#what is this willingness to erase a lifetime of experiences that shaped someone into the person they are now

[sporesgalaxy]

bursts into the room unprompted. the fact that Trebol didn't personally shape Doflamingo into a monster doesn't mean that Doflamingo was born a monster. The fact that Corazon doesn't understand how they turned out so differently doesn't mean Doflamingo was born a monster. Doflamingo was born a kid and he was given total power over the lives of other humans by the adults around him when he was still a Celestial Dragon. Then after that, he was still a kid who was angrier and felt more powerless than he ever had in his life, and an adult gave him a gun. It doesn't matter that no one forced him to shoot his father with it. No one gave him anything else. The point of Doflamingo's backstory is that kids take what adults give them.

And regarding Corazon, speaking from personal experience: being a little bit younger than your sibling when your life is suddenly totally uprooted in childhood makes a world of difference. remembering even one or two years less of your old life is a huge chunk of your small lived experience that you DON'T have to reorient yourself around. Additionally, having someone around to get angry first makes a world of difference. It's a lot easier to push yourself to be the optimistic one when you have a counterexample to measure yourself against, and measure the reactions of your parents / other influential adults against.

Obviously none of this excuses Doflamingo's lifetime of committing atrocities, but One Piece goes out of its way SEVERAL TIMES to emphasize the importance of treating children right. The point of Doflamingo's backstory was to exemplify how blaming kids for the past sins of their family solves nothing, and CAN-- doesn't always, but CAN-- push those very kids to grow up into monsters. How it does nothing but perpetuate a cycle of tragedy and anger and loss. Corazon's willingness to help young Law despite the myths about Law's inherited disease serves to break that cycle. You can help kids instead of trying to erase them for the things they inherited thatre beyond their control. Okay

[academicgangster]

Nah, actually I'm not done talking about fandom's bizarre takes on death.

The thing about life is, you age. You learn things, you come to terms with things, you build a life that's at least a little better than it was for you when you were young. You get happier. Only very rarely does anyone's happiness peak in their twenties or thirties.

If you're going to imagine your significant other as you die, in your sixties, would you not imagine your significant other AS HE IS NOW, rather than as he was thirty-five years ago? You see his current face regularly. You hear from him nearly every day. He is on your phone sending you emotional texts from the bar where he's ignoring his government mandated heterosexual love interest.