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amorremanet · 7 years

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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

#lactosefreepussy #ocs tag #ask box tag #memes for ts #that story with the mutants that i should find a working title for fml #pete arden: dramatic disaster #leilani arabejo #james arden #jimmy arden #cora arden #emerson arden #virginia arden #jimmy & pete #james & pete #emerson & pete #leilani & pete #pete x seb #abuse cw// homophobia cw// racism cw// abuse culture cw// drugs ref// addiction ref//#oc fact sharing meme

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