His parents are awful but the escalation to strangling her is really disturbing and I'm no...

I mean if my step-mother is a bitch, and keep tormenting my mental health by giving me the excuse of making me and my father get along together when it's NOT. Then I wouldn't hesitate to do an attempted murder. Since she's just using that to manipulate me, plus she's an asshole when she threw everything Cirrus mother things that's left on the house, she's just a step-mother period. For goodness sake there not even married.

I wouldn't resort to murder, I'd call my relatives and get away from these two assholes. Then maybe leak what they did to humiliate them.

Except he can't this man has lost his mother, neglected, abused, sexually assaulted by the one dude he thought he could trust and has just seen his father have sex in his room on the anniversary of his mom death

Does cirrus even have any other relatives that he talks too other than his shitty father or something?

He tried calling his old nanny but couldn't cuz his tears made him call the wrong number

Stop being an abuser-sympathiser ur not that guy

Ahh right, sorry I forgot about that.

^^^^THIS THIS THIS
Ofc it isn't right that he's trying to murder the step-mom, but some people here who are all like "omg he's so messed up, it's disturbing, he shouldn't be doing that" have to realize that YEAH NO DUH HE SHOULDN'T. YOU'RE MISSING THE POINT. THIS IS ABOUT HOW MENTALLY TORMENTED HE'S BEEN. The story is showing how a victim can understandably snap when driven over the edge. You're not supposed to judge and be offended by his actions, you're supposed to understand as fellow human being. You're supposed to empathize and hope things get better for him. Not go like "oh, wow, he's messed up. I would never do that."

Then why do we only empathize with him as a human and not his father or step mother? Like that's an insane take that you can't judge a character for their bad actions. Obviously we're only seeing his pov and he has had an abusive and neglected life so we sympathize with him but saying you can't judge or be offended by his actions is really weird and sort of defeats the purpose of reading a story if you can never have an opinion on anything.

Like sure he's been driven over the edge but also I'm allowed to be bothered by how his character reacts and what the implications of that are in the story. Also allowed to read and interpret how I want, I don't have to read it the same way you do lol. You can understand someone and be "offended" too. And again all I ever said was I wonder how this will work out narratively.

Also I'm being rhetorical about why we don't empathize with his dad/step mom before you think that was a real question lol

You make some valid points and I realize we will never see eye to eye because we're actually talking about 2 different things. What I'm saying is "weird" to you because I'm speaking about the bigger picture here, not just the story. As you said, you're only talking about the narrative, so to you it's all technical. For example, you said you're allowed to interpret it how you want to, which checks out. However, the fact that you think -even if it's just story-wise- that Cirrus is far from saving, because he snapped and resorted to extreme violence feels incredibly judmental and wrong to me. As in, imagine if we take what you said and use it on someone who's like Cirrus in real life. You basically just said they're hopeless and you felt like you had the right to judge them like that, despite knowing everything they went through, which rubbed me the wrong way. To me, your comment was weird and heartless, which is why I said my piece. Though, of course, it's no big deal to you, because you're only referring to a fictional character and story. This is why we'll never see eye to eye and I apologize for criticizing you over my own notions and view points.

But I will mention that I never claimed we should only empathize with Cirrus. Rather, I was trying to get you to realize that you weren't.