Reflections on a baseball bat
Few things piss me off more than the framing of the bashing in terms that make it seem like Brian's tragedy rather than Justin's. Justin not only nearly died but lost part of his memory, suffered a hell of nightmares and trauma that lasted for years, and developed a permanent neurological disability that interferes with his ability to create art and even earn a living -- not to mention having a very brutal lesson about societal intolerance and hatred delivered with devastating force, and having a moment of supreme happiness be shattered by someone who was specifically threatened by that happiness and what caused it . Then let's add that Justin was further betrayed by Brian, who let him spend weeks in the hospital waiting for him, even asking for him... think about what Lindsay and Melanie tell Michael, that EVERY TIME they go to see Justin in the hospital, he would ask, "Where's Brian?" Christ.
The bashing is about Justin first and foremost, and it's the worst kind of Brianite crap to ignore or skim over that to get to how it affected Brian.
And yet...
The fact is, Justin is a character with enormous strengths and personal resources. He has, if you will, an intact and undamaged ego. We call him the "stalker," but what we really mean is that Justin is strong, determined, smart, and self-motivated. It's almost impossible to knock pre-bashing Justin off-center, and even when you succeed, he comes back quickly.
Brian is damaged. Brian is heavily defended. Brian has a huge capacity for love but almost no trust in anything beyond the immediate -- that's the real reason he fears getting older, I think, not that he won't be pretty and get laid anymore, but because it's in the future, a future he really doesn't believe he'll ever see, or see as real. And we're told point-blank that one thing he fears is being responsible for someone else's happiness. He tells Justin that more than once, including in the scene when Justin shows up and Brian sends his trick away and lets him spend the night, in "Forever Young," and in the scene at the loft with Michael in 301.
Brian also was traumatized by his upbringing in an abusive family. I know there's fandom debate on whether or not Brian was physically abused, but whether he was or not doesn't matter. He was abused, his mother was definitely beaten, he was raised by alcoholics... Brian has PTSD when we meet him.
So when Justin is bashed, it's an initial trauma for him, but it's a re-traumatization for Brian. So even though the impact on Justin is life-altering, long-lasting, and tragic, it is also a single, initial traumatization instead of hitting an old bruise. That doesn't mean, "Oh, yeah, Justin can take it," but rather that for me as an author, the repercussions on a post-bashing Justin are less layered, less convoluted, less hidden, and have less history than those on Brian.
When you look at Brian as a character, it's obvious that his "fatal flaw," if you will, in the series is that he's so heavily defended. He's made himself self-sufficient (although he isn't, of course), cynical, and while principled, also remorseless. And yet he is also capable of enormous love and personal loyalty, as well as of empathic bonds (very rare in people raised the way he was).
When you take that person, wear them down over time until many of their defenses are thinned out in a number of areas (what Justin does; or as Debbie says, "Somehow that persistent kid got in under the wire."), and then they take a dramatic step towards a new behavior -- making someone else happy -- and instantly have it be met with violence that was directly prompted by your action... and this is not the first such lesson you've learned, but a re-traumatization... this is a recipe for incredible pain, a re-fortification of defenses, and not just a re-wounding of an old trauma but an intensification of it.
In the sense of character development, it really is true to say that Brian was, in fact, more affected by the bashing than Justin was, even though as a PERSON it's clear that Justin was the primary victim. It's kind of like the way they warn people who are on chemo or have an immune deficiency disease that they're more susceptible to food poisoning. I might vomit and have diarrhea from a huge, whopping dose of salmonella, but they'll die from a small dose.
If the primary struggle for Brian as a dramatic character is to believe in his own future, to detoxify the idea of happiness, comfort, safety, trust, and love for himself, to allow him to believe in something bigger than his self-protection and cynicism, it's clear that the bashing is literally and symbolically the main instrument by which that change is prevented in the seasons that follow it. It's not that it made Brian into something he wasn't before; that's more what it did to JUSTIN. Instead, it made Brian's existing pathology -- which Justin did not have, due to his strong, healthy ego and sense of identity and his own worth -- both worse and more entrenched.
Justin was harmed by the bashing. It damaged his core self. It changed him and the direction of his life. But after a couple of years had passed -- after he processed his anger during the Pink Posse arc -- he was again a strong person with a healthy, intact ego and sense of self.
Brian, on the other hand, sent into the bashing with pre-existing damage that got worse. He didn't start out with a healthy, undamaged ego and came out of it with even worse problems than he went in with. Brian would have been less damaged if he had, in fact, taken that bat to the head instead of seeing it happen to Justin, not because what happened to Justin wasn't "as bad" as what happened to Brian -- it was worse -- but because Justin was stronger and healthier than Brian was.
So yes, I want it both ways: To affirm and believe in the fact that the bashing happened to Justin and was about Justin and an act of violence against Justin, but that when you look at Brian's characterization in the show and fiction, the bashing happened to Brian, too, and in the long run did have a deeper and more destructive impact on him than it did on Justin.