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Jun. 22nd, 2020 02:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
iniquiticitymostly talk about caleb trauma and caleb ships and my perceptions about caleb-endgame and also about "why" people ship
so just this morning i read this sad but somewhat hopeful article about romanian orphans and how they were deprived of contact growing up and their various futures, and talks a lot about attachment theory and just how important it is that human children get love in their first two years. the main character of the article, so to speak, is a romanian orphan izidor, who had polio in his leg and was, for shitty government reasons, attachment-abandoned (in which he was fed sometimes but never loved) in a horrible orphanage until he was 3. he was adopted by an american family and there was trouble, but now he’s an adult that works at a KFC.
anyway at the end he talks about how he is aware that he is not like everyone else. that he is deficient in the attachments other people make. essentially that this is the way he is now, and it’s Not Great, but it’s OK. and that while his life is a good one, in the scale that he is successful in his recovery -- because many people who went through what he want through are not -- he is conscious that things are gone forever. that this horrible experience is an intrinsic part of him and his life. and when he looks at people who have relationships, which he can’t form, he doesn’t really understand or miss it.
anyway so also this poem. it was a good day. i worked 60 hours and fought with the bank. called my brother. said it was a good day.
in my past life as a hamilton fan i wrote a long story called on the construction and tending of greenhouses, and one thing that’s important to me in that story is while you can - should, hopefully do - recover from your trauma - a lot of the story is about healing - you carry it with you all the time, and it is a part of you for the rest of your life. you don’t ever “go back” -- this is normal for you. parts of you break and scar over, and of course the scar is better than whatever came previously, but you’ve got a scar, and that scar is not the unblemished flesh that came before. which isn’t to say that you’re not successful or not making it or not having a good day or not doing a good job! and the world, society, governements, etc - should accomodate the scarred, in whatever literal, metaphorical, or psychological way that you’re scarred.
some of the scarred will try to hard to become unscarred, in whatever ways they can. but i think a lot of people are happy/settled/content with their scar. this is good. this scar is part of my identity and some external desire for everyone to be unblemished isn’t part of their life. this experience is a part of me and will affect me forever.
so five paragraphs of explanation later, and because it’s behind a cut i’m not summarizing - caleb often comes to me as this kind of person, which is why i recoil so hard from the ideal of some kind of happily-ever-after with him. i think everything about his institutionalization, and him murdering his parents, has left him with a large scar. and it’s pretty obvious that he’s done SO much healing in 100 episodes. when we met him the wound was huge and festering and raw, and now it’s pale and hard, a good, solid scar. but so much of caleb’s identity is wrapped up in that moment, in his experiences with ikithon and the vollstrecker and the assembly. i think that, even in this possibility that they somehow make the empire not corrupt (??), he wouldn’t know what to do with himself. i mean sure he needs - appreciates - a touch of domesticity - coming home and someone asking you how you’re doing - but it’s SO hard for me to buy this “happily ever after” for caleb. especially because while i didn’t watch C1, i watched dalen’s closet and liam went ALL IN in what is Vax now. that Liam commits like that makes me feel like he won’t .... caleb won’t become unblemished unless liam thinks he should, and listening to liam talk about caleb doesn’t make me feel like that will happen, maybe ever.
i think caleb’s idea of a happily ever after is always finding some new evil to root out, some new corruption to purge, some new library to discover. caleb’s idea of domesticity is someone bringing him a sandwich which he doesn’t realize is there for several hours. caleb’s idea of showing affection is being useful, being helpful.
i think caleb’s idea of a good life is to always find a new evil to root out. i think caleb will always be trying to figure out how to atone, how to improve, how to become someone new and better. i think even after he has rebuilt his self-esteem -- and by the way i think we’re a long way to go there, becuase while in e1 caleb though he was worthless garbage good at nothing, at e100 caleb thinks he’s nothing but a tool to strike his enemies and improve his friends, and that’s an improvement but we’re A LONG ways away, and maybe we’ll NEVER get there ---
i think that - and i am putting words in a lot of people’s mouths here, but it’s my blog and i do what i want - people who give caleb this happily ever after that ( i percieve) he doesn’t want is because they see themselves in caleb. but i have news for those people .... you are not caleb. caleb’s suffering is so deep, so horrible, so completely person-shredding, that i find it hard to believe someone like caleb could enjoy critical role. you might be jester, and you might be beau, and you might be fjord -- but the utter massacre of the person caleb was, and the horror that he’s gone through, and the very beginnings of his growth - it’s not likely to me that any of the people i see posting about caleb TRULY get at the depth of his suffering. HELL, i DEFINITELY don’t get at the depth of his suffering! but the nature of the character is so horrifying that it seems so unlikely for any tumblr teen to ACTUALLY be caleb. i think that people like caleb and want him to be happy so they imagine THEIR domestic dreams for him. but it’s not him.
