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thought i’d add my two cents to the “is andrew a sadist?” discussion going on from a sadist’s perspective. andrew displays very strong and consistent sadistic tendencies, but understanding those requires understanding what the source of that gratification is. it is, of course, power, and everything in andrew’s life revolves around it.

most tend to think of sadism as exclusively sexual and the plain polar opposite of masochism— which, granted, it often is for people whose sadism is limited to the confines of the bedroom. when it isn’t, however, i wouldn’t say that’s particularly accurate. sadism in the paraphilic sense is just a psychological association between sexual pleasure and seeing others in pain that develops gradually when you get off enough times to that specific stimuli. your brain’s reward system now associates it with the rush of dopamine you get when you bust a nut. congrats, you’ve pavlov’d yourself into a fetish. this is not more innate than jacking it to footjobs on the daily and then getting aroused when you see feet.

i can’t relate to the exclusively kinky flavor of sadism myself, and i wouldn’t consider people for whom it is only a kink true sadists. for people with a sadistic personality, the gratification is emotional, sometimes exclusively so with no sexual component to it, and even with that component, the sexual arousal is secondary. no matter how many wires get crossed between how the sadism actually manifests and the core of that desire or need, the motivation is almost always vengeance and punishment for a perceived crime, projected onto whoever is seen as deserving of that punishment.

andrew sure as hell wants to avenge himself. that’s a recognizable pattern in his thought processes and behavior.

i saw his behavior towards ashley being used as a reference point here, but i personally do not see andrew’s sadistic tendencies applying to ashley— on the contrary, she’s the one person i’d say is exempt from his sadistic inclinations, who he instead feels mental discomfort when he’s causing her harm. his internal conflict shuts his sadism down instantly when he has thoughts along those lines, when he feels a desire to hurt her, because the sense of fulfillment he finds in being her one source of safety, comfort and happiness is stronger than acting on any sadistic desire would be. that’s where he gets his sense of purpose, his reason for living, and the two desires are naturally completely incompatible.

when andrew reflects on his lack of regret over murdering the warden, he admits that he only regrets not killing him slower and making him suffer, deriving pleasure from it, rather than hacking him up impulsively out of necessity to defend and protect his sister. why? the guy supposedly leered at ashley, looked at her as a potential sexual conquest, and for that, andrew would certainly gouge your eyes out and scrape out your eye sockets with a rusty spoon, and he’d savor every moment. my point: every other murder he commits is a stark contrast to the manner in which he kills ashley. he does this with tenderness and bitter sadness, her death pains him so unbearably much that he commits suicide the moment she is gone and dead in his arms, and he makes sure her death is quick and painless and that she doesn’t suffer. and to andrew, this is a loving act of mercy.

this deep love and care for her is not his sole motivator here, we’re not gonna do him the favor of pretending otherwise, he has utterly selfish motives as well, but andrew cannot stand the thought of abandoning ashley, so if he dies, she will have to die with him. in his mind, he needs to spare her from living without him even for a second, save her from the agony she would feel when he is gone and she’s alone in the world without her brother. if he kills her, he won’t have to leave her, and he could never, ever be the one to make his sister’s deepest fear into a horrifying reality. incomprehensible logic if you do not think like andrew does, but he’s not exactly sane.

as for the reactive abuse he inflicts on ashley, it does undeniably feel good to him in the heat of the moment, but it’s not sadistic gratification. it’s a wholly different emotional response. it’s relief from the extremely distressing feeling of powerlessness, the result of ashley relentlessly robbing him of any control until he feels small, helpless and cornered. perceived powerlessness induces panic, it suffocates him, and he lashes out accordingly with explosively excessive aggression when he’s triggered. he takes his power and control violently, whether this is when ashley pushes him so far with her abuse of him that he responds with violent reactive abuse, or when the woman in 302 attempts to retake control over the situation by lunging for the nail gun. the latter may look like self-defense, but only if you don’t know that andrew graves is a pathological liar.

the narrator generously informs us that andrew snapped and stabbed the woman in 302 way, way more times than is needed to kill a person, that he kept going until he felt satisfied even after she clearly stopped breathing, because the “dumb bitch” had the gall to think he was stupid and embarrass him.

