sidewaystime:

the things i think about when i think about thomas hamilton

• there’s a kind of exile in what happened to him that looks like Miranda’s exile: a loss of power, of influence, the destruction of his reputation and name, loss of the freedom to act in the ways that he was accustomed to doing. The closing in of his world to the environment immediately around him. Miranda says that she felt like Abigail was a clock that had struck its chime (it’s fine. i mean i will never be okay with clocks in this show ever but sure. it’s fine.) and woken her from a  dream. is that what flint’s arrival is like for thomas? 
• Does he know that James and Miranda were alive? Was he waiting? Or had he let them go and hoped for the best? 
• sorry i just cracked myself up thinking of Thomas-as-Penelope and the suitors thing and flint’s whole :[ response to that kind of mess
• i keep thinking of thomas and change. he’s a catalyst for flint, who is a catalyst for literally everyone else. and his fate in all of it is to be confined and regulated in a way no one else really is. he’s an agent of change and he ends up in a situation where there isn’t any nor hope for it really. 
• and how does he deal with the idea of never being free? if the shame farm’s goal is that people who come there are never seen or heard from again, that those people effectively cease to be, what is the actual psychological effect of living without actually living? Miranda says that there’s no life, no joy, no love on Nassau for them; how much worse is that for Thomas? 
• Thomas’ WHOLE THING IN LIFE is that he’s about not feeling shame. And then he’s stuck in a place whose whole reason for being is to be a repository of it. The disgraced sons, the embarrassments, the outcasts. The unjustly imprisoned. The whole farm exists as a place where families send people they are ashamed of to make the problem go away. fuck that place. can you even imagine the level of outrage Thomas would feel about the whole concept? He goes from trying to change the world specifically to prevent the damage the old world causes from being in the new world and then he ends up in this place in the new world which is designed to perpetuate and hide the sins of the old? Oglethorpe makes a profit off it and calls himself a reformer and the reform is being less of an asshole than an asylum? The level of “what kind of bullshit nonsense is this?” that he must feel is staggering. Also that it doesn’t help anyone but the wealthy. ao;fjisldfsaljoidfkljasdflkj
• The stigmatization of queerness as anathema to civilization, that he and people like him are considered to be debris on the march toward progress, the isolation and estrangement from society, the rejection of everything he is capable of for the sake of propriety and the status quo? not to bring this all back to James McGraw, but this is an amplified and external manifestation of James’ whole entire fucking life and Thomas gets to live it for a long time.
• How much does Thomas quiet himself down as a response to institutionalization? Especially in response to Bedlam and then the shift to the kinder but no less restrictive environs of the shame farm. There’s got to be some amount of that kind of response: a relinquishing of his autonomy and agency for the some of the trappings of civilization or acceptance of this status quo because the alternative can be worse. 
• What are the lines that can be drawn between Eleanor and Thomas? both of them are children of privilege and both of them have that privilege stripped from them and go to prison. What are Thomas’ responses to that? IDK but they’re fucking profound in Eleanor.
• I think about this line a lot: “sooner or later, you are going to have to confront these realities, chief among them being that England takes whatever, whenever, however it wants. Lives. Loves. Labor. Spirits. Homes. It has taken them from me. I imagine that it has taken it from you.” That loss (lives, loves, labor, spirit, home) is the motivation behind everything Flint does. Thomas lost those things too. How does that manifest? 2/3 of that trio responded with wrath. 
• i don’t trust a single word that came out of peter ashe’s mouth. thomas forgave him? mmmmm. maybe. unreliable narrator is unreliable.