Strong Female Protagonist (No Relation to Hark! A Vagrant!)

The next page came out. Looks like the dad is dead, and Patrick doesn't seem to be terribly bothered... Pat, I'm disappointed in you. His mom of course is acting so matter-of-factly; in fact, she seriously seems to think by her carrying out that murder, her son will honestly honor his deal and not be even more disgusted in her behavior.

She is waaaay out of the ordinary in terms of human behavior and understanding.

edited 17th Apr '18 7:37:06 AM by SgtRicko

Indeed. Although the haggardness of Patrick makes me think he's numb as much as anything else. I do feel like his villain turn (and to a large degree, his general emotional inaccessibility) is due to him copying his mother's lack of human emotion. So much easier to do things when you don't care about others. Of course, this also kind of makes me wonder if this scene was what drove him to give up villainy, realizing the futility of it all.

Shoving all his emotions and pain down into jars where he doesn't have to look at them is how the whole mind-city started.

Courtesy link.

Also, any guesses regarding what his mother wanted him to see?

My assumption is that he'll find that she believes she's done all of these things to protect him.

Of course, a good theory is that she's from an earlier phase of biodynamics and she's giving him the secret information about the secret cabal killing them off.

Or maybe she had some role in creating him.

Update. See, she was just misunderstood this whole time. "You totally should have let me murder you as a child, then everything would have been fine. Why are you so selfish?" As for Patrick's alternative, I almost think that he's going to use her brain as a model for his own, but that doesn't make sense because the entire thing with Lord Boy is that he created the city as a child.

Hm. She's a literal sociopath, as well as a murderer. Interesting. She also has some pretty good points, at least the ones not related to killing her child.

I was thinking the opposite. He's going to induce emotions in her mind.

He has stated in-universe that he cant project thoughts or emotions.

He needs her alive because that was the whole point of having her kill his dad—he needs her to take the blame. She figured this out, so she went along with it.

Huh. So maybe this is why Patrick claims to not be able to mentally influence people? Presumably, it ended badly with this case.

So Patrick was technically telling the truth to Allison back then - he really thought that he couldn't control others psychically. But in reality he can - he chose to forget due to the trauma of what's coming next.

Still disappointed about the dad's death. Perhaps he truly was a coward and terrified of his own son, but he was far from the monster that Patrick's mother was.

Oh shit, I got it right. Huh. That's going to backfire somehow, isn't it?

edited 24th Apr '18 5:44:43 AM by TheLovecraftian

Well, geez. He could have thought of that before he convinced her to kill someone.

edited 26th Apr '18 8:31:09 PM by DeMarquis

There can be various reasons. First, he thought that he couldn't handle them both. Second, that his father's twisty mind wouldn't take the attempt - the mother while more screwed up, is screwed in a straightforward manner. She was just empty and that may be easier to put something into. Which of course may lead to the expected screwup - there is nothing else in there but love he implanted. Too much slant in that direction.

Hmmm... full recovery.

I'm split between whether this is all a delusion, what Patrick wished had happened, or a case where her suddenly becoming whole will also lead to something like a suicide because now she feels remorse for a lifetime of deeds. I guess a third possibility is that she has no will except Patrick's now... that would certainly scare him into never using his talent to write onto minds again.

Milk and cookies?

Just because she says and even thinks she's "whole" now doesn't mean she is.

Case in point, zero feeling about the murder she just committed. Super-focus on her newfound love. She thinks that's all that matters now.

edited 27th Apr '18 8:04:31 AM by Adannor

I'm reminded of Lelouch's (aka Zero from Code Geass) ability to Geass people, because that's exactly what happened right now. She's not a true being with free will but instead some parody of what he believed he wanted.

My prediction is that the mom won't commit suicide or anything drastic like that - she probably no longer has the mental capability to do so. Instead, we'll find out that Patrick abandoned her in some old folks home or has her attending to some near-perfect copy robot of her son. He does own Templar Industries, after all.

She is sounding more like he's talking to himself... and she still has blood on her hands as she gets the milk and cookies.

She's a caricature of his ideal version of her. His fantasy of a loving mother wasn't complex enough to accommodate nuances like "when you get blood on you, wash it off before you make food." And how many times has he probably wanted to hear "your father and I are proud of you"? That's in there too (without consideration for context).

That's my speculation at the moment.

He ends up deciding that this incident is a terrible thing, so it all goes wrong at some point.

Isn't it right now? I mean, besides being preferable to being stabbed by your own mother.

EDIT May 4: Hm okay, it's getting worse now.

edited 4th May '18 1:14:39 AM by StateOfBedlam

Regret sets in.

As with Patrick's childhood memories, I suspect that some of this is a sort of Unreliable Narrator story because he doesn't want to remember things too clearly.

Pretty sure she did that under his orders, although I could see it as her psyche's one remaining act of "flipping the bird" by hurting him within the bounds of his control.

I do not think its "on purpose". Just the complete mess his fumbling around creates inside her.