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Drawn by

Look at 'er! So pathetic!

__________________

"Please welcome Lucy to the show. She says she's an abusive sister who wants the best for her brother. And hidden camera footage seems to corroborate her claims, as I'm sure many of you have seen!" The camera cut to Terri Ballon walking amongst the audience. "Lucy, tell us, what is going on?"
The caption went up: "Worst Sister in America"
The sad-eyed goth set her hands across her lap and looked straight into the camera. With a delicate motion, she spoke: "Sigh..." At least, she tried to speak. She'd open her mouth and half-gasp in trying to say something. Her face warmed until her cheeks felt molten, and she realized she was going to cry if she didn't say anything. Her voice quivered as she said, "My name is Lucy Loud, and I have done terrible things. I... I just wanted... wanted to tell the world of how much grief I've brought upon my brother Lincoln." She rubbed her face with the edge of her hand. "I've not cursed this planet for 10 years, and yet I've already decayed into a terrible person."
She ignored Terri as the spiffy host cut through the tense room towards her side. "You're a terrible person? Is that what you are, or what you say you are?"
Seeing a nine-year-old girl so near tears left the audience a disquieted mass of concern, but Lucy knew better than to believe she had any of their sympathy. How many views had that video amassed? Two million? Three? Did it matter? She wasn't here to be pitied. All this amounted to was a follow-up, a public humiliation.
"I am." Her face twitched with every effort to hold back tears, each pulse hitting with ever greater strength. Through some arcane power, she succeeded.
After a minute of silence, Terri offered a saving throw: "Well, you know, it's appreciable that you know that you've done wrong, Lucy. It's rare for people to come out and admit it. Some people would say that you're still pretty far from the worst."
Lucy rubbed her face. Was she really so narcissistic as to believe the title of the video? Of course not. Terri knew her stuff, for she lived to dredge this human trash for others' entertainment day in, day out. America absolutely was home to girls exponentially worse than herself in ways she knew better than to dwell upon.
But reality was the eternal fleeting victim of cold escapist memes of boring middle-class twits excited to rage against some new approved mark. And she, Lucy Loud, would gladly be a punching bag if it brought even one extra hand of comfort back to him.
This dimension of misery was her penance.
Terri flipped her hair back with a swing of the head and said to the camera, “Well then! Before we get too far into this, I have another guest here who claims that the hype and hate is way overwrought, misdirected, and exaggerated. And I don’t know about you, but I’d be inclined to take his word for it.”
Lucy looked up and over to the stage entrance, knowing in her heart who was about to stroll up. In times like this, the questions came fast. Did she really love him? Was she sure? If she did…
“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Lincoln Loud!”
…why would she ever hurt him?

______________________________

Part of my toss into the ring of angsty dramatic Loud House fanfiction, Rotten Apple: www.fanfiction.net/s/13964668/…

Because ultra-angsty, tonally unfitting fanfics about a 7-12 children's comedy cartoon will never get old!

I've decided to get some spoilerific artwork done of future chapters and events being that I'm still so early in the story (only two chapters published and only six-and-a-half chapters written) and yet I've already plotted things out very far (quite literally to the very end)

So spoiler alert-alert!
Background: In a fit of frustrated anger, Lincoln's sisters pulled a Syngenesophobia, nearly killing him in a sister fight gone wrong and leave him in a wheelchair, with their sibling bond seemingly severed for good in what's now known as "the Incident." Unlike Syngenesophobia, however, rather than deal with the guilt in private, they turn themselves in and head to juvie, and the typical Loud Family Drama unfolds. The sisters are ultimately sentenced to house arrest, but are offered commutation that'll see their sentences reduced. However, due to the sheer bad luck of being framed for a Humiliation Gone Wrong, Lucy loses this opportunity and instead has to serve a full sentence. During her time at home with just Lincoln (and Lily), the two gradually rebond and reconcile, complete with Lucy doing something so awesome for Lincoln that he seriously considers forgiving her. However, it's still too soon. Some harder feelings and trauma still linger and beyond the walls of the Loud House all is not well.

