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rainjoyswritingThis is a really weird post I never thought I would write, and I don't know if it will help matters or not, but it's something I can't get past and I got jarred into really badly again this morning reading a post about the Google discriminatory-email-fired-douchebag case, and now I *really* feel like I can't get past it. This has been tormenting me since the episode aired, and so this is basically a very long discussion of canon, and how fanon ignores canon, and a fact about canon I *can't* ignore, we *shouldn't* ignore. The post I was reading was arguing that white men claiming a right to air the political view that women and PoC shouldn't get hired by tech firms because they're not as good as white men are abusers, what they are doing is abuse, because abuse is a belief that you are entitled to certain things at the expense of other people (white men feeling they are entitled to be judged by lower standards, only against other white men, and not the rest of us, and they're entitled to make our work environment toxic to get what they feel entitled to; it was a good article, but I felt so ill with reading it I had to stop quarter of the way in).
And what it brought back to me, again, was the fact that I go through periods of writer's block in this fandom because I can't - I refuse to - get past a certain point of canon: Porthos is presented to us, in canon, as an abuser. And I am so angry at the character that I have difficulty now in writing him even in situations where I've given the character enough difference in situation that *that* character doesn't act like that; it still feels like condoning the abuse, saying somehow that it's not his fault, that it's *okay* to abuse people. It's not. Every new verse I've started in this fandom for a while (none of them has been posted yet) has either not featured Porthos at all or moved him into so minor a role that I can largely avoid him, because I can't write him as a good person when he isn't presented to us as a good person. I am struggling through finishing the affinityverse (it soothes me some to know that if affinityverse!Porthos met canon!Porthos, he would *hate* him, and they might come as far as physical blows; that verse was started long before we found out in canon who Porthos really is), but I really long for the relief of just not dealing with the character anymore. Below the cut will be a really lengthy discussion of canon evidence - nothing more, all of this is there onscreen to see - of Porthos' behaviour. If you don't want to read it, fine. I just want it out in fandom because it doesn't seem to be there that if you have been treated the way Porthos treats Aramis, it is *not your fault*, what was done to you is *wrong*, and you deserve to be somewhere safe away from the abuser, you *deserve* that. You certainly don't deserve retraumatising every time someone says that what Porthos did is alright. It's not. That is not up for debate: you do not treat people like that, good people *do not do that*.
This will be long, and despairing. You can guess the content. Don't read it if you don't want to read that content.
There are some pretty decent writers in this fandom, but I've never yet read a single fic featuring Porthos IC, canon Porthos simply does not appear in fanfic. I'm guilty of it too; I started most of my universes before we saw the worst of his behaviour, before we could in retrospect join the dots and see the pattern of what he's done. I don't want to go into the psychology of why we refuse to see *that* character as he's actually presented (that would require an entirely different post, and I'd probably only feel comfortable writing it in collaboration with someone who knows better than I do, if I really can be said to at all - I'm not a psychologist and underequipped to consider white people's unconscious racism in their attempts *not* to be racist), but I do give the writers of the programme a very hard side-eye that they chose *that* character to make so disloyal, so self-serving, so aggressive and entirely untrustworthy. It's been clear from S1's lack of any arc for Porthos that the writers never knew what to do with that character (it's been clear from the rest of the series that they just don't know what they're doing full stop).
Quick disclaimer: I've seen the first series a whole bunch of times, but I only watched S2 once because it really was bad, and I found S3 so unwatchable that I gave up after only a few episodes. If something happens later in S3 to spin all of this back - if Porthos has a great moment of self-realistion, takes responsibility for his actions, apologises and genuinely determines to change himself - do let me know. Do be aware that nothing less than that can change the character at this point; you can't handwave away abuse because the abuser was talented say or achieved something special or was maybe nice to someone *else*. That's what society already loves to do, and it's bullshit, and we really fucking ought to know better.
The most important thing first: in S3, it becomes clear that Porthos is abusing Aramis and, going back through canon in light of it, it becomes clear that he always has been.
What am I talking about, given that fandom seems to have made invisible the thing that actually happened: way back in 3x01 in the monastery, Athos is happy to see Aramis there and safe, d'Artagnan is happy to see Aramis there and safe. Porthos isn't. Why not?
What Porthos makes clear very quickly is that his friendship is conditional, and Aramis hasn't met the conditions. That alone might have made his use of 'all for one' just funny - the irony that he doesn't recognise that he doesn't understand what the phrase means - but it's so much darker, what Porthos is doing with that phrase. He's using it to gaslight Aramis. He's using it to say 'I have always supported you, and you have failed to support me'. This is a manipulation of the facts, or as we used to call it in pre-post-truth days, a lie. Throughout canon Aramis has supported Porthos, until his despair drove him to the monastery. And throughout canon Porthos has *failed* to support Aramis, because their relationship is fundamentally one-sided, and Porthos wants to keep it that way.
