#make him have some kind of breakdown in s5. can he be depressed. is he allowed to deal with the ramifications of it all

[drydak]

not to get sad about things that weren’t meant to be but do you think steve spent all season in s4 just desperate to be helpful because he felt useless? like i know that’s just how he is but in terms of like. plot relevance. all he really did was drive and get fucked up by bats? yeah it kind of helped them figure shit out but i don’t even think they needed to go to the upside down in the first place. everything they figured out about the gates was like a ‘no shit’ kind of revelation. so he didn’t even get beat up to protect somebody it was kind of just for nothing! and when they were all trying to figure out what was going on he was asking questions like he was trying but he wasn’t the one making the deductions that helped them. and every question he asked was in good faith but mostly got everyone looking at him like he was stupid. he wanted to help get information at the asylum but he was in charge of the kids and then max ended up floating anyway and he couldn’t do anything but watch and hope that they found something. and like even when they faced vecna he didn’t really need to be there it was definitely more of a two person job nancy and robin could have done that by themselves no problem. and then max and eddie die anyways. so like. at the end of it all he hasn’t made any ‘useful’ contributions and everything is shit anyways and what is the point!!

[dramaticviolincrescendo]

“I never left basic.”

This is what Ian tells Carl when he first comes home after months of mania-induced transience. It’s heartbreaking as well as something of a relief: while he isn’t feeling the impact of it yet, Ian has solidly given up on his dream, but at least he isn’t going to get shipped out and potentially killed. The problem is that he went AWOL in order to reach this point, which is obviously enough of an offense to warrant time in prison. That said, there is a point of order (a point of meta order, I daresay) that I haven’t seen addressed yet and would really like to discuss. 

Pointless, Ian-inspired rambling ahead. 

For an upcoming fic I plan to write (because for someone who loves Ian as much as I do, I haven’t written nearly enough from his perspective), I’ve been researching the army’s basic training to get a feel for what he would have experienced when he got there. He’s pretty tight-lipped about the whole thing, with the exception of one story to entertain his younger siblings over breakfast and half a story to explain why he didn’t actually steal a helicopter. (Not for lack of trying, though. Manic!Ian has some lofty goals: we haven’t seen him drive a car yet, but he’s going to try to pilot an aircraft. Points for effort.) We don’t really know how far along he got, but we can assume that it wasn’t very. There are three phases of basic training that last approximately ten weeks, according to their website. At the end of that time, if service is not for you, you can receive an administrative discharge. Well, Ian went AWOL instead of applying for a discharge, so he definitely didn’t mean “never left basic” as “never got past basic into advanced training.”

Now, here’s the thing that prompted this meta-rambling: completing basic training makes you “eligible to wear the Black Beret as a full Army Soldier,” according to the outline of basic training on their website. I understand that to mean that, like the Army Unit Patch provided at the end of the first phase of basic, you don’t actually receive the beret until graduation. 

The beret that Ian is wearing with the rest of his uniform at that soldier’s funeral in S5. 

So, somewhere along the line, Ian managed to get his hands on a beret that is only awarded to graduates who have made it through all three phases of basic training. How that happens is up for debate, though I certainly have a few ideas on that. (I won’t say what they are here, though, because...fic.) But...

I’m thinking about what that shows about Ian’s mental state by that point in S5. He’s already experienced his first manic episode, come crashing down into a depressive episode that lasted for at least a few weeks since Fiona and Lip said that medication would keep another from lasting as long, has been gradually ratcheting back up to hypomania since the start of the season, and is on the verge of mania considering the length of his symptoms and impending psychotic break. He is still working at the club, which has apparently become enough of a norm that Mickey arguably isn’t visiting there anymore. Otherwise, Ian’s life has come to a standstill. The excitement of S4 is over: he isn’t bouncing from place to place anymore, Fiona has mostly stabilized after her breakdown, Mickey came out, they’ve made some kind of peace with Svetlana, and they’ve settled into the beginnings of a life together. 

How dull must that seem when your brain is telling you that you need to go go gogogogogogogogogo?

Maybe that’s why Ian suddenly returns to emphasizing his former military dreams. In S4, he denounced them, saying that the military tried to control him but that he doesn’t have to do anything. Manic!Ian saw the military as attempting to impose a sort of order and stability on him that he simply can’t endure in his current state, as a fantastic meta I saw earlier today pointed out. After returning home and to some new semblance of normality, though, those days could take on a new light. They were exciting. They were new. They were freeing. His life isn’t like that now, and so why shouldn’t he don the black beret he managed to get his hands on and try to relive that feeling in the only way he can? There’s no harm in it, especially since no one was actively hunting him down at that point. If they were, he wouldn’t have been standing at that funeral with his name on his uniform. And hey, maybe he didn’t care. It would be risky and exciting to feel like a fugitive in plain sight, wouldn’t it? 

According to an article in the Harvard Mental Health Letter, “The diagnostic criteria for hypomania require at least three of the following symptoms for at least four days: inflated self-esteem or grandiosity; decreased need for sleep; increased talkativeness; racing thoughts or ideas; marked distractibility; agitation or increased activity; excessive participation in activities that are pleasurable but invite personal or fiscal harm (shopping sprees, sexual indiscretions, impulsive business investments, and the like). For mania, the symptoms are mostly the same, except they last at least one week, lead to hospitalization, or include psychotic symptoms (a break with reality).”

I’ve bolded the symptoms that we have definitely seen by the time Ian and Mickey attend the funeral in S5. Most of the others are more in-tune with Ian’s behavior while he was manic in S4 and, by all accounts, should have been hospitalized in order to receive a diagnosis and medication. 

Now, Ian could have exhibited these symptoms and gone to that funeral in just his uniform. It would have accomplished exactly what I mentioned above. He could even have gone in civilian attire after Mickey expressed his concerns that the MPs were still looking for him. He didn’t do that, though. Whether he snatched one on his way out the door of basic training or somewhere along the line in the months that followed, Ian didn’t want to just show up in uniform to show his respect for this soldier he didn’t know. He wanted to show up looking like somebody who had successfully completed his training--training that he scoffed at in S4. 

“Inflated self-esteem or grandiosity.” 

Tl;dr Ian wearing a hat for three minutes was enough to send me into a full analysis of his mental state and how it’s a very subtle indication of his symptoms before he more noticeably loses his shit with the protesters and the luggage. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.