#Angus McDonough | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

langernameohnebedeutung · 2 years

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this is definitely no 'this is what it all means and im right about it!1'-take and more of a 'this is how I am reading it'-take, but between all the (valid) 'how could they make Blaine reconcile with his abusive father'-takes and the discussions about their respective motives and manipulations etc - - - I actually kind of like to take that uncertainty at face-value.

I like to read it not so much as a story about the pain of past abuse - but the horrible situation of being put into the spotlight and having your abuser throw a complete 180 at you and having changed - while the victim is still stuck in the limbo of their trauma and basically just has the rug pulled out from under them - a situation where everyone else seems to have figured out everything and you're alone with a bunch of re-opened wounds - are you the idiot for actually still caring about what this person did to you? or are you an idiot for actually hoping this has a chance? both? neither?

Anyway, I'm putting this under a cut, because it's a) very, very ridiculously long and b) talks about subjects such as child abuse, suicide etc.

So, as the audience, we're mostly seeing this changed relationship between Angus and Blaine from Blaine's point of view. And the anger and uncertainty about 'what's going on with them?' - and: 'he wouldn't really forgive him??' that many people feel at this change in their dynamic kind of mirrors Blaine's own feelings as they are presented on the show. The show (a bit like Angus) seems to have fast-forwarded through a lot of all the emotional debris and entanglement between these two characters - and looks back at us like 'wait, you're still hung up on that?' Which, again, is kind of how Angus reacts to Blaine's reservations in a lot of these scenes.

Think of their first meeting after the well - at the restaurant, when Angus tells Blaine that he 'forgives' him and Blaine flies absolutely off the handle and loses control over himself and threatens to kill him. Because that's the ultimate slap in the face - being told by your abuser that they forgive you. In the most condescending manner possibly. Of course Blaine's pissed. It's actually one of the most out of control moments Blaine has, and yeah, it makes sense for him. The last time his father drove him into a corner, Blaine ended up suffocating his own grandfather with a pillow.

It would have been really easy for the writers to just say outright: "Well, Angus is just faking this whole Brother Love thing and he is really just intentionally manipulating Blaine this whole time."

It's also really easy to say: "Well, if an abuser really changes, they can make their apologies! And then, the victim decides whether they continue that relationship/fix things - or reject it and say no." - - - And morally, this approach is correct. But it also gives a strong agency to the abuser - while reducing the situation of the victim and the entire pain and trauma they're dealing with to factors in a binary decision-making process. Remember, many abuse survivors actually don't have a clinically cold view of their abuser. There is love mixed with fear and thousands of other emotions.

Because it's not a simple 'yes' or 'no' - from the perspective of the victim, accepting an apology is a decision affected by past and current power-dynamics, by people around you, by narratives, by past experiences etc.

People will often look at things like: "Well, they hurt you but they put in so much work, so they're serious!" OR "Actually they apologised before AND they hurt you again, so you can't trust their apology a second/third/tenth time! You're naive!" - again, it's made all about the abuser and how good their work is, whether they're convincing or not - and the victim, will still weighed down by a bunch of conflicting feelings, has all that 'evidence' shoved at them and has to make a rational judgement.

(and the easy response to that is: "Put yourself first! Make whatever decision helps you move forward and makes you happy and safe!" - and that's...also much harder in practice, because you got your own emotional debris to sort through and dealing with an apology means you also have to deal with another person's emotional baggage. There is a reason why the people who hurt someone and feel guilty get told to apologise - for 'closure' - because they're not the victim. Because moving on is always easier for the abuser than for the victim - and that's how victims get forced into uncomfortable interactions with past abusers under the guise of apologies/fixing things/making amends.

My first controversial take would be: Blaine doesn't want his father dead.

Which isn't even really controversial, because he literal says it the first time we meet Angus. Blaine tells him that he wants to take over the company and put Angus into a 'hell-hole' (mission accomplished) to get revenge for what he did to Blaine's grandfather. Blaine wants his father to live and suffer, not just die. He wants to torment him but he also wants to show off his successes and repeatedly tells Angus in the well about them. In fact, considering how casually Blaine takes lives in his line of work, it's not really surprising that murder is not really his idea of the worst punishment.

