InkySlinky

Not to yuck anyone else's yum or anything, but it actually bothers me whenever I see Franco genuinely being depicted as infantile/child-brained. It's very clear to me whenever I run into someone who has never age regressed themselves or only consume idealized/romanticized fictional agere content, because they always seem to perceive characters who age regress as literal children.

Not only is Franco a grown man who commits vile crimes, on purpose, for fun—he's also arguably one of the most lucid and self-aware Prime Assets in the game's canon. He remembers his past in vivid detail, he's consistently lucid, he mentions Murkoff and the trials themselves several times in his in-game dialogue, and he acknowledges the Reagents as fellow (mostly) autonomous adult humans. The reason he's one of the scariest Prime Assets is literally because he's fully self aware of the cruelty he's committing and enjoys it. I feel like there's the smallest chance Reagents could appeal to other Prime Assets' delusions to get their way, but negotiating with, or even attempting to speak to Franco, would require appealing to his grounded sense of reality.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I can't stand when Franco is depicted as a baby-brained hornball who turns into a crying puddle when he sees 1 (one) tata. This dude literally kills people and steals their nipples and looks at naked bodies all day, I PROMISE you he isn't turning into a puddle over ONE bare chested woman. And regardless of this, this dude's pride is the size of Mt. Everest and more fragile than a porcelain teacup; he's more likely to feel insulted and made fun of by someone trying to appeal to his fetishes than he is to readily jump at the opportunity.

Do I think Franco age regresses?? Yes, absolutely. But I also think he's a complicated grown man who struggles with this fact and clings to his adulthood and "manliness" like his life depends on it. I don't think Franco would ever be happy being infantilized 24/7, and I think this is WHY he is infantilized ao heavily in Sinyala/by Murkoff—because it keeps him tense and on edge, and forces him to make desperate attempts at weaponizing this infantilizing against other people (like using childish behaviors to scare, disorient, and intimidate Reagents.) To me, Franco craves the validation of being perceived as a hard-working adult man just as much as he craves a safe space to indulge in his age regression and fetishes/fantasies.