#emjen rambles

[emjenwrites]

Okay, so some thoughts on Tommy and unwanted sex:

I think the first thing to establish is that Tommy does not actually want or enjoy every single sexual encounter he has in the series. It's really easy to miss that because a lot of the time the show itself buys into the idea that Tommy is always down for sex and always enjoys it. There apparently is a certain type of viewer who will like Tommy more if they can view him as an alpha male who has lots of super hot sex (though I have no idea who exactly this viewer is supposed to be) and the show is bound and determined to catch those viewers regardless of whether that's actually an accurate depiction of what's going on.

There are a lot of places in the series where Tommy has sex he doesn't necessarily want because it helps his plans or otherwise seems necessary. One of the most blatantly obvious examples is what happened with Diana in this week's episode along with Tommy x Tatiana in s3. However, this pattern is also visible in other situations like Tommy x Jessie in s4 or when he's trying to avoid other situations or conversations, like in 6x02 when Lizzie's asking if he plans to sleep.

Tommy knows that sex tends to be a thing people want from him and he knows to make use of that. My favorite reading of Tommy x Jessie is the one where neither is particularly into the other but each is doing just a good enough job at pretending to be interested that the other thinks they're succeeding in using sex to manipulate the other to their own ends. I think that pretty clearly illustrates the "Tommy has concluded that there are situations in which offering sex will make things move more smoothly and he's generally okay with doing so." While there's definitely enough evidence that Tommy does enjoy sex at least as much as anyone else in the show does, a lot of the time his sexual encounters are much more transactional not just him not being able to keep it in his pants.

Let's go back s3 for a minute and talk about Tommy x Tatiana. Arguably, the dynamic here is similar to Tommy x Jessie in the "both these people have outside reasons to be having sex."

(I've been fighting with this post all week so at this point I'm just going to import some stuff I wrote about Tommy x Tatiana elsewhere since none of you have previously seen it:)

Tatiana claims that she understands Tommy better than anyone else and that she knows what he wants and needs. There's a number of dubcon things which happen in s3, but the excuse given is that Tatiana knows what Tommy wants so deep down that he doesn't even know to ask for it, so he doesn't have to consent because she's giving him what he wants.

Personally, I think Tatiana's majorly projecting her own traumas and desires onto Tommy. I don't actually dislike Tatiana and I feel kind of bad for her, but that's different than saying that I think she's right in her estimations of what Tommy wants. I don't think there's a whole lot of indication that he doesn't like the things that she says he does. He strikes me as actively freaked out by the events of 3x04 and seems like he wishes they would end, though I've never been sure how much of that is me projecting onto him.

Tommy is a mess for most of s3 both because of Grace and because of the later traumatic brain injury. I don't think that s3 Tommy is suicidal so much as self-destructive. He goes along with what Tatiana wants because it indulges that self-destruction.

The conclusion I came to at the end of the above quoted Tommy x Tatiana post is that the worst thing about Tommy x Tatiana is that we as the audience are supposed to think its sexy when it's actually messed up and dubiously consensual and I'll stand by that. The one thing I'll give the Tommy x Diana scene in that it's not framed like it's sexy.

One thing about Tommy and unwanted sex is that while I do think he is capable of conceptualizing "this is a thing I don't want to do" I don't think he's capable of viewing "I don't want to do this" as a valid reason not to do it? It's probably more obvious in s3, where he takes steps (the nail in the tire) to make sure he can't say no even though he wants to. There's probably a larger discussion to be had about whether Tommy will avoid further traumatizing himself, but in the case of sex specifically I don't think he conceptualizes any negative affects of just agreeing to sex he doesn't want might have as worth taking note of when deciding whether or not to do it.

Diana has expressed an interest in sleeping with Tommy since 6x02, and Tommy and Lizzie have both known it's coming for the same amount of time. However, you can tell even in that first scene where they meet Diana that Lizzie thinks Tommy's going to be the one doing the pursuing (ex: that bit where he reassures her that he's just pretending Diana's attractive). That's reasonable given Lizzie's characterization and her insecurities about herself and her relationship with Tommy, but it's also an example of the way the "Tommy can't keep it in his pants" story plays out in the family itself. Lizzie's worried because she perceives Diana--who is powerful and upper class and beautiful and looks a little like Grace--as exactly the type of woman Tommy would want to jump in bed with and because Lizzie doesn't think Tommy actually cares about her. Diana makes things worse by having fun poking at Lizzie's insecurities.

