#Helena eagan

[dinovia-grant]

Me to Mark:

this has strong meme format potential

[sageshouldknowbetter]

It’s tempting to think that innies are just the outies at their core, right? That they’re what you get when you take a person and peel away all their past trauma until you get to their very soul. The true essence. The self free from expectations. “The you you are.”

But we have to remember: innies can’t be the “true” outies without the environmental influence to “mess them up,” because the severed floor is NOT a non-environment. This world that the innies are born into forms their every character trait and idiosyncrasy that isn’t already BURIED in the outie’s subconscious. So though it’s fun (and not completely wrong!) to say innies are outies without the baggage… they aren’t the outies in their “purest forms” either.

Take Mark, for example. On the surface, the Mark S we see at the beginning of season one is a hard-working, kind, and seemingly content yes-man. Mark Scout, meanwhile, is a depressed and sarcastic alcoholic who gets drunk at night and sobs in his car the next morning.

The apparent difference between them? Mark Scout remembers his wife dying in a car crash and Mark S… doesn’t. Therefore, Mark S must be basically like Mark Scout was before Gemma died. … Right???

Not exactly. Because Mark S still has a past. A short one, sure, and closed-off too — but still a past, and it highly affects his personality today.

It’s heavily implied that he didn’t start off as the corporate tool we see in early episodes. In fact, based on his account of threatening to kill Petey and extensive references to past torture (“bad soap,” “Milchick can’t always be nice like that,” and “It’s easier for you both if he knows which end to start from”), he could’ve been almost as rebellious as Helly. The difference is that where Mark Scout remembers being formed by a drunk father, screeching tires, and policemen at the door, Mark S remembers days on end in the Break Room, saying he was a blight on humanity until he believed it was true.

That’s a decent portion of why he comes across as a “sweet” yet timid bootlicker! Because he is built on trauma! Just new trauma! Different trauma! Trauma he remembers, but Mark Scout doesn’t! (His outie’s past still impacts his character, sure, but it’s not at the forefront of his mind the way his conscious memories are.) The fact that his bad experiences are novel, weird, and surface-level innocuous don’t make them any less potent or formative to the kind of person he is now.

In the same way, I don’t think it’s exactly right to call Helly “what Helena would’ve been like if she was free from Lumon and the pressure of being an Eagan.”

Yeah — in some ways, it’s true. Helly doesn’t have to worry about public opinion, the weight of her name, or what her father thinks. She can have friends and a surrogate dad and, well, baby goats. But the difference between Helly and Helena is more than just one remembering her Eagan upbringing and the other not. The severed floor is in NO way some controlled, pressure-free, unable-to-change-its-inhabitants environment.

Helly remembers cutting her arm in a smashed-open window under red glow, apologizing in the Break Room over a thousand times, and learning just how much she isn’t considered a person. But she also remembers three other people being her only allies, friends (and lover), and entire world — literally. Less than ten people, and always under horrific circumstances, are the only people she ever sees. This kind of life could NOT happen to anyone on the outside, including Helena — even if she wasn’t born an Eagan.

So what would Helena be like if she wasn’t an Eagan? The truth is… we don’t know. But the question isn’t what she would be like. It’s if, stripped of her heritage, it would even still be her in the first place.

Your brain is split in half. Is that still you? You are awakened, memories gone, born again into a whole different kind of world, and grow to fill it like water in cupped hands. Is it still you now? Are you the same “you” you were ten years ago? Ten months ago? This morning? Who ARE you? And what IS “you,” anyway?

That’s what Severance wants us to ponder. And whatever the relationship between innies and outies is (the same person, completely different people, Cain and Abel, you in another lifetime) (can you even call that “you”?), one thing’s for certain: innies aren’t just outies with the bad stuff wiped off. If anything, that’s what Lumon would like them to think.

[maxanor]

Your outie prefers two scoops of ice cream in a serving, but they must be the same flavor.

[nupsume]

Helly R. 💙

[heck-star]

Another thing abt this that I haven’t seen a lot of people mention is Milchick’s reaction. Man was fucking FLOORED. Man straight up watched one of the heads of his religion, a mythic figure an EAGAN for christs sake, start laughing hysterically and making fun of their deeply important religious texts.

helena taking the chance to make fun of the stupid mythology she’s had to pretend to take seriously since birth……her catholic ass

[consultingfujoshi]

having some barely formed thoughts about the three severed women we know of (excluding o&d) and how they're all sort of experiencing their own misogynist hellscape and how severance not only exacerbates the existing struggles of women but reduces those women down to nothing but their suffering

gabby's innie exists purely to gestate and give birth to children and then is switched off again and never gets to raise or even meet her child until her husband decides it's time for the next one. episode 7 suggests gabby is not the only woman who has done this to herself. how many female innies exist just to be a walking baby incubator?

gemma is quite literally in hell. dozens of versions of her are being subjected to physical or psychological torture at the hands of the same white guy, at least one of which is in an endless performance of housewifery, her body given over to the hands of strangers, and she has to willingly walk into each room knowing anything could be happening to her in there and she will never know what, only that her alternate selves have literally never known anything except suffering. you did it to yourself, you asked for this.

and even when she tries to free herself she is immediately sent back by one of these innies who literally does not know what is going on and why she's here, and doesn’t know enough to question what she's being told. these women she becomes do not have the tools, the knowledge or agency, to fight back. if you'd known better, you'd have stopped it. why didn't you stop it? why weren't you smarter about it? why weren't you more careful?

tell me you love me before you go, sweetheart

and helly. she's more complicated but there's really something to be said about helena, a woman that by all accounts should see her as a sister, and uses that very idea to propagandise herself and inflate her own status, but in reality does not even see helly as human - she is constantly at the mercy of a woman far more affluent and powerful than herself who feigns care for her to the masses whilst happily subjecting her to torture. and then without that support from another woman, without that sense of solidarity, she seeks refuge in the arms of a man who can somewhat understand what she's going through because that feels like her only option, to gain approval or social standing through a man, but even that is hollow and it is soured by the very woman she is at the mercy of competing with her for that same man. she has been forced to place all her bets on the love of a man, like that'll prove she's real and worth something, and even that she can't have for herself

severance is used in all of these cases as a means of further dehumanising, objectifying, and reducing women down to their base biological functions and forces them to subject themselves to the whims of men. all in totally unique ways but all very real experiences that women go through every day, crytallised by having it quite literally be all they exist for. severance as just another tool to exert violence upon women

[metaphoricallyrose]

Hello helly!

[gazpachito]

I am a person. You are not.

[011759]

Helena Eagan, is this you?

would u still love me if i were stuck in a cycle i've never been able to break

[kendrysaneela]

Severance the show where you get to watch two characters who have had sex twice meet for the first time.

[melonsharks]

did you tell him that you fucked his innie at the ortbo?

[sorrydetka]

gemma sinking down in the elevator crying for mark and helly down in the same position in the elevator after her suicide attempt and seeing mark

[camikudo]

My shaila

can't stop thinking about her

[carlsdraws]

my girl(s)

[awanderingtortoise]

Replaying the hallway kiss scene like Helena did with the elevator one and I'm not even ashamed of myself

[torturedpoetspsychward]

helena eagen is giving us the girlfailure representation we have been missing since shiv roy

there’s something so beautiful about helena eagan not being written as an elite frigid untouchable evil yet perfect woman like she’s such a loser and it’s so wonderful. she’s revolutionizing loser women on my tv in the same way helly r continues to revolutionize the representation of girls that bit someone in 3rd grade. and they’re both the same person and hate each other and are messy about it. it’s just beautiful.