promethia_tenk (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
promethia_tenk) wrote2011-11-16 03:18 pm
promethia_tenk) wrote2011-11-16 03:18 pm
Entry tags:
Fear is the Mind-Killer
Hello, flist! Long time, no see. In answer to your questions: yes, I have been avoiding you. Have also been avoiding Doctor Who and watching Fringe at a frankly unhealthy rate (Mini rxn: Fringe! <3 <3 <3). I have lots of lovely posts queued up for reading, though, and shall be trying to catch up with you all as soon as possible.
I'm back, though, because I have finally had a eureka moment on a question that's been eating at me ever since Let's Kill Hitler: What the frak did they do to Melody? And I know I'm not the only one who had a hard time seeing any River in Mels or who was dissatisfied with Moffat slapping a "psychopath" label on her and counting that as explanation enough. So here's my theory:
Basically, it's all about fear: I think the essence of what the Silence did to her is to make her terrified of the Doctor (He's gonna get me! Gonna eat me!) and leave her with no tools for recognizing it or expressing it or addressing it but to kill him. The sort of omnipresent fear that shadows everything else, clouds judgment, makes every moment about trying to manage the fear, somehow . . . So, the end of LKH wasn't about letting go of anger, or a vendetta of some sort, but about facing a fear, which is why the turn-around seems so sudden. And fear, not hatred, is a catalyst for love (chemically, this is true: falling in love involves massive quantities of anxiety hormones--hence the butterflies. Also where Stockholm Syndrome comes from).
I think it's basically an Occam's Razor kind of thing. They didn't have to make a psychopath--they just had to make her irrationally afraid of the Doctor. It's like what they talk about in Inception: to plant an idea in someone's head and make them accept it as their own, you have to reduce that idea to its simplest emotional form and let them build it themselves from there. Why does she want to kill the Doctor? Because she's afraid of him (The Silence may be the stuff of nightmares, but young Melody didn't actually run away until the Doctor showed up . . .). They plant the fear . . . they use the Silence to do it . . . which means she can't remember why she's afraid of him . . . which is like a perpetual motion machine for crazy. And from there she'll pretty much do all the work for them: learn everything she can about him, soak up any skill that might help her neutralize him, think about him all the time because she doesn't know why she's afraid of him and doesn't know how to stop it. She can't feel anything else because she's afraid all the time, but she can't be afraid because she doesn't have a reason to be afraid . . . so she won't be afraid. She'll test herself against every scary, dangerous thing she can find to prove to herself that she's not afraid. She'll come up with flimsy alternate excuses for everything she does (psychopath?) because she's certainly not motivated in everything by fear. She'll go over everything about it over and over to try to come to grips with it. She'll basically tear herself apart at the seams trying to cope with a fear that she can't feel because it doesn't have a reason.
But then, as they also point out in Inception, negative emotions are less potent and less durable than positive ones. And fear is not so different from falling in love. So how do you "trick" programming like that? Love is a more stable, more desirable state than perpetual fear. And of course she fell in love too quickly. What holds people back from falling in love? Ultimately, it's fear. And she'd already spent her whole life afraid.
I think this explanation also makes more sense of how quickly she seems to recover all her normal faculties as River than if you assume she had much more involved brainwashing: once she faces her fear, all the parts of her that had been misdirected trying fruitlessly to manage that fear would be freed up to do what they were meant to.
ETA: All y'all should probably go read![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kaffyr's lovely meta River Song is Not a Psychopath, which I would say helped get my head moving on this.
I'm back, though, because I have finally had a eureka moment on a question that's been eating at me ever since Let's Kill Hitler: What the frak did they do to Melody? And I know I'm not the only one who had a hard time seeing any River in Mels or who was dissatisfied with Moffat slapping a "psychopath" label on her and counting that as explanation enough. So here's my theory:
Basically, it's all about fear: I think the essence of what the Silence did to her is to make her terrified of the Doctor (He's gonna get me! Gonna eat me!) and leave her with no tools for recognizing it or expressing it or addressing it but to kill him. The sort of omnipresent fear that shadows everything else, clouds judgment, makes every moment about trying to manage the fear, somehow . . . So, the end of LKH wasn't about letting go of anger, or a vendetta of some sort, but about facing a fear, which is why the turn-around seems so sudden. And fear, not hatred, is a catalyst for love (chemically, this is true: falling in love involves massive quantities of anxiety hormones--hence the butterflies. Also where Stockholm Syndrome comes from).
I think it's basically an Occam's Razor kind of thing. They didn't have to make a psychopath--they just had to make her irrationally afraid of the Doctor. It's like what they talk about in Inception: to plant an idea in someone's head and make them accept it as their own, you have to reduce that idea to its simplest emotional form and let them build it themselves from there. Why does she want to kill the Doctor? Because she's afraid of him (The Silence may be the stuff of nightmares, but young Melody didn't actually run away until the Doctor showed up . . .). They plant the fear . . . they use the Silence to do it . . . which means she can't remember why she's afraid of him . . . which is like a perpetual motion machine for crazy. And from there she'll pretty much do all the work for them: learn everything she can about him, soak up any skill that might help her neutralize him, think about him all the time because she doesn't know why she's afraid of him and doesn't know how to stop it. She can't feel anything else because she's afraid all the time, but she can't be afraid because she doesn't have a reason to be afraid . . . so she won't be afraid. She'll test herself against every scary, dangerous thing she can find to prove to herself that she's not afraid. She'll come up with flimsy alternate excuses for everything she does (psychopath?) because she's certainly not motivated in everything by fear. She'll go over everything about it over and over to try to come to grips with it. She'll basically tear herself apart at the seams trying to cope with a fear that she can't feel because it doesn't have a reason.
But then, as they also point out in Inception, negative emotions are less potent and less durable than positive ones. And fear is not so different from falling in love. So how do you "trick" programming like that? Love is a more stable, more desirable state than perpetual fear. And of course she fell in love too quickly. What holds people back from falling in love? Ultimately, it's fear. And she'd already spent her whole life afraid.
I think this explanation also makes more sense of how quickly she seems to recover all her normal faculties as River than if you assume she had much more involved brainwashing: once she faces her fear, all the parts of her that had been misdirected trying fruitlessly to manage that fear would be freed up to do what they were meant to.
ETA: All y'all should probably go read
kaffyr's lovely meta River Song is Not a Psychopath, which I would say helped get my head moving on this.
no subject
It's been awhile--what's the connection?
Also, this ties in beautifully with the whole thing that she sees him as just a man, that she is from then on the person to drag him off any cloud he might like to sit on, and nothing he can do will frighten her (and vice versa).
*nods* And I think the fact in general that there's just so little she seems afraid of.
no subject
Children 'programmed' to be something (and the whole business of procreation being tightly controlled). In Brave New World it's done with sub-conscious messaging while they sleep, so they'll *think* that their later choices are their own, when actually they're conforming to what they're meant to do. (Ooooh, just found it online! Here's chapter two, which is what I was thinking of. And I'll bet anything that Moffat was thinking of it too! Silence, silence... Damn. The last few sentences. Really... damn.)
no subject
There is a certain obvious connection between suggestions implanted during sleep and ones given when the mind won't be able to remember them.