#marion barnbridge

[ccuniculusmolestus]

Bunny Corcoran: Mother, Women and Sexuality (Masterpost)

Apologies for the shitty quality screenshot, idk why their quality got butchered.

Anyway I divided this thing into IV parts.

Intro

Camilla

Marion

Henry

INTRO & DISC.

Not to be a bunny apologist literally, he's sexist piece of shit, but you know whats funny? The way this fandom absolutely REFUSES to acknowledge the fact that, despite Richard's shady ass describing Bunny as "homophobic but not in a repressed way", Bunny could very well be gay or bi at the very least. The fandom just doesn't want to see it because he doesn't form "convenient" enough ships with major characters (he does. You guys are just cowards.)

Yes I know, sexist hetero men despise women just for being women, but they view women purely through a sexual lens. But Bunny's prude ass was NOT a pervert. I mean, this is the guy that got triggered when Richard asked him about his hickey.

Yes yes sexually repressed people can act prude-ish in front of people but be total pervs when alone, but nothing at all hinted at Bunny being a pervert who viewed women as walking meat bags. I just find it weird that the only two female companions he had (Marion and Camilla, aside from Judy bcs we never see them interact) he just...didn't like them. Camilla he was good to, occasionally, in a very platonic way ("paternalistic stance").

CAMILLA

And you know what drives me crazy? In this group of 5 boys and 1 girl, Bunny was the ONLY one who was never inappropriate (sexually) or sexual with Camilla. Even the openly gay guy in the group had kissed her at least once. Even her own brother-- not finishing that. Henry slept with her too. Richard kissed her, and wanted to sleep with her. Not Bunny. Yes, Bun was cruel to her in other ways, ordering her around, saying she was intellectually inferior, but he showed ZERO romantic interest in her. Which is kind of ironic to me. The only homophobe in that group was the only one not acting straight.

MARION

With Marion, my god, the way this boy behaved.

He called her his "reason of being", the purpose of his existence, but he could barely tolerate her. She was only a clip holding him together from those parts where he was falling apart; wounds left from a neglectful mother. Lets not mention how Marion is sort of an underdeveloped image of his mother; delicate, blonde, somewhat haughty.

That bitterness he probably feels towards Kathy was then pointed to Marion. Its so freaking clear that Marion is filling the "Mother" role in Bunny's life. She's "feminine" (a trait often associated with motherhood and vice versa), she's "bossy and businesslike". I don't need to explain this, I'm sure.

But watch Bunny's reactions to her; hes submissive for the most part.

For a man who's so incredibly sexist, it doesn't make sense for him to choose such a woman as his partner, does it? Now, either Richard entirely fabricated or exaggerated Bunny's sexism in order to justify his murder, or

His "dislike" for women didn't stem from the weird sexual obsessions misogynists tend to have, but from something else. It could be, purely, his mommy issues, or something else.

You know that whole, Bunny calling Marion that title, but treating her like a chore just reflects what a big performance his relationship truly was. He didn't love Marion, perhaps he liked her, appreciated or cared for her, but he didn't love her. Marion was, like every other thing in his life, just an element to uphold an image of himself. Potential beard? Maybe.

HENRY

Bunny's true "raison d'etre" might have not existed. The only person he could be said to gave been obsessed with was, truly, Henry. And im not just saying this for the sake of it. Bunny was invested in and attached to Henry, perhaps a result of his financial dependence on him.

I don't know guys, I just don't think its normal to snoop around your best friend's things often, or make multiple attempts to read their journal--

this boy was DESPERATE to know the inner workings of Henry's mind. Mind you, this is BEFORE Bunny found out about the murder, or had reason to suspect Henry for anything. Henry's said he was always nosing around for it, and he mentioned Bunny was an "obtrusive" roommate -- meaning this was normal occurrence for him around Henry. Yes, he was also kind of like this with others (Stealing stranger's foods, stealing Charles' cooking literally as he works in the kitchen) but neither of these required a sense of interest in the person he was stealing from. It was to serve his own needs.

Bunny also shows a reluctance to lose Henry.

After their fight, he's so overwhelmed that he doesn't know how to react (mentioned by Henry himself), and his first instinct is to try and cling onto whatever shred of normalcy there was left between them. Despite knowing the numerous cruel things Henry had written about him, Bunny just took it. He stayed somewhat amiable to Henry later. Yes, yes. He got annoying about "the blackmail" (or his inability to keep his mouth shut) but Henry and Francis BOTH tell Richard that Bunny doesn't see what he's doing as "blackmail".

In fact, i think Bunny the fool was trying to get "in" on the feeling of being in on a secret. Image below is regarding that German that started following them in Rome.