sliding along here, one of the many reasons that i dislike widojest as a ship is because i think jester has such a different opinion/desire of domesticity - for her domesticity is a comfort, is something she returns to, her dreams of a happily ever after in a very traditional way - and i just do not think that’s in the cards for caleb. i think he would really struggle with that. and maybe i am selling jester short here. i don’t mean to say that she is any less a fighter than caleb is, but i just think her needs are so much different. or maybe it’s too hard for me to see past jester’s suffering because she’s suffering so much, or laura plays it so masterfully, or i don’t know what i’m looking at, and jester DOES want something else. but i digress.
and that’s why i think that shadowgast has a really interesting and fun dynamic which appears to me. in many way caleb and essek are VERY similar - and i think that had essek met BREN he would have seen CERTAINLY an enemy and maybe a rival and who knows what that might have been? it’s very much this is how you lose the time war imo. but in terms of their trauma and damage, they’re VERY different. in terms of how they’ve learned and grown, they couldn’t be FURTHER apart. essek is SUCH a selfish coward! anytime the nein have gotten anywhere CLOSE to danger, he’s out of there. he is one of the ONLY people wo know all the dangerous things the nein are up to and he IS ALWAYS instantly disappeared (and maybe this is due to the logistics of the dmpc, but maybe he was made a selfish coward BECAUSE of that, which unfolds the character in the same way). i come back again that he said he was RELIEVED when adeen was taking the fall for him. what A SELFISH THING TO SAY!!! “oh thank god someone else is going down for my treason; don’t have to worry about that anymore.” this is a dude who, his whole life, has had access to incredible, innumerables riches, privilege and station, and has used those essentially EXCLUSIVELY to enrich himself.
and yeah, we did see a moment where essek admits he is a selfish coward. and caleb, because we are in this point of caleb’s healing where he’s going “how can i be of use/how can i purge corruption/how can i help?” is going ‘look.. it doesn’t have to be like this. you can be like me.’
and essek CAN do things that caleb does. he CAN, of course, use his wealth and station and privilege to do good things. but we haven’t seen him DO any of those things - not yet, at least. so far essek’s all talk in trying to be a better person, and in this extremely private, vulnerable moment he can admit to this person he cares about that he’s a coward but that’s SO, SO, SO far from where caleb is, what caleb does, who caleb has become. it’s the OPPOSITE, even. caleb will tell you he is cowardly and shitty but see what he does and you’ll get the different opinion. essek behaved poorly and now he feels bad, and being a fuck up is a matter of ontology, not ethics. (esseks, if you will.)
so the idea of essek and caleb essentially having a happily ever after is so weird and impossible and foreign and UNLIKELY to me.
1. anyone who proclaims they care about caleb, he would hold him to his insane standard of always rooting out corruption, making improvements, growing better, learning. (we generally see the nein meet this standard, and widofjord intensifies, but i digress)
2. nothing we’ve seen from essek indicates he’d meet that standard. essek has said he will try to be better, but he certainly hasn’t made any actions to prove that to us. of course we’ve JUST seen all this, and maybe he WILL - but we don’t know that. and even if essek HAS departed from Neural Evil, (the selfishness alignment!), what’s he moving towards? True Neural (which is Caleb’s alignment)? There’s so much uncertainty about how Essek will be in the future.
3. let’s SAY that Essek DOES try to become a better person. that shit is hard. that dude’s lived a comfy fucking life. now he’s gonna fucking sleep on a bedroll and eat shitty inn food? remember when caleb smeared mud on his own face when jester said how rich she was?
