a list of stranger things fics that center around robin buckley
All the Best People See You (All the Best People Know) | hilarychuff | T | 135k | Robin/Chrissy
When Robin and Steve drive all the way to Indianapolis to see that new lesbian movie Desert Hearts, they're pretty sure they're not going to run into anyone they know — so it comes as something of a shock when Chrissy Cunningham walks into the theater, too.
feet on the ground, reaching for the stars | ProfessorSpork | T | 29k
“So,” Mom says one weekend afternoon as she and Robin stare down the Sunday Times crossword, huddled together on the porch swing, “you and Steve Harrington sure have been living in each other’s pockets lately.” She puts down the pen and gives Robin a carefully-probing smile disguised as a teasing one. “Anything you wanna tell me?”
Yeah; I’m gay, Robin thinks. Her throat constricts painfully. “I—you’d know if I were dating someone,” she says instead.
hummingbird | sapphirerays | T | 18k
Steve learns that Robin's dad is dead. Then he finds out just who her father was. Then, worst of all, he finds out she doesn't know the truth of his death.
Or: Robin is Benny Hammond's daughter.
here i am, a rabbit hearted girl | sundaisies | M | 104k
In 1983, Robin disappeared into the Upside Down. One year later, it all comes back to haunt her.
Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club | roseyoptic | T | 13k
Robin doesn't know where this is going. She doesn't know if she and Steve will ever be friends, or if they'll just be coworkers who tolerate each other for the summer.
But she does know one thing for certain: she can't keep pretending she doesn't care.
Steve isn't who she thought he was and whatever happened last semester matters—she doesn’t know why, but she knows something happened to him, and that’s beyond getting the shit beaten out of his face.
There's… there’s something else too.
And Robin's going to figure it out, one way or another.
Even if it kills her.
Trying to finish my pseudo-essay about Infinity Train Book 3. This is technically part three. I had to divide it into several parts since it would have been unreadable otherwise. It's still borderline unreadable. You've been warned.
perpetuating the cycle of abuse (part 0)
on the nature of leadership aka “oh cool, another negative feedback loop” (part 1)
empathy isn't enough (part 2)
This is how my .odt file has been titled since day one, and now I can't think of another title, so:
How not to defuse a ticking time bomb
(a shit ton of thoughts about the two main characters of Infinity Train Book 3)
This post has been cooking for far too long. I need to get it out of my system. I need to get them out of my system.
One thing everyone, I believe, thinks about after watching Book 3 is "What could Grace and Simon have done to prevent this disaster?". This question has also been haunting me for two years now. And I think I’ve come to a conclusion several months ago. This is the short version:
Nothing.
They would have needed to be different people, with different patterns of behavior.
Now that that's out of the way, I'll try to explain how I came to that conclusion, and to do so, I'll have to completely deconstruct how I "read" their characters. It's going to be a very long post. Sorry.
Let's start with Grace, because it's tempting to think she was inherently easier to save than Simon, but that's mostly survivor bias talking.
Some basic things about Grace
"I just wanted to be noticed"
According to everything we’ve learned so far about Train numbers, each passenger's number does not inherently represent how bad they are, but rather how much they are aggravating the problems that are ruining their life. Grace's number was slightly higher than Simon's at the beginning of the season - meaning they had both gone very far in the wrong direction, but she had gone a little further than he had.
For the sake of simplicity I assume that the root of Grace's original problem is “I just wanted to be noticed” (episode 9 The Origami Car). Her parents neglected her and (accidentally?) isolated her from other children, kind of treated her like a commodity (her father not looking at her and telling her to stay quiet, her mother saying she doesn’t have time to take care of her and paying other people to babysit her), and she ended up viewing attention as a substitute for the affection she lacked. If she isn't the best, the most popular, or the most admired, she doesn't feel loved.
Her parents expected her to be perfect in every way and yet her efforts were seemingly never rewarded with affection. No wonder she started acting out for negative attention instead. Which, by the way, didn't work either.
In order to be admired, and therefore, in her logic, loved, she quickly discovered that the easiest thing to do was to lie so that she always appeared to know what she was doing (see part 1). And since adults ignored her, obviously she recruited other kids.
Acting out and breaking stuff on the Train also got a reaction out of the system, in the form of her number going up, which was also a form of attention being received. Someone, somewhere, was reacting to what she was doing.
Because she decided early on that her number was a score that she had to increase, she has been trying for at least seven years to do everything that aggravates her basic problem (attention as a substitute for affection), creating a negative reinforcement loop. And there are clearly other problems that have been added on top of the initial one. Her number and Simon's are monstrosities formed by intertwining problems.
It's just turtles Conductors all the way down
Regardless of that, I feel like subconsciously, she's trying to become someone who would have saved her at age 10 or so - a protector who would stand between her and danger, aka what she BELIEVES Amelia did for her. It's the ideal she seems to be striving for without realizing it.
Note that she isn’t trying to become the person who would help her now, but the one who would have saved her in the past. Someone who notices neglected kids and tries to protect them.
To do that, to become her ideal of the Conductor, she has to be a leader. She has to be the one who knows the rules, who is admired, who is powerful, and above all, who is infallible. All of this also forces her to lie constantly, and the image she actively cultivates, her determination never to show vulnerability or introspection, acts as a wall between her and the uncaring world that frightens her so much. I already wrote an entire separate post about what being a leader means to her. It’s a mask (again, part 1).
The most ironic part of all of this is that she's still trying to be perfect in the eyes of others, like what she was initially trying to be in the eyes of her parents - she only replaced their idea of perfection with her own (also flawed) idea of perfection.
