IW fr just felt like yokoyama's cope for killing Aoki off and then regretting it

im not saying yoko shouldve ryuji'd aoki but im just saying maybe the aoki-lives truthers were onto something if not copium but serving a warning for what was to come

incredibly messy essay of my thoughts on darkstalker, straight from my DMs with a friend because they demanded i post it [which means it has incredibly improper grammar]

hes an awful awful person, unapolagetically, and i think there are scenes and areas where he could've been written better. or had more nuance, like his dynamic with arctic [why do they hate each other ?? theres no explanation given, really, besides the fact that they do] but people who reduce him to a monster just baffle me. he loved his mother, he loved whiteout, he tried to love clearsight even though he did it wrong. and clearsight/darkstalker is a really iffy territory, because he did love her and he thought he was loving her right but he wasnt he was kind of controlling and bad! the earrings !! the earrings that kept her from seeing the bad futures !! but he also loved her, he did. their relationship was doomed from the start but he tried. she loved him back too, thats why it didnt work. thats why it hurt so much. he loved his mother too,, the few brief interactions they got in arc 2 hurt me to my core because fuck foeslayer loved him too, even though she realises he's done bad things. and whiteout!! whiteout!! she's one of the only characters we see darkstalker actually properly caring about in a way that doesnt really hurt them somehow. i think she loved him too,, she tried to warn him, she did :( ive thought about them a lot, maybe darkstalker trying to calm whiteout down at times, or them hiding with each other while arctic and foeslayer fought. arctic and foeslayer make me really ill too but this rant is getting long enough as it is. darkstalker lost a little of his pizzazz in arc two because of how domination focused he was and the writing went more focused on making him this evil, hateable villain [imo] than a relatable and understandable villain. which is the best kind of villain. i hate the peacemaker thing i hate it i hate it and that scene in book ten makes me cry every time because he was hurt by it he was so hurt by it. he didnt need a second chance, he needed to die, he needed to reconcile with himself and accept that there was no way he would ever save any of it. something like him coming to his senses, him realising everything he's done is awful and hurtful and he's not ever going to be able to fix it, but he can at least apologise even if the icewings dont accept his apology, not all of them, they'll understand they havent been hating a monster without feelings this whole time,, and maybe some of them can start to understand him and they can start to heal and they can stop hurting each other. but he needed to die and it needed to be on his own terms and i think foeslayer shouldve gotten her peace with that and i think if i were here i wouldve chosen to die too. the world is so different from what either of them knew and i would be tired of trying to change and i would be tired of trying to fix it and i think ending that legacy right there and right then with the two of them together wouldve been good. and maybe foeslayer can tell darkstalker she loves him - maybe she never had time when he was a kid - and maybe he can tell her too and they can leave that world together with the knowledge that they tried but they dont have to try anymore.

The conflicting feelings tara had after sam left would be very interesting to look deeper into, in my opinion, if my sibling left me w/ a very toxic alcoholic mother, no matter the reason, i dont think id forgive them as fast as tara did (that could just be that ive never had a great relationship w/ my sibling though, whereas tara did) but i feel like even if tara forgave her, there would still be lasting conflicting feelings about sam (which they did show in scream 6, but i feel like it could've been deeper than that), i feel like something like that is something you don't just get over, and it tends to end in resentment, cause why could you leave when i couldnt? Or why did you get to reconstruct your life piece by piece when i was stuck in a toxic home? Those tend to be the most common reactions to abandonment like that, and just knowing why sam left wouldnt remove all the years tara spent wondering what she couldve done, what wouldve made sam stay. I do quite like the path they took in 6, where they did kind of show the resentment/anger tara had for sam, but i wish there was more to it. They kind of passed it off as 'oh, taras drunk. Theres not much behind it' and dropped it for the rest of the movie when they could've done so much more. Like i said, if my sibling ever did what sam did, even after they came back into my life i would constantly have conflicting thoughts of 'i hate them' to 'i love them' and back and forth, and i hope they show atleast a bit more of taras abandonment issues if they make another movie, because i feel like it would be really interesting to get more stuff about her character and reactions.

I would like to add that this is partially based off how i would react to my sibling doing that, which in itself could make my perspective on this completely different cause ive got like 10 scenarios i can think of off the top of my head that would make me 100% biased about how i would react to stuff. But it is also based off some human behavior stuff i already knew

I think there's too many individual factors involved to generalise the situation. At the end of the day, there's so many people who wouldn't forgive their sibling in this situation, but there's so many who would.

Personally, I've never forgiven my brother for the nerve to be born in the first place.

I think this is all part of what makes Tara a much more fascinating character to take apart and reconstruct, because I know Sam, I can see why she does the things she does, I know her motivations, her fears, what makes her tick. We just don't have that information for Tara. Sam's story starts the moment she finds that diary, and we know what happens after that. But it feels like Tara's story starts the moment she is born, and we don't see any of it, any of the formative stuff. We only see the aftermath. By that I mean, what defines their characters and their personalities. It's really interesting actually, because obviously we don't actually see a young Sam either, and yet we've been given so much more context to who she is and why.

In 5, she's overwhelmed by her sister's return to her life - an event she thought would never happen. She never thought she would see her sister again. She clearly begins to work through her feelings about Sam returning between 5 and 6, however I don't read the way she reacts to Sam in 6 as actually being upset with Sam at all.

I think Tara has forgiven Sam. For everything. I think, as we see at the end of 6, she realises she would rather have her sister in her life than not, and to do so, she has to let go. Of her anger, of her fears, of her facade of a normal life.

She learns in 5 that Sam leaving was never her fault, that there was nothing she could have done to help her or change what happened. She learns that Sam left because she thought it was the only way to protect her, from herself. Tara forgives her for that. Sam clearly then makes up for lost time, and does so in a way that unfortunately Tara can't quite fully appreciate because it's conflicting with her trauma and her attempt to ignore the fact she died. Something she can't do because it's also what brings her sister back to her. Sam uproots her life once again and does so to make one with her sister, she's dedicated to her, she builds her new life around her. It's all an act of worship, and Tara knows that. She digs into it when she's drunk and arguing with Sam. But that argument isn't really about Sam and Tara's feelings about her. It's about Tara trying to pretend everything is fine, when she's not fine.