Y/N: I almost choked to death last night.
Carol: You’ll be fine. Next time, just stay still and breathe through your nose before you take more.
Y/N: I was talking about food. What the hell, Carol?
Carol: …
Carol: I was talking about…stuff in general.
Michonne: Daryl is “stuff in general.”
Daryl: -Chokes on his food-
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thinking a lot about how the different ways in which rick and michonne have suffered while separated really heavily informs how they approach their reunification and their arguments about it. and it essentially boils down to like…. rick’s trauma happening within him while michonne’s trauma happens to her, is how I would put it??
so much of michonne’s suffering post-bridge was external. I think about when the bridge happened and how she was keeling over and wailing, of the physicality of childbirth, of how she was tortured while pregnant, of having to physically rebuild her body and recover from the effects of chlorine gas. and she had a community to get her through all of it, she had children to raise and a home she still lived in, but she had a lot happen to her!! and I think the phsyical act of the fight externalizes her response to the trauma: when she finds out rick is still alive she nearly chokes a guy out thinking he’s involved, she and nat shoot down a helicopter with an explosive as payback for killing their friends, and she lashes out (in understandable ways!) when rick isn’t acting like the man she knows and pushes her away. everything she has been through is expressed so outwardly.
for rick it’s different. what he’s been through is so internal and in his mind. even before the bridge he’s suffered from hallucinations under extreme emotional distress, he’s been conditioned into a constant state of both numbness and fear by the CRM, he dreams of michonne and carl only to have the memory of them taken from him, he’s ripped from his home and confined to a place he can’t escape, which are all… dare I say… forms of psychological torture?? the CRM never phsyically tortured him— they never had to. they only had to threaten his family if he ever tried to leave and brainwash him. the only physically violent act we see him really face is the scene with his hand, and I would argue cutting his own hand off was more of a psychological trauma than a physical one. this internalizes so much of rick’s response to his trauma because his mind is the thing under attack, not his body. so when all of this war is happening inside him, it’s not just enough for michonne to get angry and yell. she has to ask to be let in to what’s going on inside him first. she can’t quash this conditioning from the outside, he has to let her in emotionally, into that internal war, which he wasn’t doing.
that’s why episode 4 is SO BRILLIANT!! and so crucial!! because it’s sort of like their trauma responses contrast so strongly that they become at odds with each other and danai and andy nailed that concept to a tee it was just *mwah*
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