TL;CR MEME

[gatonina]

1. Comment with your character.
2. Receive comments from others.
3. Reply to their comments with long ballads and explanations of your characters' relationship throughout the game.
4. Suffer as we have suffered over your CR.

Comments

[successives]

GOD. okay so then the end of the week two trial rolled around (i cannot believe i am still only on week two in terms of specific threads to go over), and that was when lili confided in natalie that she isn't used to people thinking she's impressive or worthy of praise, and that she worries about disappointing people or not being good with words. which definitely surprised her! natalie didn't think that she was, like, completely infallible or anything like that, but normally lili acts so effortlessly confident that hearing those kind of doubts and insecurities coming from her was a little bit startling. it helped her think of them more as equals rather than lili being someone who completely outshines her, even though that feeling was still there and didn't really go away by the end of the game. it made her more determined to be there for lili, though!! since natalie knows firsthand how insidious and painful those thoughts and feelings can be. that got even further exacerbated with memshare week, because she could see firsthand just how much blame lili placed on herself.

THEN!! WEEK THREE BODY ANNOUNCEMENT!! god. lili is one of the people where, like, i am not sure what she would have done at that point if she didn't have her there to lean on. there was something lili said early on in their cr where she mentioned she understood how scary it can be to thinking about losing something, especially when you're not used to having it in the first place. that was 100% true for natalie in regards to jason and percy - because of canon point stuff, she considers them among the only group of people who have ever loved her unconditionally (along with a few other people from rw who were sneep). and the fact that lili said that to natalie weeks ago, and came running to find her as soon as she heard the announcement, honestly meant more than i can really express. she's so used in canon to feeling unseen or not really cared about, or at the very least like she isn't an important priority, so lili coming to find her and stay with her meant a great deal! it was also kind of terrifying. she's the type to push people away when she's stressed or emotional normally, but with this specific loss, it was like... she was so lonely and in so much pain over this that i don't really think she could have told her to leave no matter what. and that kind of bloomed into a deeper sense of trust, and that's the first time she started thinking "haha what would i do if something happened to lili" which i'll return to when i talk about one of their other threads in particular, wipes brow.

that feeling of trust only increased during the emotion share, which is the first time she was kind of confronted with the fact that lili really does care about her. she didn't think she was lying about it, because lili doesn't seem like the type to lie about how she feels about people in less it's in the specific context of being very awkward about friendship (which, relatable), but it's a different thing entirely to have that explicitly proven through a magical emotion share. it was also the first time they really dug into lili's problems with her father, and while natalie's relationship with her parents is drastically different than lili's relationship with her father, natalie can at least deeply relate to the feeling of wanting to make a parent proud at the same time that you hate the way they treat you. that's why she was so, like, adamant about telling lili how awful she thought her dad was. another layer to that is, like... so there's a cut song from the show where natalie talks about her relationship with her parents, and one of the lines is "and now, am i allowed to live?", as opposed to just being someone who's supposed to ignore her own needs to be there for her mother. again, the situation is a lot different, but natalie has a lot of resentment about what's supposed to be an important time in her life being overtaken by helping take care of someone instead of thinking about her own wants, so every time lili was like "yeah i rebelled against my dad though" natalie was just internally nodding her head. you go, lili.

ANYWAYS HER WORRY ABOUT LILI GETTING HURT CONTINUED because as determined as she was about making sure everything ended well, she was still pretty terrified that it wouldn't. and even apart from just being a close friend to her, she considered lili really important to that effort because of how much she networked between people and how hard she fought to find answers that they all needed. which really culminated in the thread they had after lili came out of their second break in, which was... there was a lot going on in that thread and i continue to close my eyes at natalie.

she's so fucking bad at talking about her feelings, and this was honestly the one time she got overtly angry at lili, so she didn't know how to express it very well. along with the anger, part of it was just her being stressed and near another breaking point because of the way the last few trials had gone, and lili kind of being the straw that broke the camel's back here, so unfortunately she got to deal with some unfair anger from natalie's part. at first the frustration was only there to mask some worry, but it got more real as the conversation went on (BECAUSE NATALIE WOULDN'T TELL HER WHAT WAS ACTUALLY WRONG SO LILI COULDN'T ADDRESS IT god). but like, she isn't emotionally mature enough to just accept lili saying "i care about your feelings but i don't have it in me to not do something to help even if i don't want to hurt you". unfortunately, one of her big things in canon is trying to deal with the knowledge that the people she loves might care about her, but that they don't care about her enough to stop doing things that hurt her, and lili (again, unknowingly, because natalie is awful at coherently explaining her feelings) kind of walked right into that. that's why natalie kept telling her stuff in that thread about, like, "well what i say won't matter anyways so we don't have to talk about it!". foolish.

and hilariously, she might have tried to talk about it a little bit more openly after the trial the next day, but then kara got the majority vote and she was like "hmmmm let's not bring that up again now", and then in next week's mingle it became apparent nobody else was going to get murdered so it became a moot point and she chilled out. and honestly, the fact that lili kept repeating the fact that natalie's feelings mattered to her both before and after that thread made her a lot more likely to believe that it wasn't just the kind of lip service about her perspective mattering that she's accustomed to in canon (and even then, doesn't always get). the frequency with which lili repeated that actually did a lot of good for natalie in terms of believing that she was important, and that she mattered, despite that one stumbling block they hit on that friday. lili in general was such a good, supportive friend to her even if they were both internally screaming about friendship. god. the thread where she told natalie she doesn't care if she's killed people and that she knew she was a good person despite that is a really good indication of that, and the thread where they did the task that pushed them to, like, spell out their honest feelings about each other. my heart.

in general she adores lili and is still basically in awe of her? she would fight anyone who so much as looked at her wrong, and she hopes she can harness her inner badass as well as lili does, wow. i refuse to look at the word count for this one specifically