#and just the growth from the beginning to the end of s1 ????? from lydia trying to force makeup on elena to making a suit for her????

[lesbianlotties]

on one hand, rewatching odaat did literally heal me. on the other hand, I just finished s1 and the quinces episode has me crying at 10am 😭😭🤧🤧

[actuallylorelaigilmore]

I was just going through my #odaat meta tag and I re-read this one of yours [post / 172076218500 / i-love-your-meta-on-schneider-and-his-need-to-be] and now I kind of want you to update it for S3--like, how S3 built upon and added to all the things from the previous two seasons. But I know you have a long list of fics to write and gifsets to make, so no rush, no pressure. But if you're inspired, I'd love to read your thoughts!

as s4 starts tonight, now seems like a great time to update that meta series :D

since it’s been two years, here are the adorably retro rambles i wrote back then (i was so newly in love with schneider and his found family! it’s cute to see!):

part one & part two

for those who don’t want to spend all day reading them, the gist is that an ask invited me to discuss schneider, and i did…and then i got another ask disagreeing with a claim they thought i was making about schneider in the first one. but my conclusion overall was:

S1 of One Day At A Time gave us [smudged first name] Schneider, who is always there when anybody needs him, and it told the audience that he considers himself a member of Penelope’s family.

S2 of One Day At A Time took the Schneider we were told about in S1, and it SHOWED us where he came from, how it led him to who he is now, and why that makes him a part of the family.

During the quinces dance in 1x13, when Schneider joins them on the floor, the audience laughs.

When Schneider tells a comatose Lydia in 2x13 that her family is also his family…nobody laughs. Because it’s not even a little bit funny. It’s just true.

That’s how you develop a character without changing him. And that is why this show is everything to me.

in this case, you didn’t ask for a new specific angle like i had for the previous metas, so i’m just going to ramble about how schneider, his place in the family and his sobriety are further developed in s3…behind this cut!

honestly s3 is a goldmine for those of us who love schneider. he has more story, he gets to show even more range as a flawed but lovable human, and we get to fill in more details about what continues to be his interesting but not-that-deeply explored life. (i will not rest until we know if schneider’s original mom is alive and neglectful, pushed aside by his dad–or dead and replaced. I WILL NOT REST.)

there’s a lot that happens in s3 that i was even specifically wishing for. besides the fact that i wrote his sobriety chip going in the museum as a fic before it became canon (can’t i just write for the show already? i’d be good at it!), i really wanted to see some proof that his friendship with penelope was not as one-sided as it looks in s1 and 2. 

as i mentioned in last year’s metas:

Schneider is the epitome of someone whose emotionally neglectful childhood turned him into an adult who is desperate to be loved. Who expects people to leave him or not like him very much…who is himself full of love and gives it away to people who deserve it AND people who don’t. He’s unconditionally devoted to his best friend and her entire family, he’ll be their mentor or support or punching bag when they need it without hesitation, which is so pure it hurts my heart.

Ir hurts my heart even more that he doesn’t demand anything back, though. He focuses on them and their needs completely, and while it’s easy to list off moments that demonstrate why Schneider is Penelope’s best friend, times he has helped and supported and openly loved her, the reverse is harder. I think those moments are there, but much like Lydia visiting Schneider in rehab prior to S1…we haven’t gotten to see them.

well, now here we are. i got my wish, and it broke my freaking heart, but in the good way. penelope wasn’t just there for him in the ways you would expect, like trying to be chill and supportive when his father was going to visit–and then working through her own issues to offer him love and reassurance about his value to her as a person after their resulting fight.

she also faced what was probably one of the worst case scenarios she could’ve imagined for schneider, given everything she’d already lived through with the kids and victor. and she never once hesitated. she did everything she could think of to help him, even when that meant planting her feet and refusing to get out of his way to stop things from getting worse. 

penelope looked at her best friend and knew not only what he was going through in those terrible moments but also what he was capable of in his better ones, and decided not to let him go. not then, not ever, as long as he was willing to keep trying. which of course he was because s3 also told us that losing his true family would be the worst thing he could imagine for himself.

speaking of his sobriety, that was the area where his character was developed in huge leaps this season. i wasn’t expecting that to be his s3 arc when i said this, but again, i give past me a lot of credit for being psychically linked:

In the first season, all of Schneider’s sobriety mentions are played for laughs, until Elena’s coming out storyline. We get a lot of mentions, actually–about his addiction to gambling, his stints in rehab, his five year chip–but he talks about it breezily and other characters don’t invite him to elaborate.

As viewers, we know he’s an addict and an alcoholic who’s working a program but since he’s not the focus of the show, we’re not asked to think about it much. However, since Penelope is separating from someone who is also struggling with addiction and we know they celebrated Schneider’s milestone right after moving in (when they barely knew him), we can infer that she takes this very seriously.

one of the interesting things to me about victor’s storyline at the end of s1 is that the show doesn’t try to draw parallels between them at the time. the season is just so not about schneider that it doesn’t come up, not even with victor staying at schneider’s place after penelope kicked him out. 

the two times schneider seriously discusses his history with penelope are instead in relationship to elena’s coming out (one of the central arcs of s1) and in relationship to penelope’s mental health (one of the central arcs of s2). which makes sense. but by the time we’re heading into s3, we’ve also seen schneider talk to lydia about his past, in more heartwrenching detail than ever before, while she’s unconscious. 