Save her
"Just something to play with when we're bored"
Therefore, Grace's attitude towards the Denizens is quite different from Simon's (here's a really good post about this by mmikmmik2) – she is initially indifferent to their emotions and suffering, and uses them as props to look cool. She wants to be like the Conductor, so why would she fear the Denizens ? The Conductor sure doesn’t. She does not seem to have been deeply traumatized by her encounter with the Steward, and she even appropriated its image like a trophy, as she wears a mask that seems to be either directly inspired by it, or was torn from a Steward of a different model.
The fact she treats the Denizens like objects also echoes how her parents treated her, by the way.
I have sometimes seen people say that Grace was basically easier to save than Simon because she had more empathy than him; I disagree with this opinion. But it takes so long to explain that I wrote ANOTHER separate post just about that, and that was part 2 of this essay.
And then there's her relationship with Simon.
Oh boy.
"I didn't want you to see me like this - to think less of me"
"Wait," you might say, "I thought we were talking about Grace first." The thing is, it's impossible to talk about one of these two characters in depth without talking about the other one at some point, so bear with me.
By the time they meet, Grace has already been on the Train for some time, at least several months (her hair was straightened, but it has had time to return to its natural state!). She doesn't have any Denizen companion with her. She doesn't give that impression in the flashback, but she is probably emotionally vulnerable, tired, very lonely, and feeling more neglected than ever.
And then she comes across a kid who's about her age, so of course she's going to do everything she can to be friends with him. And since she immediately positioned herself as the other kid's protector, consciously or not, she wants to pretend she knows what she's doing. And she's hardly ever going to stop from there, having decided that in order to maintain this illusion, the numbers had to go up. That was probably the trajectory she was already following anyway.
I think it's very easy to judge 18 yo Grace and Simon super harshly if you forget how utterly toxic it is for the mind to have only one other person your age as a social connection and zero supervision for EIGHT YEARS. And as much as I don't like to play armchair psychologist, I don't think it's an exaggeration to describe the inextricable web that is their interpersonal relationship as a codependency. They each enable the other’s self-destructive behavior, encourage it, rely on the other one for approval, and find their identity and purpose in that.
More specifically for Grace, she tends to hide her emotions to act as Simon’s emotional support (while he tends to suppress his needs to act as her soldier or even her weapon without asking questions, but we’ll talk about that later). Trauma-express made a REALLY good post about Grace and emotional support, so I'm just going to redirect you to it. Incidentally, this is the post that inspired this entire essay. I just realised early on I had WAY too many things to say to post them in a reblog of that post. That would have been insanely rude of me lol
As previously mentioned, since anything that lowered their numbers was considered bad, I also suppose that at some point, Grace must have noticed that sharing her real emotions and fears with Simon lowered her number a little, so she learned to avoid doing so over time. Which is, obviously, a really bad idea in any relationship.
For the same reason, that emotional support often consists of her simply validating his feelings then trying to move the conversation in a different direction (episode 4), finding something else to do, or making a joke to dedramatise the situation (episode 3) instead of having an actual conversation about whatever the problem is.
So she doesn't even allow herself to be vulnerable with the only friend she's ever had.
This is fine. I'm fine
"Back off and give me some space"
A side effect of having such a toxic codependent relationship is that neither person has established any clear personal boundaries with the other one in seven years. So at first, it's kind of cute that they're completely in each other's personal space 24/7 without asking permission, as long as they get along, but it gets really scary really fast when the rift between them becomes more pronounced. And inevitably, when Grace tries (rightly so!) to set boundaries she never needed to set before, it makes the situation even worse.
One detail that always gets to me during that scene where she's (again, rightly so) telling Simon not to grab her arm to look at her number and to "back off and give [her] some space" is that she's literally cornering him while doing so. I'm fine. I am fine
While setting these boundaries, she doesn't realize that she herself doesn't really respect them when it comes to Simon, and she even uses this to manipulate him on occasion. That scene on the gangway between the Canyon of the Golden Winged Snakes Car and the Hey Oh Wow Car always makes me want to scream. You just told him (AGAIN, RIGHTLY SO) to not touch you without permission and to give you some space and you IMMEDIATELY DO THIS TO HIM AAAAAAA
By the way, this is borderline headcanon territory, but: I think Grace was fully aware of Simon's crush on her. She's good at "reading" people. She was just seeing it as something else she had complete control over. It was part of her power trip, and she probably thought it was harmless and a little funny.
It was not.
"We are the Apex but also, we're Grace and Simon"
And here's another important aspect of how messed up their relationship is. This goes without saying but nobody is supposed to live their life completely disconnected from society and with only one other person around. They were alone together at first, and then decided they wouldn't trust adults at all even if they recruited younger kids for their weird cult. So because they only have each other in the world and have zero supervision, and because it's been like this for nearly half their life, they are a bit of everything at the same time for each other. Everything is true, and everything is contradictory.
They are friends, but also they are a mentor and an apprentice, but also they are co-cult leaders, but also he's only the second in command, and also he's her first convert. But also they compete for the rank of leader at all times. But also they constantly have to save each other because they're always putting themselves in danger. But also she can pull rank on him whenever she feels like it. But also he knows the rules better than her. They keep saying they're still kids, until someone tells them they're kids, and then they decide they aren't.
