easy to forget but book jon snow is great actually. he gets so drunk he cries in his first chapter. he's 16 years old and laser focused on loan negotiation. he keeps getting promoted against his will. he's the chosen fantasy protagonist with the worst genre awareness ever. he implements pro immigration social reforms. he has a giant albino pet wolf. he cuts a guy's head off. he thinks he invented cunnilingus. he's been dead for 15 years.
Thomas Barrow begins Downton Abbey as one of the sharpest sources of friction downstairs. He's ambitious, status-conscious, resentful, and quick to look for advantage, and the early seasons let him occupy a fairly antagonistic role beside O'Brien. He wants promotion, security, and some form of control in a world that offers him very little genuine safety. The series never builds him as a simple schemer, though; even at his worst, there's always something defensive and hungry underneath the nastiness, as if nearly every act of aggression is also an attempt to stay one step ahead of humiliation.
As the series goes on, he becomes one of its clearest studies in loneliness. Thomas is a gay servant in a world where that leaves him vulnerable to blackmail, disgrace, social isolation, and the constant need to monitor himself. The show uses that reality in ways that are sometimes blunt and sometimes surprisingly sensitive, but it's central to the whole arc. His manipulativeness, watchfulness, careerism, and the almost constant edge in him all make more sense when you keep in view how little room he has to be openly known without risk.
He also carries a very particular kind of class pain. Thomas is intelligent and capable, but most of his life offers him no respectable way to convert those qualities into freedom, and that tension shapes a lot of his bitterness. He can see more than people assume he can, he often wants more than his station allows, and he lives in an environment where a servant's mistake or scandal can permanently narrow his future. Much of his cruelty grows out of that, and so does his drive.
By the final seasons, the show shifts him out of pure antagonism and into something sadder, more exposed, and more adult. His failed 'cure', his professional dead ends, the loss of the few attachments he'd managed to form, and his suicide attempt all push the character away from the old role of house villain and toward a fuller portrait of a man who's spent years making himself difficult to wound and still ends up deeply wounded anyway. That later version of Thomas doesn't erase the earlier one, but it explains more of him.
Psychology
Depression fits Thomas very well, especially once the series stops treating his misery mainly as abrasiveness and starts showing what daily life feels like from inside it. He spends long stretches of the show isolated, joyless, resentful, and visibly cut off from any stable sense that life might improve. He can still be active, spiteful, and ambitious inside that state, which is part of why the depression is easy to miss if someone expects it to look quiet or passive; with Thomas, it often looks like chronic dissatisfaction hardened into temperament. By the time he attempts suicide in Season 6, the hopelessness is no longer subtext but the plain emotional truth of his arc.
Shame is just as central; Thomas lives with the constant pressure of concealment, and the show keeps returning to how damaging that is. His sexuality leaves him exposed to danger in ways the people around him can rarely understand fully, and it teaches him to treat vulnerability as something that can become catastrophic very quickly, which helps explain why he's so defensive, why he often strikes first, and why his moments of tenderness are usually followed by some attempt to regain control of himself. The series even gives him the awful storyline where he goes to London for treatment meant to 'cure' his homosexuality, which says a great deal about how desperate and self-loathing he's become by that point.
There's also a strong pattern of social hypervigilance in him. Thomas reads hierarchy, mood, and weakness quickly; he notices who has influence, who's slipping, who can be manipulated, and where a person is most likely to crack. That doesn't make him more emotionally healthy than the people aruond him, but it does mean he's rarely socially unaware. He's often very aware, and he uses that awareness to protect himslf, improve his position, or wound first when he feels threatened. The problem is that this habit leaves him trapped in a very adversarial relationship with other people; he spends so much time scanning for danger and leverage that simple trust becomes almost impossible for him.
What keeps the character from becoming one-note is that he's deeply susceptible to kindness, attention, and belonging when he actually believes they're real. He responds strongly to being chosen, trusted, or wanted, and some of his worst collapses follow moments where those things appear possible and then vanish again. That's one reason the depression reads so convincingly - Thomas isn't someone who never wanted connection, he wanted it very badly, he just lived in circumstances that made wanting it humiliating, dangerous, or both, and he built a personality around managing that contradiction badly.
