#so to find out he was heavily involved with the criminal underworld and abused children in his care would be quite the sensational story!

[ahc-au]

The newspaper got Cody and his brother's images have revealed , wouldn't that be leaving them in a disadvantage since they are completely exposed to Dunn's "business partners"

Interesting thought! That drawing is mostly meant to show off all the characters involved, so take its canonicity with a grain of salt. But! The kids would have been put into the public eye no matter what. Their staying with Bishop was primarily to afford them his top-of-the-line security, specifically because their involvement being made public was an inevitability. So it's not necessarily that avoiding getting photographed puts their safety at risk any more than it already would be, more that it makes them uncomfortable. Hope that makes sense haha!

--Adelram

[normalbrothers]

Omg my discord server has discussed that exact “facilitating sexual violence” thread with tommy. Our running theory (literally what we call “The Theory”) is that Arthur Sr facilitated Tommy’s abuse for money, and that’s created a lot of his views on people being investments. The “everyone’s a whore” line and his whole complex about Lizzie’s past (side note, also the way they look suspiciously similar… the mirrors are mirroring) are probably the most obvious examples, but the fears he has about being seen as useless to his family and his tendency to Literally “sell them out” for their continued success read like a monstrous combination of soldier mentality and childhood trauma. On top of that, the other people who (imo) conduct themselves the most like him in the criminal underworld, such as Polly, Michael, Grace, Jack (heavily implied), and Alfie (if you’ve listened to TGOAS) have also all been SA/SH victims. AND, in one way or another, those people betray Tommy— or a stand-in for Tommy —while playing the role of someone who was supposed to protect him/the stand-in. It is sooo!!!! Sorry that was a massive amount of word vomit but I had to yappppp 😫

´mh. the dangers of posting a take that doesn't get into the nuances. i kind of see your point(s), but i think i only agree with half of it, and even then with caveats. looking at a thematic thread is important, because it obviously Says Something, but i think getting into individual situations and what causes them, and the specific motivations that underline them is somewhat more important here, because it Says Something Even More.

this is rather long so i'm putting it under a read more (i hope it's not typo-riddled and that the sentences are legible, i find it awfully diffcult to actually make post on tumblr hdhd somehow the lay out doesn't appeal to my brain)

i haven't seen a lot of meta that actually argues for this, but arthur sr prostituting tommy (though, there are also fics that do the same thing with arthur) seems to be a relatively commonplace trope on ao3 - at least it's more prevalent than, say, arthur sr sexually abusing tommy himself. i can see where this comes from - sr appears like an opportunist who is mostly driven by wanting to make a quick buck for his own gain and who apparently has little emotional attachment to his children - and we have tommy's scathing line about children working for men "in their various ways", clearly implying sexual exploitation, but my personal theory when it comes to tommy and his relationship to his father doesn't exactly involve this (though, to be fair my take on their father is in general a little different than what fandom tends to go for - and, admittedly, i'm sentimental about this, but i don't think it's entirely unfounded either). but both are theories in the end, with an equal amount of "validity"; it's not like the concluding movie will confirm anything in that regard.

however, the problem with this theory, or rather making it the source of tommy's view of the world and the people around him, is that it precedes the war trauma, but the way we are introduced to tommy, how he operates and how we are meant to look at his initial ruthlessness (which is not a permanent state, it dissolves more and more as the show goes on) is the result of that specifically. the tommy before the war is someone that largely remains elusive to us. but we know that most of his family's grievances with him in the first season in particular are about how different (see: inaccessible and emotionally detached) he is since he came back - polly, arthur, their father point this out, all with varying degrees of judgment and condemnation, and much to tommy's dismay: he knows he's different, but unable to change that. it begets an odd feedback loop where he is rejected and simultaneously unable and often unwilling to talk about anything. thus the entire 'tommy doesn't talk to his family, his family (sometimes justifiedly) calls him out on it, but seemingly doesn't actually want to know anything, so tommy says even less' Complex becomes kind of a chicken and egg situation that causes most of their strife. but it's not necessarily a dynamic where one is categorically wrong and the other right. the troubling thing about this, of course, is that he often jumps things on them without briefing them beforehand and this may have the result that someone gets hurt - it's a nasty habit he has, but also something that lessens as the show goes on, but it's ... not exactly coming from nowhere. indeed, his family doesn't listen to or is dismissive of him; they are quite a few instances where they against his orders or don't heed his requests or warnings (a huge point of contention in season 3). important here is also that he doesn't retaliate or punish for this - if he's sometimes displeased and huffy that he isn't given a lot of respect by the people closest to him (as one would respect a traditional patriarch), he does little to and is unable to actually enforce it, nor is he feared by them.

