Oh Anon. If you’ve been following me, you know what I think of the shame farm. You know that the idea of it is soul-shudderingly awful to me, for so many reasons, but the chief among them being that the men there aren’t just relieved of the responsibility of making decisions – they’re denied the right to, and those are two very different things. So while I think that for a time, yes, James might find it a relief to not be in charge of anything, I think that Thomas has had ten years of being denied the right to decide his own life, and I think by the time James finds him he’s probably absolutely burning up with anger about it. And I think that when James is done being absolutely exhausted and hurt down to his very marrow, he’d get them both out of there faster than you’d believe, and probably burn the place down in the process, and Oglethorpe would deserve that and more for stripping them of their rights and their dignity as people.
See now all of a sudden I’m suddenly head-cannoning that it was Thomas who got them out, not James. I think you’re right, I think by the time we see Thomas on the shame farm he’s probably burning up with rage, but kind of has nowhere to direct it and thinks there’s nothing for him on the outside anyway so what’s the point. But then he gets James back, James who is hurt and exhausted and has been through actual hell and back in the ten years they’ve been apart, and now Thomas has something solid to fight for. And oh boy does he – I’ll bet Oglethorpe never knew what bloody hit him!
That is very true. Thomas has, in fact, probably thought of a dozen ways to leave that place by now, and getting James back is likely to be the moment that he understands just how far he’s buried his own anger and how much of it there is to come out, and let me tell you that realization is… quite something. Especially when it starts with seeing someone you care about treated like shit – it’s like a release valve for when the normal “someone hurt me and I didn’t deserve that” pipe has been blocked.
Meg's Mumbles 