Most notably there's a gray-haired girl named Jackie-Lynn Majors who dogmatically refuses to offer the Loud sisters any forgiveness or quarter, and yet also has taken Lucy under her watch as a sort of pseudo-friend. There's the L.O.U.D. Defense Club, originally meant as a school support group for Lincoln but which has now transmogrified into a targeted harassment club that, thanks to the circumstances, now has Lucy all to themselves. And finally there's little Lucy herself. In her darkest hours, she found herself alone, ostracized, and increasingly taken by the warp of toxic guilt over not just the Incident but so many past events involving Lincoln.
More than a year has passed since the Incident and Lincoln's no longer wheelchair-bound (in fact to his slight disappointment, as he's come to adore the sick tricks he's learned to do with it). The other sisters are back, now free, but Lucy remains under house arrest. What's more, her mental state has deteriorated into something awful and the sheer guilt she has over what she's done has long since become self-destructive. She's a rotten apple and she wants the world to know it...
Here's the sitch: Lucy's toxic guilt has gotten the best of her. For all she's done for Lincoln this past year to make everything up to him and earn her forgiveness hard (most notably that Very Awesome Thing she did in the summer and her part in his Best Christmas Ever but also dozens of smaller things), she finds it near impossible to forgive herself, not helped by the continued harassment she receives from the L.O.U.D. and Jackie-Lynn's efforts to convince her of her rottenness. Thus as her relationship with Lincoln progresses, her relationship with herself collapses and derails the reconciliation process.
Furthermore as time goes on and the Incident starts fading into memory, she's noticed the love and attention so many others gave Lincoln has been declining as well as new comedies and tragedies come and go in people's lives and everyone starts moving on. In the aftermath of the Incident, Lincoln was everyone's wonder boy. Now he's just another kid again. She is dedicated to nothing less than making sure Lincoln knows he's loved and is safe in the hands of this community, and also becomes so convinced that she really is a bad person after all that she wants the world to know it -- her guilt now so toxic and overwhelming that she's succumbed to major depressive disorder and severe self-hatred.
And so we come to her hair-brained scheme to reignite the town's love for that saintly boy Lincoln and curse her for ever laying a finger on him. With help from Charlotte and unintentional help from Lisa and Lola, Lucy collects multiple video angles of herself looking like a demon sister, as well as other bad events in Loud House history, and compiles them into a video titled "WORST SISTER EVER" which is posted online for the whole world to see.
All this to inspire people to give Lincoln their love and realize that she is the piece of trash she now believes herself to be. Call it social suicide. Lucy sees it as a necessary exposé.

Recall that Charlotte is:

Totally not Lotte!

But as with everything in this wacky universe, things got out of control when the video went viral to such an extent that Lucy wound up getting her own segment on the exploitative trash-TV program The Terri Ballon Show, where Ms. Ballon interviews who many now believe may be the Worst Sister in America.

The consequences are just getting started too! As we'll see in the future...

But you know what? To her, it was worth it. Because now people will remember the name Lincoln Loud as one to respect, and it doesn't take more than a day before Lincoln's celebrated at school. It's like the high days of the L.O.U.D. all over again! Seeing him so happy and joyful, eagerly anticipating every new day that comes -- there's no greater feeling. It's such a 180 from the days when he was down on himself, fearful of his sisters, and felt like he was all alone. At this point, who cares about how she's feeling? As long as she can springboard Lincoln to better things.

What frustrates Lucy's family, ESPECIALLY Lincoln, is that Lucy wasn't even the worst sister in the house. Heck, she wasn't even the worst of Lincoln's younger sisters, let alone the worst sister in America. Some would even argue she wasn't even the worst person sleeping in that particular room.

