starting off with satoko because it's the least complicated (still extremely complicated but somehow??? the least???)

anyway satoko killed her mother

her mother was described as a lot like her, similar both appearance wise and attitude wise, so she was probably very skrunkly. she had a habit of remarrying pretty quickly and she went through several different husbands, providing a very turbulent and difficult situation for her children who went from yoshizawa to hojo to a bunch of other surnames i forget.

some of the men were also abusive to satoko and her brother, and after a while she started to conflate them together due to her struggles with psychosis as a result of hinamizawa syndrome, so she convinced herself that her mother's new husband who was trying to work on himself and be a good step father was actually all of the OTHER step fathers trying to

get her guard down so that he and her mother could finally get rid of her. so in a paranoid state of pure delusion she pushed them both off a cliff. she was like 9 and she's heavily repressed the memory to the point where only rika and dr irie are the only ones who even know.

and i guess takano

and then there's amy's mother. this bitch.

technically amy's biological mother is someone we know next to nothing about beyond a word of god that she raised her daughter for a few years and then found out she had a terminal illness, so she went back to find the baby's father who just happened to be a supervillain, and came to the conclusion that he was 1. not a monster and 2. could take care of amy

AND THEN HER DAD WAS ARRESTED BY CAROL DALLON. and her dad asked CAROL DALLON to take care of her as she was arresting him. and carol hated marquis because he looked kind of similar to a guy that kidnapped her when she was a kid, and so when amy also looked similar to that guy.... she decided that amy was a stranger who had invaded her home (been adopted)

carol in particular very much toed a line between exploting amy's powers and neglecting the hell out of her. she believed that amy basically had bad blood and that she'd turn out rotten based on that, so she sort of raised amy in a pressure cooker of shame and guilt that inevitably made her explode.

but also. amy's powers were incredibly useful and incredibly powerful. so combined with the shame that she'd been raised with, she felt an extreme obligation towards helping as many people as possible that just piled up and up until she couldn't really do anything else. so yeah, not great.

when amy did explode and turn her sister into a cronenburg style car, carol instinctively went to attack her but was stopped by the realization that she's not actually evil and she never was, and that this is just a scared child that she herself has ruined. it ends with her ruminating that "she can't ever forgive amy, but she is sorry."

idk if it's mostly a japan thing but i always found it kinda fucked up that satoko and satoshi had to keep changing their surnames

like maam. let your kids keep their last name??

i assumed it depends on the parent that keeps the kids usually: my mom let us keep our dad's last name while she changed hers, for example, but i knew another kid of divorced parents who was forced by their parent to change it to the one who had custody of them

yeah and like, given satoko's mom's type...

but yeah it sucks. satoko had it rough. especially because satoko was then punished forever for association with the step dad that she killed, because he was like "idk i think i would prefer to take the money and move."

yeah the whole hatred against the hojo family thing is fucked its not like the kids had any kind of say in their parents supporting the dam project

especially because the narrative kind of settled on "nobody Really hated the hojos they were just really afraid of losing face "

fucking. oryou.

they pulled that narrative in the same episode where child services calls oryou to ask about satoko and she's like "i want that child to fucking suffer"

anyway

damian's mother.

where to fucking start

damian and talia's relationship is a complicated mess. she gave him a solid 40% of his Issues and influenced a lot of the way that he sees the world. it's also largely dependent on continuity.

despite what is commonly stated though it actually wasn't really morrison who made talia be the one behind the majority of damian's abuse, as in his introductory comic, he only met her when he was around 8, well into his own training. this got retconned in the new 52 where talia never left the league of assassins and instead she oversaw his training from the

start

in current canon that's still true but there's a degree of ambiguity as to how much of the worst of it was done under her orders. and after dying and coming back, she wanted to make amends, and still wants to. so things are. complicated between them. but he loves her and she loves him. he no longer really sees her as the bad parent to bruce's bad parent and

instead generally believes that they both fucking suck as parents but, as sad as it is, they tried their best somehow.

he has a screaming match with her in a graveyard where he says he's never going to have kids because he's never going to inflict the life that they lead onto another, like it was inflicted upon him. and she hugs him and says that they can start again. it's very bittersweet.

they have a lot of horrible moments and a lot of very sweet moments. before she had damian, talia used to idealize batman as the figure that would come and set her free. when damian went to meet batman for the first time, in a lot of ways he sort of inherited that dream as she gave up on it.

shadow war was a hot mess but it did have a bunch of good talia moments

talia + damian moments i mean. i'm iffy on some of the talia characterization

anyway talia and damian's relationship makes me very sad, it's soooo tragic even under all the editorial enforced misogyny