She's terrified of losing him, but she openly doesn't care about his stupid book, and she keeps teasing him about his appearance. He's so devoted to her it makes him feel entitled to her affection, but also he has a huge crush on her that he refuses to talk about, but also he'd love to take her spot as the leader. She rants about "dance moms" putting you in contests and yet that's exactly how she behaves with her best friend. She takes his loyalty for granted but also she doesn't trust him at all. They are a bonded pair that only death could separate and yet they have no idea how to properly communicate with each other.
It's such a mess. It's a giant fucking mess. It's a disaster.
Let's move on before I start screaming again. Let's talk about how Grace starts changing in Book 3.
The world is a stage, but nobody's watching anymore
"Let's learn this dance"
Because Grace is separated from the rest of her cult after episode 1, she has a unique occasion to drop her persona and try to engage with new things, but she's not seeing things this way. First, Simon is still there, so even before meeting Hazel, she still has no real incentive to change what she's always been doing on the Train. Second, she still refuses to engage with anything the Train is trying to do.
The first real crack in her resolve obviously appears in episode 3, mostly because a Train puzzle forces her to think about a past event from her childhood. Thankfully for her, this happens in a place where she's still fully in control, even if she's technically trapped.
I'm not going to go into too many details about how Grace rediscovering dance in a positive context is a timid first step on her path to emotional growth, mostly because someone did a much better job than me already. Oh. Would you look at that. It's mmikmmik again. But yeah, the general gist of it is that this puzzle allowed her to reappropriate a previously negative experience in a positive way, and made her reconsider her priorities a little bit afterwards.
Notice I said emotional growth and not "redemption arc".
What do you mean, a redemption arc
What happened to Grace in Book 3 was essentially deradicalization. And, as with the vast majority of people who have gone through deradicalization, she had to be tricked into it, because everything about it ran contrary to her entire ideology. It is impossible (or very difficult) to convince someone that their extreme prejudices are illogical or have no connection with reality, but someone may realize this after their own emotions have led them to act contrary to those prejudices at least once.
However, until fairly late in the season, we are not watching a Grace redemption arc. Again, bear with me.
By accident, the Train separated her from almost all of her cult, then immediately introduced her to a new recruit who was ideal for said cult. So Grace acted as she always did, and tried to recruit her, and became attached to her, exactly like (I think) she must become attached, at least momentarily, to all her recruits. So in practice, she did nothing different than usual. But Hazel was a Denizen AND she spent a LOT more time with her than with a typical recruit because of their distance from the Apex. So when Grace realizes that Hazel is not a passenger, of course, it's unthinkable for her to apply her usual prejudices to her. It's too late. She's already become emotionally attached. Something else will have to give. What gives way, as a result, is her certainty that she understands everything about the Train, and her prejudices are based on that, so she starts rethinking them.
This means that meeting Hazel, and even becoming attached to Hazel, is not the beginning of Grace's "redemption arc." If we compare her first encounter with Simon and how she behaves with Hazel, Grace is actually repeating the exact same mistakes with Hazel that she made with Simon - Hazel is someone she wants to protect, who admires her, who gives her affection, but it’s a relationship partly built on lies. She is recreating a harmful cycle over and over again, because that is her only way of functioning, and that is all she has been doing for seven years.
Simon may be acting like the immature kid he never stopped being when he yells "I was your friend first!!" at her when she talks about Hazel in the Origami Car, but he's right about one thing - she is literally repeating the cycle with another lost child. Who just happens to also be a turtle.
The biggest sign that episode 6 isn’t the start of her redemption arc either is that her instinctive response to the situation is to hide Hazel's denizen status from Simon. She doesn’t tell Hazel that she’s going to protect her, she tells her that Simon won’t kill her because they won’t tell him. She decides to place the burden of secrecy on Hazel, a six-year-old girl whose adoptive mother has just been murdered, instead of showing vulnerability and explaining to Simon why she’s not happy that he killed Tuba. And that's very revealing. At this point, what she considers to be the most pressing problem to solve is the fact that Hazel is a denizen, not that Simon has killed someone. Because at that point, she hasn't yet fully processed that yes, Tuba was a person. And even when she realizes this in the same episode, she continues to keep the secret.
It’s actually being separated from Hazel that starts Grace's redemption arc. It’s Hazel's refusal to stay with her that truly triggers Grace's self-reflection - it finally forces her to confront her toxic behavior, and it's no coincidence if Hazel becomes the voice of Grace's self-reflection in her tape. She says it herself, "you tried to control me just like you control the Apex"! And even Grace admits it moments before escaping from her own tape: "[Hazel] deserved better."
(sidenote: I hate "redemption discourse" in fiction. I don't care who "deserves to be redeemed" or not. I think the idea is too inextricably linked to catholicism for me. I only care about characters being interesting and compelling, and if they mess up, or even if they do terrible things, I want to know what they're going to do about it and if they're going to try to do better or not.)
"Guess we'll have to figure it out?"
This is beyond obvious but: if Grace's problem is based on wanting to be admired and presenting a mask of perfection and absolute certainty to the world for that purpose, her personal evolution involves the total deconstruction of this persona that she spent seven years building. It's also no coincidence if she loses her literal mask in episode one.
She spends the entire season learning how to say "I don't know". Don't get me started on how Simon reacts to that incredible moment of vulnerability cause I'm gonna chew glass
Anyway
In therapy, one exercise that they sometimes make you do to better understand yourself is to list several things that you think define you, and see what happens when one of them is removed. Someone who's afraid of aging may find it very reassuring to change the description "a young person who loves walking, gardening, and reading" to "a person who loves walking, gardening, and reading" and realise that aging is not that scary after all.