so as much as it hurts to watch it happen because of a relapse, it’s also nice to see him get much more serious moments related to his sobriety in s3. from his counseling of penelope about alex smoking pot, to the alvarez museum, to the balcony with dr. b, schneider talks about it a lot without it being a joke at all. this is awesome and fitting--he has earned being taken more seriously as a character and a family member. 

not all the time, it’s still a sitcom obviously, but in s3 he’s treated like an honorary family member with a serious history of addiction, not just a hipster landlord they like having around.

and the relapse storyline teaches us so much about schneider that we didn’t know before: what triggers him, how well he can lie when it matters to him, what a different person he becomes once he’s no longer sober, and most importantly, what he values enough that it can convince him to stop drinking again after he’s started. all of the pain involved in those reveals makes him seem more like a real person.

in terms of schneider’s growth, i was also really hoping that he would get to experience a healthy romantic relationship at some point. to quote me again:

And Schneider trying to do romance…wow is he lowkey out to break your heart. Thanks to what he witnessed growing up, he thinks a good relationship can be two people who don’t even like each other, that love probably isn’t real, and he jumps at the chance to be married, like he just needs a person to belong to–anyone who’ll have him.

s3 did give us some growth for him on that front, though not as much as i would have liked. he met someone he really liked, who seemed to really like him for just who he is, and who seemed to want more than a surface-level relationship of hooking up.

since we don’t know what happened with avery after his father came to town, i’m not comfortable saying that they did have a healthy relationship–we’ve got no proof they didn’t, but also nothing concrete to say that they did. we just know that while they were broken up, they missed each other a lot, and they were really happy to be reunited. 

i won’t feel good for schneider about finally finding his first stable and healthy love in avery until we actually witness them work through an issue rather than just moving past it with no real discussion. ‘i came back and you’re sober again’ is not automatically the same thing as ‘everything is now fine and we’ve learned and grown from what just happened and are a stronger couple because of it.’

also it worries me a lot that schneider thinks of avery as perfect. he has so little experience trying to do the real relationship thing, i need him to learn she has flaws, and that means it’s okay that he does, rather than keeping her on that pedestal and believing he’s unworthy. because that’s already a vibe he’s given off since we met him, and i just want better for him than that.

and when it comes to schneider’s place in the alvarez family?whereas s2 left him as a firmly self-identified alvarez, s3 kicked off by showing us that he had been enveloped into the larger family with the funeral--and then both of his major storylines this season, his father’s influence on him and his relapse, solidified it even further. 

elena puts extra work in on the whole building to help makes schneider’s dad proud of him, and the whole family welcomes the man despite their valid misgivings--with penelope even very impressively not punching him in the throat. it was entirely for schneider’s benefit that they tried so hard, especially pen. he deserved their love and effort where his father really didn’t.

and when his father’s presence threatens to take him away from them in a fundamental way, turning him into someone they don’t recognize, i honestly think it scares penelope. she gets angry, and she lashes out, sure, but underneath that she’s scared too, because she’s supposed to be able to count on schneider. he’s one of them, he’s family--not one of those guys. ‘the man.’ 

so their reconciliation not only mends their bond but strengthens it, because all that penelope wants is for him to stay family. to stay theirs. 

which is a priority she probably would not have expected to have back in s1, but it’s crystal clear that it’s true in s3, especially once she realizes schneider might be drinking again. 

her immediate reaction to the possibility is denial, which i love because it shows how deeply she really does trust him at that point. he’s not just the friend who sends her dogs in wigs and drinks coffee with her mom: he’s a man she expects to be stable and present in her life, even though she knows his history includes decades of addictive behaviors. 

it also shows that she doesn’t want it to be true, possibly even more than she believes it couldn’t be. she knows how addiction works, she has to know that schneider’s not guaranteed to stay sober even after five years without a drink. but she needs him to be.

the way the rest of the family rallys around schneider further makes it clear: he’s part of them, yes, but not because he’s forcing his way in. he’s wanted there. in s3, schneider is an IMPORTANT member of the family, who is loved even when he makes bad choices and breaks their trust and has to earn it back. 

and that’s the biggest evolution for his character, to me. after the way s3 ended, it’s hard to imagine schneider not being a part of their lives--not because he refuses to leave them alone, but because they wouldn’t have it any other way.

now, much as i like to share my grievances about parts of s3, schneider’s characterization isn’t on that list for me at all. it remains remarkably consistent for a character who started out on the periphery. and honestly, before i reread these metas today, i hadn’t thought about that much. 

you can finish watching s3, where schneider is 30 days sober and still trying to pull his life back together after relapsing, and then start watching the pilot episode, and there he is–the same guy we know and love and understand better than we did in the beginning.

so, to end this the same way i looked back at the first two seasons...

S3 of One Day At A Time took the Schneider we had gotten to know better in S2 and showed us a completely foreign side of him, using that to make clear just how important he is to the family now.

After Penelope told Schneider he wasn’t really part of the family in 3x10, she went to lengths she never had before--handholding and sincere compliments--to make sure he knew that wasn’t true. And afterwards, when Schneider put them above his own father, because her family is his family and everyone knows it...it was a completely serious moment.

That’s how far Schneider has grown in Penelope’s esteem, and as a character, in just three seasons. Without losing what makes him Schneider. Which is why this show is still everything to me.