#and a few are genuine middle school oc survivors

[grogblog]

All of these guys are insane hope this helps <3

[dhbelzinone]

𝓟𝓻𝓸𝓯𝓲𝓵𝓮𝓼 (ᴬⁿᵈ ᴬˡˡ ᵀʰᵃᵗ ᴶᵃᶻᶻ)

𝓞𝓞𝓒 𝓘𝓷𝓽𝓻𝓸 𝓟𝓸𝓼𝓽

Hi hello I’ve never done anything like this before but it looks like there’s a blog specifically for ooc intros so here’s my best. ♡

Hi my name is Sal, I go by they/them/theirs, and I’m a med school reject turned gender studies honors student. I’m currently working on a thesis about sex worker rights so I’m balls deep I can be in the industry without the good money and devoting the rest of my undergrad career to fighting for their right to make theirs. I’m also an artist and run an indie if y'all wanna see more of my muse’s roots. Bel’s been my emotional support muse for a good while and has gone through more character development than I have my entire lifetime, so although she may seem like a big softie compared to the rest of the muse crowd here, here’s hoping she can hold her own!

Bel Zinone Abridged: Devil’s Highway Vers.

Her mama is an undocumented immigrant who fought tooth and nail for her piece of the American dream. Much of this was due to the help of a vigilante organization that helped her flee from Europe, but her reputation was volatile enough to charm them into seeking out her membership.

Thanks to their international influence, she was able to keep running with the Wallflowers across the continental U. S. She soon settled down with her husband, a high profile (albeit black market) doctor, and raised her two children beneath the protection of the empire they built all the way from the city underbelly up to the high class elite.

Bel and her older brother Beau were relatively spoiled children until he left for the army and the family secrets started to leak. Adolescence was already hard on her, with her elusive sexuality and growing dysphoria yanking her identity chains, but as soon as she discovered her parents’ reign over the criminal underground, Bel doubted the authenticity of her upbringing and fled to the southern inlands with the resolve to make it on her own.

Little did she know that she’d find herself right smack in the middle of a gang war of the very nature she tried to escape. However, this time was going to be different. She wasn’t going to be at their mercy.

They were going to be at hers, for she offered one of the few medical resources in the entire desert that didn’t come with the liability of a paper trail.

In the meantime, she floats between bunny ranches, strip clubs, and the odd burlesque show. When she’s not working, she can be found frequenting bars, on Instagram, streaming her cam, tinkering with her Widowmaker, or looking for a good meatball sub.

Whereas she would’ve used her earnings to run as far away as possible from her past, Bel ironically finds solace in the lucrative lifestyle, calling a cozy studio apartment home and splurging on the occasional odds and ends that make the closeted queer life she embodies just a bit more bearable.

Relationships for her? I’m not gonna lie: despite the past rancor she’s had for her parent’s occupations, she genuinely wants to help and support people, patching them up so they’re good to go back to whatever they were doing without judgement. Her view of the life’s changed and she’s come to understand the institutions (as well as will) that brings people to commit and run with crime. She’s yet to make peace with her family, but she’s come to terms with the blood she’s from and wants to make a difference in peoples’ lives. That being said: 

Give her your tired, your poor, your horny

A job @ Paradise, maybe? Maybe she could learn about the surrounding gang activity from other dancers / affiliates or Kimi when she applies?

Maybe she could’ve known Esmeray from medical school?

Seeing other muses in the medical field are inspiring some joint black market clinic potential~

Maybe she could’ve known Rodrigo from when he was doing his work, possibly from Backpage before it got shut down?

On this note, maybe Nikki too? (Hello~)

If there are any other queer muses around, maybe they can shine a community light on her? Potentially while she’s yanking a shank out of their shoulder?

If there are any single muses too, I’d love to develop a ride-or-die boo or friend for her.

