Forthsyth County, Georgia having a history of being a sundowns town makes Sybil's backstory all the more horrifying
In her own flashbacks, she first demonstrates a willingness to turn the other cheek to others' suffering when she benefits from it, especially when it's not overt like with the revolt. She has a place in the upper class, so she defends their safety over allowing the revolution to take place because people will die as a direct result of war. But when the lower classes faced what was likely centuries of political and economic suppression, she doesn't see that as harm
Then she moves to America. She marries a man who is literally worse Robert E. Lee because of the social power it affords her. She doesn't mind the thousands of Black lives she directly endangered by enabling a man like that. The only time she stops him is when her first daughter's vision shows him taking power, taking lives, away from the white spheres she cares about.
And in the modern day? She uses a Black man to produce another daughter that she can manipulate into giving up her power. She sees her daughter--a young Black girl, so intelligent and compassionate and in love with the world, a girl who wants to take care of animals and loves nature and wants magic to be real so she can finally feel special--and fears losing control so she tries for another daughter. And for once? She fails. She has a son and she ignores him when she needs to make sure Kaneeka feels the weight of the responsibility of others' lives when it's not her job to. She coddles him when she needs Kaneeka desperate for connection. She gives him too much freedom because she doesn't truly value his safety.
And Kaneeka, encouraged by her dad, leaves. She goes to college, she finally gets out of Scarlet Hollow. And to make sure she can still control Kaneeka, she kills her husband. Directly harms someone to keep control of a Black woman, after centuries of ignoring Black suffering, or outright enabling it
She views herself as this savior but she's not omniscient and she doesn't value all lives equally. She is biased, and while her actions are rarely blatant violence, she has a hierarchy of suffering that she magically enforces. She will insert herself into events at a massive scale because of a narrow understanding of the repercussions.
Sybil Forsyth is the quintessential white woman, she smothers certain groups to maintain her own sense of the world and she is willing to use Black bodies to do it. Even if she doesn't have any conscious biases against Black people, her past and her current actions show how implicitly racist her viewpoint is. She made sure that a Black woman felt that her life was meaningless unless she gave up her entire existence for a cause that wouldn't have helped her much, if at all, had she no connection to Sybil
Scarlet Hollow as a game has never been afraid of commenting on the South and America's racist past and present, and I am so excited to see that commentary shift from the background to the main narrative!
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