#benjamin linus

[capturedbythemoment]

God what a tv show… ✨, I need to watch it again 🤩

Lost + Top Rated IMDb Episodes

[thornieta]

[spiltmiiilk]

Telling my friends my favourite character in Lost is so embarrassing. Like what do you mean it's the 50 year old man in business casual with the luminescent blue eyes and not any of the age appropriate normal options? It doesn't help that when you google him every picture looks like this

[art by me but heavily inspired by @kitnorm 's art of Jack]

[softdisclosurecore]

[lost-inanotherlife]

If I had to describe John/Anthony and Sawyer/Anthony parallels in a sentence it would be the following: Anthony represents for John the fact that "dreams" can come true; for Sawyer that nightmares can.

So let's talk about James/Sawyer.

I feel the need to say that, unlike John, the narrative doesn't really delve into Sawyer's past. We know the essential facts and that's it. So, if I want to analyze Sawyer relationship with Anthony I need to add some stuff on my own. In other words: be warned because I'll add some things that the text doesn't mention but that make sense within the narrative (or so I think).

If John's wound is for everyone to see, Sawyer's is nowhere to be found. On the surface, Sawyer seems a "more or less" well-adjusted man (at least compared to John, lol). This is because Sawyer's wound is like those injuries from sharp objects: if you pull out the knife, the victim will die. Sawyer simply cannot pull out that knife so what does he do? He starts building himself around that knife. He starts creating "Sawyer" as he imagined the man he took the identity from would be. This is why you can't see Sawyer's wound: because you can't see James internally bleeding inside Sawyer.

The obsession James/Sawyer forms for the man who conned his mother is, to me, a clear substitution for something else. Anthony's actions are surely reprehensible but he didn't kill James' mother, Mary. James' father did (a father that remains unnamed, by the way, huge red flag). And then he killed himself. And James was there when it happened. And he was thus "left behind". I think it should go without saying that this is too much for even a normal, adult, balanced person to take. Let alone a child. Unfortunately, on top of that, we must take into account the fact that the myth of sudden bursts of violence has long been debunked. A husband doens't just wake up one day and kills his wife. He was abusing her from before. This means that violence was already a rule in Ford's household (we have proof of this thanks to Anthony himself when he says that Mary begged him "to rescue her from her sorry little life"). The bed under which little James took refuge from his father's violence towards his mother knew too well that these happenings weren't exceptional cases in that house. The show doesn't go there but it's easy to imagine a young James hiding under his bed hoping, praying that THAT won't be the end of it. And it's never the end of "it", aka the abuse. Until Anthony Cooper enters the stage in James' story and "turns" the nightmares into reality.

Where John lacks con-fidence, Sawyer has an abundance of it. Where John needs the world to give meaning to his life, Sawyer shapes the world into doing his bidding and "creates" his own life (or so he thinks, of course). The world performs for John because in it he hopes to find his destiny, Sawyer performs for the world so that nobody can see that there's a dying James inside himself.

James moves his terrible childhood trauma onto "Sawyer" and he becomes Sawyer, aka he becomes "the thing" he can't control, the bad "thing" that turns nightmares into reality so that he can control that thing (or so he thinks) because he can't look at what he has repressed. Interestingly, by claiming that "Sawyer" is responsible for his parents' death AND claiming "Sawyer" as his new persona, James, (and let's remember he's a child and children rationalize the world in a different way than adults) is actually blaming himself for his parents' death. If he is "Sawyer" then he is also the person who has "caused" his father to kill his mother and then to shoot himself. In other words, just like John, according to James what happened was his fault. If he hadn't been so scared and so little things would've gone differently, if he weren't a coward and didn't hide under the bed, his parents would be alive (this is what I suppose is James-as-child line of reasoning).

This is why Sawyer is all about bravado: it's just a way to fool the world and not to let people see that there is a little child under the bed who's scared to death. If the island is for John a way to "demonstrate" that he's right, that he has a great destiny to fulfill, for Sawyer is the ultimate escape. On the island Sawyer is as far away as he could ever hope to be from his trauma: he's on an island that doesn't have an exact location and moves through time, hence Sawyer is free from time and space. This means that Sawyer doesn't have to perform anymore, he doesn't have to hide under the bed anymore, he can potentially come out. Or re-invent himself, ditch "Sawyer" and give himself a new persona.

But on this island, out of all places in the entire world and the entirety of time, Sawyer finds himself in the BRIG of a SLAVING ship trapped there with none other that the "Real Sawyer" himself, aka Anthony Cooper. And how did he get there in the first place? By getting FUCKING conned by none other than John Locke. Sawyer/James is actually as far from freedom as he could have ever hoped for.

The irony, the beauty, the poetry. In that moment Anthony is not Anthony-as-a-real-person, he's Sawyer-as-imagined-by-James. In other words, it's Sawyer vs Sawyer, Anthony Cooper doesn't matter. It's fiction-vs-reality just like in John's case and his "Fall" from that building. And once again, reality doesn't win. It doesn't matter to Sawyer that Anthony didn't kill his parents because what matters to Sawyer is to kill the person responsible for his parents' death, which is Sawyer-as-imagined-by-James. Which is himself.

Sawyer strangles "Sawyer" to death, he kills him with his own hands, strangling him from behind. It's intimate, physical, slow and might suggest a certain pleasure in doing it. Choking has a whole series of erotic connotations that cannot go unnoticed because... well, Sawyer is killing a father-figure who has castrated both him and Locke for all their lives. It's perhaps worth mentioning that Ben will kill John in the exact same way (although I would say that the erotic connotations in this case are vastly different).

So yes: Sawyer kills "Sawyer" kills Anthony kills himself. James sheds himself of Sawyer's protective glaze and, in a way, it's "good". Too bad that the knife is still there, though, James is still internally bleeding. Sawyer/James' original trauma is ultimately never resolved, imo: the name of Sawyer's father remains unknown, the actual responsible for the murder of Mary Ford is never taken into account. He killed himself, sure, but he caused irreparable damage to his own son. And for that nobody ever pays because his name is never uttered, the real deed is never talked about. The abuse stays hidden, in-doors, in the family. In the... brig.

One day we'll have to talk about John, Sawyer... and "The Man from Tallahassee", Anthony Cooper.

[secretsofthewilde]

Lost textposts 5/6

[porcelain-skullsforeyes]

what do y’all know about LOST

Sketches + closeups + meme templates 🥳

[ivebeendressingforrevenge]

[lostfan23]

[fist-of-vengeance]

Ben Linus + textposts

[szyszkasosnowa]

[linusbenjamin]

Lost + Tags

[thornieta]

Finally finished Lost and I’m convinced that no one gets Ben Linus the way I do‼️ Your honour he’s just a girl🗣️🗣️

[w1ng3dw01f]

Thot daughter:

Gay son:

Boy mom:

Girl dad:

weaponized incompetence uncle:

Trauma bonding aunt:

Black cat neighbor:

Golden retriever Labrador:

Sister-in-law:

/

Golden-retriever-sister-in-law:

“I can’t get away from this fucking family”:

[lost-inanotherlife]

middle aged, gay and married. who does it like them?

MEANWHILE JACK:

[kirbys-long-arms]

My first Lost text posts 🥰🥰🥰