• Lvxferre
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    665 months ago

    Shinji, from Evangelion.

    He’s 14. His mum is dead. His dad is a piece of shit and a manipulative bastard, who sees him as nothing but a pawn. “Emotionally traumatised” doesn’t even start to describe him. He’s pressured to pilot a mecha and if he fucks things up people will die, he knows that they will die, and that it’ll be his fault.

    And yet people expect him to be assertive or to not have meltdowns? Come the fucking on.

    • SSTF
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      275 months ago

      Cool story, now get in the fucking robot.

    • @[email protected]
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      5 months ago

      Imagine if nerv had invested some of its money in the mental health of its employees. I like to think many issues could have been solved by hiring a few therapists.

      • @[email protected]
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        65 months ago

        A few? There are so many traumatized people that would need entire teams of therapists, it would probably increase their employee numbers by at least 50%

    • @[email protected]
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      5 months ago

      I really thought the idea was, “You like mecha? You like kids piloting mecha? This is how it’d go down.” I loved it so much. Shinji’s a broken, abused shell child. He lives with a broken human who drowns her sorrows in drink. His father is just evil. He’d have to be to let his kid pilot the mecha.

      The only real father figure we ever see for shinji is a spy. Who gets killed. He’s in love with a girl that hates him. Because he’s broken. But he has no one else. Except those friends at school who I think they take away. Don’t remember. And that angel who he has to kill or something. Damn, it’s been like 25 years. I have no idea what happened. But in my memory it’s terrible. Wonderful stuff.

    • @[email protected]
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      5 months ago

      I think the biggest problem that people have with NGE is that it just isn’t your typical shounen anime. All of the characters behave in a way because of their past experiences. Shinji being abandoned by his father, witnessing his mother’s death without actually understanding or realising it, asuka being neglected by her mother and Rei being a clone. And all of them in their teens, in a broken world getting told to fight and probably die or humanity is doomed.

      With how saturated anime are with flawed main characters that then use that flaw to their advantage to overcome their enemy, NGE just doesn’t do that.

      I think that viewers just expect this hero story when they watch it.

      I mean. I had a similar impression when I first watched it a long long time ago and thought that shinji was a wuss. But that was after I watched the typical shounen, DB, DBZ, Naruto and bleach. Not to mention that I didn’t understand what the fuck was going on. Only later after watching it a second time and digging into the background a bit, shinjis Oedipus complex, asukas hedgehog dilemma and the general motivation of each of the characters it made a lot more sense. Including the context of their situation made me appreciate the storytelling a lot more because it put everything into perspective.

    • @[email protected]
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      25 months ago

      Didn’t realize he was hated? He is a fucked up little weirdo but so is everyone in that show. Man, I might need to rewatch, been way too long.

      • Lvxferre
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        45 months ago

        Plenty anime fans hate him. Because he’s weak, indecisive, broken. He craves affection but once people offer “here’s some affection”, he turns them down. That rubs plenty people the wrong way.

    • nocturne
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      265 months ago

      I am only a few years younger than Wesley was in TNG. He was someone with whom I could identify. I never got the Wesley hate, and if it was not for the internet I would not know there was any.

      • BigFig
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        5 months ago

        An ambitious smart young man who has clear life goals and the drive to serve the federation and push the limits of human expansion and discovery? His character is to show that all generations young and old are willing to further humanity’s/the federation’s goals of a peaceful coexistence and cooperation for greater prosperity for ALL.

        Some of Wesley’s haters often come across as honestly jealous that THEY couldn’t be born into such a time and place.

        Edit: furthermore, a character like Wesley is SUPPOSED to be the way he is. It’s not the actor it is the character. Young viewers were meant to look at him as a mirror to themselves, a way to imagine yourself in such a universe, someone to identify with and better put your mind into the headspace of the story.

        While Riker is cool and funny, you are not Riker.

        While Picard is cool and professional, you are not Picard.

        • CALIGVLA
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          85 months ago

          Fair.

          I just always found him annoying and nothing much else.

