bedes | There Is No BY15 in Ba Sing Se

As mad as I am about Shadow Milk being made into the main baddie (which you think I’d enjoy, as a Shadow Milk fan, but this is just a Bad writing decision), White Lily's "sacrifice" is easily the worst part about this update.

To recap:

"Suicidal person sacrifices themself" trope
"Traumatized person starts to realize they can be happy, then they immediately die" trope
It goes against the whole point of her character arc — she JUST learned that she doesn’t need a special reason to live and be happy
The letters she left highly imply that she planned this in advance, meaning that it really was suicide

The messages that Devsis is sending to their child player base (purposefully or not) include:

If you make mistakes, killing yourself to make up for it is a viable answer
The good ending for mentally ill women is death, for the greater good
Framing White Lily’s suicide as a form of freedom (“may your journey… be forever free…”) is genuinely an extremely dangerous message, as wanting freedom from life is a reason why many people in real life commit suicide — it serves as confirmation bias for those who are traumatized and think death is their only option