Last but not least, if we still need prospects and other make characters I’d be game af to have Beau go AWOL and trade his fatigues for a potential patch (maybe through the Mexican border with Nikki, if she’s gonna hate Bel asdkjfnaks). ♡

𝓐𝓹𝓹𝓵𝓲𝓬𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷

OUT OF CHARACTER

INTRODUCTION: Sal (24) they/them/theirs ; PST ACTIVITY: I'm in my last year of undergraduate study and will have class three days a week on average. I'll be online at least once a day and will be able to devote most of my week to nitty-gritty writing as well as plotting. PASSCODE: angel wings and/or crown MISCELLANEOUS: I've been running an indie oc rp blog for almost five years (same character @belzinone) and this will be my first group/skeleton/rl fc rp. I'm worried about being ignored/left behind/largely uninvolved in threads and plotting because that has largely been my experience in discord server rp groups, but y'all seem to have good administration going on so I'm not feeling so worried anymore. I look forward to the experience if you'll have me. :)

IN CHARACTER

NAME: Bel Zinone DATE OF BIRTH: (March/08/1991) (28) PLACE OF BIRTH: San Francisco, California GENDER/PRONOUNS: demifemme｜she/her/hers AFFILIATION: N/A RANKING: N/A OCCUPATION: freelance sex worker, hitwoman, & black market physician FACE CLAIM: Antonia Thomas

BIOGRAPHY

triggers: domestic violence, murder, abuse, misandry, severe burns, sex work Her mother was an undocumented immigrant, fleeing from her orphaned past and domestic abuse in the Italian slums. A headstrong, promiscuous, and violent woman, it wasn't long until she found sisterhood amongst a like-minded gang of vigilante women with international influence called the Wallflowers, well-versed in her infamy and coming to her aid while she was pregnant with her son and escaping prosecution for murdering her husband. Risa Zinone, codenamed La Eglantina, docked in New York city, giving birth to her son Beau Zinone and raising him with the rest of her sorella while continuing her bloodthirsty occupation of murdering abusive men and liberating survivors from their regimes of terror. However, one could only run with the Wallflowers for so long before beginning to challenge their belief system, however righteous it claimed to be. The murderer mother fell in love with the black market doctor who saved her life and once again fled across the country and retired so she could live a peaceful life with him, safe from the constraints and watchful eyes of the sisterhood, but not without heavy cost. She suffered major burns to her entire body by a fire and had to undergo near total facial reconstruction, a miracle performed by the love of her life. In exchange for her life, she'd no longer bear resemblance to her children. Thus Bel Zinone was born on the opposite side of the country as her brother, hilly San Franscisco. She was a wildly rambunctious child, calmed only by the sounds of her brother's guitar strings and a profound interest in her father's work. Little did she know, her living was earned via the illicit means of her parents and their continued association with the country's underbelly. Shambled by the loss of one of their most valuable members, the Wallflowers had undergone a civil war. A near complete overhaul of organizational structure and creed had taken place, leading to an abysmal divide between the matriarchal supremacy of days past and the new order. Enemies of the new regime all around the world were sought out, assassinated, and replaced with a stronger, more diverse membership. During that witch hunt, Risa was reinstated into the Wallflowers with her husband Dmitri and the power couple ruled the pacific branch. The Zinone's hid their criminal affiliations well. Dmitri, a renowned surgeon specializing in the central nervous system, Risa, an uptown socialite who moonlighted cabaret clubs as a jazz singer. Their children had a generous, almost spotless adolescence until Beau graduated high school and joined the military. He was an upstanding, self-righteous man, yet his fatigues all but killed the respect his little sister had for him. As the Zinone siblings grew up, their parents had to try all that much harder to hide their criminal affiliations, often leaving the two with ample bonding time and hiding various criminal survival skills (like how to fight and use firearms among other things) under the guise of "street smarts". Combined with her surfacing struggles with her sexuality and gender identity, Beau's abandonment was very hard on Bel. Her high school antics began to resemble those of her mother during her youth, starting fights, finishing others' fights, and getting dress coded nearly every day. If not for physical altercations, the young lady spent most of her time in the principal's office for getting into arguments with teachers and staff over technicalities in her STEM courses and exposing discrimination in curriculums and attitudes throughout. If not for her parents' powerful influence, she never would've dodged juvie, let alone made it to college. Fortunately, she found her calling and started settling down as soon as her father invited her to his workplace in the hospital. College was a breeze for her, even as a fierce insistence to be independent led to her paying her own tuition. She was no party animal or sorority sister, but the continuing troubles she had with her sexuality and gender identity pushed her towards casual sex work and the porn industry when work-study wasn't enough. Bel was steadily making her way through adult life, planning to devote the rest of it to medicine like her father. However, as she started having to use her special "survival skills" more and more, she slowly began to realize there was more to her parents than she thought. The Wallflowers were growing in influence, and La Eglantina's daughter was growing a bounty on her head as well. By the time she cornered her parents with the truth, she was already well into medical school and bore nods of her mother's pseudonym and her father's occupation on her back. The betrayal she felt when her brother left her resurfaced as she uncovered her parents lies, spurring her to cut her familial ties and live her own life exclusively by her own means. Bel rejected her father's footsteps in favor of sex work, something she pursued entirely of her own volition, and eventually found herself amongst the "bunny ranches" in Las Vegas, where her life in the crossfire between the Sinners and Jokers would begin. CHARACTER QUOTE: "Do no harm but take no shit." CHARACTER ANTHEM: Half God Half Devil｜In This Moment