            • CALIGVLA
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              55 months ago

              Sorry, but no amount of context would ever make Wesley not annoying to me. I don’t hate the character, I just don’t like him, period. 🤷

            • @[email protected]
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              15 months ago

              The context that’s he’s supposed to be an annoying child? You’re really not getting that people can dislike a character that is “well done”. Yes, he’s well done… as an annoying child who tries to act like he’s on the same level as Picard and Riker. He’s the equivalent of internet comments.

        • @[email protected]
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          75 months ago

          He had a tendency to be immediately dismissive, impatient, and often outright insulting to other cultures and non-Federation types. The kid needed some humility, and often showed his age and closed-mindedness when he shut out ideas that didn’t come from his superiors.

          • BigFig
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            165 months ago

            That’s called “being a teenager” and having a character which the others can offer corrective criticism that is also a message to the younger viewers by proxy

            • @[email protected]
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              45 months ago

              Oh, no, I get that, I’m just saying those things make him annoying. It gives lots of opportunity for character development, but he’s still annoying until he develops.

            • @[email protected]
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              15 months ago

              In a show otherwise filled with adults. This why we hate him. It’s a common trope that when you add a child/baby actor in a show that otherwise doesn’t have them, the show becomes worse. Wesley absolutely fits.

        • @[email protected]
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          45 months ago

          Personally, I didn’t really mind Wesley in the later seasons and a few of the Wesley-centric episodes were pretty good. It’s really the first season, and even more so the first few episodes of the first season where he was annoying as all hell. Oh look, boy wonder saves the ship, yet again. Unfortunately that kind of seems to have stuck with the character, despite the show toning down his antics significantly after that.

          • HobbitFoot
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            75 months ago

            The later Wesley episodes are good because you see him as a bright young man trying to do right in the world rather than a precocious kid who solves problems the grown-ups can’t.

            The writers didn’t really know how to write the Crusher-Picard relationship(s) in the early seasons.

    • CEbbinghaus
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      5 months ago

      My personal theory is that jar jar is not a sith but rather a domestic terrorist that is really good at making it look like an accident

    • SSTF
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      5 months ago

      I know this a joke theory (mostly), but given how much Star Wars rips from classic scifi works, I think looking at the Foundation books makes a good case for this being viable as more than a joke.

      • @[email protected]
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        5 months ago

        It’s not even viable. In canon, Jar Jar was relegated to being a shunned street performer on Theed where adults hated him but the children would laugh at his clown antics. A Sith lord wouldn’t become that, ever.

        • SSTF
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          35 months ago

          I am viewing from intention as written, when written for the films. It seems plausible that “Darth Jar Jar” or something similar could have been an original, but abandoned intention.

          • Dem Bosain
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            25 months ago

            “Jar Jar is the key to all of this.” – George Lucas, during filming of The Phantom Menace

  • @[email protected]
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    455 months ago

    Willie in Temple of Doom. So what if she wasn’t cut out for the big adventure! She liked her life in Shanghai- dresses, performing, champagne, and nightlife. She didn’t ask for any of what happened next!

  • @[email protected]
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    425 months ago

    Skyler White. I didn’t even know that she was hated quite a lot. I always thought she is actually the most sane person given the situation she’s in.

    • HobbitFoot
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      265 months ago

      She is hated because she is acting sanely in this situation and is constantly trying to stop Walter’s insanity.

    • @[email protected]
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      105 months ago

      Same, and I suspect that not many people ever did hate Skylar… But the narrative makes for good content, so the few that did hate on Skylar got portrayed as the majority.

      IIRC, though, Anna Gunn mentioned having a lot of negative interactions with the audience conflating her with her character… So who knows.

    • ElectricMachman
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      85 months ago

      She’s hated because Walt turned everyone against her - including the viewer, it seems

    • @[email protected]
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      15 months ago

      I like how these conversations always ignore the wrong things Skylar did, such as cheating with Ted. It’s always “well Walter was the devil, so anything she did was ok”. She still begins the show by showing very little care for his birthday and making it feel like a chore. She’s literally part of why he feels he’s in a hum drum boring life with no control. His character ark is largely about him going from a meek high school professor afraid to do anything into a completely fearless kingpin who finally has control over his life. Yes, the point is that he goes too far. But it’s also shown pretty clearly early on that he feels powerless and like his life is out of control(you know, like a sudden terminal cancer diagnosis might do).

