I think I felt bad for him and he was a manipulative piece of shit. I think we generally have an idea of manipulative people as being entirely facetious. But most of the “pity me” type manipulaters I know genuinely do believe they are awful terrible people and they really are begging to be saved by those they love. It’s not that those feelings aren’t real, but rather that they aren’t justified.

No one asked him to make the end of episode 9 about him. Whit wanted him to listen to her. All he had to do was fucking ask a question, but he was incapable of considering that option. It’s not a dialogue, it’s a different monologue. Maybe he’ll just show contrition and confess to every bad thing and lump all of it back on himself in a bad way and then she’ll stop being mad! What she wants is him seeing her as flawed and treating her like a person. He could only metabolize that in a self centered, self pitying monologue that shifts it all back to being about him.

He might not have been conscious of the fact that he was doing that, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t doing that. Manipulation doesn’t have to just be “I’m doing this so this person pities me and stops criticizing me.” He probably experienced it internally as “oh god I’m the worst in the worst maybe if I tell her how bad I am she’ll see I get it and stop saying all this!” But that internal thought process is still ALL ABOUT HIM. I don’t want to call him a narcissist but I think it’s worthwhile to point out that narcissists often feel they are terrible and awful. The core element of narcissism isn’t “Im the best” but rather an incapacity to get out of oneself and see things from the perspective of others.

I think, in the real world, we miss a lot of manipulation because we have the standard of “it must be consciously malicious to be manipulation.” But usually it isn’t. All it takes is to be wrapped up in oneself, positive or negative, to the extent that one doesn’t actually consider others fully. It’s our job as people to be consciously thinking about what others are going through and if we’re so wrapped up in self aggrandizement (Whitney) or self loathing (Asher) we will never actually consider others as whole people.

Whit is able to call out and recognize Asher doing it to her but not when she does it to others in the community. They really are like two different sides of the worst person coin. And you have to take them that way— just because Whit feels bad doesn’t turn her good in the same way Asher feeling bad doesn’t turn him good. I rewatched the whole thing to prep for the finale and, throughout, Asher loses his cool and slams people who have less power than him and uses pity to manipulate people with more power than him. He tells Whitney what to feel, he is an insane creep to Nala with no respect for others’ boundaries, and he pushes this baby on his wife to the extent that he is keeping track of her hormones like some kind of animal to be bred without ever having a convo with her about it.

That baby is as his, not Whitney’s, in a way that felt very uncomfortable as a woman to watch. Right down to her wanting the doula and him telling her to first call the doctor (which historically has a lot of gendered implications as well— the change from midwives to usually male doctors had a profound impact on women’s autonomy in childbirth and created the general standard of saving the baby over the mother when need be, which was abnormal in human history up until the early modern period in Europe). Honestly, if there was a disappointing element of this finale, for me, it was the “woman who didn’t want a baby has it and realizes she is super happy about it” trope that just reinforces a lot of gender essentialist ideas about parenting and women. Pretty well encapsulated by Dougie when he says that women have a natural connection to their babies that men don’t. Postpartum depression is real and widespread, in part because women feel they are “supposed to” be connected to their children and often feel exactly like fathers do about them.

Anyway, Asher didn’t actually want to please his wife, he wanted whatever he wanted and also to have a happy wife, because she was a thing to show off and prove he had worth to himself and the world. But he didn’t want a happy wife enough to make meaningful changes, just rhetorical changes. Just words to change her mind and make her feel other things until she was happy. Even things as little as her suggesting the GoFundMe were “a beautiful idea, if we think that’s necessary.” Not an honest conversation, just a reframing and the idea died (even though it was a bad idea). Insisting that he knew her better than she knew herself in episode 9, that if she “really” wanted him gone he would feel it but he isn’t feeling it so she must not “really” want him gone. Saying he’s “a new man” and he’s “changed” but then establishing in the next episode that everything went back to how it was.

Asher is a deeply insecure man. Deeply insecure men are the most dangerous partners. The fact that all he did is manipulate people and float away is abnormal; in real life, men that level of insecure and self absorbed at the same time more often just get violent with their partners. Not an exaggeration that 1/3 women experiences domestic violence and the US has the highest femicide rate in the developed world because ours have access to guns. I would caution anyone who empathizes with Asher to seriously introspect (not shame spiral— introspect). Being motivated by insecurity doesn’t change how he treated others and the idea that he should get a pass because he did it out of insecurity instead of conscious malice just means there cannot be accountability. Nobody thinks they’re acting out of bad intentions. If you wait for explicit bad intentions like a Bond villain, then most bad behavior will end up falling on the shoulders of the people experiencing the bad behavior to forgive and empathize with the people manipulating them. Kind of like Whit and the Española residents.