EDIT: Risa Zinone fled from Europe as a result of Romani persecution.

P.S.: I reiterate that this is my first group/skeleton/rl fc rp. This is all pretty overwhelming so please have patience with me and for those of y’all who have a lot of experience with these things, please help me out <3

[heartwarminghockey]

Meet Jay Elder

That’s right, it’s the second installment of my “Meet the Characters of My Upcoming Garbage Party Writing Project” series. Camp Nanowrimo is literally right around around the corner, and I am so unprepared, y’all. Guess I’m a pantser this year, armed only with 15,000 headcanons and a very loose outline. No worries, right?

Anyway, today I am introducing the secondary main of garbage party 2.0, using the same format as last time. See you once again under the courtesy cut!

So I don’t have a fancy picture for Jay, unfortunately, but just imagine that there is a beautiful portrait here of a hesitant dark-haired well-built man. He’s looking at you like he wants to say something, but you’re pretty sure he won’t.

Jay’s the Love Interest, as you probably assumed. He’s the old flame that never really went out. No spoilers, but they’re still in love. He was a big part of Miles’s life, and when they reconnect after Miles’s Big Breakdown, he’s a big part of Miles’s recovery.

So! Onto the questionnaire.

AN INTERVIEW WITH THE LOVE INTEREST:

1. Full Name: James Ronald Elder III

2. Age: 30 at the start of the novel

3. Gender and Sexuality: Demisexual gay cismale

4. Pronouns: He/him/his

5. Ethnicity: Straight-up white, Welsh ancestry

6. Birthplace and Birthday: Jay was born April 24 (Taurus) in Selma, LA - one week after Miles, and shared birthday parties were just another facet of their early years.

7. Family Ties: James Ronald II “JR” (father), Lynn (mother - deceased), Samantha “Sam” (stepmother), Martha Jean (sister - 12 years older), Curtis Jones “Jonesy” (brother-in-law), Linford “Lin” (nephew), Veronica “Ronnie” (niece)

8. Career/Job: Owner and General Manager of Elder Paint & Supply, a hardware/home improvement store in Selma, which has been in the family since the first James Ronald Elder

9. Guilty Pleasures: A lot, actually. Sometimes Jay takes bubble baths to relax. He puts on his favorite jazz albums and just soaks in the warm water. He has a lot of old injuries from his time in the US Army, and this is the only time he gets to tend to them. He also loves chocolate and sets aside his Saturday nights for TV and chocolate pie, because he keeps a pretty strict regimen most of the time. Jay loves anything cozy, so there are so many knitted blankets in his house. He’s trying to learn to knit because he’s heard it helps with nerves, but his fingers are so big that he’s having trouble.

10. What They Would Be Famous For: Sensational gardening. Nothing would make him happier. Or workout videos, but that’s less fun.

11. What They Would Get Arrested For: In his teen years, this could have been anything - “criminal mischief” - because he was a bit of a troublemaker then, when his mother was dying slowly and his father was turning to alcohol and the pretty bartender to cope. But now? He would be more likely to be “arrested” during a safety/crime demonstration at the local elementary school.

