PALADIN KRISTEN. I Will Die On This Hill.

PALADIN KRISTEN. i will die on this hill.

i don't want kristen to lose her faith entirely. i think back to prompocalypse, talking to the ether the gods get their answers from, and saying into the ether that she cares. she wants a god that cares, not just about her but about all the good people she wishes she could help, because if there's nobody more powerful that cares then it's her responsibility to care for them and she's not a god. she couldn't trust her family to care, couldn't trust her church, couldn't even trust her god, and she had to step up and be the person who cares even though she's just a clumsy kid who got her girlfriend newspaper-copying putty for a joint anniversary/birthday gift.

[and then she makes cassandra, still desperate for that perfect god that she can trust to protect people for her. but cassandra, just like yes, is created and controlled by her and thus entirely dependent on her and her ever-changing ideals. kristen still only trusts herself to do right by people, so the only god she will accept is one that she designs to be just like her and indulge her every phase and that means without her there to decide what the god should be there is no god. there is no morality to a religion that bends to your every will because your actions don't have consequences - cassandra and yes weren't created to be good, just to give power to kristen when she wants it. and that means that all of the responsibility still falls on kristen to be good.]

because the alternative would be being complicit, and kristen cannot rest unless she is doing everything possible that she can to help people. and so she never rests. even doing nothing, she's wandering labyrinths in her head trying to be better and find the answer, and she can't let herself take a break from trying to be better without being plagued by guilt. she can't push let go of the guilt because she's seen first-hand what happens when people don't feel guilt or question themselves.

and in the summer starting junior year she and tracker break up and the guilt becomes unbearable and suddenly she can't remember why she let herself feel it. so she stops feeling guilty. she forgets to heal her friends, she devotes herself to her own body (my faith is mostly physical, tracker had once said, kristen doesn't remember what she meant by that) and she breaks all the promises she made to protect cassandra. she stops caring.

until she sees bucky again. until she sees her parents again. she remembers why she wanted to fight to stop bad things from happening to good people, and more importantly she remembers what happens when you don't question yourself. how mac and donna follow their beliefs blindly and never questioned whether they could be wrong if they could be better. how they promised to love her and left her to suffer, how helio let the people he swore to love suffer, and how she was leaving cassandra to suffer. and she doesn't realise until after that cassandra wanted to help. cassandra was always encouraging kristen to grow the church not just because she couldn't rely on kristen to keep her alive but because she knew kristen couldn't handle the responsibility of keeping her alive on her own.

kristen chose to be a cleric of cassandra because she thought cassandra was good and wanted them to have a religion. it was the only way to revive her, but if she can grow the church then kristen would be free to work on herself with cassandra being free to take care of her, not the other way around. as a paladin kristen could take an oath she will always believe in - an oath to care and love her friends, perhaps - and trust that cassandra's church will still be helping people on a large scale even when kristen needs a break. kristen can get swole and learn to fight and know in her heart that what she's fighting for is right. she can trust that cassandra wouldn't bless her if she didn't deserve it, and in that trust she doesn't have to worry so much about being a perfect person because she knows she's good.

listen. listen. as a pastor kid ex-ministry person who left the toxic religious group they were raised in. it’s not about cassandra being rad or not (she is i really think she is). it’s about whether or not kristen can make peace with what being devout means. if she can take that leap of faith. if she can really settle in on a belief system and ask others to do the same.

i think this arc is gonna be about kristen giving up on cleric and reclassing (my guess on barb) because this is about kristen finally FINALLY giving up on how she was raised. she didn’t need to a different god. she needs to reject, wholly, that lifestyle and figure out the best version of herself and what she needs. maybe she doesn’t need to be a cleric. maybe trying to force herself to be one is perpetuating the harm she escaped. maybe she can step back.

i think this will have HUGE complications. but it really feels like ally is interested in explored why kristen has struggled this whole time with this. maybe she doesn’t want to be a cleric at all.