nevertheless, he's still, in a way, regarded as the family's emotional center (next to polly), and despite everything, is still entrusted to look after his family members, my assumption is that he had a sort of caretaker function before the war without being considered the head of the family (it's important to point out that he takes over in s1, in his late twenties, instead arthur (early thirties) is introduced to us as the head of the family, the script itself goes as far as calling him a 'king': and he still tries to act with authority towards tommy in the beginning, which makes me think that this is something that *did* work once upon a time (actually, you can still see glimpses of this throughout the show), but doesn't anymore: tommy only starts to challenge him at this point, where both of them are well into adulthood) - and what tommy says of himself is that he believed they deserved better and that he used to be impatient and angry at 'slowness'. the notion that he was a romantic and idealist seems plausible to me; in that sense i don't think he was born a businessman, that he was always able to strategize, and use people, with aim for profit - and even then this is not exactly what motivates him in the first place.

so this is evidently not something his father taught him, but rather a trait (the compartmentalization, using people as tools as he himself is a tool) he developed over the course of the war where at some point he served as sergeant major, with men under him that he was responsible for, but also had to command (always in the extremely stressful context that any of them could die, and that any mismanagement or misstep on tommy's part could be the reason for this - *that* is the root of tommy's ruthlessness/emotional "coldness", he has to compartmentalize: his friends and brothers become soldiers he commands, with the traumatic knowledge that he might be sending them to their deaths - that arthur and john survive, also because of him, informs their dynamic once they return. they very much trust him as their leader, that tommy will take care of things and that he knows what he's doing, but without the circumstance of a literal war, they become brothers (human) again and these pre-war relationships and the traumatic distribution of their roles during the war are a source of conflict - it's not just a terrible thing for arthur and john, it also has a bad impact on tommy. something of a side note: while wealth and status and the trappings that come with it are things he enjoys - as does the rest of the family! - his attempts to achieve legitimacy and assimilation have more to do with safety for himself and his family (and he brutally learns that this is not really possible). for example john and arthur - as "bad" as him - enjoy the life, even as they admire tommy for what he seems capable of, they don't really see a point in tommy's plans to go legitimate. both of them would have, likely, been "content" to remain gangsters and rule over their small corner of the world (though, of course, we are privy to arthur's ongoing dilemma of wanting two opposing things and that he buckles under his own guilt, as tommy does) - that is not a safer way of living, however. sooner or later someone like campbell would have shown up anyway, and any of them could have still been gunned down in a turf war or have been arrested and eventually faced legal punishment for their crimes. this is not a position that tommy put them in, but of course, through tommy, they face problems on a larger scale - but the entire family wouldn't have been safer either way - this is an incredibly important point - poor and marginalized and criminalized and criminal as they are.

so, my very longwinded first point here is that tommy's behaviour, as it starts out in the show and how we see it transform over the course of it, is not something his father taught him. i also think it's a mistake framing tommy as acting like his father in any way (their motivations and ambitions and personalities are almost completely diametrically opposed) - this isn't really something that the show makes a point of, and he is certainly not replicating something, according to this theory, that his father subjected him to with his family members. mostly he structures the business militaristically, with him as a commanding officer - that business and family are the same thing, in a sense, and that it doesn't work as neatly as it should in theory is big ongoing problem for all of them.

okay, now coming to the actual point around the subject of 'facilitating sexual violence'.

