#lovemea malia | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

amorremanet · 7 years

Note

Margot!

oc profiles meme!

sdkfgshff, 1. eeee yay, thank you for asking! and 2. sldgfjdgfj, eeee YAY, thank you for asking about Margot in particular!!

Full Name: Margot Temperance Gabriel.

Gender and Sexuality: Cis woman. // Lesbian.

Pronouns: She/Her/Hers.

Species/Race (Ethnicity): Human (non-mutant) // White (Quebecois French).

There’s probably a mix of other white European ancestry in Margot’s family tree somewhere, but the Quebecois French part is the one that was actually important to her growing up

It’s even more important to her now. Despite all the times she says that she’s okay with having been disowned by her parents and how she hasn’t been back to Canada in about eight years — and despite how, on a day to day basis, she does seem more or less okay with it all — Margot was very deeply hurt by that loss, and it’s less that she’s dealt with it, more that she has done everything she can to distract herself from those feelings and bury them under anything and everything.

Which makes her Quebecois heritage more important to her — and leads to things like how she plays up her accent and throws more gratuitous French into her speech when she’s not having a good day (or when someone is annoying her) — because it’s like…… Well.

She can’t go back to the place she used to call home, and she can’t have her blood family in her life since they want nothing to do with her, but she still has the comfort of the rituals, superstitions, and so on that she grew up with.

Birthplace and Birthdate: Montreal, Quebec. // May 4th, 1985 — she’s a Taurus (Scorpio Moon, Cancer Rising).

Guilty Pleasures: Arguing (which, to be fair, she doesn’t actually feel guilty about most of the time, but she does admit that arguing with people has caused more problems for her than not). Making people watch hockey, even though she doesn’t actually care about hockey, because she’s not having a good day.

Drawing up elaborate plans for ridiculous heists that she’s never going to act on because, for example, she knows that there’s no way she can get away with trying to boost the Mona Lisa (“And that one isn’t even worth the trouble to steal. One of the most important lessons I learned on mine and Bastian’s study abroad year in Paris? Is that the real life Mona Lisa is completely and utterly, in all ways, unimpressive”)

—but fuck off, it’s still fun to have an elaborate fantasy life where she’s a masterclass art thief or similar.

(That said, there are some things that aren’t invited to her fantasy life, for various reasons.

Like, she doesn’t even dream about stealing Ancient Egyptian artifacts because reading up on the history of how white archaeologists dug them up and stole them made her go, “Okay, they are most likely not cursed, but if they were, then those people would deserve it, because that’s fucked up”

But the Hope Diamond, on the other hand, isn’t invited because Margot knows that the alleged curse probably isn’t real, but just in case it is, she’d rather not invite that into her life, thanks.)

Looking at different options she might have for taking art classes, because one of her alternate fantasy lives involves art forgery — but ultimately, only looking, sighing, then going to make coffee and distract herself because, as far as she’s concerned, she has no artistic ability whatsoever, so what’s the point

The whole process of hunting for horror movies she hasn’t seen yet (she’s especially fond of campy and schlocky horror that takes itself too seriously, but she’ll watch anything, and the more obscure, the better), getting copies of them, and watching them on Sebastian’s TV because it’s better than her own TV

(though she doesn’t make Seb watch them with her, because he scares easily and usually doesn’t sleep well after watching most horror flicks, he’s grossed out even more easily, there is a fairly long list of horror movies that have made him vomit because he was just that grossed out, and most importantly?

Ever since getting clean, he’s had enough trouble sleeping without horror movies freaking him out and making it worse. Making it worse will make it harder for him to stay sober, because unfortunately, his periodic grousing about how he could sleep just fine if he could get high or have a couple drinks? isn’t entirely wrong.

If you ask her about this, Margot will probably try to insist that she’s doing this primarily because, best friend or not, Sebastian is also her partner in, “extralegal activities that are only crimes if you get caught,” and him falling off the wagon is bad for both of them and worse for business.

The reality, however, is that despite her claims to be cold and heartless and out for herself above all others, Margot does care about other people, she does have a heart, and it’s more that she wishes she could be as cold and selfish to the detriment of others as she says she is, because she thinks that her life would be a lot easier.

And it might be easier, but in that life, she’d also be even lonelier than she already is, and she does not handle loneliness nearly as well as she wants people to think.

In the matter of Seb’s sobriety, Margot used to genuinely believe that, best friend or not, her primary concern here was whether or not Seb’s substance abuse — which, at the time, neither of them acknowledged as substance abuse — impacted their “business.”

