keensers:

WELL anon you certainly don’t fuck around. that’s a very good question and i’m afraid i’m going to give a not-particularly-satisfactory answer, but the only answer i have is this: i think his key qualities have largely remained the same. just as i think “flint” has always been a part of “mcgraw” and separating the two is impossible (star trek tos 1.05 “the enemy within,” anyone?) i also think that thomas post-finale is still idealistic, manipulative, snarky, sort of a dick, and also incredibly kind. what has probably changed is the RATIO of those things – i think now he probably thinks a little more before speaking. his edges are probably sharper and less polished. the ratio of “being a dick” to “being a kind person” in particular has probably tilted slightly in favor of being a dick after having almost everything torn away from him. his idealism has probably taken the most major hit, though not a fatal one (hope is such a strange, insidious thing). my personal headcanon is that he’s come to terms with the notion of incremental change mostly because he’s HAD to; i think if you put him next to flint at the head of that army in season 4, he’d damn well still lead it (dreams, too, are insidious things).

but essentially all we know about thomas in those “lost years” is that 1. he probably did spend SOME time in bethlem and 2. he’s been on that plantation for at least a few years (likely since peter’s ‘lmao he’s dead sry’ letter to james and miranda). we don’t know if he knew that james and miranda were alive (probably not), we don’t know if he ever tried to escape (maybe), we don’t even know for sure who got him to that plantation in the first place (peter? his dad? some combination of the two? hennessey??? jk that’s too wild a conspiracy theory even for me). WE KNOW NOTHING! so i’m gonna go with the notion that “nothing so fundamental changes so quickly” – obviously, ten years isn’t “changing quickly” but i don’t think he’s a Different Person. i think we can safely draw a line from 1705 to 1716 and project a moderately-but-not-entirely changed person; the reason we CAN draw that line is that 1716 thomas was 1705 thomas once.

i also feel pretty comfortable in saying that he probably did a lot of soul-searching in bethlem and then on the plantation (e.g. “was i wrong? was my plan really that crazy? was it worth the sacrifices we made?”), and landed on “i wasn’t wrong, i wasn’t crazy, the world was wrong for the sacrifices it forced on me, and society was crazy for deeming me so.”
his whole credo of “know no shame” surely comes from his own bloody-minded self-assuredness, that whole “i see the goal and i see the path and by god i’m going to walk it until i get there and i don’t care what anyone thinks of that” thing. and, as i said in this meta earlier, thomas is an idealist with a mile-wide stubborn streak. the thomas we saw in flashbacks wouldn’t fold, and he wouldn’t give up, he would get fucking angry. unlike james, though, whose anger means to (and almost does) set england on fire, i think thomas would far more quietly sharpen his own anger into a new plan, a new goal, a new path. i think he and james are getting the hell off that plantation and i think thomas is going right back to his world-saving, just from a position of more caution and significantly less influence. (but that’s okay. he’ll build it back up.)