#will help

Bianca: *look of what the fuckery*

Enid: *screams at him* "ARE YOU SERIOUS?? YOU THINK I WOULD WANT TO EVEN BE NEAR YOU AFTER THIS??!?"

Something I’ve always liked keeping an eye on and is so bittersweet about Tallulah’s character is her relationship with promises. I’m not quite sure when it became so intense, maybe it’s been there since the beginning, but Tallulah for a long time has had a unique relationship with making and keeping a promise.

I want to say that first and foremost, how she handles promises can be incredibly childish. Both because they can be nonsensical and “immature” AND because well, she’s a child. What kind of promise do you expect from a child?

A promise is everything to her, it’s a contract. Its words set in stone and written in the stars. A promise CANNOT be broken. Doesn’t matter who it is, a promise is a promise and you keep it. And it’s not all bad. Things like this can be reasonable right? She’ll get upset of course when someone makes a promise or when she can’t keep hers. She uses promises as a way to hold out hope. She uses them to keep herself and those around her accountable, so she has the assurance that they’ll do what they promised and she’ll do what she promised. That no matter what happens in the world, no matter what life throws at her, she can count on those promises.

So when someone breaks it, when she can’t live up to her promises, it shatters her world view.

And then the problems start to stack up, especially when we get into the realm of false promises, it starts becoming a mess. A mess of false hope. Because remember, to her, promises can be translated to hope (another big part of her character).

Gonna breeze pass through this one but she did make a promise when she first joined the island. A promise to someone, who never kept up his end of it, and she held on to it for MONTHS. For months that child held out her promise and repeatedly brought it up again and again that no matter what she was gonna be alive for when he came back and when he needed her. With not a sign of him returning that promise to her. And this promise was also hope. Hope she wasn’t gonna be left alone again, abandoned.

And that’s when we get into false promises. Because although Tallulah does value them a lot, she also asks for people to promise her things that sometimes cannot be done. There have been countless of times she has tried asking q!Phil to promise her something, but q!Phil has rarely ever promised her anything (with a handful of exceptions). He’s careful, he’s always very careful about what he promises to her because he doesn’t want to make a promise he can’t keep. And whenever he doesn’t promise her something, I feel like a part of Tallulah’s hope gets cracked. Because without a promise, how positive is she that q!Phil will keep his word? How hopeful can she really be that everything will be okay?

She hangs onto promises like a lifeline. They’re the one tether that can keep her hope afloat. And she remembers them, remembers her promises like a burn on her skin.

She’s done the same thing to q!Bad. Has asked if he could promise things, like promise that he wasn’t dying, but q!Bad never could. And when people can’t promise something, she has little hope that everything will be okay.

And some promises she asks for can be so… nonsensical. Promises we know, and I KNOW she knows, cannot be made. But she asks for them anyway. Because she’s a child. A child who just wants everything to be okay and wants her Papa Phil to promise that nothing bad will ever happen to him, to promise that he will never leave them, because she’s a terrified kid of being abandoned again and not having that reassurance, that solid ground, that things will be okay.

But q!Phil can’t promise that. And it aches.

One time she broke that barrier, she couldn’t take it anymore. She asked q!Bad to promise her something and he refused to. And afterwards she just told him to promise it to her even if it’s a lie. She full on broke that glass wall and was transparent.

Pinky promise to me you would not die

At least lie to me

And he did.

Because promises make her feel better. She holds onto them until she can’t, even if it is filled with lies. Because sometimes a child asks for a promise and they don’t expect the truth, they just expect comfort. Because it’s the only thing they can handle.

It’s so sad to watch her hold onto promises that she KNOWS deep in her heart can’t be kept. But still she wishes and she hopes and she believes in these lies as if they’re the only thing holding her up above ground.

Sometimes the promises she asks for can be unreasonable. She puts up a wall to protect herself because reality is scary, it’s terrifying. Tallulah values the truth like no other. She hates lies and she hates when people like q!Phil and Chayanne hide things from her. But when it comes to her dad potentially abandoning her, when it comes to him dying and leaving her, she’d rather believe everything will be okay than face the harsh reality of what’s going on.

And this topic has a lot of nuances I won’t get specifically into. It’s a blend of promises and lies and hope and truth. The lies the promises hold aren’t the same as someone straight up lying to her face and hiding things from her. It’s different instances of a lie.

Anyways, again, a lot of different things I can get into and definitions to go through BUT I will to say that it’s not wrong of her to want to believe everything will be okay. I’m an optimist at heart. ‘Hope’ to me is important and I think it isn’t wrong to have it even when things are looking down. But, something specifically for Tallulah is that alongside that hope, she also is terrified of reality (rightfully so) and tries to erase it by making a promise. And essentially, that’s not how the world works.

It’s such a childish way of thinking. You cannot erase the bad things from happening with a promise. And that’s what Tallulah sometimes does. If she makes q!Phil promise that he won’t leave her, then surely he won’t. That’s how promises work right?

Tallulah holds herself to these promises too. She does everything in her power to keep her word. When she doesn’t, when she breaks a promise she makes, she beats herself up for it.

That first promise she made? She broke it during purgatory and it broke her. It was one of the many accumulated reasons why she hated Purgatory island and everything associated with it. And when she broke that promise a piece of her hope broke with it.

Whenever Tallulah makes a promise to q!Phil she engraves it in her mind. She does everything in her power to keep it. And when she’s accused of breaking a promise, she panics and becomes defensive. She looks back into her mind to see if she ever DID make that promise and if she didn’t she starts defending herself. The conversation begins to shift from the actual issue to “no I never made that promise I didn’t promise you anything I didn’t break anything.” Because it’s SUPER important to her. The idea of breaking a promise is like a rock to glass. So she remembers the promises she makes.

Promises for Tallulah are a childish way for her to rewrite reality. But they’re also a way for her to have hope. There’s a balance when it comes to having hope and being able to see reality for what it is. And it’s something Tallulah struggles with. And I don’t blame her for it.

A child who cannot cope with reality will make pinky promises of clear skies and sunny days. A child who cannot handle the possibility of being abandoned again will make someone promise her to never leave even if she knows things are out of his control. Because in the mind of a child, a promise cannot be broken.

A promise is sealed. It’s a binding rope that should never give. So if Tallulah can make q!Phil promise her things, then that means he will never leave her, that means he will never hurt her. If Tallulah can make q!Bad promise her he won’t die then she can live in the lie that he will be okay. If she can promise to always be by her brothers side then surely they will never be separated again.

Because promise can’t be broken.

Right?