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#this list of shameless hawkeye moments on my actual blog
marley-manson · 1 year
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Hawkeye has virtually no shame about public displays of emotional vulnerability and mental instability, imo.
I’ve seen a lot of people who place a lot of importance on Hawkeye’s “If this keeps up, people are gonna realize I'm as crazy as I think I am,” line in Hawk’s Nightmare but honestly I just see it as mainly a wry acknowledgement that he’s acting less than sane in public and weirding out his childhood friends back home by detailing his nightmares to them, with a side of alluding to his actual fear, which is being crazy, as he tells Sidney over and over during that conversation. The key word there is “think” not “realize” imo.
Sidney reassures him by telling him his nightmares mean he’s sane, not by telling him that they’ll go away and he’ll stop publically sleepwalking. In fact he implies it’s something that will continue until the war’s over, and Hawkeye doesn’t seem to have a problem with that as long as it doesn’t mean he’s actually going insane.
And Hawkeye never really demonstrates any concern over people witnessing his breakdowns, and in fact seems to go out of his way to make them public half the time. I mean you got your most blatant example in Bananas Crackers and Nuts where he’s happy to exaggerate his feelings to make people think he’s insane to get a break. But even when it’s genuinely serious (and less cartoony, tonally), he’s also got no issues making public scenes.
He doesn’t quietly seek out Potter or BJ alone when he decides yes he is in fact seriously ill in Bless You Hawkeye, he walks right into everyone having a meeting and announces that he’s gonna die. He’s not only perfectly fine with Sidney visting him for a consultation in Hawk’s Nightmare, he’s the first to acknowledge why he’s there during the poker game while Sidney’s trying to be politely subtle (”Mind if I come along?” “Fine with me Doc, as long as your couch has wheels on it.”) He also ofc calls his childhood friends and tells them he’s having fucked up nightmares about them, tells everyone else about them to ask for their opinions, and tries to have a heart to heart with Frank about being afraid to go to sleep.
He makes a joke about cracking up at the farewell party in GFA, and tells some random patient he just had his “head in a cast,” apropros of nothing. He throws a tantrum in Adam’s Ribs, he publically screams out his feelings at the end of For Want of a Boot, he loudly narrates his impending panic attack in CAVE (and says that the reason he kept quiet about it for a while is specifically because he didn’t want Potter to choose a less safe place to retreat to on his account), he casually describes his emotional state as “mania” to Potter in Depressing News while, yk, building a big tower for 2 days without breaks in the middle of the camp, he breaks down in front of BJ - a guy he’d only recently met - in The Late Captain Pierce, he angrily confronts everyone about feeling betrayed and abandoned by them in the phone scene in GFA. We don’t see what he does after Dr. Pierce and Mr. Hyde but he casually mentions the insomnia to Winchester in Dr. Winchester and Mr. Hyde so he’s fine talking about it. He has two public breakdowns in the O.R. that I can remember off-hand.
And he never demonstrates any shame or regret about the public nature of any of this.
He never tries to hide his feelings - I think the closest he gets is in Sons and Bowlers, and he proceeds to tell Charles how he’s feeling for the entire rest of the night in that one - and while nearly everyone else gets plotlines where something’s troubling them that they don’t want to talk about, Hawkeye never ever does. He’s usually the one prying these feelings out of other characters and chiding them for not talking about them. Even in GFA what’s stopping him from talking about it is the amnesia - he’s reluctant and upset about having the conversations about the bus because he’s subconsciously afraid of remembering, but he still does, and after he has his breakthrough he willingly talks it through with Sidney multiple times afterwards as well, both offscreen in Sidney’s mention of follow-up sessions (including Hawkeye explicitly wanting more of them), and on screen when Sidney visits the 4077.
And in Bless You Hawkeye, the other trauma amnesia episode, he’s perfectly willing to a) accept it could be psychosomatic, b) talk about it with Sidney to find the root cause, and c) joke about it afterwards during a poker game.
And then you got a bunch of moments and jokes where he shamelessly reveals personal information about himself, sometimes likely exaggerations that he’s still fine with people believing, sometimes clearly accurate. I sucked my thumb until my twenties, I can’t get hard, here’s the kind of niche sex I like, I’m a coward and proud, I’m fucking my married ex, I was jealous of my dad’s girlfriend, monologue about how much I miss my dad to a stranger, monologue about how miserable I am to a stranger, monologue about how terrified I am to a stranger, etc etc.
There’s also overt commentary on this - in Check-Up for example, Hawkeye suggests that Trapper got an ulcer because he’s the strong silent type who keeps his feelings in, in contrast to himself. In Bless You Hawkeye Sidney points out that Hawkeye never holds back when it comes to his feelings about the war, which is why he’s assuming the root cause is something Hawkeye isn’t even consciously aware of and goes back to Hawkeye’s childhood.
When it comes to Hawkeye it’s very difficult for me to imagine a scenario where he would try to hide anything about himself, whether that’s his feelings or something about his life, and I have a feeling it was the same for the writers of the show most of the time too lol, hence relying on amnesia twice for the mystery and reveal structure.
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