i fuck with it heavy to be clear. one of my favorite songs in uniclr

all that is just me waffling on about a novella most people havent read in a fruitless attempt to prove to an audience of none that i know how to analyze media but i dont know ive just been having some strange feelings lately. yes. thanks

theres that moment where obrien sees him unresponsive and assumes hes in danger but the truth was that he just seemingly didn't know how to emotionally engage with the situation and that stuff hits for me. of course thats just my personal reading and likely unintentional from the writing, but yeah.

he casually maps out social interactions prior to engaging in them so that hes in control. he visibly changes his behaviors depending on the person hes talking w/ to get the best outcome. he lies casually. he is very intelligent and aware of that. he is combatative when his judgment is questioned.

wrt my more personal readings... ive talked about this on tumblr before but the way hes characterized in tc22 felt really interesting to me, he displays very prominent npd traits (NPD HAVER DO NOT MISCONSTRUE MY WORDS) and not just. "hes evil" i mean tc22 exclusive behaviors and social interactions

sheffield doesn't receive the same treatment at all tbf and i respect that, he's not really a character that textually exists beyond serving as an ideological opponent to obrien. i do also have a lot of very subjective feelings about him that may veer into slop territory but trying to be fair ...

however it is hard to divorce the idea of that from the fact that tc22 does seem to serve the purpose of making obrien a sympathetic character to a degree. this isn't necessarily a bad thing, people are complicated. but it injects this level of complexity into a character that was purely functional.

sera is an idea, she is quite literally replaceable. to obrien, implicitly this is him making things right with his sister. it is not the actual abuse being addressed here on an emotional level. and like i said i think this does a lot for making the aspect of the story i liked feel clearer.

tc22 adds the wrinkle of his traumatic backstory with his sister that almost definitely plays into how he treats sera. i think the addition of this context makes him more explicitly morally dubious because part of the point imo is that to the karma society staff sera is not a person.

long thread incoming: i love tc22 to be clear it's very funny and interesting to me. but in the game i feel while it's conveyed that obrien wanted the best for sera but couldn't express that, it is kind of ambiguous about whether or not it thinks he's absolved from abuse by this fact.

i feel sheffield and obrien exist perfectly fine within the narrative of dds2 as representative characters they don't need to be fleshed out beyond what their purposes are so i feel like the stuff tc22 adds complicates the backstory in both a bad and good way?

i hate that ocd makes me feel the need to add on all these qualifiers to everything i say to prove ive thoroughly thought out my ideas before sharing them or else everybody will misinterpret what i mean. being a frequent tumblr user has not at all worsened this. lol