Thank you! I think "He's stopped thinking of her as a person with her own needs and started thinking of her as the plaster that's going to fill in the cracks in his own psyche" describes things extremely (and depressingly) well.
I have seen an otherwise excellent fic or two that I thought was unfair to Dora by depicting her as genuinely cruel, but even then I it was only Dora as she exists in Harry's mind, which admittedly isn't quite the same thing. But I'm glad that mostly she's regarded compassionately, because women who've "wronged" men in fiction, even men who've treated them horribly, are so often unreasonably hated, and it sucks.
And I think the writing in the game does an absolutely amazing job with Dora. It seems very clear to me that underneath the parts of Harry that want to tell her she's a monster and the parts that see her not as a person but as an objective which, if achieved, will somehow magically fix his broken life, even he does understand that she's really just a human being who's trying to live her own life and doesn't want to do this dance with him anymore. Because the dream version of her, produced his own mind, is basically telling him as much, whether or not he's listening. And the themes of being trapped in your past and needing to let go are so well done in the game in so many ways.
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AstroGirl Sat 05 Feb 2022 12:36AM UTC
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