So, the TMA Season 4 “wait wait there’s more!” Jon Sims Trauma supplemental to the “So About That Abduction And Captivity … .” post I did a while back.
Some notes before I start:
- if you are really invested in the idea that any character (and I am explicitly looking at Basira and Georgie because they are the ones that tend to get held up in things I see as Unproblematic Faves, but I do mean any character and this also includes Martin and, obviously, Jon) did not, at some point in this season, behave in a selfish, hurtful, morally reprehensible fashion for which they bear full moral responsibility - in short if you think any of them did not at some point Do Bad Hurtful Shit to other people in order to attempt to assuage their own pain/terror at their loss of control - then you don’t want to read this, and you can spare us both a lot of aggravation by just moving along. Nobody has clean hands. Nobody.
- if you thought the other essay was heavy, this one’s going to be worse. It’s also going to deal very starkly and directly with the idea of being in an unwinnable situation, with no nifty Captain Kirk “hah hah I reprogrammed the computers to win!” Hail Mary. I’m going to be pulling out some realities of the situation all of these people are in that I find both some parts of fandom and the characters themselves are prone to ignore or forget because of the cognitive dissonances involved and what admitting how fucked they really are would do to their ability to get up in the morning.
- this essay is specifically focused on Jon Archivist Sims, but Jon is not the only one with trauma. Indeed he’s not even the only one with trauma affecting his actions - not by a long shot. I will touch on others’ trauma (as I did on Tim’s) and psychological states (as I did on Martin’s), but a. it’s not going to be as in-depth (as then I’d be here FOREVER), b. that anyone’s actions arise from trauma does not inherently erase moral agency (and we’ll get to that) but even when it does have an impact on their moral responsibility (and sometimes it does, and we’ll get to that too) it doesn’t necessarily change the effects, and that may in some ways be the part of this essay that may seem Heaviest? Because I’m gonna be getting into the fact here that moral agency and moral responsibility do not have a direct correlative relationship with scale of effect: to whit, harm can be done, incredible harm, without it being reasonable to blame anyone involved.
- In the other essay I did a brief thing about what my background in knowing about trauma at all was; here what I’m actually gonna foreground is the following: I am a queer AFAB neuroatypical (autistic) woman, a survivor of assault, and a member of a religious minority who has lived with depression her entire adult life (and most of my adolescent life, I was probably clinically diagnosable by 11) and whose depression includes significant suicidality that has at this point in my handling it literally become existentially boring. I mean it’s still also a huge mental health challenge and a risk to me, but it is also boring: I live perpetually with the fact that given an inch a significant chunk of my brain wants to kill me.
I don’t entirely like foregrounding this, but bluntly for the same reasons I made that first note up there and given some of the ways that fandom approaches these discussions these days, I already know it’s worth front-loading it: if you’re gonna come at me from any position that assumes I am not intimately familiar with the experience of being any of the things above, please just save us both the aggro and go talk about how much I suck somewhere other than the notes here.
[ “So Feather why are you even making this post if you’re that apprehensive?” Well firstly more than one friend went *!!!!* at the idea; but also secondly one of the things I’ve found happens as a result of these posts is at least a few people going “oh. OH THAT APPLIES TO MY LIFE, oh, uh.” often with extremely useful results. Plus I have Terminal Opinions Disorder and this is tumblr, if I can’t make seriously unwise leaps into talking about contentious things here where can I?]
So. Now comes the Read-More. And it’s gonna be a lot more. (Oh my god, you say, that was the PREAMBLE and there’s going to be MORE? I’m sorry I know exactly why I’m like this but well here we are.)
This is a fantastic meta. A lot of this hit really hard, especially the summary at the end of the others’ contradictory actions and victim-blaming towards Jon. Also, “No choice of his will make that stop. If he went and checked into the best mental health institution in the world and swore to never do … anything you decide is connected to him being an Archivist again he … would die.” I’ve seen a fair amount of discussion along the lines of" Jon should have gotten help or talked to people!“ Nobody would give Jon the time of day except Daisy. And yes maybe he could have gone to therapy but I doubt it would have been very effective due to his lack of options to remove himself from his stressors. Ultimately Jon is responsible for his own actions (giving people PTSD is BAD, Jon) but honestly it’s a miracle that he didn’t go full Monster mode sooner, given that everyone around him treated it as a foregone conclusion.