Abuse is not just doing something shitty to a person, abuse is deeper than that - we all do shitty things sometimes, we're all in a bad mood so we snap when we shouldn't. There are patterns that point to abuse (those 'red flags' we spot), and those patterns point to a particular mindset, which is that the abuser thinks they're entitled to something from the abused, and so they are entitled to do whatever they want to the abused to get that. Physical violence is only part of it; emotional abuse is now illegal in my country, thank god, so you can go to prison for what Porthos does over the course of three seasons. Because his behaviour makes obvious that he thinks he's entitled to something from Aramis - one-way and utter loyalty, putting Porthos' needs before his own every time - and he is going to do whatever it takes to *make* Aramis give him that.
By the end of S1 I was disappointed in Porthos, but eager for him to get to do his thing in S2. I was disappointed because over and over we'd seen Aramis go above and beyond for him, and yet Porthos hadn't done the same in return (He can be permitted the excuse of not having many opportunities for it, but the one big one he had - The Good Soldier - he chose not to take. Apart from that, Aramis goes above and beyond repeatedly for Porthos, and Porthos does no more than Athos or d'Artagnan does for Aramis in return, so their 'best friends' status looks very one-sided). I thought he'd do better in S2. He didn't; Porthos is an abysmal friend in S2. We know how bad a liar Aramis is (again, just look at TGS - it takes Porthos and Athos, what, four seconds to know Aramis is hiding something?) and Porthos must *know* that Aramis is acting really fucking weird. But Porthos doesn't care. Even in little moments where Aramis might need some comfort, like at the end of the saga with Emilie, it's Athos who offers it, though Porthos must know it's needed. Porthos just ignores Aramis for most of season two. Aramis supports Porthos when he thinks Treville is lying to him (even though he didn't do the same for him back in S1) and supports Porthos when he goes to meet his father (which Porthos responds to with open ingratitude) even when he is dealing with a mountain of his own shit at the time. But when Porthos accuses Aramis of turning his back on him in S3, this isn't just hypocrisy - it's manipulation. It's playing on the guilt that is the very reason *why* Aramis has banished himself to a monastery, just to try to cope with the psychological trauma of his last year, to try to force the behaviour Porthos *wants* out of Aramis. A good friend understands how massively fucked up Aramis has been by everything that happened in S2. An abuser uses all of that to manipulate a person, to lie about the past and influence their future behaviour by doing so.
Porthos doesn't say 'I'm having a really hard time with you going away'. He says 'you deserted *me*'. Yes, Aramis went to a monastery - which is in no way a natural place for a man of his temperament to be, and whether he went to try to heal or cope or just punish himself is obviously something writers can play with over and over, because it's complicated, and he'd been through and done so fucking much, and he's probably been *dying* of his guilt and loneliness every damn night there. And Porthos says to him, You *should* feel guilty. You failed me. Fuck whatever you were feeling, fuck your trauma, fuck your needs. *I* am entitled to your undivided attention, and you are a bad person for not giving me it. And Aramis is primed to respond to this. He's primed to believe it, because Porthos has been doing this to him all along. Aramis goes above and beyond for Porthos over and over, his *adoration* of Porthos has so many obvious canon examples I don't even need to bother to quote them. Where are the reverse ones? Where are the moments when we realise how *entirely* Porthos loves and supports Aramis?
*crickets*
Remember when Aramis' old friend Marsac comes back, and Aramis flounders on trying to remain loyal to him, and asks his friends for help, and they say no. Remember when Porthos' old friend Charon comes back (and Porthos sleeps with his girlfrend while Charon is recovering from a bullet wound; Flea belongs to herself but that doesn't mean that what Porthos did wasn't a clear example of what 'friendship' actually means to him) and Aramis goes a bit deranged to rescue him. Remember when Bonnaire turned up the first time, and Athos threatened Porthos' life, and Aramis went apeshit; remember when Bonnaire came back the second time, and Athos threatened *Aramis'* life, and Porthos very literally turned his back on him and walked away. Porthos' use of 'all for one' in that monastery was very telling of what he thinks it means. He reads it not as his owing Aramis his loyalty - he makes clear even in the act of saying it in those circumstances that he doesn't believe that - but he thinks it means that Aramis owes him his loyalty regardless of anything else. Fuck your trauma, fuck your needs, fuck your life; I am entitled to everything from you.
Abuse doesn't just pop up from nowhere, and there have been clues all along that Aramis loves Porthos (whether you want to interpret it as romantic or not is entirely up to you) and Porthos doesn't love Aramis. Worse, there are indications throughout canon that we shouldn't trust Porthos. The way he treats 'friends', how easy a liar he is - not for specific reasons, Aramis lies (badly ^^;) when he needs something in particular, Porthos we meet in the very first scene as a liar just to win at cards, and he deceives people fluently for the entire rest of the series. Reading back in retrospect from the monastery, from Porthos' open act of gaslighting ('the past is not what you actually experienced, the past is the lie I am feeding you now'), there's a pattern of red flags all the way along.
