one thing about surge and kit, something that i think is really important to understand them, is that surge is over seven times as brainwashed as kit is. this is probably because starline's inexperienced blunt-sledgehammer-esque mind control worked okay for âyou live for this person nowâ, and not as well for âyou hate this guy for no reasonâ.
kit also has actual real-life reinforcement of his commands. even with the partial memory wipes, his only memories are of being with surge and starline. kit can reason around his brainwashing, and he can justify his attachment to surge that way. they were both abused together, both victims. against the unreliability of their memories or reality, surge is always there.
but surge has no real reason to hate sonic. even after she learns she's been mind-controlled (and keeps those memories for once), her strongest logical condemnation of sonic is âwhy does batman not simply execute the joker, huh, fucker???â. the rest of it is all wrapped up in her mind control: that her entire existence is against sonic, that she can't rest without him gone, that she'll be endlessly psychically tormented unless she kills the guy.
surge is so aware that her obsession with sonic is artificial. but it's not like knowing that helps her! she can't turn it off; she can't decide not to be herself. she's constantly hallucinating starline telling her he made her, he owns her, that she can never get away from him because she's his. she isn't anything else outside that. she has no past self she can return to, or even learn about. even if she could bring that self back, âsheâ would die. (self-note: a bit like su in flower that bloomed nowhere)
and all of her experiences just reinforce that people want to use her and hurt her. that she can never feel safe anywhere. she knows kit's devotion to her was artificially induced, and i think it's likely that she'd underestimate how much real sentiment is there â but this also means he's one person who can't hurt her. she can't let herself really think about that, or face it, but
and kit also feels like everyone's trying to use them, but he's also the one that had being used brainwashed into him. he has more flexibility of thought around this though, because again, he's almost an order of magnitude less mind-controlled than surge. he can remap it onto sonic â âsurge can't use me, but sonic still canâ â which is obviously unhealthy, but shows he can still function if he's going against his programmed commands. he can also reason around them even with surge there, building a coherent idea and something he actually feels strongly about around this artificial core, and rejecting both the use he and surge were made for and anyone else's claims over them, too
and because surge is so much more constrained by her commands, and has so much more starline-trauma because of that...i'm sure he can defend his internal feelings that surge needs him, because she really does need him! they're all the other has!!
