Why does Heisenberg bother with the robot army instead of just killing Mother Miranda in some other way?
So there’s two reasons for this, actually.
Miranda’s actual power, and Miranda’s perceived power.
For the first one, Miranda’s actual power, funny as it is to call her “just some stuck up old lady”, we can see from her fight with Ethan at the end of the game that that’s simply not true. Miranda has quite a bit of viral/supernatural power, shape shifting, mental fog, all kinds of strength, regeneration, and nasty attacks.
And this is when she’s in a weakened state, due to the ritual to bring back her daughter.
Second, is Miranda’s perceived power.
What you need to remember is that every person in the village has grown up isolated and indoctrinated into a cult, the central tenet of which is that Mother Miranda is all powerful. This includes your man, Karl.
Now Karl obviously doesn’t believe that she’s all powerful, but here we have to peel back the second layer of Miranda’s perceived power over him.
Karl didn’t start this relationship as an adult man. Karl was a child.
Miranda raised him as a son, AND as part of her cult.
To Heisenberg, Miranda is an abusive parent.
And speaking as a victim of child abuse, one of the key elements of an abusive parent is raising your child with the perception that your power is absolute, and unshakable.
Whether or not Heisenberg could kill her some other way is irrelevant, because at the end of the day, Karl is scared of her. He fears exactly what she’ll do to him if he tries to kill her, and messes it up. He isn’t going to GET another shot. The plan has to be perfect, foolproof.
This is what Heisenberg sees every time he thinks about killing Miranda.
(image transcript: a meme of a baseball mascot with mother Miranda’s face pasted over it. The text reads “What are you gonna do with that big bat? Gonna hit me? Better make it count. Better make it hurt. Better kill me in one shot.”)
And that’s why the robot army. That’s why the insane amount of planning, and preparation, and secrecy.
Heisenberg is afraid of his abusive mother Miranda, knows he has exactly one shot to kill her, and is terrified of what will happen if he misses that shot.
THIS THIS THIS!!!! also I headcanon/it’s implied that karl knew the BSAA were on Miranda’s ass so i’d wager he was hoping they’d duke it out too and enemy-of-my-enemy team up against her with his own army it’s why he’s so eager to have ethan prove himself and get him on board too because by the time he gets to the factory any other allies karl might have found in his siblings are dead he’s backed into a corner and he’s trying so hard to even the odds against miranda because as you said: he has one shot to get it right he’s aiming for overkill karl heisenberg meta
It also makes it harder or impossible for people who are triggered by those things to create strong filters online to keep from seeing them.
If you’re talking about rape, and you write it r*pe, then someone who has the word “rape” filtered will now SEE THAT POST that they were trying to avoid.
Censoring words that way is explicitly useful for GETTING AROUND FILTERS on sites that automatically filter those words. Censoring them is to avoid machine censorship so that the topics can be discussed, it is not to help people who don’t want to see them.
On a site like tumblr that doesn’t autocensor topics like that the best thing you can do is write them out fully so that people who are trying to filter them out can do so.
I didn’t realise that some people think *ing out words will make readers unable to know what the word is.
I suppose some people will have difficulty understanding words with *s in them, but then idk how these people are supposed to understand the rest of the post. Like if I said ‘do not interact if you romanticise r*pe,’ and a reader didn’t know what the word was, how would they understand my DNI? Or if you made a masterpost of ‘r*pe crisis resources,’ how would a person who didn’t know what the *ed word was understand the purpose of the resources?
The majority of people, of course, will get from context that these are rape crisis resources, even if they couldn’t parse the word r*pe. In which case they are now thinking about the concept of rape despite your *, which, if they’d blacklisted the word, is presumably what they wanted to avoid in the first place
Just…sorry for going off on your post to say probably very obvious things, @blackheart-biohazards, I can delete if you want, I’m just stuck on the idea that a) *s can stop the majority of people understanding words, and b) that this would be desirable or helpful.
