One aspect of Stolas and Octavias relationship that I think deserves a little more attention is the fact that Stolas is traumatized as Fuck, and growing up with a traumatized parent can have a pretty profound impact on you as a kid. Even if they’re a good parent, even if they try their hardest in every way, their issues always seem to have a way of making themselves known. So even though Stolas clearly loves Via to bits, and she him, I wouldn’t be surprised if her relationship with Stolas was more complicated than what we see onscreen, even beyond the “abandoned her for some random imp” of it all.
There’s not a lot of discussion of this in canon, understandably since most of Stolas and Octavia’s immediate issues stem from the divorce, but there’s a hint of it in Loo Loo Land, when Stolas talks about how much Via used to love seeing RoboFizz:
It’s pretty clear in this scene (at least to me) that Stolas is projecting his own love of clowns onto Via, who was in fact terrified by RoboFizz as a child. He goes so far as to misinterpret her tears as “tears of joy.”
That’s a pretty weird detail, and doesn’t really have anything to do with the Divorce, so there’s any number of ways to interpret it. At first, given Stolas’s character in season 1, it comes across as self-absorbed, but looking back, i could see how that self-absorption might be Stolas’s response to always ignoring his own needs and wants for the sake of others. Think about it—Stolas spent 17+ years believing he couldn’t make choices about his own life, and constantly sacrificing his freedom and well-being for others (his father, his wife, his daughter). He spent well over a decade being abused in order to give his daughter a normal, happy childhood. If he’s convinced himself his desires don’t matter, one way around that is to do things because “Octavia likes them.” So if he convinced himself Octavia liked clowns,,, you get the idea.
So anyway, in Sinsmas this side of Octavia’s childhood isn’t really the main issue, but I like to think she is starting to realize not only how weird and sad her dad always was, and how much that may have affected her upbringing. We see a tiny hint of this when she confronts Stolas about his pills:
Of course, Octavia doesn’t know the full story, but she knows enough to be upset. She knows that Stolas was unhappy enough to need the pills, and he stayed in that environment for her. Thats a lot to process at 17. It’s not a nice feeling to realize your childhood was an extension of your parent’s trauma. It’s also not fun to realize your parent chose to harm themself for you, even if they did it to protect you. It makes you feel used, like you’ve been made into an accessory to hurting someone you love. In my mind, Octavia is processing all of this, AND that her dad ran off with a random man.
All this is to say, by my wildly non-canonical interpretation, I really feel for both Stolas and Octavia in this situation. For Stolas, making his own choices and following his instincts for once was important for him to do. For Octavia, it’s reasonable for her to feel upset at her dad, perhaps for more reasons than she realizes. She’s looking back on her relationship with Stolas, and how he raised her, and reevaluating everything. Their relationship is changing, and I hope we get to see a bit of that reflected in season 3.
