anyway also. can we talk about how house consistently misjudges and misreads cameron. fandom always goes on about what a perceptive person house is, and he is, but he's also so biased and he's very often wrong. explicitly. two good examples are no more mr nice guy and don't ever change, where house insists the patients have brain damage/illnesses that made them nice/religious. instead, they're simply nice. they simply have faith. house is perceptive but his flaw is that he assumes the world is much more cynical and dark than it is.
and nowhere do we see that more with cameron, who house always misjudges.
we see this as soon as the pilot, and it's a thread in s1: house immediately catches on to cameron's damage, and starts trying to guess what it is. he assumes death, and loss, and he's right, but he assumes cameron has been the victim of something tragic, and the answer is closer to: cameron put herself in this position, knowingly, out of love.
when she develops feelings for him, house gets it wrong again. he doesn't understand why she likes him, and lashes out on their date, telling her that actually not only does she not like him but she is incapable of love and only cares about fixing broken people. fandom takes this as law, but i cannot stress enough how often the show and cameron explicitly says this is not the case: she never tried to fix house in s1, but responded to him reaching out and being kind/empathetic/protective of her (promising not to "crush her", buying her a christmas present, emphasizing with her dead husband). not once do we ever see her try or want to fix house: on the contrary, cameron alone in s1 believes house is fine as he is, and even doubts his addiction.
(we learn, too, in s1-3, that cameron is actually consistently miserable around dying people, driving herself into obsession and burnout and depression out of desperation to help: she is not, contrary to house's self-loathing claims, at all enjoying this.)
by no reason, it's even more explicit: house spends the episode imagining cameron besotted with him, sitting at his bedside, unable to so much as touch him without longing. it isn't to say that she doesn't care or wouldn't visit him in the hospital -- she certainly would -- but the exaggeration is intentional: house imagines cameron this way. by the end of s2, cameron is largely over house, but in house's mind, she's madly in love with him and his damage. (something confirmed in the tail end of season five, at that, with hallucination amber musing that house has no interest in cameron, but is interested in her being into him. we know he's susceptible to this kind of flattery: see also aly the teenage stalker.)
house spends much of season four and five insistent that cameron misses him and wants to return to diagnostics; that she isn't interested in chase because chase isn't damaged enough to fix. in saviors, house triumphantly assumes cameron wants to dump chase, and is shocked into silence when she says it's actually that she wants to marry him but is scared: by season six and teamwork it all comes to a bitter head, with house assuming that a) cameron is incapable of forgiving chase for dibala and b) that cameron will dump chase to return to diagnostics. that none of this makes any sense is probably the point: it's cynical to the point of being nonsensical, but very, very house. love doesn't win, love is fake, everything will return to the status quo. that cameron in fact tries to prioritize saving her marriage and leaving house entirely, and that she follows through, even if chase buys house's cynicism, completely blindsides house. he thought he understood cameron. he never did.
and you could certainly read this in a shipping light. house is a bit obsessed with cameron, and very much wants her to be in love with him, whether he feels the same or doesn't, whether it's an ego thing or a comfort thing. but i don't think that's the point, or not the entire point.
in everybody dies, house hallucinates cameron along with stacy, kutner, and amber. he includes her among his list of biggest regrets, the people he lost and failed to save and failed. this is telling, as cameron doesn't really belong in this group: she is alive and happy, she never dated or had her heart broken by house. but house imagines her on the same level as amber. his biggest regret and a source of incredible grief. and he imagines cameron as cruel. that she wants him to die, that he should give up and it would be a mercy.
let's be clear: this is not cameron. not just in the sense of it being a hallucination: we know cameron will drive herself into spirals trying to keep people alive, will lie and avoid and run test after test and do anything but let them be terminal. that she did help one terminal patient commit suicide and that it destroyed her. cameron does not believe that "allowing someone to die is loving." she has said the literal opposite many times.
house is wrong. that's the point.
house doesn't understand cameron, the same way he's never understood people who are genuinely kind or selfless or devoted. he claims that everybody lies, but many of the lies he so smugly uncovers aren't really hiding cruelty or apathy: sure, the honest mother hasn't told her daughter she's adopted, but that doesn't make her a bad or unloving mother. the nice guy really is that nice; the special needs teacher did have brain damage making her abnormally patient, but when that's fixed, she still loves and cares about her students the same as before. house assumes cameron has cynical motives, that she is selfish, that she doesn't love but gets off on fixing people, because that's what he believes (and because it conveniently means her feelings for him aren't real and he can reject them). house assumes cameron wants to leave chase and return to him, because that confirms house's biases and desires.
that cameron truly is a loving, caring person -- if also a flawed one, if also stubborn and pushy and messed up -- cannot be true, because it means that she is sincere. and sincerity is perhaps house's greatest weakness. he thinks it's pathetic, he finds it frightening. and so he assigns her additional motives, he imagines her as selfish and cynical and enabling, even when she tells and shows him otherwise.
and house never, ever gets it right.
gamechangershow
amandla
turnnoffyourmind
titsay