But his immediate reaction of pretending everything's fine isn't the first or last time he tries to keep things cool with Henry.

Henry, despite having to deal with Bunny's worst tantrums, was still treated with a degree of respect that seemed to be reserved only for him. Was he afraid of Henry? Hell no.

Bunny was never afraid of insulting Henry, or fighting with him. But he rarely ever got personal with him. Yes yes he complained about the money and every little thing, but the way he went after the rest of the class? Targeting their weaknesses? He would've known Henry's weakness, he was perceptive enough. But he didn't. He still treated Henry with respect. Deference. Described as "polite submission and respect".

With Henry, Bunny was totally emotionally vulnerable. Henry reactedd explosively twice during their arguments. The first is when he slapped Bunny so hard that he "left a big white mark on his cheek", and the second where he broke that chair when Bunny was fighting him in his room. Despite losing control, Henry maintained a level of composure. Bunny never did. He became hysterical each time, screaming and becoming violent the first time, but sobbing himself to sleep (IN HENRYS BED) the second time.

He slept in his bed. There was literally no reason for him to do that.

Except maybe he craved closure. Maybe he just missed his best friend. Maybe he was too shaken up to move from his spot.

And I don't want none of you fools being all "Henry didn't gaf about Bunny."

This is Henry's reaction to Richard essentially saying "You thought Bunny wouldn't be a problem??" And then reiterating that they're old friends.

Do you even understand the implications of that last line? Bunny, whose entire being was hidden under a carefully crafted persona, admitted his family's SHORTCOMINGS with HENRY. Bunny, whose image was everything for him. Perhaps his image WAS his raison d'etre. Bunny, who lived life as an illusion of his true self, projecting away his insecurities. Bunny, who would never admit that he was poor, that his family was flawed in any way, told Henry this. How many more things do you think he confessed, or what other parts of his past and home did he reveal?

Yes, he could have just been telling Henry those things to mooch him off, but he also mooched off his other friends.they didn't know a thing. Marion, who I believe his family hadn't met yet (?) Probably didn't even know. Amd if youre from a dysfunctional home, you already know the only people you've told about your home are special, hand-picked.

Henry was also the first and only person Bunny told about Camilla/Charles.

Perhaps it hurt him, being left out of such a major events of Henry's life because Bunny was sharing practically everything with him.

Alls I'm saying is, Henry meant more to Bunny than most people realize (and dare I say, vice versa), and the only reason people don't see it is because RICHARD didn't see it (fool saw the potential of the dynamic but then was like "nah bunny's too ugly for that").

Bunny was most definitely either a repressed bisexual/gay man, and you cannot change my mind. And while his hatred of women is vile and inexcusable, it stemmed from a place of deep personal issues and insecurities.

Anyway. I'm done rambling LOL.

[smol-soop-spoon]

I tthink we need to make something clear and it's that the guys of the greek class get pegged. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.

[barnbridges]

i hate mansplaining stuff that really doesnt need to be mansplained, but because francis implies that he and bunny started in the same year and that in that year he wanted to bang sophie deabold, and yet that marion had a previous argument with EVERYONE in the greek class besides richard (thus including the twins) she's at most one year older than richard. and she's never seen henry and bunny's shared bedroom more than richard has. it was other real or imagined women who've listened to art pepper records.

[basil-isdead]

✨the expansion pack:✨judy, cloke, and marion

[kingthcrin]

                                               HAMPDEN EXAMINER: MISSING COLLEGE STUDENT

          Sunday afternoon Edmund Corcoran, a Hampden College student known to his family and friends as “Bunny,” attended a campus party which he apparently left some time in the middle of the afternoon in order to meet his girlfriend Marion Barnbridge of Rye, New York, also a student at Hampden. That was the last that anyone has seen of Bunny Corcoran.

           The concerned Barnbridge, along with friends of Corcoran’s, yesterday alerted state and local police, who put out a Missing Persons Bulletin. Today the search begins in the Hampden area. The missing youth is described as being six feet, three inches tall, weighing 190 pounds, with sandy blond hair and blue eyes. He wears glasses, and when last seen was wearing a gray tweed sports coat, khaki pants, and a yellow rain slicker.

           At St. Jerome’s preparatory school in College Falls, Massachusetts, Corcoran was active in varsity sports, lettering in hockey, lacrosse and crew and leading his football team, the Wolverines, to a state championship when he captained during senior year. At Hampden Corcoran served as a volunteer fire marshall. He studied literature and languages, with a concentration in Classics, and was described by fellow students as “a scholar.”

keywords: POLICE, KIN, SEEK YOUTH, 24, MISSING IN HAMPDEN

[ccuniculusmolestus]

Huge headcanon but you know that hickey Richard tries to tease Bun about and Bun becomes so triggered over it? ("Fell down some stairs," he says ''BRUSQUELY")........

