#I’ve been writing him as a Work Guy who loves his malewife and eventually realizes he should’ve been a Wife Guy the whole time

[compacflt]

does thomas kazansky believe hes an honarable man? what does honor mean to him?

i love this question because this is my version of tom kazansky’s whole thing, and i think my version of tom kazansky is a man very conflicted about what honor means—the purpose of everything he does, the way he acts, what he acknowledges and refuses to acknowledge, is to achieve some higher level of honor… one more medal, one more rank, one more star. but of course in his personal life (womanizing, his relationship with mav, all the secret-keeping), he is not an honorable man, no.

and the funny thing is, i don’t think he could answer this question—the fatal flaw of my fanfic, as I’ve written about (and made diagrams etc) here, is that… for plot reasons, no one can really ask him that question! It’s actually very visible in the slider one-shot: every time slider or someone else gets close to asking, “Look, can you just be honest with me about this for a sec,” they literally get interrupted in the middle of their sentence, because for plot reasons Ice can’t actually be pressured to answer a question like that until maverick dies! So I think, if you asked him what honor is, he would say “I’d like to think I’m an honorable man. I have four stars that prove it.” But if you pressured him about some of his actions… what about pulling Bradley’s papers, or your secret illegal relationship… he wouldn’t know what to say. Honor, for him, is whatever the NAVY tells him it is. The navy says honor = four stars, he has four stars to prove how much honor he has earned. Anything in his personal life comes secondary to the honor he’s starving for in the navy. And, he feels like he has no control over his personal life, because he just lets that happen to him.

So—in summary, I’ve been writing him as someone who values professional honor over personal honor, and then ends up paying for that in the end.

But here’s also the thing… I’ve been trying to write him as someone who still TRIES. He’s been given this life…all these secrets… some of it is his fault, yes, but some of it also isn’t. It’s just life. He’s trying to do the best he can within its (admittedly artificial) constraints.

He’s just trying his best. hopefully ive left it up to you to decide if he succeeds.