Who's gonna whine about the pregnancy arc yet again? That's right, it's meee!
Spoilers, as always
We're going in bullet points cuz with every rewatch I hate the pregnancy subplot more and more, buckle the fuck up:
It helps vilify Cissy for not liking Arthur and frame his later rejection of her as a kind of karma. She should be allowed to just ... not be into a guy, and it shouldn't be a sin for which she's essentially punished by the narrative! It really feels like the show's out here saying "lol she thought she was too good for a nice guy who liked her, now she's pregnant and needs him for convenience and he gets to dump HER stuck up ass!" Not cool, show, not cool!
It's got some uncomfortable race dynamics, at least for me as a Black American. That it's her brown lover who's the only one who has sex with her (one time, at that) AND gets her pregnant? Maybe this isn't a problem for Maori men in New Zealand, but where I live, Black American and Latino men's imagined hypersexuality (down to stereotypes about fertility and even dick sizes) are a racist cultural myth that helps fuel their dehumanization. In keeping with the 'white womanly purity' bullshit, it helps set up this image of the brown male predator who deflowers and impregnates chaste white women. I also don't like that it now makes Manaaki guilty of the same sin as his own shitty father, even if by accident! God I hate it.
The way Awa suddenly gets weirdly male-centric about it. Yes, it was Awa who suggested an abortion, but that was before Cissy told her the baby was Manaaki's. After that you'll notice it's all "My brother's son has a new father" or (after Cissy admits to being desperate enough to CONSIDER ATTEMPTING SUICIDE) "And kill my brother's son?" What the fuck! If there's any woman in this show who hasn't centered men, it's Awa, what's up with this? Yeah I get that a lot of women 'make exceptions' for the men closest to them and Manaaki is clearly Awa's exception, but this feels like a really weird extension of that and it rubs me the wrong way. It's giving enmeshed boy-mom behavior?
(How the fuck do you even figure the baby's gonna be a boy, Awa?! The fact that it turns out to be a boy later is by authorial fiat, it's not like you have foresight or something!)
Anyway! That's what I don't like about the pregnancy subplot. God I hope I can actually get people in this fandom to, like, debate me and point shit out to me that I'm getting wrong or smth.