Out of curiosity, do you like how Bollers wrote Max, or do you think he should've written him more like Penders, except ofc without the narrative excusing him? I kind of wish they'd kept it consistent, but on the other hand I feel like that would've set a precedent for Penders to do whatever the hell he wanted and Bollers would just have to run with it.
I vastly prefer Bollers Max. I do think interesting things could be done with writing Max as a bad person--as I’ve said before, I don’t really care for the concept of monarchies, and having Sally and Sonic rebel against his wishes could be great. But Penders just did the exact same thing with Max that he had already done with Locke. He made him a manipulative monster, then went “But! He had good intentions!” and his kid instantly forgives everything. He wants to write morally gray dads who fuck up out of a desire to protect their kids, but instead he just writes bad dads
With them being so different, I can honestly just write off all the Penders stories about Max as being some poorly written nonsense that has no baring on how the other writers handled the character. If they were written similarly, Bollers could have done everything in his power to try and hold Max accountable for his actions, but Penders would’ve ignored it and said that Sally forgave him and that his actions were justified. There was no point in playing nice with Penders. He never listened to the other writers, and he always made sure he had the final say
Plus, like. Bollers wrote Max way closer to the SatAM King Acorn he was supposed to be based on, who was just a nice dude