Strengths and Flaws
Thomas is highly perceptive. He reads class dynamics, interpersonal tension, and weakness quickly, and that makes him one of the most socially alert people in the house. Early on, he often uses that perception for petty or destructive ends, but the perception itself is real and consistent. He knows how people work, he notices what they're hiding, and he's very rarely naive about how power moves through a room.
He's also competent in ways the household repeatedly ends up relying on. Thomas works his way through several positions at Downton, serves in the war, understands the rhythms of the house, and by the end is considered fit to succeed Carson as butler. That progression wouldn't be possible if he were merely malicious or opportunistic; the series is clear that he's difficult, but it's just as clear that he's capable. He knows the job, takes professional pride in it, and has the discipline to carry responsibility when it's finally placed fully in his hands.
Another strength is that he can change, though never quickly and never in a sentimental straight line. Thomas isn't one of those characters who becomes soft once enough people are nicer to him - his growth is slower and less flattering than that. He remains prickly, proud, and capable of meanness even late in the series; what changes is his ability to let care in, to feel gratitude without immediately poisoning it, and to stop treating every human interaction as a contest he has to win.
His first major flaw is cruelty. Thomas can be petty, vindictive, and extremely willing to exploit someone weaker or more trusting than himself if it improves his position or relieves his own bitterness for a moment. William, Bates, and Baxter all get some version of this from him at different times; his pain often sharpens him into somebody who knows exactly where to aim.
He's also deeply defensive. Thomas has trouble accepting help cleanly, admitting hurt before it curdles into hostility, and trusting affection unless it arrives in a form he can control, which makes him harder to reach and also leaves him constantly misjudging which relationships are actually safe. He often ruins or strains the very connections he most wants because he cannot tolerate the vulnerability they require.
A third flaw is that he can become trapped in grievance. Thomas has many real reasons to feel angry, but he also has a habit of arranging his whole emotional life around injury and exclusion. Once he's fixed on the idea that he's been wronged, he struggles to loosen his grip on it, which makes him tenacious but also exhausting. He can stay psychologically pinned to an insult, slight, or lost possibility long after someone healthier would have redirected that energy elsewhere.
Relationships
SARAH O'BRIEN
O'Brien is Thomas' most important early ally and one of the clearest expressions of who he is in the first half of the show. Together, they form a defensive, poisonous little unit built on class resentment, opportunism, and mutual recognition. O'Brien understands Thomas' sharpness and uses it, and Thomas understands hers and works alongside it. Their bond is never warm in any simple sense, but it is real; for a long time, she's one of the only people in the house with whom he doesn't have to pretend to be softer, duller, or less ambitious than he is.
JOHN BATES
Bates brings out the ugliest, most competitive version of Thomas. Bates arrives carrying moral authority, experience, and a kind of quiet self-possession that Thomas immediately dislikes and tries to undermine. Some of this is careerism and some of it is personal resentment; Bates has a steadiness Thomas lacks, and Thomas seems to react to that like a threat. Their dynamic is one of the best eaxmples of how Thomas' perceptiveness can turn nasty very quickly when it's driven by envy or fear of displacement.
JIMMY KENT
Jimmy is one of the relationships that most clearly exposes Thomas' vulnerability around desire. His attraction to Jimmy is genuine, and so is his terrible judgment around it; the whole arc is painful because it shows how little room Thomas has to pursue closeness safely and how quickly longing can turn into danger in his world. Jimmy also brings out Thomas' immaturity; around him, Thomas becomes hopeful, foolish, defensive, and then humiliated in a way the show rarely allows him elsewhere, and that humiliation reverberates for a long time.
PHYLLIS BAXTER
Baxter is one of the best later relationships in Thomas' story because she gives him a form of patience he doesn't know what to do with at first. Their history is complicated, and he treats her badly more than once, but she still continues to see the misery under the malice more clearly than most people do. Her response isn't indulgence, but a steady insistence that he's capable of being better and that his pain doesn't have to be the only thing organising his life. Her role in finding him after his suicide attempt says everything about how that relationship develops.