Look at every time Porthos snaps at Aramis - there's no pattern there, Aramis usually doesn't actually *deserve* it, he hasn't done anything to warrant it. When Porthos lies to Alice and sleeps with her (here is a pattern, Porthos lying to people to get what he wants out of them), Aramis doesn't know this; he thinks Porthos is having a very open exchange with her. Porthos chooses not to tell Aramis what he really did - perhaps he knows it's not okay to do it - and snaps at Aramis for *not* knowing it. Insensitive as Aramis' choice of wording often is (hoo boy), look at exactly what Porthos snapped at: Aramis' confusion that Porthos has *not* performed a clean exchange of service for money but is doing - what? He doesn't even know. Because Porthos has been hiding it, because . . . I'm a philosopher, so naturally I look to Occam's razor, and the only obvious explanation (apart from just being generally deceptive, which Porthos does lean towards - he's the most accomplished liar of the group, and there are obvious reasons in his past why that would be true) is that he knows what he's done won't be viewed as okay, so he hides it, and either guilt or not wanting to be punished for doing wrong leads him to snap. (It baffles me that fandom very rightly recognises that what Aramis did to Marguerite was wrong, but will handwave as much as they can for Porthos; what Aramis did was really fucked up, but I get that he did it because it was the only chance he had to be near the only child he had. That doesn't make it okay because nothing could make it okay, but it means at least I *understand* his motivation. What Porthos did was really fucked up and he did it for money, which he didn't even *need*, it was to get him into a competition - so he did it for ego. I do not understand *that* motivation.)
Porthos and Alice part because they have incompatible visions of the future. Porthos tells Aramis he stayed specifically for him (very bluntly: this is a lie), and Aramis is grateful. Porthos has been manipulating the truth, and Aramis, for a very long time.
The simple point is this; Porthos snaps at Aramis pretty randomly, as far as Aramis' own behaviour goes. And Aramis looks fucking traumatised when Porthos snaps at him, Aramis *adores* Porthos and really needs his esteem (well, you would, if it's dangled at you and snatched away randomly and you always think if you can just *not* fuck up *this* time you might deserve it . . .) which Porthos must be aware of. So Aramis never knows when Porthos will be angry with him, can't predict or prepare for it. There's a particularly dangerous sort of red flag, even besides all the deception involved in that episode.
So I state, categorically, that the way Porthos treats Aramis in the monastery and beyond is not okay and I do not condone it. Porthos gaslighted Aramis, told demonstrable lies to manipulate him because he knew how to manipulate him, because he's been doing it for a very long time. That is abuse. If it has happened to you, if someone has emotionally manipulated and gaslighted you, you *did not deserve it*. It was not okay, it was not your fault, and you deserve to be safe and psychologically untraumatised. Lying about the past to specifically manipulate behaviour out of someone that you feel entitled to is a shitty fucked-up *evil* thing to do. Please think about what you are doing if you try to defend that action. Abuse is not okay because you like the character. Abuse is not okay because the character did this other nice thing that one time. Abuse is not okay. Do not tell me it is, *think* about what you're saying.
So: I have never read Porthos written IC anywhere in fandom, and yes, I really am guilty of that too. He's written as a nice guy, when he's presented in canon as a 'nice guy'. Remember he's a bigot; xenophobic towards the Spanish in 3x01, no wonder he treats Aramis so shittily, and we also learn in S3 that he holds refugees in contempt (that fucking *stung*, I raised money for the refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East, I supported friends in their efforts to help, I have watched that horror unfold over *years* and now I'm told I'm supposed to view a man who views refugees the way the tabloid press does as if he's a *hero*?). Remember that he's a hypocrite - over and over and over. Remember that he is, at the end, a coward; Aramis will face down Athos for Porthos' sake, but Porthos won't do the same. And no, I don't know what the fuck the writers were thinking. I don't know why they decided to do this with this character. And I don't know why fandom is so determined not to deal with that character, because that's the problem here, that we condone by ignoring. Because *how* interesting would the character piece written on Porthos' bigotry be (He seems to empathise a lot with people he identifies with, but if he doesn't? He doesn't give a shit what happens to you. Pry into Porthos' past and isn't *that* bit of psychology very telling.). *How* interesting would the piece be that considered the extreme poverty he grew up in and how self-serving and entitled that's made him (Do you know the very first moment in canon that I ever had a doubt about Porthos? In the bar with the old woman, in Homecoming, when he gets the barman/maid(?)'s attention with a jerk of his head and no smile, no friendliness. Body language can do the work of please and thank you but Porthos chooses not to. I've worked retail. I know that expression on his face: You serve *me*. The thought you are beneath me isn't articulated but it underlies it, and that made me cold for a moment, before I thought how fascinating the psychology, that someone who grew up so deprived and despised of course enjoys his power over those he can wield it over - and I didn't know, then, to look on that thought with dread.). How fascinating the look at his inability to empathise where he doesn't identify (Fuck the Spanish, fuck refugees; and I always remember - what the hell was the episode's title? Ninon, and those girls, and Porthos sitting down pretending to kindly listen to one frightened girl's story but he didn't *look* kindly, he looked constipated. Because he didn't really care and for once his acting failed him; he doesn't know how to pretend to care about someone that he doesn't. He doesn't really know what caring about someone else is, is the thought that worries me after his future behaviour).