Even when it did, though, as long as the effects weren’t that bad, she had a pretty easy time hand-waving it all and going, “This isn’t a problem, he’s fine, nothing’s wrong, it’s under control and that means I don’t have to be harsh with him in ways that will not make me feel good because they’ll upset him and risk losing me one of the only real friends I’ve ever had”

—and then she had a pretty easy time of ignoring her own feelings about it all and going, “Nope, it’s all about how our business is going, and not about a lot of potential problems that might be going on under all the substance abuse and motivating it, or making it worse, or anything like that — it is definitely not about those problems at all, because there are a lot of potential problems that could be going on, and what if we can’t do anything about them and they never get better? But they can’t get worse if we don’t acknowledge that they’re problems, because then they won’t be problems, and then he’ll be okay and things will be in control and I won’t lose one of the only friends I’ve ever had.”

And then everything was really, really not in control, and things did get worse because it turns out that ignoring the problems in life does not make them magically stop being problems

And then there were the couple days that happened a few weeks before Seb went to rehab, on the heels of his cousin Jeremy’s death, where Seb overdosed and had no idea if he’d done it intentionally or not, checked out of the hospital AMA as soon as he possibly could, went right the fuck back to trying to get as fucked up as possible, kinda dropped off the radar and made people panic and then Todd found him in the general vicinity of a literal gutter, and then, during an argument with Max and Ambrose to the tune of, “you just almost died, you are GOING to die if you keep doing this” “so the fuck what,” inexplicably passed out in the middle of a word, and just

That whole incident was a huge wake-up call to Margot, in some pretty bad ways, and while Seb was busy fighting with his brothers and having fainting spells because his mutant healing factor was well and truly sick of his shit and stretched too thin to keep him alive without knocking him out so it could work on undoing all the shit he was doing to himself…

…Margot was busy babysitting Seb’s dogs with Todd and Pete, trying to keep it together and trying not to snap at Pete for being high himself and talking about the obvious problem that Seb had while ignoring his own, and trying not to snap at Todd for turning into human platitude instead of a person and just dropping a bunch of lines he cribbed from AA, NA, pop-self-help books, and fucking Trainspotting which was apparently making him feel better but not actually helping because he wasn’t dealing with the situation or Sebastian on their own fucking terms, and trying not to snap at both of them for acting like they had any idea how to work on making anything right when they really blatantly didn’t, and oh yeah, trying not to have her own crying breakdown where they could see her do it

She failed on all of the, “trying not to” counts, though the order of events was a little different

First, she called out Todd for mashing up the, “choose life” speech from the movie adaptation of Trainspotting with some, “one day at a time” speech that he’d heard in rehab, which Pete laughed at because he’d been thinking the same thing, and then Margot chewed him out for how he’d been going on about trying to address the issue here and get Seb help while drinking from a hip flask and after admitting that he’d gotten high during this ordeal, because, in his own words, he “couldn’t do this sober,” then she chewed out both of them, and then came the crying breakdown of emotional overwhelm, guilt, fear, anger, more fear, more guilt, and “everything happens so much”

—which all goes back to horror movies and not making Seb watch them with her, because Margot doesn’t always act like she takes Sebastian’s sobriety seriously — because if you let people know that you take something so seriously, they can figure out that it’s a vulnerable spot for you and use that knowledge to hurt you — but she does. There are a lot of counts where she doesn’t know what the best way to help him is, but she wants to.

Because Margot knows that she can survive a lot, and that she can get through a lot and manage to thrive (or feel like she’s thriving, anyway) — but she’d really prefer to do that with her best friend, rather than without him, and so, in the average week, she puts more time and effort into trying to help him avoid or deal with potential relapse triggers than she spends on most other people in six months.)

Another guilty pleasure, though? All three of her boys don’t really care about Harry Potter that much. Like, they’re familiar with the series, but Pete thought the first three books were way overrated and has only seen a couple of the movies because of friends or boyfriends dragging him to them, and Seb’s opinion of it all is, “…eh? I mean, it’s okay, but I guess I’m not really the target audience, because I wasn’t wowed or anything,” and Todd’s biggest reason for caring about the series is that Bianca, his 15-year-old niece, loves it, and he likes sharing it with her even if it’s not really his first choice

Margot…… genuinely enjoys all the books. She’s a bit more, “eh” about the movies, but she does enjoy the books. It took concentrated effort not to come off as too excited when Todd went, “Hey, would you be open to, er. Making a Pottermore account as part of helping me apologize to my niece for missing her birthday while I was in rehab? And then being her friend on it and stuff? Like, please? Pretty please?”

