How is it fucked up though? He was tortured for five years and then had to watch his best friend die which made him turn his humanity off.
I was talking more that his revenge plan continued to present day? I don’t know, it made me double back to think that it would be something that would consume Damon past the point where he had seemed to form relationships/started getting to be slightly healthier? I mean, not to undermine how traumatic it was for Damon, but that he killed a Whitmore 3 months ago says a lot for how hidden this is for him and how no matter how many changes in his life, he’d still use a revenge plan from decades back.
Because that was the plan, and the whole of the plan. Never to forgive, never to forget. In an episode about PTSD (recurrence of trauma) where Katherine very nearly went there about the impact of her abuse on Stefan, surely the point is that we cannot rely on others to ‘get over’ what we deal out. Why should this be ‘the past’ for Damon?
What even are decades to an immortal? Those five years would be an eternity for any thinking creature, as Whittmore must have known. And Hybris = Nemesis. It wasn’t just those five years: it was all the decades after, all the dead people in them. It was his self-consciously unreasoning hatred of Stefan for failing to save him. It was having been forged into something broken and horrifically effective, something without fear of anything except being back there. A there that still exists: it’s not the past, it’s still happening (routine, institutionalized, respected). We all understand what we do with reference to what has been done to us - it is the moral responsibility of others not to knowingly shift our lines further than they can survive.
And the thing about being made used to severe pain is it makes one unable to remember that it isn’t default. Literally and functionally unable, because in surviving, one learns that others only think it is unbearable.
Aaron shot the vampire who killed his parents, but he learned that his grandfather was the person who destroyed his family. Did Whittmore mean to? No. He intended to destroy innumerable other people. Because he saw them as less, treated them as less, deliberately and repeatedly made them into less. Cycles of abuse: this is how they work. People must do what they can to avoid feeling like a victim (after you victimize them) and particularly, to avoid ever becoming a victim again.
There’s been a lot of talk about failure to show the consequences of trauma (I personally haven’t thought Elena’s trauma was even close to over enough for her to explore - rather than act out - consequences). Well, this is one of them. You break people, you get broken people (see also Tyler) who no longer have any investment in the systems of behaviour that keep others unbroken. Neither love nor reason cures PTSD, and regaining the ability to ‘act normal’ is not always a sign of health (Stefan). I also think it’s pretty damn topical: it is very important not to sow that wind. What does it mean to be trained to ‘kill or be killed’, actually kill, leave friends to die, and then find yourself in a situation depending on emotional intimacy and empathy, not aggression? I don’t know, but my generation is at war, and they are finding out.
I thought it was stunning. I thought it explained so much of Damon’s hitherto special snowflake-ness. I love that they’re prepared to suggest the co-existence of his re-born, infant, fragile, humanity alongside his unrepentant (unrepentable) calculating killer. And it does rather explain ‘I do bad things that hurt you’…