But in a way, it gets even more twisted than that because there is a certain...pattern between these two. Because Blaine doesn't actually only focus on the direct physical and emotional abuse his father inflicted on him that he wants revenge for. There is something he addresses even more often: That he felt abandoned by his father - in fact, feeling unloved and rejected is something he brings up much more often than the physical abuse. And sure, he wants him gone - but he's not just occupied with the idea of having Angus gone, but the idea of what it would be like to actually have a father who actually did give a damn.

I think this is very important to understanding their relationship: They hate each other at least as much for what they are and what they do - as they hate each other for what they fail to be/fail to do.

Blaine doesn't just want Angus gone and powerless and suffering and revenge for everything he put them all through - he also wants to have a father that actually loves him and cares. For example, that's why Don E telling Blaine that his father never loved him was such a blow in the finale. And that's why Blaine spends in his afternoons in a camping chair with a radio next to him, telling his well-dad about his day. Down to the "Love you, mean it-" quips - he's literally enacting a normal relationship in a twisted sadistic mirror-way.

So one the one hand, Angus in season 4 is Blaine's worst nightmare:

He's free, he's back, he's powerful, and he's acting absolutely unpredictably and outside of any frame of reference Blaine has of him - which is...really not something you like to see from your abuser. But Angus is also offering him something that Blaine really wants: He suddenly does seem to care about Blaine, he suddenly values Blaine's...accomplishments instead of constantly putting him down, he's acknowledging the abuse and neglect he put Blaine through and that he was aware of what Bader did to him and that it was wrong. He's no longer mocking Blaine's trauma. Meaning that Blaine basically gets what he wants - what he always wanted - all of a sudden, completely unexpected, after he had long since written it off.

And he doesn't know what to do with it.

This is kind of where I circle back into this view we have of apologies.

We treat it kind of like a Sphinx-situation. The abuser has to solve the riddle of how to get the words 'I accept your apology' out of the Sphinx/victim.

The guilty party does some work (or doesn't, or fakes it or anything else) and returns to put the solution to the riddle/their remedy in front of the cryptic Sphinx that either accepts the answer/apology or does not.

That's what I mean when I say that taking the abuser's perspective on apologies also gives them a lot of agency. We focus on the inner-workings of the person that solves the riddle - on their thought processes, on the way they approach this. The Sphinx doesn't get inner-workings in that sense. It's a machine, a yes-or-no-creature. It's a computer, spitting out a 'yes' or 'no'. It's not like we acknowledge the Sphinx feelings here. Or wonder how easy/difficult she finds it to say yes or no. And that's not a good way to look at victims in an apology-scenario. Because they're the one in the most difficult position here and their 'yes' or 'no' is affected by hundreds of factors - for example, whether they're afraid that their abuser might get angry again, if they refuse the apology. Or the fear of losing mutual friends.

It leads us to scenarios where we say: "Why doesn't she just leave him if he keeps treating her like that?" or "Why do so many victims keep forgiving their abuser (subtone: when it's obviously the wrong answer). I would just leave!"

But...looking at apologies from the side of a victim, we have to realise that they're not an automaton. They're a human being! A person in an extremely complex situation. They have to deal with old wounds being re-opened. They cannot be sure which of their feelings are to be trusted - where the line is between rationality and trauma.

And Angus has really a way of making this worse by switching back and forth, treating Blaine as irrational whenever he doesn't trust him/is cautious - and then violating his boundaries or saying stuff that re-opens old wounds. To the point where he reverts to old form at the end of the season.

For example, you get scenes like this

So not only do you have Angus basically springing his presence on Blaine at the restaurant to the point where he pops up unannounced with a bunch of dozen of followers of his and makes demands - and says that they will now be coming back again and again, no discussion about it. Which is...pretty much par for the course of their relationship. Angus tried to almost the same thing back in season 2, after he found out that Blaine wasn't actually a zombie anymore and blackmailed him into killing for him.

So at first, this looks like a solid continuation of their old dynamics - setting Blaine up to believe that this is same of the old song. While at the same time, Angus is really changing the rules, now that he's suddenly obsessed with charity and his cult. In fact, Blaine pretty efficiently summarises the ridiculousness of the situation by referring to the cultists as 'my brothers and sisters' - because Angus has gone from not giving a crap about his 1 own, biological son, to taking care of a bunch of strangers to the point where he calls them his 'children'.

