my vision of the great unified Omni Stratt where I graft her book and movie selves together with hot glue is that this woman is the most effusively warm, bleeding-heart, hopeful and loving person there has ever been. she likes her hair and clothes soft as can be, she listens to top 40 pop music, she's a singer in what little spare time she has, she likes boosting people's confidence, and she could almost wrap her arms around the entire planet in an embrace with how much love she has for every person on it. and, she is neither ignorant nor stupid. she's hopeful but a realist; she knows perfectly well that human nature is often violent and destructive and that the right choice isn't always the kind choice, it's just that knowing these things doesn't make her love her species any less or dampen her desire to be kind when she can.
she'll do anything she can to protect the world without hesitation, not doing so would be unthinkable, so she crosses boundaries and breaks her morals and contorts her soul and hurts some people to save a greater number of people. hurting people is difficult, but just letting the world freeze over when she has a chance to fix it is simply not an option, so she stores the guilt somewhere for safekeeping out-of-sight where she doesn't have to address it until she's done. if she felt all she was doing she'd crumple up and freeze forever, which would mean she would get less efficacious, and that's also not an option.
she's not a saint made of cold marble, she's not immune to the occasional mini power trip and she sometimes acts with the assurance that she already knows best without, yknow, actually checking if she really knows best first, but she gets no joy in cruelty for cruelty's sake. she gets carte blanche permission to commit any crime she wants for who knows how many years in a row and it never occurs to her to abuse that power for her own pleasure because for her that just wouldn't be pleasant. she'll bomb the antarctic without flinching then console her accomplice as he buckles under the remorse she is categorically not allowed to feel. she'll kidnap and conscript people into labor then make sure they never want for anything while they live in her domain. she'll see the prison sentence barreling ever towards her and never say a word about it. she'll give her friend the barest chance to say "yes" so that maybe he won't ever have to know that "no" isn't an option. it's her spark of hope, the mad idea that he'll be the first person to spare her a hard choice.
when she has to hurt him, it's the only thinkable choice available. she loves humanity too much to even consider lowering its chances, it would be the worst most selfish cruelty to not send him just because she doesn't want to, so she makes the arrangements and gives the orders and files the new guilt in that same ignorable dark corner. but when he goes down kicking and screaming and threatening and begging, when it's playing out right in front of her eyes, that she can't tuck away in time. it makes contact with her stupid heart and the sudden pang behind her ribs for the first time in years has her wishing with a kind of resentment that she could just make him agree. but she can't, obviously. she is neither ignorant nor stupid, she knows human nature, so she has to be right over being kind. towards him or towards herself.
she loves people, she loves warmth, she loves her team, she loves him, she loves the world, and she's ensuring that he'll never get to see it again. her heart overflows with bitter, angry, terrified empathy as she sends him away, and she feels it full-force as the most vile thing that's ever been done. it's just that the only thing viler would have been to let him stay.
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snowghoul
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