#sigh tumblr can't i talk about traumas of girls and women without having a big bad 'mature' tag on my post

[satohqbanana]

Food for Thought: Zero and Her Sisters and a Girl's Development

Note: (Points to "Rose") This baby could take so much gender/sexuality-related trauma! Anyway, I thought I was going somewhere with this but some stuff didn't fit with my original idea. I still like it enough, so you can have this WIP. (Btw not consistent with the Rose/Zero novella)

A young girl who is undergoing puberty would be akin to Five. Likely due to the influence of adults around her, she becomes fixated on flaunting her sexuality as a way to make herself attractive to potential partners. She is very sexual and presents herself as physically mature (or whatever she thinks means "mature"). She pushes herself on a partner her age, but boys aren't really taught that they need to grow up this fast so her actions scare him. Through her observation of adults, she is taught that this way of acting is desirable, so the boy's response to her is simply him playing the love game. In the end, that doesn't work. She isn't the older woman the world is somehow pushing her to be, and this relationship is clearly not working.

Four represents the girl who wants to act like the new ideal girl for her age: the pure maiden. She has to cast aside the "impure" desires that she possesses so that she may show self-control and proper maturity. She even looks to an older guy as her ideal partner, a man who like her ought to show self-control. Their relationship fails because she cannot communicate her desires properly, because she is clearly just a young girl who has no idea what she is doing. She lashes out at the world for damning her whether she had her desires on the forefront or not.

So she becomes Three, the girl who just doesn't care anymore about the world. She likes what she likes and she'll roll with it. Her interests goes places, even towards the most disgusting, perversive, or deadly - if only to feel alive and have something exciting to amuse herself with. Her partner of preference is an actual old man, hairs greying and with assumed accumulated wisdom and knowledge over the years. He cares for her and keeps her company, but she eventually grows bored of him, because he runs out of novelties to share with her.

But one day, things miraculously change. The girl finds something to care about in the world: the lesser fortunate, and she becomes Two. Love blooms in her heart, and she offers what she can of herself to help out orphans and the like. She also finds a man who might as well be her Mr. Right. Her life feels perfect, almost too perfect... until it isn't. Mr. Right was Mr. Wrong, and when her belief in him shatters, she finally lets go of the idea that she needs a man.

Now she is One. Alone, she works to better the world in what way she can and be knowledgeable in its ways. Alone, she bears her burden and leads her life. People look up to her and there are times she yearns for a partner, but she doesn't risk having an intimate relationship again. However, the more she learns about the world, the more it becomes warped in her eyes. All she has is her own judgment, and her own judgment tells her to cast everything away.

Everything but herself.

With that, she becomes Zero, a woman who works only for herself, dictated by her own rules, dancing to her own rhythm. Nothing can chain her down now.

However, her pride is in vain. What chains her is her past and herself. Tired of her misfortunes, the cycle of reinventing herself to find a sliver of happiness, she seeks to to destroy every one of her selves, including the current one. Only then, she'd be free.