More Iron Lung spoilers but now I’m gonna psychoanalyze Simon bc I’m still having a totally normal one about him
Ok so. A big question I’ve seen is what “changed” in Simon between killing other kids when he was younger vs present day in the movie when he’s constantly apologizing, even to the ship for hitting it? Why did “Simon the Butcher lose his nerve”? Well my theory is that he never really had it.
I strongly believe that killing his peers was some form of indoctrination ritual for Eden, and that Simon may not have been fully aware of what he was doing. This “Father”, or some other adult, likely groomed him, lying to him and twisting his view of reality to the point where killing his “brothers” didn’t seem wrong anymore. Maybe whoever it was said it would be better for them to die after the Quiet Rapture. Maybe they said it would be a noble sacrifice so their bodies could feed the last tree. Maybe they even threatened Simon somehow, and told him they’d hurt him (or his mother) if he didn’t kill. Bottom line is, with the environment he was raised in for most of his childhood, I don’t think killing the other kids was his own decision, not fully.
So why doesn’t he seem to show remorse the same way he does for what happened on Filament Station? Well for one thing, it’s typically very difficult for kids to process such a horrific and traumatic thing they’ve done, even in adulthood. I kinda touch on a similar incident of this phenomenon in a Star Wars fic I wrote recently, in which Padmé reflects on her experiences as a child on the planet Shadda-Bi-Boran and still considers the deaths of the children in her care to be her fault, even though that’s an impossibility and what happened was out of her control. She knows it isn’t her fault, but the part of her brain that’s still a child that hasn’t processed that trauma insists that it is.
In Simon’s case, his adult brain knows that what he did was horribly wrong, just as bad - if not worse - than what happened on Filament Station, but his child brain is either not allowing him to process how he feels about that, or shielding him from that trauma by insisting he isn’t to blame. He’s given the monicker “butcher”, his child mind doesn’t understand it - it wasn’t his fault, the adults made him do it - and his adult mind hates it because as a grown man he does understand that what he did makes him a monster.
But manipulated children are not to blame for their actions - the adults that groomed them into those actions when they were meant to be caretakers are. Like I said, Simon and the other children of Eden were most definitely groomed, manipulated, lied to, and abused. They may have known what they were told to do or what was done to them wasn’t right, but they had no control and no autonomy to express that or rebel. This is what happens to children of trauma.
So why is Simon so apologetic for his mistakes as an adult? What changed? Nothing. What we see of Simon as an adult is the way he always was, and is also a reflection of who he was when he was a little boy, before he was made to do such horrible things. In a way, he still is that little boy, the horrors of his past and his own actions preventing him from progressing any further. It’s even evidenced by his actions on the sub - he whines, complains that it’s not fair, throws temper tantrums, shows fear of more punishment; and obviously these are all natural human responses to a situation like that, but with Simon we see him acting like this even before things get really bad for him. His adult personality is clearly very greatly shaped by the child he wasn’t allowed to be. It’s even evidenced in the way he tries to avoid blame for his actions even though he knows what he did (insisting that what happened on Filament Station was an accident, for example, but also repeating over and over that he didn’t know the camera was powered by X-rays after irradiating everyone outside the sub, he says this about as many times as he apologizes for it).
I do think that somewhere, deep deep down, Simon feels the same horror and disgust with himself for what he did as a child that he feels over what he did on Filament Station as an adult, but he won’t allow himself to acknowledge that. There’s a part of his subconscious that’s protecting what’s left of his childhood innocence from what the realization of what he actually did would do to him - and I think we see that come out a little when the monster is tormenting him, when it starts talking about his mother and mocking him for not being as cruel as he used to be - it’s feeding on what he’s come to think of himself as, which is different from reality. Because in reality Simon is not cruel or evil or heartless, that is very much obvious. He’s simply broken and afraid and carrying so much grief and regret, more than he knows what to do with, and without anyone to help him process it, that is how he remains.
At his core, I believe that Simon desperately wants to think he’s a good person, that he deserves to live, but his self-image has been so twisted by the trauma of his childhood and the judgement that followed from others who learned about what he did that he has a hard time fully believing it.
