Responses
i hoped so bad she had like internalized homophobia and comphet and feels jealous and weirded out by the two, but the "i was a neglected child" really came out of nowhere
Right? The author is already doing so good with the relationship between the MC and ML. And then suddenly, this? It felt like they wanted the story to have a conflict and just pulled this out of nowhere. Just as you said, it's poorly executed.
They should have just made the girl homophobic or sm because the imprinting of her own trauma is doing too much, especially for a character we recently met and who genuinely doesn’t have a good sentiment with the community.
I get they need to address the elephant in the room of being gay in a small village, but there were so many other ways they could have done it. We don’t know this character enough to really care about whatever tf she had going on and I think because of this, her getting emotional fell flat.
Additionally the link between child neglect and being gay was very badly made, with that context it would have made more sense for her to be worried about the daughter growing up and facing challenges at school for having two dads causing her to have a stable home life but unstable social life (the opposite of her but still very harmful).
The way they link it to “otherness” is just so lazy and poorly executed.