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TL;CR MEME
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.
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.
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Harrow's relationship with her parents is pretty weird. They died when she was ten, and before that they always had a relationship with her where they were super encouraging and proud of her genius and necromancy prowess, but were pretty aloof and distant in all other respects. Harrow's feelings about them are messy because she's logically aware of information that means she knows they were pretty bad people, but she's also very defensive of them, gets upset if anyone says something unkind about them, misses them, and then deep down knows they didn't really have a normal parent child relationship but a very toxic one.
I just explain this lore because she's a pretty lonely girl who is pretty desperate for positive approval from parental figures, but is also extremely unused to it and caught off guard from it. She thinks she's used to being encouraged and praised and shown support, but it was always only for a few limited qualities, and no one ever really showed her much encouragement or support for who she is as a person.
Because of that I was so happy when Sheila was assigned to my CYOA because I felt like they would have great CR, but wasn't sure how to get it. Harrow would just naturally find zombie stuff fascinating and it wouldn't bother her, and I thought she and Sheila would vibe in terms of their creepy but ultimately moral outlook on things, but Sheila's nice suburban mom thing is by contrast so alien and weird to her that it would just wig her out and I don't think she'd realize she had anything in common with Sheila ever on her own. So the CYOA was a great way to get her to trust Sheila and bond with her a little and see her as capable, and then once I was able to get the zombie lore I was rubbing my hands. Since Harrow had reasonable creepy necromancer reasons to keep spending time with Sheila and sharing personal stuff with her, she accidentally got a healthy dose of decent mom energy sent her way.
Sheila really was pretty important CR for Harrow because it was so uncomplicated once they'd bonded. They just got along and Harrow cared about her but was also like 'oh, Sheila can take care of herself on her own.' She didn't see Sheila as a nice mom who needed to be sheltered or taken care of but just a perfectly capable lady who needed to eat corpses. Sheila always just casually saying 'yeah, I'd kill some people if they did bad things, but I'd tell you if I did' was the perfect way to get Harrow to trust her. Because first of all, Harrow has the same view that killing dangerous people is good and not morally complicated at all, but Harrow isn't a sharer.
One of the funniest things to me this game is how by even mid game, there was such a large number of people Harrow felt she could not hide things from, and would instantly tell if she had a problem. That's not at all naturally who Harrow is; she has a tendency to take on problems by herself to an unhealthy and unreasonable degree, and put all the responsibility on herself to fix things, and doesn't loop people in on her plans even if it's very detrimental. Most of this is because she doesn't expect people to trust her, rather than her lack of trust in others; she doesn't see the point of informing people of plans if they're likely to side with someone else or undermine her plans because they think she's shady. So Sheila's just obvious, casual trust in her worked wonders to make her feel like 'okay, that's the arrangement - if we kill anyone, we've agreed to tell each other and work together.' And ironically that probably kept her out of a lot of trouble because if she did something reckless there would be so many people she wouldn't want to lie to about it.
In general I just think it was really healthy for her to have Sheila around saying nice and encouraging things about her as a person and obviously liked her without making it a big thing. She always got embarrassed when Sheila complimented her because Sheila never talked about what a genius she was or anything she viewed as a natural born ability but instead complimented personal qualities she had. This made her want to die as any teenager would, but it was good for her.
After the game, I'm sure Harrow comes to visit sometimes and is completely overwhelmed by anything like going to target or Joel saying something dad-like to her, but is very engaged and right at home if they need to hide a body or are being targeted by zombie hunters or evil spiders. Maybe she'll try to teach Abby some necromancy techniques.