Why am I talking about this? Because a significant part of what happens towards the end of Book 3 is Grace and Simon, seeing most of what they have built collapse, trying to redefine themselves around what’s left. So: what is left of Grace when she is no longer supported, admired, or an infallible leader? Someone who is charismatic, and who would like to be able to help others, but who doesn't know how. And then, what else? Even she isn't entirely sure. The end of Book 3 leaves it up in the air. Which is good, to clarify! She still has her entire adult life ahead of her. I guess we'll figure it out indeed.
I love that the show doesn't shy away from how scary this is for her. She says it herself, she did everything to avoid being alone, but that's exactly how she ended up. Embracing change is scary as hell. And yet she does it anyway! It's partly because at that point she's already lost nearly everything, but still, that's incredible!
So. Uh. What could she have done differently
Now if you’re reading this you’re probably thinking "what do you mean, what could she have done differently?! She changed her heart even though she had previously gone miles off in the wrong direction! She dismantled her own cult! She understood her mistake regarding the numbers, the Conductor, and the Denizens! She stood up to her best friend who was stubbornly persisting in his error! And you have the audacity to criticize her?"
I'm not criticizing her. I find Grace's turnaround extraordinary, logical from start to finish, and exceptionally well written. But it's not entirely based on her own internal decisions, it didn't come out of nowhere, and I think it's important to understand that turnaround and how it happened in order to better understand what I'm about to say about Simon after this.
So: what could she have done differently?
The most obvious thing is that she should have told the truth about Hazel sooner. But she would never have done so without being forced to, because of that very first point about her confusing attention and love, combined to that second one about being someone who notices and saves lonely children. She wants, she needs to keep both of them by her side at all costs. If she publicly admits that Hazel is a Denizen, she has to admit that Denizens are people, and if they're people, that means she and Simon are serial killers - and if she admits that to Hazel, it means she has to say goodbye to her, and emotionally she just can't do that - and if she admits it to Simon, it means they have to face the horror of what their entire existence has been for years and it would probably mean leaving him behind, and she can't do that either. That's not even counting the fact that she also has to protect Hazel from Simon on top of all of that.
For the exact same reason, she can’t pick a side between the two of them. "We don't leave Apex behind." She refuses to be the one who abandons others. It goes against everything she's trying to do and everything she’s trying to be.
Not only that, but admitting she’s second guessing her own dogma would be vulnerability. She has a moment of vulnerability in the Cat's cabin, where she admits what's been bothering her (her number going down) and why ("I didn't want you to think less of me," which hits even harder when you remember that again, for her, attention=affection). She’s clearly terrified. It's awful for her to be vulnerable. Do you really think she would have done that for something infinitely more serious, like "Hazel isn't a passenger, and I think we've been wrong about literally everything we know for years"?
She could have avoided isolating Simon from her own character development, since it’s one of the biggest reasons why things ended up that badly. The thing is, the beginning of the rift between them is almost imperceptible (episode 3). As soon as she starts trying to keep everyone happy (Hazel wants to do the puzzle and Simon wants to avoid the puzzle), aka her normal mode of operation, she is forced to divide everything they do in two. And since almost all of Grace's character development happens in Hazel's presence, Simon is almost completely absent from it, and so he's unaware it’s even happening. He has no access to any of the new information. By the time she realizes it was a mistake (in episode 9), it's far too late to course-correct.
She literally tells the truth about everything and apologizes in episode 9! She literally did it! She did it very late, but she still did it. And it still wasn't enough to prevent this entire dumpster fire because at that point, Simon was no longer willing to listen to her.
She could have been clearer about Tuba and explained unequivocally that she had changed her mind about getting rid of her. Frustratingly, she tried to do so, but miscommunication ruined it. Looking back, one of the most horrible turning points is that discussion they have right before they enter the Color Clock Car, when Grace says that they shouldn’t get rid of Tuba (implying that it’s because it would make Hazel sad) - Simon's understanding of the implication is completely off the mark, judging by the fact that he feels visibly insulted (I think he thought she was implying he was not capable of doing it). This is one of only two moments where I think this disaster might genuinely have been avoided. Grace could have made it clearer that the plan had changed, that they no longer had to get rid of Tuba. But she isn’t very good at communicating when it’s about topics that could make her look vulnerable, and Simon obviously sucks at communicating in general.
Which brings me to the other tipping point that fucked absolutely everything even though Grace thought she was making the right choice at the time: she should have let Amelia talk to them, instead of running away the first time they met her. I’m going to talk about that moment at length later in Simon’s half of the post, so I’m just going to put a pin in it for now, but let’s be real. Even if I genuinely think this is the most credible change that could have avoided this disaster, Grace was still trying not to reveal Hazel’s identity at that point, and Amelia was threatening to do so. It’s really infuriating, but to her, it looked like the most sensible choice at the time - even if Grace really, really struggled to find a good excuse to run away.
Grace says it herself, she did a lot of things wrong, but protecting Hazel wasn’t one of them. I’d be a bit more nuanced (she was really bad at it, and also pretty much ruined Hazel’s life in the process), but let’s be real: she was in constant "damage control" mode, she was put in an impossible situation (admittedly one of her own making, but still), and she had only bad choices or good but insanely painful choices as far as the eye could see.
And it would be extremely stupid to put most of the blame on her, which brings me to the most explosive topic of the two.
Let's do this.
Some basic things about Simon
It is tempting to consider Simon a lost cause from the get-go, given how the season ends, and it’s also our bias talking. Remember that Grace's number was slightly higher than Simon's at the beginning of the season - meaning they had both gone very far in the wrong direction, but the Train thought he had gone a little less far than her.
