The CRUCIAL thing about Sissy that is right in front of us

Cobel’s aunt SISSY is SEVERED. maybe the first person to ever BE severed, by her own niece, in order to take care of Charlotte Cobel. let me rap to you:  

The first sign of this is Sissy never once goes or attempts to go upstairs. Cobel is able to crash out, nap, huff paint etc for hours because she knows Sissy cannot follow her up there without becoming her innie. Sissy has to yell up the stairs to communicate with her — “do you want to come down and tell me what this is all about?” Sissy cannot come upstairs without becoming her innie.  

The boundary being upstairs/downstairs also mirrors the severed floor/was probably the inspiration for it, and the way Gemma is currently trapped by her innie on the floor above her. And echoes thematically the importance of basements in the show that Dan Erickson just mentioned the After the Episode  

So why did she get severed in the first place? “I would have cared for her MYSELF” the hidden barb here in Cobel’s delivery—Sissy didn’t take care of Cobel’s mom Charlotte through her terminal illness, her INNIE did. She abandoned her own sister as she was dying of the terminal illness Lumon gave her.

This is why Sissy can remember “listening to her wheezing” but not, apparently, her last words. Cobel “tests” Sissy with that bc she doesn’t know them, only her innie (uppie?!) would. Ditto why she can’t tell Cobel where the key to her mother’s room is; she’s not the one who hid it    

Sissy is a likely patient zero for the severance procedure as a someone close to Cobel who is also an early Lumon faithful. Clock the plaque upstairs—Youth Apprentice Maven sure sounds like child labor trailblazer. Cobel says she’s the one who gave Hampton “his thirst” for ether, likely as the main indoctrinating/recruiter of local children to the ether factory.

see also “why do you bring nothing but woe into my life?”: likely a reference to Cobel asking Sissy to take care of her mom so she could stay in school. Cobel could have offered severance to mitigate the burden of what she was asking Sissy to do, OR  Charlotte already detested Sissy and Lumon so much, as the causes of her long terminal illness from the ether factory, that she wouldn’t agree to live with Sissy or let her care for her unless it wasn’t “her”. Hampton /the waiter makes a point of saying Charlotte hated Lumon even more than he did, and they seem to have similar experiences of addiction and sickness because of the ether factory.

Sissy didn’t just kill Charlotte by taking out her tube-she killed her by recruiting her to the ether factory that made her sick in the first place