#ace rimmer
Our first look into why Rimmer is so completely messed up.
Fiction loves the plotline of characters being forged in the fires of childhood abuse, whose greatest consequence once they leave home being a lack of trust that can be solved with the Power Of Friendship, and whose issues are solved once they confront their parents.
Despite his childhood being used as a constant punchline, Rimmer’s a surprisingly sympathetic and multilayered depiction of how severe childhood abuse can lead to an adulthood of failing to relate to other people in a pleasing or healthy way.
- Having never been allowed boundaries as a child around his own interests and person, he fails to understand other people have boundaries. Before encountering his parallel self he’s a creep with women because he was taught that if you want something from someone else’s body, their discomfort and objections are unimportant.
- He attacks others before he can be attacked, for he’s learnt that attacks can come from any angle and can be completely arbitrary
- Likewise he constantly postures in conversation without realising that he alienates others by doing so, for he desperately needs to cover up his inadequacies before others see them and punish him for them
- He takes the path of cowardice because he’s learnt no one will protect him if he can’t protect himself. The fact that by season 6 he can openly admit that he’s an utter coward is a sign of progress
- He abuses every scrap of power he gets his hands on because that was what he learnt power was for. He can only see rank in terms of The Oppressor and The Oppressed, which results in him resonating deeply with the lives and philosophies of ancient dictators.
- Likewise he despises tales of romance and love, for his parents didn’t love one another (or at least, his mother didn’t love his father). Depictions of passion and loving sacrifice appear deeply unrealistic to him as he never learnt that love could be a fulfilling, moving force.
- Still, though he has no framework to understand what a nurturing relationship looks like but he grasps for one blindly, never achieving what he naturally desires but has no conception of.
We can argue “he’s had his entire adult life to pick up these skills” but it’s not that easy, is it? The thought processes that have been laid down since toddlerhood aren’t something that can bebanishedwith therapy and self-reflection. Breaking the effects of childhood abuse doesn’t make the bad thought patterns vanish, it just teaches a person a second set of thought processes that counter the initial unhealthy ones. It’s a lifetime of mindfulness that becomes slowly second nature with practice, but a horrible event could always cause backsliding.
What about Ace? Ace Rimmer didn’t cure himself, he simply learnt a level of self-awareness that forced him to be consciously kind to everyone he met. It’s likely that his initial emotional response to any situation is exactly the same as Rimmer’s but frankly that’s what makes him such a brave hero. Courage isn’t the same as lacking fear, it’s the ability to not let fear prevent one from taking a necessary action.