CHARLES CARSON
Carson is one of the authority figures whose opinion matters most to Thomas, which is a large part of why their relationship carries so much hostility. Thomas resents him, pushes against him, and often seems to take satisfaction in provoking him, but there's also a strong sense that Carson represents the kind of legitimacy Thomas has always wanted and rarely been granted. Carson sees the worst in him for many years, and responds from a moral framework Thomas doesn't trust but still can't entirely dismiss, which gives their dynamic a lot of bite. Thomas doesn't only hate Carson's judgment - he's also stung by it. By the time Carson's position eventually opens to him, the promotion carries extra weight because it comes from a standard Thomas has spent years resisting while still wanting, on some level, to meet it.
Just for Fun / Typology
MBTI - INTJ
Ni fits the way he thinks in patterns, leverage, and long-term positioning. Thomas isn't somebody who mainly responds to the social moment in a spontaneous or improvisational way; he watches, stores information, anticipates outcomes, and often acts according to a larger private read of how the house works and where he can move within it. Even when his plans are petty, they usually have design behind them.
Te also makes sense; Thomas is pragmatic, strategic, and strongly oriented toward results. He's often willing to use systems rather than merely live inside them. Promotion, security, influence, useful alliances, small manipulations that produce a larger shift in status - all of that has a very Te quality. He's also much more comfortable acting decisively once he's settled on a conclusion than he is lingering in open emotional uncertainty.
I can see why some people land elsewhere, especially with how emotionally wounded and socially reactive he can be, but the core of him still feels more like a private strategist than a feeling-led or perception-led type. The emotional life is intense, but the operating style is much more controlled, goal-aware, and guarded than the more diffuse INFP or INTP readings usually suggest.
MORAL ALIGNMENT - True Neutral
His choices are rarely governed by a stable commitment to doing good, and they're not governed by a love of harm for its own sake either. Thomas is usually acting from self-protection, ambition, resentment, loneliness, desire, or the need to preserve a place for himself inside a hostile world, which leaves him capable of real nastiness but also loyalty, gratitude, and care when those things finally feel safe enough to express.
Lawful doesn't fit cleanly because he has too little reverence for rule, hierarchy, or propriety as moral goods in themselves. He uses those structures when they help him and undermines them when they don't. Chaotic misses the amount of control and calculation in him.
On the moral side, Good gives him more consistency than he's earned, while Evil flattens the very real attachment, growth, and vulnerability that keep surfacing around the edges of his worst behaviour. He's too self-interested and too hurtful for a genuinely Good alignment, and too emotionally alive and changeable for Evil to feel complete.
Conclusion
Thomas is one of the richer characters in Downton Abbey because the show never fully lets him become either the house villain or the house penitent. He's cruel, lonely, ambitious, ashamed, funny in a dry and often nasty way, and far more fragile than he wants anyone to see. The series gets a lot of its sharpest downstairs material from letting those traits coexist in one person without smoothing them into something easier to forgive.
So much of his later arc is organised around hopelessness, isolation, thwarted attachment, and the collapse that follows when even his defensive routines stop keeping him upright, which doesn't replace the manipulativeness or the damage he causes, but places them inside a life built around concealment, class vulnerability, and repeated emotional dead ends. Thomas remains difficult nearly all the way through, but he also becomes one of the clearest examples in the series of what prolonged loneliness can do to a person who has almost nowhere safe to put it.
While I was surprised that Becka would kill her father so brutally, it does make sense in the grander scheme if things because they are in the Republic of Brutal Punishment. The first episode begins with the girls having fun while several people have been hanged around them, the episode ends with the girls watching a man lose his arm to a chainsaw, they are encouraged to cheer as it happens. They have been living like this for over a decade. That would fuck anyone up, especially when they keep telling you that violence is deserved and it is God's will and everyone should be implementing God's will and you cannot have friends, you cannot love people because at the end of the day you are merely God's eyes and hands on Earth even if those hands have to turn on you and your own. In the grander context of that world, I don't think we can find the issue with Becka. In her own way she's doing exactly what they taught her to do.
