tell me the gospel of Casscaine
i think the core appeal of casscaine as a ship is that these are both characters who are driven by fury and deep intractable grievances against a kingdom that screwed them over, and while the narrative does invite us to sympathize with cassandra’s anger her story also ends in her groveling for forgiveness from the very people who hurt her in the first place. meanwhile of course caine doesn’t even have the fig leaf of a personal issue with rapunzel to disguise the fact that her problem is corona’s fucked up monarchy, so she doesn’t even get the benefit of a sympathetic narrative and in fact after establishing her as this sort of character in BEA, TTS walks it back in her subsequent appearances by turning her into a generic antagonistic thief driven by grift and greed. they are in short two characters who are right, stuck in a narrative that is incapable of treating them that way.
take them outside of the context of a disney princess show controlled by disney’s conservative executives with a mandated pro-monarchy and pro-status quo stance, there is. so much. you can do with that, and they have so much common ground to work with.
both of them orphans, in such a symmetrical way - cassandra watched her own mother abandon her for rapunzel, and caine watched soldiers drag her father away in a cage in rapunzel’s name. both of them grew up carrying these hideous traumas in a kingdom that didn’t care about them. did caine have a mother, or other relatives who took care of her after her father was stolen from her? did she grow up in an orphanage? was she fending for herself from a young age? we don’t know, but we do know the wound of her father’s loss never healed—and cass, of course, had a father who loved her but was not equipped to care for her, and his emotional distance and the martial relationship he cultivated with her damaged her just as much if not more than gothel’s abuse did. i don’t think either of them ever had a shot at climbing out of these holes without transgressing against corona itself - & caine of course embraced that without hesitation while cass kept holding on and trying and trying until she had literally nothing left to give and she snapped.
and im just like obsessed with the idea of that anger bringing them together but then healing being what makes it stick. there’s just something so very appealing about - not just someone who can hear you and who gets it when you scream rage and anguish into the night and then, also, helping you find your way out of that darkness - bc as good as it feels to scream and be heard you also can’t just marinate in anger and violence! it’s not good for you! and having someone who’s right there with you to hang onto while you’re both going through it and struggling towards freedom & peace! hoo boy!!
its also extremely appealing to me that they are both commoners of no special importance socially speaking. gjksdlf anyone who’s been following me for any length of time knows i don’t like royal!cass AUs or just AUs where cass has any kind of status in that vein, and that same taste extends to romance and shipping lmao. esp in bitter snow where cass is literally just the child of some impoverished farmers and caine was just a poor kid from a poor family barely scraping by!! it hits, it hits
i will probably never write a canon compliant tts fic but if i did it would be post-s3 casscaine jskdkjf
