one of the things that strikes me so hard about ian is that his character is a very deftly handled testament to the fact that everyone has the capacity to be an abuser, and to be an abuser while fully thinking of themself as doing the right thing. ian has convinced himself that the sexual abuse jeremy revealed that he suffered from greg is just delusion on jeremy's part because he (jeremy) is traumatized from sandra's death. he reflects upon his prior violent behavior with jeremy in trying to push jeremy to confess when he (ian) believed jeremy murdered greg, and rightly acknowledges it as bad and himself as being at fault... but only in the context that what he did overwhelmed jeremy's fragile mental state and pushed him to believe the "delusion" that greg was sexually abusing him. basically he's reflecting on his behavior not because of genuine growth and contrition, but because he's doing mental gymnastics out of unwillingness to believe that his father, someone he trusted and cared about, was a pedophile and a rapist. ian has a consistent tendency to become physically and emotionally violent with jeremy when he gets heated enough -- from attacking jeremy to holding him down and threatening to rape him to accusing him of having lusted after greg and made up a fake sexual relationship with him out of jealousy over his mother's marriage with greg. never mind taking jeremy's word for it about his own sexual abuse and trying to listen to and support him, he invalidates him, talks over him, gaslights him, implicitly calls him insane, and accuses him of making false claims out of envy. this is abusive behavior.
and the thing is, ian is not malicious. he's not like greg, actively scheming to keep jeremy subservient to him, holding threats of his mother's wellbeing over jeremy's head to make sure he stays in line. in many ways he's on the same playing field, so to speak, as jeremy: a teenager flailing to make heads or tails of the situation that he's found himself in. and since so much of the story following greg's murder is from his pov, the audience truly does experience and feel just how much he's struggling, just how hard he's trying to understand what's going on, and just how frustrated and powerless and out of his depth he feels in all this. and notice how he frames his actions: "if [jeremy] wasn't that stubborn, i wouldn't have gotten so pissed." he knows getting violent with jeremy is wrong, he knows he shouldn't do it, but he doesn't think of himself as an abuser because he sees his actions as temporary lapses borne of extreme emotion. he doesn't reflect on what it says about him as a person that he has a consistent pattern of doing this, and that that consistent pattern makes him an abuser. in fact, i have to say -- and i'm very impressed by this -- there was no one single scene of ian lashing out at jeremy that made me go, "oh, ian is an abuser," right at that very moment. i had to actually think about what he's been doing, how he's been treating jeremy, over the course of these many chapters, before i realized that he's abusive. and i think that's very true to life: many abusers, like ian, aren't constantly plotting and scheming and spinning webs to make sure their victim can't get away from them. they "just" lash out in moments of anger, again and again, and feel bad about it afterwards, again and again. ian, more than any other character i've seen before him, reminds you just how easy it is to dismiss your behavior under extreme emotion as occasional failings, and never interrogate any bigger picture of the pattern behind it. it's very much a trap that any of us can fall into
