#to be clear Sam is a kind and empathetic person who is also very reserved and intellectual in his response to things
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Sam is stubborn and outwardly reserved, holding his emotions in check. It’s a trait he learned at a young age. His dad and brother were emotional people, prone to explosions and maudlin moods, but they valued strength and stoicism above all else and would tease at any softness they found. By the time Sam was thirteen he knew better than to let slip in front of them. By the time he was seventeen he didn’t let slip even when he was alone. Instead he learned to dissect his emotions intellectually, to pick them apart and puzzle them out like they were a riddle that needed solving rather than letting them run their course. It was fucked up and unhealthy, but so was his life. As a grown man, he lived through or came back from trauma that would land most people in permanent psychiatric care and still he rarely breaks down. He flinches at certain types of noises, at fast or violent movements, he has nightmares that make him keen and weep in his sleep, and occasionally he sinks so deeply into flashbacks that he loses himself for hours. But even as a teenager he didn’t just burst into tears. Sure, he’d get so frustrated and angry that he’d end up with tears blurring his eyes sometimes, but that’s not the same as crying, not to him, even if his dad and brother would occasionally still give him shit for it. But he didn’t call them out on how soft and sad they’d get when either of them were three quarters of the way to the bottom of a bottle. At least not unless he was feeling particularly spiteful. Because that’s another thing about Sam, he seemingly exists for long stretches of time on a heady concoction of stubbornness and caffeine seasoned with a dash or two of raw spite. He has survived what would put most people six feet underground permanently because he’s got something to prove. And he is capable of literally walking through Hell and back to prove that he can, proving it to his brother and the rest of the world, but mostly proving it to himself. Proving that he IS good, that he does more good than bad, and that he cares enough to keep at it despite everything going against him. And even though he knows that showing emotions (or even just having emotions) doesn't equal weakness, he struggles with expressing them outside of an intellectualized way. He struggles with allowing himself to be vulnerable because vulnerability IS a weakness, one that can be disastrous.
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deniigi · 5 years ago
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It may not be exciting, but I personally find it INCREDIBLY HEARTWARMING that there's a Matt who can get TWO nurses trying to look out for him. It's definitely NOT a one person's job - too taxing, bad hours - but two? Now, if only Claire and Rio could get in touch... "Hey, I've got a date this Saturday, can you go mother the idiot for me?" "Sure, Claire, go and have fun". So... exciting? Nah. Relatively practical? YES, for Claire's own good :D
heya boo!
So, I’m totally into how much you love this and I’m not sayin’ what I’m gonna try to say to rain on your fun.
That is 100% not my intention. And I absolutely don’t think that you meant it to come off this way. So you’ll forgive me if I take a moment to kind of talk into the void a little bit from your ask.
But I want to kind of explain why I feel a little lukewarm about that ficlet and about the idea of Rio filling this secondary role as a nurse to Matt.
So as a person who is mixed but who identifies as white (basically, my mom’s mixed, but my dad is hella white and I have never suffered discrimination as a result of my skintone) I work very hard to be careful and thoughtful about the roles that people of color perform in my work, and this was a moment that I wrote that I went, ‘Hm. Actually, I dunno about that.’ Because there is a very fine line between appreciating characters like Claire and Rio as strong, empathetic women of color in public service and imagining those characters as essentially, just supports for a white person’s success.
I’m iffy on the idea of Rio serving as a ‘second nurse/mom’ character to Matt because I feel uncomfortable with the idea of Matt having another women of color essentially acting as his mom.
Like. We are kind of skirting into ‘mammy’ territory here. (Mammy, for those of you unfamiliar with the term is an archetype of a black female housekeeper who historically oversaw the running of white, middle and upper class households in the American south, which included the rearing of children in many instances, you can read more about here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammy_archetype )
Matt is a grown man and he’s a grown white man and it’s fine every so often for him to scurry off to Claire for patching up and medical attention, but I am very very wary of the characterization of Claire or Rio going past that professional, friendship-based, or moral-good sense of obligation into mothering territory. There are too many dangerous implications there, including the suggestion that women of color can only fulfill these motherly types of roles in our media and the suggestion that it is fine for a white man to act recklessly and irresponsibly without thinking about the consequences because he’s being heroic--that’s essentially just a different form of the man-child trope.
So basically, there are some hypermasculine and racialized types of discourses going on in this little space which I am not sure I want to engage with.
I get that realistically, in the world, there are hella folks who would not (and probably do not) see this as a problem and who believe that maternal instincts or behavior is part of certain identities and professions etc. etc.
I get it. And maybe if I was a woman of color writing this material, I wouldn’t feel the same way about it. But because I am not, I am just very reserved about working in this type of space, if you know what I mean.
Sorry if I’m not articulating myself very well here. I just want to be clear that while I’m happy that folks are interested in a Rio-Matt dynamic, we also just have to be careful about thinking what roles those characters are serving and how they might reinforce some problematic ideas of the roles that people of color perform in media.
So yes.
Again, anon. This is not in any way directed at you. I totally don’t think you were intending to suggest any of that at all. It’s just something that’s been sticking me in the side basically ever since I posted that little snippet and something that’s always in the back of my head when I write from Brett and Sam’s POVs in other fics.
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