#[i got your ask after i'd finished writing my response to d-i-d HOPEFULLY THIS ANSWERS THAT TOO THOUGH /o\]

[meyerlansky]

Oh goodness, what three or five characteristics can you boil Meyer down to? I'm sorry for one again asking you to elaborate on a throwaway line in your tags, but I'm so curious, and your meta is just so awesome.

@jasonjacinto said: if you’d be willing i’d love to hear more about you “you want me to be a villain? i’ll show you a villain” meyer meta 

OH NO you guys are just giving me an opportunity to ramble aaaahhhh /o\ okay so. to preface: i am a very big fan of a writer in a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT fandom who i think is fantastic at her craft, and who writes a loooooooot of AUs that stick the characters she’s writing into completely different situations than canon. but the characters are always recognizable because she’s very very good at distilling them down to a few key traits, and then having those traits interplay with the situation[s] of the AU. it’s a really effective way to go way beyond the canon content but keep the characters immediately in-character, and since reading her meta on her process i’ve been kind of trying to do the same for the only characters i ever really write fic with, and while i don’t think i can quite do it for charlie as definitively, i have Opinions on meyer and i also think meyer is the easier of the two to misunderstand and therefore mischaracterize, so that influences how strongly i feel about my read as well. after thinking about it a bit more in depth, the “you want me to be a villain? i’ll show you a villain” thing that the tags were on is teeechnically not one of those pillar traits of his, it’s a combination of two traits that ARE pillar traits, and i’ll talk about why it’s a combo trait later on. for the actual traits themselves, with longer explanations under the cut:

a drive to survive/succeed and a fundamental need for security;

extreme stubbornness;

Smartypants;

and the limited emotional expression we all know and love;

and the “i’ll show you a villain” thing is a weird blend of traits 1 and 2.

so in terms of Base Motivations, for me meyer’s number one priority is always always always his Drive to Survive/Succeed. in canon this is influenced by his traumatic childhood, because growing up in a place full of people trying to kill you and everyone you know constantly sort of makes survival the ultimate goal with everything that you do. but because i don’t like the idea that trauma and its effects are necessarily immutable parts of someone’s character, and because when we’re talking AUs the antisemitic violence the lanskys experienced in grodno was a very specific moment in history that can’t always be replicated perfectly when translating the character into an AU, i read a significant chunk of meyer’s focus on survival and security as an essential part of his personality. the circumstances around him can influence how he interprets survival and security, but in general, for me, his number one goal is “work towards getting to a position where no one can ever hurt me ever again.”

a sub-trait of this is that he is… extremely stubborn. he’s quiet about it, but he is next to impossible to win a fight with if he really digs his heels in, physically or verbally or whatever. the stubbornness has its roots in the survival motivation, but expresses itself in enough ways that aren’t directly related to survival/security that i think it can be counted as a separate trait. if he gets knocked down in a fight he’s gonna get back up again, he very rarely expresses uncertainty out loud or through body language, he very rarely asks anyone for anything as opposed to [politely, but without giving up ground by putting a question mark on the sentence] stating what he wants and what they’ll get out of it in exchange, and he never ever apologizes. for anything. like he might have apologized once ever in his life and if he did it was to his mom. like i said, this is related to his goal of survival and need for security, in the way that, like… if you can’t be sure of yourself, what can you be sure of? so in his view he is Never Wrong, because he doesn’t think he can afford to be.

trait number three doesn’t exactly help with Never Thinking He’s Wrong because trait number three is that he is Smart. whatever universe, whatever circumstances, he has an analytical outlook and an intellectual curiosity that is… pretty wide-ranging. he’s good at and enjoys math, which is the stand-out thing, because math is hard and it’s the easiest way to express being analytically-minded, so it’s what sticks out to other people the most, but he does just like to read nonfiction and absorb Facts in general. he’s also fairly good at predicting how people will react to things, so he has some degree of… emotional intelligence, i guess? in that he can use previous examples of people’s behavior and reactions to predict how they’ll react to other situations in the future, and he’s able to leverage that analysis of other people to his [and his partners’] benefit.

which leads into trait four, which is the emotional reservedness that i am always torn on how to explain, because to some degree i do think his tendency to limit his emotional expression is an intrinsic trait, but just because he doesn’t outwardly express his emotions as clearly as the people around him [in a way that people other than charlie can clock, anyway] doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel it at all. i guess sort of the delineation for me is that meyer’s emotional repression in canon is influenced by his trauma—his strong emotions tend to be a little muted because of his PTSD—but the limited emotional expression is a Pillar Trait—he might be more aware of his feelings in AUs where he has a lesser degree of trauma in his past, but he’s never going to be effusive about them. also he is… way more susceptible to outward expressions of anger in particular than he thinks he is, and he only gets better at restraining his anger after being around AR for a while, for whom that restraint comes a little more naturally. teenager meyer is a tiny ball of rage just waiting for some idiot to give him an excuse to let it out.

SO I THINK THOSE ARE THE BIG FOUR? i can go more in depth with sub-traits, particularly of number one, but suffice it to say that i think most of the sub-traits i can think of are all in service of Attaining Security—as an example, meyer demonstrates a higher consciousness of mainstream acceptability than any of the other baby gangsters do, with the acknowledgement that liquor’s only outlawed temporarily and gambling is also only on the fringes for now but Drugs Are Not Acceptable To Mainstream People, plus his interest in the land in tampa [and later havana] as a pathway to legitimate money via real estate development, and i think that for meyer has its roots not in a need to be Accepted [which i think charlie feels more keenly than meyer does tbh] but in an awareness that, basically, the less you stick out from The Norm, the safer you are. basically, “will it help me survive” will override almost everything else, in terms of “what motivates meyer,” and then the other traits filter in and influence and are influenced by the others.

IN TERMS OF THE VILLAIN THING. that basically comes down to a blend of traits one and two? because he Has To Survive, and the easiest/most sensible path to survival in canon is by doing the organized crime shit—which is not Wrong, because the ultimate goal of EVERYTHING HE DOES is survival, and crime shit enables the survival, but it conflicts with the awareness that by engaging in crime shit, he’s sticking out from the norm, which means there’s a tension between “i have to be secure” and “the actions i’m taking to make myself secure in one respect are making me less secure in another.” the resolution to that tension is not “get out of crime immediately and do something less profitable but more acceptable,” the resolution to that tension is “Everyone Else Is Wrong.” he’s just doing what he needs to do, but if society is going to insist that he’s A Bad Person, then fine, he’s gonna be the best at being bad, and gradually move into more acceptable things, because that’s not an admission that he’s wrong to be doing crime, it’s just a natural progression of his investments. so yeah! hooopefully all that makes sense and jives and i’m not just. rambling. without making sense?