4. essek does care about caleb, and he does try to be a better person, and he becomes adventurer or at least do-gooder essek. what does it look like, caleb coming around to the idea someone could love him? him accepting love from another person? his interactions when anyone in the nein show affection for him are ... painful and sad! it’s SO far from where caleb is right now.
let’s say we hit ALL of this boxes. oof. that’s a lot. but we hit them. what’s essek’s happily ever after look like? does he stay in the library researching happily while caleb goes off on his dangerous adventures? or does he get free from his clearly determined desire to learn? or does caleb realize learning with essek is more important than doing good? and NONE of these have the notes of typical domesticity. first of all, essek definitely has servants or waitstaff of some kind! that dude does not cook for himself. and these two are IMPASSIONED learners. they’re not lazy sit around by the fire types. and essek -- what? isn’t the shadowhand anymore? we don’t even know what that means?
i’m just sort of trailing off her becuase i’m tired of this post. but like MAKE IT INTERESTING. GIVE THEM CONFLICT. THEY’RE SCARRED AND THAT SHOULD BE A PART OF THEIR LIVES AND YOUR ART (WRITING OR OTHERWISE). STOP JUST MAKING CALEB “OKAY” AND ESSEK “NOT A SELFISH COWARD” without giving me SOME EVIDENCE OF HOW OR WHY i don’t CARE about their shitty lunch i want to see CALEB PUSH ESSEK TO BE BETTER and i want to see essek be ANNOYED by caleb not healing and i want them to realize their differences AND their similiaries make them uniquely matched.
also comments on this from darya:
this is the best analysis of these characters trajectories and how they do not particularly intersect. esp regarding Caleb and people’s projections onto him. he’s not one to let go of the weight he carries; he literally can’t. and anyone who doesn’t understand that we cannot grasp the extent of that weight, that scar, that’s fundamentally not understanding the character and what drives him. maybe this is why Essek execution fics appeal more to me than domestic ones
also we consistently forget that Essek is completely focused on self-preservation. he wouldn’t willingly do anything to endanger himself, ever, which is why adventurer Essek, as much as I love it, there’s no way he would put in that sort of work into his “”atonement” which he absolutely does not care about. his reaction to caleb in 97 always caught me on rewatches: he was still trying to negotiate, still trying to weasel his way out, his reaction to the kiss is “ I gotta go."
so just this morning i read this sad but somewhat hopeful article about romanian orphans and how they were deprived of contact growing up and their various futures, and talks a lot about attachment theory and just how important it is that human children get love in their first two years. the main character of the article, so to speak, is a romanian orphan izidor, who had polio in his leg and was, for shitty government reasons, attachment-abandoned (in which he was fed sometimes but never loved) in a horrible orphanage until he was 3. he was adopted by an american family and there was trouble, but now he’s an adult that works at a KFC.
anyway at the end he talks about how he is aware that he is not like everyone else. that he is deficient in the attachments other people make. essentially that this is the way he is now, and it’s Not Great, but it’s OK. and that while his life is a good one, in the scale that he is successful in his recovery -- because many people who went through what he want through are not -- he is conscious that things are gone forever. that this horrible experience is an intrinsic part of him and his life. and when he looks at people who have relationships, which he can’t form, he doesn’t really understand or miss it.
anyway so also this poem. it was a good day. i worked 60 hours and fought with the bank. called my brother. said it was a good day.
in my past life as a hamilton fan i wrote a long story called on the construction and tending of greenhouses, and one thing that’s important to me in that story is while you can - should, hopefully do - recover from your trauma - a lot of the story is about healing - you carry it with you all the time, and it is a part of you for the rest of your life. you don’t ever “go back” -- this is normal for you. parts of you break and scar over, and of course the scar is better than whatever came previously, but you’ve got a scar, and that scar is not the unblemished flesh that came before. which isn’t to say that you’re not successful or not making it or not having a good day or not doing a good job! and the world, society, governements, etc - should accomodate the scarred, in whatever literal, metaphorical, or psychological way that you’re scarred.
some of the scarred will try to hard to become unscarred, in whatever ways they can. but i think a lot of people are happy/settled/content with their scar. this is good. this scar is part of my identity and some external desire for everyone to be unblemished isn’t part of their life. this experience is a part of me and will affect me forever.
