#and the wHOLE show has had him being the worst he's either neglectful completely absent attempting to buy her affection OR

[foxx-queen]

the real villain of father brown is lord montague

[nebulous-tundra]

oh yeah that absolutely bothers me too, like Lauren DID write a character who has very obvious privilege and is seen multiple times using it and it's Sam, but we're not ever supposed to question that because she's Good and Always Uses It Good. and then she tries to draw all these parallels between Sam and Damien and their backstories which falls totally flat because Sam lost her parents to a car crash at 16 while being filthy fucking rich and therefore having a ton of societal support that allowed her to live comfortably and enabled her to essentially not leave her house (which allowed her to do the Good Pure Trauma Survivor thing of Avoiding People, something Damien actively could not do if he wanted to like. not die in a gutter of exposure and starvation), whereas Damien was deliberately abandoned by his parents much younger (making him a survivor of profound childhood neglect) and with nothing but his ability to survive with and absolutely no social or societal support whatsoever and these are completely fucking different situations that would obviously have different effects on people but also it just solidifies how much privilege Sam has and how we're just not supposed to think about that lmao

i exaggerate a lot of my disdain for Shippen's choices for TBS but i will straight up admit i hate the whole Good Victim horseshit. very often i will see depictions of trauma and grief and mental illness where the characters meant to portray those qualities are essentially sad chew toys that the audience can quietly 'awww' at, and any mention of poor reactions to said issues the character might have aren't mentioned because they're too 'ugly'. it shows a side of our humanity we don't like to think about, that we could have done nothing wrong, but because of something that happened in our past or in our brains, we can develop personality defects that make us cause others harm- even deliberately.

i think one aspect of why people hate on Damien so much is because he represents that, he -just like the vast majority of people- did what he thought best given his knowledge and circumstances, and he ended up making tons or enormous mistakes that hurt both himself and others. people like Shippen will insist that he just needs to 'try harder' to be a good person, but that's not really how that works. what is a good person? what does it mean to be a good person? how does one become 'good'? these are ideas that we develop throughout our childhood, with great guidance from our teachers and peers and parents. if your perception of reality is warped, if your guides are misspoken or absent, your concept of these ideas too will be misinformed, warped, or under-developed. it's scary to think that a person could have done their best but because of circumstances just come out like shit, people want to believe they either do have or can have control over their life, including if they're 'good'. this isn't to say that free will is meaningless, just that is more to being 'good' than just telling someone try harder at being good.

the Good Victim stuff isn't necessarily a poor representation of what can happen in life, i've certainly met some very sweet, traumatized people at my job, however, to say that is the only way to be good, to say you can only experience and express your pain in a certain way to be good is very upsetting. people lash out when they're hurt. they do ugly things to make others hurt before they think you'll hurt them. they force people to be at their side because they don't know how to ask -or even how to have trust in another that they'll do what they say. an abuse survivor could try to seek out therapy, or they could avoid it because every interaction in their life has told them that if you tell people things about yourself- they'll just use them against you later. it's their choice to make, and the 'right' one that might seem obvious to us might, to them, seem to be the worst thing they could do for themselves.

Samantha had a traumatic childhood, never knowing when she would be taken from her loved ones when her emotions got the better of her. her parents, from her recount, seemed very loving and she was definitely more well off than the majority of the world. by the point she lost her parents to the car crash(from her perspective, by her own fault) she was late into her childhood, 16, and had just enough guidance at that point to have her own well-developed answers for what 'good' is, even if she didn't know just yet how to quite pursue it. she had the the resources and support to pursue just about anything she wanted, it was only a matter of overcoming her own insecurities.

Robert, by his very first memories, had his whole reality warped by his ability. his parents catered to him at a very young age, and followed all his wishes up until the moment they abandoned him when he was 13 years old. whether or not they loved him, we will never know because of the nature of his ability. we know from his accounts in A Neon Darkness that they had a corn farm, so from that we can assume they were fairly well off, but not so well of that they didn't worry about money. we know he's from Nebraska which seems to have a decent education system, and we know he attended school for a while after, but with an ability like his that literally warps the behavior and words of those around him w/out him even having to think about his own want, whose to say how faithful that education was? needless to say, Robert's concepts of 'goodness' are completely underdeveloped. that he didn't come out a complete psychopath is nigh a miracle.

the issues that plagued Damien in his childhood followed him into his adulthood, because until he loses his ability, he's working with the same data he's been given his whole life. no wonder he's such a bookworm, even slice of life stuff must seem like fantasy to him. Samantha already had a head start in her childhood, but as she became and adult and attended therapy, she was gradually able to expose herself to new data that guided her on how to master her ability and cope with her anxiety disorder. Damien's ability robbed(heh. Rob.) him of the ability to develop. it's described as a poison but i think rather than degrading him, it's put him in this perverse homeostasis where he never grows because he doesn't know 1.) how to change 2.) what he even needs to change 3.) why he should change, even if he wants to, as he clearly so desperately does.

to say his issue is that he just hasn't "tried hard enough" like Sam or Caleb is just insulting, and i'm sure triggering for anyone who's heard those exact words from their own teachers and parents. he's been put in this impossible situation, made to act realistically, and then blamed for it, over and over again. even in his letter in Some Faraway Place, as much as i loved it, it read's as Damien finally blaming himself too, just like how literally everyone else in the series has, and now it's his turn.