Richard automatically assumed it was Marion but........lol. Henry gave it to him.

[barnbridges]

do you ever think about how Marion's got relatively 0 mentions and yet gets shifting characterization (that even contradicts itself within 3 sentences) and seems solely based off ill intent or judgement from the classics students, but we ignore that because... it's so small and the book already is drippinging with elitism and the male gaze of our narrator and his friends, we don't have time for background girls that are concerned for their boyfriend.

[barnbridges]

actually smollest woman in the world

[barnbridges]

Marion, we knew, recognized the difference in Bunny’s behavior as clearly as we did, and was puzzled and angered by it.

an (incomplete) study in being a shrew, The Secret History, Breaking Bad.

[barnbridges]

the dorm where richard lives (monmouth) and the one that marion lives (roxburgh) are both named after historical cities in the uk, which to me subtextually says henry and bunny lived at monmouth in their first year as well BESIDES that bunny says that is where henry's mother was looking for him at.

[barnbridges]

on hiding things from your wife, The Secret History/Better Call Saul

[barnbridges]

why do you care such about Marion?

Tunglr user Barnbridges Caught Caring About Marion Barnbridge of Rye, New York???? MoRE News AT 6!

No, but seriously.... I just love blondie a normal amount because she's better and worse at the Greek class than the Greek class themselves.

She's Bunny's "real girl" who "keeps him in line" when there's no line, when Bunny himself is 10 different shades of fake, when their relationship falls apart at the seams when Bunny begins to engage in Julian Morrow's least favorite virtue of honesty.

.... But she's also fake. She's so preoccupied with his money that she doesn't notice Bunny being gone for a week, she doesn't call his brothers, not his parents, not until Cloke and Charles push. She sits in Charles' lap at the funeral. She's all looks and friends and malarkey, the words of our man himself.

They deserve each other, and its shallow and it will pass, right? He's a kleptomaniac and reads to the person who knows of it what should happen to thieves, it's willing and consensual denial for the sake of appearing Normal People.

But she also is just as haunted by him as the class themselves, she's just... more normal about it. She married his brother, who loved him. A guy without much a generational cent to him, whose only virtue is he's there. She has a kid she names after Bunny's mother, who never acknowledges her at the funeral, she's never around any of them, misses in any newspaper or interview. She planned to marry Bunny, right? She called Charles every day since Bunny's been missing, she broke off any relation to Cloke based off the possibility he and his drug business were involved. She's cared about him, in some ways that never pass the brain of our narrator, busy with his own grief to realize he's never thought twice of other pathological liars in the building.

She's the physical embodiment of Bunny's codependency to the Greek class, the person closest to him that's not them, the person with whom he spends most of his time and energy on in their absence. He's the only one of them that has a girlfriend. She's but a Presbyterian blondie in the midst of the Catholic fuckery of rituals in the group, foreign and cheap to them, but all the freedom they'd never allow themselves.

Their relationship is the only thing "normal" Bunny can claim to be or have or be, but it's all a shell and a lie. How much does she know of random sex rituals in the woods, we never know, Richard never cares to find for himself.

She's the group's "no speak" list alongside the time they had sex in the damn woods and thought they met Dionysus. She's the worst things of Bunny's that Julian doesn't like, tacky and lazy and something deeper than that, something we aren't privy to. She haunts Francis personally, deeper than his absentee father and she lives right by his door to see him on the streets.

She's.... a person who laid her eyes on the Metahemeralism essay and gave it to some magazine to publish. She stares at the half-eaten Twinkie in his bedroom and shuts down when confronted with that he's gone gone. She can only name Henry and Francis as Bunny's friends in the Greek class.

If you ask me she's just better at lying than both Bunny and the whole lot of them, Richard and Henry are too busy to figure out their own lies to figure they've been outlied to by yesterday. Besides Julian, the only character that has come out the affair doomed and broken, but alive with at least a little girl of hope to her name.

[barnbridges]

Bunny has a great day every day. Marion, we knew, recognized the difference in Bunny's behavior as clearly as we did, and was puzzled and angered by it. If she'd seen the way he was around us, she doubtless would have realized that she was not the cause; but as it was she saw only the broken dates, the mood swings, the sullenness and the quick irrational angers which apparently were directed solely at her – Was he seeing another girl? Did he want to break up?

[barnbridges]

On Denomination Semantics, Church Authority, Bunny, Marion and Julian

I'll say that much, the Greek class is predominantly Catholic, with it being noted that Richard is a non-denominational Christian and Bunny being an Episcopalian.

