about her. Kyouko literally just expressed that she'd like it if we would help Yuma and leave her to rot.
I was planning a vote around some similar ideas to the current vote. But the thing is, my vote was going to focus heavily on why Kyouko has not been a bad thing for Yuma. On why Kyouko will not be a bad thing for Yuma. On why it is okay that Yuma cares about and is attached to Kyouko.
I fully agree that we want to push the fact that Yuma is better off with Kyouko onto Kyouko, and that we want to absolutely, categorically refuse to accept that she would be better off anywhere else. That is crucial; it was my first reaction here, Godwinson's first reaction here, hopefully everyone else's first reaction here -- because if Yuma isn't better off with her, then nobody is. And that is an idea that we are absolutely compelled to degrade and destroy, especially because Yuma is better off with her.
But we must not just say to her, "Currently, Yuma is better off with you than she would be without you."
Currently better off is not enough. Kyouko has a well-developed and well-documented tendency to blame herself over the past. If we say to her, "Now that Yuma has come to care about you and has made a contract, she is better off with you than she would be with her grandparents," -- if we say that as a conditional, if through that we say to her "If Yuma had not come to care about you and made a contract, she would be better off with her grandparents," Kyouko Sakura will blame herself for it.
That scenario is not acceptable.
[X] If you thought that you could make Yuma's life better by separating her from Kyouko, you would have done it already. You even know where you'd place her -- she has grandparents.
-[X] It wasn't Yuma's grandparents who were there for her when she needed them. It wasn't Yuma's grandparents that spent twenty four hours a day, every day with her.
--[X] It's not Yuma's grandparents who she's willing to stand up to only weeks after leaving a heavily abusive environment. Who she's willing to trust.
---[X] That's not normal. It's absolutely incredible. Kyouko says all this stuff about how terrible a person she is, but she's done nothing but work miracles for Yuma, and you're disinclined to harm Yuma's rate of progress by separating them, particularly when Yuma wouldn't want that anyways.
----[X] School, better habitation, you're happy to help with that sort of thing. But Yuma seems to be well fed, healthy, and far, far happier than anyone who was that heavily abused could be expected to be. You're not pleased that she's a magical girl, but it seems to you that as long as Kyouko doesn't get herself killed and can take care of Yuma, the trade-off is well worth it. You'd like it if they both had Homura as an emergency contact, because she could pull them out of a barrier in the middle of a fight in an instant if she had to, but so far you've been trusting Kyouko to skewer things properly.
...
I'm gonna sleep on this. I hope. My brain is complaining at me.
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