We need more! Pleaseeee

I want to be annoyed that the story diverged from the epic cliffhanger, but I can't be. This chapter was beautifully written, and finally getting some insight to Tricia's backstory was so eye-opening. So I suppose I can keep hanging until we find out Miguel's fate. Maybe Sofia just hit the "HOLD" button instead?

But yeah, Tricia is such a delightfully complicated character, even moreso than Sofia. I feel a bit validated in my assumption that the excuses Tricia initially gave for hating downsizers amounted to talk at the sizist dinner table. I mean, Tricia's not paying taxes!

But I was so distracted by this thought that I didn't even stop to considering a deeper underlying reason serving as the real source of her anger. In some ways, I came away from this chapter feeling sorry for Tricia. Her life was upended and her family was destroyed by what happened to her father. Of course she's going to be resentful about that.

But her anger is misplaced, likely (based on the fact that Tricia has to hide him from her mother and stepfather) from the way the rest of her family feels about downsizers. It seems clear that her current parental units wouldn't consider him a person, and Tricia's friends certainly wouldn't, and that's what guides her frustrations. It's not her mom's fault for being closeminded about her dad's downsizing (if she even knows about it; there's still a lot of questions around exactly what happened with him, including his leg). It's not the fault of a seemingly decent-sized pocket of society looking down on downsizers.

No, it's her dad's fault for being duped and becoming downsized. It's the fault of downsizing in general and, therefore, all downsizers.

From the start, I got a sort of "illusory crime" vibe from Tricia, like she was the victim of a sort of social conditioning to hate downsizers. While that's true, I think, this is so much worse than that. That illusory crime by those around her has altered the way she views her own father and dashed her hopes of having a happy family (there are ways she could be happy with her dad, even if her mom just wanted a normal-sized husband and wasn't a full-blown sizist, which it sounds like she might be).

We see the results of this play out in a couple ways here. First, it's obvious that Tricia loves her father. She's clearly not keeping him out of some sense of obligation or a refusal to let go of the past or even because it's cool or fun to her to have a downsized pet. She likes comforting him. She gets pissed when he's too scared to tell her when something is wrong and chooses to suffer instead. She even kept him with her when she slept for comfort once. She loves him even now that he's a downsizer.

However, that love actually seems to make that resentment even worse, as we saw in his latest round of punishment in the chapter. His mistake destroyed her family and, in some ways, took her father away from her, as he's now a downsizer and not a person. So she cruelly punishes him for it, truly feeling as though he deserves it. But even then, when she goes too far and is worried that she actually hurts him, we see that her love for him is still there. It's an internal struggle between what her heart is telling her and what she has been raised to believe, and it's so intriguing to watch it play out.

Then there's how Tricia vents her general frustrations from school, with her dad having to take the brunt of her anger from that as well. And that ... that doesn't subside so quickly. It's much more aggressive and cruel, too. He just happens to be a downsizer she has access to, someone she can punish for no reason and without consequence, so he just has to deal with it.

I like how Tricia becomes super sweet toward him after that venting subsides, though, even if it takes a month or so sometimes. It's not stated in the chapter, but I get the feeling this is because she realizes that the things she does to him when she gets like that are wrong and feels shitty about it, but at the same, she won't lower herself to apologize to a downsizer. So she pretends it never happened and treats him especially well as a way to make up for it. Or that's my theory, at least.

I do want to note here that I think it's a bit ironic that it seems as though everyone else in Tricia's life is so judgmental, that she needs to have certain standards (hating downsizers the appropriate amount, for example) in order to feel accepted, but her dad clearly still loves her even after dealing with all of this horrible shit from her. Despite everything, it's a downsizer who truly accepts her no matter what.

I also love that Tricia is so self-centered. Yeah, I feel like everything I said above is true and that, in some ways, she's a tragic victim of that social conditioning, but her way of thinking is also very selfish and short-term. She wants to punish her dad for what she did to him, even though he was scammed into being downsized. And now Mateo has to pay for her losing her boyfriend, even though he didn't want to downsize and it's her choice not to date him. So while I can feel sympathy for her at times, she has really good villain traits like this at the same time.

