what is goodie my gang

💨💨

And this>>>

Wip!!

It's meant to be tragic. That even after all that she realized she wanted to change as her last words and thoughts. She didn't want to go.

Everyone knows the trope of the Madwoman in the Attic. That the thing to do with an incurably mentally ill person is to lock them away where they can stop being so noisy and distracting and disturbing. Anyone who has been institutionalized or even been mentally ill enough that the institution was a possibility has dealt with the specter of the Madwoman: the idea that one day, people will decide they're done feeling sorry for you, so they're gonna get rid of you and don't care how badly you get hurt as long as it's quiet. Caine used the cellar as the Attic. He didn't care about helping the Abstracted at all, the fact that the dark helps calm them is a happy coincidence. He just needed them gone. They're too loud, too disruptive, so just tidy them away and forget. Out of sight, out of mind. Quiet.

The Abstracted are loud and flashy and violent. There is no reason to believe they can be cured. They are dangerous to help, and there's very little the Players can do to help anyway. But instead of just cutting their losses and locking them away, the Players went out of their way to do what little they could. Zooble sacrificed their whole stash of arms to take Jax somewhere safer. They built homes that would ease their pain, experimented to find what environment would be best for them and their unique needs. They still go to visit them, even if it might be personally painful. Just on the off chance that the Abstracted might find comfort in their presence.

triangle IS CANONICALLY AND EXPLICITLY A GAY BAR. which MEEEEEEANS

But to extend the metaphor a bit further, Imagine Caine is a person living isolated in the middle of nowhere without internet. He's desperately lonely, so he raises a bunch of ducks he captures from a nearby lake because they are his favorite animal.

The Ducks keep dying. He does not know why. The ducks peck at him whenever he tries to pet them. He does not know why. He tries to build the best possible coop for them, but they keep plucking their own feathers from stress.

He loves them, but no matter what he does, no matter what he tries, the ducks are miserable and keep dying and want nothing to do with him. But he doesn't want to let them go, he has nothing else in his life. He has nobody else in his life.

Now the metaphor breaks down when you remember the humans can actually talk to Caine, unlike ducks. But honestly that only would help so much, Caine had pretty much zero context to comprehend most of the things the humans talked about as being important to them.

Caine pretty much saw most of the human's complaints as being a case of Preferences rather than "I need things to change so I don't abstract from the stress". And given Caine does not really understand things like nuance and Unspoken Meanings, he was not going to get that unless somebody spelled it out for him directly in those terms (Caine my beloved AuDHD disaster dentures).

Caine literally had to Google humans in their natural habitat before he had even an inkling of what they were actually upset about.