Caleb’s Episode 49 Confession Meta
Time for some things that are probably obvious af but they’re Sad and Angsty so I’m going to through them in a meta piece. Because I like to meta about Sad Things and that’s just Caleb through-and-through. So we’re going to talk about Caleb’s episode 49 confession and a few things we can derive from what was said.
I think his comments about Trent were quite telling, both about his behaviour presently, and also about how he thinks about/feels about Trent.
“He believed that the unwashed masses relied on their base instincts and the highest calling was to rise above the muck and control the cattle for the good of all.”
This quote says a lot about why, when he’s trying to hide desperately from Trent, he covers himself in dirt, and mud. Perhaps taking that too literally, but he never thinks that Trent will look for him, or notice him if he’s just one of the ‘cattle’.
When he sees the two elves from the Assembly in Felderwind, the first thing he does is, not just rub dirt on himself, he full on faceplants into the ground and rubs dirt all over himself as an instinctual response. It’s like Nott’s porcelain mask, it gives him comfort, it helps him hide, it makes him feel safe and invisible. Which is exactly what Caleb wants to be.
He’s been special. He’s been singled out. He’s been the top of the class, the one everyone’s watching, and pushing, and believing in him and it nearly destroyed him. Now he wants to be no-one. He wants to be nothing, not least because that’s about how he views himself self-esteem wise. But that’s safe. Being noticed isn’t. He put his hood up in the victory pit. He covered himself with mud so that he blends in with everyone else.
I also think that that little incident with Jester, when they talked about money, it was a rejection of ideals, not Jester’s ideals, Jester I think just accidentally triggered this. But I think it was Trent’s ideals in terms of believing that peasants are lesser in some way, and that was a small rejection of those ideals.
While he’s telling the group his story, he abbreviates part of his story, just saying, “I went a little crazy.” Later, when he’s discussing Trent, he says, “He was a little mad himself.”
This connects him and Trent. That implication in that word ‘himself’ ties them together, he’s effectively saying ‘I went a little crazy, and Trent, he was a little mad, too’ it’s this uncomfortable link that he makes between himself and the man who groomed him, and brainwashed him, and abused him.
After he tells the group about the crystal experiments, he then says, ‘But everything was for empire...We were at war. We are at war. There were many that felt that way, that feel this way.”
That kind of ideology was fed to Caleb, Astrid, and Edowulf so exclusively that all three of them, upon having a false memory implanted into their minds showing their parents had been disloyal to the empire, were willing to murder them at Trent’s command. They killed other people that Trent brought them, dissenters, who were executed by these teenagers under this justification of everything being for your empire, your country, your society.
And that justification becomes an incredible powerful thing within the cycle of Trent’s abuse. Because it’s the justification that Caleb and the others use for the terrible things that they’ve done? So when Trent does terrible things to them, under the same justification, they’re almost forced, psychologically, to condone it. Because if they don’t condone Trent’s actions towards them, how can they condone their own actions against other people?
What Caleb does immediately after he tells the group about Trent’s twisted crystal experiments is to start making excuses for him. ‘It was for the empire’ ‘we were at war’ ‘it was for the greater good’ which also minimises the trauma and abuse that he endured.
A lot of traumatised people do that with their abusers, and I’m not a psychologist or anything, so don’t quote me on this, but I think, definitely in Caleb’s case, it’s again about taking some of the spotlight off of himself. But I also think it’s a fear response. It’s the same reason he smears himself with dirt and mud. He smears these harsh truths with gentling justifications and excuses (bullshit as they are) because if Trent ever found out he had told anyone about this, if he ever found out Caleb had complained about this, and disclosed details of his little experiments, that probably doesn’t even bear thinking about for Caleb.
Trent is a master manipulator that groomed Caleb in a likely very practised, very specific, very targeted way. He found a young boy from a small town with very little means who wanted to prove himself, and make something better of himself, and twisted him utterly. He made Caleb feel special, and important with his little private interviews, and chats, and then putting him into “advanced classes” as Caleb called them.
He twisted and controlled him to the point that Caleb consented (I use that word loosely, because coercion and ‘consent’ under this kind of abuse is not consent at all. Nevermind the fact Caleb was a minor at the time, but in his mind, that’s what I believe he thinks it was) to have agonising experiments conducted on him for this man.
Trent still influences everything that Caleb does, everything he thinks, everything he feels, everything he fears, everything he says. From what we’ve seen, he’s incredibly charming, just as a person, and also via some kind of strange magical influence which he used on Yasha. Imagine that presence, that influence, that power exerted on an impressionable, eager, hungry fifteen year old kid in a very concentrated, very personal manner for over two years.
And that all happened a long time ago, but psychologically, for Caleb, it didn’t. He was in an asylum for eleven years, but during that time, he still had the false memory that Trent implanted in him, and I highly doubt anyone would have been talking shit about the empire there. Abuse like Caleb’s needs to be validated from an external source before it can be believed.