to andrew, she insulted him, she deserved it, and it felt good and right to stab the fuck out of her for it. if the circumstances he found himself in simply made her death inevitable, if this was only a necessary evil to eliminate all witnesses, there was certainly no need for andrew to mutilate her.

but here we are. in the flashback to his point of view in apartment 302, we see the undeniable gratification he gets from power and control before the murder when he has the knife to her throat and she is entirely at his mercy, her life is in his hands, when she’s scared of him, and we see it again in the grand finale and act itself when he throws her onto the bed and stabs her to death without a second of hesitation. which he does when she shows that she is not as afraid of him as she should be— as andrew wants her to be. to andrew, fearing him is respecting him, and she was stupid enough to disrespect him when he’s holding a knife.

now this woman is just like ashley. andrew goes fucking batshit, sees red and snaps like a rubber band wound too tight, and the parallel here is clear as day to me given how we saw ashley treat him just a few scenes prior— i’m not scared of you, andy, who do you think you’re talking to?

ashley belittles him, subtly humiliates him when he stands up to her and challenges her to make him back down. she doesn’t take him even remotely seriously even when he makes an honest threat on her life, and now this “dumb bitch” doesn’t either. she doesn’t think he has it in him, so sure he’d never actually use that knife, he’d never actually kill her, he is not a real threat, he’s weak, he’s spineless, he’s a pushover, a doormat, he’s all bark and no bite. yeah, andrew’s livid, and there’s no fucking way he will let that slide when he has nothing to lose and everything to gain by killing this woman.

he will fucking show her how seriously she should have taken him— andrew makes a terrifying example out of her, she will take his sister’s punishment because he wouldn’t think of ashley as truly deserving of it, and he definitely enjoys every single second of it. that taste of power? i’ve no doubt he enjoyed it more than he’d ever imagined enjoying anything in his life.

none of this sadism ends up directed towards ashley at all. in fact, he obsesses over whether or not she’s safe and sound upstairs even as he’s reveling in the complete power and control he has over their notoriously fuckable neighbor. ashley returns unscathed and immediately calls him out on his shit, observant as she is— he killed the lady in 302 because he enjoys killing, not out of pure necessity, that’s an excuse, and he got off on it.

this is hardly ashley making shit up from a dismissive throwaway comment andrew made about the woman being easy on the eyes, even if he defensively reduces it to that to make ashley look and feel irrational. she can’t prove anything, so andrew will die on that hill insisting he was just dutifully protecting them both from harm, while this is ashley’s insecurities talking and making her act crazy. as usual. he clearly jumps through mental hoops to justify what he did and lies his way around his motives and intent constantly, but when ashley accuses him of getting his rocks off killing their downstairs neighbor, there’s his “even if i did, who cares, she’s dead.”

king of telling on himself even when he’s bullshitting.

ive been on a okegom kick lately

me when that one couple doomed by the narrative say i love you without saying i love you (i will be crying over them for several months)

Why do people call us proshippers? Because we're professional shippers? Because we have professional taste in ships? Not my fault the doomed sisters have more chemistry in one glance than shitbomb and acabvi have in their entire forced narrative. Sorry that your otp is basically soggy toast in a trench coat.

Honestly, I don’t get how people can watch everything Ashley puts Andrew through and still think she isn’t the worse of the two right now. And saying she’s worse doesn’t mean Andrew gets a free pass, far from it, but come on, she absolutely wrecks him in episode 2 and especially in Decay. She’s the one who pushes him to the edge and breaks the promise she made back in episode 1. Every time someone tries to reason with Ashley or calm her down, she just doubles, even triples down. It’s the same cycle over and over: promises to change, only to spiral even further.

Now, if we’re talking about before episode 1, sure, Andrew was a total asshole and definitely played a big part in how Ashley ended up. But seriously, try raising a traumatized kid while being neglected yourself and see how well you turn out.

