Nah, I don't mind in general. I just wanted to point out that there might not be any real parallels here between what was being talked about and what happened with him. I get the feeling your experiences with him loom pretty large in your mind, and sometimes stuff like that creeps into unrelated conversations, so I just wanted to mention that it might not be relevant here. Not because I mind you talking about it in general, but because I think you might be jumping at shadows a little. Or letting your past experiences color things they shouldn't. It's good to have someone call your attention to it when you might be going off-track, or when something's influence on your thinking might be waxing a little too strong, you know?
And sorry, I think we might be talking at cross-purposes again. I just meant whether you perceive my explanations as being just me making excuses for him. And, I guess, I was also referring to whether or not you consider those circumstances to have been genuinely out of his control, and his actions having been done under such an altered state of mind that it's hard to consider them conscious decisions to hold his saner self accountable for...which is to say, I don't know whether or not you consider my personal reasoning compelling. But I wasn't saying that what either of us think of it is some objective truth, or that it should influence - much less overwrite - how Dimitri feels about it.
I know I did speculate about Dimitri maybe being helped by the idea of himself and the Dimitri who did those things as separate entities, even if only briefly, but that was never out of a desire to just...absolve him of culpability, or to excuse him from trying to make reparations. It's more that I tend to feel like he never really acknowledges fully that he wasn't in his right mind at the time. It feels like he considers himself a monster because he treats his actions as though his every action was guided by a conscious decision, in full awareness and with nothing influencing his actions, to be horrific for the fun of it. Which everyone knows isn't true, frankly. It feels like he doesn't take the extenuating circumstances - of which there were plenty - into account at all when it comes to judging himself.
I think I'd feel better about it if he'd just say something like "I couldn't help it, but what I did was still awful". Not making excuses for himself to escape accountability, but just...giving himself the tiny and completely reasonable bit of credit as never having wanted to do those things, and having ended up in the place where he did due to a lot of circumstances that were never up to him. There has to be a middle ground between "I did nothing wrong" and "the fact that I was completely insane at the time is immaterial, I'm just as awful as if I'd decided to do those things for fun". I don't want either extreme for him.
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Date: 2021-02-25 11:45 am (UTC)And sorry, I think we might be talking at cross-purposes again. I just meant whether you perceive my explanations as being just me making excuses for him. And, I guess, I was also referring to whether or not you consider those circumstances to have been genuinely out of his control, and his actions having been done under such an altered state of mind that it's hard to consider them conscious decisions to hold his saner self accountable for...which is to say, I don't know whether or not you consider my personal reasoning compelling. But I wasn't saying that what either of us think of it is some objective truth, or that it should influence - much less overwrite - how Dimitri feels about it.
I know I did speculate about Dimitri maybe being helped by the idea of himself and the Dimitri who did those things as separate entities, even if only briefly, but that was never out of a desire to just...absolve him of culpability, or to excuse him from trying to make reparations. It's more that I tend to feel like he never really acknowledges fully that he wasn't in his right mind at the time. It feels like he considers himself a monster because he treats his actions as though his every action was guided by a conscious decision, in full awareness and with nothing influencing his actions, to be horrific for the fun of it. Which everyone knows isn't true, frankly. It feels like he doesn't take the extenuating circumstances - of which there were plenty - into account at all when it comes to judging himself.
I think I'd feel better about it if he'd just say something like "I couldn't help it, but what I did was still awful". Not making excuses for himself to escape accountability, but just...giving himself the tiny and completely reasonable bit of credit as never having wanted to do those things, and having ended up in the place where he did due to a lot of circumstances that were never up to him. There has to be a middle ground between "I did nothing wrong" and "the fact that I was completely insane at the time is immaterial, I'm just as awful as if I'd decided to do those things for fun". I don't want either extreme for him.