tell me about Sister Imperator 🎤
OHOHOH
I am obsessed with Sister Imperator. She fascinates me to no end. Here is this woman defined by tragedy, refusing to let tragedy be all that she is—no matter what.
She's a victim, this isn't debatable, but she doesn't play the victim. She gets what she wants by playing the game the way the men who ruined her life play it: with force, violence, and unrelenting control.
But there's a thread I find so utterly fascinating about her: she truly loves her sons, and wants to do right by them. To some degree, she projects her sisters onto them. She sees in them her insurmountable guilt over not being able to protect her little sisters. All she wanted was to have a fun Halloween with them... She can't let anything happen to her kids. She can't. She already can't forgive herself for what happened to her sisters.
So she makes the smartest choice she could, and passed the children off to the one person she truly trusted in the world: Marika. Now, I fully subscribe to the idea that Sister's stepfather abducted Perpetua (intending to grab both children, initially) as a way to get some level of control back over her. And I fully believe that the narrative we see in the Sister Imperator comics is less a straight narrative of events, but more Sister chronicalling her life and presenting it to us as a sort of memoir—and finally making that final accusation against her stepfather. So I think it's less important that I believe he kidnapped Perpetua, and more important that SHE believed he did.
We don't really know why or when she came back to the ministry, or how she rose to so much power, but we know what her goal was once she did. She wanted to give her boys EVERYTHING, and set about organizing EVERYTHING to give them this whole little slice of the world she'd carved out.
She pushes Cardi too hard, we can all see it. She's unresponsive to his obvious paranoia, and dismissive in general. She waited 50 years to even tell him she was his mother, and their whole relationship is bogged down by her regrets. But she still cares. She urges him to give it all he's got, and she genuinely believes in him. In her last years, she tried to be a mother. Not a very good one, but I don't think she even knows what that looks like. She just wanted to be something other than HER mother. She wanted to be herself.
She's so fascinating to me because she's manipulative and evil and absolutely killed people so many times in her life. But she does everything to make sure her boys don't have to suffer like she did. She wants them to succeed in life, and orchestrates everything to facilitate that. She's such a fascinating and multilayered character and I wish the fandom would stop boiling her down to a uniquely evil bitch who only exists to orchestrate ways to prevent them from fucking Cardi.