There are at least two things worthy of note going on in that last scene in Arrow House. One is that Diana is bound and determined to make sure everyone knows she and Tommy had sex. Her motivations seem to be a) humiliate and isolate Tommy and possibly assert some kind of dominance over him (as @weeo pointed out, she talks about him like he's a thing in this scene), and b) to humiliate Lizzie. Diana can tell Lizzie's insecure about her relationship with Tommy and she's been enjoying toying with that the entire season.

The other thing worthy of note is that Lizzie's kneejerk impression of what was going to happen between Tommy and Diana has--from her perspective--been proven correct? However since Lizzie's conceptualization of Tommy as a person doesn't allow for him to end up in sexual situations he doesn't want and didn't actively pursue, the idea that maybe he wouldn't have chosen to sleep with a fascist who by her own omission is part of a belief system that is angling to commit genocide against Roma people doesn't really occur to her. It's similar to that scene in s3 where Polly is half-teasing Tommy about him sleeping with Tatiana; there's this underlying assumption that Tommy can't get himself into sexual situations he doesn't want so any sexual situations he does find himself in must have been something he actively wanted and pursued.

I think that reading is probably too harsh on Lizzie, though. Tommy has given her precious little reason to think that he values their relationship or would be faithful to her if he asked for it, and Lizzie has a long history of being treated like relationships with her don't really matter. It makes sense that she'd come to that conclusion, and the fact that Tommy doesn't try to defend himself (even though that's because he feels guilty) probably makes things worse.

I think ultimately the point I'm trying to make is that Tommy's relationship with sex is more complicated than just "Tommy Shelby really, really likes sex and will sleep with any woman who he's not related to." A lot of the sex he has in the show happens because it helps his plans and some of that sex is sex he doesn't actually want.

Idk, hopefully this is coherent.

#no i didn't know how to finish this i'm sure you can tell #but it need to go to work and don't have time to keep angsting about it #just peaky things #s6 spoilers #hopefully i won't regret writing this #emjen rambles

[emjenenla]

Something about Tommy being so willing to take on blame for things he totally didn't do suggests to me that he's probably spent his whole life knowing that his family will believe the worst of him. But also it's such a catholic thing, at least in my family, to internalize the shame and guilt of something you didn't even do. No point arguing just go about doing your penance and move on. Idk I wonder why he does that but I've def seen that happen in the very strict catholic side of my family too

Sorry for the late response, I kept forgetting to respond.

I’m not sure I have any coherent thoughts on the concept of Catholic Guilt in the context of the Shelby family, though I would love to hear other people’s thoughts on the matter.

Moving on to “was Tommy raised to believe the family will always believe the worst of him?” Overall, I think the dynamic the family has in the show where Tommy is always to blame for everything regardless of whether he actually had anything to do with it is largely a post-war thing. I especially think this is true regarding his relationship with Polly, because the impression I got was that pre-war they were basically equal partners in the running the betting shop and the Peaky Blinders. @deadendtracks mentioned in a meta once that it seems like the real issue Polly has with Tommy in s1 is with the fact that he’s no consulting with her the way he used to, and I’d agree with that. After that things just keep snowballing and eventually we get to where we are at the end of s5.

You could perhaps combine your thoughts with the “Tommy was a parentified child” theory and argue that Tommy could have picked some “people will always believe the worst of me” stuff that way, though I’m far from an expert on parentification and therefore probably don’t know what I’m talking about. That said, if you assume Tommy and Arthur’s relationship dynamic (where Arthur leans on Tommy to avoid having to make decisions for himself) pre-dates the war, that could tie into this, because it would mean that Tommy is long used to taking the blame for Arthur’s actions.

Tbh, I’m not quite sure where I’m trying to go with this. Does anyone else have any thoughts?

