#william man! what a sad short life of complete service and devotion to The House And Its People

[nickandros]

would LOVE to hear your thoughts on William!!

i'd need to rewatch to remember exactly but i am 99.9% sure the only bit of actual ~supernatural~ shit that happens in the whole show is when matthew and wiliam get shot during the war, and back at the house, mary drops her teacup and daisy gets this wide eyed stare and says "someone walked over my grave" which. okay first of all. mary being psychically and spiritually linked with matthew, fine. sure. makes sense. if anyone was going to be, it would be those two. but daisy and william?

daisy knows william loves her, and she's coerced into agreeing to be his "sweetheart" by everyone because it will give him something to hold on to during the war, and most of them believe william will die in the war, so it's meant to releave daisy of any long term commitment. she's chained to him entirely out of guilt and duty.

william, on the other hand, is kept in the house so entirely by the family. it's actually insane the lengths to which they keep him there. even earlier, when his mother is sick, and cora agrees not to tell william bc they don't want to distract him from his work, and it's only mary that tells him after she mockingly disparages his job ("my mother wanted me to have a chance at bettering myself" "as a second footman?"). and then violet makes up a condition so he doesn't get drafted into the war, and then when that lie fails, lord grantham forces matthew to take william on as his servant to keep him safe, and all the while it's just like. WHY is this happening? and then you find out that every attempt to keep william safe, is for the sake of his father.

mr mason is a tenant farmer. the land he works on is owned by the crawleys and he has worked on the farm his entire life. robert crawley is notoriously terrible with money, and the tenant farmers are literally one of the only ways downton makes any income at all. mr mason is old and has lost his wife and all other children apart from william. violet literally says that her reasons for lying about william's "condition" was for the sake of mr mason's wellbeing, but violet very rarely cares about the wellbeing of anyone outside of the family so like ... they want william to be safe in the war so that his father can still make them money. MAYBE they care. MAYBE they don't actually want william to die because they like him. but it's very clear that violet's priorities are on his elderly father.

so whatever. william goes to war and then throws himself in front of a blast that would have killed matthew because of COURSE he does. and then he's dying in some hospital in bath or leeds or something until the crowleys intervene Again and ask for him to be brought to downton so he can die in the walls of the house (ghoulish!!) and then he begs daisy to marry him before he dies and she is guilted into it (ghoulish!!) and then the Whole House stands witness to this HORRIBLE wedding between a dying man and a mostly teenage girl (her age is never clear but i think she's implied to be not even 20 at this point) and the whole time you can just hear william's breath rattling around in his ruined lungs and daisy's wide eyed fear and guilt and everyone in the house sitting and watching and then william dies and it's just so!! what the fuck!!!