"Bunny’s family was Episcopalian, and my parents, as far as I knew, had no religious affiliation at all; but Henry and Francis and the twins had been reared as Catholics;"

This established dynamic is a setup to a later conversation in the book, where Julian questions Richard on the changes in Bunny's behavior, attributing them to a possible conversion of either Bunny or Marion, wherein we learn she is a Presbyterian. All fun and good, we just learn that Bunny is so panicked Julian thinks he's having a mental breakdown, right? This is just foreshadowing to Bunny writing the confessional letter to Julian, right?

Upon closer inspection... why would we need to know, in particular, the specific denomination that Bunny holds, when his social status as a Protestant has already been established, and even less so Marion, who Richard doesn't even know?

Well, that is because the confessions are a metaphor for the structure in their lives.

The Roman Catholic Church is one of the three major divisions of Christianity in the Western World. It has a known structure, and it bases its belief both on the Christian Bible and the Papacy, with the structure of the Church as important as the religious text itself. It is a very rigid structure, and it is indeed, as Julian says, "a worthy and powerful foe".

Episcopalians on the other hand, are seen as a "halfway" point between the structure of the Catholics and the relative interpretative freedom of other Protestants. While the Episcopal Church is a Protestant denomination, meaning it does not hold the Pope as any authority, it has structures of authority (mainly, bishops and cardinals) and holds different views on sin as opposed to Catholics (as Francis ironically points out in the Epilogue).

The motto of the Episcopal Church is "Protestant, yet Catholic!", I kid you not. EDIT: The phrase "Protestant, yet Catholic" has been associated with the Episcopal Church and their beliefs.

Not relevant to the theological discussion, but the Episcopal Church also was founded in the US and is a very American phenomenon, being one of the most common denominations for American Presidents and wannabe DC political larpers as well.

A noteworthy detail is also that... the central book of Episcopalians is The Book of Common Prayer... Which Charles desecrated at Bunny's funeral service by using it to kill a wasp. This shows both the particular lack of respect the other characters have for non-Catholic tradition, but also their lack of connection to the gravity of such an act. Charles desecrated a religious text in a church, and it was a comedic moment. They are very in touch with reality /s.

"Charles had killed it with a resounding thwack from The Book of Common Prayer."

Presbyterianism is not a church, but rather a set of beliefs and principles. It is one of the most reformist of Protestant beliefs, and does not at all recognize the need for any religious authority or church to practice. Presbyterians believe in a personal relationship with God rather than a need for a house of worship or sin to practice. Presbyterians are also stereotyped as low class, again as our judgemental professor puts it "

"He had a habit of attributing all of Bunny’s faults indirectly to her—his laziness, his bad humors, his lapses of taste."

What this primarily means for interpreting our characters and their morals, is that Bunny finds himself at a middle-point between the strict hierarchy of the Greek class and the personal freedom afforded to him by decentralized beliefs. He has all his life existed in a state of "in between" authority and lack thereof, and Julian is questioning if the main force in his life that feeds the "contrary" impulse in Bunny is gone with Marion's hypothetical conversion.

This speaks mostly to that... our Julian was probably reared Catholic himself (calling it The Church... yeah he totally also was Catholic at some point), but has turned his back on the particular beliefs of the faith to where Richard finds him today. This also implies that of his 6 students, ironically enough, Bunny would be the one that has a relationship to religious authority most similar to Julian's own, and that has been since he joined the Greek class. This contempt would only grow larger as Bunny engages with people who care even less about religious authority than he does, which Julian might not like or respect, but certainly affirms Bunny as... uniquely able to challenge authority, and certainly the most "liberal" of his students on matters of authority. Bunny is the only one of them who indeed, has a girlfriend. A girlfriend that has been a problem to the Greek class that they simply do not want to even address her at all, to the point where Francis goes into prayer that she leaves Bunny.

It's also quite a touch ironic that after Bunny's death, the next one to question the hierarchy of the group, Charles, is coincidentally the one most influenced by Marion herself. Symbolically, Marion represents the "normalcy" and "gateway" from the Catholic-like structure of the Greek class, and Richard, Henry, Camilla and Francis' disregard and mockery of her presence is just a sign that they are quite far removed from any notion of leaving the cult of Julian or challenging why the belief in Classicism needs Julian for a God and Henry for a priest.

[barnbridges]

i cannot explain to you WHY, but bunny and marion are absolutely a butch/femme lesbian couple, no other energy.

[barnbridges]

if you ever wondered yes i only defend marion the secret history because im an ex elementary school major.