"Why would I ever want to change if I'm always right"
One thing that is often perceived as an obstacle to understanding how Simon "works" is that we don't know how he ended up on the Train and what he experienced in the real world. We can only guess, but we do have a few clues: his mother dressed him rather haphazardly, which gives off vague vibes of neglect; he was making wooden miniatures from the moment he arrived on board, suggesting that this was a passion he developed before the Train; and he has very specific anecdotes about funerals. This last point could mean many things, but they all fall into the category of headcanon. In any case, since what he remembers most from a funeral are his neighbors, this suggests that his parents weren't that present.
In short, the few clues we have paint the picture of another lonely and neglected child.
And then he ended up on the Train, found a person he trusted (the Cat), and she accidentally (?) abandoned him after several months. And for a minute, the world was terrifying again.
And then Grace immediately arrived, and he imprinted on her like a baby bird, and he trusted her, and the world finally started to make sense and have rules he could understand.
I assume that the root of Simon's problem is “Why would I ever want to change if I'm always right?” (episode 10 The New Apex. Saying this adds something like 4 DIGITS to his number, effectively multiplying it by at least 1000). He is afraid of losing control. If he is wrong about how the world works, he loses his grip on the world. It becomes frightening and incomprehensible again, like when he was a kid.
If he is wrong, to him, it essentially means that he's going to be abandoned again. And die.
It's no coincidence that his main hobby is painting miniatures and creating dioramas with them - it's just another way of having control over a small world where everything is in its proper place. The same goes for his fantasy book.
"For the first time in a long time, things are right in the world"
To feel safe, Simon needs clear rules that are stated, written down, and respected by him and anyone he considers trustworthy. Every time he's lost and isn't sure what to do, he's mentally going back to the rules they established, and they inform his decisions. We literally see him quoting one word for word off the top of his head in episode 2.
He has already lost his first trusted person on the Train, Grace is his second. She’s not just his best and only friend of seven years, she’s at the core of his beliefs, how he understands the world, and his place in it. She co-wrote the rules and co-enforces them. She’s his only safety net. She's everything.
Like Grace, Simon has other problems that have been added on top of the original one. His codependency with Grace is clearly one of them. His inability to question himself and his beliefs is made even more complicated because Grace keeps validating most of the things he does. And since she saved him and he put her on a pedestal, it's further complicated by the adoration he has for her. They are best friends, they're a team, but at the same time, he's thinking so highly of her it kind of loops around and starts negating the fact she's also just a flawed human being.
Which means that once she stops being everything to him, well, she's nothing.
Get used to this kind of all-or-nothing mentality with Simon cause we are just getting started.
"We're the victims here"
I get the impression that Simon is also subconsciously trying to become someone who would have saved him at age 10 - someone who would have destroyed the danger, just as he believes Grace did for him. It's the ideal he seems to be striving for without realizing it. Note that he ALSO isn’t trying to become the person who would help him now, but the one who would have saved him in the past. Someone who Destroys Bad Things™ for others.
All of this leads to Simon having a very binary view of the world. Since he defines himself as a victim, and his in-group as a group of other victims, he sees all the denizens not merely as objects, but as aggressors.
From this perspective, anyone who sympathizes with a denizen sympathizes with the aggressor and so, becomes an aggressor. This reality is self-perpetuating, even when his friends question it: if they do, they are siding with the aggressor, and what he considers to be his in-group is becoming increasingly insular.
Defining himself as a victim also has the added effect of making him blind to the fact he's an aggressor himself, and he feels fully legitimised in his violent actions. Again, it's an all or nothing, black-and-white mentality.
Unlike Grace who just sees Denizens as props, he doesn’t really think in terms of who’s intrinsically a person and who is not, not really. There’s people who are Like Him™ and people who are Not Like Him™. And people Like Him™ are right, and the others are wrong. People who are Like Him™ don’t lie to him, and people who are Like The Cat™ lie all the time and can’t be trusted. Those are fluid categories despite the fact they are binary. It's like a switch being flipped. If someone is no longer Like Him™, then he's free to dehumanize and destroy them.
Hence every horrible thing he does to Grace during the last two episodes.
tldr: Simon let his trauma define him, as well as the entire world around him.
And then there’s the whole toy soldier thing, which is yet another binary way he has of seeing things around him. As I previously mentioned, there’s a recurring motif of toy soldiers around Simon, something about him seeing himself as a little soldier. There’s the commander making all the decisions, who’s always right, and there’s the soldiers, who follow the rules, and nothing in between. It’s extreme, it’s very black-and-white, it’s another binary that makes him categorize people around him, and it makes him see the world as some sort of permanent battlefield. Mmikmmik also has a excellent post about this.
Normally, at this point you realize that everyone in this story is accidentally trapped into a cycle of abuse. I’ve ALSO made a very long post about that. To clarify: this is not entirely his fault, this is not entirely Grace’s fault, this is not entirely the Cat’s fault or Amelia’s fault. Or even the Train’s fault. It’s a giant tangled web of mistakes, and neglect, and ignorance, and unhealthy relationships involving misguided people just trying to survive. It's everyone's fault. Including Simon's, of course.
The world is a battlefield, but the war is imaginary
What is particularly disheartening when watching (or re-watching) Book 3 is seeing how close Simon came to being accidentally deradicalized like Grace was. However, there are a whole host of factors that prevented it, and there are roughly as many internal factors as there are external ones. Let me say right away that I'm not making excuses for him - just that, again, this total disaster is not purely and simply his fault.
