S8F w/ morally dubious kids

Disclaimer: Norman and Ray don’t actually say this in canon, it’s simply what I inferred from when they felt betrayed by Isabella, Emma, and each other.

@officersnickers THIS EXACTLY!!!

As much as it may be joked around in the fandom, I don’t think people fully realize how much trauma warped Ray’s perspective. He canonically gives too many fucks and while he tries hard to not care due to the circumstances and his dwindling hope, it’s pretty obvious that he does. Once they were outside the farm and in no need to mask his feelings from Isabella and such, Ray is very open with his care for others. Though actually, he shows signs of affection even before that lmaoooo big ass sweetheart. Those emo looking bangs cannot hide that love. Oughhhh he loves others so much yet himself so little💔💔💔 His heart was so big that he still has a bit of compassion for a person he has always considered a monster oughhhh🩵🩵🩵🩵 please my guy love yourself too I know you’re getting there (thank fuck for your family) but please get there sooner

(!!MANGA SPOILERS!!)

In anime/manga, when it comes to female characters that are not your typical bubby outgoing girl, people are quick to jump to conclusions about their personality, and one of these examples is Barbara.

Most people in the TPN fandom don't like her because she's apparently "too aggressive" or was "mean to Emma when she expressed her opinion about the demons." But they don't really understand why she is the way she is.

To start this off, her behavior is rooted through her trauma. She thought she was going to get adopted with her best friend Cislo when they both came of age (I say that because the specific age of shipment for Goodwill Ridge is not confirmed) when in reality, they were both sent to Lambda, an experimental farm that was known for heavily testing and drugging children. Not only that, she was severely traumatized because of what the people in that facility did to her. They ran experiments on her, drugged her, and it eventually gave her super strength, but it doesn't erase the fact that they damaged her mind physiologically.

When Norman blew up Lambda and saved her along with other victims, she was finally experiencing what freedom felt like after spending four years of her life living in torture, and because of that, she saw Norman as a savior, a God, which is why she indebted her loyalty to him.

Now, the main thing that makes her stand out from the rest of the other characters is how outspoken she is about her feelings. She was never given a healthy outlet for her trauma, so she kills demons and eats them as a sort of coping mechanism. She wouldn't care if people are uncomfortable with it because frankly, why would she? She wants people to know what the demons did to her, even if it's in a way they don't like. She will prove her point, whether you like it or not, which explains this moment in Chapter 124

Like I said in the beginning, most people in the TPN fandom don't like her because of this specific moment in the manga, but there's a reason why she acted the way she did, and a huge reason why it's absolutely valid for her to feel this way. She had never seen anyone who felt sympathy for the kind that murdered her people, tortured her, she believes that all demons are the same because of what she went though in Lambda.

Her reaction wasn't just a "valid crashout", it was more than that. She saw Emma's hesitation and only said what she said out of assumption. She can't sympathize with the demons the same way Emma does because she saw how much the demons did to her. She wasn't saying that to be rude to her, it was because she couldn't understand why Emma, who was raised as demon food, wasn't happy to have the demons exterminated. Yes, she might have gone a bit overboard when it came to explaining her feelings, but she's not meant to be a perfect character. She's meant to be flawed, not in a bad way, but in a way that would want to make you want to understand her reason for her behavior.

Barbara, you deserve better girl. No one will mischaracterize you on my watch! 😭🫂

Oh yeah Emma makes this exact face in the manga too; the thing is, in the manga she’s alone with Sonju: I suspect Emma would never show such a scared and vulnerable side of her to the younger members of her family 🤔

I don't have a firm outline for them beyond a certain point since there's a number of other factors that could influence their interactions, but I'm open to a variety of outcomes from authors as long as Ray's allowed to ride out the turbulent storm of emotions he has over this rather than glancing over them for some schmaltzy sitcom scenario where he forgives her at the drop of a hat and is acting chummy with her (outside of short-form lighthearted comics).

Here's what I imagine happening in the immediate aftermath of them traveling to the human world (borrowing a bit from this ask of yours for this)

                        whatever  whatever  pacing  and  subject  focus  issues  re:    the  manga  aside,     there’s  a  whole  big  thing  about  late  story  isabella,     how  she  interprets  ray’s  address  as  forgiveness,      but    .    .    .         it’s  maybe  just  more  speaking  to  how  their  worst  qualities  are  the  ones  that  they  share.     not  as  much  a      “  you’re  my  mom  and  i  forgive  you   ”         as  it  is  a         “   i  get  it,     i’m   there  too,     it  doesn’t  matter  anymore  anyway,    stop  feeling  sorry  for  yourself    ”        and  it  just.     tapers  off  into  something  impersonal,      something  more  just  a  person  speaking  to  a  person  than  a  son  to  his  mother.                  and  then  there’s  emma’s  big  wrap-up  speech  about  how  isabella’s   love     &.    kindness  before  the  jailbreak  arc  began  had  been  genuine,    and  how  they  all  just  remembered  the   happy   things   about  living  in  grace  field,     and  she’s  speaking  on  behalf  of  all  the  kids.      but  that  speech  doesn’t  apply  to  ray,    like  at  all  at  all.      as  near  to  the  present  as  ayshe’s  inclusion,     and  the  visions  at  the  seven  walls,      ray   isn’t   at  peace  with  isabella.     he   doesn’t   remember   only   the   happy   times ,       because  the  happy  times  for  him  only  lasted  for  as  long  as  he’d  been  willing  to  pretend  he  didn’t  know  about  the  farms. 