You are fundamentally misunderstanding what makes Andrew tic as a character, WHY he'd rather die than be separated from Ashley no matter how awful she gets, and why those two things make people go "He's just as bad as his sister, maybe even worse"

Andrew's entire inner struggle can be explained by his thoughts on Julia after she breaks up with him "You'll never see her again, and the fact that it doesn't bother you bothers you."

Unlike Ashley, Andrew has at least some understanding of what a normal, healthy, GOOD person does or doesn't think/feel/do. But he still has all the same petty, immature, selfish, possessive, controling, manipulative and violent impulses Ashley has.

That's why, no matter if the player is making Andrew stand up for himself or revert back to Andy, the parents and the campers still die, because Andrew resents the former and doesn't care about the latter. Why his relationship with Julia is doomed, and why he'll get furious at the very thought of Ashley being with someone else. Why Ashley's obviously fake tears still convinced him to leave Nina, a girl he knows is asmathic and has clearly heard said the words "I can't breathe", locked up in a dusty box all night.

Despite knowing better, he still goes along with all the vile things Ashley wants - because even though he knows it's wrong, some sick part of him either doesn't care about these people (and thus doesn't care what Ashley puts them through) or actively ENJOYS their suffering just as much as his sister does.

Ashley is a chaotic, impulsive, reckless type of evil, and thus acts on impulse. Andrew is all about PREMEDITATED evil. He doesn't really "snap" and "get pushed too far" or even "gives into pressure/manipulation" that often. Most of the time he's making the conscious choice to ignore what he knows it's right. He doesn't care about the harm he causes, but he knows he should, and that brings him shame.

That's why in Burial, if he embraces the "Ashley and me VS the world" mentality, he is SO calm with all the vile things he's doing, that even his sister is shocked, and both demons/entities take an interest in him (as he likely "hatches" into a Tar Soul like Ashley in that route, instead of being just a grime one like in Decay, wich we explicitly know is all about self-perception - aka despite lack awareness of most things, Ashley was the only one between the siblings, up to that point, to not kid herself about the evil they did).

That's why Ashley doesn't just break her promise about never mentioning Nina again, but also points out that Andrew chose to kill her too.

Being "the doormat" that is simply "too weak willed" to tell Ashley no is far more comfortable for him than admiting that, even if she had never been born, even if he had been an only child, he would still be a terrible person, and would actively seak out someone like Ashley so he'd have someone who can understand and accept him.

"Snapping" at her only when she (admitedly) does horrible things to him that no one else would tolerate gives him a way out of acknowledging that there's a part of him that, no matter how much he loves Ashley, genuinely wants to hurt her simply because he's a monster too, not because of anything she did.

That's why he's so codependent to the point of killing himself right after murdering her - she's a terrible sister, friend, girlfriend and partner in crime, but she's still the scapegoat. If she's not around anymore, Andrew will run out of excuses, and in Decay he'd rather die than accept responsibility. In Burial? We'll see.

"Ashley is worse than Andrew" is and has always been bullshit. They're both violent, controlling, possessive, manipulative, and abusive towards each other in every way imaginable (verbal, psychological, physical, sexual). They're the exact same. And Andrew is well aware of it because, to some extent, Ashley is his creation as much as Renee's. And while he knows that should be tragic for several reasons (including the fact that he couldn't have been expected to act differently since he was just a child too) there's some part of him that is PROUD of having damaged his sister that much.

That's why he'll say things like "you're the most alluring thing I've ever laid eyes on", or mentally gush about how "his" Ashley summoned a demon on her first try, beat her to break her down even more, or actively use their feelings for each other to get her to fall in line, just like she does with him.

Andrew doesn't want Ashley to be "better", despite seeing all the harm she causes to everyone - including the two of them. At some point, he went from "Innocent child that should have never been raising another child, especially one like Ashley, because he's obviously unfit for the job and will accidentally enable her" to "Bastard that is actively shaping his sister/girlfriend to be the perfect scapegoat/partner in crime."

If she weren't exactly what she is, Andrew would have gotten rid of her a long time ago, like he did with all their victims.

incest without codependency is like an angel without wings

Valentines

in one of mukero’s free time events she mentions loving bunnies, i’ve been wanting to draw something like this for a while now hehe