Lynn Jr. in particular felt the creeping pangs of regret and negative-envy build up in her belly. She's long since come to see that she is the one truly at fault over the Incident, that one and many others in the past. Maybe her other sisters had some fault in it too as they always do, but Lynn's the source of the drama. Yet once again Lucy suffered for her actions. Rotten Apple should be a Lynn story. It should be a tale of Lynn estranged from her abused brother and hated by the community, desperate to make things right while the rest of the siblings have their own stories in the background. But it's not. In fact, Lynn's been getting off infuriatingly easy time and time again. For months now, the same refrain played in her ears: "This should be happening to me. This should be happening to me. This should be happening to ME." Yet every time Lynn begs the universe to spare Lucy and bring its karmic wrath down upon her, Lucy instead gets punted deeper into despair and antiglory. Lynn's finally realizing that her actions have dire consequences, and the thing that makes it so awful for her is that she's NOT the one facing the fire. Rather, it's her sister and roommate who has been smacked by the hammer of fate, a hammer that should have smacked HER. Even the Bad Luck Incident, something for which Lynn didn't even fully regret or see as wrong until after the Incident, is now pinned on Lucy in other's eyes. It's like the universe is torturing Lynn through Lucy, and she's not dealing with it all that well. She's sad and angry, remorseful and vengeful alike. Right now, she's still 6 months behind Lucy in terms of reconciliation with Lincoln, so she has to focus her efforts on him first. But someone has to pay for this... right? Or is that just going to cause this to all start over again?
At first, no one other than Lucy herself and Charlotte knew that Lucy is actually the one behind the video, and even Lucy doesn't know that it was Charlotte who amplified the video's reach or gave it such an obnoxious title. Though eventually Lincoln figures it out, as do his friends and sisters.
Plus... Lincoln also has grown to despise many things about this whole ordeal. He despises the harassment his sisters have faced ever since the Incident, despite his early approval of them facing SOME sort of payback. He was fine with SOME retribution, within reason. He despises Lucy's atrociously bad luck as the girl is currently facing a seemingly endless assault of negativity (trust me, this isn't the only thing that's happened). And most obnoxiously to him, he hates this perception that he's some divine saint of a human too good for this sinful Earth. For starters, it sets up expectations in others' minds that he couldn't possibly live up to, AND it also over-excites people to literally anything his family does wrong. He's just a normal middle-class boy who just happened to get involved in wacky hijinks. Making him out to be a saint is just going to end badly at some point, and he knows it. It doesn't allow him to be a person. If he's St. Lincoln, he can't be Lincoln Loud. Man... even when they help him and overcome their flaws to do something selfless and reconciliatory for his sake, his sisters still manage to put him in a bad spot.

Also, he despises these crappy exploitative talkshows whose only purpose is to get people to laugh at others' expense.
Alas, while he does appreciate Lucy's constant efforts for atonement and reconciliation, he feels this has gone way too far. All he ever wanted was respect and for his family to understand the error of their ways. Sure, a little payback was fine. Sure, he was angry and scared once upon a time.. But THIS isn't what he ever wanted... THIS is overkill! He didn't want any of his sisters to be so totally destroyed, and yet he had to watch all this bad juju happen to Lucy. Worse, he feels he could have done something, if only he wasn't so selfish as to keep her at arm's length for so long. Her life was already pretty much ruined after the Incident, but they were working things out between themselves. Yet now out of some stupid idea that she could get the world to love him by sacrificing herself, we're basically back to the post-Incident days in terms of social blowback.