Phobias: Margot would probably tell you that she fears nothing but fear itself, “the crushing inevitability of death,” being rejected by any of Seb’s dogs (which hasn’t happened yet, but Margot doesn’t rule it out as something that could happen), and the possibility that the Loch Ness Monster might be real. But that isn’t entirely accurate and most of these are some kind of lie.

Death technically isn’t a lie, because Margot does fear death, but she holds that it’s different and “doesn’t count” because she has confronted and dealt with Death, but she doesn’t feel like she’s ever “*really*” been confronted with the reality of her own mortality. That is based in a lot of Margot lying to herself, but still, she says that Death doesn’t count as a “real” fear for her because it’s not really a conscious fear for her, so much as the basic-level instinct to survive.

Fearing that the Loch Ness Monster is real is just an outright lie, because Margot thinks that would actually be pretty cool. (Just don’t ask her to choose between being a beautiful green mermaids lesbian or a beautiful green space babes lesbian, because she likes mermaids and space aliens equally and her answer would be, “what about beautiful outer space mermaids, can I be an outer space mermaids lesbian?”)

And, “fear itself” is a straight-up lie for her, too, because fuck you, fear is good and useful, okay? Fear exists to warn us that things might go badly for us, and it exists to protect us from stuff that might try to kill us. True, it’s not always right, and yes, it can be hyper-vigilant or irrational, and it can cross a lot of lines into being more harmful than useful, but Margot actually values her fear and thinks it’s completely ridiculous to wish that you didn’t feel fear.

She would also argue that, for all of the bad shit that has come out of humans being afraid and letting their fear run rampant and mess up everything, most of humanity’s big achievements — the good ones, she means — wouldn’t exist without humans experiencing fear and being driven to create something bigger than themselves, something that could comfort or help or at the very least outlive them

So, shut up about how great it is to be liberated from fear.

Margot would agree that too much fear is bad (though, good luck getting her to just admit to having an anxiety disorder, because nope, she’s pretty sure that she’s fine; she’s had problems like this for her entire life, which in her mind means that she can’t have a problem, because she still thinks that disorders have to come out of nowhere or be a reaction to something that happens to you)

—but in general, she sees a lot of value in fear, and she’s not sure where the line is between, “things Margot really does believe” and “things Margot tells herself to avoid all the problems that she doesn’t want to deal with.”

(I’d say that it’s about 75-25, in favor of, “things Margot really does believe,” but that’s beside the point)

Being rejected by one of Seb’s dogs is a genuine, conscious fear on Margot’s part — especially because Seb has broken it off with guys before because his dogs didn’t like them or they didn’t like his dogs, because dogs are more reliable and better overall, in Seb’s experience, than boyfriends — but this is just one part of a larger fear, and that fear is rejection in general, the threat of being alone, the chance that maybe she really isn’t worth all the trouble to love, and so on

If anyone wants to accuse me of having a lot of characters for whom this fear is a Thing, then

Well, yes. Duh. I haven’t exactly tried to hide it, and a lot of human beings are afraid of being alone, of not being good enough, of being rejected, of being unlovable, and so on

So…… *shrugs*

I wouldn’t say that it’s every character’s biggest and deepest, most powerful fear, or something they’d all see if they had to fight a Boggart — but it’s a recurring Thing for my characters because these are common fears irl, and they resonate with me so I like writing about them

But I digress

Margot is in a position, with these fears, where she’s afraid of ending up alone, but also assumes that it’s probably inevitable — like, she was opposed to making actual friends in undergrad until Seb decided that she was cool and he was going to be a friend to her, because Margot’s feelings on it all went, “why even bother making friends, they’re not going to last?”…

…and then she spent a lot of time being deeply confused about why the weird, unfairly tall (he’s 6’3” vs. her 4’11”) guy from their RA’s “getting to know your hall-mates” exercise was being so nice to her, like actually trying to talk to her and get to know her, and seeming genuinely happy when she went, “I’m going to the library and I need someone tall to get me the books that I want and then carry them for me, you are literally the tallest person on our hall and you work out so I’m guessing that you have a decent carrying capacity”…

…and then she thought that, because he’s a guy, it probably had something to do with wanting a date, and they had the, “Sebastian? I’m gay” “Oh, really? Me, too!” talk, which was even more confusing for Margot, because if he wasn’t trying to get a date with her, then why the Hell was he being so nice and trying to get to know her

(The eventual, “I’m just trying to be nice? And, y’know, act like a friend?” / “Yes, Sebastian, we’ve established that. But why.” / “……Because I want to be your friend?” / “………but WHY?!” talk was a little bit of a mess, but it worked out okay in the end)

