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angorwhosebabyisthis · 1 year

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honestly like. the more i take it apart and examine it, while going into it entirely is going to be A Post or Three of Its Own and will probably get its own thread: i think one of the reasons nine in canon upsets me so much is that i genuinely related to the version of him that made sense to me, when i tried to apply some continuity to his character from before his imprisonment vs after. he's actually the muse i wrote for the most prose for in this fandom, even more than five--which is saying something!--and he came to me pretty easily.

[longpost and Decidedly Harsh toward canon's depiction of him, but less ARGFMSKDKDKFK HATE than usual so much as 'man the awful way these people handled him was a waste.' believe it or not i'm actually pretty attached to him, but as the secret Better Version that lives in my head lmao]

the arc of his character could have been such a good one about how men and boys and the people around them are harmed by toxic masculinity, and examining the ways in which that's held up by other cis men, every other configuration of gender and AGAB, and both. he came through loud and clear to me as an example of a poorly socialized, abused, isolated homeschooler with very little life experience, who is throwing bits and pieces at the wall that he's cobbled together from the outside without understanding the experiences behind that kind of thing, to see what sticks. all this while having suppressed and sublimated his emotions so much that he doesn't actually recognize what he's feeling, and goes 'well, i guess this trauma reaction to killing people means i like killing people. let's go then!'

like... in canon, you can kind of see how the seeds of his trauma, and baseline personality, from before his capture might have gone septic in the process the way it does in canon. if he was already the kind of person who would spit that result out on the other side. the writers used his Acute Trauma as an excuse to go 'anyway his cêpan was a sexist dickhead under the guise of ~respecting women,~ and he got captured by pursuing a normal teenage crush and blames himself for it, and then he went through solitary for a year. so now he's a gleeful sexual predator who harasses john and thinks women are meat!'

and this becomes even more glaringly obvious when you set it next to how the aftereffects of his trauma are (not) depicted. this kid spent a year in solitary confinement--broken up by the intermission of mercy-killing his adopted dad after watching his torture--while not being fed enough and hurting himself on the forcefield on the regular. he's not going to immediately come out of that Ripped and an Incredible Polished Fighter; he's not going to come out of that a ~charming edgy debonair lovable asshole.~ this kid knows what the fuckin hat man looks like, dude. that's shit you come out of an emotional, physical, and psychological wreck, and not in a 'haha look how rude and boundary-pushing and violent and sleazy i am uwu' way.

he is barely going to be able to walk out of there on his own two feet. he is going to be hallucinating and not remember how to tell faces apart. he is going to freak out at anything like an enclosed space. he is going to be food-insecure. he is going to be constantly finding ways to self-harm when he feels at all out of control, and once again not in a 'haha i'm so quirky and edgy' way. he is going to have obsessive rituals and get stuck on repetitive thought patterns because you run out of shit to think about after a year with nothing to do but pushups, even before you add in the shiny new PTSD events to obsess over. which tend to take up all of your brain space even when you aren't isolated with them for long periods. he is going to be doing weird fucking shit after he gets out, bizarre and frightening shit that's not just 'being violent and a dick,' and other people will probably notice.

and all of this is before you factor in his backstory! (which, by the way, is not conducive to him coming out of his imprisonment an Unstoppable Highly Trained Killing Machine. he was taught how to actually fight opponents for Three Whole Ass Weeks before he got captured, and none of that was training against human-shaped opponents. i don't care how many pushups he does over how long, he still has had zero practice fighting Other People and that's immediately going to fuck him over in a fight. it's one thing to have him be dangerous because he makes up for lack of skill with being completely fucking berserk with zero regard for his own safety or anyone else's, but he's not going to be an unstoppable whirlwind of death. and you're not going to build muscle while you're being starved.)

and like. i could go on for a long time about how they fucked up his character to the point where seeing him onscreen anywhere outside his novella makes me instantly want to flip a table. but i think so much of what it comes down to--and i don't say this casually, i mean after laying out and examining all his scenes in the first series--is that he doesn't actually have an arc. he doesn't grow. the entire point of his character's existence is to be an awful person and never be held accountable, self-examine, or allowed to face any kind of real consequences for it.

it's genuinely fascinating to examine all the different methods they use to do this (which is for a whole post of its own), but he's not an exploration of culpability or responsibility--for past, current, and future actions--the way five's arc is. he's just a parade of all the abuse tactics and rhetoric the authors could think of, both direct and via enablement by people around him, to pour into one guy. nine is literally The Missing Stair: The Character.

contrast this with five getting nailed to the fuckin wall for things that are often, arguably, much less horrific or unhinged than what nine does. he's treated like a ~broken, irreparably insane monster~ by characters and narrative both. he's punished brutally and endlessly over and over and over and over no matter how much he tries to grow, or make amends, or even lay down and take everything that might be done to him as punishment because he Deserves It for, [checks notes] repeatedly having been groomed and manipulated for years. If You Can't Tell I am a Little Bitter

and it's not just other characters who suffer for it. the creators are SO invested in nine never being accountable, by himself or anyone else, that he is PUNISHED FOR IT when he makes even the slightest effort to unpack. when he has a moment of vulnerability during a breakdown over fucking up, he is restrained in exactly the same way as when he had to watch eight die. this so that he can have his self-blame literally beaten out of him to make him 'stop moping.' the writers don't care about his trauma, or being compassionate or fair in their portrayal of it, or letting him heal. the only thing they care about here is getting to write a Missing Stair as a good thing, and trying to get you, the reader, in on it by forcing you to like him.

anyway just. man. they did nine so fuckin dirty and their version of him brings down every other narrative around it. i know i rant about nine a lot but justice for my boy

#lorien legacies #LL number nine #LL number five #LL crit tag #the crit files #nine is a platter of sushi the writers put in the microwave and [horse staring out over the ocean meme] man #also if you fix this SO MUCH about his parallels and foils with five snap right into place and it is CHEF'S KISS UGH #also lifts up john's arc in the process to 'kid with some pretty ugly qualities buried under Nice Guy surface; who has to grow past them'#'and does'#instead of 'oh gross wtf'#dyn: lost boys #like frankly i feel like it's pretty shitty to both neglected/abused homeschoolers and survivors of solitary confinement #to go 'ya that's what made this guy a sadistic bullying bigoted creep uwu'#instead of you know. establishing the traits of /his/ that would be brought out by that #there's also just. so much to be said here about how in the process of giving nine a pass for his cruelty and toxic masculinity #the writers also give a pass for perpetuating the cruelty of toxic masculinity toward men and boys against /him/#also like this kid self-harms in a variety of ways when he needs control and it's a pattern that starts from his very first scene #Writers Address Literally Any of This Instead of Portraying Men Self-Harming as Quirky Badass Peak of Masculinity Shit Challenge #LL tag

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