your favorite ponyboy

A. pretending that having emotional responses to harrowing situations is abnormal

or

B. claiming that curly should’ve just (insert action that would either get him jailed, result in pony express docking the pay of himself and his employees, or would lead to him no longer having a co-pilot, which would force him to fly the ship the rest of the 8 month journey without assistance).

or both of these.

Curly isn’t perfect and there are actions he could have taken, but people greatly overestimate his options. People also tend to forget that Curly had less than a day to figure something out, because his friend (who he knows is volatile!) has been informed that the woman he raped is pregnant. he wasn’t sitting on this info for months, he fully didn’t know what happened until a day before.

I shouldn’t have to repeat myself but for the purposes of dispelling anyone trying to give a bad-faith interpretation of my curly takes: curly isn’t a great person. he’s not a bad person (I don’t think good or bad people exist, I think it’s reductive) but he’s deeply flawed in ways that hurt himself and others.