So episode 3 is up, and we need to talk
The relationship between Shay and Charles O’Donnell is, for lack of a better word, toxic. About as toxic as the vat of sludge the Joker supposedly fell into as a child.
It is a trend in Shay’s life. Willingly or unwillingly, with or without her active participation, she gravitates to less than ideal people, and even though she proves herself completely capable of fighting back, sometimes she just... doesn’t. Especially if it’s a bit of an older man, someone with authority. A father figure, so to speak.
And to be fair, she hasn’t had the best luck with father figures. On the good guy/ /arsehole spectrum, O’Donnell is firmly on the arsehole side, as was that priest in Oxford. And she doesn’t immediately seem to notice or care.
But Peter does. Peter notices. Peter grew up in a normal, healthy family. He has had training on how to recognise victims of abuse. Peter both knows what a normal situation looks like, and what are the red flags are. And he’s been taught to speak up, by his job and his father.
And Shay calls him a people pleaser, and it gets thrown right back at her. And neither of them are wrong. But they also both are so very far off the mark in what they actually mean. Shay sees Peter as just another drone, someone willing to butter up the right people and climb the ladder at the cost of everything else. She sees him as a young O’Donnell. And Peter sees her as a coward, someone who will meekly go along with whoever has the loudest voice.
But Peter still has standards. He has an upper limit to how far he’s willing to go along with someone, how much he’ll let slide, and he’ll let no one, no matter how powerful, push past that limit.
And Shay is almost the opposite. She falls in line as a defense mechanism, an instinct to keep her head low and out of the line of fire. In a low-stakes situation, she can be her sassy self, but when an authority figure starts yelling, she forgets how to fight back. Unless she’s not the one being threatened, of course.
They are two halves of one whole idiot.