—and for all this worked out with her making an actual friend, Margot still assumes that Seb is the exception, not the rule. She took a long time warming up to Pete and Todd, for instance, because her thoughts here went, “They’re just being friendly because they’re Sebastian’s friends, not because they actually like me”

Even now that she’s long since accepted that Pete and Todd see her as a friend, and that she feels similarly about them, Margot still has a periodically overwhelming fear of not actually being a True Part of her Fab Four

This fear is actually the reason why she simultaneously hates Wormtail while feeling for him a lot

To explain: once upon a time, Margot noticed, very fairly, that Seb and Pete’s relationship reminded her a lot of the James-Sirius relationship, with Seb as the James (comes from a wealthy, loving, supportive family; more or less a good person, but trips over his own feet and makes a lot of stupid choices, though James was actively a bully while Seb only got into altercations with bullies when they started it; the “heart” of their Fab Four, in a lot of ways; doesn’t always think about the consequences of his actions or how people may not necessarily agree with how he sees himself [though James was more in love with himself vs. Seb feeling like he’s garbage and not getting it when people disagree])

and Pete as the Sirius (acts flippant and cool but actually cares a lot; has a great capacity for kindness that’s rivaled by his great capacity for wrath; tenuous and complicated relationships with his siblings, and those complications have a lot to do with their abusive, racist father [who was, at the time, still alive]; will probably destroy you if you try to fuck with his friends, or at least he’ll try; doesn’t always think about the consequences of his actions or account for the fact that his idea of “helping” is not always going to be considered helpful by anyone else; can pretend to be polite or heterosexual, but not both at once; would probably go, “ugh, I’m too gay for this,” flip his hair, and leave, if he really didn’t want to be somewhere right now; not a drama queen, a drama khaleesi)

—and then, that led to Margot pinning Todd down as Remus and herself as Peter. Her rationale for the latter was based entirely on two points: 1. fear that her boys don’t necessarily consider her a “real” part of their Fab Four (they do, but good luck telling that to Margot’s anxiety disorder and making it stick); and 2. fear that she could turn out to be the, “weak link” in the four of them, the one who’s most susceptible to outside corruption or influence and ends up getting everyone else hurt, screwed over, dead, or all of the above

Which makes her look at Wormtail with mixed sympathy and revulsion, because she looks at him and sees herself

(And here, I editorialize really quickly: Margot’s reasons for pinning herself as her Fab Four’s Peter make sense to her and they have underlying logic and all, but she’s still wrong.

In reality, she’s much more the Remus of their Fab Four, and Todd would be the Peter because he wastes so much time and energy trying to be whatever mixed caricature of himself and the version of him he thinks that people want, and it makes him way easier to lead astray because, even as their Fab Four’s Ravenclaw, he has a big tendency to think critically in the face of peer pressure but about the wrong things and usually coming to the wrong conclusions.

Like, even granted that Sebastian is the one who has a history of dating abusive douchebags that gives everyone else fair reason to be relieved when he actually falls for a good guy? Todd is the one out of the four of them who is most likely to notice literally nothing about how he’s started dating a supervillain henchman or similar, and in the face of evidence, would have like a million and ten excuses that sound plausible enough until you hold them up to scrutiny.

Because he wants so badly to be accepted that he would ignore his own better instincts about this and make himself believe that his new boyfriend is really got that black eye when he got mugged after leaving the nursing home where he went to visit his grandmother.

Margot has a similar desire to be accepted and have a group of friends, but the fact that she handles that desire and the attached fear of abandonment by trying to push people away before they can hurt her? Totally not a Peter Pettigrew way of dealing with things. But I digress.)

And on one hand, she gets that her ways of handling these fears and assumptions create a self-fulfilling prophecy… but on the other hand, she has been hurt by people she was close to, before, and she hates being alone but still believes that, “Sometimes it’s better to be alone because no one can hurt you” is probably one of the truest things that has ever been said by anyone

And on the tentacle, her Boggart would probably take the shape of Marceline, Seb’s Mom.

