Can we stop talking about cannon c!Phil being a terrible father using the context of sbi family?
Like yes, with that context his actions are riddled with favoritism and neglect, but Wilbur is/was his only canonical son. The cannon here(or at least my understanding of it) is that Philza, a semi-immortal/never aging being spent his entire life watching the people he loved die in front of him without being able to stop it. Phil took a chance having a son, he knew he would outlive Wilbur but he still took the chance to be happy only for it to end in a harsh reminder that he shouldn’t get attached to things that won’t stick around. He kept in contact with Wilbur through letters before everything went down but as Wilbur spiraled and stopped sending letters, Phil eventually got worried and started heading to the SMP. When he got there he found a country in shambles and his own son corrupted by madness and begging to be killed. And yes, maybe killing Wilbur wasn’t the best course of action here but what immidiate course of action could he have taken here, accounting for the fact that as an immortal, he had already known Wilbur would most likely die long before him, only not expecting to have to be the one to cause it.
After Wilbur died, Phil saw L’Manburg in ruin. It had to have been something he’d seen thousands of times before and he could have just left and not given it a second thought, but he stayed because it was something Wilbur cared about. He tried to see what his son had put his life into only to never get it back, and he watched it only corrupt further. Then he saw the same people go after Technoblade, an old friend of his, which was the last thing Phil could put up with. L’Manburg had moved so far from what Wilbur had loved and Phil blamed the country and its corruptness to Wilbur’s downfall. Siding with technoblade, a person known for not dying, he took an open hostility to the government and system that he believed to have made him kill his own son.
Phil learned over his years not to love things, when he finally tried to love again and had a son, he was given a painful reminder of why he had learned in the first place. Phil can’t/doesn’t let himself love or care greatly for the people around him because it will more likely than not only end in grief for him. Phil had probably never even met Tommy more than briefly before he holed up in Techno’s basement after leaving Logsted, most likely only knowing about him from Wilbur’s letters and anything Techno had said about him before. Any actions Phil has taken that (directly or indirectly) end in bad things for Tommy shouldn’t be used to argue him as a bad father because Phil legitimately barely knows him.
C!Philza is really a good character and all the ‘haha shit dad’ posts are just people completely disregarding that SBI family isn’t cannon, analyzing his actions within the story as if it is. I do enjoy these posts and find them funny to an extent but I’m tired of looking in the comments of these types of posts just to see people talking about how horrible of a dad Phil is to Tommy and was to Wilbur. None of this is to say that c!Phil is a great dad, or even a good dad. He did kill Wilbur, good course of action or not, and how he deals with Ghostbur isn’t exemplary either. Keep in mind though, that he is functionally immortal and has lived for a very long time. I wouldn’t think its a stretch to assume that his character doesn’t have an amazing grasp on how to love or care for people properly. Tommy and Techno are not his children, Techno is an adult and a friend, and Phil barely even knows Tommy.
Can we stop analyzing his character’s canonical actions in the context of SBI family and instead acknowledge how interesting of a character c!Phil is??? C!Phil is a bad dad? Yeah! Let’s talk about how his immortality has potentially degraded his knowledge/ability for love and human connection, how there are things about his mortal son that he could never have understood and how as a result of these factors among other things c!Wilbur ended up the way he did! Talk about c!Phil as he actually is in cannon because there is so much there to look at if you wanted to analyze him as a character!! I’m tired of seeing the ‘Phil is a bad dad because he went to live with Techno and blew up L’Manburg leaving Tommy to fend for himself’ arguments when they don’t hold up in cannon. Let’s talk about the interesting stuff.
TLDR: c!Phil had one son that he knew he would outlive and ended up having to kill him himself, he took that chance with Wilbur and he paid for it. He took another chance with L’Manburg and Techno almost paid for it. He joined techno in wanting to destroy L’Manburg as he credited his recent grievances to the country. Phil is not by any means an amazing dad, but his being immortal adds a lot of interesting ideas to his character’s thoughts and actions. Can we stop reducing cannon c!Phil to a shitty dad when your main evidence for it is based on a head cannon, if you want to argue that he is a bad father then use the actual cool and interesting stuff you can take from cannon!
I do really like SBI family dynamic stuff as well, so I can appreciate jokes and hcs and all with it in dsmp, but pls try to use canonical evidence when having discussions about canonical stuff I am tired, feel free to add any thoughts you want