Can you imagine how different the Jet in Ba Sing Se plot would be if Jet, when realising Iroh is a firebender traveling with Zuko, who’s an obviously traumatised teenager with a giant burn mark, assumed Iroh was the one to burn him ??
Like think about it, it would give even more reason why Jet was so obsessed, even when he’s trying to get a fresh start (Ik canon Jet has his reasons too but I think Smellerbee and Longshot would be more willing to help Jet if they think Iroh is actually hurting someone)
one theory I have based on the substance of our conversation is just that skip is a more appealing closet narrative… it’s two fundamentally healthy reasonably well-adjusted adults who communicate well and whose only barrier to happiness is External Homophobia, which causes them momentary distress but in the end turns out to actually be super easy to overcome and everyone is sooo happy for you why didn’t you come out sooner? we could’ve thrown you a parade 🌈 but I think the shane/ilya storyline appeals to me much more because, while it’s still very much romance novel fare, it’s a bit more about like… the emotional damage that compulsory heterosexuality + the closet + punishing standards for masculinity can do to you/your ability to form healthy relationships. I feel like, as presented in the show, skip would have zero conflict after they get together, whereas I think shane and ilya might continue to have lots of narratively interesting issues rooted in their respective damage. the former is (maybe?) more palatable to people because it’s nicer and cleaner. the latter is more intriguing to me personally because it’s messy and feels more real.
having now rewatched all of Downton Abbey, can i just say that the biggest missed opportunity of all the missed opportunities was Isobel's storyline after Matthew's death?
like. it's Isobel. she's a crusader. she's a campaigner. she's an sjw. her whole thing is busy-bodying efforts to improve the world. and her only reaction to her only son dying in a car crash is being sad for a while?
SHE SHOULD HAVE BEEN RADICALISED AGAINST CARS!!!!
Fuck's sake! It's so obvious! It's so SIMPLE! Cars were a new, dangerous, revolutionary invention and a LOT of people did not like or trust them yet!!! Have Isobel process her grief by campaigning for banning automobiles! We know it's a lost cause, we know it won't work, so it adds an extra layer of tragedy to the story and, more importantly, GIVES HER SOMETHING TO DO! other than waffle over whether or not she's gonna marry some lord guy i don't care about
and! then! in the final season! when Mary falls in love again! with a guy! WHO LOVES CARS! AND IS A RACE CAR DRIVER! holy shit. can you imagine Isobel's apocalyptic rage. her dead son's wife, marrying a man who champions the very accursed machines that killed him? and she and mary have a huge fight and ultimately it's Violet who has to step in, be the sensible one, save the day and tell Isobel 'look i love you very much and i'm sorry your kid's dead but it is time to chill, babe, you are hurting this family and you are hurting yourself'
and then idk maybe something happens to wee George, his life is in peril and the only way to save him involves a car somehow, and Isobel has to grapple with the fact that the thing that killed her son has saved her grandson, and it's bittersweet and dramatic and all the things Downton Abbey CAN be when it's bringing it's A game!!
Pls can u reblog that post about the decade long time loop I didn’t save it and want to read that thang 👁️👁️ also the post where people were reccing time loops 🙏
Help! I saw the rec for a fic, but I can't remember where!
I just remember clearly in the summary it was mentioned Ilya going to the Admirals? And maybe Shane and Ilya get married in Vegas in 2014.
thank you in advance!
is it this one?
I Wanna Be Somebody to Someone (Someone to You)
by stabthroughme
Vegas, MLH Awards, 2014: Ilya Rozanov wins MVP and decides to make Shane Hollander experience Vegas.
Boston, November, 2016: Ilya calls Shane his husband while making him a tuna melt. Weeks later he's traded to New York.