#peaky blinders #tommy shelby #meta #analysis #emjen rambles #sort of #emjen answers

[emjenwrites]

I feel like people aren't realizing that Tommy is literally doing everything in this episode days after losing his daughter. Like he's barely holding it together. We know he closes off when he suffers a loss & he isolates himself. He's not being cold to Charles and Lizzie on purpose. This is just how he deals with death. He closes down & focuses on work.

Firstly, I'm sorry for the late response.

I do think that Lizzie understands that this is how Tommy grieves. There is some tension there because Lizzie is also grieving and Tommy is incapable of giving her what she needs to help her in her grief, but I don't think she thinks he's cold or uncaring. In that scene in his office where he's using the typewriter and you can tell she's trying not be angry at him and I think that's because she does understand this is Tommy grieving. It occurs to me that Lizzie might know Tommy better than the rest of the family does, but I'd have to think on that a bit more before I could make more comments on that.

One of the things that's so painful about that funeral scene, is the fact that Tommy gives that eulogy even though he just outright told Arthur he can't do it. Because Tommy is himself, it seems that Arthur's the one who's more of mess, because Arthur always seems like more of a mess. However, Tommy wouldn't have said he couldn't do something if he actually could do it. That point during the eulogy where he stops and turns his back on the rest of the family to gather himself is really painful, because that's not something which he would have done unless he was about to break down. It's a lot like that scene in 4x06 where he almost collapses while trying to convince everyone that Arthur is dead.

However, beyond Lizzie I'm not sure to what extent the rest of the family understands the way Tommy grieves. As @weeo pointed out, you'd think someone else would have agreed to read Ruby's eulogy for him, but no one does. That didn't surprise me when I watched the episode, but it was frustrating to see anyway.

I think the point I'm trying to make here is that a lot of Tommy's coping mechanisms are focused around enabling him to keep on going in the face of things which would otherwise stop him (actually Tommy's disastrous 4x06 vacation shows us that keeping on going is his ultimate coping mechanism). I think that Tommy grieving shows that more obviously than at other times. When someone dies, it's more obvious that Tommy isn't stopping--that he can't stop or he'll fall apart--than it is when other things happen. Unfortunately, this also makes it really easy to come to the mistaken conclusion that he doesn't care because it's expected that grieving people will stop.

#hopefully some of this is coherent/interesting #that scene in 4x06 is a whole discussion of its own #it's one of my favorite scenes in the whole series tbh #just peaky things #s6 spoilers #emjen rambles #emjen answers

[emjenwrites]

To further demonstrate my point: I’ve avoided mentioning how annoyed I am by Alfie’s continued state of alive-ness out of respect for all the Tommy x Alfie shippers, but one of the reasons that frustrates me (beyond the fact that he hasn’t had any relevance to the plot since s4 and is obviously only still showing up because he’s a fan favorite) is that at the end of s4 he tells Tommy he’s “riddled” with cancer. For him to still be alive now (and looking better than he did in s5, might I add) we have to either actively ignore the fact he canonically had cancer or suspend our disbelief about whether someone who’s riddled with cancer could miraculously survive in the 1930s when survival under those circumstances is a toss-up now in the 2020s. That’s a smaller scale example of what happens when you promise your audience a character is going to die and then don’t deliver on that promise, either by killing them or by coming up with a logical and satisfying reason for them to survive.

#just peaky things #s6 spoilers #emjen rambles

[emjenwrites]

There’s been a lot of discussion in the fandom about the way the family’s dynamics set up a situation where everything is always Tommy’s responsibility and his fault when they go wrong. One important facet of this is that Tommy’s not a passive object of that story; it’s a story he buys into just as much as the rest of the family does. Tommy does believe that everything that happens in the family is ultimately his responsibility. He does believe that Polly and Grace's deaths are his fault, because he got himself mixed up with Mosley, because he couldn’t adequately control Arthur and John, because he’s a “coward” who wants to die, etc.