I find everything about the character so distressing now that I just can't fucking wait to finish the affinityverse. I love that Porthos the way I used to love canon Porthos - as a complicated and often difficult character, but fundamentally likeable. But by S3 canon Porthos is an abusive bullying hypocritical bigot, and I can't like that. I don't think it's *right* to like abusers. It's - it feels really weirdly personal when a character you used to love turns like that. It feels like betrayal, and I know that's ridiculous because we're not talking about real people, but particularly when you occupy those characters to write about them they do feel very real and now it turns out that they're capable of evil, not just in the abstract way that we all might be but they *will do it*. I grew up reading those books, and I haven't been back to them for a really long while but my abiding memory of Porthos was that he really was the noblest of them, in the end. This incarnation of Porthos isn't. He's toxic masculinity walking, and it feels like frustrating panic-inducing horror that characters I actually *like* are vulnerable to him. He's eventually so poisonous a character that I just want to remove the others from his power; Athos and Aramis are very difficult and complicated characters themselves and do their share of fucking awful shit, but Aramis is willing to display remorse, and Athos' situation is just such a complicated mess of lies and violence and awfulness that hell, all you can do is look at it, and hope that everyone ended up a happier person *eventually*. (It still sits really weirdly with me, the way Aramis' and Marguerite's storyline did, that Athos finds out that Anne was telling the truth about Thomas and Athos tried to kill her for defending herself and he's not even sorry. Just. *rubs forehead* The fucking writers on this programme I can't even. But I've been dealing with this in the affinityverse anyway =/) But Porthos' evil still feels so very alive, so very present, he's still doing all that awful shit with no remorse - he feels *entitled* to do all that awful shit, when I left the programme he still felt very smug for making Aramis feel beholden to him forever for Porthos granting him forgiveness for *not doing anything wrong*. Manipulation of that sort, psychological violence of that sort, is just so toxic, just so indicative of something so, so wrong in a person, and *I liked him*. I was fooled by him, betrayed by him, it feels so fucking personal. Which I know is fucked up, but is really hard for me to get past when I have to *write* him.
So this is the crux of the whole mess: when I finish the affinityverse, I will write Porthos a great deal less, because it makes me too angry and sad to see what he turned out to be. When I do write him, I will write him in character. I won't write fanon Porthos (who not only has character traits canon Porthos doesn't possess, he has character traits canon Porthos is openly presented as having the literal *opposite* of: canon Porthos is disloyal, cruel, and self-serving; he's a lot of other things as well, but if you're going to ignore those facets of his character, you're simply not writing the character.). I will write a Porthos who may actually get an opportunity to recognise himself and repent, but I'm not going to pretend he's not who he is. Fanon Porthos is such a weird invention, he has almost nothing in common with the canon character, and I'm not going to perpetuate the lie that abusers are nice guys. Abusers are abusers. I will not condone what they do to people, and brush it under the carpet as if they're entitled to treat people like that.
This is obviously very personal to me, because it's about what I need to write, and how pathetically personally betrayed I feel by that character and the writers of the programme. So I'm going to tell you this here and now because this is my blog and I do get to set the boundaries here: if you write a defence of abuse, I will block you. If you defend the abuse with 'Athos/Aramis/whoever does it too!' I'll also block you; I haven't gone into the psychology and actions of the other characters much in this, either because fandom is doing that very widely in a way they aren't with Porthos already or because *I've* already done that and I'm doing that in my writing, so I don't feel the need to get it out here, and also you're still defending abuse fucking hell. Think about what you are putting into the world, and another defence of abuse is not what this world needs. I didn't write this as a piece of character assassination. I wrote it because it is *genuinely eating at me*, I've been troubled-to-miserable trying to deal with this, it's very hard to write with empathy and love of a character when you look at that character and what you see is a monster. I *miss* liking Porthos, I *miss* it, in a weird way you *mourn* for the loss of a character like that. I write this from a place of *unhappiness*, not just because I took a weird dislike to someone and decided to kick them; a character I used to love did something monstrous, and it turned out they'd been a monster all along and I didn't notice, I was taken in, I thought they were a 'nice guy' too. It hurts. I don't care if it's ridiculous to feel like this for fictional characters, I still feel it; it hurts, in a queasy intimate way, and I only hope that honesty can help because I don't know what the hell else can.
Please remember that I can't type much - this has taken about two days' worth of typing out of me - and I have chronic fatigue to deal with, and if you comment my reply may take some time. Please also remember that I didn't write this to upset anybody, I used to like that character too, I wrote it because I'm fucking miserable not acknowledging this. Nice guys abuse too. Nothing else they do excuses the abuse. Gaslighting someone is abuse. Manipulating someone is abuse. Bullying someone to get the behaviour you want out of them is abuse. As a fandom we ought to face these things; we've done it with other characters, we need to stop pretending this one is immune to his own behaviour. This wasn't one shitty action, this is a concerted effort to manipulate performed by someone very practised in manipulation. Abuse is believing that you are entitled to something from someone else and feeling entitled to get that something whatever you have to do to that person to get it. And in canon, on screen, Porthos is an abuser, and I really haven't got the energy to pretend anything otherwise, my batteries are empty, and I have to let that character go; I'm not going to defend the indefensible. I've barely got the energy to get from one day to the next, I do not have the energy for the mental gymnastics to make what he did *okay* when it isn't.
