I have a variety of feelings about Shadow Milk redemption fics/headcanons/possibility in canon. This isn't going to be well organized, it's just stream of consciousness.
A theme I've noticed in a lot of things about SM being redeemed is that often times he is either woobified (that is, made more incompetent/less cruel/more pitiable than canon), or he maintains his usual demeanour but is declawed in some way - loses the Soul Jam, etc, and is often left at PV's mercy or somehow in his debt. And I feel like both are bad for different reasons, and oddly I dislike the latter more than the former. Mischaracterization is something we all do, sometimes on purpose for the sake of whatever idea we have in our heads, sometimes by accident, I do it too (I was complaining about a mischaracterization I made recently in fact), so I can't really be that mad at people for it. But the second one...makes my stomach churn. Because, to me, it evokes the imagery and "benevolent cruelty" of things like psych wards.
To me it is very telling that so many people think that taking away the main method Shadow Milk uses to defend himself (even if that self-defence is maladjusted) is the only way to get him to improve as a person. He's a control freak. You cannot help a control freak by removing all avenues to control because that makes them panic and go into survival mode. You can't heal in survival mode. And yet so many people seem to think that this is the way to make him change, as if he wouldn't immediately shut down or lash out or end his own life in the face of losing every modicum of control he'd fought for.
Yes, giving up control in some ways is how to heal (it's like exposure therapy but it sucks even more). But the key in that is that IT MUST BE ONE'S OWN CHOICE. You cannot FORCE someone to do these things. You cannot FORCE someone to heal. But narratively speaking, that's what is happening when SM is declawed for the purpose of PV helping put him back together.
This forceful view of "healing" when the mentally ill person in question is violent or highly unstable is what underlies a lot of medical/psych abuse. The idea that by being mentally unstable, someone revokes their right to be treated like a person with dignity. The idea that in order for an imperfect victim to get better, they must be re-broken and re-set, like a bone that healed improperly. But cruelty begets cruelty, and re-traumatizing someone is never going to make them better. It will only worsen the pre-existing issues. This is why it irks me so much to see fics and whatnot of SM becoming better only after losing his powers or becoming dependent on PV somehow, as to me the message becomes "unstable people must give up their autonomy and suffer only in quiet ways to ever have a chance to heal"
Now I will admit, as someone also in the whump community, I do understand the appeal of injury as a sort of forced vulnerability. I've seen many people expound on how they like injuring The Character to force them to open up or trust another person, especially when The Character is particularly walled-off or cagey. Particularly, it seems, when authors relate more to the whumpee (one suffering) than the whumper (one causing the suffering), and seem to desire that sort of care in the face of being in a vulnerable position.
(Off-topic for a moment but I was genuinely surprised when I realized some people related to whumpees more? I thought we were all out here either being voyeurs to suffering or imagining ourselves beating up our favs. But I digress.)
However in the case of SM specifically, I feel it's a bad route to go just because of that underlying message/implication. Stripping away the Cookie stuff, he's someone who was abandoned by his creator/"parent," never had a childhood or life of his own, lived in service of others for who knows how long, was treated more like an object than a person, is implied to have been BEHEADED BY HIS OWN PEOPLE (which when extrapolated to the real world can be seen as any sort of mob violence/attempted murder) when he failed to live up to their expectations, and then snapped and became incredibly violent in retaliation, taking control to ensure that would never happen again. How in the world would removing his main avenue of control not make him immediately feel like he's right back where he started? Like I said before, he would regress even further, become even worse.
Episode 15 is a dumpster-fire but I think it shows this pretty clearly. He was used for his powers by DE then almost killed by Salt, he was as vulnerable as he's ever been in canon. And how did he react? By fucking...fusing with the Ultimate Dough and absorbing the souls of the other Beasts, and vowing to DESTROY THE TIMELINE! But sure, yeah, just remove the Soul Jam, or depower him some other way, that will fix him.
Now, one may ask, "well, Brick, if you are the Arbiter Of Writing Shadow Milk"—I'm not but thanks for the compliment, Person I Just Made Up—"how should we go about writing a redemption for him?"
And I'm going to be honest. I don't know. Not for his current form, anyway. But bottom line is that for all the Beasts, the want to improve has to come from within. You cannot force someone to heal. You cannot force someone to get better. Forcing the Beasts to improve through some contrivance where they are no longer magically/physically powerful enough to be a threat defeats the whole point.
Mandatory disclaimer for the sign-off, I don't think anyone is a bad person for writing fics where SM is woobified or declawed (even if I personally dislike it). No one is banned from writing this stuff. Hell, I think someone could write a pretty good psychological horror about how much it would re-traumatize SM to be declawed. Someone get on that, actually. I have too many WIPs. But regardless, we are playing toys. However, sometimes the way we play toys reflects internal biases and broader social issues. It's important to consider whether this trope represents anything about one's own biases about violent mentally ill people and the psychiatric system as a whole.
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