For a while, it would’ve looked like her own parents, but after they cut her off and Margot met her best friend’s Mom, her Boggart would’ve started looking like Marceline. Initially, this would’ve happened because she was afraid of getting on her best friend’s Mom’s bad side and consequentially losing her best friend, since Sebastian is a certifiable Mama’s Boy™

These days, though, Margot’s Boggart would look like Marceline because she’s gotten onto Marceline’s bad side before, several times over, and the threat of losing her best friend due to maternal intervention is still there, even though it hasn’t happened yet (and, barring something completely and utterly catastrophic, it won’t)… but now, Margot kinda thinks of Marceline as someone who could, in five minutes or less, rip to shreds Margot’s ego, her sense of self, all of her self-defense mechanisms, and so on, and completely destroy all of the lies she tells herself on a daily basis, and probably do it without losing her cool

She’s not wrong

Marceline could totally do that, if she wanted

But to be fair, Marceline would at least try to be tactful about it and do it in a more constructive way than just giving Margot a, “Reasons Why You Suck” Speech, because Margot’s important to Marceline’s wayward youngest, and she isn’t a bad person, so it’s better, if you ask Marceline, to try and do this in a way that nudges Margot in the, “being a better version of yourself” direction

Which is only marginally less terrifying a prospect for Margot than the one where she just gets emotionally eviscerated and left to pick up whatever Marceline left of her sense of self while forced-smiling through the face-crack of the century

What They Would Be Famous For: Realistically? If she gets any fame, then it’s going to be because she ends up being one of the non-mutant members of a new superhero team. But if that hadn’t happened, then Margot wouldn’t have wanted to be famous, like? She would’ve wanted a reputation enough for some people to know her name and for it to command respect, but she’d much prefer to work from behind the scenes. Fame makes that plan very difficult.

What They Would Get Arrested For: Trespassing, breaking and entering, theft and/or burglary (and she would be pointedly insistent about how it wasn’t robbery because she didn’t use deadly force), myriad conspiracy charges, miscellaneous charges related to her and Seb’s “extralegal business activities” (read: smuggling and playing small-time but well established middle-folks in distributing various controlled or illegal substances to people who want them)

OC You Ship Them With: Adelaide, but… uh. I go back and forth on whether or not a romantic relationship between the two of them would be good in the long run, or if it would mostly be a hot damn mess, or what.

But, uh, aside from this possibility, most of Margot’s most significant relationships so far have been platonic in nature, even with other ladies.

Like, for instance, Lucy has a girlfriend (Sara Grace) and is too young for Margot’s comfort (23 to Margot’s 30, so Margot feels like, “yeah, it could be worse, but I would feel skeevy about dating her”) — but Lucy and Margot are going to get to be friends, and Margot is actually going to make an effort to reach out to her in a positive way, because she feels for Lucy and her current position of being closeted with her homophobic parents and relatives, but out to almost everyone else, and trying to find herself as a young lesbian and her place in the world, and ugh, Margot is so not used to actually wanting to be nice and help someone, but…… she wants to be nice and she wants to help Lucy out where she can

So, currently, Adelaide is the big answer to this question, but I keep going back and forth between several possibilities for how that might play out

OC Most Likely To Murder Them: Hmm. Well, Senator Huntington is the one who’s most likely to order the hit — and frankly, much like Josie, Margot is most likely to deal with Edward and Desmond, at first, because they are Those Two Bad Guys who just kind of suck at most things, and they’re usually the ones who get sent on, “the Senator is displeased with this person, go murder them for him” runs first — but if someone were going to murder Margot, the antagonist who’s most likely to actually put in effort is either Joan or Tammy.

Margot, personally, would be way more worried about it if Marceline ever wanted her dead.

That’s never actually going to happen, because, for one thing, Marceline might get annoyed by Margot, but she doesn’t want her dead, and doesn’t have the right kinds of connections to the wrong people that she’d need to call out a hit on someone.

But even if she did have said connections, Marceline wouldn’t call out a hit on Margot because, for all she is vexed by Margot and by the fact that she’s important to Sebastian on a fairly regular basis, Marceline also knows that her youngest son’s myriad problems are not actually Margot’s fault, and that they have a habit of enabling each other, rather than the one-sided, “Margot enables Seb in dangerous, self-destructive bullshit and it’s not like he’s entirely innocent but at least he’s not being an enabler for her” view of their friendship that Seb’s brothers have.

Still, though?

In Margot’s mind, when Marceline wants something done, then it gets done. Somehow, someway, it gets done. And she might not want Margot dead right now, but that could change, if she ever decides that maybe it’s not wrong to blame Margot for all of Seb’s problems, or Margot fucks up badly enough to earn her no romo soulmate’s wrath, or something.

