comtessedebussy:

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.

I have so many feelings and most of them come down to this. There are two options: either Thomas was so broken by what happened to him that he just wants to settle down on a peach farm and never deal with the world again, or he is enraged. Personally, I lean towards the latter because Thomas has always had such strength of character.

But my biggest takeaway is that, if it is the latter (as I think it is) and Thomas still has the fighting spirit inside him, his views on how to bring about change have changed pretty radically. He used to believe in the ability to change systemic things with words, and kindness, and pardons. After the past ten years, I’m pretty sure he thinks that’s an untenable proposition. I don’t think he’ll be very happy about most of the things Flint’s done (Charlestown, Peter Ashe, his father, etc) but the one thing I think he will understand is why Flint started this war. Because I really, truly think Thomas has realized that the only way to change the civilization that tells them to feel shame and imprisons them for being themselves is through war. I don’t think he’d like what war requires one to do – the death, the destruction, the innocent lives lost – but I think he would have come to understand the necessity of war.

In short, Thomas’ thing has always been “know no shame.” My feeling is that his response to ten years on the shame farm (more or less) would result in his response being “fucking hell, I”m burning this place down.” Unless his fighting spirit is too broken to do anything.

In fact, the parallel between Thomas and Eleanor is interesting, but I find the parallel between James and Thomas more interesting. They were both fighting to change things for the better, and both suffered for it. Both lost everything they cared about. Both were told that they should be ashamed of what they were. James’ response was to literally go to war because of it. But what about Thomas’? I can’t imagine that James’ partner, the man who would not back down in the face of “mortal danger,” his father the earl, or the lords of Whitehall , would just accept and make peace with anything that happened to him. There’s no way to escape Bedlam, but did Thomas try to escape the plantation? Has he been stirring up the other workers/convicts in an escape plan? Has he been secretly penning pamphlets? Did he make an escape attempt and fail? In fact, I have a really hard time imagining that Thomas managed to make peace with being on that plantation for nearly a decade and accepted it as his lot in life, when James’ response to what happened to them was war.

And maybe I’m projecting a lot onto Thomas, and making him into this heroic freedom fighter without any canonical evidence, idk, but I like to think that his fighting spirit is intact but his views on the feasibility of changing things have become more nuanced and less optimistic. And I honestly think he would have understood but also deplored the necessity of James’ war.