    and  speaking  of  all  that,      it’s  crazy  how  ray  rlly  kinda  invoked  his  own  mistreatment  when  he  robbed  isabella  of  that  easy  blissful  delusion,      just  off  the  basis  that  he  happened  to  retain  more  memories  than  what  was  normal         &.      decided  that  he  loved  emma  and  norman  more  than  he  feared  the  consequences  of  laying  his  cards  on  the  table,        but  it’s  even  crazier  that  she  let  him  do  that.          she  rlly  stood  there  and  let  her  six  year  old  kid  weaponize  himself,       really  let  that  bond  shift  from  that  of  a  child  and  their  protector,      to  one  that  was  almost  purely  parasitic,     transactional,     &.    conditional  by  definition. 

    ofc  it’s  all  painfully  logical  and  understandable  how  far  into  this  system  characters  like  isabella  and  sister  krone  had  sunken     &.    how  it  took  watching  these  kids  do  what  they  never  could  to  put  their  own  humanity  back  into  perspective,     but  just……………… hhhh.      it’s  broken,     it’s  a  tragic  cycle,      and  for  as  much  as  isabella   did   love  her  kids,      as  nice  as  it  would’ve  been  to  just  raise  them  all  like  a  normal  mother  should,       the  backbone  of  her  character  journey     &.    ultimate  redemption  was  laid  out  plain  and  clear  right  to  ray’s  face  that  everything,     including  his  birth,      was  all  just  collateral  damage  of  isabella’s  desire  to  survive  in  this  world  as  according  to  the  demon’s  rules,        longer  than  most  ever  could,        and  find  some  sort  of   meaning   to  all  this  sacrifice  in  the  only  option  that’d  ever  been  available  to  cattle  like  them.      the  tragedy  is  that  the  prioritizing  of  her  own  position  trumps  that  love  of  a  mother  more  times  that  it  ever  didn’t,        and   that’s   the  mom  that  ray  was  left  with.  

@punching-unicorns Hmm! I continue to debate how much of her maintaining her deal with Ray was strictly for pragmatic reasons and how much was due to wanting to keep him close out of some painfully complicated mess of emotions that was constantly oscillating between a tainted affection and spiteful hatred. Any time she would find herself falling into the former, forgetting the circumstances of their relationship, him being the living, breathing reminder of one of the worst things HQ forced her to endure would resurface and how they chose to put him in her plant as if to silently mock her and unknowingly rub in how pitiful the life of a Mom would always be under this system. To openly love him would be one step further in giving in than she’d already done by accepting the Mom position and loving all the other cattle children she raised for slaughter, and she hated to give that much more of herself than she already had when she wasn’t aware of his origins. So she would dutifully do what was tasked of her, but on her terms, as petty as they were.

And once Ray was gone hopefully she could finally put these turbulent feelings to rest.

Deep down, she probably knew the significance of this would largely go unrealized by those she intended to get back at, and yet when one is forced to live such a routine, mundane life under the thumb of such a system, knowing there are humans out there who live lives freely without having to make any similar sacrifices, it eats at a person. So she took it out on the only other person in the house who had an inkling of the true hell they lived in. Never directly in the form of physical abuse or boorish spoken threats because the former would be counterproductive and the latter lacked the perceived elegance she’d cultivated about herself, but in the form of emotional neglect by withholding affection and regularly keeping him off-kilter with the choice of words she did use. Not constantly, because him being perpetually fearful would render his services useless, but enough to keep him on his toes while still lulling him into some semblance of security to explain his confidence in his exchange with Norman when it’s revealed he’s the traitor.

And then in a case of bitter irony, Ray’s retaliatory act of spite was threefold in its pettiness:

to Emma he verbally confirms he intends to deprive the demons of the feast they waited twelve years for

to Isabella the caretaker who sacrificed her charges so that she could live, he silently denies the means of prolonging her pitiful life

to Isabella his mother he proves that he’s better than her, that he isn’t afraid to die because dying as a human is better than whatever pathetic existence she had carved out for herself, ideally forcing her to look at him one last time with the same look of terror she had on her face the day she realized their biological connection

You're good! I talked about the framing of the end of the scene here forever ago in internet time, touch on it here as an add-on to a post regarding the false belief there was a rivalry founded on the basis of a classic love triangle inextricably integrated into the core of the narrative (i.e., Norman and Ray actually dislike each other because they're both vying for Emma's romantic affection), and a brief summary of those feelings in this paragraph from this post, so my thoughts on it are kind of scattered about lol

Ray knows Norman, knows his sense of rigid morality well enough to account for him discovering his alliance with Isabella and using that to his advantage, to further push Norman away so he’ll be more comfortable with using him (he even chides Norman for not keeping his original plan to do this a secret) and so his death will hurt him and Emma less. And for roughly the entire back half of October 2045, Norman did genuinely hate Ray for his betrayal in the same way he hated Isabella, his reaction so visceral at being deceived and hurt by people he had loved all his life. He would have been willing to sacrifice Ray if not for intervention from Emma, which opened him up to directly confronting Ray and, in turn, led him to discover Ray’s true motives. He was so humbled and taken aback by the depths of Ray’s love and loyalty he returned to his original categorization of him: a dear friend who needed to be saved from his intended fate in their cruel world. Even if saving him came at the cost of his own life; even if he desperately wanted to live.

So I do believe Norman would have done it given the circumstances, and that Ray was banking on him doing so if Norman suspected him of being the traitor (and from Ray's perspective, this was the more likely outcome because of how much stock he puts in Norman's intelligence).

It fits with Ray's meticulous planning, Norman's overall morality when left on his own at this point in his life plus his pride and ruthlessness, and the series' themes of redemption/second chances for those who genuinely work toward change and the positive influence of friendship/solidarity over isolation.