(Seb kinda feels like Margot is getting to this fear based on ideas about Marceline that aren’t entirely accurate, and to be fair, she will agree that yes, her fear of Marceline isn’t entirely rational and yes, her view of Marceline is not necessarily as accurate as it could be because she’s afraid of Marceline…

…but she’ll only agree to that as long as Seb is willing to admit that his own view of Marceline is also inaccurate in places, and distorted by virtue of him being one of the world’s biggest mama’s boys, so he can maybe understand why Margot takes his opinions about his Mother with a few ten-pound bags of salt? :))))

—and to his credit, Seb will agree to that without question, since…… yeah, no, he would have no case if he tried to say that he isn’t a mama’s boy, and it’s not fair on Margot to act like he has some pure, objective view of the situation or of his Mom or any of it, especially when Margot can get very upset about this very easily, even if there isn’t a proximate cause for that, at least not one that actually has anything to do with Marceline

—for example, a situation like, “Margot is sleep-deprived and anxious about a lot of things in general, and focusing on this one right now because it’s more familiar, so it’s easier, and there’s more of a chance that focusing on this thing will ultimately make it easier for her to calm down, because she and Seb have been over this often enough that it’s easier for Margot to remember the reasons why this fear is irrational and talk herself down — and if she can’t do it herself tonight, then it’s easier for Seb to talk her through the anxiety spiral if they focus on this thing, and then they can try to deal with anything else that she’s worried about tonight”)

Favorite Movie/Book Genre: Horror of all stripes, Harry Potter, and literally anything with WLW in it, even if it ends up just baiting her, just…… jeez, she wants to watch something with other WLW in it, is that so wrong?!

Least Favorite Movie/Book Cliche: She’d tell you that it’s romantic happy-endings, because she is trying way too hard to seem like she is trying too hard edgy so you will be disinclined to ask any more questions about this. In reality, the way that a lot of popular media mistreats lesbians and WLW affects her more than she lets on, and more than she even lets herself be consciously aware of because it makes her feel weak, so she tries to repress and ignore those feelings.

But if pressed about the romantic happy-endings thing, she might tell you that her least favorite cliche is boring, bookish brunettes with inexplicable superiority complexes who talk a lot about how they’re totally not like all the other girls

She will probably not tell you that she hates that cliche because she has been that girl so many times before, and can slip into back it really easily when she doesn’t pay attention to her own behaviors, but…… well. If you got her to admit that she hates that trope, you’ve gotten further than most people will ever get, for whatever that’s worth?

Talents and/or Powers: …Okay, I answered these out of order, and a lot of Margot’s talents wound up being discussed in the next point, oops. And in the conventional sense, she doesn’t have any actual superpowers, but Sebastian would tell you that she has the gifts of super-wit, super-observation, and super-patience (most of the time)

Margot would tell you and Sebastian that awww, he has the gift of being super full of shit, but she appreciates the compliments nevertheless :)

Why Someone Might Love Them: She may not give her loyalty out easily, but once she does give it to someone, she actively makes an effort not to push their relationship or push them away like she does with most people, almost all the time, and she may not fight for you in the conventional sense — because she’s a 4’11” chain-smoker who doesn’t know how to throw a punch and doesn’t particularly enjoy most physical activity — but she will cheat, manipulate, make veiled or not-too-veiled threats, and several other things in the name of advancing your interests.

She’s intelligent, attentive, and thorough (though, in fairness, she can also skim over details that are actually pretty important because they weren’t interesting enough right now). She’s witty and, once you get her to warm up a little, she can actually be pretty fun to be around, even if she doesn’t think so.

She’s kind of trying to be a better person, even if it’s not always going so well for her, but she does care about making that effort (and she would probably say something like Peter Quill’s, “I’m an asshole, but I’m not 100% a dick” bit from Guardians of the Galaxy, though she and my Pete might have to share it, since both of them would probably say something like that).

Also, uh. These are some of the things that Margot has used in the name of making herself useful, potentially indispensable, because she doesn’t feel like people would want to keep her around on her own merits, but… She could be more organized (she kind of goes through cycles of being hyper-organized and then falling into “creative chaos”), but she manages to make sense out of her “creative chaos” and keep a lot of important details straight.

She knows a lot about legal loopholes and how to exploit them. She also keeps up to date on who the best lawyers to call are, based on how much people can afford (and/or whether or not they’re willing to just let Seb pay for it), and if you’re in trouble with the cops, she will very calmly remind you that you have the right to not talk to them and should definitely exercise it, and then she’ll handle getting you a lawyer.