Yeah, people are giving him a lot of love, comfort, and appreciation... long after he's gotten over the worst of it, after he's been fixed right up even. That's probably what gets Lincoln the most. It's not like he DIDN'T get loads of appreciation. His best friends created a whole club for him that attracted pretty much half the town to his side, at least before it got corrupted and he had to disband it by force. And his sisters, he's already done the whole rigmarole of angsting and forgiveness (to a great extent). It's not like the Incident happened a week ago -- he's been working things out with them for many months now, and even though he still needs more time for the more tender sides of it, as far as he cares, he's worked it out with them. And then there's Lucy. I speak no hyperbole when I repeat that the Very Awesome Thing she did endeared him to her far more than any sappy apology or joint therapy session. These two were cool by this point. So what on Earth possessed Lucy to do this? Simple: that festering self-hatred that he spent so long ignoring.
What a mess!
And the mess is only going to get messier!
I didn't post it fully, but Lincoln's on the Terri Ballon Show as well. He tries arguing against the meme, but I felt there were way too many "minute" spoilers in his speech defending Lucy. I'm fine spoiling the larger beats and some details (especially considering I'm 100% open about the fact this fic is following certain well-worn beats of other stories -- up to a certain point, at least), but some other details I want to keep under wraps until those chapters go live.
By the way, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that a certain OTHER Incident is busted wide open, though Lucy may have fudged some details so as to not get her whole family separated. Will Rotten Apple wind up becoming a stealth NSL fic? (Please, God no!!) And when Lincoln's in such an advanced reconciliatory state of mind now that most of the family's sins and flaws have been addressed and resolved, you can only imagine how poorly Lincoln would handle it. It's one thing when NSL is a fresh, raw event as almost all NSL fanfics are. But things would hit so differently if they unfold now. Lincoln's the furthest thing from upset and certainly wouldn't tolerate his family being ripped asunder over something they've long since worked out. Heck, he openly laughs at the Bad Luck Incident these days. He doesn't even tolerate people harassing his sisters over the Incident, and they literally nearly killed him! While he absolutely loves his sisters, sometimes he kinda hates them because they pull thoughtless crap like this...
On that note...
Feel free to create your own context if you so desire! Maybe in your headcanon, this is actually a big talkshow panel about the Loud sisters following No Such Luck, trying to figure out which one is the worst of them all? Or maybe it's something else entirely, like a big exposé on this Michigan child incest ring... or Lucy's been outed as a Manson-like mass murderer. Or perhaps Lucy's not the subject of the segment herself but is just giving her own argument that one of her other sisters is. Have fun! Go crazy! And don't worry, Rotten Apple will be resuming soon enough! I just need some extra time to procrastinate (and brush off long COVID).

Description

Drawn by

Look at 'er! So pathetic!

__________________

"Please welcome Lucy to the show. She says she's an abusive sister who wants the best for her brother. And hidden camera footage seems to corroborate her claims, as I'm sure many of you have seen!" The camera cut to Terri Ballon walking amongst the audience. "Lucy, tell us, what is going on?"
The caption went up: "Worst Sister in America"
The sad-eyed goth set her hands across her lap and looked straight into the camera. With a delicate motion, she spoke: "Sigh..." At least, she tried to speak. She'd open her mouth and half-gasp in trying to say something. Her face warmed until her cheeks felt molten, and she realized she was going to cry if she didn't say anything. Her voice quivered as she said, "My name is Lucy Loud, and I have done terrible things. I... I just wanted... wanted to tell the world of how much grief I've brought upon my brother Lincoln." She rubbed her face with the edge of her hand. "I've not cursed this planet for 10 years, and yet I've already decayed into a terrible person."
She ignored Terri as the spiffy host cut through the tense room towards her side. "You're a terrible person? Is that what you are, or what you say you are?"
Seeing a nine-year-old girl so near tears left the audience a disquieted mass of concern, but Lucy knew better than to believe she had any of their sympathy. How many views had that video amassed? Two million? Three? Did it matter? She wasn't here to be pitied. All this amounted to was a follow-up, a public humiliation.
"I am." Her face twitched with every effort to hold back tears, each pulse hitting with ever greater strength. Through some arcane power, she succeeded.
After a minute of silence, Terri offered a saving throw: "Well, you know, it's appreciable that you know that you've done wrong, Lucy. It's rare for people to come out and admit it. Some people would say that you're still pretty far from the worst."
Lucy rubbed her face. Was she really so narcissistic as to believe the title of the video? Of course not. Terri knew her stuff, for she lived to dredge this human trash for others' entertainment day in, day out. America absolutely was home to girls exponentially worse than herself in ways she knew better than to dwell upon.
But reality was the eternal fleeting victim of cold escapist memes of boring middle-class twits excited to rage against some new approved mark. And she, Lucy Loud, would gladly be a punching bag if it brought even one extra hand of comfort back to him.
This dimension of misery was her penance.
Terri flipped her hair back with a swing of the head and said to the camera, “Well then! Before we get too far into this, I have another guest here who claims that the hype and hate is way overwrought, misdirected, and exaggerated. And I don’t know about you, but I’d be inclined to take his word for it.”
Lucy looked up and over to the stage entrance, knowing in her heart who was about to stroll up. In times like this, the questions came fast. Did she really love him? Was she sure? If she did…
“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Lincoln Loud!”
…why would she ever hurt him?

