Help my sanity

Don't get me wrong, it makes sense why someone would say that. Scott did absolutely come up with the idea of hurting himself to punish his soulmate first.

But when Scott and Cleo did their axe crits, Pearl didn't know Scott did it on purpose, in fact she makes a remark about how Scott judged her last episode for taking damage but now he was taking damage, which indicates to me that Pearl very much thought the damage was unintentional.

Pearl then, within a minute of this, announces that she's going to be "less careful" about taking damage (before adding in a purposefully exaggerated 'creepy' tone that this is what happens when scott doesn't want to be on her team and that scott did this) which implies to me she was already planning to take damage to punish Scott too.

A few minutes later, without talking to Scott at all in this time, Pearl and Scar have a conversation in which Scar suggests various ways they can torture their soulmates, at which point they use the powdered snow together to take damage and punish their soulmates.

At no point during any of this is there any indication that Pearl knows Scott took damage on purpose, or that she's only taking damage as retribution for that. In fact, she explicitly voices her motivation as just wanting to mess with Scott, not revenge.

Scott and Jimmy at the time were not aiming to tell a tragic love story, they were playing up a gay shippy bit like every other SMP does. When you watch it without any narrative interpretation or c/cc divide, it becomes really clear the FH interactions are supposed to be funnier than genuine.

Jimmy's funeral sequence is a great example of this. It's the fandom that made this moment tragic and about Scott's mourning, the bit in Scott's video itself consists of Scott fake-crying in a very jokey way and then showing a compilation of Jimmy dying as Jimmy's "best moments" -- very much in line with the jimmy bullying humour we often see in these videos.

Retroactively because he stalks the fandom, I do think Scott swayed to the side of playing FH up as if it really was a "storyline" but it's very clear to me that at the time 3L was recorded there was no intention of it being seen as anything more than a bit or unserious shipbait. It makes sense too since this was the first season before any establishment of the storytelling element that draws so many fandom goers in became acknowledged by the CCs.

You probably see it with some distain considering how grian adds to the jimmy ecosystem and my argument for Grian caring about Jimmy is his relationship with scar, where he just occasionally kills him, sometimes for no reason.

The reason why grian is so effective at riling jimmy up is because they're effectively best friends like grian coming up with excuses for being late to his streams. But regardless of how grian may treat jimmy from an outsider's perspective, he does care about him.

Mmm I hope we're still strictly talking about characters haha (with the late to streams thing) but as I see it personally, yes, he does care about Jimmy to some degree but he prioritizes enforcing the ecosystem because if Jimmy isn't at the bottom of it as the runt of the litter, taking the brunt of things, then that would mean anyone could be that runt, including him, and he prioritizes his own wellbeing. Which after watching KOV makes a lot of sense as he's been in that role before and suffered for it. He bites and fights though, and he fought his way out of that and now sees it as necessary to keep Jimmy in that position instead. Usually he just makes offhanded quips about it, but when Jimmy survives that long in Wild Life, he takes it into his own hands to kill him. He really makes it look as if he thinks it to be inevitable, and that he'll make it inevitable, the way he tries to coax Scar not to enter the bunker because he doesn't want to hurt him, because he will if it means he can get Jimmy out. And he does end up hurting Lizzie in the crossfire that way. After seeing KOV I can't really see it any other way as it makes way too much sense to me now haha