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Joffrey Baratheon

i genuinely don’t understand how people watched this movie and walked away without thinking about petro.

he was taken in at fourteen. fourteen. that’s not old enough to consent to anything that happened to him. he didn’t choose maxim, he was shaped by him. groomed into being useful, obedient, grateful. maxim didn’t just train him to fight, he trained him to erase himself. to follow orders without question. to say “thank you sir” no matter what was being asked of him.

and petro learned fast. he learned how to be the perfect soldier because that was the only way to survive. when someone takes you in that young and frames it as salvation, you grow up believing you owe them your entire life. your body, your loyalty, your silence. petro doesn’t argue because he was never taught that arguing was an option.

maxim tells him not to lean on anyone. not to get attached. not to fall in love. and petro listens. but the sick part is maxim leans on him constantly. emotionally, structurally, in ways petro never agreed to and probably doesn’t even recognize as wrong. petro exists to stabilize maxim, to affirm him, to stand behind him and absorb everything quietly. and all petro gives back is “thank you sir.” every time. like gratitude is the rent he pays to exist.

then yuri happens.

and you can see the shift start way before the confrontation. petro finds her at dasha’s house and instead of exposing her, instead of dragging her back, he stays outside all night with a gun. all night. he doesn’t cross the threshold. he just guards it. like that’s the line he’s finally willing to draw.

that is such a big deal for him. because petro has never protected someone against maxim before. he’s never chosen care over obedience. and the fact that he only alerts maxim when yuri leaves tells you everything. he’s giving her time. he’s letting her have warmth and family and safety, even if it means standing alone in the cold with nothing but a weapon and his thoughts.

that’s when the lies really start to crack.

because the ochi aren’t the monsters maxim said they were. the fear doesn’t line up. the violence feels rehearsed. petro starts realizing that the thing maxim warned them about all these years was never the real threat. maxim needed a monster so no one would notice that he was the one breaking families apart.

and when petro finally yells at him, it’s not just anger. it’s everything collapsing at once.

he’s not just standing up to an authority figure. he’s standing up to the man who raised him, controlled him, shaped him, told him who he was allowed to be since he was fourteen. petro yelling is him breaking years of conditioning in real time.

“i let her go” is petro admitting that maxim failed to fully own him. that after all the training, all the mentoring, all the obedience, petro still made a choice maxim didn’t approve of. he disobeyed. knowingly. intentionally. and he’s not apologizing for it.

that act of rebellion is so small on the surface and so massive underneath. petro doesn’t rebel by running away or throwing punches. he rebels by choosing not to perpetuate the lie anymore. by letting yuri escape the same cage he grew up in.

and that’s the part that hurts the most: petro doesn’t get out. he doesn’t get a family. he doesn’t get a do over. he just makes sure yuri does.

he learns the truth too late to save himself, but not too late to save her. and he accepts that.

people miss petro because his pain isn’t loud. because he doesn’t narrate his trauma. because he does brave things quietly and then goes back to standing still. but if you actually look at him, his entire arc is about realizing he was groomed into obedience and choosing, once, to break that cycle.

he lets yuri have a family. something he never had. something he probably never will:(

(Fanart by @47-61 )

Thank you for the ask!

Why do I ship Raybins, or what makes their canon dynamic interesting? Which do you want to know?

The short answer is that, even though I first read the book over 20 years ago, on revisit the dynamic between Ray and Stebbins got into my head like a snatch of pop music.

The longer answer has a lot to do with the narrative foil dynamic my moots @idlesdays and @rambling-ids discussed in their own analyses.

One aspect of that which I have not yet seen discussed is that the Stebbins-Garraty narrative foil relationship operates in part along the lines of World’s Dumbest Genius vs. World’s Smartest Dipshit.

Stebbins has the analytical apparatus to understand essentially everything except the thing that matters most to his own survival and wellbeing. Stebbins’ intelligence is both his greatest asset and the instrument of his destruction. He was smart enough to understand every facet of the Walk inside and out, but not wise enough to see that his plan was built on a foundation of need he couldn’t acknowledge.

In contrast, Garraty stumbles through the novel in a fog of unexamined feelings and propagandized assumptions, and yet his instincts keep pulling him toward the right people and the right conclusions even when his conscious mind can’t articulate why. Garraty’s relative lack of self-awareness is what keeps him walking in some ways, because if he had Stebbins’ clarity about what the Walk actually is and what survival costs, he might not have the same capacity to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Another thing I love about their narrative foil dynamic is King’s extraordinary sleight-of-hand regarding which of the two is actually the strange one. When you actually inventory what we know about each of them, Garraty is the one with genuinely disturbing psychology. His sexualized response to witnessing death isn’t incidental. It happens multiple times, which suggests it’s a pattern rather than a shock response, and has been produced by a society that has thoroughly normalized the Walk as spectacle. He’s been conditioned into something deeply aberrant without any framework to recognize it as such. His sexual shame, particularly his suppressed homosexual attraction, adds another layer of internal conflict that he can’t articulate or process. He’s a profoundly fractured person whose perspective almost reads as normal because we as readers only see things from his point of view.

Stebbins, viewed from outside, seems strange. Viewed from inside, to the extent the text allows it, he wants his father to acknowledge him. He wants to belong somewhere. He made a catastrophic miscalculation about someone who had power over him. These are among the most universal human experiences imaginable. Stebbins’ strangeness is almost entirely a projection of Garraty’s limited capacity to understand him. Which, given Garraty’s own unexamined psychological depths, is a fairly rich irony.

Lastly, I love Raybins as a ship because of the mutually obsessive and somewhat dysfunctional relationship between Garraty and Stebbins. We see Garraty’s obsession with Stebbins long before Stebbins interacts with him or even has significant dialogue. Even though we don’t get to see Stebbins’ perspective, it’s safe to say the obsession is mutual. Stebbins prefers to interact with Garraty to the point of ignoring or barely reacting other characters who try to talk to him. For this reason, Raybins is the ONLY Stebbins ship that makes sense if one prefers to stick with canon. And by canon, I mean both the book and the film.

“Why won’t you let me die, Garraty?” “Same reason you keep walking, Stebbins.”