#katherine who could’ve have been so much better but doenst have it in her to break the curse i will always love you

[transitofmercury]

The thing about Katherine is that I am really defensive of how she is in canon. Like, she is absolutely flawed but she’s also at most 18 (IMO), the daughter of a very selfish man and fundamentally a good person. And the way a lot of the criticism I see of her comes across is very “GIRL has FLAWS? she must be EVIL!” which is misogyny when all the boys get to be flawed without suddenly becoming supervillains. So when I’m talking about canon Katherine I’m very leave her alone, she isn’t perfect but she is a good person with the capacity to improve!!!

At the same time, all my headcanons about her as she gets older are not about her improving, they’re about her getting worse. I think Katherine absolutely could become a lovely person but I also think she’s a lot more interesting if she doesn’t. Katherine who manages to right her father’s wrongs on a journalistic-business level but just becomes him on a personal level.

She dedicates her journalism to workers’ rights after the strike and spends 30 years getting incredible at it. Then, when her brothers are trying to sell The New York World, she forces them hand it over to her and she doesn’t just save it, she makes it better than it ever was. She dedicates it to actually serving the working class and standing for the values it pretended to have when she was a child. On that level of how she uses her influence and her talents, she is better person than her father.

But towards the people she loves, she ends up just as bad as he was to her. The thing you need to know here is that while a lot of things about Pulitzer in Newsies are very inaccurate, he was absolutely a bad father. To quote James McGrath Morris: “He was so cruel to his children, unspeakably cruel.” In my head, Katherine in canon has some Pulitzer-esque traits deep down that she is self aware about and wants to not have. After she moves out, she does get better in how she treats people. For 11 years she’s learning how to express love in a way that people who aren’t her, her father and her siblings can actually understand. Pulitzer dies in 1911 and something breaks inside her and it’s just a downhill spiral into the Pulitzer-esque from then. She is nice to people who are further away from her but she slowly stops being able to express love to the people closest to her in un-Pulitzer ways. Those who knew her when she was younger, especially the older newsies, and her siblings, who are just like her, understand that this is what’s happening and that she loves them. But (in my headcanon she has one daughter, you don’t need the details) her daughter doesn’t really get it and feels exactly how Katherine did when she was younger.

This whole post is just me waffling about how interesting I find the idea of a Katherine who is doomed by the Pulitzer family generational trauma (which did exist)… but I really do find that idea so interesting, she’s so miserable to me :(