#but i will not stop saying alex was WILDLY and absurdly out of line in that scene

[haloud]

I always thought Michael's hand being healed was such a strange direction to take, it was such a huge part of his arc in season 1 they even went as far as showing us on screen how it happened which is something I havent been able to watch since it aired I have to skip that whole scene, to just erase it at the end was such a disappointment and then there was never really any follow through in season 2 but season 2 was kind of a mess anyway I figured we would of got some confrontation between max and michael about it.

there are multiple excellent metas about consent in RNM, particularly how it pertains to Max, so I can see why Max violating consent in this case would be a deliberate choice to demonstrate just how much Max was affected by the energy and power he absorbed, how much it could change him. however, yeah, you’re right--michael’s hand was a huge part of his arc in season 1, it’s a huge part of his character, and even flirting with the line of a disability cure narrative is very difficult to do well, so this was a decision that had to be approached with a lot of intentionality, with a very deliberate direction, with something to say about max and michael, about how healing powers can be misused, about bodily autonomy...

and season two just showed again and again that that wasn’t the case. there was nothing there. max and michael don’t talk about it. it barely even comes up with michael. and the time it’s dealt with directly, it’s your show’s only remaining disabled character berating him for not dealing with it the “right” way. it’s honestly very upsetting, and this is what leads me to the stance i expressed in the tags on my previous reblog--that i don’t believe that rnm sees michael’s hand as a disability in the same way alex’s leg is a disability.

with this criticism i also feel the need to say that i do recognize that RNM is still a living document--they may go back and address it better, let michael and max talk about it, let michael feel what he feels about it and process it on his own schedule. but season 2 has given me NO reason to trust that this will happen. michael? ALLOWED to be angry about something that was done to him? automatically toxic, none of that allowed here, no sir.

like im sorry, this is a salty tangent, but of all the things--you can accept all the times the show TELLS and not SHOWS that michael has a consistent anger issue that harms the people around him and alex specifically, but michael wearing the bandana, even if it was because he wasn’t ready to let go of his anger at jesse or max--which that’s a big IF, because michael doesn’t say that, alex assigns him that motivation and gets mad at him for it (alex, you see, is allowed to be angry about things)(at michael at least, not in a sustained way at his abuser, noooo)--it was literally hurting NO ONE. literally no one. for michael to wear a piece of fabric on his hand. if alex has a problem with it, if it’s hard for alex to see, that’s officially alex’s problem and something for him to deal with with a therapist, not a stick to beat michael with when he’s mad at him.

anyway

rnm may go back and address this topic, and i hope they do, i hope that this storyline can be salvaged somehow. like i’ve previously expressed, i think the most eloquent solution would be to restore his disability somehow, preferably through him protecting loved ones again, as that reinforces that element of his character and kind of reclaims the circumstances, reframes them from the very painful hate crime to an active and empowering act of love...but they didn’t ask me. and there are other ways to do this right. but season 2 damaged my trust significantly, and whether or not they do, eventually, fix it somehow, people are allowed to react to even an in-progress story as it happens and work with the current information they possess.

[haloud]

okay, sure, let’s talk about this.

First: yes, this post approaches the topic of Michael’s hand and the erasure of Michael’s disability (and what the show should do about it going forward) from Michael’s POV. If you think there is an issue inherent to approaching the topic of Michael’s hand and the erasure of Michael’s disability from Michael’s POV, I don’t know what to tell you.

Second: this post is talking about one thing: the way the show handles (or, rather, doesn’t handle) the nonconsensual healing of Michael’s hand, including the one scene that focuses on it the most, the bunker scene in 2x10. If there are other moments throughout the show that you think constitute Michael being “disturbing and nasty” to Alex, I encourage you to make your own meta post pointing out those moments and explaining your reasoning.