so five paragraphs of explanation later, and because it’s behind a cut i’m not summarizing - caleb often comes to me as this kind of person, which is why i recoil so hard from the ideal of some kind of happily-ever-after with him. i think everything about his institutionalization, and him murdering his parents, has left him with a large scar. and it’s pretty obvious that he’s done SO much healing in 100 episodes. when we met him the wound was huge and festering and raw, and now it’s pale and hard, a good, solid scar. but so much of caleb’s identity is wrapped up in that moment, in his experiences with ikithon and the vollstrecker and the assembly. i think that, even in this possibility that they somehow make the empire not corrupt (??), he wouldn’t know what to do with himself. i mean sure he needs - appreciates - a touch of domesticity - coming home and someone asking you how you’re doing - but it’s SO hard for me to buy this “happily ever after” for caleb. especially because while i didn’t watch C1, i watched dalen’s closet and liam went ALL IN in what is Vax now. that Liam commits like that makes me feel like he won’t .... caleb won’t become unblemished unless liam thinks he should, and listening to liam talk about caleb doesn’t make me feel like that will happen, maybe ever.
i think caleb’s idea of a happily ever after is always finding some new evil to root out, some new corruption to purge, some new library to discover. caleb’s idea of domesticity is someone bringing him a sandwich which he doesn’t realize is there for several hours. caleb’s idea of showing affection is being useful, being helpful.
i think caleb’s idea of a good life is to always find a new evil to root out. i think caleb will always be trying to figure out how to atone, how to improve, how to become someone new and better. i think even after he has rebuilt his self-esteem -- and by the way i think we’re a long way to go there, becuase while in e1 caleb though he was worthless garbage good at nothing, at e100 caleb thinks he’s nothing but a tool to strike his enemies and improve his friends, and that’s an improvement but we’re A LONG ways away, and maybe we’ll NEVER get there ---
i think that - and i am putting words in a lot of people’s mouths here, but it’s my blog and i do what i want - people who give caleb this happily ever after that ( i percieve) he doesn’t want is because they see themselves in caleb. but i have news for those people .... you are not caleb. caleb’s suffering is so deep, so horrible, so completely person-shredding, that i find it hard to believe someone like caleb could enjoy critical role. you might be jester, and you might be beau, and you might be fjord -- but the utter massacre of the person caleb was, and the horror that he’s gone through, and the very beginnings of his growth - it’s not likely to me that any of the people i see posting about caleb TRULY get at the depth of his suffering. HELL, i DEFINITELY don’t get at the depth of his suffering! but the nature of the character is so horrifying that it seems so unlikely for any tumblr teen to ACTUALLY be caleb. i think that people like caleb and want him to be happy so they imagine THEIR domestic dreams for him. but it’s not him.
sliding along here, one of the many reasons that i dislike widojest as a ship is because i think jester has such a different opinion/desire of domesticity - for her domesticity is a comfort, is something she returns to, her dreams of a happily ever after in a very traditional way - and i just do not think that’s in the cards for caleb. i think he would really struggle with that. and maybe i am selling jester short here. i don’t mean to say that she is any less a fighter than caleb is, but i just think her needs are so much different. or maybe it’s too hard for me to see past jester’s suffering because she’s suffering so much, or laura plays it so masterfully, or i don’t know what i’m looking at, and jester DOES want something else. but i digress.
and that’s why i think that shadowgast has a really interesting and fun dynamic which appears to me. in many way caleb and essek are VERY similar - and i think that had essek met BREN he would have seen CERTAINLY an enemy and maybe a rival and who knows what that might have been? it’s very much this is how you lose the time war imo. but in terms of their trauma and damage, they’re VERY different. in terms of how they’ve learned and grown, they couldn’t be FURTHER apart. essek is SUCH a selfish coward! anytime the nein have gotten anywhere CLOSE to danger, he’s out of there. he is one of the ONLY people wo know all the dangerous things the nein are up to and he IS ALWAYS instantly disappeared (and maybe this is due to the logistics of the dmpc, but maybe he was made a selfish coward BECAUSE of that, which unfolds the character in the same way). i come back again that he said he was RELIEVED when adeen was taking the fall for him. what A SELFISH THING TO SAY!!! “oh thank god someone else is going down for my treason; don’t have to worry about that anymore.” this is a dude who, his whole life, has had access to incredible, innumerables riches, privilege and station, and has used those essentially EXCLUSIVELY to enrich himself.
