[ID: Greyscale art of Sophie Devereaux from Leverage Redemption wearing two items of the stolen Louvre jewels - the sapphire earrings and necklace. The sapphires are the only coloured part of the art. She's leaning on a chair, and has her other hand on her hip, while looking up and into the distance thoughtfully. End ID]
sophie loves and respects parker very dearly, but you cannot tell me that in original recipe leverage at least, there wasn't an element of their dynamic that was just sophie going "she looks like a real life barbie doll and by god i am going to brush her hair and put her in a cute little outfit"
sophie’s expression in the inside job when she notices & picks up parker’s bunny is so sweet. like yeah seeing a stuffed bunny amidst the extremely spartan, dark warehouse filled with knives is a little adorable and a little heartbreaking and so very parker.
so is this parker's side job now? her personal passion project? finding the most reprehensible marks and putting the Fear of Parker in them? is this how she's gonna spend her weekends?
i am occasionally reminded that parker knows how to shoot/handle a gun competently in redemption s1e3 and it's like, eliot, mr. "i dont like guns", why are you teaching people this.
(i am aware parker has a handgun in s1e1 but i dont think the skills are transferable to shotguns and its never really established if she can actually hit anything and also i doubt archie would train her in it bc its not a gentleman thief skill and by the same logic i doubt parker would teach herself bc its not particularly thief-y)
anon, this ask was like an early christmas present for me. i love when people are "wrong" in interesting ways, or if not wrong then... take a different view to what i do. so, parker and guns. i can't believe i've never made a post about this.
(heads up, i've stolen vast swathes of this post from conversations i've had with both @ghostlyarchaeologist and @aardvaark. words are all mine but ideas are mutually borne, so thank you both for being sounding boards at various points in the past. everyone go follow heather and adrian cos they're better at this than i am.)
right, let's talk about the pilot, becuase parker can absolutely hit things with that. both eliot and nate know immediately that hardison isn't a real danger, but the second nate hears the safety beng turned off there he whirls around and matches her threat; that's what you do when you know someone's not making pointless bluffs.
also, boiling this back to it's utter basics, what's the main skillset you use in order to handle a pistol competently? hand-eye coordination. which is something we know for sure parker has in spades; she's a master pickpocket and she learns fast.
we need to remember, also, that parker's initial sense of morality is completely fucked. or... not morality, exactly, but sense of what does and doesn't count as wrong, what does or doesn't count as harm? because there's that scene in homecoming, right, where everyone's protesting the concept of eliot having to do the thing they hired him for, and parker weighs in with "i never hurt anyone." except... like, the FIRST thing we know about parker is that she blew up a house as a child. it's canonical that the parents survived, but parker also spent six months in juvie and has broken out of prison multiple times and lived on the street for god knows how long and stork job shows she can fight pretty well pre-leverage, too. i'll come back to all this in a minute.
her being a crack shot with a gun is... not really incongrous with who she was pre-leverage. archie describes her when he found her as "a danger to herself and to others" and like YEAH no i buy that. i buy that completely.
next up, what about things that aren't pistols? well.
that's a fucking sniper rifle.
that's a fucking sniper rifle.
that is, and i cannot stress this enough, a fucking sniper rifle.
so yeah, i'd say that those skills are transferrable. she can take out an armed gunman and tie him up with duct tape, without causing a scuffle, and re-aim the gun. with enough consistency that nate knows for sure she'll manage it in less than three seconds. sure, we can chalk some of that up to parker at this point having had four seasons of eliot here's-how-you-take-out-thugs-with-guns fight training, but... i think at this point it's pretty fair to say that (regardless of the provinance of her skills) parker's kinda a good shot, actually.
okay, let's revisit that point about morality, because there are kinda a bunch of really important touchstones here.
so, john rogers once said that "parker is the second most dangerous person on the team, and eliot would argue first most dangerous." she's the team member with the least qualms about hurting people, always, and that's a detail that tends to get brushed over.
she would have killed tara here. she makes that extremely clear. i can't listen to that "Bye, now." and not get shivers.
talking of shivers.... "I want to do the right thing."
because, look, parker's not eliot. she's not thawing ice all the way through, and yet we're shown again and again that, despite that, "She has the nuclear winter inside her." there will always be a part of her who's first instinct is to jump, to hide, to run, to kill, to not care because caring hurts. but there's also a part of her that is softer than any of the team, that is a child who'll never grow up and yet grew up too fast. she grew up beaten, bruised, neglected and starved yet she's something wonderful - but she knows she's broken, she knows they all call her crazy, and it hurts. she wants to do the right thing, make the right choice, but she hates that it'll never be her first instinct. and the thing is? that's okay. she went through hell and back and turned out someone strange and weird and at times unkind, but... the team like how she turned out. hardison likes how she turned out. and that's worth the world - she just needs to remember it and believe it and use HER skills instead of trying to be something she's not. that is what parker and eliot's conversation in the ice cave is about, if you strip it back to it's bare essentials. parker doesn't want to be normal, she just wants to be normal enough for her friends.
has parker ever killed someone? i don't know. i don't know if she even thinks like that, in such clear terms - as i already talked about, parker's definition of 'hurt' is not the same as anyone else's.
so let's talk about broken wing job for a second, because absolutely everyone overlooks the reason why parker does the job in the first place - "You brought a gun? To my bar?"
because. yeah.