So what Blaine is basically saying is: 'fuck off, these guys can eat at my restaurant as guests as long as they pay for it and that's it on that.'

And Angus, acting as if Blaine is being ridiculous says what basically translates to: "Well, they're your family so you have to feed us. Duh."

I don't think it needs saying that if you actually want(ed) to make amends, you wouldn't/shouldn't waltz in, make a bunch of demands on the foundation of the very same relationship in whose context you abused the other person in. But it's something many abusive parents do - "you are my child, you have to do this for me!" It's something that abuse victims (and in fact, hurt parties in many scenarios) - will often encounter. They will be put through their abuser acting like nothing is wrong - among friends, in a court of law, when meeting their victim at family dinners etc.

In fact, we know Angus only had a bunch of meals in his lifetime with Blaine - 'seven times', apparently, and we know Blaine literally counted stuff like that - so walking in there and calling on the tradition of 'family meals' from the son he abused is kind of a ...bold move, I must say. And it's just topped off by the 'I forgive you'-line.

There are many small occasions like this: Angus either flat-out ignores some boundaries and takes control of a situation and makes it all about himself or acts like Blaine is being ridiculous for not trusting him - or he just straight up reframes the same rhetoric he previously used in an abusive way now in a 'positive' way.

Now, again, the point isn't how to solve the problem 'correctly' (they're both too far gone for that to work) but really to illustrate the situation it puts the person on the receiving end of an apology in.

The probably most obvious example is the execution of Fr. Bader.

Because in that scene, Angus had complete, perfect, total agency. He has complete power over this situation. He literally puts his son's very traumatising and very intimate and very humiliating childhood experiences on a physical stage in front of hundreds of strangers - to talk about his own personal 'growth'. He once again springs something like that on Blaine without warning, without his consent - and then even confronts Blaine with another person that he was abused by - and proceeds to kill someone who played a pretty large role in Blaine's life without Blaine's consent. (...I mean, the insanity of asking for consent to kill another person already illustrates how unfixable this situation is, but my point stands.)

In fact, that he is willing to kill Bader for 'hurting my son' when he is guilty of the same crime, actually shows very much that he's still making the calls here. He decided that Bader has to die and he gets to live - because he has found god. He has total agency over this.

This is Angus' show for his cult. It happens the way he wants it to. And that is the problem for example with public apologies or public displays of guilt or redemption - you have the abuser absolutely in charge while the person who actually is the victim gets dragged into the show without their consent under the direct supervision of strangers (in this case, literally the cult-followers of the person who abused Blaine) - and they have to react appropriately, on the spot.(While the abuser can prepare for it.)

Another thing Angus loves to do is point out how Blaine is such a successful businessman.

Now, on the surface this is nice. A compliment. But one of the major points Angus always disliked about Blaine in the past was that he didn't consider him a good businessman. It's literally one of the things he spits at Blaine before he gets dropped into the well. Also, it's one of the first things we hear Angus say on the show at all, when he asks Blaine whether 'business is so bad that you're reduced to making your own deliveries?'

He accuses Blaine of being held back by his own hedonism (e.g. dropping out of Wharton, Angus blackmails him in s2 with the threat of re-zombifying him) instead of putting business first, like him (Angus embraces immortality). It's a central part of why Angus didn't value his son - in Nietzsche-terms, Angus sees Blaine as a Dionysian counterpart to his own Apollonian nature.

And by now calling Blaine a good businessman in season 4, Angus shows us that while he has changed - he's still judging Blaine based on the same criteria. Only that now, he's satisfied with Blaine's businesses instead of dissatisfied.

But being on the receiving end of such insults-turned-praise from a person who used to hurt you is that - the love you're getting is conditional. The approval you getting can be very temporary. It's just one failure or change of mind away. The same power structure still exists. It can just as easily be turned around on you again and if it does, you will be judged (and hurt and rejected) on the same scale again. (2) Except now you cannot criticise it anymore, because you're 'moving on' and 'they apologised' - and currently they are being nice to you, even if your lizard brain tells you not to trust them. It means that literally nothing has changed about the power-relations in that dynamic or the toxic view that person has of you - and it means that this person has not actually challenged their own harmful worldview that led them to hurt others at all.

