娜娜

Honey, just put your sweet lips on my lips, we should just kiss (like real people do)

!!! BIG FAT PANTHEON ENDING SPOILERS, OK?

Me when I murder cloves of cinnamon ngl (inspo under the cut!)

I was reading the story of an abuse survivor and she was talking about how her abusive father shaped her psyche and caused her to have an inner voice that would put her down all the time, even after years and years. And how healing for her was a process of fighting back against that inner voice and learning not to believe it.

Which gave me Thoughts about this duo and why they act so different in the end.

My theory: Holstrom's toxic inner voice is his father, of course. We learn about Mr. Holstrom through the snippets of those interviews and through Cary's acting. He was abusive, and specifically he was very belittling, always putting him down, attacking his intelligence and his accomplishments, making him feel like he'd never be good enough.

That abuse shaped Holstrom for the rest of his life, even if he claimed that he "never gave a damn about what anyone else said after [his father] left". His inner voice is still his father, telling him he's not good enough, not smart enough. That's why he veers so sharply into egotism and his whole god complex, because he's overcompensating with "I AM good enough, in fact I am the best at this and I know better than everyone else, and people should listen to me above all", because he didn't heal, he just slapped a bandaid over his issues and pretended he was fine.

But Caspian? Caspian doesn't hear Cary. Maybe he would've if his path hadn't diverged, but it did, hard. Cary did still psychologically scar him with his abuse, and you can see that shine through still, like early on in the data center in season 2 where he is acting like Holstrom. But never to the same degree as Holstrom himself, because all the stuff Caspian learned about Cary and who he was and why he did what he did really screwed up his ability to attribute his abuse as a kid and teen to Cary.

Instead, Caspian pretty quickly was handed a BIGGER, uglier, even more crushing abuse that reshaped his entire life and kinda blew everything else out of the water. Learning that he was Holstrom's clone, that his existence and his abuse was all to serve this guy, and THEN finding out that he was created to be discarded on top of that... Holstrom became the face of his lifetime of abuse and manipulation.

The internal voice that Caspian hears, the one he fights, isn't his father, but Holstrom: the voice telling him that "regret is a waste of time", that he only needs himself and his own intelligence, telling him to succeed at any cost to others, to be ruthless and objective and apathetic. That's what he's fighting, and that's why he becomes so kind and so selfless, even to the cost of his own life. Because that's the opposite of what Holstrom was and wanted.