Booker thoughts
Sep. 6th, 2020 02:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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the_old_guardI've seen a lot of discussion about Booker, but there's one thing I've been thinking about lately that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere, so I wanted to throw it out here in case anyone else thinks it's interesting too.
Booker's tragedy, the thing that made him so miserable he was willing to sell the team out for a chance at dying, was outliving his family and being resented by (some? all? of) them for it. And I don't mean to suggest that that isn't an awful thing, but if you think about it, it's not actually a situation that is unique to immortals.
Like, obviously it wouldn't have happened if Booker had died when he did and stayed dead, but consider the slight AU where he deserts from Napoleon's army but doesn't get caught and executed for it. Instead he successfully gets away and eventually makes it home. He could have gotten back only to find out that his house burned down while he was gone and his entire family died in the fire. Or maybe there wasn't a fire, but his wife was pregnant when he left and she ended up dying in childbirth while he was gone, and his older sons resent him for not being there (maybe if he had been around there would have been money for a doctor, or she wouldn't have been working so hard right up until she went into labor, maybe maybe maybe). And then over the next several years his sons die one by one in other wars or accidents or of diseases while Booker is just lucky and stays healthy. These things happen. There are countless people in the world who have, for one reason or another, lived much longer than their partner and children.
Or even, for that matter, everything else goes exactly as in canon. Booker says in the film that his youngest son died of cancer at forty-two. Depending on how old Booker was when Jean-Pierre was born, if he was aging normally he would presumably have been somewhere between late sixties and early eighties at that point. Sure, living that long in the nineteenth century wasn't super common, but it wasn't impossible either. And yeah, Booker talks about "them" finding out his secret and wanting him to share it, but being resented for your health and longevity by your child who is dying prematurely from a debilitating disease or disability that you can't fix is also not a thing that only happens to immortals. Booker didn't have to be immortal for his son to have unreasonable expectations in terms of his father's ability to save him from cancer.
Being immortal made it all worse of course - more cause for resentment, much more time spent having to live with all afterwards - but the core of his tragedy is something that can and does happen to plenty of ordinary people too. I'm not sure what point I want to make with this exactly, I just think it's interesting.
Booker's tragedy, the thing that made him so miserable he was willing to sell the team out for a chance at dying, was outliving his family and being resented by (some? all? of) them for it. And I don't mean to suggest that that isn't an awful thing, but if you think about it, it's not actually a situation that is unique to immortals.
Like, obviously it wouldn't have happened if Booker had died when he did and stayed dead, but consider the slight AU where he deserts from Napoleon's army but doesn't get caught and executed for it. Instead he successfully gets away and eventually makes it home. He could have gotten back only to find out that his house burned down while he was gone and his entire family died in the fire. Or maybe there wasn't a fire, but his wife was pregnant when he left and she ended up dying in childbirth while he was gone, and his older sons resent him for not being there (maybe if he had been around there would have been money for a doctor, or she wouldn't have been working so hard right up until she went into labor, maybe maybe maybe). And then over the next several years his sons die one by one in other wars or accidents or of diseases while Booker is just lucky and stays healthy. These things happen. There are countless people in the world who have, for one reason or another, lived much longer than their partner and children.
Or even, for that matter, everything else goes exactly as in canon. Booker says in the film that his youngest son died of cancer at forty-two. Depending on how old Booker was when Jean-Pierre was born, if he was aging normally he would presumably have been somewhere between late sixties and early eighties at that point. Sure, living that long in the nineteenth century wasn't super common, but it wasn't impossible either. And yeah, Booker talks about "them" finding out his secret and wanting him to share it, but being resented for your health and longevity by your child who is dying prematurely from a debilitating disease or disability that you can't fix is also not a thing that only happens to immortals. Booker didn't have to be immortal for his son to have unreasonable expectations in terms of his father's ability to save him from cancer.
Being immortal made it all worse of course - more cause for resentment, much more time spent having to live with all afterwards - but the core of his tragedy is something that can and does happen to plenty of ordinary people too. I'm not sure what point I want to make with this exactly, I just think it's interesting.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-06 02:28 am (UTC)Also, there isn't any support available to him in the way that there would be if he was mortal. Normal parents who lose children can find therapists and go to support groups, but he obviously can't. The only support he has is the other three, and while I'm sure they're sympathetic, they all went through the grieving process for their mortal lives hundreds of years ago. (And he's right, Joe and Nicky have each other - Booker has Andy to commiserate with, but I got the impression that they tend to encourage each other's tendency to wallow.) Being seriously depressed, having a drinking problem, and being cut off from the help he needs - bad decisions were almost inevitable. It's just unfortunate that the bad decision he went with resulted in him losing the only support system he had left.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-06 05:58 am (UTC)It's also - speaking as someone who has stood on the outside of a seemingly perfect pairing - incredibly difficult to want to open up to them when you're feeling unhappy, and I can totally see Booker not wanting to "ruin" that happiness.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-06 04:05 am (UTC)It's true that if Booker had been sixty or eighty and aging normally, he still might have outlived a son who died of cancer in his forties. But three major differences that stood out to me watching that scene:
1) If Booker had been mortal, he would have lived with the memory of his family's death and the ugliness of their goodbyes for a finite amount of time and known that he would only have to bear the pain of it for a finite amount of time. Depending on his religious beliefs, he may have also have had hope of being reunited with them someday.
2) While people often blame their loved ones for not being able to save them or someone else, there is more room for forgiveness and accepting the eventuality of death in a world where death is an absolute. When you open the door not just to the possibility of living a few more years or decades but to eternal health and youth, that fundamentally changes how desperate a person might become. Not everyone makes peace with death, but it's easier to when it's a question of "when" and not "if".
3) Booker may not have known how to save his son, but he also doesn't know for certain that there wasn't a way. He doesn't know why he is the way he is, and the others are too small a sample size to really guess beyond thinking it likely has to do with dying in wartime - but war is a common enough cause of death that who can be sure? For all he knows, there is something he could have done to make sure his son came back to life like he did. And not only does he have eternity in front of him to think about what that might have been, but he's also living long enough to learn about all the medical ways his son's life might have been prolonged or his suffering reduced. It has to make for a profound sense of helplessness, one compounded by the fact that he doesn't even have the basic control of knowing that he could end his own life.