Additionally, in the tags on my original post, I said “ #please do not @ me for criticizing alex in 2x10 i get that michael was a shithead for calling him stupid #but i will not stop saying alex was WILDLY and absurdly out of line in that scene  #if you want to call that ooc be my guest #i might even agree  #but im not going to stop criticizing it/him anyway  #take it as doylist or watsonian criticism whichever one you like.” I stated my perspective on Michael in the 2x10 scene: he was being a shithead, and he shouldn’t have called Alex stupid. Wa-hey.

Third: I say nothing that absolves Michael of all wrongdoing throughout the series. Is the expectation that for every character but Alex, no points can be made without reading out a laundry list of that character’s sins first? Or does this only apply to Michael? Is this my bias we’re addressing, or yours?

Fourth: I do make some statements that indicate a perspective that deserves more explanation/context, so I’ll provide it.

“michael? ALLOWED to be angry about something that was done to him? automatically toxic, none of that allowed here, no sir.”

“you can accept all the times the show TELLS and not SHOWS that michael has a consistent anger issue that harms the people around him and alex specifically.”

 I don’t believe that RNM has sufficiently shown Michael’s anger issues being toxic to the people around him. It’s an informed attribute. We’re told he has a long habit of getting in bar fights, but we’re only shown him doing so once, under extreme emotional and mental stress, despite the numerous flashbacks we’re shown to the period of his life when he was supposedly doing this most. The other brawl he’s gotten into was with Wyatt in defense of Mimi, and yes, he enjoyed it, but Wyatt’s a piece of shit

Michael’s violence shouldn’t be celebrated, and some people, particularly early on in the show/fandom, tended to make excuses for it (particularly against Max) because it stems from trauma. However, I don’t intend to excuse him, only to say that I don’t think Michael is shown to be remarkably more violent or angry than, say, Max or Liz or even Alex himself.

But the show treats him as if he is. We have Isobel telling him to stop “manufacturing anger.” We have Alex berating him about using anger as a defense mechanism. There are others; to go into more detail than this, I’d have to rewatch to be able to reference them directly. The disparity between the anger Michael displays (in context of other characters also displaying anger) and the way he’s treated exacerbate the feeling that Michael is shamed for the way his trauma manifests in a way that’s unique among the cast.

However, my belief that Michael’s anger issue is an informed attribute not well substantiated by on-screen evidence…doesn’t mean the show isn’t telling what it doesn’t show. People have every right to interpret it as the authoritative word on Michael’s behavior and just assume the majority of it happens off-screen. I’m not the boss of you. Which I said, directly, in my post.

“(alex, you see, is allowed to be angry about things)”

Alex is one of the characters who often reacts with anger–justified anger, most of the time, I’d say. He isn’t directly shamed for it by other characters the way Michael is.

“(at michael at least, not in a sustained way at his abuser, noooo)”

However, I do have a serious problem with the way the Alex and Jesse story played out in season 2. I found Alex s1 anger empowering, and I thought it was a huge part of why he was a fantastic character. In season 2, I don’t feel like the erasure of that anger was well-written in a way that genuinely feels like a character who wants a better relationship with a man he literally wanted to murder in 2x01.

Like you say…the show often doesn’t let Alex deal with things. The show doesn’t let people deal with trauma; this isn’t a problem localized to Michael. And me making one post about one facet of how this problem TOUCHES Michael and Michael’s story does not mean I think it is.

Moving on.

Fifth: Alex does have trauma. He has PTSD. He has “issues with Michael.” All of these are true statements.

This is something I need many people to understand.

Your trauma does not absolve you of the harm you do to other people.

It is an explanation, not an excuse.

In 2x10, Alex comes into Michael’s space with a purpose and refuses to take no for an answer. He does not explain himself to Michael in a way that would be convincing to Michael, as someone who was literally maimed by Jesse–Jesse, who ran the torture prison that Alex doesn’t even mention in this scene–Jesse, who wants to see Michael and his siblings and Maria and Mimi eradicated–Jesse, who (from Michael’s perspective) Alex suddenly wants to work with. When Michael reacts poorly to this, Alex goes on the attack, berates him for not getting over the circumstances of his disability or the nonconsensual modification of his body on Alex’s schedule, takes an object that was created by Michael’s mother (his dead mother, killed by Caulfield, a Manes family project) without permission and in defiance of his own past actions when he gave it as a gift and as part of his pact to not act like every other Manes, and insinuates that the only way Michael could stop him was with physical violence.