All I really anticipate from posting this is abuse, btw. At least then I'll know who to block ^^;
And what it brought back to me, again, was the fact that I go through periods of writer's block in this fandom because I can't - I refuse to - get past a certain point of canon: Porthos is presented to us, in canon, as an abuser. And I am so angry at the character that I have difficulty now in writing him even in situations where I've given the character enough difference in situation that *that* character doesn't act like that; it still feels like condoning the abuse, saying somehow that it's not his fault, that it's *okay* to abuse people. It's not. Every new verse I've started in this fandom for a while (none of them has been posted yet) has either not featured Porthos at all or moved him into so minor a role that I can largely avoid him, because I can't write him as a good person when he isn't presented to us as a good person. I am struggling through finishing the affinityverse (it soothes me some to know that if affinityverse!Porthos met canon!Porthos, he would *hate* him, and they might come as far as physical blows; that verse was started long before we found out in canon who Porthos really is), but I really long for the relief of just not dealing with the character anymore. Below the cut will be a really lengthy discussion of canon evidence - nothing more, all of this is there onscreen to see - of Porthos' behaviour. If you don't want to read it, fine. I just want it out in fandom because it doesn't seem to be there that if you have been treated the way Porthos treats Aramis, it is *not your fault*, what was done to you is *wrong*, and you deserve to be somewhere safe away from the abuser, you *deserve* that. You certainly don't deserve retraumatising every time someone says that what Porthos did is alright. It's not. That is not up for debate: you do not treat people like that, good people *do not do that*.
This will be long, and despairing. You can guess the content. Don't read it if you don't want to read that content.
There are some pretty decent writers in this fandom, but I've never yet read a single fic featuring Porthos IC, canon Porthos simply does not appear in fanfic. I'm guilty of it too; I started most of my universes before we saw the worst of his behaviour, before we could in retrospect join the dots and see the pattern of what he's done. I don't want to go into the psychology of why we refuse to see *that* character as he's actually presented (that would require an entirely different post, and I'd probably only feel comfortable writing it in collaboration with someone who knows better than I do, if I really can be said to at all - I'm not a psychologist and underequipped to consider white people's unconscious racism in their attempts *not* to be racist), but I do give the writers of the programme a very hard side-eye that they chose *that* character to make so disloyal, so self-serving, so aggressive and entirely untrustworthy. It's been clear from S1's lack of any arc for Porthos that the writers never knew what to do with that character (it's been clear from the rest of the series that they just don't know what they're doing full stop).
Quick disclaimer: I've seen the first series a whole bunch of times, but I only watched S2 once because it really was bad, and I found S3 so unwatchable that I gave up after only a few episodes. If something happens later in S3 to spin all of this back - if Porthos has a great moment of self-realistion, takes responsibility for his actions, apologises and genuinely determines to change himself - do let me know. Do be aware that nothing less than that can change the character at this point; you can't handwave away abuse because the abuser was talented say or achieved something special or was maybe nice to someone *else*. That's what society already loves to do, and it's bullshit, and we really fucking ought to know better.
The most important thing first: in S3, it becomes clear that Porthos is abusing Aramis and, going back through canon in light of it, it becomes clear that he always has been.
What am I talking about, given that fandom seems to have made invisible the thing that actually happened: way back in 3x01 in the monastery, Athos is happy to see Aramis there and safe, d'Artagnan is happy to see Aramis there and safe. Porthos isn't. Why not?
What Porthos makes clear very quickly is that his friendship is conditional, and Aramis hasn't met the conditions. That alone might have made his use of 'all for one' just funny - the irony that he doesn't recognise that he doesn't understand what the phrase means - but it's so much darker, what Porthos is doing with that phrase. He's using it to gaslight Aramis. He's using it to say 'I have always supported you, and you have failed to support me'. This is a manipulation of the facts, or as we used to call it in pre-post-truth days, a lie. Throughout canon Aramis has supported Porthos, until his despair drove him to the monastery. And throughout canon Porthos has *failed* to support Aramis, because their relationship is fundamentally one-sided, and Porthos wants to keep it that way.
Abuse is not just doing something shitty to a person, abuse is deeper than that - we all do shitty things sometimes, we're all in a bad mood so we snap when we shouldn't. There are patterns that point to abuse (those 'red flags' we spot), and those patterns point to a particular mindset, which is that the abuser thinks they're entitled to something from the abused, and so they are entitled to do whatever they want to the abused to get that. Physical violence is only part of it; emotional abuse is now illegal in my country, thank god, so you can go to prison for what Porthos does over the course of three seasons. Because his behaviour makes obvious that he thinks he's entitled to something from Aramis - one-way and utter loyalty, putting Porthos' needs before his own every time - and he is going to do whatever it takes to *make* Aramis give him that.
