#opposing stance I get all kinds of weird contact over Dr Sam Loomis like I’m not sorry he’s a horrible person & responsible for the tragedy

[ziracona]

Ok, Loomis isn't a very good man but i don't think it's fair to say he's to blame for Michael's evil. The novelization reveals Michael would bring bad luck on fellow patients, and suggests he's possessed by an ancient evil spirit, something beyond Loomis' expertise. Also Loomis still tried to atone for his failure. In H4 he tried to let Myers kill him to save Jamie Lloyd.

The rules aren’t the same for every Halloween timeline, including the novelization & the Halloween 4-6 timeline. I don’t really care about those or the ‘it’s an ancient Celtic curse’ explanation in the H4 timeline because it’s ridiculous. When I talk about Michael, I’ve said a lot I’m explicitly talking about OG/DbD/H20 timelines only, unless otherwise stated. It’s not the same characters in every timeline, and what’s true in some is not true in others. That said, Loomis sucks pretty universally. In the H4 timeline he goes right from ruining Michael’s life to mistreating Jamie & going for a high score in the same. He’s a fun character who tends to get great dialogue, but he’s horrible. He does in a way try to ‘atone’ for his failure, but not to the patients he hurt. His idea of fixing not having fixed Michael is killing the guy. In H2 he sacrifices himself to protect Laurie, but again, that’s not atoning to the person he hurt at all. It’s satisfying his own obsession with ‘killing a monster,’ even if the cost is high.

It’s up to everyone how they consume media, but OG Halloween is responsible largely for the demonization of psychosis and has had awful and measurable real world effects for people with psychotic disorders—I mean, /the/ single most well known psychotic character in anything is Michael Myers the serial killer. Carpenter couldn’t have known how popular the film would be, but when you create you do have a responsibility to the effects it has, best you can, and basing a serial killer off a real human 12 year old in a sanitarium he met because he thought he looked creepy, poster chilling psychosis with a serial killer, and overall handling Michael as he did was not great, and he certainly didn’t do work to rectify that. This doesn’t mean I like, hate John Carpenter or something. The Thing is a fun movie and I enjoy Halloween. But I am a disabled person, and just as much if I wasn’t, it’d still be important to me (& I think should be in general) to bring how things effect the real world with me to viewing media.

I don’t think that’s everyone’s responsibility all the time, but I do think people should try and think, you know, about how media has and does effect everything from perception to legislation and treatment. So I consciously — especially with horror — view the media through a disability lens, as it’s the genre 80% responsible for popular demonization of mental illnesses and disability, and that makes it sort of up to people creating horror now to rectify—which to their credit, many creators are trying (and many, in media like Split, are still not). If you look at Halloween 1978 through a remotely realistic lens, taking the facts, Loomis is entirely responsible, in canon, for taking a six year old child who was vulnerable, gaslighting him into not believing he even had a mental illness, overdosing him at a level that can cause permanent brain damage, threatening him, and keeping him in isolation for the next 15 years out of a religious fear he was a demon, which isn’t an acceptable way, stating the obvious, for a doctor to behave. Six year olds aren’t evil. Point blank. They can be shits, but they’re too young to have the complete mortality, let alone ethical, understanding an adult has, that it would even /take/ to take on evil actions.

There is supernatural stuff going on in some Halloween timelines, none in others, and it’s kind of just unexplained in yet more. So how characters function mechanically is not always the same, and thus their actions and motives reflect differently. That said, Loomis is always a horrible person, even the most sympathetic one—the Rob Zombie, who gave up on the trust of a patient and trying to help him, to capitalize on his condition for fame and a book deal he demonized him in.

I’ve explained my position many times, and I’m kind of tired of it at this point. If you want to know more about why I think what I think, you can easily find at least three long posts on it, but I’m getting tired at retyping the same information over and over and over, so I’d prefer not to again.