[DreamSword]

Act 33

Despite being the first piece of a two-parter, I really dug this one.

Uniquely, it's not so much a one-on-one between Amy and Raye as it is them both being caught in the same situation with their parents.

And on a character building aspect, I really liked how this episode showcased the different ways the two process the wrongdoings of their parents and their ways of dealing with it all.

Not helping is that both parents involved are genuinely horrible. Amy's' mother is the sort of "soothing" passive-aggressive parent who gaslights through conflicting words and actions, while Raye's' father is much more direct and physically aggressive. And neither of them properly owe up to their mistakes.

I felt the episode really did do a great job at carrying the weight of how heavy these kinds of burdens that some children face are. There's no sudden jokes to ruin the mood, no last minute save that makes everything in the conflict suddenly resolved with no hard feelings; just sheer, raw emotion in the face of adversity. And I respect the episode for that.

It's such a shame that storytelling like this has fallen to the wayside in recent years.