By the end of S1 I was disappointed in Porthos, but eager for him to get to do his thing in S2. I was disappointed because over and over we'd seen Aramis go above and beyond for him, and yet Porthos hadn't done the same in return (He can be permitted the excuse of not having many opportunities for it, but the one big one he had - The Good Soldier - he chose not to take. Apart from that, Aramis goes above and beyond repeatedly for Porthos, and Porthos does no more than Athos or d'Artagnan does for Aramis in return, so their 'best friends' status looks very one-sided). I thought he'd do better in S2. He didn't; Porthos is an abysmal friend in S2. We know how bad a liar Aramis is (again, just look at TGS - it takes Porthos and Athos, what, four seconds to know Aramis is hiding something?) and Porthos must *know* that Aramis is acting really fucking weird. But Porthos doesn't care. Even in little moments where Aramis might need some comfort, like at the end of the saga with Emilie, it's Athos who offers it, though Porthos must know it's needed. Porthos just ignores Aramis for most of season two. Aramis supports Porthos when he thinks Treville is lying to him (even though he didn't do the same for him back in S1) and supports Porthos when he goes to meet his father (which Porthos responds to with open ingratitude) even when he is dealing with a mountain of his own shit at the time. But when Porthos accuses Aramis of turning his back on him in S3, this isn't just hypocrisy - it's manipulation. It's playing on the guilt that is the very reason *why* Aramis has banished himself to a monastery, just to try to cope with the psychological trauma of his last year, to try to force the behaviour Porthos *wants* out of Aramis. A good friend understands how massively fucked up Aramis has been by everything that happened in S2. An abuser uses all of that to manipulate a person, to lie about the past and influence their future behaviour by doing so.
Porthos doesn't say 'I'm having a really hard time with you going away'. He says 'you deserted *me*'. Yes, Aramis went to a monastery - which is in no way a natural place for a man of his temperament to be, and whether he went to try to heal or cope or just punish himself is obviously something writers can play with over and over, because it's complicated, and he'd been through and done so fucking much, and he's probably been *dying* of his guilt and loneliness every damn night there. And Porthos says to him, You *should* feel guilty. You failed me. Fuck whatever you were feeling, fuck your trauma, fuck your needs. *I* am entitled to your undivided attention, and you are a bad person for not giving me it. And Aramis is primed to respond to this. He's primed to believe it, because Porthos has been doing this to him all along. Aramis goes above and beyond for Porthos over and over, his *adoration* of Porthos has so many obvious canon examples I don't even need to bother to quote them. Where are the reverse ones? Where are the moments when we realise how *entirely* Porthos loves and supports Aramis?
*crickets*
Remember when Aramis' old friend Marsac comes back, and Aramis flounders on trying to remain loyal to him, and asks his friends for help, and they say no. Remember when Porthos' old friend Charon comes back (and Porthos sleeps with his girlfrend while Charon is recovering from a bullet wound; Flea belongs to herself but that doesn't mean that what Porthos did wasn't a clear example of what 'friendship' actually means to him) and Aramis goes a bit deranged to rescue him. Remember when Bonnaire turned up the first time, and Athos threatened Porthos' life, and Aramis went apeshit; remember when Bonnaire came back the second time, and Athos threatened *Aramis'* life, and Porthos very literally turned his back on him and walked away. Porthos' use of 'all for one' in that monastery was very telling of what he thinks it means. He reads it not as his owing Aramis his loyalty - he makes clear even in the act of saying it in those circumstances that he doesn't believe that - but he thinks it means that Aramis owes him his loyalty regardless of anything else. Fuck your trauma, fuck your needs, fuck your life; I am entitled to everything from you.
Abuse doesn't just pop up from nowhere, and there have been clues all along that Aramis loves Porthos (whether you want to interpret it as romantic or not is entirely up to you) and Porthos doesn't love Aramis. Worse, there are indications throughout canon that we shouldn't trust Porthos. The way he treats 'friends', how easy a liar he is - not for specific reasons, Aramis lies (badly ^^;) when he needs something in particular, Porthos we meet in the very first scene as a liar just to win at cards, and he deceives people fluently for the entire rest of the series. Reading back in retrospect from the monastery, from Porthos' open act of gaslighting ('the past is not what you actually experienced, the past is the lie I am feeding you now'), there's a pattern of red flags all the way along.