12. OC You Ship Them With: The love of my life and his, Miles Ignacio Larue

13. OC Most Likely To Murder Them: Lin, out of sheer frustration when Jay refuses to make a move, or Miles, because Miles has a temper and Jay lives to test it

14. Contents of Their Pockets: Wallet full of cash because he doesn’t like keeping up with debit card transactions, multitool, keys, phone (yes, Lin keeps track of all his upgrades), actual hard candy/mints like an old man

15. Typical Dress: Dark colors and neutrals only, his favorite being navy blue. Tends to stick to buttonfront shirts and dark slacks for work. Sweaters in the winter. Catch him at home in old t-shirts, cutoff shorts, sweatpants. Jay doesn’t follow fashion. It makes him nervous. He has no idea what looks good on him.

16. Talents: Carpentry, automotive work. He has a notoriously lovely singing voice but he’s very shy about it. He’ll only sing if he thinks he’s alone, but he’ll hum if he’s very comfortable with you.

17. Why Someone Might Love Them: He’s very reliable, you can always count on him to be where he says he’ll be, on time, and follow through on all of his promises. You can literally wake him up in the middle of the night because you’re stuck on the side of the road, and he’ll be there in fifteen with his toolbox. He has a deep, soothing voice and a calming presence. He’ll never judge you for indulging yourself. Also, he’s had a little bit of therapy in his time, so he’s good to talk to, very good at helping you sort out your problems, and will NEVER betray your trust. Also, he’ll always do what you want to do - like, he keeps gaming consoles just for when Lin comes over and loves to play with him, but would never do it by himself.

18. Why Someone Might Hate Them: He’s stubborn as hell, slow to make decisions, hard to read, won’t speak up for himself, a little prideful, and I mean - not necessarily the most spontaneous or riveting company. Keep in mind that most of these things could be followed up with “unless he’s with Miles.”

19. How They Change: Jay’s journey is just as much about acceptance as Miles’s. At the start of the novel, he has more or less given up on love, and that’s okay with him. He initially resists the way Miles makes him feel, until he accepts that he actually can have everything he’s ever wanted - because he had kind of got to thinking that after everything he’d done, and all the way he felt broken and damaged, it was never going to happen for him.

20. Why You Love Them: I love Jay because he’s quite tender and broken, and he’s simple in his wants and desires, he’s anxious and nervous and awkward. He’s gone through some pretty major life events with the death of his mother and a pretty brutal break-up shortly after, and everything that happened overseas...He doesn’t realize it, but he’s very strong, a survivor, and he just has a lot of love to give...He thinks of himself as this dark soul, but all he needs is someone who takes the time to understand and lift him up.

OKAY! THAT’S OVER! HERE’S SOME OTHER STUFF!

Loves jazz trio, anything with piano, especially if it’s in French. It relaxes him. This is how he bonds with Maurice, Miles’s dad, after he gets back from the Army. He used to love nineties rock bands, but he can’t really take it anymore. It’s just one of the things that changed. His Army buddies call him “Pops” now.

Loves gardening. One of his favorite weekend activities - you can find him puttering about with a spade and a watering can and some pruning shears.

Has a little black cat - Maxine. She’s been with him about three years now. Cat person all the way.

Keeps a daily journal at the recommendation of his old therapist. It helps ground him, keep him organized. He’s self-conscious about his handwriting, but no one sees it except him.

Hates pictures of himself and genuinely belives he’s never taken a good one. He’s very self-conscious about his body as well.

Keeps up with all his old Army training - jogs in the morning, up the hill to Martha Jean’s mailbox, three miles roundtrip, and does his sit-ups and push-ups. It’s a good time to think about things, plus it keeps him healthy. He can account for his bad knees.

Wiggles his ears when he’s thinking, or when he’s curious or pleased.

Has a speech impediment - a stutter that developed after his return from overseas. It acts up more when he’s nervous. Miles was so patient with him that summer after his service was over, and over the next eight years, he’s learned to control it by speaking more slowly, but he uses a lot of filler words - uh, um - especially when he’s getting started trying to say something. Jay takes patience that a lot of people don’t have. It’s another thing he’s self-conscious about.

Goes through eggs and milk like nobody’s business. Loves chicken and fish. Loves food in general.

Quite cold-natured. His feet are always freezing.

