beta
This man is so goddamn stupid. She’s crying about how much his deception hurt her, that she misses her chosen home/family, and that she miserable to be trapped with him forever.
Then he flashes back to genuinely useful advice from his mom about honest communication in relationships, he digs deep, and the best he can come up with is some bs about how she changed his preference for chicken breast?!
I get that he didn’t have a lot of time, but he could have said literally anything, “ I know this is a difficult situation, but I want to treat you well”, “I’m sorry for deceiving you, I want to find a way to make it up to you”, “I know the circumstances of your arrival were not pleasant, but I want to have a positive relationship with you”, or LITERALLY ANYTHING OTHER THAN WHAT HE ACTUALLY SAID.
Granted, even if he says the right things it will ring hollow from someone who will be effectively imprisoning her for the rest of her life whether she warms up to him or not, but still
Can we talk about how destructive the mother’s choice was?!?! Forcing both kids to grow up as 1 person, which requires them to suppress their true personalities, interests, and abilities to keep up the ruse. Constantly being compared and forced to conform to a fake persona, never able to develop genuine personal relationships.
It’s established that twin girls are an ominous sign, but the explanation is that two sisters centuries ago got into a succession war about it. That’s the entire reasoning. It’s not like they would have been executed. There would probably have been some political back talk, suspicion, and negative rumors, and yes, the finger pointing could have messed them up, but ITS ALREADY HAPPENING BECAUSE OF WHAT THEIR MOM DID.
And what exactly was her endgame? Reveal the secret twin 18 years later and expect that to go over better sociopolitically? What’s more concerning, having “unlucky” royal twin girls born and grow up normally in society, or suddenly finding out there were secret twins later? People are going to freak out more for the latter because everything they knew was a lie so of course they can never trust the royals again.
The fact that she even hid it from their father robbed them of having a genuine relationship or effective support from him. And how guilty are they going to feel about deceiving everyone around them? And if/when it gets revealed, of course most people would feel betrayed.
Their mother threw them into an untenable situation with no way out just to sidestep a stigma that wasn’t a genuine threat to them at the time