Another note on Georgie: of course she had the right to distance herself for her own mental health! But it’s worth mentioning she visited him in the hospital. Unless her plan was always to bail once he woke up, it really seems like she made the decision to cut ties after Jon woke up. Implying that Jon’s new unnatural abilities were the final straw, rather than his actions or own lack of mental health. Those were definitely a contributing factors, as she tells Martin, but I don’t think they were the only reason. This is not me bashing Georgie - again she absolutely had the right to distance herself from Spooky Stuff for her own safety. But doing so literally minutes after Jon woke up from a coma with little to no explanation was undeniably harsh.
I mean, tbh: Georgie actually behaves fairly poorly in S4, and it’s actually not about her decision to distance herself - it’s about how she actually doesn’t stick to that decision in ways that are both super passive-aggressive and actually totally inappropriate.
Because here’s the thing: when you walk out on someone the way she did - however good your reasons, and she DID have the right to do that - you lose any right whatsoever to involve yourself in their life, to insert yourself into their life, to comment on their life to them, to attempt to exert influence over their life, or to get involved in their emotional landscape.
You don’t get to have it both ways. Either you’re saying goodbye and you’re not picking up the phone and you’re accepting that some day you may read their obituary in the paper? Or you get to come and ask them about their life, what they’re doing, and give them opinions, and poke at their coping mechanisms and decisions to cut you out of their emotional discourse.
So what she does in “Infectious Doubts”? Not on.
( … another readmore I just CANNOT BE BRIEF I’m sorry)
I have been desperate for SO LONG for meta like this. I want to pull my hair out each time I see people hyping Georgie “Queen of Boundaries” Barker’s actions as some sort of gold standard ideal in season 4. I hereby refuse to discuss these scenes with anyone who hasn’t read this analysis as homework first lol
Those discussions always come back to the “right to distance herself” and “she has no obligation to support him” etc etc, but the actions she takes go so far beyond distancing herself—they include actively trying to convince the only person with any faith in Jon to give up on him as well, with excessive personal attacks and textbook victim-blaming. It is horrible to listen to, and I have no clue how Martin kept his cool as much as he did. Especially since he is also trapped at the Institute with no way to escape! No external friend to help him “get better”! Everything she said about Jon doubles up as an attack against Martin, and every word of it is wrong and unfair. She knows she has partial knowledge, actively refuses to accept the offer of more understanding, but then doubles down on her judgements.
What do you give up when you refuse to learn the detail’s of a person’s situation? The right to go around telling people what a toxic and terrible person they are for being in that situation. The right to tell people that trying to help them is no use. The right to say “he only wants people to suffer with him (and unless you leave him, that includes you).” The right to say “they don’t get credit for jumping on that grenade, because they’re the one who threw the grenade.” These comments are so far from what we know to be true about Jon as a person, and Martin knows it as much as we do, but as soon as he starts to disagree the “I’m not involved so don’t want to know more” door is slammed in his face.
This scene is so over-the-top “what NOT to do when cutting someone out of your life” that I never even thought of this analysis’s commentary on Infectious Doubts. She knew she wouldn’t reconnect with Jon, and she asked right away about Melanie, so with him barely saying a word she instantly gave him some very hurtful information: that he had been cut out, with still no explanation offered, but that Melanie was still welcome. It doesn’t take a psychologist to guess the mental effect that would have on a person.
I can’t count how many fix-it fics I’ve read that force Jon to grovel with apologies to restore their friendship. I can’t count how much meta I’ve seen that concludes with “Georgie did what she had to do, good for her! Queen of mental health! No one better criticize her or else!!”. None of the characters in this show are perfect, but seeing some of their biggest mistakes put on a pedastel as something we can all only aspire to is immensely frustrating.
I know most of this is about Georgie’s actions, but I also want to just complain about how Basira acted toward Jon, especially after finding out that Jon has been taking live statements. And I just want to get the feelings out and OP has done a great job at talking about a lot of it
Somehow I missed @cucumberkale’s addition which is tragic because YES and I have continued issues with exactly this and even the exact way Martin interacts with this issue in S5
that make my way more ambivalent to their relationship than most of fandom that I’ve seenand just….yeah. Very much so.The extent to which Jon Archivist is continually objectified and then punished for being so even by people supposedly on his side is…a thing.