A fascinating ask was presented by @rover-rot on our official iron lung lore blog (run by the brilliant @ctrl-shift-alt-9, who i wonder how they don’t tire of me hounding their posts). In it, they broke down the many times in which simon froze or seemed unable to act in moments of danger or fear, even in flashbacks. Op’s response of it involved the topic of fight or flight as stress/trauma responses that in simon’s case could not be carried out.
This conversation Opened My Eyes since for some reason i didn’t identify a lot of simon’s reactions as a freeze response, and as soon as i did, my entire perspective of the movie changed. again! This coincided greatly with my fixation in simon’s dissociative sequence, of which i had been wondering why it wasn’t mentioned or discussed about more often.
op’s post analyzing screenshots of simon’s dissociative sequence, as well as other posts about simon dissociating in a bloodymary setting, were my only source of water in an oasis of a fandom that side-stepped the topic—apart from the lovely plural community ofc! so shoutout to you guys for your awesome ideas that inspired me on making this post: @acephoric, @projectironmaiden, and @hard-times-paramore. You guys are really cool :)
yes trauma, dissociation, and polyvagal theory are my special interest. Since my reblog of the original post was getting a bit too long, i decided to make my own post here! i got really excited, can you tell? :,) i added a read more below bc there’s lots to discuss and lots of ref pictures hehe
So! What both asker and op were talking about in this post can be summarized greatly in the chart below, courtesy of Ruby Jo Walker.
As you can see here, we have a baseline, outlined in green, which can also be called our window of tolerance. When we're in our element and feel a sense of safety and connection to others, we are more aware, calm, grounded, and in control of ourselves. The part of our nervous system naturally in charge of this state is the parasympathetic nervous system, which helps our body rest, digest, relate to others, and heal or recover.
When there's a threat to our well-being, our body naturally turns to Fight or Flight, which is the body's mobilization to keep us safe. In this state, our sympathetic nervous system floods our body with adrenaline and cortisol. These are chemicals that activate our heart rate, speed up our breathing, tense our muscles for heavy mobile activity, and pause our digestion and immune response—because this is no time to rest or recover. It's a time to survive.
But what happens when we can't do anything to survive? What happens if we're in a position where we cannot defend ourselves or escape from what is threatening our lives?
This is inescapable shock! And we can only respond to it by freezing. Animals do this to not be noticed by their predator. (You can tell that Simon is instinctively attempting the same thing when he is Perceived by both creatures much greater than him: the Eel and the Eye.) But when prolonged freezing cannot lead us to safety, because of the nature of a danger that is inescapable, our body shuts down.
This is where dissociation comes in.
We can see that the events of the movie are not the first time Simon has experienced inescapable shock. Long-lasting relational or organized trauma such as Eden is so difficult, if not downright impossible, to affront or escape that the brain's only response is to either freeze, fawn (a common trauma response in abuse), and/or flop (collapse). But an even greater, physically inescapable shock is enforced in the SM-13, which retraumatizes an already traumatized Simon. And though he tries his hardest to argue, maneuver, bargain, and plead his way out, he still can't. And worst of all, in order to be free, he has to repeat it all over again in thirty minutes.
This is why he begins to heavily dissociate in the third act of the movie. Being in a prolonged state of hyperarousal (a state of panic and rage), but without the ability to carry out fight or flight, was too much. So he instead swung to the other extreme: hypoarousal. This is why he was unresponsive to what he saw in the camera after being warned by (what we assume to be) his mother's voice about the trap the Eel had set.
He stared at the screen for a long time, but he didn't seem to assimilate it despite the many times he took a picture of the wreckage of SM-8. If anything, coughing blood was what temporarily snapped him out of it, but not for long, as shown by the following shots:
The camera blurring in and out of new shot compositions tells us he lost time again, staring at his bloodied hand and later standing by the console, unmoving. We don’t know for how long he stood like this—neither does he. What brought him back to a semi-grounded state was the computer’s alert that it was connecting to the SM-8. His hand recoils away from the accelerator when it does. This implies that, while heavily dissociated, he was pushing the SM-13 close enough to establish that connection, while knowing it could be a trap and it could lead to his doom. Here’s this short but amazing sequence in video form to clarify what i’m trying to get at here:
It's just fascinating how, if you pay attention, you can in fact pick up on simon’s earlier freeze signs, even from the very first time the proximity sensor activates, and how they're in crescendo until finally spiraling in this very impactful scene. Here are just a few shots portraying his freeze responses, they’re actually too many to count!