Look at every time Porthos snaps at Aramis - there's no pattern there, Aramis usually doesn't actually *deserve* it, he hasn't done anything to warrant it. When Porthos lies to Alice and sleeps with her (here is a pattern, Porthos lying to people to get what he wants out of them), Aramis doesn't know this; he thinks Porthos is having a very open exchange with her. Porthos chooses not to tell Aramis what he really did - perhaps he knows it's not okay to do it - and snaps at Aramis for *not* knowing it. Insensitive as Aramis' choice of wording often is (hoo boy), look at exactly what Porthos snapped at: Aramis' confusion that Porthos has *not* performed a clean exchange of service for money but is doing - what? He doesn't even know. Because Porthos has been hiding it, because . . . I'm a philosopher, so naturally I look to Occam's razor, and the only obvious explanation (apart from just being generally deceptive, which Porthos does lean towards - he's the most accomplished liar of the group, and there are obvious reasons in his past why that would be true) is that he knows what he's done won't be viewed as okay, so he hides it, and either guilt or not wanting to be punished for doing wrong leads him to snap. (It baffles me that fandom very rightly recognises that what Aramis did to Marguerite was wrong, but will handwave as much as they can for Porthos; what Aramis did was really fucked up, but I get that he did it because it was the only chance he had to be near the only child he had. That doesn't make it okay because nothing could make it okay, but it means at least I *understand* his motivation. What Porthos did was really fucked up and he did it for money, which he didn't even *need*, it was to get him into a competition - so he did it for ego. I do not understand *that* motivation.)
Porthos and Alice part because they have incompatible visions of the future. Porthos tells Aramis he stayed specifically for him (very bluntly: this is a lie), and Aramis is grateful. Porthos has been manipulating the truth, and Aramis, for a very long time.
The simple point is this; Porthos snaps at Aramis pretty randomly, as far as Aramis' own behaviour goes. And Aramis looks fucking traumatised when Porthos snaps at him, Aramis *adores* Porthos and really needs his esteem (well, you would, if it's dangled at you and snatched away randomly and you always think if you can just *not* fuck up *this* time you might deserve it . . .) which Porthos must be aware of. So Aramis never knows when Porthos will be angry with him, can't predict or prepare for it. There's a particularly dangerous sort of red flag, even besides all the deception involved in that episode.
So I state, categorically, that the way Porthos treats Aramis in the monastery and beyond is not okay and I do not condone it. Porthos gaslighted Aramis, told demonstrable lies to manipulate him because he knew how to manipulate him, because he's been doing it for a very long time. That is abuse. If it has happened to you, if someone has emotionally manipulated and gaslighted you, you *did not deserve it*. It was not okay, it was not your fault, and you deserve to be safe and psychologically untraumatised. Lying about the past to specifically manipulate behaviour out of someone that you feel entitled to is a shitty fucked-up *evil* thing to do. Please think about what you are doing if you try to defend that action. Abuse is not okay because you like the character. Abuse is not okay because the character did this other nice thing that one time. Abuse is not okay. Do not tell me it is, *think* about what you're saying.
So: I have never read Porthos written IC anywhere in fandom, and yes, I really am guilty of that too. He's written as a nice guy, when he's presented in canon as a 'nice guy'. Remember he's a bigot; xenophobic towards the Spanish in 3x01, no wonder he treats Aramis so shittily, and we also learn in S3 that he holds refugees in contempt (that fucking *stung*, I raised money for the refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East, I supported friends in their efforts to help, I have watched that horror unfold over *years* and now I'm told I'm supposed to view a man who views refugees the way the tabloid press does as if he's a *hero*?). Remember that he's a hypocrite - over and over and over. Remember that he is, at the end, a coward; Aramis will face down Athos for Porthos' sake, but Porthos won't do the same. And no, I don't know what the fuck the writers were thinking. I don't know why they decided to do this with this character. And I don't know why fandom is so determined not to deal with that character, because that's the problem here, that we condone by ignoring. Because *how* interesting would the character piece written on Porthos' bigotry be (He seems to empathise a lot with people he identifies with, but if he doesn't? He doesn't give a shit what happens to you. Pry into Porthos' past and isn't *that* bit of psychology very telling.). *How* interesting would the piece be that considered the extreme poverty he grew up in and how self-serving and entitled that's made him (Do you know the very first moment in canon that I ever had a doubt about Porthos? In the bar with the old woman, in Homecoming, when he gets the barman/maid(?)'s attention with a jerk of his head and no smile, no friendliness. Body language can do the work of please and thank you but Porthos chooses not to. I've worked retail. I know that expression on his face: You serve *me*. The thought you are beneath me isn't articulated but it underlies it, and that made me cold for a moment, before I thought how fascinating the psychology, that someone who grew up so deprived and despised of course enjoys his power over those he can wield it over - and I didn't know, then, to look on that thought with dread.). How fascinating the look at his inability to empathise where he doesn't identify (Fuck the Spanish, fuck refugees; and I always remember - what the hell was the episode's title? Ninon, and those girls, and Porthos sitting down pretending to kindly listen to one frightened girl's story but he didn't *look* kindly, he looked constipated. Because he didn't really care and for once his acting failed him; he doesn't know how to pretend to care about someone that he doesn't. He doesn't really know what caring about someone else is, is the thought that worries me after his future behaviour).
