#without coming across super emotionally unstable and/or manipulative somehow????

[spacecrows]

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[secretlyatargaryen]

So, um, Legion season 3.

Obviously huge spoilers ahead.

So season 3 goes full tilt into David being a narcissist and a bad guy (although to the show's credit they did it more subtly than I expected. David never actually becomes the destroyer of worlds, the evil acts he commits with his powers are mostly in manipulating people's minds when he can't deal with anything negative. Which is a good analogy for why a lot of abusers who become that way because of trauma and abuse do what they do. I still don't buy the way he got there as a character though. The show seemed to occasionally be suggesting that he had multiple personalities, and I understand that comes from the comics, and I could possibly even buy that the "Legion" persona, the narcissistic person who believes that "nothing that hurts me is real", is distinct from the David persona that we saw in season one, as psychologically dodgy as that is.

And I do think the show was TRYING to address the issues of abuse and redemption and how sometimes you can't save everyone and how shouldn't try to save abusive men. They never had Syd go back to David or forgive him for what he did to her, as hard as it was for her.

But that's also hard to reconcile with the rest of the way the show treats the topic of abuse and mental illness. Okay, so the show spent the whole season telling us that David's desire to rewrite the past was a symptom of narcissism (true) and what made him a villain (okay) but then in the end they had him...get what he wanted anyway? And present it as a good and hopeful ending?

The fixation on David's biological parents was definitely narcissistic, but then it seemed like the show actually brought into it in the end, which made no sense. After season two I felt like this show insulted me as a viewer and now I feel like it slapped me in the face again and tried to convince me I was stupid for believing what was presented onscreen. Which, okay, it's Legion. The show has always run on the idea that nothing you see onscreen might be real, but there has to be some narrative grounding somewhere.

I didn't like the suggestion that all David needed in the end was to be loved by his biological parents. I go pretty hard on nurture vs nature usually, but the thing is...he had loving parents before. His adoptive family loved him. They didn't understand him, which led to a lot of his trauma, but...that's life. X-Men and all its properties have always been about the trauma of living in a world that doesn't understand you. And Legion season one said that's okay. It doesn't make you a bad person. Season two said, well, actually, it does. Season three said you can fix it by resetting the whole thing. The show tried to say that the other characters weren't acting from the same narcissistic place as David was, but David was still never held accountable and never had to actually deal with his shit, because everything just got reset like he wanted it to.

Oh? Also? The show's insistence that some people can't be redeemed would have made much more sense if they didn't try to convince us not only that the mentally ill protagonist was bad all along, but that the Shadow King actually became a good person! That was completely ridiculous, narratively unearned, and insulting. David doesn't get redemption because of his abusive actions but his abuser, who the show had built up as totally sadistic, does? Because he said he loved David? The show said no to one abusive love story but then gave us another. The show demanded that David be held responsible for things that (in season 2, at least) weren't his fault, in order to make him a villain, but then they never held the Shadow King responsible at all. I think the show was trying to say that the Shadow King got redeemed because he chose redemption, but there was still no build up. Yeah, he repeatedly said that he loved David but you can love someone and still be abusive to them, and whatever the Shadow King felt for David was never shown as anything other than extremely toxic. The hypocrisy of the Shadow King showing us David's life to show his newfound empathy when during all those scenes he was the one who destroyed David's life was bizarre and offensive.

Speaking of troubled relationships, the show's increased focus on David and Syd didn't work, either, because they never felt like a believable relationship in the first place. I liked it in season one largely because it hit my hurt/comfort kink, but as I said before, it also came across as a male fantasy and an unbalanced relationship. From the beginning, he was emotionally dependent on her because she literally saved him. I saw a gif of the scene in the first episode when she saves him from the anti-mutant organization, and when she's holding out her hand to him, there's a flash of her as she was in the mental hospital, holding a hand out to him as he was in the hospital, and in both scenes she is standing over him and offering a hand to help him up. I remember noticing it at the time but thought it was an indication that what was happening was maybe in David's imagination. But I think the meaning is more symbolic, and it's really a brilliant visual way of showing the audience how David sees her, as someone who not only saves him from literal danger but who saves him from his life in an institution, saves him from the schizophrenia narrative, from himself. And given what happens later I feel like the show wants me to think that David was the unhealthy one in the relationship all along, and I want to tread very carefully when I talk about this because I've read some discussion and it seems like there's a lot of discourse over whether David actually raped Syd. And I want to make it clear that he did and that she shouldn't be blamed for it in any way. I also think that it never should have been her responsibility to fix David. But she was the one who told him in season one that she could fix him. In fact, she was the one who told him that he didn't need fixing.

I saw somewhere someone say that season one Syd was like David's medication, and season two was him going off his meds. But first of all, women are not and should not be responsible for fixing unstable men. And second of all, that wasn't what happened onscreen. In season one, Syd was like the manic pixie dream girl that told David he didn't need his meds. That what he thought was a problem was actually a super power.

That relationship worked when it seemed like they were both unstable (their initial meet cute and "Do you want to be my girlfriend?" "Okay, but don't touch me" works in the confines of the mental hospital, but as the grounds for a real relationship it doesn't work, on both ends. Syd never explains to David why he can't touch her until it's too late, and then she's all "this isn't a problem we have to address in our relationship, it's a super power!")

If season two is David going off his meds it's because his girlfriend literally told him he didn't need them, and then at the end of season two it's like "just kidding, plus you're the one in the wrong for not accepting that you're ill." God.

Again, that does not change the reality of what he did to her or make her somehow not a victim, but I still think the narrative had to twist things in unbelievable ways to get him there, and part of that was some bullshit regarding his relationship with Syd. And it's not that she's at fault, I think it's more that she's not written well. She does the "you left me, you don't appreciate me, also I'm irrationally jealous" thing that women written by men often do in fiction to advance a male character's plot and provide conflict. Like, he literally gets kidnapped (by her from the future!) and she accuses him of leaving her?? She tells him to lie to her, won't tell him why except that if she loves him he'll do it, and then tells him he's sick and doesn't really love her when he does those things? Like, maybe this is a commentary on what happens when two broken people initiate a relationship, but in the end the show definitely tried to present Syd as the healthy one and David as the "crazy" one. Again, I'm not saying Syd was really the abuser or whatever junk the man-boys of the internet are putting out there, but I am saying this narrative frustrated me a whole lot.

One commentary I read which I do agree with is that the show went off the rails when season two flipped the script from seeing the world from David's fractured perspective to presenting us with a crazy outer world instead of a crazy inner one. Which on one level I understand why, because it's hard to create a sustainable TV show with the premise of this show. Once David figures out that his powers are real it's hard to maintain the "is he crazy or not" narrative, so at the beginning of season two it's largely dropped, as is the conflict of David struggling to control his powers. Then at the end of season two the narrative becomes "he actually is crazy but in a different way, and now he's powerful and that presents a problem." Which, on paper, okay. But I really feel like the show missed an opportunity to show David struggling with the aftermath of finding out his powers are real, picking up the pieces of his life after the Shadow King is gone, and really dealing with what happened to him and what he is. That would have been a compelling and weird and wild journey without the constant narrative fake-outs. Maybe it's because I read him as a trauma victim in season one more than anything. Or maybe it's because of how season two introduced a lot of elements that I hate in fiction (time travel, self-fulfilling prophecies). But I do think that season one, even with its faults, presents a nuanced and empathetic picture of mental illness and healing that ultimately isn't delivered on.

But, the stylistics of this show! The dance numbers!