It’s one of the best portrayals of PTSD/C-PTSD i’ve seen in a while. Especially something as misunderstood as dissociation.
This scene is so important. It tells us that even those who fight the longest, who try to be the strongest, have a limit. It was here where his window of tolerance, his threshold, had shattered. Because what do you mean you have somehow escaped from a dark pit, a series of caves where a monster lured you, deceived you, crumbled your reality, made you see That Which Man Cannot See, only to be forced to go back in order to be rescued? Simon literally said, “I thought I died... I might've died.” Look at the way his features twitch when that sinks in. They’re very subtle micro-expressions, but they’re there.
He won’t mention this again, because trauma of this caliber is, by definition, unnameable, indescribable. The only natural response would be to put up an amnesia barrier and move on. He can’t fall into a crisis now—he has to survive.
But if survival means having to relive it all again? If survival means facing death in the eye? Is there a greater example of inescapable shock repeating itself than the fact that he had to make his way to hell against his will? Again?
This naturally explains why, even after he reaches the SM-8, is gathering its Black Box data, and has to race against time to reach Ava again, Simon becomes even slower to react and more vulnerable to getting stuck in freeze states. It becomes harder and harder to fight the inertia of stillness and produce momentum. The gravity of trauma is becoming much too heavy to bear. It comes to the point that he has to verbally spur himself forward, to varying degrees of moderate to no success. This is only compounded when the SM-8’s pilot speaks in the last recording, and he freezes in horror when he recognizes that voice. The slow coming-alive of the ship renders him equally frozen, until he drives himself into action, piloting the transforming SM-13 out of the caves. But once again, he’s left staring horrified at the fact that the SM-13 is not the only one mutating—he is too.
But then something crucial happens. Or rather, Ava speaks.
Simon refuges himself in the one source of human connection he has left, scrambling to the speaker like a lifeline (the same way he clings to a holster in the search of fleeting touch). He sounds slightly dazed when he tries to communicate that he’s ill, but he can’t seem to find the words for it. Ava tries to silence him to enlist him in one more task, but it’s actually the Eel that succeeds in rendering him mute with terror once more. Throughout the entire time that Ava was held hostage, he was visibly unable to move.
But she brings him a small moment of connection—a repeated call to his name, a genuine apology, and the weight of her belief in humanity’s chance to survive as more than the both of them. This connection allows for her death to not bring the collapse that the Eel expected in Simon. Instead, he felt rage.
gifs courtesy of @blursbian (idk why i can’t link them to the post)
Because Ava tried to rectify her dehumanization of Simon, re-humanizing him by believing he has a purpose for good and the power to make a difference—that he is the only one who can do this. She believed this to the point of sacrificing her life for his own. She showed him there was worth not just in his survival, but in his fight for the world’s survival.
This single-handedly switched his mentality from helplessness to defiance. In spite of his certain coming death, he had enough hope to do go down fighting.
Jingle Jangle. Official-Unofficial Simon Characterization Post.
Hey, so, not only are you right on the money, having conceptualized exactly my point regarding many posts where I've tried to convey this in text format, but going through the effort of digging through the movie to find direct examples of this is superb work. I saw it, I just didn't have it in me to scrape for all these examples.
So, hats off to you. I don't usually put reblogs in my main lore tag, but this is an exceptional piece. I really cannot add anything of substance to this because you've elevated my "catch" to something viable and provable. You're crazy. Never stop!
Seven is my favorite character which means I enjoy making him suffer! :D Here's a little angst based off of the painting Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan by Ilya Repin
Man, it's one of those things. The COI was unnecessarily cruel to Simon. Is it because he's probably directly responsible for the deaths of 1/4th of their population? Yes. But he surrendered and is obviously trying to make up for it. It wouldn't be easy, but for all Ava wants to be a utilitarian, wants to work together for the future, she's still human and still let her emotions get in the way. She, as the representative of the COI, gave Simon no reason to trust them. And what's worse, they could have succeeded if they had.