for this i actually have to make another point that i haven't gotten into yet, but something that is important about tommy is that he starts out with a very rigid "them vs us" mindset (@deadendtracks pointed out that this also is a result of the shelbys being particularly marginalized as romani/travelling people, even among their equally poor working class peers) - he actually makes a sharp distinction between family and not-family. it's a fairly fascist rationale and it's not an accident that once he enters politics, and comes up against mosley, he starts to expand his scope (though it is incomplete as of yet), to care for more than just his family's safety and success. non-family people are those he tends to use or exploit, often with little consideration or guilt (or the guilt is compartmentalized: there is a reason he sees the pile of anonymous dead bodies in his bathroom when he has the seizure in s6), those are who he sees as investments and who he would "sell out" if it benefits him and the family. this is not true for his family members, actually. my guess is that fandom conflates these two things, because there seems to be a lasting misunderstanding of what happened in s3 with the arrests - which didn't happen, because tommy "sold them out", but as a consequence of things tommy had a limited amount of control over (i'm not at all suggesting that tommy is blameless here, but it's a little more complex than that). and this actually starts in s2, after his mock execution (a form of torture) he is told that churchill/the government will make use of him when the time comes, the events of s3 are predicated upon this (actually the entirety of s1 and s2 are the building blocks for the s3 arc and fallout (tommy being arguably hubristic in the beginning plays a minor, rather than a major, part)): under the threat of his family being executed, they are coerced into the russian plot - this is not something tommy chose to do. what he does is demand payment for it, however, but you can see a logic in this: if he gets fucked, they should at least compensate him. (this is an aspect of tommy's "everyone's a whore" thesis as well). tommy repeatedly warns and cautions is family over the season: it's absolutely not in his interest that any of them get arrested, or that he "sells them out" or that he sacrifices them (i could also get into the fact that even if one makes the point that he doesn't care for his family beyond seeing their utility, sacrificing them would be dumb, economically, because tommy knows he can't do things on his own, he has to delegate, and willingly sacrificing people profoundly loyal to him through familial and love relations for some middle-term goal, that might not work out at all, is ... a silly thing to do - who could he possibly replace them with?)

i somewhat understand that the initial perception would be that tommy is capable of this, tommy is possibly somewhat opaque in the beginning - but it never actually happens in the show, certainly not in the way people talk about it, and at some point i think the distinction (family and not-family) tommy makes should become clear to the audience - because it's a thematic element that underlines tommy's arc from s1 to s6. i also think you have to make a difference between arthur and john as soldiers/gangsters and polly and ada (and finn) who are "civilians". they are all part of a criminal organization, voluntarily as far as it goes (ada, of course, makes a point of distancing herself from the family at first, which tommy doesn't really fight her on). john and arthur are soldiers like tommy, and they make up the "illegal" musclework of their business efforts; beyond the moral injury around killing (sustained in the war), they are also aware that what they do could end badly for them: they are not blue-eyed about it, and they agreed to this. it's not forced upon them by tommy, setting aside that tommy himself gets his hands dirty; he does not treat them as disposable goons who do all the bloody work while tommy sits back and keeps his hands clean. (tommy does have goons he doesn't care about, though). he is not exploiting his brothers - which is another aspect of "selling them out", i guess. i think that is diminishing the agency they have, and the fact that they act on their own and why they do so and they certainly don't always follow tommy's orders. and then of course, ada and polly (and the wives) are kept out of the line of fire (which tragically doesn't always work), both as women, but also because they don't have the experience of killing/war. finn is an different can of worms, and probably deserves it's own separate meta.

okay! i'm getting to the part about sexual violence. now.

sexual violence - the allusions to past trauma, the constant threat of it and the actual acts we see happen on the show - permeates the narrative fabric of the show. as another smart person once pointed out, it's not a mistake that the show's (powerful) antagonists, simultaneously representatives of institutions (the police, the clergy, the aristocracy) that shape and order society, tend to be perpetrators of sexual violence as well: campbell is a rapist, hughes is an abuser of children and while mosley and mitford are not shown to be either of these things, their depraved sexual predatoriness still stands out.

of course, tommy here, as a "middleman" or medium is a subject worthy of discussion, then, but i also think we have to look at these instances where it happens separately (because they are not the same, despite the connecting thread).

