Anonymous asked: d'you ever think about irving waterboarding helena as a way to threaten her life without damaging helly too much in the process. how he must have known how long to keep her under and how much to let her breathe. and how irving bailiff was in the military. in the navy.

I do think about this quite often. About waterboarding (because yes, that was torture, whatever the ends were). Your outie can swim gracefully and well. Your outie values water. A photo of your outie with a trophy was once in a newspaper. The language he used (she’s a mole!). Ahow Milchick calls him with “stand!” to send him to his death, and the staredown is mocking and irreverent. How in season 1, Irving stood to attention the second Milchick entered the office. About his “lats” brag and ramrod-straight posture. His two visible refined filenames so far have been Pacoima (which I’m assuming is a little nod to Judy Baca, and it makes me super happy) and Montauk in his dream in Woe’s Hollow (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind reference). about tying Burt’s hands together to reassure Dylan on the way to O&D.

Even when I frame the last one in the context of leather culture and bondage, a lot of gay men in the military and the police engage with kink subculture through power play, sometimes to subvert and deconstruct, sometimes because they can’t engage with their homosexuality without that mediation of violence as punishment, control, or affirmation of one’s place in an interpersonal dynamic, and (after)care as a polite expectation rather than an admission of need. We don’t know much at all about Outie Irving because the repression extends to the information we are given, and the single bed, the neat split between his Lumon clothing and his polish and leather gear, the encroaching blackness around him in every shot… It seems to me that this is an extremely lonely man. He isn’t necessarily alone (popular among dance attendees, it appears the Lumon investigation involves other people, and there’s a degree of familiarity in which he apologizes to the caller after the OTC, presumably because it triggered suspicion), but it’s wild to me how raw Innie Irving was in both joy and sorrow and how tall the walls rise around Outie Irving. having to drive to the other end of town during the OTC because there was simply no one else, not just because he sought out Burt; everyone else woke up surrounded by people, and he gets Radar (sweet, sweet Radar, aptly named for scouting his perimeter) and a photo of his dead dad hidden inside a uniform, and that’s that.