Okay. Hear me out about this. I think Bro Strider is actually a overbearing helicopter parent rather than a neglectful one, while Mom Lalonde is the neglectful one.
I know a lot of ppl portray him of disappearing for long stretches of time but I wonder if he would've even allowed Dave to have that level of alone time and privacy at all. All of his work and stuff he does for cash is on his computer can be done from that apartment he doesn't really have to go out at all.
And someone who constantly checks in on you, stares at you, looks at what you're doing etc. That would invoke a feeling of needing to keep up appearances at all times and not knowing how to actually relax at all since your nervous system is set to expect that he'll show up all the time and does. And it's to the point that you can see that Bro Strider predicted every single fuck up Dave made trying to get into the medium and prepared for a contingency for it. Getting a second copy of the game, cutting the meteor for more time, saving him from his fall from the tower, using Lil Cal to keep an extra eye on him at all times.
He wasn't the inebriated deadbeat weirdo, he's the hyper strict, suffocating helicopter one When we usually think of these kind of parents, abstinence and religion tends to be one of the core reasons for how strict they are. But Bro isn't like that. His strictness comes from trying to prep for the end of the world, which has nothing to do with sex and violence in his head. So why would he care? There's more important things that need to be drilled into this boy so he'll live
by contrast, we know Roxy can literally hop into the void and allow herself to fade into the background and out of your life if she so chooses. Mom Lalonde definitely left Rose to her own devices while she was either away or passed out from drinking, then her guilt gifts later fell on deaf ears bc Rose can't be bought like that
I think you can also get the gist of how each type of abuse was based on how Dave and Rose process their childhoods and their initial reactions to it as they start to put pieces together.
Dave falls into an anger and hatred for his brother and breaks out to do anything and everything he can think of while he's finally not being monitored. All the while brewing deep in his guts how pissed he is about what he went through.
Rose, on the other hand, knows her mother loved her and goes through a phase of feeling like she was the worst daughter in the world when in reality, her lashing out was a direct result of the neglect she was facing. Rose knows her mom loves her and did her best but she needs to, now, let go of the 'but she tried' mentality and get to 'she let me down,'