      Was Walter a bad person? Yes. Was Skylar also a bad person who didn’t truly see him as an equal and who, when given the chance, cheats on him remorselessly? Also yup.

      Multiple people can be bad. Even Hank, arguably one of the most moral characters, suffers from major blindspots and is a dismissive dick to Marie.

      People defending Skylar are the kind of people that say “I can do what I want because it’s a free country” and get shocked when they learn there are consequences to their actions, even if justified.

  • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin
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    375 months ago

    Basically every character who’s worst sin is just being kinda annoying

    It makes no sense to me how an annoying person can catch so much more vitriol than a genuinely malicious person.

    Like “sure he murders puppies as a casual past time, but at least he isn’t a bother about it!”

    • @[email protected]
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      95 months ago

      I don’t hate characters for being evil in fiction. Evil characters can be super entertaining. The game of thrones books really captured this potential IMO. A character being annoying to the reader/viewer directly impedes with you enjoying the show.

  • @[email protected]
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    255 months ago

    I was listening to a football podcast (they go off topic in the offseason because there isn’t a lot to talk about), and they had a whole rant about how Pam Beasley is a monster.

    Because she was friends with Jim while dating Roy. (Yeah him having feelings for her wasn’t exactly a shocker, but it’s different when it’s you. And she shut him down clearly when he actually made a move.)

    Because she did the art school thing, I guess?

    Because she was sad when Jim was dating Karen. (She did genuinely try to be her friend despite that, and went to cry in a corner alone.)

    And because there was tension when Jim did Athlead. (Which if you actually watch, was him biting her head off when she messed up with a video of a recital, and him instigating a couple other times, presumably because of the stress of the situation, while she was being run ragged as almost a single mother at home.)

    And because apparently chasing your dreams going to New York to go to art school while in a relationship is the same as doing it when you’re actually married and have kids. But she didn’t bend over backward enough to support him I guess?

    It’s just really weird to me, and he’s not the only one with that weird twist on the character. (No she’s not perfect. Sitcoms are all characters who are kind of monsters. But her as the bad guy doesn’t make sense.)

    • HobbitFoot
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      155 months ago

      Yeah. I also find the relationship has a lot more dysfunction on Jim’s part than fans want to admit. Jim wouldn’t cheat on Pam, but Jim makes several life changing decisions without Pam and gets angry if Pam doesn’t go along with them.

      • @[email protected]
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        65 months ago

        To be fair, I don’t think he’s actually a bad dude either. Again, flawed, but reasonably well intentioned.

        The “worst” thing they did was definitely developing feelings while she’s engaged to Roy, but most of that was the nature of working in close proximity. It’s inherently different than sneaking around to spend “platonic” time together for a bunch of hours by choice. He had feelings, but mostly didn’t cross the line. I don’t think he’s a terrible person for laying his feelings on the line when she’s engaged to someone he doesn’t like either. Actually married is the line where it moves to completely not OK.

        But yeah, the whole end thing really wasn’t anyone being awful. He unilaterally made some decisions that should have been a partnership, and he was wrong to put that much stress on her without talking to her and hearing her. Because they had kids, primarily. But he did recognize that and came back and made the commitment to their family. Then, once she had time to actually breathe again, she was ready to take the leap with him.

        That was longer than I meant it to be again lol. But I was surprised to hear the take (and that it was more popular than I’d guess) because it genuinely never occurred to me. She was in pretty deep and he was lashing out from the stress of the situation before she even vocalized her problems with it. (At least from what we see.)

  • @[email protected]
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    165 months ago

    Thanos; I can understand his reasoning, his solution doesn’t favor anyone either and seemed painless.

