growing up as a depressed teenager when your parents love you is so unspeakably painful, because the moment you start to grow up and get better and have a chance to look back on the past with clearer eyes, you realize that for every attempt at connecting you shot down, every conversation you reluctantly got dragged into, every time they prodded at your loneliness and pushed you to make friends, for every way they tried to help that didn't work because you were too broken and ontologically bad and sick in the head for it to stick... your parents spent years of their life suffering alongside you, worrying themselves to rags, helplessly watching their kid suffer because they lacked the ability or the knowledge or the medicine to make it better. but because they didn't lack the will (because they're good parents and they love you) they just kept slamming themselves against the wall between you, hoping something, anything would one day reach. because they just want you to be okay.
if you see a child go hungry because their family struggles to put food on the table, if you see a mother at her child's sickbed holding their hand and wiping the sweat off their brow because she can't do anything else to take the pain away, you would never blame them for "failing to provide what their child needs". so how the fuck do you watch toriel run around hometown day after day, asking for information or anything that could make kris feel better because she's one of 2 people total who noticed something is wrong, when the reason they're hurting to begin with is that they're possessed by a god and probably doomed to die..... and feel anything other than pity. for both of them. how do you see them as anything other than victims of very tragic circumstances. why does this fandom always treat the phrase "toriel is a nuanced character" as synonymous with any of this being her fucking fault
gracieabrams
blakekathryn
