Yellowcanary

He should’ve just gave him backshots. I wanted to see it. Snow has been such a forgotten character until this moment he deserved some good backshots.

Some of y’all about to be real mad at me, however I think it’s important to point out the reason behind Raymond’s behavior is the shitty ass emperor. Like everybody says that him and his adopted brother had the same love from the emperor, but that’s clearly not true. The emperor clearly has a favorite and it’s not him. Like he told Raymond he would have to marry who he says he has to marry however, his favorite could marry for love. And you can say that’s because he’s younger however, if that was all Raymond needed, he would’ve been crown prince soon after his marriage to MC. But that wasn’t enough for the emperor. He wanted them to be in love. He literally tried to force people to be in love for his own reason and got mad when Raymond tried to push back. And now that he found out that Raymond doesn’t have any magic he’s willing to throw him away. There is no way the emperor ever genuinely cared for Raymond and that makes sense, especially when you see his behavior as an adult because he can’t regulate his emotions which is a sign of emotional abuse by the way, not diagnosing anyone with anything fyi and it’s not like this isn’t a common thing in these types of stories but it’s always crazy to see. Like I don’t go as far to say that the emperor is Raymond’s abuser however, I will say that if Raymond ever died there would be no love loss and the emperor wouldn’t skip a beat.

Now I don’t mean all this to say that Raymond is a saint either. He’s clearly awful but how much of that awfulness is a trauma response then you get into the murky lines between a victim and an abuser and that’s too much for the scope of this conversation. Because he did get forced into a marriage he clearly didn’t want and while he didn’t physically abuse his wife (such a low bar), he did emotionally abuse her (aka cycle of abuse) and let his mistress harass her. I don’t think it’s ultimately crazy that Raymond fed up with this behavior for almost 2 1/2 decades go to let’s get rid of him. I just think it’s so interesting they keep poking at him until he breaks and then blames him for all of it. It’s just very telling