ONE LAST SECTION, I PROMISE

Some Jay quotes:

Jay “chronicologically” Elder

Jay “Smiles Larue” Elder (Miles loves hates that)

Jay “act like you got some raising” Elder

And a few songs from Jay:

“Make You Feel My Love” by literally anyone, although he’s partial to the Adele version

“L-O-V-E” by Nat King Cole (he loves this song - the brass - he loves to watch Miles dance to it)

“All of Me” by John Legend (truly a masterpiece)

“Luckiest” by Ben Folds (it has piano, and it makes him think of Miles)

And that concludes Jay’s introduction post! I can’t believe Camp starts in like three days, holy cow. I’ll probably do one more post for all the other characters (Lin! Dean, Miles’s ex! Parents and step-parents! Martha Jean! Zuzu, Miles and Dean’s roommate in CA!) but I’m not sure when. Stick around if you want to see how much all this changes when I actually start writing, lol.

[amorremanet]

Something about Oz, my OC: abusive father, "we gotta keep the appearances up" mother. After his dad's death he can't bring himself to spend too much time with his mom, he hasn't forgiven her for letting the abuse keep going.

send me a fact about your ocs, i reply with a fact about mine!

Oh man, he’s the opposite of my Pete, in that regard. In the aftermath of his abusive father dying, Pete’s gotten closer to his Mama (and he was already pretty close to her), and turned most of his blame toward Jimmy, his big brother.

Some of it’s in the realm of, “it might not be fair, but it’s understandable,” like being mad at Jimmy because he was the one who got more praise when their Dad, James, pit the kids against each other for myriad reasons (like, it’s not Jimmy’s fault that their Dad did that to them and he didn’t “get it easier,” but it’s still understandable that Pete feels resentment over it, and it’s easier to direct that at Jimmy than at their Dad, not least since Jimmy’s still alive and can actually react to it. Also, it’s really not Jimmy’s fault that he takes more after James than Leilani, physically, but it’s kinda understandable that Pete doesn’t always handle it well when he looks at his brother and sees a reflection of their Dad).

Some of it’s in the realm of, “Pete is mad at Jimmy for something else, and dragging it into the mess of feelings about their experiences with their late father, because it gives him justification for being mad at Jimmy” (like how he’s perpetually peeved at Jimmy for his tacit homophobia, which he just keeps spewing, no matter how many times he gets called out on it, or like how he can’t, “voice concern” for Pete without it sounding a lot like, “Are you sure you’re gay? Because I think that this might all go away if you just weren’t gay anymore” — and it’s fair for Pete to be mad at Jimmy over it, but it’s not really related to their issues that were more directly caused by their Dad).

And some of it’s in the realm of, “Okay, Pete is reaching by a lot and he’s projecting his internalized victim-blaming and internalized abuser logic onto Jimmy because he’s an emotional wreck at the moment and he has no idea what else to do with it. On some level, he realizes this, but he’s also most likely a few minutes off from having an emotional meltdown” (like, if he ever slips into anything that sounds like, “It was Jimmy’s fault that Dad did [x thing] to me and Cora”? He’s a mess, he’s probably alone with Sebastian +/- Seb’s dogs, and there’s a really good chance that Pete is going to be crying into his best friend’s chest in the next five minutes)

Granted, there’s a pretty big difference in the situations, because of the differences between Pete’s Mama and what Oz’s Mom sounds like. Pete’s Mama, Leilani, was less about keeping up appearances (and when she did care about that, it was less of a, “but what would the neighbors think” thing and more about trying to put up a strong front to her kids and her side of the family), and she was pretty limited in her ability to actually get out of the situation (if not for the kids, she might have had the resources to leave, but she also wouldn’t have forgiven herself if she’d pulled a “Doll’s House” and walked out like Ibsen’s Nora, leaving her kids with James).

Then, there’s the issue of how messy the situation was, because James’s primary methods of abuse weren’t physical (and when they did cross into the physical realm, it usually wasn’t like breaking big brother Jimmy’s arm or slapping Leilani and middle sister Cora around, but in ways that put fear into his wife and children, and that he could use to manipulate them). One of his most frequently used tactics was gaslighting about his emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually abusive behaviors, and there were plenty of things he did that Pete didn’t get weren’t part of How Every Family Is until he’d seen enough of Seb’s parents to decide that they weren’t just acting kind and supportive when their kids had friends over; they were actually like that.

