Yk I realised one of saddest thing. Like people often hc that if Reese and Dougals were more present in Andy and Leyley's life things would be normal. But they both themselves just run away from their families. They were young and then they got to support two children in the hard economy, of they were gonna neglectful. I also think it highlights the point the young couples who often thing if they just run away with from their trama and start new life- everything be fine. But it's not a child cannot act like parents.
I’m going to answer these two asks together because they are very related.
I think what episode 3 has really served to hammer in is commentary on the cycle of abuse across the Graves family. We are shown Douglas’s parents in the opening sequence of the episode, and we finally get to hear about Renee’s family life (at least, slight mentions of her mother and sister) because like how the abuse between just Andrew and Ashley motivates each of them to keep the cycle going against each other on a somewhat self-contained level (at least whilst they’re just by themselves) a lot of their parents behaviour can be explained by their early home lives, and a lot of their behaviour can be explained by how Renee and Douglas treated them.
Douglas inherited many meek behaviours from his mother because his father is a physically and verbally abusive misogynistic prick. It’s clear enough from how Douglas actually respects Renee that he hasn’t internalised his father’s mindset, but he has certainly internalised things from growing up under him anyway. He’s like his mother in that he has learnt how to not set off his father by necessity. He doesn’t know how to stand up to himself because you just often can’t stand up to people like his father. And so when he becomes a parent himself, he’s apathetic, and he’s distant. He’s still very young himself, like you say, so he’s not emotionally equipped to actually support Andrew or Ashley, and given that he’s still recovering from being under his father’s oppressive thumb, of course it makes sense that his strategy is to just not enforce anything on his kids.
And then Renee… We know less directly about her homelife, so she’s slightly harder to analyse, but we also know MUCH more about her character. Interesting points to note are that she’s internalised a rule against physical violence – quite possibly due to Douglas’s parents given her total disdain for them, but this could also possibly be indicative of what her parents were like – and that her view on siblings is… skewed. We know that Renee felt that her sister’s presence was oppressive. We know that she tells Andrew that feeling like your sibling is everywhere and taking over your life is normal, and whilst she could just be trying to placate him, because that is most certainly her overall intention in the scene where she tells him that, I do think it likely comes from something of a genuine place, given how utterly vindictive she is about her sister’s death, and also how upset she gets after her mother only calls her to ask for help with her sister. So Renee won’t discipline with violence, but she will yell and scream and pass on responsibility, because in her mind, if siblings are that are oppressive, they might as well do something for it, right? And because she has very, very likely taken on a lot of her mother’s behaviours in a similar way to how Andrew has taken on a lot of hers.
It’s a genuine question that can still be asked why exactly Renee had Ashley. We know Andrew was an accident, and we know that he was an easy child despite Renee having gotten pregnant so young, but it’s certainly worth noting that Ashley was also a teen pregnancy, and that given Renee’s view on siblings, there is certainly something to look at here. Yes, we’re told by Renee herself that she had Ashley basically just because Andrew was easy, but if you start to think about it, why did she need a second child at all? Just the one was enough reason to never go back home, and Andrew was being at least partially raised by Douglas’s parents, who she hates anyway. We know she later views Ashley as a mistake, but what exactly were her intentions here? She was never going to be a great parent to Andrew, even if it had stayed only him, because she had already internalised a lot of the wrong behaviours, and Douglas is just so apathetic to anyone who isn’t Renee.
If I’m to speculate, the obvious throughline is regarding Renee’s own sister. We know that Renee is an older sister, and one possible interpretation of why she hangs up the phone when she does in the vision where her mother calls her is because she maybe does have complicated feelings on just letting her sister die. (Another possible interpretation, and perhaps the more obvious one, I should say, is that she’s just upset in general and has had enough of her mother so clearly using the same manipulation tactics that she uses on her kids on her) We know Renee’s angry at her mother for kicking her out and for not supporting her. But what role did Connie (her younger sister) have in that? Because she can’t have been a direct force, but she certainly could have been a compounding one, to Renee. We don’t know enough about her to say exactly, I suppose. I think in general though, a decent reading of this scene, and Renee’s broader story in general, is that she had Ashley, the second kid, because she’s acting at least partially out of spite to create the sort of “happy family” she felt she never had.
Or at least, the image of the happy family. Renee keeps Andrew despite everyone telling her not to, because suddenly it gives her reason to live with the one person she actually loves, and because when she’s met with an ultimatum by her mother, she decides she’d much rather do the harder thing of literally raising a child than stay there. It wasn’t her choice that she was kicked out — her mother is wrong about that – but it was hers to keep the child even after she left. So then Andrew is an easy child, and despite her and Douglas still being children themselves, maybe it does seem easy. Like, really easy to prove her mother entirely wrong, and show that she could raise a nice little happy family. So she has Ashley two years later as well, because maybe she feels the tiniest bit of lingering regret about Connie, but mostly, I suspect, she’s just sticking it to her mother. “Look, I have two kids now, and we’re all much happier than you’ll ever be!”
This goes wrong, terribly wrong, because Renee and Douglas’s motives for having these children are clearly not fair on the children themselves and don’t seem to actually have much interest in doing the hard work that comes with raising a child. To some extent, this is not their fault. They were children themselves at the time, and we can clearly see patterns of the cycle of the abuse appearing in them. But they made the decision to have Andrew and Ashley anyway. The thing is, to Renee, I suspect, it doesn’t matter that much. Siblings are oppressive, so leaving Ashley with Andrew is just normal, and as long as she looks like a good mother from the outside, especially to her family, I’m just not sure she cares.
You raise an interesting point about the gender of the kids, but I should say that I actually think it might matter considerably less to Renee that is being assumed here, because I think her ideal completed family is moreso built upon her own family’s structure, as opposed to societal norms. She is the older sister, and so she is the parallel to Andrew. If her first child had been a girl, I think perhaps she might have seen the parallels to herself more, but I also think that would have just been more likely to have to have the second kid – the Connie to her Renee, to really build up the image of the perfect happy family. And if her second child had been a boy? I still think she would have stuck Andrew on him to raise him, had he been as difficult as our Ashley, but I think this would be much more likely to potentially impact the Andrew and Ashley relationship (or, uh, Andrew and hypothetical second male child who for the sake of argument is exactly like Ashley) than it would be to impact Renee’s relationship with her kids. I think the scenario in which she would maybe have a third kid is one where Ashley was just as easy if a child to raise as Andrew, but even in that case, if Renee was just trying to mirror her own family’s structure, I suspect she would have stopped at just two kids anyway. (Unless, of course, she has more siblings that we don’t know about)
This is all mostly to say the firstly, I’m not certain there is any recognisably similar scenario where Andrew and Ashley are still born under the same circumstances but Renee and Douglas aren’t neglectful, but also, of course they would not be equipped to raise children at such a young age. The game tells us this through Douglas’s mother, who basically says as much to Renee, even if she’s not so direct about it because of her learned behaviours from being around her husband.
Douglas and Renee couldn’t just run away from their trauma in the most literal way possible, because they had to leave Andrew and Ashley at “the wife-beater’s” house anyway, at the heart of Douglas’s trauma, and with the people Renee had been planning to murder only months before. She has no good options once she’d had the child, no, and if she really wanted to have it, then that was her prerogative, but just because of her situation, it was never going to go well. Andrew was never going to have a good life under his parents, let alone Ashley.
