#clipped wings

TW Blood

He probably would start clipping them, tbh. He spent so much of his life not being able to fly, so he has a moment after his dad's death where he stress molts, and he didn't think to clip them when they grew back in at that point. He doesn't really have flight muscles because of not being allowed to fly, so he ends up clipping his flight feathers again after quite a few crash landings.

He just thinks it's safer for everyone, because he doesn't really know how to fly, and he has no easy way to learn. He's too busy being Mecha Man anyway, he can't afford to lose time by learning flight. The Mech can fly, and he can still glide with clipped wings, so he makes do with that.

Every time Robert molts, he clips his flight feathers (or just outright rips them out, but they grow in faster that way, and it hurts more). He doesn't really take care of them too. He doesn't preen them, or wash them unless they get itchy, or anything apart from very basic self care. Clipping is frowned upon by a lot of people though (Chase had hated it. He'd tried talking to his dad about it, but he hadn't listened), so Robert learned to hide it. He tucked his wings in a specific way that hid the missing parts of his feathers, and never spread his wings in public.

By the time the Mech explodes and he wakes up from his coma, his wings are in awful shape. The nurses cleaned his wings as best they could, but proper preening is more of a family/friend thing, so he has a bunch of crooked feathers, unkept pin feathers, debris stuck in places the nurses couldn't see, and they'd been damaged in the crash and were still healing.

And, he'd molted during his coma, so his flight feathers were back.

Robert clipped them without thinking once he was discharged, then went on with his life.

Perception can change the context of a photo immensely. He wears this angry mask, and his face does alot of heavy lifting here. But it feels like a different story when you crop it to just his eye. The rage is still there, but the anxiety, fear, depersonalization, depression and CPTSD become alot more apparent, too. The eye patch is not his identity that much I understand, but it felt wrong not to include it. It's something he had to endure and I absolutely refuse to believe that it did not cause serious psychological damage. Its important to acknowledge that fact because it has an impact.

Not to mention it was something he had to learn to cope with during a trauma inducing period of his life that left scarring in more ways than one. And being thrown into servitude under the threat of a slow painful death, and given no opportunity to heal was very much meant to be a breaking tactic.

I know that feeling of having something taken from you and having to endure the aftermath and carry that pain with you for the rest of your life. All you can do is accept the hand you're given because you can't really change it.

I fear he carries that shame with him since he covers it. People bringing it up has to be painful, so maybe he covers it so theres no room for interpretation or questioning. He hardly talks about it either.

This man could not be further from perfect, but I think that's precisely why I am so smitten with him. Life is full of hard decisions, and he's managaing something so much bigger than himself, and had to let go of alot of things along the way to get where he is now,(or maybe he didn't have much to begin with, which also tracks) and has made Yakuza his idenitity because he's good at it, and it seems to fill a void for him, which makes sense why he chases the chance to return so adamantly, despite the people that have made his life hell. Sounds like it's all he's ever known. I'm excited to take this journey with him as I approach the end of the first game in the series chronologically.

and then in paragon, we get to add the twin layers of wifies treating parrot exactly like any other captor would—has—and also that not having his full feathers feels sort of... right. familiar. like that's how he's supposed to be, grounded and by wifies' side.

This made me giggle and kick my feet evilly. Yes anon, I love this idea. I love the idea that Parrot's feathers had really just finally grown back right before Wifies traps him in Paragon. Like he was almost healed and then bam. Right back to square one.