I Have To Disagree With This.

I have to disagree with this.

We know she was aged up to around 25 in 2 from character documents, but in Classic, Anna is 18. Eighteen. She's the youngest character in the game after the Termites. And the Caravan was caught and captured five years ago. The Corpus page for the Caravan explicitly states that "the gymnasts, heavyweights, animal trainers along with the animals and the innocent freaks [aka, the children they kidnapped and experimented on and forced to perform] were killed instantly."

Anna was born mute. The Caravan gave her a voice through what she calls sorcery, and made her into a performer for them. This is when she was a child. When the Caravan was caught and slaughtered and she had to flee for her life, she was thirteen at most. She and Willow only escaped because of Var, whose back was broken in the process. She reached the town and was taken in by the Mellow family, but remained extremely anxious, paranoid, and defensive. And why wouldn't she? She spent her childhood in the Caravan and then was hunted down as a criminal when she was barely a teenager. Even if she did join the Caravan willingly, which is what she implies, she was probably less than ten years old at the time. That's not trying to join a child trafficking operation. That's a mute little girl seeing a circus performance and being entranced and wanting to run away and join it, and the circus agreeing and taking her with them. A circus who gave her everything she ever dreamed of, a voice, a purpose, the spotlight, all in exchange for simply helping recruit other children to join too. By the time she realized what she was really doing, she was either completely trapped or fleeing for her life, and again, even if she realized but still wanted to stay there and keep performing, she was twelve or thirteen at most.

She's not a good person. She does some horrible things. I'm not sure how much of this is going to stay the same in P2 due to her increased age - but there is far, far more to her than being "simply evil." She was as much a victim of the Caravan as Willow, even if she got the "good" end of the stick. She's rightfully paranoid and can't tell anyone about her past for fear of being murdered over it, despite being a child at the time. This is especially true after her adoptive parents died - though it's revealed that wasn't her fault at all (the father died in the war and the mother in the first outbreak), and she only killed Willow Mellow, she's still suspected of slaughtering the whole family to take their house. Of course she's going to shut down and end up isolating and clinging to anything that could give her any advantage in life. She wholeheartedly believes she can't talk about what happened if she wants to live, and directs all the blame for her current situation to herself ("I never should have joined the Caravan") because that's the one thing in the situation she had control over.

I was talking about this with a friend, but I'll share it here as well

in pathologic 2, the only one who doesn't get some sort of redemption, or receives a kind of justification for their actions, is anna angel

artemy can choose to forgive his father, simon, even oyun. big vlad gets the "I did it for my family" trope, the saburovs are shown to be trying to love each other once more, aglaya is given depth to her character - a purpose, full fleshed out morals, same with aspity

anna, on the other hand, doesn't change. she still acts antisocial and hostile, doesn't stop to consider her actions, goes her way to kidnap infants during an epidemic to "better her reputation"

the only thing the narrative has to offer her is pity, she mentally regresses to a child, and her ending is her alone, and isolated

I Have To Disagree With This.

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