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dent-de-leon · 7 months

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@garnetgh0st Oh yes, definitely! They're facing the same trauma from polar opposite ends, but I think it's just tragic that they ultimately still feel the same--in the end, they both just want to bring their families back.

For Caleb, family is...everything. He tries so hard to protect the Nein and keep them all together because the family he had before is already gone. Because he can't bear to lose anyone else. And it pains him when someone is fortunate enough to still have a loving family, yet pushes them away."Young man, you do not take your mother's love for granted." He'd give anything to get that back.

And yet, even though Caleb believes so firmly in family and prioritizes his at every chance--he knows not everyone was raises by parents like his. He was there when Beau faced her father, when she was finally given a bit of the justice she deserved after years. More than that, Caleb knows what it's like to be a child that was taken advantage of; someone abused and tormented by his own mentor, betrayed and used, turned into weapon. He's still haunted by all the people he was coerced into torturing and killing under Trent's influence.

And Lucien was much the same. The only difference is, his parents weren't victims--they were complicit in all of it. His father giving him lists of names, targets to lure to a witch in the woods. Forcing his child to pay the price for his devil's bargain, staining his hands with the blood of countless victims.

And all the while, Lucien loathed and regretted every moment of it, always looking for an escape, a way out of this hell. Before he became another empty husk, the witch's next puppet:

"'We did owe her. Mum and Da did, I mean, but I was the one who paid that blood price.' I'm not surprised you remember the way. His stomach lurched. 'I'd…lure folk out to her cottage. Da would hand me a little paper slip, and whoever it said, I'd convince them to come along, get them near her cottage, and she would charm them. You saw what happens after that.'"

"'We were punished for seeing what they couldn't. After a while I couldn't let it go on, couldn't look at myself or live with myself, so I burned down the caravan with all three of them inside, took my sister, and that was that...No more little songs. No more farces.'"

And when Lucien is finally free of the witch who tormented him for so long? He just...doesn't know what to do. He's still shaken by the trauma of all the deaths he'd seen, all the faces that still haunt him. He doesn't believe she could just be dead, that he could ever really be free of this nightmare so easily. For a moment, was he gutted by the realization that she was gone so easily, and yet Lucien had already lost all his family? That she'd taken so much from him he'd never get back, and any taste of revenge left him terribly empty?

I think it's likely Caleb might have felt a bit similar, when he finally escaped Trent for good, and yet was still coping with his trauma in the aftermath. Grappling with everything he'd lost to get here, and trying so hard to believe that perhaps he and his loved ones would finally be free of this monster.

As for Lucien's parents--"After a while I couldn't let it go on, couldn't look at myself or live with myself"--when Lucien finally decides to end it all, his breaking point sounds a lot like Caleb's own breakdown when he realizes his parents are gone. "But it didn't exactly go according to plan, because as soon as I heard my mother and father screaming inside...I was so sure. I was so sure. Until I wasn't, and...I broke a bit..."

I don't think Caleb would be a stranger to Lucien's immense self-loathing and guilt, even though they both lost their families for very different reasons. I feel like Caleb would probably pity him; Lucien never even got the chance to have a happy family, to experience the childhood and memories that Caleb so treasured and lost. All Lucien has is empty promises from higher powers he can scarcely understand, otherworldly beings who are still just using him; the hollow comfort of a dream, a fantasy. And I think it's his desperation to bring them back, even if it means tearing reality apart at the seams, that Caleb would find so painfully familiar:

Lucien going all the way to Cognouza because he thinks it could give him the fantasy of a loving, happy family. Caleb following Lucien to Aeor and stumbling upon the one thing that could bring his parents back--they both find what they've always wanted, are both tempted by it more than anything. And when Lucien has that chance, he seizes it immediately--even as he destroys himself, spiraling beyond all recognition.

He's exactly what Caleb would've become if he never had the Mighty Nein, never had the chance to escape and heal. "Anybody can make lights. Anybody can send a message through a wire. I want to bend reality to my will." They're both so desperate for the same thing, the same impossible dream--willing to do anything to make it a reality. I think they'd understand each other on a level perhaps no one else in the Nein could; they both started the fire, but then they spent years still consumed by those flames.

I think Lucien and Caleb mirror each other in a lot of ways. And it makes me happy that, through Molly, they were able to help each other heal in some way. And I really love how Molly/King gets to have the family now that Lucien always wanted--Caleb telling Kingsley to stick with them, admitting that he Nein have a fondness for "strays." I like to think he and King are still close, and maybe one day, Caleb will be there to help Kingsley reach out to the last of his family in Rexxentrum--

#I MEANT TO ANSWER THIS SOONER IM SORRY--#anyway...ya...caleb and lucien parallels still hurt me #lucien tavelle #mollymauk #caleb widogast #lucien is tragic to me because even though his parents were so awful...he still wants his family back more than anything #because he thinks he can “fix it” the way molly tries to in choir practice #but even if he did bring them back #it wouldnt change how much they've hurt him #yet lucien is still so desperate for their affection--#and i think caleb would really feel for him in spite of how different their circumstances are

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it-is-bugs · 6 years

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I Love Lucien Week: Soldier’s Heart

Anyone who follows me may have noticed I'm not one for revealing my great inner pain or anything of the sort on tumblr. But it's actually relevant to my post, so I'll make an exception this time.

@aussiegirl41 recommended TDBM to me, and as we tend to like the same things, I started watching 1.1. And found myself turning it off at the first Box of Pain scene, to not come back for another two years. I told Aussie that the lighting was too dark and I couldn't understand their accents, but now I have to wonder if something else made me switch it off. My father suffered from PTSD triggered by his WW2 experiences until his death at 59 from alcoholism. So....yeah.

