Your post about Mary seeming nice and showing every sign of a classic sociopath - Im so sorry you went through that with your mother. Mary makes my skin crawl because she is my ex. Everyone loved him, he was funny and cheerful and put on such a good act in public & evil as soon as the door closed. I'm distressed people don't see through Mary. People trust because they never suffered a psycho/sociopath and it hurts to see. They miss the entire point of Mary: actions, not words, count most.
Hi Lovely!!
I’m not sure if you’re talking about this post or about the read-more of this post, since they both reference my mother, but yes, I feel like a lot of us who have dealt with emotional abuse, manipulation, and / or gaslighting immediately picked up on Mary’s devilry; studying her character has been a healing process for me, and lucky for everyone else it had me churn out a tonne of meta about her. It troubles me also that people just don’t see that she is the true sociopath of the show, but I can’t condemn them because I didn’t see it at first either (I didn’t really clue in until I was distancing myself from my mother). People like her character excel in fooling people into a false sense of security with them, and able to manipulate situations in their favour – it’s ESPECIALLY easier if said victims are people who love them. But as soon as things aren’t going the way they want, or as soon as the people they’re manipulating aren’t playing by their rules anymore, they seemingly change.
The only way that we can help people understand that abuse is simply not just physical is with patience and raising awareness that emotional abuse is a real thing – it leaves its own invisible scars and bruises that can take even longer to heal. By presenting the tells that I have observed in my own life, I have been able to have people see why I read Mary the way I do, and that’s all I ask for; I’m not asking for them to hate her or change their own reading of the character, but to just understand that I also have my own reasons for reading her as a villain.
Sometimes, people don’t see things until someone who has experienced similar things lays it all out on the table for everyone.
I’m sorry that you had dealt with such horror in your own life, and I truly hope you are doing better. *HUGS*