While not exactly a paragon of communicating openly and honestly with people, Margot is very good at making sure that everyone is on the right and relevant pages… and at judiciously choosing which pages may not be exactly necessary in case it seems to be more in her and/or her Fab Four’s best interests to avoid certain truths in order to manipulate someone else (and at listening to arguments for why that’s not the best way of handling things, even if she isn’t always convinced by them)

Why Someone Might Hate Them: Well, in terms of, “fandoms gonna wank” (because statistically, I’m not likely to end up with a fandom but this is where my mind went first), I would expect hypothetical fans to hate Margot because:

1. she’s a lesbian, so she and Sebastian aren’t going to be a Thing romantically, period (even though both of them are gay, so that was never going to happen), and this would get construed as Margot’s fault because she’s the lesbian here, instead of the white gay boy;

2. the fact that she and Sebastian nevertheless have a deep, close relationship that’s incredibly important to both of them, which precedent says some fans would turn into, “ugh, she’s so clingy and why is she trying to get with a gay man” (even though she isn’t because both of them are gay, and do they love each other? Yes. But not romantically, and frankly? If either of them is, “the clingy one,” it’s Sebastian.

Like, in cat terms, Margot is the huffy cat who will run an intense kitty background check before deigning to let you pet her, and she’ll huff and stomp off as soon as you do anything to bother her ever-so-slightly, and Seb is a nervous, clingy cat who sleeps on your face so he can be close to you, sits on your wrists while you’re typing because he’s afraid that you don’t love him, and probably wrecks up the place a little if you’re gone for too long because he thought you were never coming back);

3. her life doesn’t revolve around Sebastian, she calls him on his shit and tries to hold him accountable for it (never mind how this is a thing that he needs more of in his life and generally, she does this when he deserves to be called out on something, and…… uh, yeah, last I checked? The whole, “You have a right to tell the people you love when they aren’t doing right by you and ask them to stop” thing applies to lesbians, too)

—and the list could go on, because I’m a cynic about this and I expect this shit out of people (just like I expect that people would probably be kind of shitty about Holmes — the unit chief and supervising agent on Seb and Josie’s team of mutants at S.T.R.O.M.A. — because he’s an older, black, bisexual mutant who isn’t intentionally cruel or over-harsh with people, but also doesn’t coddle the people on his team, expects them to do their jobs and stay professional, and doesn’t talk much about his personal life at work because that’s not what work is for and, in his mind, maintaining professionalism can help them keep their work as ethically sound and morally sound as possible)

But in terms of Margot’s personality, uh

There are a lot of reasons why most of the people she meets don’t like her:

She’s abrasive and often deliberately off-putting, because she doesn’t like most people — and sometimes she decides that she doesn’t like them without giving them a real chance — and assumes that they don’t or won’t like her, so she tries to push them away first.

She can be an elitist, and it’s not like she tries to be — sometimes, people don’t notice it at first, because she’s not always an elitist in more conventionally understood ways — but, still.

Not only can she be an elitist, she can also be a huge snob to people who don’t meet her standards (which are often unpredictable because a lot of them are based on absolutely nothing, at least nothing concrete), and she has an attitude about all of it like, “*shrugs* Sure, it’s not my best side, but I’m not doing anything too horribly bad over here and… what, like other people don’t have flaws? Uh huh. Right. *rolls her eyes and continues as she was before*”

She has a tendency to tune out of conversations when she thinks someone’s being tedious, and she handles it in one of two ways: 1. she outright admits that she wasn’t listening because someone was being boring and has the tact of a brick about it because she probably doesn’t care if you’re upset by being told that you were being boring, and she’d say that you should’ve been more interesting in the first place or this wouldn’t have happened;

or 2. she pretends that she was listening and plows ahead with things, no matter how many important details she may have missed

(TO BE FAIR: Margot does know that this is kind of a problem and it’s one of the few flaws that she cares about working on at all…… but she only cares about working on it because on one hand, she has gotten herself into trouble with it before

and on the other hand, she has exactly three friends at the start of the story and she’s hurt all of them by doing this, and Margot doesn’t feel good about that. So, she wants to do better by her friends and for herself.

But the rest of humanity…… well, uh. They can get some of the benefits of Margot trying to do better about this, sometimes, but she’s not doing it for them and trying to make her do it for them will not work because she’ll probably just stop cooperating.)

And true, most of her ambitions in life aren’t really huge things that she’d run roughshod over other people to see accomplished — though, in fairness, if she puts time and effort into not running roughshod over other people, then her primary concern is almost definitely, “it would be a lot harder and more annoying for me, in the long run, if I ran roughshod over them” give or take a dash of, “at least one of my three friends might get hurt or be I’m Not Mad, I’m Disappointed at me” — but…… uh.