Like, the first deliberately cruel thing they do is tell Simon not to go into the red knowing they were dropping him directly into the red. A seemingly small and petty prank; they just wanted him scared for his life, he deserved to be a little scared, but it sets the tone of their relationship. He was nervous at the start, but he wasn't scared until they said his life was in danger. If Simon wasn't scared he was going to die the whole time, it wouldn't have lead to: them ignoring him telling them vital information about the expedition (there's a monster down there) while they think he just doesn't want to stay in the submersible they made him scared of. And, if they had told him he was looking for evidence of the SM-8 or what happened to it (you cannot convince me that isn't the real goal of his mission), he would have probably found it. At the beginning he seems almost desperate to prove he's useful to them, so if they hadn't convinced him he was in a death trap, convinced him this was a convoluted execution, gave him any reason to trust them to keep their word, he probably would have kept looking. He probably would have kept coming back for multiple expeditions until he found the SM-8. Ellie was pretty nice up until Simon started ramming into things, there's real precedent that Simon could have found the SM-8. If they had just given him the barest reason to trust them, they could have had the happiest ending they could have. Instead, he was a convict who deserved an execution, so that's what his expedition turned into.
The COI Failed Simon, Insight on Ellie & Ava
The COI’s institutional cruelty and petty desire for vengeance completely blinded them to the answers they needed. They sabotaged their own survival. This entire movie is a fucking shitpost on human nature, dude. We're prejudicistic fuckheads who can't stop hating each other for one reason or another. /hyperbolic
By intentionally withholding the fact that the coordinates were in the red zone, Ava completely freakin' destroys Simon's trust in them from the get-go. He starts the mission already thinking the hull juuust might implode. We're descending thinking this might be the end for Simon before the movie even really starts.
Because they manufactured this panic for a slice of petty retribution, they primed him to interpret every single thing that followed as an assassination attempt, just about. They think he’s just being a coward or throwing a tantrum to get pulled up when he urgently complains. If they had treated him with basic professional transparency, they would have listened when their pilot told them the ocean floor was actively hostile. Their arrogance cost them this mission.
Simon's resourcefulness was the only fucking reason he lived as long as he did. And he made them all pay for it, both psychologically and physically. I think in the end, both Simon and the three people who sent him down got their revenge on each other. Everybody died in the end (some of those going through the prolonged horror of radiation poisoning). He also irradiated that entire deployment hangar, making it unsafe for further use.
Also, I'm a softie Ellie truther!!! She was too caught up in fantasizing about having someone to talk to down there in those tunnels, she was willing to lead Simon straight to the light in an attempt to mutate him like it did to her and her crew. She was only upset Simon had that black box because A) I think there was some kind of King in Yellow shit going on, and B) if the COI had what they need, they would stop sending hemorovers down, and thus, stop looking for her.
The monster's only motive was to get help. Was to help, in a sick kind of way a monster can. Simon was the antagonist in her story.
The COI was so obsessed with containing information and maintaining an absolute power dynamic over a "psycho Eden fuck" that they kept him completely blind. As you said, Simon was desperate to prove his usefulness at the start. If Ava had said, "Look, Simon, we lost a sub down there called the SM-8. It has information we need. Find it," Simon's survival instinct would have aligned perfectly with their mission goals. He would have hunted that shit down and paid his penance. Win-win scenario.
They convinced him it was a convoluted execution with their shitty actions, so he acted like a man on death row. That's only fair.
There is also an irony in how Ava's character operates. She constantly uses the slogan "This is bigger than us" to justify treating Simon like a slab of meat, but the second her own ego and past trauma are poked, she throws her own rules out the window. It's ridiculous and heavily familiar of Simon telling himself it wasn't his fault. That he was forced to do it all. It's a self-soothing mantra to shift blame.
I love her because she's just like him. She knows the anatomy of breaking someone down into parts like Simon does. Ava and Simon are reflections of each other, just on opposite sides of whatever "law" they have. They're both butchers.
When David tries to hold her to her own orders, she snaps: "This is my ship and it's my call." She hid the truth, broke the trust, and turned a sampling mission into a personal vendetta.
It was her call.
The COI could have had their miracle. They could have had the data, the sample, and an expert pilot who was functionally rehabilitated. They traded the future of humanity for the satisfaction of watching "Simon the Butcher" squirm in the dark for a little while.
Human cruelty will be the downfall of us all, is the vibe I'm getting. It's a very "Markiplier" kind of message to send. Peace and love, brother.
I love how the notes for this are just chock full of examples of the most batshit specific things people research for their fanfics. Truly a treasure trove.
blakekathryn
germansingergirl
jacobvanloon
discoholicmusic
annaxmalina
romaincrisis
baratheonpilled