I was thinking about Tommy’s repeated insistence this season that he’s becoming a better person, the way he brings that up to Esme and how that ties into everything he does in this episode. @merhige​ mentioned Tommy viewing the whole episode like a fairy tale where Ruby will be saved if he does the right thing and I think that’s true. He’s believes that if Ruby is sick it must somehow be his fault and that means that he must have the power to fix it. It’s not that his feelings of reasonability and guilt are necessarily different with Ruby than they were with Polly or Grace, it’s just that Ruby hasn’t been murdered she has TB so the disconnect between Tommy’s feelings and reality is more obvious.

After Polly dies, Tommy quits drinking and invests all his energy into “becoming a better person” however he interprets that. He is convinced that if he can manage that people will stop dying because of his actions. In that context, Ruby dying is basically proof that he hasn’t done this adequately, which must be devastating. 

It’s interesting, I guess, seeing a dynamic which likely developed in childhood with something like “if I don’t do take responsibility my siblings are all going to starve to death” spiral completely out of control.

Also, I’ve kind of avoiding talking about John because Tommy’s so disassociated for most of s4 that it’s hard to get a read on whether he feels responsible for John’s death, but I think it’s likely he does.

#just peaky things #s6 spoilers #emjen rambles

[emjenwrites]

...I really do think that it might be accurate to say that Lizzie knows Tommy better than the rest of the family does. Half the issue in Tommy's relationships with the family is that the version of Tommy Shelby who exists in their heads is often only superficially similar to the person who Tommy actually is. Whether that hypothetical Tommy Shelby is better or worse than the person he actually is depends on which member of the family you're talking about and which season you're discussing, but the underlying "the family doesn't actually understand Tommy" thing remains the same. I think Lizzie might be the exception and have a much clearer vision of who Tommy is and why he is the way he is then Arthur or Ada or Polly do/did.

The outlier in this equation is Michael. How well does Michael know Tommy? I think he might understand some fairly important things about Tommy in s4, but I'm not sure if that holds true for s5 or s6.

#just peaky things #s6 spoilers #emjen rambles

[emjenwrites]

My knee-jerk reaction to Arthur refusing to read that eulogy while I was watching 6x04 was "this is the worst thing Arthur has ever done to Tommy." Looking back, I'm less certain, but I still think that moment is the most bald-faced the show has ever been about how one-sided Tommy and Arthur's relationship is. Tommy provides the emotional support Arthur needs to keep from going completely off the rails and Arthur takes that emotional support without reciprocating it. That's the way their relationship has always functioned, but it's a lot more obvious in the later seasons.

One thing I talked about in regards to s5 is how every time Arthur acknowledges that Tommy's falling apart in that season its in the context of how Tommy is failing to hold up his end of their dynamic. It's "Tommy, what's item number 5, I need something to focus on because my wife left me," "Tommy, you're scaring me," etc. That's actually why Arthur taking the bullets out of Tommy's gun on the way home from the rally surprised me, because I honestly didn't think Arthur was capable of a) recognizing that Tommy was suicidal and b) actually doing something about it. I would have thought acknowledging that outright would be too detrimental to Arthur's entire worldview for him to actually be capable of it.

There's a whole discussion to be had about whether the emotional support Tommy provides actually helps Arthur at all or just enables his issues. Probably it's the latter, but the exact same charge can be leveled on Linda and it's actually easier to notice there because (until s5) Linda believes Arthur is a good person who is just under bad influences while Tommy doesn't believe anyone is a good person. I think an important thing to realize is that Tommy and Arthur have a very similar relationship to the one Arthur and Linda have in the sense that they're both providing Arthur with basically unlimited reassurance and protection from consequences. They're doing it in slightly different ways, but the end result is the same.

A good example of this is actually the way that scene at the party where Arthur turns up in a black shirt plays out. Tommy is (understandably) furious, but as the scene goes on it turns into Tommy taking responsibility for the situation. I think Tommy thinks he's giving Arthur a helping hand up after he's been knocked down, but what he's really doing is taking the blame for Arthur...choosing to hang around with fascists because they throw good parties. By taking responsibility Tommy absolves Arthur of the need to feel any guilt and gives him an excuse to keep from facing the implications of his actions. That scene in the wine cellar (which, to be clear, I loved) is basically the same: its Tommy absolving Arthur of guilt for failing to step up the one time Tommy actually needed him to step up and outright asked for it.