"Are you pulling rank on me"
If Grace hides her emotions to act as Simon’s emotional support, he’s also stuck in a constant support role, just a different one. He’s her little soldier, he’s her weapon, he’s following orders without asking questions.
It makes him feel safe, because he knows exactly where he fits in the world, but it also makes him neglect his own needs. It's clear that he doesn't care much about his own appearance, so I’m not sure the raggedy way he looks is part of it - but he’s also constantly endangering himself to the point where "Simon falls while trying to do something cool" is kind of an early running gag.
Him not paying attention to his looks doesn't explain the number of times he keeps watch in a Train car for Grace without sleeping, either. I don’t think he slept a single time from episode 5 to 9, which is, of course, great to make rational and logical decisions (it’s not). I'll get back to this later, so let's put a pin in that for now.
Because he’s in this little soldier role, he also lets Grace make the vast majority of the decisions, and he doesn’t ask questions very often. Episode 4 shows clear as day that he’s uncomfortable when he has to make decisions on his own. Later, when he finally starts asking questions in episode 7, he doesn’t mind when the answers he gets aren’t very convincing, very minimal, or (in episode 8) explain literally nothing.
Since Grace is Not The Cat™ (in Simon’s logic), Grace can never lie, at least not to him. And the rules Grace made up must be true, because they work, because they kept him alive. If the rules are wrong, then he’s going to die, so they have to be true. Which means that until very late in the season, Simon genuinely has no idea Grace is hiding stuff from him and that she's second guessing her own rules.
His first reaction when she yells at him in episode 6 isn’t suspicion, it’s sadness. He’s hurt that she’s yelling at him. He has no idea why it’s happening, and since she has accidentally, then willingly isolated him from Hazel and by extension her own character development, his first guess isn’t that she’s hiding something from him, but that something happened to her to make her behave like this.
It happens again in episode 7 when he grabs her arm to try to check her number, not realising how messed up that is, and she yells at him again (I feel like I've already said that a dozen times but: rightfully so). And, of course, he just takes it without arguing too much even if he doesn't get why she's suddenly setting (much needed) boundaries, because on top of him trying to be the guy who follows orders, Grace is his only safety net, his only real connection to humanity, and the idea of being separated from her terrifies him.
Perpetual emergency mode
Okay so let's go back to that pin and talk about a different consequence of it. Simon sees himself as a little soldier, but it's not just about letting Grace make most decisions and him following without asking questions. It also turns his entire world into an imaginary battlefield.
Of course, there is this imaginary war against One-one he's so invested in, to the point where "down with the false conductor" seems to be their tenet he's the most fond of.
But this isn't just limited to his "us versus them" mentality, it goes way beyond that. Weirdly enough, I feel like one of the very first things we learn about him (his mother making him wear socks and sandals because she "thought they were practical") is directly linked to that. Outside of his hobby shop in the Mall Car, for the most part, he cares only about what's practical and purely useful. Nothing else seems to have value to him. Why would it? This is a battlefield. He's stuck in perpetual emergency mode. There's no time for fun. Or puzzles. Or self-reflection. Or emotional growth.
This is particularly obvious in episode 2 when Grace tries to convince him to take their trip back to the Mall Car like vacations, and the minute he's starting to relax, they're in danger once again (from their perspective at least). He looks more comfortable quoting their procedures and being validated for doing so than when he was trying to have fun.
That's also his thought process when it comes to solving puzzles to get out of a Train car. Puzzles are "dumb" (episode one), they're a waste of time. Dressing up for the dance in the Debutante Ball Car is a waste of time. Fun is a waste of time. The only exception to this seems to be the rare occasion when he wants to collect something because he feels entitled to it (like that seashell at the beginning of episode 3).
It seems he also only interacts with anyone who isn't Grace in the same way, passengers and Denizens alike. They have to be useful to him, otherwise he's not bothering.
We even see that as early as Book 2, when he's talking to Lake and tells her "You two are only as good as you are useful".
He has a few scenes where he interacts with Hazel, but from the get-go Grace tries to sideline him, since he’s not as good with kids as she is. From that point, nearly all of his interactions with Hazel are framed with him being on one side and Grace and Hazel (and Tuba, before he killed her) on the other side. I think his only on-screen interaction with her that isn’t framed like that is at the very end of episode 3 when he’s asking her to sing to give a window of opportunity to Grace so she can ditch Tuba. Which she doesn’t do. So it's, again, him trying to find something useful to do. Even the snowball fight he starts is framed as something useful to keep warm.
Even then, even with that mindset, we get a pretty good idea of what his dynamic with the rest of the group could have been if he hadn’t killed Tuba, and we get that idea, of all things, in episode 5. I'm sorry for using a mmikmmik post again but I don't know what to tell you, these posts are really good: "It’s Simon as the Simon he could’ve been if he chose to be. Cranky, sardonic, dry, but working hard to help his friends. (...) There’s just so much there that’s likeable and fun about him, the kind of guy who could be a great friend, and he chose not to be that. Over and over he decided those weren’t the worthy, important parts of himself." I can't put it better than that. Kudos.
The thing is, right before episode 5, the Train accidentally did something that could have been really good for Simon, but which was a total disaster. It forced him to stop and think. In a place where he was emotionally vulnerable. And also trapped.
Let's talk about episode 4 for a second.
Timing is everything
In the Debutante Ball Car, Grace was able to remember a negative experience she had with dance in the past, to briefly examine it, and to have a second chance to experience it in a setting she could mostly control, with friends supporting her and a public admiring her. In the Chat Chalet Car, meanwhile, Simon meets the Cat again, so he has a second chance to confront a negative experience as well. Except in his case, he once again has next to no control over the situation, in a place where he can't even run away.
