Not to harp about how much I love Gerry Keay again but
I haven’t seen a lot of people talk about the fact that he unlearned Mary’s bullshit by himself. Nobody deprogrammed him, nobody sat him down and told him that what she was doing was wrong. Nobody taught him that protecting people from the Fears was more worthy than sacrificing them to it. It wasn’t Eric, Eric was already dead and Mary never let him near his page. It wasn’t Gertrude, he didn’t meet Gertrude until years after Mary’s death, which in turn was years after he started resisting her.
He grew up isolated by a parent who did everything she could to mold him into something as selfish and brutal and toxic as she was, and went on to lead an ultimately short life plagued by misery, fear, and manipulation, and you have to wonder how much choice he ever had when his entire existence was spent being used and exploited by the people around him, but that choice? The choice to do good and fight back and help strays? That was his. He made that choice and he kept making it for the rest of his life.
And as far as we know, he made it without ever being told it was even an option.
ALT
ALT