That is the dynamic working as intended. It's probably accurate to say that Arthur couldn't handle actually feeling guilt for any of the numerous things he's done which he should probably feel guilty for. I think on some level Tommy and Linda both realize that and take steps to prevent that from happening whether or not they realize that's what they're doing. This whole thing reminds me of that scene in s5 where Arthur beats the man who was talking to Linda and afterwards keeps repeating over and over that he's a good man. That insistence on his own goodness is ridiculous in context but also evidence of how Arthur isn't able to keep up the fiction that he is a good man/not guilty of things he's actually guilty of without someone there who's willing to take the blame away from him.

#i'll have to go looking for that s5 meta i mentioned #just peaky things #s6 spoilers #emjen rambles

[emjenwrites]

I'm...intrigued/confused, I guess by the difference between my reaction to Tommy and Diana having sex and some other people's. To me the fact that he didn't want to have sex with her matters a lot more than the that fact he did and I wouldn't call it cheating, but perhaps I'm just being dense about the whole thing.

#i suspect it might be at least partially because i draw a firm line between sex someone genuinely wants #and sex which is technically consensual but only because someone involved felt they couldn't say no #but i'm unsure how to actually discuss that #without getting into the internal ace community discussions of the difference between #willingness to consent to sex and genuine sex-favorability #(two things which are subject to considerable debate and conflation even amongst aces) #just peaky things #s6 spoilers #emjen rambles

[emjenwrites]

There are numerous examples of characters going for the throat about Tommy being a fundamentally incorrect/broken/badly made person this season. There's Diana outright asking Ada how Tommy "got to be so emotionally mutilated." There's Lizzie saying he's "beyond the help of doctors." There's Tommy saying that lots of money is an equal or better trade for his life and visibly being unaware of how nuts that statement is. There's an ongoing litany of people insisting that Tommy is mutilated and beyond help and not fit be around other people, etc.

It's not that the earlier seasons didn't have this undercurrent that Tommy is somehow wrong and that being near him is like watching a strange creature animate the body of someone you thought you knew. That subtext is a pretty fundamental part of Tommy and Polly's relationship in the earlier seasons, but this is the first season that's been so forward about it. It's like it was the last season and they decided that they were going to make sure everyone noticed it was there.

#just peaky things #s6 spoilers #emjen rambles

[emjenwrites]

Basically, at this point it would be very difficult for Tommy to survive and the show to still end in a satisfying way, but probably not impossible. I’m thinking specifically of that doctor who was mentioned as a second opinion (Helen Something, I have to go back to find her name so I can Google her and figure out if she’s a real person). There’s probably a way to save Tommy still through that character, the question is that, given he appears to have decided to just ignore it until he can’t anymore, whether Lizzie or someone will figure out in time to force him to seek a second opinion. Even then it would be complicated to not kill him and still stick the landing, but probably not impossible.

#just peaky things #s6 spoilers #emjen rambles

[emjenwrites]

Also the Lacrimosa at the beginning. Mozart. Literally Mozart.

It's a bit on the nose, actually. A requiem is basically the hymns in a Catholic funeral mass, and Mozart's Requiem is well known enough that most people recognize bits of it even if they don't know exactly what it is.

Oh, and Mozart literally died while writing the damn thing.

#don't mind me i sang the mozart requiem in choir back in high school #as a fricking soprano #**snorts** #(for those unaware i am very much an alto) #the soprano part is more fun than the alto part though so i can't really complain #just peaky things #s6 spoilers #emjen rambles

[emjenwrites]

The other thing it would be really great to know is what the timeline for s6 is. Yes, I know, expecting chronological consistence from Peaky Blinders is like expecting the sun to rise in the west but still:

S6 takes place four years after s5. s5 took place in 1929, so that says s6 takes place in 1933.

The first scene on Miquelon Island is clearly stated to take place on December 5 1933, which is when prohibition in the US was repealed. Even if that hadn't been said, the scenes back in England with Lizzie, Ada and Arthur also imply it's just before Christmas.