Which is literally what happens at the end of this season to their relationship. In their final scene together, Angus' reverts to his roots the instant he doesn't get what he wants.

One example, there is Angus' attitude towards his dead wife. Most of what we learn about her comes from Angus comparing Blaine to her. She receives very little identity of her own throughout the show. Old Angus usually liked to compare her to Blaine in order to explicitly insult them both and place blame for Blaine's real and perceived shortcomings as a son on his mother - and even subtly blaming Blaine for her his mother's unhappiness (think the earring story where he blames his own dislike of Blaine on him making his mother sad.)

For example the first time Angus is introduced, he says this when Blaine brings up his mother's suicide and Angus' lack of interest in it:

There is also one scene in s4, where Angus starts talking about her over their 'Monday's dinner' and Blaine immediately cuts him off - either because he doesn't want to talk about her at all or he specifically doesn't want to talk with his father about her, both of which are pretty understandable. Angus, on the other hand, ignores that request and continues talking about her - once again taking over a situation, because he's not the one being made uncomfortable. (And returning to the whole victim-perspective thing, Blaine is once again in a situation where his discomfort with the situation is cast aside in favour of Angus pretty much telling him how happy and great they're doing now)

Then, in the season finale, she is brought up again in a scene that very much mirrors the one from season 2:

In that scene, Angus once again compliments Blaine on being 'a businessman, an innovator, soon, the founding father of a zombie republic' (step down from zombie messiah?) - and then directly moves on to bring up his dead wife.

In itself, it's a harmless compliment - probably not the healthiest or sanest thing to say to your son, but by their standards pretty okay.

But at the technical level of it all (the: what does this compliment say? how is it saying it and what is it complimenting?), it's still very much working the same way the old insults went: By reducing all involved parties to their parts and speculating about where Blaine got what. Basically, he's treating his family like an equation. I'm not saying it's inherently toxic to spot similarities and differences between family members. They're bound to exist! But Angus does have a long history of doing this in an abusive context.

That time then, Blaine doesn't cut him off and seems to accept the compliment, indicating that he's build a certain level of trust that Angus is not going to say something awful about either him or his mother - the way the old Angus would have.

And having this level of trust to actually accept a compliment from a person who had the power to abuse you (and used it), means giving them a little bit of power back again. Over you! That's why so many people dealing with trauma shut out other people completely. Why they keep them at arms-length and try not to get too close to another person. Because they know that if they allow themselves to have friends, to rely on people - they're giving people power over them, to a degree and they experienced that power being used against them.

Trusting someone to be good to you also means giving them the power to disappoint you - to fail you and hurt you. (of course, trusting in itself isn't bad. we need to rely on others. But it can be terrifying, if you had your trust betrayed before) It is a great, great leap to trust a person that has hurt you before.

Which brings me back to (2): Because Angus' view on life, on the world, on zombiehood, on his son - is pretty much the same, he never challenged his views. And the moment he doesn't get what he wants - how does he insult Blaine?

- yeah-

The mother-thing. And that time, he can use it to hurt Blaine again - something he couldn't before the well - because he had built up an actual trust between them and Blaine actually genuinely cared for him at that point - because we know he begged Angus either not to go or to wear a helmet. Back in the day, while Blaine didn't want Angus dead (so that he could torture him), he also wouldn't have been sad if he died)

In a way, in this scene in the season finale, Angus actually comes closer than ever to challenging his own world-view once he realises that Blaine fooled him with the brains in the wood-chipper thing - he is no longer saying that any random quality/lack of quality of Blaine's directly relates to his mother and instead notes the difference between them by pointing out that Blaine's mother would be disappointed in what he did. By what he is. But Angus is still going for the mother-thing. Knowing that it's one of the ways he can actually still hurt Blaine.

But what he never questions is who taught Blaine that lying, tricking, stealing etc. are legit ways of doing business - and being successful(-).

