perfect victims
you need people to see how independent you are, how well you're coping. so they won't see the lost, hurt little girl. because that's not what you see. you see someone who did something terrible . . . who deserves to suffer. who doesn't deserve to live.
sophia makes for such an interesting patient because she is preternaturally aware of the optics of her situation. multiple times she calls out how the team see her in broad stereotypes: a poor little orphan girl or a reckless teenager or a victim of sexual assault. indeed, she seems to live her life in direct reaction to how she fears she will be perceived. thirteen shares that painful self-awareness; she knows how tragic her whole deal looks, a beautiful, brilliant young doctor dying young. that's why she goes to such lengths to avoid being perceived. kutner meanwhile gives the impression of someone who lives their life without a thought to external judgment--thirteen even calls him a kid--but as his discussion with nicole in birthmarks about being the odd one out underlines, he actually understands very well how he is perceived. if he seems careless about how others see him, it is because he is comfortable with how they see him. they haven't skimmed the part that he isn't comfortable with.
when kutner sees a piece of his trauma in sophia, he is quick to believe--as he did with nicole--that trauma makes her nobler. just as he thought that nicole's transracial adoption absolved her of responsibility for her addiction, he thinks sophia's loss of her parents negates any possibility that she could fall prey to normal teenage foibles.
but the minute he realizes that sophia lied about her parents, he switches 180--even insinuating that she also lied about rape. in the context of emancipation, we can chalk this up to the sting of betrayal but the revelation of kutner as a teenage bully in joy to the world puts his reaction to sophia in a new light. in contrast to his excuse-making for nicole, kutner does not think his sins are excused by his trauma. instead, he is haunted enough by them that his anger at himself comes out as anger at the patient's bullies.
in that context, kutner's reaction to sophia parallels how he sees himself. regardless of what she did, sophia clearly suffered something awful. but, for kutner, once her lie was exposed--once the veil of her perfection was pierced--she is no longer worthy of sympathy. for kutner, a child of trauma is either a saint or a sinner, no in between.
in sophia, he saw an ugly part of himself. sophia cloaked herself in lies because, seeing only her sins, she felt undeserving of sympathy. so she dug herself a deeper hole. kutner had no part in his parents' death but it's not hard to imagine that like sophia, he stung at how they saw him as a poor little orphan kid. maybe he made himself a bully--an aggressor--to avoid being the object of pity. in a perverse way, maybe it's easier to re-make yourself into someone deserving of tragedy than it is to accept that something so terrible can happen without rhyme or reason.
.
thirteen doesn't idealize sophia. she knows better than anyone that tragedy doesn't make you a saint. but she also doesn't relate to sophia. she's kind but vaguely clinical, telling sophia to report her assault. though she tries to find sophia's parents, she can't get through to her. she is visibly horrified that sophia stymies every attempt to save her life, but she cannot refute sophia's logic. taub even accuses her of being impersonal because she refuses to use her own experience to convince sophia to live. so taub does his best thirteen impression:
i have huntington’s disease. i'm dying. i don't know when it'll happen, but it'll be sooner than i ever planned. and i'd do anything to stop it.
the only problem? it's not true. at this point, thirteen is still in self-destructive phase. and even after she accepts that she wants to live in last resort, agreeing to the drug trial, thirteen starts finding every possible way to get out of it. she immediately tries to give up her spot, claiming nepotism.
we learn in let them eat cake that, like sophia, thirteen has a secret that is (in her eyes) worse than her hereditary disease: she hated her mother so much that she wished for her to die. she even uses her fear of her future as a red herring to throw foreman off the scent of her real secret, just like how sophia used dead parents and rape to obscure an even worse trauma. (it's a good strategy because the listener feels bad enough for you that they won't question the details.)
thirteen's guilt over her mother explains so much more about her than her diagnosis: her angst over amber's death, her self-destruction, her inability to be vulnerable all have at their core her pervasive sense of guilt. sophia wanted to condemn herself to death--reminiscent of the mother in forever--because some part of her believed that's what she deserved for (accidentally) killing her brother. like sophia, thirteen cannot bear pity not just because it's condescending but because she doesn't see herself as a victim. she doesn't see her mother's death as something terrible that happened to her, but as a way in which she failed as a daughter--as something terrible that she did. thirteen cannot tell sophia that she deserves to live, because she doesn't even believe it for herself.
these stories--sophia's original sin, kutner's bullying, thirteen's guilt--are ultimately about the tension between trauma and agency. trauma, self-inflicted or not, turns someone into an object of sympathy, pity, even the kind of moral virtue that kutner expects of sophia and taub expects of thirteen. that prospect is unbearable for kutner and thirteen, who even more than others on a show that's basically about playing god, need to see themselves as the agent in their own lives--who need to exert control over their lives even if it's destructive.
