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autisticblueteam:

This has probably been said somewhere before, god knows I wasn’t here for the peak discourse and discussion days, but sometimes I do find myself thinking about how fandom often oversells Daisy’s meanness to Jon in s4, specifically, in service of the ‘Jon surrounded by mean women’ joke.

This isn’t to say Daisy isn’t mean or that she’s not a mess—she’s both and I wouldn’t have her any other way—but frankly in s4 she really doesn’t get on Jon’s case that much. Sure, she joins in with the intervention about the live statements and she ribs him about moping, but these are not in any way on the scale of how Basira and Melanie interact with Jon on an episode after episode basis.

When she ribs him, it’s rude and blunt, sure, but she’s actively trying to get him out of his own doom spiral because she’s just as concerned as she may be fed up.

And her role in the intervention scene is noticeably smaller and less aggro than the others. When she interjects, she’s not particularly angry—she recognises he’s hunting, puts together the details because she recognises the pattern, then actually speaks up in his defence at one point and only doesn’t push it because it’d be starting an argument about her own problems with Basira that she doesn’t really want to be having in that particular moment in time.

ARCHIVIST: (overlapping) No, that’s not what I meant. (shaky inhale) I was walking the streets; I – I thought I was trying to clear my head… DAISY: But you were hunting. ARCHIVIST: Apparently. I, I found a woman who, every year on her birthday, wakes up in a fresh grave, just for her. DAISY: And the third was after the coffin.ALT
BASIRA: You’re a danger, John. A monster. You’re hurting innocent people. ARCHIVIST: So did Daisy. BASIRA: Shut up. It’s not the same thing at all. DAISY: Basira. He has a point. BASIRA: You didn’t know what you were doing. [Daisy makes a pained sound, as if to contradict her, but stops.]ALT

Like, Jon is very much making a point about Basira’s hypocrisy that Daisy then makes a point of agreeing with! But to get further into that matter would mean having to rehash one of her own ongoing arguments with Basira, which would be both a distraction from the matter at hand and the kind of personal business a private person like Daisy would rather avoid dealing with in a group setting.

Her only contribution to the actual discussion after this point is where, after Jon starts suggesting that the Web might be controlling him into taking these statements, she says (unfortunately misattributed to Melanie on the transcript site, it is definitely actually Daisy saying it):

DAISY: John, I – I’m not sure that it’s actually the – BASIRA: (overlapping) No. No, if he is being controlled, we need to know. And we need to know now. Do you know where she is?ALT

She tries to discourage him from following this line of thought, from trying to alleviate his guilt by blaming an outside force, because as we see in other conversations this season she’s already accepted her own fault in her own actions rather than fall into blaming something or someone else.

Yeah, she thinks Jon should stop taking live statements, but this is a standard she’s also holding herself to. And she’s not beyond talking behind Jon’s back (see: the planning stages of the Ny-Ålesund trip, or her and Basira running off without warning in Rotten Core). But at no point in s4 does Daisy actually get truly angry and spiteful with Jon or cut him any less slack than she’s cutting herself. And ymmv on said slack, I suppose, given she is expecting herself to die, but sometimes I see posts where it feels like people have decided 'well, the joke is that all the women are mean to Jon in s4, so clearly Daisy was also mean to Jon in s4’ without actually thinking back through her actual behaviour.

She may be blunt and gruff and sometimes fail to think ahead, after all she’s still Daisy Tonner, and Jon understandably still finds her difficult to truly lean on both because of who they both are as people and because of their history, but she actually kind of is in Jon’s corner for most of s4 and I think that gets lost in the fanon shuffle sometimes.