listen, you all know the tam lin trope.

roachpatrol:

jumpingjacktrash:

the friend-turned-enemy, the hostage with stockholm syndrome, the POW who doesn’t know what’s real anymore, the brainwashed slave.

you know how hard the heroes have to work to get them back, and how much it hurts. how the victim attacks their rescuers, screams the manifesto of their captors as if it’s their own.

and those are people who were turned by the enemy, who have nothing to lose but their chains and their false sense of certainty.

so why would you think you can convert someone who was raised from birth to wrong thought, and only ever benefitted from it, and sees no personal gain from joining the right side, just by being an asshole to them on social media? or punching them in the face?

captain america brought bucky back by dropping his shield. luke skywalker redeemed darth vader by refusing to kill him. janet rescued tam lin by holding him tight while he turned into monsters and red hot iron.

and you think you can turn comfortable people into freedom fighters by calling them names?

humanity tells itself these stories for a reason. learn.

i’d like to point out also that tam lin, in pretty much every version recorded, says that he likes living in fairyland. it’s his home, he’s been treated well, he’s considered a valuable member of titania’s court, he’s grown up there and enjoys his life. he ONLY asks janet to free him because he’s a nominee for fairyland’s tithe to hell. not because he wants to escape fairyland. not because he loves her and wants to do the honorable thing by parenting the baby he impregnated her with. they’re making a bargain: she bails him out of paying for the literally charmed life he’s been leading, he resumes human life with her. 

it can be an extremely badass, romantic story. but there’s an important, hidden moral: people don’t leave fairyland when they’re its shining knight. they escape it when they realize they’re its victim.