Again, he just spins on the same axis: Before, he blamed his wife for Blaine's shortcomings. Now, he credits her with his good qualities. But he doesn't really analyse his own behaviour. It's not like he contextualises his own past behaviour to a degree where he sees how he played a role in Blaine becoming the person he is. In fact, he rather seems to ignore Blaine's faults at all now - which is also an unhealthy view of a person. It's putting them on a pedestal. If you don't love someone with their flaws, you're cannot love them fully - because you will be forced to deny significant parts of their identity (because we all have flaws and Blaine is one big, walking zombie-shaped bag of flaws) OR you will be so let down once you realised that they're a human being like anyone else, that you might just not see them as the same person at all anymore. (I'm not saying you have to love someone regardless of their flaws. Some things are obviously not tolerable in another person. But everyone has bad sides, weaknesses, flaws and faults and bad habits. That's what makes them human. That's what makes them lovable. Angus on the other hand sees Blaine as the 'zombie messiah' - not as a person.)

(-) We know Angus took over his own father's company be having him institutionalised. Later he strong-handed his way into Blaine's brain-business via blackmail and ordered him to kill the son of a competitor so that he could get trade secrets from that brain AND torture the man's father. We also know that when Don E and him opened the Scratching Post, they were supposed to be equal partners - until Angus completely sidelined Don E and took over the enterprise alone. Literally the last thing he tried before Blaine tossed him into the well was offer him a partnership - while calling Blaine 'no real businessman' because he was acting on feelings rather than throwing all morals and past grievances overboard for the sake of money. WHERE DO YOU THINK YOUR SON LEARNT THAT THIS IS HOW YOU DO BUSINESS? IN FACT, WHO TAUGHT HIM THAT THIS WAS THE PRICE FOR RESPECT, I WILL CHEW DRYWALL, YOU FUCKING-

anywho.

If Angus had actually really grown and actually realised the true problem with his past actions, he'd have been forced to unwrap a l l of that - he would have had to address all the ways in which there are many things extremely fucking wrong with Blaine - - - and how these things also lead back to his own past actions. And how the pattern will continue, if they don't change anything.

But he didn't.

Because he felt he didn't have to. Because he moved on, made a big show of his own self-martyrdrom and guilt for the world to see - and actually just expected Blaine to play along. In fact, probably considered it inevitable. He put his redemption tokens in and the victim-machine spits out an 'apology accepted', because clearly, nothing more complex goes on in a victim's life and mind and emotional world. /s.

Just like before, he still doesn't see Blaine as a person in his own right - he sees him as his son, his wife's son - and, thanks to his newly discovered cult - Blaine also gets the credit of being a zombie, which makes him part of the 'chosen people' or whatever.

(In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Angus never sees anyone as a fully authentic human being. Even his cultists are just...zombies. He loves them - - - because they're zombies. He hates humans - - - because they're humans. Neither because of who these people are. And the zombie-supremacy ideology he represents also doesn't venture far off his old paths - he already used to believe that being a zombie is better than being human in season 2.)

So yeah - in the finale, in the blink of an eye, Angus reverts to old form - without even really changing his moral compass or anything, because he never challenged an of that to begin with -

Just right back where he started from. Sure, he spent his last season talking about 'charity' and 'helping the poor' - but the ideology underneath it all was just as inhumane as the old one.

In fact, in the 'Don't Hate The Player'-episode, we can see one of his pamphlets for a second and I actually screenshotted it and transcribed the entire two pages and it boils down to pretty fascist talking points, calling humans 'inferior' and 'cunning', trying to trick zombies away from the true faith, and saying that humans should be subservient etc. It's not like Angus is suddenly turning against the powerful for the sake of zombie-liberation or to help Seattle - he goes against humans. The only difference is that he's no longer interested in having money for himself.

Returning once more to the whole victim-perspective thing - and decide to read this storyline in such a way- that's the problem with these balloon apologies (all blow-up, no substance). Basically, the only reassurance Blaine got that Angus had really changed was a) Angus performances of guilt and repentance and b) Angus either directly brushing off Blaine's concerns and acting like he was being ridiculous or forcing his hand by acting like everything was normal.