As I recall the only absolute concrete date we have for s5 is Black Tuesday (October 29th 1929), but if you look closely at the posters for the Mosley rally in 5x06 you can see that they say the rally is on December 6th. Polly is shown alive in the ending sequence of 5x06, so we know that she died on the night of December 6-7th 1929 same as Aberama and Barney did.

Why have I gone back to s5 chronology? When Tommy has his seizure in 6x02, he says that it's been four years, one month and six days since he last had a drink. That means the absolute earliest that scene could have been is January 13th 1934, and that's assuming he stopped drinking the day he figured out Polly was dead, which he might not have.

It gets harder to figure from there. When Tommy goes looking for Esme in 6x04 he tells Lizzie he'll be back in five days, and if we assume he kept his word that means Ruby deteriorated really quickly (since she dies the day he comes back). I don't know enough about TB to know if that's possible or not. There could be a date on the letter from Holford but I don't think I wrote one down when I was transcribing it while the season was airing so maybe there wasn't. I'll have to go back and look.

My last bit of chronology-related subtext is that Tommy isn't wearing a coat and has his sleeves rolled up in 6x05 when he meets Diana on the January. It's warmer in the UK in the winter than it is where I live, but I still think it seems to be a bit too warm to still be winter in that scene. The weather seems to be really nice in the final scenes of 6x06 too (though Ruby tells Tommy he should light a fire to get warm at the end of the episode which might imply that its still cold at night?).

Lastly, that Armistice comment in 6x06. I interpreted it to mean that it was 11am, which is when the armistice when into effect in 1918, but it seems some other people took it to mean it was November 11th 1934. I suppose that's possible, but that would mean Tommy blows up Arrow House in early October of the same year and I'm not sure how you'd spread out the rest of the plot which takes place after 6x02 out over nine months. If I had to take a mostly-blind guess, I think it's more likely the end of 6x06 is in March/April 1934.

Oh, and Mosley and Diana were married in 1936, so obviously there's some date fudging going on there.

(some of these dates I knew to google because of a fic called "A Month of Sundays" which was posted on AO3 earlier today. I'd link to it, if not for the whole "the link function on Tumblr is hilariously broken right now" thing.)

#just peaky things #s6 spoilers #hypothetical post s6 fic #emjen rambles

[emjenwrites]

I could go off on a whole thing about when it occurred to me that liking whump was potentially a bad thing and how I learned to be ashamed of writing whump, especially largely plotless whump which only existed because I wanted to read fic where the character was hurt. However, I've generally gotten the impression that indulging in my penchant for navel-gazing on Tumblr just makes me seem even more cringey than normal, and I'm already hopelessly cringey (I mean, I'm ace, for fuck's sake, that alone is maximum cringe). However, the people elsewhere who I normally navel-gaze to either aren't in fandom or aren't into whump and it's awkward talking about whump to people who aren't into it.

I've liked whump literally as long as I can remember, and while I can speculate on what the tropes I like now say about me as a person, I can't speculate on why I like whump as a concept because I was so little when I realized I liked stories where my favorite characters got hurt. I kind of want to talk about how I actively tried to stop liking whump in my teens because I concluded it was immoral but was never able to manage it. I'd like to talk about how even after I got over that I started calling what I writing hurt/comfort because I thought that made it sound less bad and how while I'm more comfortable with calling the stuff I write whump now, I still feel like even other whumpers would think less of me as a fanwriter if I wrote plotless whump.

Idk, it's a whole thing.

#emjen navel-gazes #hypothetical post s6 fic #emjen rambles

[emjenwrites]

The Heralds are really fascinating both as individuals and as a group. They've all got massive PTSD and are...well the word the book usually uses is "insane" but I'm not sure if insanity is the right word to describe the symptoms some of them display (or if a person actually can be insane at all, I've tried finding a straight answer to that question before but never found one).

My brother and I have been reading Game of Thrones together and we were recently talking about how Jaime, Cersei and Tyrion are all what their lives have made them. I think a similar thing is going on with the Heralds here. The Heralds are what happens when you make demigods out of normal people* and then have them fight an unending war for thousands of year with brief interludes that they spend being tortured.

