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x-birdsong-x · 4 months ago

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Curious what you have to say about Adams

Edit: speed-rewrote/rearranged this at 10pm in a burst of anxiety-driven rambling because my coursework started up again. posted it as is because i probably need to take a break and it's been in my drafts for a few weeks. there's not really an ending here this is one big post with me rambling about my underdeveloped blorbo

I've rambled at my buddy @/willowpelt about Adams for weeks now n I think any of my House moots know how very autistic I am about her,,,,

Adams is stubborn. And petty. And sheltered. She's short-tempered and avoidant and nowhere near as trusting as she likes to think/say she is. She does not make it easy to get along with her.

Her moods are about as reactive as early-season Chase, the closest any later character ever gets to being similar to that; the smallest thing can set her off and she's snapping at everyone like a cornered cat for the rest of the day (god knows what made her angry in the first place half the time). She can get physically destructive when she's angry enough and refuses to get physically destructive when she's angry enough until her upgraded dad tells her to and gets her a rage room to destroy with a baseball bat. Her reaction to House asking if she's still angry before that is to shut up and stare at him. She swings between Fight and Freeze depending on the situation. The one time she reads House even mostly correctly is when she tells him he took the first deal anyone offered him Because He Wanted To Punish Himself. The only time she even near-successfully lies to House (or Chase) is when she is lying about her family, and Adams is Not A Good Liar. She can not lie to House or Chase or even Foreman to save her life.

She's completely Insane in ep 1 and is drastically toned down after that for literally no reason -- She gets attached to House before he gets attached to her and within two minutes of him calling her a dumbass she decides he's her Free Dad Upgrade and she'll never listen to anyone else ever again. She spends a good few seconds just pouting at him and then sulks for a good few hours when she finds out he briefly (indirectly) lied and then drops it completely when she's done. She gives him Vicodin when she's already on incredibly thin ice with her actual boss- and she doesn't like being in trouble here. She gets herself fired doing House's test and still finds a way to get a note smuggled into solitary just to tell him he was right. She's happy to meet up (for what she thought wasn't even work) with him when he first contacts her before ep 3 and sticks around from there.

Ep 5 is where she and Park are dramatically watered down even further just so Chase and Taub can play House-translators in a way that wasn't at all necessary given the way it's done covers misunderstanding House in ways Park and Adams literally never did.

And then there's ep 6. I project on Adams like a little whiteboard. I get mad when I think about her parents. Icicles by the scary jokes most Adams song of all time

This

Was Not

Her Fault

"You took the first deal they offered you because you wanted to punish yourself" is the only time she accurately reads House, the only time she almost manages to lie to any of them is when she's lying about her family. House spends their interactions this episode poking his second-to-newest daughter with a stick, as he does, and it gets little to nothing out of her except that her parents totally didn't do anything

When she does give him an answer, she starts it, and only when she has the opening to tell him He's Wrong, it was All Her Fault.

Honestly Adams would need years of therapy even if she hadn't had another episode after this (And Parents wasn't even her assigned episode, it was mostly Taub's)

The way Adams carries this around is genuinely so fucked up. Your sixteen-year-old with anger issues did a majorly impulsive thing. Something snapped and she went missing for two months and got into a very confusing very Not Good situation. She's not the type of person to have told them where she was- or at least where she stayed- while she was gone but I literally don't care if she didn't tell her parents that part of it I literally don't care if she got home and said she just stayed with a friend you can not tell your kid that She Did A Bad Thing that It Was All Her Fault that You Can't Believe She Did That that She Was Always The Problem There that She Caused All That Trouble to the point she believes it so strongly to the point she carries so much guilt so much desperation for absolution that when a kid who did the same thing who is the same age she was shows up she spends every second of it making everything worse by going This Is How It Has To Be This Is What You Need To Do Next

Runaways my beloved mess.

Why is this character-driven episode stuffed full of everything they needed to get into the season before Nobody's Fault/Chase covered months in-universe? Why are we following House running around without his ankle monitor all on-screen? Why is he taking the whole team with him to all these places? Why is Wilson here to say House is protecting Callie because he feels a connection with her but House never interacts with Callie at all past the opening? Why wasn't Foreman's relationship with Anita put in the episode before this - where it would've fit infinitely better because a point there was the patient's wife having feelings for her friend? Also I swear to god that reveal of Foreman going to that boxing match with House at the end of Parents did more for Foreman and House's relationship than any of this here.

Why is Chase so out of character and/or non-existent?

In context this one was Callie lying to keep covering up what her mom was really like, but this still feels ooc for Chase to me. Once they know about it, Callie's home life before she left is more fitting to Chase's situation with his mom and his sister than any other patient Chase has ever been matched up with and the one line he directly gets about Callie at all implies he doesn't believe her?

The most in-character thing Chase does in one of his so few significant appearances in this ep is be brutal when Adams tries (again) to go to him for reassurance/advice.

Chase doesn't ever hold back with her and I find it funny

The way Adams was handled here could have really worked if the episode had focused on what it was meant to focus on - if this one episode hadn't been used to scramble to tie up these other things pre-Nobody's Fault - if this other stuff wasn't taking up So Much Time in Someone Else's Assigned Episode.

