The Knight and Her Emperor - Ch. 172
- Thread starter MangaDex
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I hate that this chapter ended!
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I'm not sorry but Pauline is a terrible mother. Illigetimate child or not, that is still your kid. Psychologically, her brain chemistry should have switched.
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That's absolutely fucking not how it works.
You're straight up throwing away all of her trauma and mental problem because of her childhood "just because she's a mother now"
You're literally missing the entire points of the last chapters as she struggle to understand herself and what she's supposed to do with the entire situation.
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but she's not denying the kid's hers, and she's spent the last dozen chapters thinking about how to ensure his wellbeing alongside her own autonomy. how do you manage to have a more stone-age take on this situation than the comic characters who live in a literal medieval-style patriarchal feudal empire?
that's not how oxytocin works, btw. same stuff gets released when you pet your dog. do we "switch" our brain chemistry every time there's a puppy around?
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you're conflating psychology with neuroendocrionology. you might not be sorry, but my friend you are factually wrong.
beyond me getting pedantic about your semantics, let's not play the biological essentialist game because it's a losing one. our behaviors and decisions are determined by far more than "brain chemistry," and we're discussing fictional characters here, so let's not continue down that path. from this and your previous comments, it sounds like you're frustrated with pauline's actions right now, and i cant really blame you. she's not a loving mother - but that's the point of this current arc. i genuinely encourage you to look beyond the idea of how a mother "should" act. instead, consider what you would do if you were put in a situation you didn't want to be in, never wanted, and one might drastically alter your life (possibly for the worse) like Pauline. i think that's what the author is challenging us to try and do here.
building off of this to my own comment i originally wanted to make, i'm really fascinated and excited to see where this goes. if pauline had accepted her child with open arms, i dont think that would fit with her character or the ideal the author's built up to this point. of course, this is a romance story and i'm a sucker for romance so i'm hoping things work out in the end - but i'm relieved the author decided to seriously interrogate what a romantic ending between pauline and the emperor would actually mean in the context of the struggles and challenges she's faced up to this point.
ive read dozens and dozens (probably well over a hundred at this point) romance-focused otome-adjacent stories by this point. even in my favorite ones, none have ever directly addressed the consequences of struggling to survive and be true to yourself in a patriarchal society quite like this one has. many have included allusions to discrimination sure - but none have actually portrayed the constant tug-of-war, confusion, and frustration of trying to navigate how we're perceived/treated by others alongside our search for personal fulfillment in life. let alone what we would do if all of that was threatened by a life-changing event like this!!!
i have a lot more thoughts about this that i hope to crystalize more in the future, but i'll stop here. this wall of text is already enough -- but i guess that's what happens after MD re-enables comments after ages and i've lets this all build up in my head. i'm really looking forward to seeing where this arc leads. even if i'm dissatisfied by how it ends, i'll always appreciate this story for the important, difficult issues it's trying to tackle.
(edited because MD didn't like my original formatting)
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