#Mags Bennett

[jeremydaviesarchive]

some Dickie Bennett Moments™ from Justified 02x01: The Moonshine War

[dailyjustified]

[freekicks]

t-shirts i saw in harlan, kentucky, and the "justified" characters i would buy them for: a list

boyd crowder:

raylan givens (ironically):

ava crowder:

helen givens:

arlo givens:

johnny crowder:

dewey crowe:

mags bennett:

[dimmadoome]

I was gonna say how ______ villain from Justified is the best, but trying to fill in that blank is actually becoming extremely difficult. Every single "outlaw" character was fantastic and unique and well worth the storyline and time invested in them. They were all...(even Michael rapaport 🤮) well written and well acted characters. How can I choose Boyd when Ava exists? How can I choose Ava when Dewey Crowes death almost made me cry. How can I choose Dewey Crowe when Loretta or Arlo or Mags or Winn Duffy? Ive realized that hell...I genuinely can't choose.

[acorrespondence]

I was just thinking about how much I love Boyd in your Boyd/Raylan kid fic, and sorry this is such a vague question lol but I'd love if you had any like bonus Boyd backstory or details that you'd want to talk about in that universe, or like just any info on how this version of Boyd and the like perfect imo characterization of how he would be as a dad and a partner came to you!

Oh no this is a great question! Well, great for me because I love to talk about this stuff, maybe not so great for you since this answer is about to be real long and rambly haha. Ultimately though I think it comes down to the fact that, at his core, Boyd is a lot less like his father or even Arlo, and a lot more like Mags Bennett. I think on the surface level, they’re actually quite different—Mags has her matronly, pillar-of-the-community persona, and her ruthless pragmatism is tucked away underneath that, but it bubbles up to the surface sometimes. Boyd, on the other hand, inhabits his personas much more fully, and cycles through a lot more of them. I think probably the biggest difference between them is that Boyd really doesn’t seem to believe in violence as a form of control, at least not for those in his employ. Killing Devil and Dewey isn’t a way to control them, it’s just a solution to the problem their presence presents. Even when he gets violent with Ava in the last season, he’s not using it to influence her behavior, it’s just more of a controlled version of a child’s tantrum—you hurt me, so now I’m gonna hurt you.

At their cores, however, Boyd and Mags are both motivated by the same thing: the idea of legacy. I think many people often mistake this in Boyd as a survival instinct, and I sort of agree, in the way that legacy and lasting impact past death are our way to blunt the innate human fear of mortality—death may be inevitable, but our works and stories can continue on. Except I think saying he’s “just trying to survive” throughout the show kind of neuters his character a bit. Because one of the things that makes him so interesting is that everyone else around him is just trying to survive, and he’s not. He wants more than that, and makes other people believe that he can get it, not just for himself but for them too. It’s why he can rally people around him so easily.

In fact, he routinely does things that he does not *need* to do, that put his life directly in jeopardy, in favor of making a name for himself and trying to improve his position in life. And in so doing, he and Mags fall into the same trap: this idea that legacy is achieved only when you beat the game. All the suffering will be worth it when you reach that light at the end of the tunnel. Mags hurts her children over and over again, both directly and indirectly, all in the name of securing her legacy, *for them*, and in the end it takes Doyle dying and losing Loretta and getting the thing she thought she wanted for her to look back and realize: *that* was her legacy. Nothing good was ever going to come out of any of it. Every action she took in the name of securing her legacy was actually destroying it, was moving her further away from the thing she thought she was working toward. All that suffering in the name of legacy? That *is* her legacy. That’s what she’s leaving behind. Ava saw it clearly, even if none of the rest of them did: it’s all just people making choices, all down the line.

I honestly think characterizing Boyd as being motivated solely by survival throughout the series is a bit of a disservice to his character development as well, because I think his whole arc in the show is leading up to his realization, in the finale, that his life is actually more important to him than his symbolic life after death—whether that symbolic survival is secured by religious means, by his epic Bonnie and Clyde-style love story with Ava, or by his adherence to Raylan’s own personal mythos that places them in opposition on a time-tested scale. These are all just the natural replacements for his astronaut goals and later his goals in going off to war—the theater for his exploits grows smaller and smaller as he fails to make a name for himself outside Harlan. Ava even came right out and said it: in Lexington she’s anonymous, no one knows her name or marital status or anything about her. If anyone’s going to remember Boyd, it’s gonna be Harlan (though several times throughout the series he gets designs on something bigger, it never pans out). In the end, though—and in contrast to Mags, who couldn’t see past the crumbling of everything she’d thought she was building—Boyd makes the decision to put life over legacy.

