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.
ETA EVER SO MUCH LATER: eventually I will get around to actually sticking this shit on AO3 or something but life is full of things. I have no idea why the previous post has disappeared off tumblr. http://web.archive.org/web/20200513131945/https://findingfeather.tumblr.com/post/189634505492/not-to-make-fun-jokes-serioustm-but-its-always is the WayBack Machine link to it for now.
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.)