hi, your kim takes are top notch. I want to pick your brain about the post you made about the rcm possibly taking away his sidearm. If you want to expand on that, of course
TY!!! And Yes I can: On a first pass through the game, Kim’s relationship to his sidearm is easy to read as basic cop vigilance, but once you start watching for it, any time a situation threatens to go bad, his hand goes to the gun. Sometimes even when nothing has happened yet, only when he is on edge, like walking into the book club. And sometimes that vigilance does escalate things, like with The Pigs, where he pulls his gun and starts shouting.
The badge is abstract authority. The gun is authority you can touch. It has weight. It sits on his body. It's physical security and responsibility in one.
The sidearm is the RCM saying: we trust your judgment in the final second.
The gun is symbolically physical in a way the badge is not. Kim is already a seolite man in an institution and a city that does not let him forget it: his authority is conditional. He has to be sharper, and calmer, and more correct, but worse is that the badge does not protect him from being scrutinized. in some ways, it also makes the scrutiny worse. It means he is someone who has been allowed into power, which means people are always waiting to decide he has misused it, failed it, or never deserved it.
So after Eyes dies, that matters in a truly awful way, because grief makes Kim extremely administratively vulnerable. If he is too numb, too angry, too honest, too strange, too changed by it, then suddenly his grief becomes a liability, and the first thing they would take is the gun. Without it, he is behind a desk. Without it, he is no longer trusted to be the person he has spent his entire adult life proving he can be. And worse: without it, he loses the choice of it. The finality. The terrible comfort of knowing that, whatever else has been taken from him, there is still one decision no one else can make on his behalf.
If I wanted to read into it further, I could also talk about juxtaposition. Harry loses his gun, willingly. or, more accurately: Harry disposes of his gun during the bender, along with his badge, his ledger, his memory, his name, and almost every object that proves he exists in the world as a detective except his green coat, and the interesting thing is that Harry does not treat the lost gun with normal professional alarm at first. Everyone around him understands it as a disaster, but Harry’s relationship to it is slippery and avoidant. The gun is gone because the part of Harry that could be trusted with it was also gone. Harry is the nightmare version of what happens when the performance fails, so Kim clings to the gun because it means he is still fit to choose. Harry loses the gun because he has already tried to abdicate choice entirely. And I think this is one of the reasons Kim is so fascinated by Harry, maybe even envious in some humiliating way. Harry has already done the unthinkable. He has become the institutional cautionary tale. He has made his grief, addiction, instability and suicidal ideation so public that everyone knows. The RCM knows. The union knows. The cafeteria manager knows. Strangers know. Children know. And somehow he is still standing there. Still a lieutenant double-yefreitor. Still allowed to come back.
Kim cannot afford that kind of collapse. He cannot afford to become funny, he cannot afford to become embarrassing. He cannot afford to be pitied, watched, handled, or removed from the field. So he does not heal. He remains fit for duty, and he makes certain that he keeps the gun, because the gun means the RCM still trusts him in the only way that still gives his life meaning. He knows it. He hates it. He tries not to think about it. This is his place in the world. If they take that away from him, he does not know what is left.
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