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#hi hello yes caleb's whole everything is extremely personal to me i promise you i am not being flippant about this
your-turn-to-role · 3 years
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Hey assuming someone is "mentally younger" because they spent time in an institution is kiiiinda ableist jsyk. Someone who lost time to extreme mental illness isn't any lesser than someone who didn't.
alright, was saving this for after the battle royale hype, and im slightly nervous to answer it bc i don’t want to start a fight, but i do want you to know i’ve heard and considered what you said
but i do also think you’re putting words in my mouth a little?
i’m plenty familiar with ableism, im both autistic and someone who started university at 22 because i lost four years to chronic illness i am well aware the ways it fucks with you, both in having people assume you’re not a real person, and in the social disconnect of spending that much time stuck in a room with very little change (and man covid was wild bc 2020 was my first year out of the house and let me tell you trying to relearn how to navigate the world while everyone else is having the opposite problem is a time)
and i'm not at all saying he's lesser, nor do i believe that
but it’s not an assumption, in this case, it’s a canonical fact that caleb does not remember that time
if this were just about time spent in an institution, if he was conscious for any of that, if the memories from that time were more than just the memory of escaping it, plus whatever assumptions he has about what trent could have done there, that would be a different story, and i absolutely wouldn’t consider that missing time
but caleb describes it as missing time, in his own words. he doesn’t remember it, he refers to himself during that time as having been asleep, and while i can’t think of the episode off the top of my head, im pretty sure liam has said on talks that he’s mentally a lot younger, because that time basically skipped for caleb, so he suddenly went from being 17 to 28? which does fuck with him, and would fuck with anyone, if the last you remember is being 17 and in your head you still are 17 because no time has passed except your body is 28 now. and this is only 6 years after that, so in several regards he is essentially 23, and i feel like it's kind of reductive to his character to not acknowledge that?
not all regards, there are some ways he's 34 too, but that was kind of part of the joke anyway, because all 8 of them have some kind of time or age disconnect
i think, the misunderstanding here might have come from you thinking i meant mentally younger in the way that like, autistic people or people with down syndrome or anyone else who gets this gets seen as an adult child, and that he deserves that label bc he spent time in an institution? maybe? but if that was the case, yeah that’s absolutely not what im getting at
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