What I've come to appreciate about TDBM is that the creators and writers went beyond just slapping "PTSD" on Lucien as a sort of tragic aura; they took the time to build the backstory and make his behaviors a result of his mental illness.

The risk factors for PTSD start in childhood trauma, which Lucien has in spades. It's not just his mother's death, but I feel that Genevieve was an alcoholic with possibly some mental illness tossed in, and his father was emotionally unavailable well before her death. I also wonder about the little details like there's so much about his childhood which he either didn't know about, or was given a different version, from the reason for Rosie the dog going away, to Genevieve's actual cause of death, to the loss of a pregnancy, to her diabetes. A sense of not knowing your reality is not a good foundation for a strong life.

My own father's childhood was quite different from Lucien's economically, but they share similarities which resulted in entering adulthood without the strength to face trauma. He was raised in great poverty in Appalachia coal mining country during the Depression. His traumas included his mother's mental illness, siblings dying as babies due to that poverty, and violence from union busting forces who would do things like rake the house with gunfire at night. Like Lucien, he was the sensitive, intelligent sort, not quite fitting into his world.

One of the most chilling moments for me was Nell's line, about what a sweet boy Lucien had been. It echoes nearly exactly my aunt telling me, "We gave them our sweet boy, and we didn't know the man they sent back to us."

My father was significantly younger than Lucien when he joined the Army at age 18 the day after Pearl Harbor Day, but their paths rejoined after the war. My father was recruited to join military intelligence, when the Army doctors rightly diagnosed him as now mentally ill, but they reassured him that this would now make him suited for the sort of things that they needed him to do. Although there's not been that scene with Lucien, I would think he would have been similarly evaluated and routed into intelligence.

It does seem counter-intuitive that you'd put yourself back into dangerous situations when you're already deeply traumatized, but there can be a need to recreate the trauma, to fix it, to control it, as much as to avoid heightened emotional situations. One of the fascinating things that the writers do with Lucien is weave this need to control the pain into recreating the crimes. Instead of his own horrible flashbacks and recreations, he puts himself in this other situation, where he can focus those heightened emotions while in the shoes of the victim or killer. If Lucien's in the events, he can control it to an extent, and not be overwhelmed by it. At the same time, he often put himself in deadly situations with this technique, showing several times no regard for his own survival, facing down knives, guns, hands around his throat with such relish that you sense he wouldn't mind dying. A real emotional turning point is 5.5, when he truly fights to live. After all, Jean's got dinner waiting and she'll be cross if he's late.

I've felt a certain frustration at fan reactions to Lucien's actions, as though it's something he could control. His emotional paralysis is a result of horrible awful things happening when he’s made decisions in the past. His drinking is about more than addiction. He needs it to sleep and to stop the terrible images. PTSD sufferers are still drinking themselves to death, even with many more medications available. It works. And in 1961, with so few options available, I can't see how he'll be able to stop. His brain itself has been changed by the trauma. He will suffer from nightmares, have hyper response to stimulation, mood disturbances, etc, for the rest of his life. I'd love to say that marriage to Jean will change things, but if the story were to be told realistically, not so much.

Which brings me to another similarity with my family and the show. I see a lot of my mother in Jean. Strong women, with a great capacity for caregiving, but who expect others to be as strong as they are. One of the little touches that I like is how Jean treated Christopher Sr with the same toughness as she treats Lucien--she has her own patterns to replicate. Although she understands that Lucien has been through a lot, I don't think she understands the true effect. I don't blame the character for this at all--it's completely realistic for the timeframe. He should put the pictures away, he should stop drinking so much, he should stop doing crazy things. When she says that everyone in the Colonists' Club had lost something/someone and thus Lucien had no right to have his meltdown, it really showed that she doesn't grasp the full extent of his trauma. Does she by the end of S5?

But there has been progress for Lucien in five seasons. Initially, I found the resolution to Genevieve's death to be frustrating because it just opened up more questions to me than it answered. But in showing Lucien finding peace in that, I have to interpret that as he's ready to move on, and accept there are no neat answers for anything. He's never going to have a satisfactory answer as to why his own family had to suffer so much either. And that's fine. He chases the bus for a happy future, rather than staying behind at his mother's graveside. That seems like such a no-brainer, but we can see that Lucien's been told time and time again in life, you don't deserve happiness. Everyone goes away. Look, there's Jean going away too. Chasing that bus is as difficult as opening the studio door. It means leaving certainty behind to accept a new uncertainty. There’s so much certainty in unhappiness; it never lets you down.

I was equally 'huh?' at his peacemaking with the spirit of Thomas in the telemovie at first. But I remembered how I had to make peace with my own dead father, and a lot of that came from simply aging, reaching his age when this or that happened and realizing your parents were just people making mistakes, having no great knowledge and skills to cope and all you can do is try for a better outcome. I find it as an example of Lucien's incredible capacity for grace, truly his most attractive feature.

I cannot guess what the writers had planned for S6 which makes me want to see it so much. Love won't cure Lucien. Though we've seen improvement, a sense of comfort and security for him, his PTSD won't go away. Having Jean beside him in bed shouldn't make the nightmares cease. But you know what? If the writers were to decide to make it all just go away with a POOF, I won't have a problem with that at all. Lucien and Jean deserve that happiness my family never had.

So to start off I Love Lucien Week, this is why I love Lucien, and have so much respect for George Adams, the writers and Craig Mclachlan for creating this character and honoring his difficult journey.

#I Love Lucien Week #doctor blake mysteries #lucien blake #PTSD #meta #long post

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