Long Live Bad Taste

It's 2024 and I still.

love

Reference pages and lore tidbits from the Hollow Knight AU I host on @askthepalechildren. It's not in the usual style and breaks the fourth wall so I'm posting them to my main instead.

Oh I'm going three for three with Hazbin Hotel, just you wait.

Unfortunately, I am drawn to stories where the thesis is giving the kindness and grace to let bad people improve themselves and everyone seems to interpret that as "your abuse specifically is invalid and this shitty person is being absolved of their crimes".

People are flawed, sometimes people are horrifically flawed, and those people I've met are people I don't want in my life because I can't trust them in it. But is the point of being angry with them not just a desire for them to not have those flaws? These are still human beings capable of complex thought, people that came up with their own reasoning that led to them being like this. It is not impossible for their mindsets to change, for hindsight to set in, for new context to be found. People aren't sedentary, in anything.

It also doesn't help these arguments that all of these characters are blatantly shown to have experienced severe trauma that guided their reasoning and the tone of a sad scene being sad makes people think that this is somehow suppose to make them angels in our eyes. You aren't shown this to absolve them, you are shown this to understand. Abusive behavior doesn't exist in a vacuum and it makes me side eye the people so violently against these story beats because they themselves are an abuse victim. Like- are you SURE you don't want to look inside yourself a little bit? Just gonna tell people to die for liking a drawing? Okay, I'm sure that's indicative of nothing.

As a victim, I can't give the people that hurt me my trust anymore, and that's okay! These series never discourage that idea! But some characters will give them a second chance because those are the kind of empathetic people they are. The kind of idealist that believes no one is stuck at their lowest point and actively wants to pull them out. You don't enact positive change with hatred.