New York, March, 2017: Scott Hunter is forced to realize he is incredibly fond of Ilya Rozanov, and knowing what he does, Shane Hollander is on really fucking thin ice.
or: the fic where Ilya and Shane get married in 2014 and Ilya is forced to care about Scott when he's traded to New York in 2016. So he noticed things. And he's there, on the ice, when Scott kisses Kip for the whole world to see.
i believe that shane probably has a lot of internalized homophobia but as you know i also believe that if ilya had firmly taken the emotional reins after first time anal and been like 'we like each other now and it's not a big deal,' shane would've been like ok! yay :) instead ilya said AAAA AAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAA and threw the reins away like they were live snakes thus spooking the horses who started bucking and rearing and then ran straight off the edge of a cliff taking the whole carriage down with them
this tiktok screenshot ruined my life i need to see the serbian pigeon movie so so badly but it doesn't exist it's so foul to make this bad of a point with something so cool and then take it away from me.
Tiktok marvel fans really will be out here like "movie fan SHOCKED because i'd rather watch superhero movie #54 in blue and not a sensual 1987 french horror film about a man discovering his wife may not exist set in what is gradually revealed to be a space station" as if you're supposed to agree that superhero movie #54 is the clear winner in this comparison
Love the idea of a story about a complex issue that's told from the perspective of something that cannot comprehend or care about the issue. The way the story would be sliced up and moments that a human would consider pointless would be focused on because the pigeon happened to be there would be hype as fuck
Mališa, otherwise known as Little One, is a pet pigeon owned by a conservative butler of the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy. She is loved, and she is pampered— until her owner is murdered in cold blood, and she is left to fend for herself in Sarajevo.
In the wilds of the city, she feeds from the poor, working nationalist radicals, and the vieux riches alike.
To Mališa, there are no ethical concerns. No politics. No burgeoning nationalism.
There are only hands that feed her, and hands that do not.
no one is asking for this but i have to make my one million hours on ao3 mean something
the texture of memory: to write a silly blurb would do it a disservice i think, but just read it i am so serious, completed
your presence has gone through me (like needle through a thread): ilya gets a family and i cry one million tears of joy, wip
the anatomy of a bird heart in slow decay: an impossible love story and meditation on grief, mothers and sons, and survival. featuring ghosts in the literal sense. completed
fall in love again and again: the classic tuna-melt groundhog day, with a house of leaves flavour, completed
Jessica: teenaged shane as seen through his relationship with his high school girlfriend, i love them both so unbearably much, completed
home economics: nhl lockout leads to hollanov living together in the situationship era-there's no way this could go wrong! completed
Route 96 Kanata: shane suffers a career ending injury before meeting ilya but where there's a will there's a tortured hollanov situationship nonetheless. full of fantastic ottawan idiosyncrasies. wip
World on Your Shoulders: what if shane had a queer rookie while deep in the midst of his internalized homophobia "i'm not gay" era? fascinating and wonderfully pessimistic characterization, this whole series is a dark comedy that i want to swallow whole, completed
wunderkind: breathtaking look into yuna hollander's inner world but everyone really shines through wonderfully here (ilya my heart i love you so much), completed
I have only two emotions (careful fear and dead devotion): shane disappears from hockey post prospect cup and hollanov meets again much farther down the road, gorgeous tender slow burn, wip
we'll make a home on the cracks: journalist shane fights his way out of an ethics torment nexus and finds true love <3 cute hollanov & fun shane characterization, wip
car wash redhead, tube top R.E.M. concert, juror #6: hollanov character study, power and love, i adore those freaks so much <3, completed
frequently, secretly fond of each other: boston! shane, you know it you love it, wip
some pacific wind: the pains of being asian in a nearly all-white sport and having to communicate to the world exclusively in your second language: a hollanov conversation, completed
side note: all of satorussuguru's heated rivalry fics are fantastic and are on here in spirit if not in actual text
It had to be you, Wonderful you: transmasc ilya you are soooo dear to me, completed
Offside: coach/player forbidden hollanov but it's sweeter than you would expect. wip