And while we're on the subject of Mateo, I was a bit surprised to see that Tricia actually misses him. And we got to see that there were things about him that she really liked; she wasn't with him for status or just because she thought he was hot. He actually made her feel good about herself, and a part of her regrets not having that anymore. This completely changes the type of threat I view her as toward Mateo going forward. I thought she was just going to try to kill or torture him out of anger before, but now it seems like she wants to keep him under her bed and under her feet because she has similar mixed feelings about him as she does her father. I don't think she loves Mateo, as the things she mentioned about him were all about how he made her feel (there's that self-centeredness again), but I do think she feels something for him.

I also believed her when she said she wouldn't have flushed Emma and him down the toilet if Beth hadn't shown up. I wasn't sure at first, but between her reflection on their relationship and what happened at the end of the chapter, I think her trying to stomp Emma and him in the bathroom was blind rage and that pissing on them was just teaching them a lesson. I don't think a calm, rational Tricia would have purposefully killed a downsizer then.

Things are certainly different now, though.

Tricia stepped over one of those proverbial lines with what happened with the unregistered downsizers (I could say a lot about them as well, but this is obviously already pretty long, so I'll just say , "Man, that's fucked up," concerning their living arrangement). I feel as though Tricia's hatred of downsizers is different from Lin's, as Lin came off to me as just a normal sizist who hates downsizers just because they're different. I say this largely because of the way in which Lin taunts downsizers throughout the chapter.

I also feel like it was peer pressure that drove Tricia to warm-bellied murder. Based on what we saw from her earlier in the chapter, the way she reacted to Lin squishing the first downsizer, how quickly and without tasting him she ate the Mateo lookalike, and the admission later that she initially only ate him to impress/one-up Lin all convinced me that, despite her hate for downsizers, she wouldn't have killed one without someone there to add pressure. Of course, that mantra that downsizers aren't really people surely helped as well, but this was Tricia acting well beyond her norm, I think.

But then she felt the tiny moving around inside her and everything changed. She liked it, and it would be shocking if she didn't eat one again! And that bit with the X-Acto knife and the tape, I found myself wondering if she would have done that before. There has clearly been a shift in her. Whereas before it was hate guiding how she felt about downsizers, she's starting to truly enjoy treating them cruelly. This doesn't bode well for Steve and probably not for Mateo as well!

Finishing up on Tricia (finally, I know), I found another bit of irony here. She hates downsizing and the people who choose to downsize, but it seems like the only people she's punishing for it are those who didn't have a choice. It seems like Steve got scammed, Mateo didn't have a choice, and poor Kamilla got fucked over hard as well, not to mention the other unregistered. It's tragically funny that she's taking out her frustrations on the downsizers who have it so well on those who are struggling or didn't want to downsize in the first place.

Lastly, it was nice to see Hazel and Beth again! It's been a while, but I think that's not necessarily a bad thing. For me, I was really happy to see them mentioned, even if it was mostly background stuff. Having them out of the story for so long has built some anticipation for when we see them again. Hazel and Emma seeing Mateo again is going to be a huge feel-good moment. Mateo reuniting with Beth is going to be a major one as well. And when Beth is finally able to make good on some of those things she said she wanted to do to Mateo, that scene is going to be so much more effective after all this buildup and delicious frustration.

I was also glad to see Hazel tell Beth happened to Mateo, even if we didn't get to see it firsthand. It also makes sense why she chose then to do it. Seeing Beth so worked up about him being missing, any doubt Hazel might have about Beth's feelings toward Mateo were erased. It's clear now that she cares about him, and that was why she stepped in to tell Beth what happened.

It sure as shit wasn't to save that "sizist cunt." I loved that line coming from sweet, innocent Hazel. It was so perfect for that moment, the first time she saw Tricia after the incident that never happened.