hiiii i'm asking about basira as a dark/eye avatar💕

saintbleeding:

GOD IM SO GLAD I THOUGHT YOU’D NEVER ASK (just kidding i knew it would be u <3)

so like. here’s the thing right.

• so she interrupts the dark ritual obvi.
• and works at the institute
• one can definitely argue for her also being very touched by the hunt and that’s extremely valid but i have Other Thoughts abt that entity. so. another time.
• SO.
• so she definitely has exposure to both entities, and i feel like if you had to reduce basira’s character to a phrase, it would be “the power of wilful ignorance”. because she actually makes quite a lot of references to being on the brink of some sort of major realisation or other.
• and she then goes on to willfully shrink away from these realisations. like. repeatedly.
• plus she is incredibly good at tuning things out.
• (mag 095):
  MARTIN You weren’t listening?
  BASIRA No, I was reading.
• i mean, this exchange is funny, but it’s also so telling? i don’t think it’s a suggestion of her being able to like, magically turn off sensory input, but i do think it shows she’s very capable of just not looking at something
• later in 95, when martin’s like “but basira? the horrors?” she just goes “yeah but im reading these cool books so i’m good actually :)”:
  MARTIN How… Doesn’t it bother you?!
  BASIRA Of course it bothers me, but so do a lot of things I can’t change. So you make the best of things.
• w o w ok
• it’s not that she is deluding herself into thinking that reality is not what it is. it’s that she closes her eyes to things that are painful or not useful.
• similarly, there’s the whole thing of how she escapes the unknowing: it’s not that she just blindly gropes in the darkness of meaninglessness. she considers pieces of information, assesses their usefulness, and curates accordingly. she does this with relative ease, as well – she literally says at one point “too much, too much” and just. moves on.
• after daisy’s death, she gets real quiet. now, of course, this is. a pretty normal reaction to something like what she just went through. but i think it’s also really interesting that in one of basira’s really key character moments, the audience is left to form her characterisation in their heads by an absence of words or input on her part. her silence says as much or more as her words would.
• almost like how someone heavily touched by the eye and the dark could be able to impart information where there is none.
• i feel like i would be remiss in making this post without mentioning what a blind eye she turned to daisy’s actions when they were both still police – though i will say i think that that’s a much bigger discussion, with much, much bigger implications, than what i want to discuss here, but it bears mentioning even so.
• for good or ill, basira is extremely good at choosing what info she does and does not want to see and take in
• eye/dark.
• fight me