Alex is an abuse survivor. His actions here are driven by a common desire of abuse survivors–particularly survivors of parental abuse–to believe that their abusers can change.

I relate to this perspective on a very deep, very personal level, a level to which I am not required to disclose to you, a stranger on the internet.

However, I still do speak from experience when I say that that is an explanation. It is a valid one. A sympathetic one.

It is not an excuse.

Sometimes, people with trauma have competing needs. No one is perfect. Michael and Alex are not perfect. People with trauma, particularly the violent trauma from a young age suffered by both these characters, often do not react constructively in conflict due to said trauma. However, people are still responsible for their own actions. Trauma is not a get out of hurting people free card, not for Michael, who, yes, should perhaps have probed deeper into how Alex was feeling about Jesse…and it isn’t for Alex either.

My description of the events of the 2x10 bunker scene is my own. If you have a different interpretation, I cannot invalidate it from the other side of my keyboard. However, our two interpretations are at least equal in terms of canonicity. I challenge anyone to prove otherwise. And the way that scene made me feel is every goddamn bit as valid as any self-proclaimed “alex stan” who thought it was awesome that mean and nasty michael was finally getting what he deserved.

Sixth: It is hilarious to me that you accuse me of “woobifying” Michael because I dared to talk about the erasure of his disability from his perspective. It is hilarious to me that your demand appears to be that people disclaim all discussion of Alex with all the ways he is traumatized and therefore blameless. It is hilarious to me that anyone could believe that to be a fair or reasonable standard–hilarious, but not surprising, because that is the standard by which “alex hate” has been identified from the very beginning of this fandom, and it was ridiculous then, and it is ridiculous now. If you would like to comb through my blog, you will find that I do not respond like this to random posts criticizing Michael from all and sundry about the fandom. He may be a favorite character of mine, but he isn’t for everyone, and I’m aware of that. I don’t expect every single person to see the show through his lens.

However, asks sent to me and reblogs of my posts with inflammatory additions….fair game.

Finally: My interpretations are my own. Nothing more, nothing less. They are most certainly not a personal attack on anyone else. No one is required to agree with me or my interpretations of canon. You are more than welcome to make your own posts full of your own opinions and your own interpretations of the show. If my interpretations are so anathema to you that you cannot bear them, I fully encourage you to block me, or to blacklist my url.

Have a nice day.

I always thought Michael's hand being healed was such a strange direction to take, it was such a huge part of his arc in season 1 they even went as far as showing us on screen how it happened which is something I havent been able to watch since it aired I have to skip that whole scene, to just erase it at the end was such a disappointment and then there was never really any follow through in season 2 but season 2 was kind of a mess anyway I figured we would of got some confrontation between max and michael about it.

there are multiple excellent metas about consent in RNM, particularly how it pertains to Max, so I can see why Max violating consent in this case would be a deliberate choice to demonstrate just how much Max was affected by the energy and power he absorbed, how much it could change him. however, yeah, you’re right--michael’s hand was a huge part of his arc in season 1, it’s a huge part of his character, and even flirting with the line of a disability cure narrative is very difficult to do well, so this was a decision that had to be approached with a lot of intentionality, with a very deliberate direction, with something to say about max and michael, about how healing powers can be misused, about bodily autonomy...

and season two just showed again and again that that wasn’t the case. there was nothing there. max and michael don’t talk about it. it barely even comes up with michael. and the time it’s dealt with directly, it’s your show’s only remaining disabled character berating him for not dealing with it the “right” way. it’s honestly very upsetting, and this is what leads me to the stance i expressed in the tags on my previous reblog--that i don’t believe that rnm sees michael’s hand as a disability in the same way alex’s leg is a disability.

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