I love all the posts that examine Grace’s cowardice and his avoidant tendencies in his relationships. I love them and I eat them up with a spoon. But it also makes me wonder: what made him this way?
Anybody can have avoidant tendencies, and most people do in some way or another. However, his are extreme in a way that makes me truly question what core experiences in his life could have made him have such an extreme aversion to conflict, to vulnerability, and to any type of real connection.
A lot of fics and headcanons chalk this up to his having dead parents, which makes sense. If you lose people who are so incredibly important to you, you might develop an aversion to anything involving personal risk, for fear of the consequences (e.g. death, or loss). You might keep people at arm’s length, because if you never let anyone get close, then you never have to lose anybody important to you again.
However, I personally have a headcanon that his parents are alive, but that he deliberately chooses not to have them in his life.
Consider, for instance, Grace being a victim of emotional neglect. When parents do not tend to the emotional needs of their child, that child grows up unable to properly process, acknowledge, and feel their emotions. I think this especially compelling when we observe movie!Grace’s “temper tantrums” (I don’t love this term but idk what else to call them). This is easily identifiable as the behaviour of somebody who is unable to understand and handle emotions such as anger.
Consider also, Grace being a victim of abuse. When a child is abused by the people who are most central to their life (their parents), does it not make sense that that child would grow up into a man who is desperate not to let anybody close to him? Because if somebody gets close to you, they can hurt you in the way that you’ve been hurt before. (This also adds extra angst if you consider the fact that he actually let Stratt get close and then all that happened.)
It also makes complete sense for somebody who grew up in an abusive household to be extremely afraid of any type of conflict. If, in your experience, conflict led to your being hurt, wouldn’t you avoid any and all conflict in order to keep yourself safe? If hard conversations led to your safety being threatened, wouldn’t you avoid those conversations altogether? Not only that, but if we take his “temper tantrums” into account again, and we look at it through the lens of his modelling behaviour that he grew up witnessing, they make a lot of sense.
I think he’d also question whether he made the right decision in distancing himself from his parents. If he’d kept these dangerous, harmful people in his life, he’d still technically have a family. Would that have saved him? Would it have been worth it? Or would it be preferable to be shot into space on a suicide mission rather than keep them in his life?
Idk. I think that someone with avoidant tendencies this extreme does not just pop out of the womb that way. His experiences shaped him into the man that he is in the book/movie, and I think it’s really fun (and sad) to dig into what those experiences could have been.
turnnoffyourmind
pixelskylines
gummygunk
stormborns
dailybridgerton
prguitarman
