Another Munch fan here, I like your analysis. Do you have any idea why Munch sometimes speaks in first person and out of nowhere in third? I didn't quite understand this, I looked for some theories, but I didn't find anything. Sad that the Fargo community is small, but good that we have people like you.
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hello!!! what a kind message 🥹🥹🥹 i have thought about this a lot!!! im putting it under a readmore bc i ended up talking a lot more than is necessary
the creators & spruell himself have mentioned a sense of depersonalization munch struggles with, and I agree 100%. munch is a human weapon with little to no sense of self. there's also the subtextual connection he has with dot which makes him wary of men, & thus more connected with women & children. if you go back to his scenes with roy, his posture is hunched with tense shoulders, & he barely makes eye contact. gator is different since, to munch, he's just a petulant child. munch is even wary of wayne at the very end, refusing to make eye contact with him until he's offered the soda, & even then he looks at wayne with intense suspicion.
the story makes it clear during the dinner scene that munch & dot are mirrors of each other; both sin-eaters who were forced to swallow the rage & violence of rich men. this with added trans subtext makes munch's disconnect with manhood even more poignant. the times when he refers to himself with first-person singular pronouns are when he's feeling extremely vulnerable, i.e. talking to irma about his past & returning to roy empty-handed. he doesn't use them exclusively, but rather they sneak through when he realizes there's nowhere to hide. other than that, its always "a man" or the royal "we" or just using his name in the third person. its also a form of armor. if he disregards his own humanity, its easier to avoid pain.
you'd think he'd start using first-person pronouns during the last 15 minutes of the finale, but its the closest he's ever been to raw hope, so its all disconnected pronouns that contrast heavily with the yearning in his facial expressions. he wants to be a person, to be loved, but he also has to guard himself in case things go exactly the way they always have for him for centuries. he's also generally just scared of dot in many ways. he's scared of her empathy, of her ferocity, of the love that fuels that ferocity, of her refusal to adhere to his view of the world, and of the ease with which she challenges it. he's encountering someone who has no ulterior motives, someone who has no desire to use him for anything. he's a guest in someone's home, presumably, for the first time in centuries.
tying into this, he's also afraid of how much he loves her, because he doesn't have the language or emotional intelligence to relay why he returned. violence is the only language he's fluent in, so he comes to the house with the request to finish their battle. it's a form of honor & respect, just the same as his categorization of her as a tiger. he views himself as an animal & he connects with the animal in her. that's why he returns with such a heavy demeanor of confusion. he's thinking about the fact that he helped a fellow abuse victim out of disproportionate unfairness, that he armed her against her abuser, that he dared to touch her! it's a lot!! and reciprocated love is just not something he understands fully enough to abandon his armor to. the lyons literally have to disarm him piece by piece. they use his name with the correct pronunciation, they offer him food and drink, they take his coat, & they make it absolutely necessary for him to accept responsibility by helping with the dinner they're going to share with him. they offer him the gift of autonomy.
Thks