______________________________

Part of my toss into the ring of angsty dramatic Loud House fanfiction, Rotten Apple: www.fanfiction.net/s/13964668/…

Because ultra-angsty, tonally unfitting fanfics about a 7-12 children's comedy cartoon will never get old!

I've decided to get some spoilerific artwork done of future chapters and events being that I'm still so early in the story (only two chapters published and only six-and-a-half chapters written) and yet I've already plotted things out very far (quite literally to the very end)

So spoiler alert-alert!
Background: In a fit of frustrated anger, Lincoln's sisters pulled a Syngenesophobia, nearly killing him in a sister fight gone wrong and leave him in a wheelchair, with their sibling bond seemingly severed for good in what's now known as "the Incident." Unlike Syngenesophobia, however, rather than deal with the guilt in private, they turn themselves in and head to juvie, and the typical Loud Family Drama unfolds. The sisters are ultimately sentenced to house arrest, but are offered commutation that'll see their sentences reduced. However, due to the sheer bad luck of being framed for a Humiliation Gone Wrong, Lucy loses this opportunity and instead has to serve a full sentence. During her time at home with just Lincoln (and Lily), the two gradually rebond and reconcile, complete with Lucy doing something so awesome for Lincoln that he seriously considers forgiving her. However, it's still too soon. Some harder feelings and trauma still linger and beyond the walls of the Loud House all is not well.

Most notably there's a gray-haired girl named Jackie-Lynn Majors who dogmatically refuses to offer the Loud sisters any forgiveness or quarter, and yet also has taken Lucy under her watch as a sort of pseudo-friend. There's the L.O.U.D. Defense Club, originally meant as a school support group for Lincoln but which has now transmogrified into a targeted harassment club that, thanks to the circumstances, now has Lucy all to themselves. And finally there's little Lucy herself. In her darkest hours, she found herself alone, ostracized, and increasingly taken by the warp of toxic guilt over not just the Incident but so many past events involving Lincoln.
More than a year has passed since the Incident and Lincoln's no longer wheelchair-bound (in fact to his slight disappointment, as he's come to adore the sick tricks he's learned to do with it). The other sisters are back, now free, but Lucy remains under house arrest. What's more, her mental state has deteriorated into something awful and the sheer guilt she has over what she's done has long since become self-destructive. She's a rotten apple and she wants the world to know it...
Here's the sitch: Lucy's toxic guilt has gotten the best of her. For all she's done for Lincoln this past year to make everything up to him and earn her forgiveness hard (most notably that Very Awesome Thing she did in the summer and her part in his Best Christmas Ever but also dozens of smaller things), she finds it near impossible to forgive herself, not helped by the continued harassment she receives from the L.O.U.D. and Jackie-Lynn's efforts to convince her of her rottenness. Thus as her relationship with Lincoln progresses, her relationship with herself collapses and derails the reconciliation process.
Furthermore as time goes on and the Incident starts fading into memory, she's noticed the love and attention so many others gave Lincoln has been declining as well as new comedies and tragedies come and go in people's lives and everyone starts moving on. In the aftermath of the Incident, Lincoln was everyone's wonder boy. Now he's just another kid again. She is dedicated to nothing less than making sure Lincoln knows he's loved and is safe in the hands of this community, and also becomes so convinced that she really is a bad person after all that she wants the world to know it -- her guilt now so toxic and overwhelming that she's succumbed to major depressive disorder and severe self-hatred.
And so we come to her hair-brained scheme to reignite the town's love for that saintly boy Lincoln and curse her for ever laying a finger on him. With help from Charlotte and unintentional help from Lisa and Lola, Lucy collects multiple video angles of herself looking like a demon sister, as well as other bad events in Loud House history, and compiles them into a video titled "WORST SISTER EVER" which is posted online for the whole world to see.
All this to inspire people to give Lincoln their love and realize that she is the piece of trash she now believes herself to be. Call it social suicide. Lucy sees it as a necessary exposé.

