@punching-unicorns Hmm! I continue to debate how much of her maintaining her deal with Ray was strictly for pragmatic reasons and how much was due to wanting to keep him close out of some painfully complicated mess of emotions that was constantly oscillating between a tainted affection and spiteful hatred. Any time she would find herself falling into the former, forgetting the circumstances of their relationship, him being the living, breathing reminder of one of the worst things HQ forced her to endure would resurface and how they chose to put him in her plant as if to silently mock her and unknowingly rub in how pitiful the life of a Mom would always be under this system. To openly love him would be one step further in giving in than sheād already done by accepting the Mom position and loving all the other cattle children she raised for slaughter, and she hated to give that much more of herself than she already had when she wasnāt aware of his origins. So she would dutifully do what was tasked of her, but on her terms, as petty as they were.
And once Ray was gone hopefully she could finally put these turbulent feelings to rest.
Deep down, she probably knew the significance of this would largely go unrealized by those she intended to get back at, and yet when one is forced to live such a routine, mundane life under the thumb of such a system, knowing there are humans out there who live lives freely without having to make any similar sacrifices, it eats at a person. So she took it out on the only other person in the house who had an inkling of the true hell they lived in. Never directly in the form of physical abuse or boorish spoken threats because the former would be counterproductive and the latter lacked the perceived elegance sheād cultivated about herself, but in the form of emotional neglect by withholding affection and regularly keeping him off-kilter with the choice of words she did use. Not constantly, because him being perpetually fearful would render his services useless, but enough to keep him on his toes while still lulling him into some semblance of security to explain his confidence in his exchange with Norman when itās revealed heās the traitor.
And then in a case of bitter irony, Rayās retaliatory act of spite was threefold in its pettiness:
to Emma he verbally confirms he intends to deprive the demons of the feast they waited twelve years for
to Isabella the caretaker who sacrificed her charges so that she could live, he silently denies the means of prolonging her pitiful life
to Isabella his mother he proves that heās better than her, that he isnāt afraid to die because dying as a human is better than whatever pathetic existence she had carved out for herself, ideally forcing her to look at him one last time with the same look of terror she had on her face the day she realized their biological connection
These are what I think heād focus on in his moments of anger over the years, though heād still primarily be guided by a selfless love for Emma and Norman. Itās a misplaced, manic bravado heād whipped himself into that night, thinking his death would be āthe best wayā to both ensure the survival of his last most precious person in the world and atone for all the siblings he did nothing to save, but this is the headspace heās in after a lifetime under such an oppressive existence.
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