So, really, Caleb spent eleven years trapped inside his own head feeling like he’d failed Trent, he’d failed his empire, his country, his home, the girl that he loved, the other students, literally everything he’d been taught to believe in.
Then one day someone magically zapped his brain and lifted that and he remembered everything. And from there he just went into a state of complete and utter panic. He admits himself that he’s been running for a long time, and that he’s been afraid all that time. He hasn’t exactly had time to process what he went through, to work out literally anything. All he’s been focused on is surviving.
Which makes a lot of sense. Because those memories are painful, and difficult, and it is so much easier to just blame himself, and hate himself, and punish himself than to examine what might have been done to him, how badly it might have damaged him, and how this man that he likely greatly respected and looked up to was always ever only using him.
-The last thing from that conversation/confession I want to talk about is: “I have been using you all” followed up with “If they see you with me they will use you to get to me” and “I don’t want one more thing on my head – you guys....It’s probably too late.”
I am SURE I’ve written meta about Caleb’s feelings towards the group before now, but this is kind of a more canon confirmation of what I thought.
Caleb was literally conditioned to be a weapon. He was made to execute dissenters of the empire from the ages of 15-17. Trent forced him to brutally kill his own fucking parents, I feel like he wasn’t exactly encouraged to care about people.
Caleb was used. He was taught that people were either useful, or they were not, they were ‘unwashed masses that relied on their base instincts’. And by ‘base instincts’ I’m assuming that Trent included ‘basic human decency/respect/caring about others’ in there. Love is a no-no.
So Caleb is battling with two years solid abuse and actual literal magical brainwashing plus torture, plus god knows what else plus eleven years of solitude in which he’s had time to brood on what an awful, pathetic failure he is to everyone and everything, and then like...5 months where he’s been half-starving to death, terrified out of his wits, and on the run. I feel like it’s a bit much to expect the dude to be able to admit that he cares about these people, even when he does.
But that denial, that excuse, that lame lie ‘I have been using you all’ is another dirt mask for Caleb. It’s something that keeps him safe. If Trent were to appear, right now, and demand to know if he cared about these people, Caleb is well practised in being able to say ‘no, I don’t, I’ve just been using them to fulfil my own ends and protect me’. It’s a protection thing, except this time it’s not himself he’s protecting, it’s them.
There’s also, I think, a deeper, far more twisted layer in that by saying this, it’s one way he can not fail Trent. He’s still sticking to this part of his teaching. He’s not being stupid and weak and falling in with the unwashed masses, he’s just using them, the way Trent used people.
I don’t think that Caleb consciously wants to be like Trent, but I do still think there’s over a decade of self-hatred and feeling like a failure, as well as a nice, generous heaping of Stockholm syndrome. I think this is a very strange, twisted combination of his desire, subconsciously, to still be linked with Trent, along the lines of linking their madness which...could not be more different, but hey! Abuse don’t give a shit about ur logic.
I think it’s also the fact that on some level he hates Trent. But he also hates himself. So telling himself that he’s like Trent, and believing he’s doing the things to others that Trent did to him gives him a false sense of power over him, but it’s also a bit like his fire magic? It’s a way of retraumatising himself, and punishing himself, but also I think, a bit like Trent’s crystal experiments, it’s punishment, and it’s pain, and it’s torture being used as a means of strengthening himself.
It’s him giving in to Trent’s teachings which are literally everywhere. He has these slips where he wonders why he’s with this group because they can’t help him achieve his goals, and he tells himself they’re slowing him down, and that’s Trent talking, not Caleb.
But then he utterly undermines it by saying that if anyone sees them with him, they’ll hurt him, and that he doesn’t want their lives set to his account, too. If he was using them, he literally wouldn’t say any of that, because it risks exposing himself in order to protect them.
I think that, in a massively oversimplified version of the real complicated psychological mess that is Caleb Widogast: the things he says and to an extent the things that he thinks, and feels are Trent.
The things that he DOES are Caleb.
He says that he shouldn’t be travelling with these people. That they’re not going to help him. That he’s wasting his time with them.
But he stays.
He says that he’s using them, and he won’t admit that he cares about them (because that’s dangerous, and not allowed).
But he literally rips open the most painful experiences of his life, risks himself to warn them about his past and what he’s been through and what he’s done in order to protect them.
Caleb says that he doesn’t care because he can’t. He can’t let himself care. Because it’s terrifying, and dangerous and has been used against him over and over and he’s spent years of his life believing that it’s wrong. And it tears him apart because he does. He does care. And it’s killing him, because it terrifies him.
Listen the tl;dr of this thing is that i love caleb widogast a whole lot, i think liam is doing an incredible job portraying a trauma and abuse survivor and, uh, i will fight you with thousands and thousands of ranting words of meta if ur rude about him. Have a nice day.
