Untitled

It’s also fairly obvious that between the two them, Beebs is the one with something to prove. Shrike is a classic case catastrophic burnout; he’s holding himself together by chasing any fleeting pleasure and has a dramatically a foreshortened sense of future and consequences as a result. I suspect following Beebs’ lead is an easier way to get himself off the hedonism treadmill than what Shrike is capable by himself right now – despite his need to argue back and assert himself, having Beebs essentially making all the decisions for him is still a lot easier and familiar than truly trying to go at everything alone. Shrike’s drive to perform is controlled by emotional inertia more than any higher reasoning, and he’s relying on Beebs to give him that push to do something useful with himself. If you left him by himself, Shrike would solve all his problems with violence and spend the rest of the time eating junk food and watching cartoons.

Beebs in contrast still has emotional bandwidth to actually have goals to strive towards. Whereas Shrike sees the job as a means to an end – money, leisure, generally the boot off their necks for a while – Beebs seems a lot more motivated to actually help people and take pleasure in the work itself, and is capable of motivating himself despite setbacks (even if he can’t do it indefinitely). @incognito-insomniac put it really well when she said Beebs’ attitude seems to be ”we are going to be the friendly neighborhood mercs where the customer is our highest priority”, Beebs just hasn’t thought through exactly what degree of moral relativity being a merc entails.

Because despite his general competence, Beebs is also not very good at this whole mercenary thing yet. He clearly comes from a much stricter society, he expects things to function straightforwardly without people trying to bullshit him. It’s hard for me to judge if he’s just a little naive and unused to dealing with this much rank opportunism, or if this is a side-effect of him being used to being at the bottom of the societal pecking order, but we see that it takes him great effort to assert himself against someone with power over him, and the path of least resistance is just doing as he's told by his clients even when he's suspicious of them. Beebs seems to have a fairly romanticised idea of what being a mercenary would be like outside of being a meal ticket –while he does have the chops to be shrewd and calculating with people like Scratch, his idealism is not a safe, harmless trait to have and can and does leave him open to exploitation.

And, critically, since he’s effectively the senior partner of Monkey Wrench, being in control of their clients and their finances and the one who has final authority over the jobs they take, this also leaves Shrike by extension open to the same exploitation because he will, against his own best interest, defer to Beebs. Beebs is the boss here and this is reflected in how between the two of them, he is the one who is actually commanding any professional respect from the people they interact with. Scratch and Tyneen have history with Shrike, which seemingly only contributes to how little they think of him, but Beebs is someone they consider a peer despite the lowly status of Monkey Wrench as a merc outfit. Beebs’ opinion of Shrike is considerably higher, but it’s hard to gauge exactly by how much.

Thus, the scales of social influence end up tipped extremely far in Beebs’ favour. And in Beebs’ defense, it’s really very easy to gesture at both how little Shrike seems to care and also his general poor self-control and go ”would you really want him in charge?” For both of their sakes, Beebs is simply the obvious best choice to be handling their shared affairs. At the same time, I don’t think it’s reasonable to hold it against him that he overestimated the degree of restraint Shrike is capable of; presumably he took Shrike at his word that he would get his shit under control, showing that characteristic trust in people’s – in Shrike’s – better nature, instead of realising he would actively have to play the part of a sober companion for his new business partner.

Also, yes, the degree to which all of this sounds quite bad has been the main thing I’ve been struggling while writing this. It’s very obvious that Beebs cares deeply about Shrike’s wellbeing and safety, and has, essentially, volunteered himself for the job of micromanaging Shrike so Shrike can do the shooting and the flying and finally have agency over his own existence. Shrike being perhaps too much for him to handle does not negate the fundamentally good intentions, and I don’t think the way Beebs shuts down and fails to communicate in a moment where he has every reason to not believe the best of Shrike negates that.

But it ultimately doesn’t matter whether or not it’s fair or realistic for Beebs to always be attentive and caring enough to not get Shrike hurt. Intentions don’t really matter in a situation where you have a lot of interpersonal leverage over someone and basically full control of their professional affairs. Regardless of whether Shrike is likely to self-destruct without Beebs’ influence, Beebs is still very much situated to take Shrike down with him whether he intends to or not.