This 'who smelt it dealt it' approach to making amends is also something that's incredibly messy when you're with a person who has hurt you - especially someone who had power over you and especially if you want to have a good relationship with them for whatever reason. Something that Blaine evidently wants, all brain-in-woodchipper related gaslighting aside.

He wants his father to survive and have a decent relationship with him at the end of season 4, because he always wanted to have a father who cared. In the past, he punished Angus for not being that father - by throwing him into a well and mockingly enacting family dinners with him. Something very mentally healthy not at all deeply deranged to do. Because in the past, he didn't have anything to lose - him and Angus were in a constant state of private war and oneupmanship. It's not like he had anything to lose (except his inheritance, but if Angus didn't withdraw that after Blaine turned him into a zombie, I guess blood does account for something). - - - But now he does.

He stands to lose the 1 thing he actually wanted, which is a father that gives a damn about him. If he had really wanted, Blaine could have gotten rid of Angus from day 2. He was outnumbered the first time Angus came to Romero's - but it's not like doesn't have means to expel unwanted guests. By Seattle standards, he's now an upstanding businessman, he could just call the cops on a bunch of weirdo cultists. He has a bunch of people working for him who don't have a problem kicking out Filmore Grave soldiers - they could kick out a bunch of unarmed cultists if he wanted them to. (There is actually a very interesting scene at the restaurant where Angus commands his cult to eat and chew and swallow on command in a bit of display of how much control he has over this people - and the moment he tells them to swallow, they cut over to Blaine and he literally swallows at the same time. Which I think is a neat and small thing, direction-wise. But I'm getting off topic.)

But basically, despite Angus hitting the reset-button on his relationship to Blaine, the fact remains that neither of them did any actual work on anything. The only thing keeping them going was that neither of them rocked the boat too much.

Not just Blaine, but even Angus does this -

We know that, brain-welled or not, Angus as Brother Love isn't stupid. The scene literally opens with Angus subtly questioning Blaine's and Stacey's story about God wanting them to raid a prison transport bus but the moment Blaine subtly pushes the 'I thought I'd fail you...' button, Angus goes along and entertains this charade even though he clearly has his doubts.

So basically, their relationship relies on no one rocking the boat openly. It's not like Angus ever actually changed his method of solving conflicts or even had any epiphany about what made him such an 'ogre' in the past - for example, he still is fine with violence. Even violence that would affect (human) children. The reason he condemns mistreating Blaine in the past is because now:

Blaine = the voice of god from his well-hell, his special zombie messiah boy.

Blaine, who hasn't had the big well-reset (yet), still schemes behind Angus' back, because that's what he does and that's how he he operates, but in the end, we see that he genuinely didn't want his father to get hurt and die - he just did what he always does and pulled the people around him into his cons.

It'd actually be easy to blame Blaine for everything going wrong but really, any relationship as toxic as theirs would eventually have come to some sort of clash - and if their entire 'reconciliation' just relies on the victim of the past abuse keeping his mouth shut while the abuser performs their apology to the world, then it was always going to come to a blow. And because Angus' views on other people and people he doesn't respect are still essentially the same, he was always gonna fall back into the same pattern, regarding Blaine.

But this time, Blaine actually cared. We know that as a kid, he wanted his father to 'drop dead' - that's why he threw those coins into the well. He hated Angus and Angus hated him - that's said on several occasions. But now, they actually had positive interactions - something Blaine actually stood to lose.

The thing is, this is not a guide to...how these two actually could have/should have/might have fixed their relationship. Or trying to find a point where anything went wrong. It's a interpretation. An approach to reading this storyline that I personally find engaging and interesting, because it circumvents the problem of 'they can't reconcile a victim of child abuse with their abuser!' by turning it into: 'A toxic apology can actually be a new form of victimisation or set up new victimisation' + "'the 'Bad Person' makes amends and then the victim decides if they accept it!' is theoretically and morally fair and healthy, but it's just a tiny aspect. We also need to acknowledge the vulnerable position it puts victims in and that apologies and displays of normalcy doesn't actually make pain or trauma go away magically - but that it might actually gloss over an unresolved conflict.

.uh. yeah, so....

#izombie #fandom #cw abuse mention #blaine debeers #Angus McDonough

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