Anybody else weirded out by that reoccurring plot point in Debt or Alive where the Fiona repeatedly obsesses over how cute a kid is and about how they're so cute that it changes her negative views on motherhood, and that there's multiple scenes where she seems to lose all her intelligence because of her being obsessed with how "adorable" this kid is? Cause that happens multiple times in the book and I found it strange.
Like this happens multiple times in the book
"I don't generally find kids very cute. They're like adults who can't talk to you about books, which is fine, but I've never seen a kid and had an emotion stronger than 'I hope it doesn't wipe it's hands on me.'
Until I saw this first kid.—page 35
"For the first time in my life I found myself opening my arms to a child not old enough to know any good curse words." —Page 173
Same kid again. Fiona goes on about how cute the kid is and then cuddles him because he's sad before Sasha informs her that she, a trained con artist with years of experience, is being fooled by a fake crying act from a ten year old and pickpocketed.
"'You're being robbed' Sasha said.
And that's when I felt it.
A little tug, too subtle for most to notice. If I hadn't spent a lifetime thieving and lying and running away, I wouldn't have felt a thing other than the adorable child's tears and my own quickly shifting opinions in motherhood." —page 174
So again, specifically stating that Fiona does not like children and didn't want any until a kid cute enough appeared. Even if it was unintentional it's still weird, and these aren't the only times this happens in the book, it happens again and again and again. Hell there's a scene where Fiona and Sasha get held hostage by these two children
"Pick gestured at us to follow her, and apparently I was in the right frame of mind to obey a nine-year-old girl unthinkingly" —page 246
and yet another where they get betrayed by one of those children who again Fiona trusted because he was "soooo cute".
"Something about the wink seemed off, but I figured it was just winks being overall compatible with Face's whole brand as an adorable child." — page 261
"We turned around to see Face standing between the two secbots, pointing at us and wiping tears from his rosy, traitorous cheeks." — page 268
And let me be clear I have ZERO issue with a female character wanting children or changing their mind about not having kids, but it does come across as weird, at least to me, when they go out of their way to state repeatedly that this female character does not like children, does not want children, and that this has suddenly changed because they found a kid cute enough, or making her completely obsessed with them whenever they're in a scene. They could've just said that Fiona had a soft spot for kids because she raised Sasha when they were young and they reminded her of her or something.
Idk it just seems strange that they chose to write the two female leads as literally incompetent half the time, one of them obsessed with how cute a kid is, and that the book seems to act like these aren't intelligent women.
Sasha spends half the book acting like a teenager and Fiona like an overbearing mother, then the other half they're getting outwitted and almost robbed/killed by pre-pubescent children. It just seems like they are very rarely written as competent outside of plot device moments. In Tales they didn't always make the best decisions and they were dorks but they weren't stupid.
I probably shouldn't have expected any different given that I've seen people critique how he writes women before but still.
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