Even worse, all of this is happening while Grace is too focused on her own number going down to pay any attention to his mental state until the near end of the episode. He's on his own to try to figure things out, after presumably seven years of running away from his problems instead of confronting them. And he tries to avoid it, again, and inevitably has a nervous breakdown in front of everyone.
Grace and Simon don’t really examine the problem either once they finally sit down and talk together on the stairs ; after Grace apologises for not noticing how bad he felt, they focus entirely on Grace’s number, then on a way to get out of the Car once Randall appears.
This could have been a chance for Simon to make peace with his abandonment issues, but it only ends up retraumatising him and reinforcing his previous opinion of the Cat (and Denizens in general) at the worst possible moment. He’s so emotionally immature it would have needed a miracle for him to start figuring things out by himself during this episode, and on top of that, everyone else is too busy to help him on this front. He leaves the car clearly conflicted. The lighting literally shows him half in the light and half in the dark. The choice to learn something from this disastrous experience or not is still on him.
Unfortunately, he ends up falling back onto what feels safe to him. They’re a team. He’s going to follow the rules. He’s going to stick to the plan. After all, it's not like his feelings matter, right? He's a little soldier. There's no time for self-reflection.
Also, he’s going to get rid of a Cat proxy in the process, and I’m not entirely sure he would have killed Tuba if he hadn’t met the Cat right before episode 5. He needs to kill Tuba, because every kid is him, and every Denizen is either a Cat proxy or a Ghom proxy, and he needs to be the little soldier that Destroys Bad Things™.
"Do I have to make every decision for you"
Which also brings me to Grace asking him if he needs her to make every decision for him. Which, in theory, could also be a very, very good thing, considering how horribly codependant they are.
Simon's entire arc in this Book aims for him to become his own person once he’s detached from Grace. The problem is that, as we've established, this person is entirely built around everything negative in his life. The guy’s entire personality is a giant trauma response peppered with a pathological need to be right. Without a proper support network actually helping him to work on all of that, "Simon as his own person" can only be the worst possible version of himself.
So yeah: who is he once you remove everything at the center of his life? The guy who’s right, because he’s the guy who follows the rules, because the rules are right, because they kept him alive.
And Grace has stopped following the rules.
To him, this means he's going to get abandoned again.
So he decides that if he wants to keep some semblance of control, he's going to be abandoned on his own terms. Get them before they get you mentality.
It is literally easier for him to overpower Grace and try to physically delete the problem she represents from his life than it is for him to do the introspection and the healing he needs to do to overcome years of neglect. It is easier for him to reject everything that contradicts his bigotry even when his beliefs turn out to be blatantly, factually false once Amelia is revealed to be the "false conductor" than to admit he’s wrong.
Feeling like the entire world is your enemy is a very adolescent thing. What escalates it to violence is that conviction of being the guy who’s right, and this sense of entitlement, the idea that the world owes you something. The urge to make others hurt because you’re hurting and because you have no idea how to get rid of that feeling so you just inflict it on other people.
Emotional immaturity goes hand in hand with black-and-white thinking. It doesn’t tolerate ambiguity. "Someone can hurt you and still be a person with an inner life and feelings" is too complex for Simon. He never grew up - arguably he was never allowed to. So he needs to know who’s safe and who’s unsafe, and there’s no middle ground. You can even see the exact moment the switch flips for him concerning Grace.
Because his beliefs run so contrary to facts, at one point reality itself becomes his enemy. It’s a type of psychological crisis from which it’s extremely hard to come back. It’s the final level of conspirations and cults. Your version of the world has crumbled around you, but facts don’t matter to you anymore, only beliefs matter. Grace tells the Apex kids they met Amelia, which is an objective fact, and he still calls her a liar. Because all his enemies must be liars.
To be fair, Grace might have believed her interpretation of the Train was right for a very, very long time before she managed to deconstruct it, but Simon has the added difficulty of not just being her second in command in the cult, but her first convert as well. On some level, she knows the rules they’re following are her own interpretation of things. He had no idea that was the case until very, very late in the season. It’s not just sunk cost fallacy - from the get-go, they don’t have access to the same informations.
And yes, this all sounds like me making excuses for him. I swear I’m not. He's a tragic villain and a monster. His abysmal mental state is not entirely his fault, but (as stated bluntly by Grace in ep 10) it’s still his responsibility to deal with the fallout, not hers. He doesn’t have the tools nor the insight to find how to stop his spiral, but at one point he literally stops even trying to do so, and that’s fully on him.
Which leads us to:
So. Uh. What could he have done differently
Since I spent the entire previous section saying that Simon was too emotionally immature for things to turn out differently, you're probably wondering what I could possibly have to say now.
Theoretically (and I've seen people argue this before), he could have stopped by analyzing his emotions and realizing that all of this wasn't making him happy, and that he felt terrible about it. That's one possibility, but "this choice is the right one because I don't feel awful" is a VERY bad way to gauge if something is right or wrong. Sometimes, the right choice is the one that hurts the most.
I mean. Look at Grace when she lets Hazel go, look at how awful the right choice felt! Change can be terrifying. It feels bad! It feels REALLY bad! Especially when it means abandoning your entire life and every safety net you’ve built for seven to eight years!