I rewrite Runaways for fun- one version generally and one Much more self-indulgent version for the Warrior Cats AU because taking how Adams is handled in Parents - even moreso if they'd let her stay Crazy like she was in ep 1 - it could have worked as well to have had her be the one causing trouble through basically acting the way House does in the canon version of the ep, motivated by keeping Callie away from her mother, rather than causing trouble by doing what is, for Callie, the opposite of what she needs/wants.

Callie is given such a hard time here and Adams actually leads to multiple of those hard times but Callie still talks to her about Everything. Callie latches on to Adams as her safe person and looks for her opinion specifically when it only gets her nowhere and gives detailed versions of why she left/how she feels about her mother to Adams alone. They're so firewatcher's daughter to me,, nothing scares me more than the stranger at my door who I fail to give shelter time and worth

These two were the perfect matchup,, House read Callie like a book within minutes of first meeting her. He had this exact theory about her before he said it out loud. She's avoidant and stubborn and initially doesn't trust any of them. She swings between Fight and Say Nothing.

Callie at sixteen reached a breaking point with her family and ran away, got into (for her personally) a better situation, and then runs away again to get out of the hospital when the chance of being sent back home comes with it.

House read Adams like a book within the first day of knowing her (given he mentions noticing her getting bored in the three months she's been there - he'd done so much earlier than that without even talking to her). She's avoidant and stubborn and a whole lot less trusting than she thinks she is. She's Fight or Shut Up.

Adams at sixteen reached a breaking point with her family and ran away, got into an even worse situation, and then ran away from that to get out of it when going back home became the clear better(safer) option (and that really fucks with your mind when all you're told is that you did something wrong in the first place)

Adams blames herself for everything that went on when she was sixteen. She doesn't look back on any of it and see a reason for her leaving that she doesn't see as play stupid games win stupid prizes. But Callie's not doing that - She's found more stability away from home than she had at home, she's going to school, she still sees her friends, she's living on her own and knows what she's doing and where she wants to go even with the pushed-down emotions toward such a severed attachment to her mom.

Lightly counting the tiny retelling she starts here is watered down with the brightness turned up (succeeded by her being surprised that Callie still goes to school):

The way Adams responds to Callie is so much of her echoing. She spends this whole episode projecting right down to you think her mother wants to feel responsible for her daughter's problems?

It's you could at least let her in the room it's she's your mom and she's finally acting like it it's your mom knows she messed up and she's determined not to do it again and beyond the existing conflict Callie is upset that her parent is not listening to her(me too girl)

Adams' parents did something to make her snap before she ran away

And that Rebellious Phase is something Adams never really lost?? She's completely insane in ep 1. She and Park do a test House didn't want, she tries (and fails) at lying to Foreman for cover for House, she destroys a whole room with a baseball bat with only House telling her she's allowed to in ep 4. In Nobody's Fault she and Chase do a test House didn't want. Ep 18 she gives the kid a treatment House didn't want. She's yes a bit of a pain in Chase. She's stubborn as all hell in (parts of) Post Mortem and Runaways itself. Ep 8 and others she's just,, in One Of Her Moods.

Callie's actually fitting in some way for each of the team. Adams - ^^^ I'm autistic about them / Chase - caring for addict mom while just being a child himself. Dad unavailable in some way. Runaways is Adams' episode, but hell if Chase isn't actually involved in my rewrites / House - mentioned in the episode by Wilson / Taub - still adjusting to being a dad, struggling to feel an attachment to his kids and Callie is mentioned to have been closer to her dad than her mom / Park - Devotion to family / It's mad how Callie is (at least one of) the most developed patient(s) in the season even when the episode spends so much time on irrelevant stuff.

And with that - and again the way Adams is handled in Parents - The way Adams was handled here actually could've fit better for Park given that devotion to family and how they responded to the patient having left his family in ep 3:

vs.

I dunno. Have Adams cause trouble by pushing back at everyone who mentions getting Callie's mom involved.

That said I actually love Adams' last scene in Runaways I'm a complete sucker for the tone of these scenes (Parents, Runaways). Callie's parallels with Adams continue. House again tells Adams she's super fucked up. House tells Adams he doesn't care if she's fucked up. Adams has another crushing sense of unfinished business relating to that part of her life.

I'm obsessed with her. She's soaking up all my trauma like a sponge. I don't even remember when I first got so attached. She should be allowed to hit her dad with a baseball bat.

Adams also tells Chase she's seeing a trauma counselor post-Nobody's Fault and in the words of Willowpelt: "her therapist has it cut out for them and Adams doesn't even know it"

#yes there is a massive chance at least 90% of this stuff was completely accidental in the writing #you can pry c-ptsd adams from my cold dead projecting hands #house #house md #hatecrimes md #malpractice md #jessica adams #< she's my little fidget toy i lovbe her. something something typical of me to put us all to shame something something #greg house #gregory house #chi park #robert chase #<tagging house cuz he's most mentioned out of the others park for what i said at the end and chase for mentioning his lines in runaways

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