Margot is the sort of person who would go, “Okay, the last two times the Dwarves got really OTT gold-hungry, they awoke a Balrog and summoned Smaug — but fuck it, I’m sure that nothing bad will happen this time and I want to go deeper than they did because there’s probably even cooler stuff that we haven’t unearthed yet”

She is also one of the main cast members who’s most likely to accidentally end up in a bad fanfiction trope (be it sex pollen or something else) because she found the Shiny Magical McGuffin that she wanted of the day, she saw the warning signs all around it that said, “DO NOT OPEN, VERY DANGEROUS,” and then she went, “Pffft, what*EVER*, that sounds like loser talk” and opened it

She is definitely the main cast member who is most likely to end up unleashing C’thulhu or some similar entity because she found an Ancient Tome Of Evil And/Or Things That Humanity Was Not Meant To Know, and well, she knew it was possibly a bad idea, but she did not bust ass and invest countless hours of work and put herself and Sebastian in several potentially dangerous situations to NOT open the book that she needs, so in her mind, the only thing to do was open the book and oh hey there, Nyarlathotep, how’s it going

(In fairness to Margot, though? She and Seb get each other into messy situations more or less equally because neither one of them is particularly good at being a responsible adult or making life choices like a responsible adult)

Also: Seb made her see Little Miss Sunshine when it first came out, and she expected to hate it. She wound up not hating it — it’s probably in her top ten favorite movies list, somewhere — but anyone who ever talks to her about it comes away with the impression that she really missed the point of the whole subplot with Greg Kinnear’s Richard Hoover and his attempts to get a book deal that blow up in his face.

That is not entirely true. It’s understandable that people get that impression, because Margot has been known to say a lot of things that either come straight from Richard’s mouth or sound like they should be lines of his — mostly in the, “how he talks about losers” vein — and most of the people who’ve ever gone, “Oh, wow, she missed the point of that subplot” before have thought she could only do this in earnest if she missed the point.

Which she didn’t. She understood the point of, “Richard’s attitudes about winners and losers are dangerous, based on faulty assumptions, and hurting him and everyone else around him too” perfectly well.

She just thought that point was stupid, and that it should have actually been, “Richard has some good ideas but the specific ways in which he pursues them are stupid; he fails because he doesn’t think about more practical things like how to market yourself to an audience, how people interpret your demeanor, how to make it sound like you’re telling people what they want to hear when actually you aren’t, and so on.”

About the only thing that she won’t say is, “Sarcasm is losers trying to bring winners down to their level,” because she’s at least aware of how she’s too sarcastic to be able to say that unironically without opening the door to people judging her in ways that she would totally deserve

And she’s not entirely sure that she believes Pete’s reversal of it — “Dismissal of sarcasm is the last refuge of losers who aren’t smart or creative enough to be witty” — though she does think that it sounds a lot better

But, yeah. Most of the, “winners this, losers that, blah blah blah winning is everything” shit? She does believe that it’s probably more or less true.

Mostly, she ends up taking this out on herself, rather than anyone else (such as by trying to psych herself up with a, “pep talk” about how it is unacceptable to be a loser, so she has to go get this shit right and don’t be a loser) — and to be fair, she has learned the hard way that what works for her doesn’t necessarily work for anyone else (…not that it actually works for her as much as she thinks it does, but she hasn’t yet had to deal with the fact that it’s not actually helping her that much

—so she’s still stuck at point, “Okay, saying these things to Pete and Todd is pointless because neither of them will buy into a definition of, ‘winners’ and, ‘losers’ that they didn’t come up with. Saying these things to Sebastian has pretty much the exact opposite of the intended effect because he’s emotionally sensitive, gets terrified that we who love him don’t actually love him and will, ‘realize that we can do better’ and leave him, and doesn’t handle the pressure well. But I like this style of motivating myself and it’s perfectly fine for me, yep”)

But on one hand, she does take it out on other people sometimes, even in situations where she does make an effort not to.

And on the other hand, even when she doesn’t directly take it out on other people, they wind up dealing with the side-effects of her self-aimed, “pep talks” because Margot’s usual style of dealing with them is calmly ignoring them until they go away. Which they never do.

Anyway, yeah. Uh. I love her, but there are plenty of reasons why other characters find her off-putting

How They Change: Okay, it’s past 2AM and I’m exhausted, so it’s crappy answers time (especially since I kind of touched on where she needs to grow and change throughout this meme). But TL;DR version is that Margot needs to learn about using her capacity for manipulation and finagling the legal system for good, she needs to learn about being nicer and fairer to herself while taking care of herself better (and without doing it at the expense of others), she needs to make more friends and doing better with and for others

Why You Love Them: …I just fell asleep on the table, so really crappy answer time, but Margot is fun for me because I enjoy her inner conflict and how she’s working on learning how to love and let people love her back

3 notes · View notes