On the surface, his situation in season 2 might *seem* like it should have done the job of disillusioning him about legacies already, but that was more of a symbolic suicide, Boyd resigning himself to the fact that he was doomed to have no legacy and thus making *no* choices. He didn’t deny his previous legacy; it was taken from him by his father. He doesn’t even get the legacy of having killed his father, or of having killed the woman who killed his father. And following that, other people make his choices for him: Kyle with the mine robbery, Ava with their relationship. But he’s *not actually dead,* and his commitment to not making choices is a choice in itself. He’s absolutely capable of fighting back against the desires and machinations of those around him, but he just—doesn’t. And in the end, both of these non-decision decisions in their own way present him with a new legacy, which he immediately latches onto as soon as that light comes back on at the far end of his tunnel. If he’d made the realization that his life is more important than his legacy, he wouldn’t have needed this symbolic revival, because *he was never dead.*

For the purposes of my fic, the inciting incident that caused the canon divergence had to be a latter such event, to my mind—Boyd losing his way—because otherwise he’s just going to stagnate in Harlan and stay in his neo-Nazi persona long enough to get calcified in it like Mags, or until something shakes up the game board, like Raylan’s arrival. But it wasn’t enough just to give him a kid, because all he’d care about was the legacy he’s securing for that kid. So I had to figure out how to make Bo do the equivalent of killing all his followers in the woods. So: the kid’s mama runs off, Ava leaves Bowman to try and make a life on her own in Corbin, Boyd’s really low on child care options and figures Bo’s a better bet than Bowman. Only it turns out that’s kind of a rock and a hard place situation (we know from season 6 where Bowman learned his wifebeating ways, and Bo definitely strikes me as the “small children and animals don’t understand any kind of discipline but physical” kind of guy, whereas Boyd as I’ve said doesn’t really believe in control through violence, likely because it never really worked on him).

Enter: Boyd going to Raylan hoping he’ll give him purpose, just like he did in canon after the equivalent event. Only this time, Raylan offers him more than just the potential for retribution against his father. He offers pretty much the same thing Ava did, for the low low price of papering over the past. So Boyd basically teaches himself architecture—few other legacies last longer than buildings, and if you make enough then at least a few of them are bound to stick around a while—and invests in a series of failed startups until he’s hit, quite suddenly, with a Mags Bennett-style reality check as detailed in chapter 5, forcing him to confront the legacy he’s already created and the fact that it’s absolute shit. Luckily for him, unlike Mags, it happened before anyone died, and he had a chance to course-correct. Fast-forward to now, where Boyd is *trying* to make choices that actually bear out his goals, but maybe still puts a little too much stock in legacy, since he hasn’t yet reached that final step of enlightenment that he hits in the finale when he refuses to pull on Raylan.

[dumdumdumsalot]

I need to. I need to hold mags bennett. I need to tell her im sorry, I need to tell her that its ok to mourn the little girl she was, who had to grow up and fight too hard, too soon to stay alive.

I know shes a murderous woman, but goddamit doesnt it make me weep when shes so loving and kind towards loretta. She just wanted to give her the affection and soft, happy life she never got to have and I just🥲🥲🥲

I love you mags bennett, you murderous, coniving woman who deserved so much more❤️

[usmsgutterson]

okay a local moonshine maker in my city makes apple pie moonshine and sells it in both big and sample sized bottles!! My dad bought a sample and big one and he gave me the sample bottle,, it is fuckin delicious so now all I can think about is the moonshine mags made lmfao

[tardisman14]

I’m just realizing how funny it would’ve been

if these 3

had been cast as these 3

especially considering that they share the same mom

[hopetorun]

sam bennett posting feet pics to celebrate the stanley cup, two nickels but it’s weird that it happened twice etc

[fridayyy-13th]

relistening to MAG 092 - Nothing Beside Remains and going a little bit insane over the fact that this is a Lonely statement about Barnabas Bennett’s lifelong solitude, with no background sound but a ticking clock, just like MAG 170 is a Lonely statement about Martin’s lifelong solitude, with no background sound but a ticking clock

but the difference between them lies in that when Barnabas and Martin each call out for help, to Jonah and Jon respectively, Jonah purposefully leaves Barnabas to die, while Jon finds Martin again (and has been searching for him since he realized their separation), reassuring him that he will stay by his side.

and at the end of 092 Elias tells Jon that his assistants are nothing more than things to discard……but Jon refuses to see them that way, even going so far as to promise Martin “where you go, i go”…………Jon is fully an avatar, he is wholly the Archivist, but he is still so painfully, utterly human despite it all.

idk. something about victims of the Lonely and the Eye avatars they placed their trust in, for better or for worse.

[sluttyjonahmagnus]

I still can't get over the fact that Jonah kept his bones. That Jonah cared for this man, not enough to save his life, but enough to keep him. To possess his remains and deny his family mourning rights. Or even the knowledge that he died, for all they know the man just went missing. Was his brother ever told?

All this as well as going to the man that essentially killed Barnabas to ask for those bones, possibly even demanded them. Has that ever been done before? Why did Mordecai agree? Is Jonah somehow lonelier with the bones in his possession?

And then he just kept them. Moved them from Edinburgh to London and kept them in his office for nearly 200 years. 'If you know where to look' are they viewable? Are they hidden somewhere, lovingly preserved? Are parts of the bones fractured or rubbed smooth from anger or sorrow?

I need to knoooow.

[paranormal-creativity]

fellas is it gay to keep a man's bones in your office for 200 years.

[dailyjustified]

[medievaltemptress]

tabitha bennett for teeth mag

[theplagueratt]

I love drawing the most obscure ships, just... They <3

[absoluteocellibehavior]

I have this really funky TMA AU that’s occasionally bounced around in my head for a hit minute now. We have a single episode with Barnabas Bennett and Mordechai Lukas and I latched onto them immediately.

A lovely AU where Barnabas begins to work as a housekeeper for Mordechai in order to pay off his debts rather than being sent to the Lonely. He’s still influenced by the Lonely the more time he spends in the house and even has another entity looking over him as well. It does end up getting romantic as I can’t help but anger the Lonely with romances.

Would y’all be interested in something like that?