Three other big factors came together to make it all worse, in Pete’s mind:

1. the moments with James that weren’t completely horrible, most of which he didn’t really turn into, “the abuser is now going to do a nice thing by way of fauxpologizing, gaslighting, victim blaming, and so on” because he didn’t mean for most of them to happen. He usually didn’t have fauxpology moments, because he very rarely recognized that he was in the wrong and needed to apologize or at least put on a façade of apologizing, so when he had okay moments, Pete trusts that they were mostly genuine, and they muddy the emotional water for Pete by a lot, because he’s pretty sure his life would be easier if he could just unilaterally hate his Dad.

Some of these moments were little things, like being proud of a project that Cora put together for science class, or being down on Pete’s fondness for the theatre and criticizing his desire to be an actor, but showing up to his opening night as Cinderella’s Prince Charming Into the Woods and being the first person to make it into a standing ovation (probably without realizing that Pete could see him).

Some of them, Pete doesn’t even really remember consciously, most of the time, until something trips a wire in his head and reminds him of one time when James, who didn’t know at the time that his youngest is gay, told his kids not to listen to their Grandparents when they went on about how LGBTQ people are all terrible, evil sinners and going to Hell, because their uncle, his little brother, is gay. Their cousins’ Dad is gay, too, and so are their Mother and her wife, so unless they think that Uncles Nicholas and Jacob, and Aunts Rachael and Melissa, are all going to Hell, then they should just know that their Grandmother and Grandfather are full of shit about gay people.

Some of them were bigger things, like getting into it with some of his kids’ teachers because he felt they were being treated unfairly (like when one of Jimmy’s essays for a history class in high school got marked down because he used sources other than the textbook and Sister Mary Margaret’s course pack, or when Pete got in trouble because his English teacher didn’t believe that a fourteen-year-old could’ve read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart over summer break, much less understood it enough to write an essay about it), or getting into it with his parents for picking at Leilani being Filipina and the kids for being biracial.

Some of them were sort of in the middle things that didn’t mean a lot at the time, but have since developed more and/or deeper significance, like one time when James was sober (which was pretty odd for him, at that point), and was a dick about conveying the sentiment, “You’re my son and I love you, I accept that you’re gay but really hate your current boyfriend because he doesn’t treat you right, and FYI, maybe you’ve got your Mama and your sister convinced that you’re doing fine, but if you have to get fucked up on tequila and stimulants just to get through bringing him to dinner with the family and having a not-that-subtle quickie in the men’s room — one that you didn’t seem particularly enthused about even with your current level of intoxication — then that’s a problem, Peter-Paolo,” but was still genuinely trying to help

But whatever form they took, the long-term end result was always massive emotional conflict, because these moments made him feel pretty sure that James did love his family, that it wasn’t all an exercise in him satiating his own ego and sense of entitlement by trying to control Leilani and their kids, and that it wasn’t all terrible — which is all a mess to deal with, because it keeps Pete from unilaterally hating James, and it’s so hard to fully parse out which parts affected him in which ways, making it harder to address all of them.

Then there’s how these moments helped further normalize all of James’s other behaviors, and just…… “Emotionally messy” is an understatement;

2. the fact that James was, himself, a victim/survivor — maybe not a textbook example of a victim/survivor who went on to be an abuser in his own right, but he was pretty close to it. James never even got to understand that what his parents had put him through was abusive, before he died, because they rarely crossed into physical abuse (they were wealthy white Catholics on the Upper East Side in NYC, who eventually moved to Baltimore instead; any physical abuse of their kids would’ve required explanations to the neighbors) and he always thought the way that Virginia and Francis were with their kids was “just good parenting.”Not that any of this is an excuse for how James treated his children (I mean, his younger brother Nicholas went through the same shit and he didn’t abuse his kids) but it’s a point where Pete empathizes with his Dad, despite everything that James ever did to him, Leilani, Cora, and even Jimmy. Like, on some levels, James believed that he was justified in his abuse because it was, “done out of love,” and he was, “helping prepare his kids for the world” whenever he abused them, and, “doing the right thing for his kids, even if it’s kinda hard for them to hear right now”…… and a lot of that came out of how he was treated by his parents while growing up, and as an adult, and how he dealt with that—and Pete doesn’t want to feel for his Dad, or understand that he was, on some level, trying to do what he felt was the right thing and that his way of handling everything was, in large part, learned from his parents and how they treated him;