I find everything about the character so distressing now that I just can't fucking wait to finish the affinityverse. I love that Porthos the way I used to love canon Porthos - as a complicated and often difficult character, but fundamentally likeable. But by S3 canon Porthos is an abusive bullying hypocritical bigot, and I can't like that. I don't think it's *right* to like abusers. It's - it feels really weirdly personal when a character you used to love turns like that. It feels like betrayal, and I know that's ridiculous because we're not talking about real people, but particularly when you occupy those characters to write about them they do feel very real and now it turns out that they're capable of evil, not just in the abstract way that we all might be but they *will do it*. I grew up reading those books, and I haven't been back to them for a really long while but my abiding memory of Porthos was that he really was the noblest of them, in the end. This incarnation of Porthos isn't. He's toxic masculinity walking, and it feels like frustrating panic-inducing horror that characters I actually *like* are vulnerable to him. He's eventually so poisonous a character that I just want to remove the others from his power; Athos and Aramis are very difficult and complicated characters themselves and do their share of fucking awful shit, but Aramis is willing to display remorse, and Athos' situation is just such a complicated mess of lies and violence and awfulness that hell, all you can do is look at it, and hope that everyone ended up a happier person *eventually*. (It still sits really weirdly with me, the way Aramis' and Marguerite's storyline did, that Athos finds out that Anne was telling the truth about Thomas and Athos tried to kill her for defending herself and he's not even sorry. Just. *rubs forehead* The fucking writers on this programme I can't even. But I've been dealing with this in the affinityverse anyway =/) But Porthos' evil still feels so very alive, so very present, he's still doing all that awful shit with no remorse - he feels *entitled* to do all that awful shit, when I left the programme he still felt very smug for making Aramis feel beholden to him forever for Porthos granting him forgiveness for *not doing anything wrong*. Manipulation of that sort, psychological violence of that sort, is just so toxic, just so indicative of something so, so wrong in a person, and *I liked him*. I was fooled by him, betrayed by him, it feels so fucking personal. Which I know is fucked up, but is really hard for me to get past when I have to *write* him.
So this is the crux of the whole mess: when I finish the affinityverse, I will write Porthos a great deal less, because it makes me too angry and sad to see what he turned out to be. When I do write him, I will write him in character. I won't write fanon Porthos (who not only has character traits canon Porthos doesn't possess, he has character traits canon Porthos is openly presented as having the literal *opposite* of: canon Porthos is disloyal, cruel, and self-serving; he's a lot of other things as well, but if you're going to ignore those facets of his character, you're simply not writing the character.). I will write a Porthos who may actually get an opportunity to recognise himself and repent, but I'm not going to pretend he's not who he is. Fanon Porthos is such a weird invention, he has almost nothing in common with the canon character, and I'm not going to perpetuate the lie that abusers are nice guys. Abusers are abusers. I will not condone what they do to people, and brush it under the carpet as if they're entitled to treat people like that.
This is obviously very personal to me, because it's about what I need to write, and how pathetically personally betrayed I feel by that character and the writers of the programme. So I'm going to tell you this here and now because this is my blog and I do get to set the boundaries here: if you write a defence of abuse, I will block you. If you defend the abuse with 'Athos/Aramis/whoever does it too!' I'll also block you; I haven't gone into the psychology and actions of the other characters much in this, either because fandom is doing that very widely in a way they aren't with Porthos already or because *I've* already done that and I'm doing that in my writing, so I don't feel the need to get it out here, and also you're still defending abuse fucking hell. Think about what you are putting into the world, and another defence of abuse is not what this world needs. I didn't write this as a piece of character assassination. I wrote it because it is *genuinely eating at me*, I've been troubled-to-miserable trying to deal with this, it's very hard to write with empathy and love of a character when you look at that character and what you see is a monster. I *miss* liking Porthos, I *miss* it, in a weird way you *mourn* for the loss of a character like that. I write this from a place of *unhappiness*, not just because I took a weird dislike to someone and decided to kick them; a character I used to love did something monstrous, and it turned out they'd been a monster all along and I didn't notice, I was taken in, I thought they were a 'nice guy' too. It hurts. I don't care if it's ridiculous to feel like this for fictional characters, I still feel it; it hurts, in a queasy intimate way, and I only hope that honesty can help because I don't know what the hell else can.
Please remember that I can't type much - this has taken about two days' worth of typing out of me - and I have chronic fatigue to deal with, and if you comment my reply may take some time. Please also remember that I didn't write this to upset anybody, I used to like that character too, I wrote it because I'm fucking miserable not acknowledging this. Nice guys abuse too. Nothing else they do excuses the abuse. Gaslighting someone is abuse. Manipulating someone is abuse. Bullying someone to get the behaviour you want out of them is abuse. As a fandom we ought to face these things; we've done it with other characters, we need to stop pretending this one is immune to his own behaviour. This wasn't one shitty action, this is a concerted effort to manipulate performed by someone very practised in manipulation. Abuse is believing that you are entitled to something from someone else and feeling entitled to get that something whatever you have to do to that person to get it. And in canon, on screen, Porthos is an abuser, and I really haven't got the energy to pretend anything otherwise, my batteries are empty, and I have to let that character go; I'm not going to defend the indefensible. I've barely got the energy to get from one day to the next, I do not have the energy for the mental gymnastics to make what he did *okay* when it isn't.
All I really anticipate from posting this is abuse, btw. At least then I'll know who to block ^^;
