Okay so related to my post from last night, I wanted to elaborate on my thoughts very specifically regarding Sparrow and Hero and the messy messy nuance surrounding their relationship that often goes overlooked in the name of simply attaching the "bad parent" label to Sparrow and calling it a day. I've talked about this before, but I'm feeling it again lmao.

Sparrow's relationship with Hero is nuanced. It was destined to be nuanced the moment it was revealed that a prophecy would deem her the Chosen One. Now, I know we still don't know exactly when the prophecy was given to the twins or even what the full prophecy entails, but we do know it shaped Hero's life in an irreparable way. I don't need to tell y'all that much though, because everyone in this fandom knows that, they know what the prophecy did to Hero but I've been surprised time and time again that nobody thinks to dig deeper into their motivations: aka, why did the twins feel it was necessary to raise Hero the way they did? The easy way out is to say they are both horrible parents and call it a day (if anything is said of Lark at all- it's kind of appalling that most people absolve Lark of all blame and solely pin everything on Sparrow when they've always done everything together).

So let me explore one of the what-ifs. Say you are a kid raised as a normal kid having a normal life. One day, though, when you're a teenager, you suddenly inherit the legacy of your parents- their monsters, the end of the world, everything. Pretty akin to how s2 starts, in fact! Except while this is so sudden for you... turns out they knew the entire time that you would inherit this mantle, and they did nothing, said nothing, and now you're completely unprepared to face an eldritch monster that even your father and uncle couldn't defeat on their own. That would be pretty bad, right? Bad parenting on their part, knowing that this would happen and doing nothing?

"But that didn't happen!" you tell me, arguing in my tags and in comments under my posts. "Hero didn't have to face the Doodler!" Sparrow and Lark don't know this. As far as we know, they received a prophecy either right before or right after Hero was born saying she would be the one to face the Doodler. Normal wasn't in the picture, it isn't a question of if that would happen, it was when. What if Hero was a toddler? A child? A teenager? What if the two of them died and she was all alone in this fight? This prophecy was the only tell of the future they have, and it said that their firstborn would be the one to face the Doodler and finish the battle Lark started.

And speaking of Lark; I've said this before, but one of the more underrepresented aspects of Lark's character in the fandom is him feeling helpless as a weakness of his. He doesn't like being put in a position where he can do nothing- this being very apparent in recent episodes, when Sparrow was taken and Lark was left alone panicking. This is how the rogue card took affect on him in the first place, because he hated feeling helpless when Walter was injured and it invoked his rage at Henry for putting him in that position in the first place.

And the twins are no stranger to being dropped into a situation unprepared. They were only kids in s1, thirteen years old at the oldest, younger than the s2 teens and yeah they did their best and rose to the top but that doesn't mean they weren't kids in a world they knew nothing about. They have both been in Hero's shoes, with one caveat: they were the ones who could prepare her in a way that they were not, to ensure that no matter when she faced the Doodler, she would be ready, she would never feel as helpless as they had when they were also just kids.

And yeah, maybe they took it too far, pushed her too hard. But that's never the argument I see online- that the twins should've been more in tune with Hero's mental state and adjusted her training accordingly. Instead, all I ever see is people bashing them for training her in the first place, comparing them to the other kiddads... except even then, the other kiddads didn't have nearly as big of a stake in this as the twins did, nearly as much of the pressure. The world at the time when the kiddads inherited DADDIES didn't need Taylor or Link to be ready to face the Doodler, but the twins knew for sure that it would need Hero, and they had to raise her accordingly. What if it had happened when Hero was six? Or ten? Or thirteen? Would it have been fair to her then to go into that fight untrained? The twins could never have known that it would be Normal and his friends to actually step in and help the Doodler, at the time they couldn't have known that Normal would need to be involved at all!

And, in the end, Hero's training did stop. Again, we don't know exactly how it happened, but we do know Lark and Sparrow, and I can imagine we all agree that it would've been Sparrow's call, not Lark's, to prioritize Hero's mental health and let her finish her teenage years as a normal kid. And accepting that they shouldn't involve Hero meant they had to find an alternative solution. That solution, what we see in canon, was genocide.

It's very fun to me personally to see Sparrow's arc come full circle in that way. He gets the love wolf talk from Henry because the twins were going to kill a lot of people in their own quest, he agrees that would be wrong, and then he gets a full arc of realizing that he can't force himself to care about the rest of the world but he does care about his family. He cares about his family enough that he enacts Code Purple to send the Doodler to Faerun and save the lives of Henry, Lark, Hero, and Normal. And, later... well, we know what the kiddads plan was for reentering Faerun and collecting magic items. We know their plan was to blow up the Doodler using the Sun and inevitably wiping out an entire realm in the process. That's not an easy choice to make, and it goes against everything Henry taught Sparrow in s1... but Sparrow was willing to do it because it would mean that Hero wouldn't have to be involved. Sparrow loved Hero so much that he was going to go against his own morals to protect her and stop the Doodler himself.

And like to me. To me? That makes Sparrow a far better parent than anyone else on this app ever gives him credit for. He pushed her too hard, realized he did so, and was willing to commit genocide to ensure she never had to be the Chosen One, to prove the prophecy wrong. Like I said; it is nuanced and there's no telling how different things would've gone if the s2 teens hadn't gotten involved, if Hero had faced the Doodler in combat before she was ready, if the twins had tried the genocide plan sooner. But it does prove my point from my earlier post: everyone wants a morally grey character who is willing to commit atrocities in the name of protecting their family, and here we are with Sparrow Oak Garcia, who fits that bill to the letter, and yet he is villainized, portrayed as a horrible person and a horrible father, and more! And it's really frustrating cause I know if Lark had been the one to make these decisions it would be accepted under the guise of Lark just being "like that" as a character, or people would find it attractive because everyone agrees that Lark is morally grey in an acceptable, attractive way. Lark is nuanced, but Sparrow is nuanced too- but we know, we know that Sparrow loves his kids more than he loves himself, that he'd burn the world down for BOTH of them, and I think it's about time we stop sleeping on him as a character and stop portraying him as a villain in Hero and Normal's story when I truly believe Sparrow stands the biggest chance of all three of Hero's parental figures to reconcile with her and when he's expressed countless times that he wants to make things right with Normal if only Normal gave him the chance.