    • @[email protected]
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      245 months ago

      Except for his solution is basically, “Let’s put the population back a whole 40 years or so, while massively disrupting society and the economy and being guaranteed to traumatize virtually everyone remaining. That will fix everything!” The only person who could think that was at all reasonable would have to have a grade school understanding of how the world works and no interpersonal connections, or what they mean to most people.

      • @[email protected]
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        175 months ago

        And then he destroys the stones, so it’s not he planned for the snap to be the first of an every-few-decades population culling. This dork actually thought he had a permanent fix and threw away his tools in confidence that it was.

        • @[email protected]
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          125 months ago

          So at best this turned the population clock back 40 or 50 years. How is that a solution to anything? This is like pining about the good old days. Also, I suggest you read a little about generational trauma, because I’m pretty sure having half of everyone you know disappearing, and that applying to everyone, is going to have a little of that.

    • @[email protected]
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      155 months ago

      Painless? Even accepting that emotional pain doesn’t count (which I don’t agree with) 50% of every person involved in operating a piece of dangerous machinery just suddenly disappearing absolutely caused widespread injury and death among those left behind.

    • @[email protected]
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      145 months ago

      Thanos’ reasoning is idiotic.

      People are a resource. If you eliminated half the people, not only have you wasted all resources that went into those people, but you’ve wasted everything those people could produce. Minus half of agricultural workers would probably mean way less than half production. The post-snap world would be a place of austerity and starvation. You could recover sure, but it’d be time for another snap.

    • @[email protected]
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      135 months ago

      I thought the reasoning portrayed in the movies made a lot less sense than the reasoning in the comics.

      If his goal is to eliminate poverty and balance the resources vs consumption, why not double the resources rather than destabilize the entire universe in the process of halving the consumption of resources?

      A shortsighted and foolish plan at least makes sense when it’s in the pursuit of romance.

    • @[email protected]
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      75 months ago

      On the surface I understand, but as you dig deeper the logistics don’t make a lot of since with the “indiscriminate” part. Let’s say you had two warring factions of almost equal power. How would the snap know to take an equal amount so that there isn’t a massive power shift which could lead to a much more negative outcome. What if there was a single, very influencial person that got snapped. Things like that. His goal was to alieviate suffering but there are so many better ways he could have approached it. It’s possible I’d need to dive into the backstory more to determine what made him choose that specific action.

      • @[email protected]
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        5 months ago

        About the 2 faction problem, theoretically 50% of each faction will be gone. Chances are big that the power balance remains the same. But you can idd argue that making 1 faction completely dissappear is also 50% and statistically possible.

        About the influential people (let add geniuses to be complete). Those persons are not unique, nobody is irreplaceable. Someone else will step up to be equally influential, Someone else will figure stuff out.

        The reason he choose that action is not to be biased and give everyone an equally 50% chance of survival. In his eyes, a cleaning lady deserves an equal chance to a CEO.

        • @[email protected]
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          45 months ago

          I think that’s where we differ in analysis. If you had a charismatic leader who was snapped and another that was ruthless who wasn’t snapped, even if you lost 50% on both sides, it could greatly cause an imbalance.

          As for a genius or such, it could set progress back by decades or more or they could have produced something that had a positive effect to change the course of their race.

          • @[email protected]
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            5 months ago

            First point: fair enough, I see the flaw. But then we’re changing to a more ethical dilemma: does a charismatic person deserve more chance to live?

            Second point: with half the population left, there is more time to solve things (caused by humanity). Global warming, for example, will likely be solved by just the snap alone.

            Maybe he could have made it that every female can only bare 2 children, that would gradually reduce population. But that would put a huge strain on the younger generation to take care of the elder.

        • @[email protected]
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          25 months ago

          I’d argue in the marvel universe it would be inevitable with the faction problem. The marvel universe is much much larger than our own and much more heavily populated, so even if it was a small chance, there’s many more times that chance could happen.