Recall that Charlotte is:

Totally not Lotte!

But as with everything in this wacky universe, things got out of control when the video went viral to such an extent that Lucy wound up getting her own segment on the exploitative trash-TV program The Terri Ballon Show, where Ms. Ballon interviews who many now believe may be the Worst Sister in America.

The consequences are just getting started too! As we'll see in the future...

But you know what? To her, it was worth it. Because now people will remember the name Lincoln Loud as one to respect, and it doesn't take more than a day before Lincoln's celebrated at school. It's like the high days of the L.O.U.D. all over again! Seeing him so happy and joyful, eagerly anticipating every new day that comes -- there's no greater feeling. It's such a 180 from the days when he was down on himself, fearful of his sisters, and felt like he was all alone. At this point, who cares about how she's feeling? As long as she can springboard Lincoln to better things.

What frustrates Lucy's family, ESPECIALLY Lincoln, is that Lucy wasn't even the worst sister in the house. Heck, she wasn't even the worst of Lincoln's younger sisters, let alone the worst sister in America. Some would even argue she wasn't even the worst person sleeping in that particular room.

Lynn Jr. in particular felt the creeping pangs of regret and negative-envy build up in her belly. She's long since come to see that she is the one truly at fault over the Incident, that one and many others in the past. Maybe her other sisters had some fault in it too as they always do, but Lynn's the source of the drama. Yet once again Lucy suffered for her actions. Rotten Apple should be a Lynn story. It should be a tale of Lynn estranged from her abused brother and hated by the community, desperate to make things right while the rest of the siblings have their own stories in the background. But it's not. In fact, Lynn's been getting off infuriatingly easy time and time again. For months now, the same refrain played in her ears: "This should be happening to me. This should be happening to me. This should be happening to ME." Yet every time Lynn begs the universe to spare Lucy and bring its karmic wrath down upon her, Lucy instead gets punted deeper into despair and antiglory. Lynn's finally realizing that her actions have dire consequences, and the thing that makes it so awful for her is that she's NOT the one facing the fire. Rather, it's her sister and roommate who has been smacked by the hammer of fate, a hammer that should have smacked HER. Even the Bad Luck Incident, something for which Lynn didn't even fully regret or see as wrong until after the Incident, is now pinned on Lucy in other's eyes. It's like the universe is torturing Lynn through Lucy, and she's not dealing with it all that well. She's sad and angry, remorseful and vengeful alike. Right now, she's still 6 months behind Lucy in terms of reconciliation with Lincoln, so she has to focus her efforts on him first. But someone has to pay for this... right? Or is that just going to cause this to all start over again?
At first, no one other than Lucy herself and Charlotte knew that Lucy is actually the one behind the video, and even Lucy doesn't know that it was Charlotte who amplified the video's reach or gave it such an obnoxious title. Though eventually Lincoln figures it out, as do his friends and sisters.
Plus... Lincoln also has grown to despise many things about this whole ordeal. He despises the harassment his sisters have faced ever since the Incident, despite his early approval of them facing SOME sort of payback. He was fine with SOME retribution, within reason. He despises Lucy's atrociously bad luck as the girl is currently facing a seemingly endless assault of negativity (trust me, this isn't the only thing that's happened). And most obnoxiously to him, he hates this perception that he's some divine saint of a human too good for this sinful Earth. For starters, it sets up expectations in others' minds that he couldn't possibly live up to, AND it also over-excites people to literally anything his family does wrong. He's just a normal middle-class boy who just happened to get involved in wacky hijinks. Making him out to be a saint is just going to end badly at some point, and he knows it. It doesn't allow him to be a person. If he's St. Lincoln, he can't be Lincoln Loud. Man... even when they help him and overcome their flaws to do something selfless and reconciliatory for his sake, his sisters still manage to put him in a bad spot.

