expanded thoughts on arc 2 (insinuation) + interlude 2 (victoria dallon)
it seems like things are starting to get into motion now! we had a little bit more ups and downs, emotionally speaking, than the last arc as well. taylor and her dad make me sooo so sad. he clearly just wants her to be happy and safe and worries about her so much. and thats the exact reason that taylor feels like she cant tell him about whats really going on in her life. horrible!!!!!!!!! its okay taylor i also tell my dad absolutely fuck all nothing about my personal life even though we love each other 🤞. although, i get the impression that for most people, coming upon your powers isnt exactly a subtle experience, so im wondering how hes really still in the dark about it??
honestly taylor generally made me sad this whole arc. i really just feel so bad for her. cancel the rest of the story and just let her and her new friends peacefully hang out for eternity. i wonder what the actual turning point was for emma, and why she decided to start bullying taylor. id be interested if it was elaborated on at some point later, but i wouldnt be surprised if it was just left as an unexplained 'teenage girls are cruel' bit.
im sure that taylors time with the undersiders wont be sunshine and rainbows forever (it literally couldnt even be sunshine and rainbows for one whole chapter lmfao) but for now i think her budding friendship with them is really really sweet. even though i learned that tattletales power isnt quite exactly psychic mind reading nonsense, ill still be really surprised if taylor actually manages to get away with her undercover cop schtick for any meaningful length of time without being discovered. my feelings about bitch/rachel/hellhound are pretty conflicted. on one hand, im basically the exact target audience for 'rude butch woman with dog powers', but on the other hand im currently so taylorpilled that i just cant bring myself to like her yet. it feels like someone went and beat up my weird pathetic little sister 😭. though i guess obviously we, the reader, are not supposed to like her yet lol.
i thought the interlude was really well done. like i said in my bullet points post, i genuinely dont care if victoria spends every next second shes on screen exploding newborn infants, thats my twin and im simply letting it slide 🙂↕️. and relatedly, i legally cannot share my thoughts and feelings on the other character that gets introduced. i had a discussion with someone about this in my replies, but aside from my inherent bias towards victoria, i really couldnt take the police brutality thing seriously since she was doing it to a nazi lol. but i do understand that was kind of the whole point, to show the way people abuse their power within the system without making the character immediately unsympathetic. also using an interlude to introduce that idea was pretty clever, considering (again, as i was talking about in my previous replies) you really couldnt get that perspective from taylors pov currently. not only is she incredibly new to the scene, but she also seemingly has too much literal hero worship to see them as anything but entirely morally good. im interested to see how long it takes for that to change now that shes getting in with the undersiders. how she will reconcile 'villains = bad people who do bad things' with 'nice people who are friendly and kind to me'. im not sure if, currently, she really understands how big the grey area really is.