grace and kimber: this might be a subjective impression, but i think what tommy does here is the most calculating (and in that sense the worst if just going by his motivations) out of all these examples. he takes note of kimber's obvious interest in grace and at this point likely already plans to make her part of his deal at the race. a big point here, in fact, is that grace is not only not-family, but she's a complete outsider to small heath/birmingham as well, and tommy very quickly clocks her as an upperclass woman on top. while he doesn't suspect her of being a spy (instead he manufactures his own explanation for her presence that grace cleverly adopts), she's still suspicious to him. initially, while also being attracted to and intrigued by her, tommy sees her as an intruder still at the point of episode 3 (where the race happens). in a way, she means nothing to him here, and given kimber's visible attraction to her, it seems like an easy quick way to let him proceed in his efforts. that he changes his mind - perhaps his conscience kicking in after all, perhaps because he already likes her more than he thought - is important conclusion to all this. he can't go through with it. and this is the beginning of the show where i think he's still reeling from the war, in that sense is the most ruthless/shut off (barring s4 where he's deeply cynical and depressed), and simultaneously on a high, because things are generally going well for him and the family (besides campbell's pesky presence).

lizzie and the marshall: it's somewhat important to note tommy genuinely didn't want to her to get hurt - that he needed her to lure the marshall away, but not to actually engage in sexual activity, is true. and tommy acts on short notice - he's desperate to get the assassination done while fearing that at the end of it he will be executed (he doesn't get out of the situation through any scheme of his, but rather is "spared", but of course, that he's spared only means is continued exploitation by the government). all of that is pretty worthless to lizzie, to be sure, who gets assaulted anyway, and none of that would have happened if tommy hadn't wasted time to brag to campbell that grace loves him. this disregard, though not exactly cruelty, towards lizzie (instead of ensuring her safety, he opts to talk about the woman he's in love with) constitutes a tragic element of their relationship. he doesn't hate her, nor do i really think he as a "complex" around her being a prostitute, but he tends to spare her little thought, and this is certainly influenced by her class (and sex) most of all. connected to this is also a mindset that "she can take it", and in that way tommy does relate to her, because he can as well, but of course, it's not the same either; their relationship doesn't start out as a very equal one, and on top of this, lizzie is not-family as well. here it's important to note that this is not a fixed, but something that changes: he very much starts to see her as part of the family and which brings me to another point that underscores tommy's family/not-family delineation. in s5, mosley basically asks him to hand lizzie over - given what tommy's trying to do, complying with mosley's request would actually make things easier for him, but he very brusquely (and remarkably so, because tommy is afraid of this man and never really finds himself capable of saying 'no' to other things) tells him off, and eventually gives lizzie room to reject him herself.

arthur and tatiana: while i included them in my post, i think it's a bit different than these other two situations - not because arthur's violation here isn't awful, or to suggest the sentiment that women can't sexually assault men, but this is the contemporary assumption and it would be anachronistic for any of these characters to actually think along these lines. tommy knows that his brothers are going to have to strip in front of izabella and tatiana, and characteristically only tells them of it last minute; arthur is unwilling, but "obeys" in the end. at first, tommy's visibly amused by it - part of this is petty revenge, because both john and arthur prior made fun of him for "working" with tatiana - but when she goes too far and starts to molest arthur, tommy's entire demeanor shifts; he grows horrified and dissociates. tommy couldn't have predicted that the situation would get out of hand, but he did wrong by arthur to not try and tell him earlier (then again, this is all under the big context that tommy doesn't actually want to be there either (and all this in the aftermath of his assault and hughes breathing down his neck) and arthur himself has shown to be somewhat fickle and unreliable throughout the season so far; he doesn't want to take any risks here, but of course, that doesn't entirely justify it either).