and 3. the Grandma Virginia factor, because Grandpa Francis wasn’t involved in Pete’s life that deeply (he more often went after Jimmy and Hank, Nicholas’s oldest son, though Pete doesn’t really know about any of that) — but oh man, Grandma Virginia mostly went after Pete and Emerson, Nicholas’s middle child.She was bad enough in her own right, for several reasons, and worse because having been one of her “favorite” grandkids makes Pete empathize with James that much more when he’d really rather not, and she just compounds everything in ways that Pete hasn’t even halfway parsed out since she died a few years back, because they’re tangled and messy, and for all he has literally danced on her grave before (it quickly devolved into having an emotional meltdown on her grave, but still), he did love her.Sometimes, he’s pretty sure he hates her for making him love her more than he hates her for all of the shit she put him and Emerson through (and if pressed to explain it, he’d guess that he hates what she did to them, and he’d hate her for that if Virginia hadn’t made both of them love her, but making them love her was even worse than that because of how it clouded their ability to see that what she was doing to them was wrong and limited their ability to fight back).Sometimes, he feels like he hates her most for what she did to James, and that usually leaves Pete feeling really confused, since he can’t tell if it’s coming more out of, “If she hadn’t abused my Dad, maybe he wouldn’t have abused us” or wishing that James hadn’t been abused because of what a mess it made of him and wishing that James hadn’t been such a mess because, despite anything that Pete ever says to the contrary, he loved his Dad and still does, and he wishes that he didn’t because he feels like hating James would make all of this easier, but…Sometimes, he feels like he hates her more for the things that didn’t seem like a lot at the time, but became bigger deals down the line — like how she tried to pit Pete against Leilani’s side of the family and pull him away from her as much as Virginia could get away with, given that Pete has always been a Mama’s Boyor like how she tried to say that Emerson didn’t need treatment or professional help for his abuse of prescription stimulants when it had nearly killed him more than once, which she said was because she, “believed that he could take care of it himself,” but really, it was because she knew that his parents and siblings wanted to push him into an LGBTQ-exclusive inpatient rehab and get him away from the pro-reparative therapy psychiatrist he was seeing, and she hadn’t succeeded in making Nicholas, “turn away from sin and homosexual deviancy,” but she shad hope that she could get Emerson and Pete to do so

And…… I lost track of that by a lot, but. Yeah, uh.

So, as seen here, the Ardens are kind of a huge mess in a lot of ways, with regard to abuse and familial dysfunction, but Pete’s trying to do his best with the aftermath of it. He’s kinda wound up treating Emerson as a mix of, “replacement older brother, because he’s younger than Jimmy but still older than Pete, and Pete and Jimmy have both contributed to the often shambolic state of their relationship, and it’s easier to talk to Emerson than Jimmy” and, “good friend, who’s okay with good-naturedly picking on each other (though Emerson isn’t sure if Pete is doing that when he says he’s pretty sure Emerson made up his current boyfriend, or if Pete really doesn’t believe that Asa exists)”

And, like. Even if things weren’t a complete mess with Jimmy, Pete would, at this point, feel like his Princess (Sebastian) is basically his brother…… but things being a mess with Jimmy made Pete decide that Seb is pretty much his brother sooner than he might’ve done otherwise, because Seb gets on Pete’s level better, he apologizes when he fucks up by Pete rather than turning it into some tu quoque, “Well, Pete, you’ve fucked up by me before, so I’m not obligated to apologize to you” bullshit, he and Pete have followed each other into multiple bad idea misadventures because they couldn’t talk each other out of it and went, “Okay, well, you’re not going alone” while Jimmy has always been more hands-off……

And I’m not sure how to wrap this up, so…… This is an abrupt ending, I’m sorry that this got so out of hand, I just have a lot of feelings about characters who’ve survived shitty abusive situations, and I’m done now