But that’s the entire tragedy of it, isn’t it? He’s in control of his own actions, and yet they’re informed by years upon years upon years of misinformation, reinforcement of bad behavior, neglect and general disconnect from reality. He could act differently, but he’s so unlikely to do so it would feel like a deus ex machina.
But you know what? Even if he is emotionally immature, even if he is completely incapable of pulling himself out of a spiral like his, there's still an option. And that is to recognize that he has lost control, that he no longer knows where he stands, and to seek help.
You can hate him as much as you want, but seeking help and trying to understand what is going on completely contradicts his role as a foot soldier who doesn't ask questions AND his need to be right, and he tried to do it anyway. And it was a very good first step!
It was also a first step that he didn't go beyond, again for both internal and external reasons. So yeah, to his credit, there’s a couple of points where Simon is actually asking questions, then looking for outside intervention.
The problem is, his options are very, very limited. And they’re all bad.
Of course, the first person he turns to when everything starts falling apart is Grace. That's what he's always done. The problem is that she is not "outside intervention", she doesn't actually reply to his questions, and also, she’s both questioning the fundamentals of their beliefs and distancing Hazel from him to protect her. Not only is she unavailable, but she is so afraid for Hazel's safety that she doesn't even want to talk things through with him. And even if she was, she would still be a terrible choice to help him anyway. Their issues are too entangled.
(she could also technically order him around and tell him the rules have changed, and this might have worked, but only on a surface level. He would just be given a new set of rules to follow. His core problem would still be there, unchanged.)
And then they meet Amelia.
If it wasn't obvious when I put a pin in that scene during Grace's part, I am absolutely convinced that their first encounter with Amelia was the best possible opportunity to kick Simon out of his downward spiral. She is an outsider. An outsider whose opinion he deeply respects by default, because of her insanely high number. She knows how the train works. She has almost all the answers he is looking for! Not only would he probably have listened to her at this point, but he actual insists, several times, to Grace that he wants to talk to her!
It's only because Grace invokes the Apex code that he reluctantly agrees to start running. Because once again, when in doubt, he will follow the rules by default.
Grace knows this, by the way. That's exactly why she quotes their stupid code. When I said the reasons were both internal and external, I meant it.
And then, after Grace has accentuated the rift between them by clearly setting new boundaries, he has two options left if he wants some outside intervention. There's Amelia, which means breaking the rules. And there's going back to the Cat.
Choosing to go back to the Cat, at this point, is both catastrophic and understandable. Understandable, because she is the more familiar choice, because he's disobeying less than if he were talking to Amelia, and because he knows the Cat knows more than he does, even if she's a liar. Catastrophic, because it sends him back a second time to a setting where he risks being re-traumatized AGAIN and where he still has unexamined emotional issues. And he doesn't know that the Cat has a grudge against Amelia, and that she isn’t neutral at all.
Of course, no progress is being made. He uses his trauma as leverage to get something from her. They talk about it briefly, but it only seems to make things worse. And she accepts to help him because she feels guilty, and gives him the ability to extract a tape, and it makes a bad situation ten times worse.
He does get another opportunity to talk to Amelia after that, but by then, the Cat already told him she was dangerous, so he doesn’t trust her anymore. On top of that, Grace changed her mind and she’s now hanging out with Amelia, and she doesn’t even explain why ("I don’t think she’s an enemy" isn’t an explanation), leading him to believe there’s something wrong with her. Or that she’s being brainwashed.
So what I’m trying to say is that everything the guy actually tried to do differently blew up in his face and actually made things worse.
You can even view that as a complete character regression – by the end of episode 8, he’s once again scared to be abandoned, surrounded by what he perceives to be hostile forces, and following blindly what the Cat told him. He’s back to square one. He's that little kid again.
There’s poetry to the horror of him being killed the exact way he could have died at ten years old if Grace hadn’t been there. Narratively, it's as if all the mistakes, all the horrors he committed brought him back to that precise moment when his character started, except this time, no one saves him, because he bit the hand of everyone who ever tried to help him, including Grace, who proved until the very end that she was still willing to help him even after he tried to kill her. Repeatedly.
Simon decided that the only control he had left was to become fully defined by his problem and trauma, that he was the guy who was always right, that he didn’t need anyone's help, and so that's how he dies, alone and without anyone's help, terrified like that ten-year-old kid in socks and sandals.
With his socked foot kicking on the gangway, mind you. That’s one of the last images we get of him alive.
am I okay? No
Good luck, Grace
So yeah, to loop back to my first statement : Nothing.
There’s nothing they could have done.
Not because it was inevitable, but because their codependency is so complex and severe that avoiding this tragedy would have required outside intervention, or required them to be different people with different patterns of behavior. The simple fact they’re on the Train made their options horribly limited even when they tried to find said outside intervention, and the only real help they got was from Amelia, who didn’t really care. Both were in control of their own actions, but also both were trying to function while their world was completely crumbling around them, and getting deradicalised or simply getting mentally better is near-impossible on your own. They were both dealt an incredibly bad hand to begin with.
I’m not trying to convince you that Grace is worse than you thought she was, nor that Simon should be pitied more. Grace is incredible for having managed to pull herself out of eight years of mistakes and try to make things right, but she's also someone who destroyed the lives of a lot of people along the way. Simon is a monster, but he is also the product of a system that failed him at every possible opportunity. I’m just saying that their characters are complex and well-written, that every bad choice they make makes complete sense in context, and that people trying to simplify either of them are completely missing what makes this season so good to begin with.
Don’t you wish the world was simpler and less ambiguous? No, you don’t. You literally have two extremely well-written characters showing you why that’s a terrible thing to wish for.
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