another sidenote: arthur and sacrifice is also an interesting subject, because i know the fandom has a tendency to assign a vast power imbalance between tommy and arthur, where tommy has all the leverage, and poor, loyal, traumatized arthur has no choice but to obey his brother. arthur is expendable to tommy, arthur is too good-natured and naive to see it. this is non-sense, of course, but it seems like no amount of meta or attempts to even the scales here will ever change this misconception. i won't get into it too much right now, but what i'm going to get at - and this is actual an important aspect when it comes to this sexual violence continuum and tommy as "middleman" theme in the show - is arthur and linda. arthur's behaviour towards linda escalates into abuse from season 4 onward and while not explicit, it seems to be that part of this abuse is also sexual in nature (linda tries to appease arthur with sex in s4, he kisses her against her will and to her palpable fear and disgust while grabbing her throat in s5, and in s6 linda makes "not sleeping with arthur" a part of her deal with tommy, it's an attempt to insure herself as she accepts tommy's request to help him) - tommy likely doesn't know this, but he does enable arthur's abuse of her. mind you, "enabling" doesn't make him the culprit or the instigator, that is all arthur. while linda is technically family as well, there is a hierarchy at play, and her imposed role is that of arthur's caretaker, if linda leaves, so tommy fears, arthur might spin out of control and self-destruct (or go destructive on others). it's not only that he worries arthur can't be of use to him anymore, he genuinely cares for and loves him, and if it means he has to stuff linda into the meatgrinder he'll do it. the decision tommy makes when relaying the information of linda's whereabouts is not one he makes gladly - he's fiddling with his cyanide capsule during the conversation - but it's triage between arthur and linda/her friend (it doesn't help that arthur insistently and aggressively threatens tommy over the phone while using textbook abuser talk concerning linda ("i just want to talk")). he makes the choice and gives arthur the information, knowing that arthur will likely do as arthur does. it's another instance that illustrates tommy's family vs not-family mindset (or more intricately, that there's also a hierarchy within his family). i'm also bringing this up, because through arthur's threats he also makes use of tommy - tommy tries to bargain with arthur and arthur steamrolls tommy (it's not an accident that this conversation is sandwiched between tommy and lizzie's deal and his attempts at making a deal with mosley, who similarly steamrolls him ("it's not going to be that kind of relationship"),

now having written all that down, my tentative conclusion is a) tommy has a habit of sacrificing people, but those are not his family members and b) the middleman theme is important, but a lot of this ruthlessness has to do with his experience in the war rather than something he strictly learned in his childhood (at the hands of his father) c) the aspect of sexual violence - and sexual violence as an ongoing theme in the show - factors into this and tommy, around whom this theme is constructed, is not free of guilt here, but that he is not the perpetrator is an important qualitative distinction. there are also other points i made, but my brain is about to explode lol

i'm trying to keep the last part short re: characters people who conduct themselves like tommy. using experience of sexual violence as the lowest common denominator doesn't actually translate into a lot of shared behaviour among these characters in my eyes. polly shares tommy's sense of familial responsibility and has vested interest in their success and safety, but she doesn't operate the way tommy (and arthur and john) does, because she's lacking the war experience. michael's big tragedy is that he never comes home - he remains alienated within the family, due to the traumatic events of his adoption, but another part of this is also that, despite this, he was afforded a relatively privileged middle class upbringing with access to a good formal education. he doesn't understand the criminal world the way tommy and the rest of the family do (he's also a little audacious about it all) grace is a true believer in her cause - she is an agent of the crown and therefore someone who furthers the interests of her class. the law is on her side, that makes her the opposite of a criminal (of course, the thesis of the show is the hypocrisy of legitimacy: what's the difference between an upperclass person/aristocrat who sits on generational wealth and power, achieved through the subjugation of an impoverished and marginalized majority and colonialism, and the shelbys who commit violence in a very direct way in order to move up in the world, but the effects of their violence are on a much smaller scale and in the beginning not structural (that the peaky blinders become a sort of institution by the end of the show is Another point)) nelson ... is tommy if tommy was completely amoral and apolitical: he's the perfect business man in that sense and they may have a shared understanding of where they come from, but the trajectory of these people is vastly differently (nelson is probably an amalgation of both arthur and tommy's worst potential, he could be tommy if tommy was, as i said, actually amoral and apolitical and he has perfected, with his lack of conscience and guilt, arthur's sadistic streak) alfie also doesn't really operate like tommy in my eyes, and i think this is mostly due to him possessing no familial ties (i mean, he seems to have a family, but there's in implication of closeness, the mother he mentions is dead, if i remember correctly). it's fascinating to me that he attaches himself to tommy the way he does, to the point of wanting tommy to euthanize him.

all these characters have somewhat different motivations, philosophies and experiences - it makes the commonalities they share interesting, but i think little of it is actually built on experience of sexual abuse, especially as it seems that this is, amongst other things, what makes their points of view so varying.

as i've said, i can see your points, but my feelings are that a lot of it is being conflated and that it requires more nuance when looking at these details. working out the themes of something - which a story is built on - doesn't quite make up for looking what this concretely means or how exactly it plays out/what actually happens