Itâs so hard having worked with TBI patients foe 3 years and trying to navigate media and fandom wherein concussions are either nonexistent (characters can get hit on the head and fully knocked out all the time and be fine) or a bit of fun flavor to casually add to your whump (and it goes away in a few days and again theyâre totally fine). And Iâm not saying itâs wrong to write this way! Itâs fiction! I just have to spend a looooot of time REMINDING myself that itâs fiction.
Now, the NFL on the other hand. NOT fiction and NOT okay.
Okay it IS kinda wild tho that on Leverage, where concussions arenât real, there is one very serious episode about the long-term consequences of repeated concussions. And the person doing the brunt of the emotional work around this in that episode is Eliot âgets hit in the head several times a weekâ Spencer. And at no point is there a connection drawn between the two situations. And then itâs never brought up again.
Again, itâs TV, heâs practically a cartoon character, itâs fine. But it is also kinda unsettling.
I'm willing to suspend my disbelief for Eliot, but...yeah
I tend to believe that Eliot is That Type of dog coded where he doesnât mention his own issues. Not really. Because heâs gone through worse, obviously, and others are still worse off and he does the best he can all things considered.
Somewhere buried in my notes and fic snippets is the idea that Brianna is the one to notice it. Because like, Hardison and Parker are always around Eliot, and heâs always been that way (theyâre too close to the problem to see any changes). Any change Sophie notices is just them getting older, and sheâs still a bit wrapped up in her grief when Redemption starts that sheâs not paying attention. Harry only knows Eliot from Redemption onwards. But Brianna? She may not have met Eliot, but sheâs heard the stories. She knows the man. And heâs weirdly angry. Snappish sometimes for no reason. Not just grumpy. (There were examples in my notes, like Eliot literally breaking the TV remote. Stuff that was probably just not the greatest writing (sorry Redemption fans) but made him extra cartoonishly pissed off) And Brianna concocts some con that just so happens to require Eliot to have a CT/MRI/whatever (listen my concussions havenât been bad enough that Iâve never scans) with Harry backing her up, because she thinks that Hardison and Parker would shut her down, knows Eliot would brush off any concern, and Sophie would stage an intervention and scare Eliot off with too direct confrontation. Thereâd still be that confrontation (Brianna and Harry are not slick and would struggle to keep up their fake con to support their scheme) but yeah. Maybe one day the fic will actually be fully written, but thatâs my two cents.
