i've been thinking a lot lately about this exchange:
i often talk about the host being a mimic -- this "inner dialogue", to me, reads instead as an internalized dialogue learned from a controlling authority figure growing up.
likely not their father, who left when they were still very young, and likely not nana, whose abuse had a different tenor (the woman running a salon called "big hair for big bitches" isn't someone lecturing a young vic on being "sensible"). so we're looking at either the host's mother or their other grandmother, who has come up at least twice now and who always seems to be on a cruise. either way, a maternal figure.
when the host plays at parenthood, that same voice comes out again, but this time externalized and directed at their stepdaughter:
repeating old cycles. looking to inflict them again on bianca (an adult who they feel wronged by -- someone they can justify any measure of cruelty against, unlike the actual children they interact with), and asserting the parent-child dynamic by falling back on the example of someone who raised them. control, conformity, looking the part.
their relationship with bianca seems caught between two modes: the reenactment of the parent-child dynamic they were raised under (as a way of feeling in control and clinging to the authority of step-parenthood) and a mode where they're looking to her for human connection/to fill voids in their life.
in the past six(+) months, bianca and the host have gone from a household/familial dynamic of, alternatingly:
a married couple and an only child
daughter, father, and the new spouse
two thirty-year-olds and a patriarch
the adult child and the (crumbling) marriage
to.... just the two of them. bianca and the host, alone. on the show, we see them looking to fill the holes left behind -- they look for a patriarch in hayes, a stable partner in jordache, sexual fulfillment in charlotte, and so on. but bianca is their constant, whether they like it or not.
saying "it seems likely they'd also try to plug bianca into those voids, in any twisted way they can justify without jeopardizing their own self-image" sounds almost like a reach. and then you remember that her full name is an oedipus reference because this show is a fucking nightmare and we're right about everything.
in trying and piece together what a home life even looks like between these two, we're faced with all sorts of glorious contradictions. the host is someone keenly aware of power -- and their most important relationship is the one where it's hardest to tell how, exactly, power is operating! and this makes sense, doesn't it? these two have such a lengthy, weird relationship, only complicated by the shifting boss-employee dynamics we see coming into play in the canon era. there's just... so much going on here.
uhh anyway evil daughterhusband dynamic literally canon send post
snowghoul
turnnoffyourmind
romaincrisis
