#fyi this is a living document because it is frankensteined together out of the various pieces i remember writing last night

[baltears]

starting to realize that one reason not everyone reads you the same way and some people think it's a dramatically dumber show than it is is bc not everyone is aware of how precise the writers were in creating joe's pathology and the amount of verisimilitude in the writing around his extreme trauma and the resultant extreme behaviors.

joe acts the way that he does because part of him (the inner child) sincerely, very deeply craves love and connection, but bc he grew up in an extremely high stakes survival situation – & never really experienced a life away from his multiple sources of simultaneous extreme threat* and longed-for crumbs of affection & validation & emotional comfort before reaching adulthood – he quite literally cannot help recreating that same completely insane level of high stakes in his own life because that is still how his nervous system is wired. he is too internally fragile to feel like he can withstand true inner scrutiny, the type required for deep recovery from trauma. this part is also hard to explain to people who dont have this type of trauma, there's this very pervasive terror that certain things will just somehow annihilate you and swallow you up, such as looking too closely at your feelings, or someone else seeing who you are deep down and rejecting you.

so when joe fixates on someone he has fantasized will save him,** he feels the need to stalk and gather information in order to craft this perfect, completely fabricated self that he knows will not be rejected the way he thinks his real self automatically would be, bc deep level rejection also = annihilation. and because his mom (and i'm not trying to be harsh here, she is also a victim and a survivor, just being real) failed in her handling of the situation with his dad and further failed in her handling of joe killing him, child joe forms this impression in his brain and nervous system that "situations that i am involved in can unpredictably escalate to extreme violence", and "extreme threat to my feelings/emotional self also goes along with extreme threat to my physical body and life". this impression never changes. he never unlearned this. so what he ends up doing is unconsciously creating circumstances where this will happen because it is familiar &he never really learned how to function in situations where the threat level is "normal". when he gets rejected or the threat of abandonment comes up or anything else goes wrong, he immediately internally escalates to maximum threat response and is prepared to resort to extreme violence in order to 'protect' himself and/or a woman or a child. i just feel it's worth noting that the vast majority of human interactions do not and would not escalate unpredictably to extreme violence, and the reason it keeps happening around joe is because he (again, unconsciously- this is a nervous system level response) either creates it himself or seeks out environments where this level of dysfunction is the norm. btw the patriarchal obsession with protecting women comes from a combination of misogyny + a deep mostly unconscious need to justify killing his dad to protect his mom because his entire self worth hinges on whether that would make him a bad person who deserves to die.***

he manipulates others as a survival tactic by mirroring them and saying what he can usually tell they want to hear, but actually does it so constantly and compulsively that it becomes maladaptive and frequently hurts the social impression he gives (how many times did other characters call him out for being a weird phony?). he compulsively narrativizes himself and his life in bizarre, binaristic, fictional trope-based ways because he coped so hard with books when he was locked in a cage as a kid & had to tell himself stories about what was going on around him and what it meant in order to feel like his existence could withstand his circumstances. i could go on. my point is that i think joe is in a lot of ways actually a very accurate intelligently written and sensitive portrayal of a cptsd victim. like frankly i personally just don't want to have the conversation anymore about whether we're allowed to relate to joe because he does the memey relatable narrator thing and is a white man, those things are not why i find him relatable. yes the "commentary on protagonist status being automatically applied to white men", "commentary on patriarchal norms and how women are de-voiced / objectified and treated as disposable", the genre deconstruction stuff, the topical stuff, the memey stuff, are all vital parts of the show as well and deliver some extremely cogent points and an entertaining viewing experience but what im getting at is this cake has layers. love is also an amazingly written character for very similar reasons and i love all the pov stuff with her in season 3. ok signing off now

*in the case of neglect and abandonment from his mom, which has life or death level stakes for a child, and physical abuse and extreme psychological terrorism from mooney

**i want to briefly draw attention here to the fact that healing fantasies are a vital survival tactic for kids in traumatizing situations, although they can become maladaptive into adulthood – there is a misogynistic flavor to joe's because he is a misogynist deep down, but my point is that the healing fantasy is used to avoid total despair/annihilation in the midst of the extreme pain of trauma. most of the other traumatized characters in the show also display signs of coping with a healing fantasy, and the reason joe is so good at manipulating fellow traumatized people is because he recognizes on an unconscious level how to create the image of a healing fantasy that they will be vulnerable to.

***so, again, life or death level emotional need to uphold this belief system, as we saw in s4 when he hit a point of no longer being able to justify any of his behaviors and very rapidly reached a decision to attempt suicide.