So I reached the episode of the rewatch in which I took far too many screenshots of my fav bitchy fairy princess, and it unfortunately reminded me of something I read the other day.
Excuse me, I’mma grump about Sky again:
Did you all know there is at least one person on Tumblr who thinks Sky did nothing wrong, not because “Bloom and Sky weren’t technically dating and he and Brandon swapped identities for security reasons”, which I could accept as an excuse if I was being kind.
No, this jerka$$ thinks that “it doesn’t count as cheating because Sky didn’t love Diaspro.”
It doesn’t matter if Sky didn’t love Diaspro, he was in a relationship agreement, it was understood between them that they would be married for the good of their Kingdoms.
And before anyone tries using that as an angle for why Sky ‘had to cheat’, please don’t.
The facts of the matter are these:
The Swap:
Sky’s fiancé was allowed in his vicinity, in which it would be expected they would interact publicly, but acts in a way that indicates she was not told about the identity swap
King Erendor doesn’t try to make excuses, he publicly acknowledges Brandon as Sky’s squire with little to no regard for any identity swap
Absolutely nothing was done to disguise either boy, one of whom would be a famous political figure on their home world, the other who has (according to season 2) been captured by the very man they are supposed to be fooling.
Again, according to the season 2 explanation, because season one either hand waves, or gives ‘I just wanted to know what normal was’ as an excuse depending on your dub.
The Arranged Marriage:
Sky makes no effort to tell Bloom he is in an arranged marriage, thereby robbing her of the right to make a fully informed choice about her relationship with him.
Sky and Bloom’s exact relationship does depend on how firm your shipping goggles are on, and which dub you’re watching, but Bloom’s behaviour in response to the revelation indicates she believed there was some romantic component to it.
Sky was able to break off his engagement shortly after the ‘big reveal’, which resulted in Diaspro feeling like a jilted lover, indicating it was Sky who broke it off, not Diaspro or her family.
This means Sky likely could have broken it off at any point if he’d tried or given it any effort.
Sky and Bloom entered a romantic relationship shortly after. Very. Shortly. After.
Diaspro had no idea who Bloom was, and was completely put out by the revelation that Sky was into someone else, meaning he made no effort to talk to Diaspro about seeing other people, or whether they would break up if Sky feel in love with someone, given the affections between Sky and Diaspro were apparently one-sided.
Conclusion:
Whether or not Sky was in love with his arranged partner, he had obligations to her and to any potential partners he might have had, and he deliberately chose to ignore all of them.
The season 2 explanation for the swap ignore the fact that no one else seemed to know the boys had done it, and the fact that all they did was swap names, and is likely completely bogus.
I’m also left with the conclusion, after giving it a few minutes thought, that people who think Sky didn’t do anything wrong or claim “it’s not cheating because Sky didn’t love the girl he was in an acknowledged relationship with” defend him because they recognise their own behaviour in him, and defend Sky as an act of denial about their own shitty behaviour.
Even if, by the most technical definition, Sky didn’t cheat, what he did was still shitty behaviour.
