#Sorry for the massive asterisk I'm a grandma who can't type

[mindthelspace]

I think a lot of my interest in Agnes as a character comes from being a) the ‘pleasure to have in class’ child whose crippling anxiety and depression wasn’t picked up on, and b) the neurodivergent kid who was acutely aware of how much of society didn’t count me as a person. 

A)

There’s this baseline idea often applied to teenagers where ‘not OK’ is conflated with ‘acting out’ (or, to put it more appropriately, with ‘inconveniencing adults’). The kids who need help are the ones who fight and commit crime and hurt themselves and run away. So if you’re a kid who doesn’t make a fuss, if you don’t cause trouble, if you try to please the adults...  if you’re quiet, if you’re considerate, if you’re studious... then clearly you’re fine! Clearly everything’s going to plan for you! 

(Seriously, the number of times I considered deliberately staging a big loud dramatic breakdown just so people would believe me was ridiculous).

There’s also a bit of thing where people conflate ‘not saying very much’ with ‘not thinking very much’, and given how so very quiet Agnes is described as being... well. Well. 

B) 

Something else people equate with ‘not thinking much’- as well as ‘not actually being capable of thought’ and ‘not having normal feelings’- is ‘appearing Other’. And boy, does Agnes appear ‘Other’. Even people who have no idea she’s a supernatural fire-and-torture monster can see that she’s off and avoid her, because she has no clue how to interact with people outside the cult and can’t really ‘pass’ as a regular human for any length of time. People who do know what she is see her primarily as that, and don’t think of her as a person at all. 

Also- and this is 100% projection time- but “wanting to be part of society and do normal people things, but feeling like it’s impossible, and that most of the spaces I want to join will be forever closed off to me because of something I can’t change” was a defining feature of my teenage years. It was horrible and traumatising and fucked me up. The fact that Agnes seems to have been experiencing a version of that says a lot to me about where her head must have been. 

*

Basically, when Arthur and Eugene described what Agnes was like as a child, and then described a ‘tiny fracture of doubt’ coming out of nowhere thanks to a pesky outsider... my instinct was to doubt them, and to wonder what had really been going through her head for all those decades. What her internal life was really like.

My instinct was that it had probably been... a lot. A mess. A tangle of contradictory feelings and wants. Crises of faith upon crises of faith. Anger. Jealousy. Numbness. Self loathing from multiple angles at once. An absolute maelstrom, all carefully hidden from the people who’d never let her forget that her purpose in life was to give them what they wanted.

And that is so fucking interesting I still can’t put it down. 

#Insert 'it could have been that deep' meme here #And the Giorgio Tsoukalos Red String one #TMA #The Magnus Archives #Agnes Montague #It's my blog and I'll write a Ted Talk about niche fandom crap if I wanna #Sorry for the massive asterisk I'm a grandma who can't type