#is different

i also don’t think it’s unbelievable that she’d change it? obvs she feels connected to her heritage, but we don’t know what her dynamic w her parents is like. she might’ve had a very difficult relationship with them and wanted to distance herself in a socially “acceptable” way by taking mark’s name. also it’s worth noting that chetri/chhetri is a caste surname (a very high caste at that) and so there are a lot of implications of casteism & oppression around it for us, to the point that some ppl in nepal & india are campaigning to abolish caste surnames, which might’ve influenced gemma (although tbf it’s unlikely the sev crew were aware of that).

(also iirc devon scout-hale originates from that being her name on the released scripts, but idk if that can be counted as canon in the same way scout is explicitly stated as gemma’s surname)

Yeah that’s all true and I didn’t know about the caste stuff! Or the script stuff!

It’s fair that this is veryyyyy soft “canon”. they are official materials, but ig it’s just my assumption that Gemma Chetri was not a fabrication of the graphic designers (if you look at who the designers were, you can see a bunch of their surnames all over the materials wherever they needed them. It’s pretty funny but it implies there are like 4 surnames in the world, lol)

The whole “maybe she had a difficult relationship with her family” thing could be something (her MIA parents who aren’t dead but seem to have zero regular contact with their daughter’s widower) and I know that’s a thing people do but I feel like??? Idk my own mother’s father completely abandoned her and was a huge pos and she never changed her name even though she had the option several times in her life because she always saw it as her own name, not his, so I really strongly go into things with that perspective, which is my own bias.

As I alluded to, as a member of the viet diaspora with a Vietnamese last name, I can’t really imagine changing it just because I got married, but that’s me projecting onto Gemma. She isn’t me. She’s not a Gen Z they/them lesbian (much to my chagrin) and she’s not necessarily likely to think the same as I do on this matter, even if I feel extremely connected to her in other ways.

Augh the thing is we really do still know very little about Gemma. Maybe her name is legally Chetri for convenience (changing your name legally is actually a pain in the ass that continues to complicate shit for the rest of your life, especially if you’re a published academic) and that’s why her last name is conspicuously obscured on her intake form (so that we don’t have to deal with whatever a general audience think that implies).

Maybe it’s just Scout and we have several reasons now why that could be (caste consciousness, family trouble, internalized misogyny, misogyny from outside sources like Mark or god knows who) and there’s no strong indication pointing towards any of them. We don’t even know how she feels about her own decision or lack thereof (distinct possibility that Mark just started calling her that to everyone and people went along with it popped into my brain. Ow. Unlikely but not impossible.)

We want to say it feels out of character for Gemma to have reasons based in misogyny for making this choice but what evidence do we have that she was particularly insulated or resistant to that kind of pressure? That she’s educated with a career? Meanwhile Devon is a literal housewife/sah mom and didn’t change her name (or didn’t drop her maiden name). We are trading in generalizations now because we have nothing else to work off of.

I want to pull everything I can from every single piece of information we get about Gemma, but we need to really take into account what is verifiably true. Do we forget this is the Gemma that explicitly apologizes to Mark for having fertility issues?

I think we as a fandom (including myself here) struggle to not conceptualize Gemma as someone with her shit together, we idealize her as this perfect professor we would have loved to have, maybe because that’s how female characters have to be in order to be likable? Maybe because we’re trying to contrast her to characters like Mark and Helena who are so clearly hot messes with five million internalized and externalized -isms? In large part, it’s because about half of what we know about Gemma comes from her closest loved ones talking about her, grieving her, idealizing her, bringing up the best aspects of her personality through the lens of how they valued her (she was pragmatic, she was self regulated, she made my brother a better person) and ignoring the sides of her that they didn’t get to see or didn’t care to notice or have allowed themselves to forget.

Gemma is an Asian woman married to a white man. There’s a lot of baggage there and because she mostly stays out of those tropes, we kind of consider her free and clear of them, but she’s aware of them. They still implicitly affect how people see her, strangers and loved ones. Idk I’m getting into the “I might be thinking harder about this than Dan Erikson did” territory since we don’t even know if s1 Gemma was intended to be an Asian/Napali character or if Dichen was cast and they course corrected in s2 to highlight that more.

Is this a safe space to admit I definitely expected “Gemma” to be a white woman before her face was revealed? Not because there’s even an iota of implication that she was, there’s just so much precedent for this perfect, sweet, blonde dead wife smiling on the beach or under the sheets that I did not allow space for the idea that she could be anyone, Ms Casey included?

"Talk MURDY to me"