never never never never never never

everyone become chardee pilled with me NOW!

I've been thinking about the gang's daddy issues and I wanna yap about this specific plotline because it's been kinda bugging me ever since it aired. I find it SO hard to believe that Dee would ever actually feel genuine grief for Frank, little crayon drawing be damned. Maybe that's just me being cynical, but this is a woman whose capacity to love anyone has been broken and beaten down by decades of abuse, and her father is one of the main life-long culprits of that abuse. I don't think she has even a shred of affection left for Frank.

But I'm not saying that her grieving here is necessarily out-of-character; I just don't think that her grief is actually about losing Frank. I think that she saw that little crayon drawing that she supposedly made as a kid and it reminded her that she was once Sweet Dee, a little girl who naïvely loved her daddy, who just wanted to play pretend and make people laugh, and who hadn't yet become too mean and aggressive and vindictive to be lovable. Dee may have interpreted her own overwhelming grief in that moment as being about Frank, but I think she was actually grieving for herself. I think she was grieving the fact that "Sweet Dee" died long ago, and now the only remnant of her is this little crayon drawing. But that would've been too painful to confront, so she focused her grief on Frank instead. She was coping by creating a comforting fantasy where she had a loving dad instead of a bastard father who had carelessly broken her spirit.

Tu fui, ergo eris.