Are They, You Know *imitates Framing A Latin Teacher For Murder* In Love?

are they, you know *imitates framing a latin teacher for murder* in love?

adam has dissociated in the series? i dont doubt it, just do you have any examples? thanks !!

It’s largely referenced off-screen, but there are big Cabeswater-influenced moments of dissociation as well (which is a really great look at how this series combines pre-existing mental illness with magic tbh).

 Pre-Cabeswater, there’s this, which is fairly straight forward:

Sometimes, after Adam had been hit, there was something remote and absent in his eyes, like his body belonged to someone else.

and this scene after Adam is deafened, which is a bit more implied/something you can recognize if you know what depersonalization looks like:

“Nice Transformer,” Blue said. “Is that the police car one?” 

Adam looked at Blue, unsmiling, as if he didn’t really see her. Then, a moment too late, he replied, “Yes.”

The delayed response, the blank affect, and the single-word replies are all classic signs of dissociation. 

After Cabeswater, this gets twisted up in Adam’s connection to the forest, but it’s still clearly a thing that he did before Cabeswater–his panic response to his father is to shut down entirely and start to see the situation from outside of himself. Look at the scene where Adam’s dad shows up at St. Agnes.

Before Adam’s father shows up, you have Adam analyzing what had just happened in the church. He’s very clinical in his thoughts, but no more than Adam usually is–he’s considering what just happened, what effects it might have had, why Ronan might have reacted the way he did, and what Adam should do about it. Complex, analytical thoughts that are still cognizant of emotion and what/why Ronan might have felt that way. It’s two or three large paragraphs of text.

And then we have this:

Adam check to make sure his hands were no longer bloody, and then he opened the door.

It was his father.

He opened the door.

It was his father.

He opened the door.

It was his father. 

“Aren’t you going to ask me to come in?” his father was saying.

Adam’s body wasn’t his, and so, with a little wonder, he watched himself step back to allow Robert Parrish to enter his apartment.

Again–cut and dry depersonalization. His body is not his own, his thoughts slow down to repetition and simple, basically constructed sentences, and his narrative becomes passive instead of active (see “his father was saying” instead of “his father said”). 

In the narrative Adam seems to exist outside of himself, and the text is dehumanizing with things like “Adam was a thing standing out of the way” and “his father regarded Adam, this thing he had made”.

And then there’s a continuation of the repetition trick, which always reminds me of the scene in TRB where Persephone says she’s going to use as many of Blue’s words that work as she can. Adam’s not thinking clearly on his own, and so he negates the things his father says in his head:

“You gonna look in my face when I talk to you, or you gonna keep looking at that shelf?”

Adam was going to keep looking at that shelf.

and

“So that’s how it’s going to be?”

That was how it was going to be.

and

“Are you not going to say anything?”

Adam was not going to say anything.

Again, his brain is not processing coherently. He goes in and out in this chapter–he starts to analyze the idea of the restraining order clinically, and then has the thought “He did not want to get hit. He did not want to get hit. He would do what he needed to do to not get hit.” Then he hears Persephone’s voice, then he remembers Cabeswater, and then he is able to say, “I think you should go.”

The Adam’s dad starts calling him a shit and saying horrible things, and Adam goes away again:

Part of Adam was still there with his father, but most of him was retreating. The better part of him. That Adam, the magician, was no longer in his apartment. That Adam walked through trees, running his hand along the moss-covered stones. 

The narrative goes on like that–swapping between Adam’s dad’s hateful speech and Adam speaking to Cabeswater, which is trying to comfort him, until the thorn sticks his father and “brought Adam rushing back to himself”. 

And finally, you have the end of that chapter:

Adam stood there for a long moment. He wiped the heel of his hand over his right eye and cheek, then dried it on his slacks. 

He climbed back into his bed and closed his eyes, hands balled to his chest, scented with mist and with moss.

When he closed his eyes, Cabeswater was still waiting for him.

Adam’s very clearly using Cabeswater to cope, as a safe place to retreat to away from his body, and he does it in the same way that his brain does naturally in response to extreme panic or trauma.

I know that a lot of the time people look at this and say, “Oh, right, so you added in a kid who depersonalizes and turn it into some magical bullshit instead of real representation,” but I don’t think that’s the case. I think that this is the addition of magic to Adam’s life twisting its way into his mind’s coping strategies; this is Cabeswater heightening what Adam does on his own. 

But yes, it is absolutely canon that Adam depersonalizes in moments like this.

down time

Who would win:

Ronan’s Stolen Dream BMW vs Andrew’s Blood Money Maserati

fyi i just finished six of crows, put the book down, left my apartment, and am now trekking through the cold and rainy dark to pick myself up a copy of crooked kingdom before the shops close because there is no other choice

god can you imagine being niall's lawyer

niall: i want to leave a few million dollars to each of my sons and the rest to maintaining my house and wife

lawyer: weird way to say that but all right

niall: she's going to go into a coma when i die, you know

lawyer:

niall: also i want my middle son to have the house, but if he ever goes inside it, bankrupt the little shit

lawyer:

niall, brandishing a scrap of paper: also here's this sentence in a nonsense language. work that in somewhere