and yeah, we did see a moment where essek admits he is a selfish coward. and caleb, because we are in this point of caleb’s healing where he’s going “how can i be of use/how can i purge corruption/how can i help?” is going ‘look.. it doesn’t have to be like this. you can be like me.’
and essek CAN do things that caleb does. he CAN, of course, use his wealth and station and privilege to do good things. but we haven’t seen him DO any of those things - not yet, at least. so far essek’s all talk in trying to be a better person, and in this extremely private, vulnerable moment he can admit to this person he cares about that he’s a coward but that’s SO, SO, SO far from where caleb is, what caleb does, who caleb has become. it’s the OPPOSITE, even. caleb will tell you he is cowardly and shitty but see what he does and you’ll get the different opinion. essek behaved poorly and now he feels bad, and being a fuck up is a matter of ontology, not ethics. (esseks, if you will.)
so the idea of essek and caleb essentially having a happily ever after is so weird and impossible and foreign and UNLIKELY to me.
1. anyone who proclaims they care about caleb, he would hold him to his insane standard of always rooting out corruption, making improvements, growing better, learning. (we generally see the nein meet this standard, and widofjord intensifies, but i digress)
2. nothing we’ve seen from essek indicates he’d meet that standard. essek has said he will try to be better, but he certainly hasn’t made any actions to prove that to us. of course we’ve JUST seen all this, and maybe he WILL - but we don’t know that. and even if essek HAS departed from Neural Evil, (the selfishness alignment!), what’s he moving towards? True Neural (which is Caleb’s alignment)? There’s so much uncertainty about how Essek will be in the future.
3. let’s SAY that Essek DOES try to become a better person. that shit is hard. that dude’s lived a comfy fucking life. now he’s gonna fucking sleep on a bedroll and eat shitty inn food? remember when caleb smeared mud on his own face when jester said how rich she was?
4. essek does care about caleb, and he does try to be a better person, and he becomes adventurer or at least do-gooder essek. what does it look like, caleb coming around to the idea someone could love him? him accepting love from another person? his interactions when anyone in the nein show affection for him are ... painful and sad! it’s SO far from where caleb is right now.
let’s say we hit ALL of this boxes. oof. that’s a lot. but we hit them. what’s essek’s happily ever after look like? does he stay in the library researching happily while caleb goes off on his dangerous adventures? or does he get free from his clearly determined desire to learn? or does caleb realize learning with essek is more important than doing good? and NONE of these have the notes of typical domesticity. first of all, essek definitely has servants or waitstaff of some kind! that dude does not cook for himself. and these two are IMPASSIONED learners. they’re not lazy sit around by the fire types. and essek -- what? isn’t the shadowhand anymore? we don’t even know what that means?
i’m just sort of trailing off her becuase i’m tired of this post. but like MAKE IT INTERESTING. GIVE THEM CONFLICT. THEY’RE SCARRED AND THAT SHOULD BE A PART OF THEIR LIVES AND YOUR ART (WRITING OR OTHERWISE). STOP JUST MAKING CALEB “OKAY” AND ESSEK “NOT A SELFISH COWARD” without giving me SOME EVIDENCE OF HOW OR WHY i don’t CARE about their shitty lunch i want to see CALEB PUSH ESSEK TO BE BETTER and i want to see essek be ANNOYED by caleb not healing and i want them to realize their differences AND their similiaries make them uniquely matched.
also comments on this from darya:
this is the best analysis of these characters trajectories and how they do not particularly intersect. esp regarding Caleb and people’s projections onto him. he’s not one to let go of the weight he carries; he literally can’t. and anyone who doesn’t understand that we cannot grasp the extent of that weight, that scar, that’s fundamentally not understanding the character and what drives him. maybe this is why Essek execution fics appeal more to me than domestic ones
also we consistently forget that Essek is completely focused on self-preservation. he wouldn’t willingly do anything to endanger himself, ever, which is why adventurer Essek, as much as I love it, there’s no way he would put in that sort of work into his “”atonement” which he absolutely does not care about. his reaction to caleb in 97 always caught me on rewatches: he was still trying to negotiate, still trying to weasel his way out, his reaction to the kiss is “ I gotta go."