"Those guys are gonna rob this store, right? Which is fine. I don’t mind robbers who aren’t robbing me, or my friends, or kids or… But they brought a gun to the party, and that changes all the rules."
this is season five. she investigates the theives because she's bored - but she only decides to stop them because they brought a gun. that's the kind of very specific morality you only get after being the good guy for a very long time, and i do think that hanging around eliot probably helped affect that a bit.
actually, fuck it, look at what else she says about this whole thing in the broken wing job.
"No cops. No cops. That will actually increase the chances of people getting hurt. [...] Seeing a uniform in the middle of stealing something could cause you to panic, make bad decisions..."
"These guys aren’t that good, which is actually another reason why we should do this, ‘cause sooner or later, they’re gonna make a mistake. Someone’s gonna get hurt."
so. yeah. on the one hand, this is weapons safety 101, for someone in parker's position. "[The Leverage crew] don't use guns because - when guns come out, people die. This attitude very much comes out from traditional American crime literature, and also from talking to our professional criminal friends. Guns are messy, when they show up things escalate, you take a longer, harder fall when doing a crime with a gun - professional criminals are pathologically averse to carrying weapons." i'm quoting john rogers here, because i can, but you'll hear similar in any training manual, and it's especially relevant to parker's actions both here and elsewhere in the show.
on the other hand, mix up all those statements and it definitely implies parker has fucked up badly in the past. again, i don't know if she's ever killed someone. but.
well, for funsies, let's look at the rest of JR's above statement about gun safety (i'm quoting from his blog on the gone fishin' job, in case you wanted to find the source): "You do not point a gun at anything or anyone you are not willing to kill. [...] I had that drilled into my head at an early age. A gun has two settings - holstered and murderous. 'Wounded' is an accidental condition. Eliot in particular is aware of this, and one of the many reasons he does not use a gun is because he is trying to, well, not kill people anymore. Hardison is magnificently awful with weaponry. Although Parker is probably a fine shot, she's trying to play nice by the new rules, and only brought a weapon to the meet in the pilot because she wanted to get paid."
and all that is, more than anything else, the core and crux of everything i'm saying here. factor in how broken parker is, how we know she's made mistakes in the past, throw in archie's "a danger - to herself and to others" line, think about the tara rooftop incident... there's a picture emerging here. it's not a nice one, but it's unpleasantly clear.
so. where does that leave us?
well, it at least leaves me extremely certain for a vast number of reasons that eliot didn't need to teach parker how to shoot a rigged game.
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Leverage (US TV 2008)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sophie Devereaux & Parker (Leverage), Sophie Devereaux & Team Leverage
Characters: Sophie Devereaux (Leverage), Parker (Leverage), Archie Leach (Leverage)
Additional Tags: Episode: s03e03 The Inside Job (Leverage), POV Sophie Devereaux (Leverage), Character Study
Summary:
That’s the problem with having so many distinct identities. The differences are defined by name and accent. She’s constrained, confined to the letters of her name.
Sophie Devereaux is the kind of person who would comfort Parker then send her to Hardison with gentle words of encouragement to talk about how she’s feeling. Sophie Devereaux is the type to only engage on a surface level and direct the deeper issues to someone else with the ease of someone who doesn’t care.
So why does she want to do more? Why does she want to help? She’s supposed to be Sophie Devereaux.
(or: watch a grifter's highly developed survival instincts go head to head with the dangerous realization that she’s come to care about people outside of herself)
added a graphic to elaborate on the specifics of what i’m trying to say.
basically, everybody changes all the time for all sorts of reasons. don’t let the myth of static selfhood trick you into thinking you’re unworthy. the only way to go is forward, which would be the case no matter what, and that’s okay.
Autism acceptance includes accepting all autistic manners of communication.
That means supporting autistic people who talk in a "very childish" way. (I do this a lot irl)
Autistic people who do "TV talking" (this means talking like a character from your favorite media,basically talking in quotes and copying their speech patterns,as far as I know)
Autistic people who use echolia.
Autistic people who are very awkward/quirky when they communicate.
Autistic people who are overly technical,or have very sophisticated and articulate speech.
Autistic people who mumble.
Autistic people who talk really fast.
Autistic people who can't control their tone of voice/inflection.
Autistic people who talk in a monotone voice.
Autistic people who use different kind of sounds,or body language to communicate.
Autistic people who talk slowly and draw out their syllables.
Autistic people who use a lot of sentance fillers.
Autistic people who refer to themselves in the third person
Autistic people who use Aac devices,communication cards,etc etc.
Edit: acceptance of nonverbal autistics is also necessary. Nonverbal people deserve love,respect,acceptance,accommodation and support.
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