#the disadvantage to letting my thoughts run whilst hatching

[viric-dreams]

All of the hatching has given my brain a lot of time to cook in the background, this time about how the PC trio handle otheredness, a main thread in each of their lives.

Even on the surface, Ockham always had to grapple with being 'separate' from others. Initially, due to his religion. He'd left home early to take on work at sea and help support his family, leaving him isolated from a community already existing in secrecy. After losing them, he lived in various cities across Northwestern Europe, refusing to return to Antwerp, never having a "home" city. And after his impressment, the starker language barrier simply alienated him further. Now, the current Ockham is not only displaced in time from hishertheir surface counterpart, but is not human. In all of these instances, Ockham's reflex simply has been to embrace that otheredness--not even make an attempt to assimilate and veer towards the opposite. Rejecting needing community or a home entirely. Ockham may not feel lonely, but heshethey is often restless and has to keep moving.

Ellie came from a sense of community, one that had little, but years of being told that she was inferior had wormed its way into her head. She left that family and place behind to try to create a future for herself where she'd felt if she'd stayed she would have had none. Indeed, she was right--she would not have been able to live as herself, either as someone attracted to men or as a woman, and would have died prematurely just as her father did from the work in the mines. Instead, she placed her sense of belonging initially into being able to amass power, to be one of those men society sees in high regard, and to push down any parts of her that do not fit that mould. Her happiness and her sense of belonging can be postponed until then... Except that "then" never came and it took everything falling apart for her to come to terms with the fact that she has to create her own happiness and her own community on her terms.

Jones is a stranger case, where his nationality did grant him a certain degree of otheredness, but class shielded him to an extent. Moreover, he developed a very fine-tuned set of interpersonal skills and charisma that enabled him to overcome this and reach that elusive "in crowd" in most cases... but it's not a space that felt right to occupy. It wasn't his. And he made the choice to deliberately seek solidarity and agitate for change, actively choosing to embrace and lean into those elements of himself that would other him, like sexuality or ethnicity, if it means that others could live authentically and equally as well... until it backfired on him. Coming out of prison, he has a very different relationship to otheredness, seeing elements like his newfound mental health problems as a liability rather than a part of that initial fight for societal acceptance. Often, he feels like he's pretending to be a person full stop, and has gotten better at utilising that charisma to play that role of an easily-palatable gentleman in order to be accepted, to get back into that space that was at least safe.