The Grove

Really big box, like an MG almost. The two big shield/booster things on her back really looks like the 2 "wings" of the Phenex. All her kit makes her very back-heavy and the knees can't bend past vertical meaning she tends to lean back a bit when on her own two feet. Plus there's not a lot of room to pose the arms if you follow the instructions to put the backpack where it is, between that and the skirt. Also, the kit comes with a lot of extra parts, including 30MM connecting joint runners.

She's also the same green-blue colour as Rydira

Some recoloured extra parts for type A and B

Compared with her Acerby改 sisters

And of course...

Acerby改 is so cute and I felt something special to Type-D改 so I super quickly drew her

Girls in swamp

The bits about people-pleasing and building resentment from avoiding conflict + the parents not being able to healthily model repair of relationship ruptures with their kids + conflict avoidance and managing others’ emotions for them as a maladaptive method of regaining a sense of control over a relationship that is out of control feels especially applicable to the relationship between Iris and Youngest. The level of convoluted bullshit Youngest engineered so that she would never have to enter direct conflict with her mother despite successfully executing a centuries-long plot to assassinate her was absolutely legendary. She resented her mother and wanted to punish her for abandoning her, but was too much of a wimp to actually stab her herself, so instead she groomed Watcher to do it and take the fall.

What was even more screwed up was that even after Iris died, Youngest still did the fawning people-pleaser traumatized daughter routine with how she presented the assassination in her propaganda stage plays. She refuses to shit talk Iris. She elevates her into this selfless saint of a mother who always loved her most dutiful youngest daughter. Even when she’s finally free of Iris’ control, she’s still fawning and desperately begging Mommy to love her. She desperately tries to gain control over her mother and her relationship by denying she’s angry, denying Iris ever hurt her, by constructing this historical simulacrum in the image of the kind of mother she wishes Iris had been.

She keeps emulating Iris, too. She continues and upholds Iris’ system of tyranny and control by ruling in her name even if she implemented superficial reforms. In some ways, she’s even more controlling and oppressive than Iris because she weaponizes the people-pleasing trauma response in her own daughters to turn them into the Red Guard. She refuses to let go of her childhood home even though evidence mounts that the ship’s life support systems are failing and the cloning program is unsustainable and the clones will need to escape the ship if they want to survive. She keeps plucking hairs to make new daughters even though Iris’ edict no longer stands.

and already i was like OH yeah that tracks, sounds like she wasn't just experimented upon but was being sexually abused

and then it went on with my own uncomfortable feelings re the alien/the source itself and how the clones and others referred to iris's relationship to the occupants--fucking them, fraternizing, comparing it to a past boyfriend; and then i realized the jiao picture was a secretary from the source and it still acted enamoured of her and offered her massages; and then i thought of all the glimpses we get of iris's exhaustion and dissociation and lost time after every communion with the source and how closely it mirrors victims of csa's own dissociation. and how even as she abused her daughters she refused the source access to them (much to its chagrin)

and THEN secretary and the source got to talk directly and the way the source talks about iris. flat out having isolated her, targeting her bc she was an alienated and unpleasant teenage girl, calling her "my iris", practically slobbering at the thought of using her, and then secretary says "you communed with her" with the same horror one would say when they heard of a rape; and the source continues on about how iris is always going to belong to it, same as secretary and other clones--because iris's children and the source's children, by default, belong to the source

because iris was groomed and abused, first abused by her mom who herself suffered trauma and was rejected by her own mother, then her peers in a racist environment, and then experimented upon and used by the soldiers and very likely groomed and sexually abused by mimi, and then the source comes in and swoops her up, a flower ready to be plucked. it keeps asking her to get access to her own children, her sisters--"to the very end, she was so protective of her sisters. she never allowed me to listen in."

But if you leave the cops and fascist alive that’s just stupid and we will give you an ending fitting that stupid decision”