There's also the fact that 4,500 years before the main body of the series, most of the Heralds broke the Oathpact and abandoned Taln to face torture alone. If we're judging by strict results, Taln was able to hold back the Desolation longer on his own than they were all managing together, so you could argue they made the right choice. Judging by the end of Oathbringer, Taln views it this way. However, that doesn't change the fact they the rest abandoned their Oaths.

The Heralds all respond to their trauma differently. Jezrien is an alcoholic, Kalak is paranoid and indecisive, Shalash and Nale both display what I would term as scrupulosity. Shalash is also compulsively destroying every piece of iconology of herself she can find and Nale is so dissociated he basically doesn't feel emotion.

Personally, I'm especially interested in Jezrien and Nale's responses, because they're the Heralds of Honor and Justice and what they did to Taln was neither honorable nor just. Given Jezrien is literally dead now, I really can only hope for more insight into Nale's character going forwards.

It's really interesting to study how the Heralds react and understand their own mental health issues. Like, Kalak knows that he's not okay ("We weren't supposed to get worse. Am I getting worse? I think I feel worse."--WoR, prologue), but Nale seems to be operating under the belief that's he's completely fine until the end of Edgedancer, even as he's going around killing innocent Knight's Radiant because Ishar told him that would stop the return of the Desolations.

And since I've brought him up, I'll talk about Ishar. Ishar, the Herald of Luck and patron of the Bondsmiths. If you're listening to Shalash and Nale he's the only Herald who survived untouched and he can make everything better. Unfortunately, Ishar is delusional and is convinced that he is the Almighty (ie literally god).** Oh, and he's also doing horrible medical experiments on spren. None of the Heralds we've met so far seem to be aware of these things, which is interesting given it seems to be fairly common knowledge amongst the regular (non-Herald) characters that Ishar's God-King of Tukar persona is insane.

I think how big a problem this is should probably be obvious given Ishar is the one who tells Nale he should start killing Surgebinders. Nale believes his own ability to judge right from wrong is flawed (which, to be fair, it pretty visibly is) so he turns to Ishar trusting that Ishar won't have that problem. It's a pretty striking example the role Ishar must have played amongst the Heralds in the beginning, that they would still display such blind trust in his infallibility literally millennia later. Unfortunately, about the last thing Roshar needs right now is more Heralds deciding they should just do what Ishar tells them to.

It's worth noting that, much of the above holds true for the Fused as well. The impression I got of them in Rhythm of War is that while they are different from the Heralds on the "ways to cram a Cognitive Shadow back into a living body" level, they are about the same on emotional/trauma levels. I really hope this series ends in a way that honors that instead of just making the Fused out to be Evil Forces of Darkness.

* This is a tangent, but it's worth acknowledging that ordinary people becoming functionally divine is a major theme of most of Brandon Sanderson's work.

** Glad I got RoW out to check what word he uses exactly here. He's distinctly says the Almighty not Honor and while the Shard Honor is the Almighty, I'm not sure if it would make sense to say he claims to be Honor.

#just cosmere things #emjen rambles

[emjenwrites]

If I'm being completely honest that "You're not a soldier, you're a coward" line in 6x01 really bothers me. Being suicidal isn't cowardice. I'm also not a huge fan of framing the reason Tommy shouldn't kill himself as being him not saying goodbye to the family (which kind of implies him shirking his duty to them). Both things make sense in the context of the family, but that doesn't mean I have to like them.

#just peaky things #s6 spoilers #cw suicide #emjen rambles

[emjenwrites]

The stuff with Finn in the last episode could have used more set-up. If we’d had scenes earlier in the season establishing that Finn knew Billy was the one who had sold out the Mosley assassination but was keeping it quiet what happened at the end wouldn’t have seemed so out of left field. If Tommy had reason to suspect Finn was hiding a traitor it would make sense for him to instruct Duke, Isiah and Uncle Charlie to figure out whose side Finn was really on and to take action appropriately. As it stands I don’t see why they thought there was a problem and that Finn should be tested to see what he would do.

#just peaky things #s6 spoilers #emjen rambles