    • @[email protected]
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      45 months ago

      Satan as in disgruntled, restricted without being explained about reasons, Paradise Lost or Melkor in Tolkien’s works kind is pretty much righteous in rebelling. Methods used during the said rebelling is questionable, thom

  • @pantyhosewimp
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    95 months ago

    In the 90s there was this purple dinosaur from a children’s TV show that everyone seemed to hate. I don’t know anything about him or why we were supposed to hate him. To know anything about him you would have to have watched a show for 3 year olds, so if you did that then you deserve to be annoyed by it. Right?

      • @[email protected]
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        25 months ago

        And there were constant commercials where he did that. Any sane adult would be quickly driven crazy by how ubiquitous, how repetitive and sappy it was.

    • @[email protected]
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      15 months ago
      1. Many of the best children’s shows could be quite watchable
      2. No, you didn’t have to have chosen your own hell, the commercials were all over kids TV. It was horrible, you couldn’t avoid that hideous song
    • @[email protected]
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      255 months ago

      And forced a sane but disruptive man through a disabling procedure?

      No. She went way the hell too far so she could protect her little kingdom and stay in power. She was not concerned with helping her charges improve their lot in life.

      • @[email protected]
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        5 months ago

        The movie takes place in a different time, just to be clear.

        The patient in question was faking being crazy. Acted out and challenged her every single day. He even snuck all of the patients out of the hospital, stole a bus and a boat, and went off on everyone for shits and giggles at every opportunity.

        Of course I don’t agree with the lobotomy. But he was pushing real damn hard for it.

        He was also a jail jumper. They put him in that ward to finally get rid him.

        Ratchet was fine giving them their meds every day, and being the only nurse in charge of doing meetings and everything else, until he showed up and instigated everything.

        • @[email protected]
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          5 months ago

          Completely disagree, but upvoted for having a well-argued, unpopular opinion which is kind of the point of this thread!

          • @[email protected]
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            35 months ago

            Thank you. Yeah I’m not trying to change any minds here haha. I know she’s the baddie.

        • @[email protected]
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          25 months ago

          I totally get where you’re coming from but wanted to put the counterpoint, as obvious as it was.

          She was caring for those who nobody else could for at that time, and to generally good effect day to day.

          I’ve worked in group homes and know of the challenges you face in serving those who aren’t all that stable.

          Just would never have advocated for that solution for anyone really. All that is said with historical knowledge and such.

          Yours was a good post.

          She was trying her best with that she had and knew at the time, even if she overreacted in the end, to terrible effect.

          • @[email protected]
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            5 months ago

            I like the discussion. Obviously I’m not dying on any hills here. I just think it’s worth looking at the movie in a different pov. Thank you.

            I’ve been on the other side, as a patient.

            Edit. I think she did want the best for everyone. Even during the climatic scene. She just didn’t know what else to do, and using his mother as a form of pressure, while definitely wrong in hindsight, was really all she had left at the time. Don’t forget that scene is the morning after they all threw a party and everyone was basically drunk, including staff.

            I also recommend reading the book. It’s really good.

    • finley
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      5 months ago

      sure, and Kai Winn was just some priest…

    • @[email protected]
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      135 months ago

      Well, she was manipulative towards the patients. The worst part was when the young suicidal patient was with the girl and she reprimanded him, saying she was going to tell his mom. And she let him of her sight. It was just a power trip.

      • @[email protected]
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        35 months ago

        I think she was just extremely fed up with the bullshit by the time that happened. Obviously it was a bad decision, I’m not going to defend the belittling.

  • @[email protected]
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    45 months ago

    Uncle Iroh
    I know he’s a genocidal war criminal, but he lost his son and traveled a long path of tea and paisho eventually cherishing and mentoring his nephew.

    Uncle Ruckus
    He’s a simple man, tryin’ to make his way in the world. Life’s dealt him a tough hand, but he played it the best he could. He worked hard, respected the values he was raised with, and tries to bring a bit of order to this chaotic world. He ma be rough around the edges and may not make words so good, but he believes in tough love and speaking his mind.

  • Alice
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    25 months ago

    Not a character it’s actually a woman but I shouldn’t say who and for why. Ultimately she is in the wrong. But could have been prevented at least I think maybe idk