Honey, you're familiar like my mirror years ago: climbing inside your soulmates body is a thing that is both normal to want and possible to have (ft. painful but warming version of shane's life post. career ending injury), wip
dark out and still thirty degrees: one of the only a/b/o fics i've ever enjoyed (sorry), dives into the misogyny in the bones of the genre in a way that's very cathartic for me. ft. a fascinating trans shane journey. completed
head and body to you: tortured self-destructive shane character study, toxic? situationship hollanov, canon-typical emotion development through the lens of sex, completed
the soviet montage: obviously already popular but i had to, cold-war era hollanov post. ilya's defection from the soviet union, completed
i've been waiting my whole life to know i wanted you: deep dive into shane's militant self denial that also fleshes out a much more culturally-connected japanese-canadian experience for him. #lifegetsbetter(eventually), completed
pronoms possessifs: shane writes a love letter, just wonderful completed
Home Ice Advantage: another boston! shane but diving more deeply into how being traded would impact the hockey of it all, very perfectionism torment nexus, completed (with wip sequel)
Blizost: what if you could climb inside your lover and share one body between two souls?, wip
Mama's Boy, Mama's Boy: shane hollander's journey if the whole time he was also haunted by his situationship's dead mom, fantastic irina characterization, completed
cracked plexiglass: canon rewrite that fleshes out a version of shane's pre-NHL hockey career that's more realistic to the actual environment of high level Canadian juniors, very very good, wip
i know where to draw the line: older captain shane and younger teammate ilya, super cute, completed
Overlay: very well written, read the authors note in the beginning before starting, completed
one of your eyes is always half-shut (something happened when you were a kid): it's GivingAlexeiDimensionality2026 !! such a gut punch to read as an older sibling, completed
Plexiglass Box: what if hollanov met as teens in Moscow? (ilya x coach's son but it was shane the whole time), Excellent tension, completed (sequel incoming hopefully)
but what if I need you in my darkest hour? : our favorite hockey players plane crash Bad on the way to 2017 All Stars, painful in all the ways, completed
always, sun: canon,,,,,,,divergence?? magical realism, gorgeous and vaguely terrifying, completed
I. ONE LITTLE GOD FALLING OVER ANOTHER: the last year in boston, has hardly begun but the mixed media format is so good and the tension is so thick,,,,,pit in my stomach as i eagerly await the rest, wip
nothing makes me feel as good: shane character study through jj's eyes, god im so obsessed with this crazy crazy man, completed
Hello From Moscow, Goodbye from Montreal: canon divergence circa 2012 where ilya calls shane drunk one night, and keeps calling after that, equally funny and devastating, wip
there are like millions more that i will add once i remember them
something sooo deliciously sterile about early hollanov.... the beginning of something so all-encompassing happening in white-lit locker rooms, impersonal arenas and budget luxury hotel rooms. stripped down to the bare bones of human connection. we are only ourselves when we are clothes-less in front of each other, uniforms and shoes we are paid to wear strewn or neatly put away. the only uniqueness that separates this hotel from any other we'd stay in this thing that we cannot name between us. we could be anywhere at all, the variations in the monotonous planes, buses, gyms and ice rinks brought about only by our contact with each other. if we're lucky we get a fire escape, a back-of-the-building stairwell stripped of luxury so that it tricks us into thinking we're somewhere different, letting our guard down -- even our houses are decorated impersonally, we are not in the practice of crafting an identity and neither are we rewarded in any way for it, so why would we even start. the things we do in those rooms are more important. the things we do together lend the impersonality comfort as we picture each other in our interior-designed holding pens. the focus always on the action and never on the atmosphere. the singularity all the visible because of the contrast. OH MY GOD!!!!!
yummm love it. also a rare instance where RR lets the dialogue do the work for her instead of telling us everything they’re thinking and feeling! I think the part where ilya is kissing him and guiding him up the stairs in the ep 4 sex montage is probably meant to do this work for the viewer… like we see the transition from vegas dom drop sub drop to ilya fucking him facedown on the sofa all the way to cozy hoodie boyfriend ilya kissing him and smiling so I think that’s probably the “ilya is getting more invested” arc. but god just imagine what we could’ve had if they hadn’t sacrificed ALL of ep 3 to fucking skip….
theartofmadeline
snowghoul
jbbartram-illu
jacobvanloon
dailybridgerton
romaincrisis
ellievsbear
