Tma and boundaries?
OH this is such a good one because I have such a strong opinion on these re: Jon and Georgie
So I think, from her perspective, Georgie was entirely within her rights to do and say what she did to Jon in S4. We, as an audience, may not like it because we know the full scope of Jon’s perspective. We know he needs the tapes. We know he needs to stay in the Institute. We understand what’s going on with him. Georgie doesn’t have that! The whole time he stayed with her he was vague and cagey, which, understandable. But Georgie set down a ground rule. She said no spooky shit in her house and no tapes, and Jon broke that. She established a boundary, and even when we understand why Jon broke it, she doesn’t. From her perspective she asked him a simple thing and he ignored her so I think it’s only fair that she sees what Jon is involved in as something he is choosing. Sure, she knows spooky shit is real because of her encounter, but she doesn’t Get It. Doesn’t understand the powers and the pull of the institute and what Jon has found himself trapped in.
With Melanie, Melanie isn’t as trapped as Jon is. She’s bound to the institute, but not the Beholding like he is, she’s Slaughter. And then the bullet is cut out and she starts to get help to deal with the root cause, her anger, because the powers don’t make us evil they just enhance the negativity that already exists within us. So to Georgie, she only has two examples to go by, Melanie who could escape, and Jon who couldn’t, and see can only see this as being Jon’s fault because she doesn’t have the full context of the situation. Her lack of knowledge leads to a lack of understanding. So I think, if you put yourself in her shoes, it’s actually very brave of her to say “I can only be one person’s support system at once without burning myself out too, I’m sorry I can’t be that for you because I already tried to help you and you broke my trust”. We just see it as painful because we’re looking from Jon’s perspective and can only see it as abandonment and betrayal. Which is what makes their dynamic so interesting to me because it really is this grey area of you can see both perspectives. You want Jon to be happy, because he really has no one for a lot of S4, but you also don’t want a woman to have to babysit a man she feels betrayed by out of obligation to fix him because I think we’re all sick of that.
We talk about Jon’s actions are trauma response a lot and how that makes a lot of his shittier things more understandable, but I think you’ve gotta apply that to other characters too. Georgie leaves him in the hospital when he wakes up and to this this is sad, because Jon just wants connection and we know he can’t get that from Melanie and Basira, and Martin isn’t around. But from Georgie’s perspective, it’s kind of obvious why she flees. To Georgie, this is the second time in her life she’s seen a corpse sit up and look at her, and it didn’t go great the last time.