Also, he despises these crappy exploitative talkshows whose only purpose is to get people to laugh at others' expense.
Alas, while he does appreciate Lucy's constant efforts for atonement and reconciliation, he feels this has gone way too far. All he ever wanted was respect and for his family to understand the error of their ways. Sure, a little payback was fine. Sure, he was angry and scared once upon a time.. But THIS isn't what he ever wanted... THIS is overkill! He didn't want any of his sisters to be so totally destroyed, and yet he had to watch all this bad juju happen to Lucy. Worse, he feels he could have done something, if only he wasn't so selfish as to keep her at arm's length for so long. Her life was already pretty much ruined after the Incident, but they were working things out between themselves. Yet now out of some stupid idea that she could get the world to love him by sacrificing herself, we're basically back to the post-Incident days in terms of social blowback.

Yeah, people are giving him a lot of love, comfort, and appreciation... long after he's gotten over the worst of it, after he's been fixed right up even. That's probably what gets Lincoln the most. It's not like he DIDN'T get loads of appreciation. His best friends created a whole club for him that attracted pretty much half the town to his side, at least before it got corrupted and he had to disband it by force. And his sisters, he's already done the whole rigmarole of angsting and forgiveness (to a great extent). It's not like the Incident happened a week ago -- he's been working things out with them for many months now, and even though he still needs more time for the more tender sides of it, as far as he cares, he's worked it out with them. And then there's Lucy. I speak no hyperbole when I repeat that the Very Awesome Thing she did endeared him to her far more than any sappy apology or joint therapy session. These two were cool by this point. So what on Earth possessed Lucy to do this? Simple: that festering self-hatred that he spent so long ignoring.
What a mess!
And the mess is only going to get messier!
I didn't post it fully, but Lincoln's on the Terri Ballon Show as well. He tries arguing against the meme, but I felt there were way too many "minute" spoilers in his speech defending Lucy. I'm fine spoiling the larger beats and some details (especially considering I'm 100% open about the fact this fic is following certain well-worn beats of other stories -- up to a certain point, at least), but some other details I want to keep under wraps until those chapters go live.
By the way, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that a certain OTHER Incident is busted wide open, though Lucy may have fudged some details so as to not get her whole family separated. Will Rotten Apple wind up becoming a stealth NSL fic? (Please, God no!!) And when Lincoln's in such an advanced reconciliatory state of mind now that most of the family's sins and flaws have been addressed and resolved, you can only imagine how poorly Lincoln would handle it. It's one thing when NSL is a fresh, raw event as almost all NSL fanfics are. But things would hit so differently if they unfold now. Lincoln's the furthest thing from upset and certainly wouldn't tolerate his family being ripped asunder over something they've long since worked out. Heck, he openly laughs at the Bad Luck Incident these days. He doesn't even tolerate people harassing his sisters over the Incident, and they literally nearly killed him! While he absolutely loves his sisters, sometimes he kinda hates them because they pull thoughtless crap like this...
On that note...
Feel free to create your own context if you so desire! Maybe in your headcanon, this is actually a big talkshow panel about the Loud sisters following No Such Luck, trying to figure out which one is the worst of them all? Or maybe it's something else entirely, like a big exposé on this Michigan child incest ring... or Lucy's been outed as a Manson-like mass murderer. Or perhaps Lucy's not the subject of the segment herself but is just giving her own argument that one of her other sisters is. Have fun! Go crazy! And don't worry, Rotten Apple will be resuming soon enough! I just need some extra time to procrastinate (and brush off long COVID).