#uncritical thought is REQUIRED in order to maintain the rose-tinted view of him as a good father

[clotpolesonly]

thinking about Declan and the moth again

it HAUNTS ME that the moth is one of the few times that Declan seems to lose his self-awareness completely. like, yeah, he's the ultimate king of repression, but he's usually very conscious of what he's repressing and the fact that he's repressing it. he knows his issues.

he knows that he forces down his emotions in an unhealthy way so that he can be the adult in the room at far too young an age. he knows he can't form healthy relationships because of a lifetime of danger and insecurity. he knows he dehumanized his mother as a means to cope with their batshit family situation. he knows he's competing with his father's ghost for a place in Ronan's life. he knows he resents Matthew for being the primary factor in his parentification and loss of opportunity in life. he knows he loves his father no matter how much he tries to convince himself to hate him. he knows he feels trapped in the life he's leading, doesn't see a way out, and likely wouldn't take it if he did because it would be at the expense of his brothers.

all of these things, Declan acknowledges openly, either to himself in narration or out loud to others. he may delude himself about how well he's coping with his issues, but he has no illusions about what his issues ARE.

except for the fucking moth.

it's such a perfect, on-the-nose symbol that it almost strains credulity for Declan not to acknowledge it as such, and yet not once does he ever look at the moth and feel the way he did about the black string art exhibit that made him recognize how trapped he felt in his life. "how the moth had beaten against the walls for those first few days, until it had learned it could not escape."

the learned helplessness of it - there's no point fighting to get free, just lie down and accept that this is your life. know what you're allowed to do, and have, and be. know what you're not. a creature of his father's making, confined by his father's hand.

and not even something as eye-catching as a butterfly, no, but a quieter subtler moth with eyes like glittering purple-black marbles that will never get to live a life because Niall made it so.

and the symbolic parallel of the display case and the townhouse. the rigid real world structures that Declan himself requested, because they made him feel more secure than being surrounded by dreams, and that his father provided in a well-meaning but ultimately short-sighted attempt to accommodate him. things that Declan only recognizes much later as the cages that they were.

Declan now regrets demanding his dad make the display case by hand, and when he puts himself through Ronan's bad-feeling security system at the end of the series, the memory it hits him with is inheriting the sterile alexandria townhouse that was exactly what he'd claimed to want.

these are symbols of Declan's complicity, in a manner of speaking, in the whole tragic mess that was his upbringing. at some point, quite early on, Declan's oppression became a joint effort, something that he participated in (because a complete lack of control in the situation would have felt worse). it reminds me of Declan struggling to remember which of them first decided to lie to Matthew about what he was, whether that was his dad's idea or if he'd done that of his own volition, just following pattern.

did dad trap him, or did he build the walls himself? or was it both?

but, for once, none of this is acknowledged by Declan in the text. this artistically-minded chronic overthinker carries the moth around with him - one of the two dreams he will never sell, alongside the gift from Ronan - and he stays so uncritically sentimental about it that he releases it on his wedding day with happy/nostalgic tears in his eyes, and it just boggles my mind.

this is the man who looked at a bunch of string and had the immediate revelation that he was utterly miserable and trapped in a spiderweb of a life precariously balanced on a knife's edge where one wrong move could get him and everyone he loved killed, but he looks at a direct, uncomplicated, one-to-one representation of himself and somehow does not recognize that it is not something to think of fondly. that, yes, it may be a symbol of his father's love for him, but it's not good.