#plus the only pay they could get was from fighting skinheads | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

amorremanet · 7 years

Note

Seb: 07, 43, 48; Pete: 02, 29, 38; Margot: 22, 35; Lucy: 08, 40?

“get to know my characters” meme — and after a day that got unexpectedly stressful, I fell asleep on my keyboard while finishing this last night, but here we are.

02. What is one of your character’s biggest insecurities? Are they able to hide it easily or can others easily exploit this weakness?

Long story short: Pete’s biggest insecurity changes constantly, but the underlying fear is whether or not he’s completely unlovable, or if he’s only going to be loved if he changes literally everything about himself or massively censors his entire personality and spends the rest of his life pretending to be someone he’s not, the way he’s done for most of his life, in all kinds of contexts, from, “Playing up certain parts of his personality to the point of borderline distortion because it made people like him in high school”

…to, “Developing a problem with substance abuse for several reasons, many of which are at best complicated and messy, but one of them was that faking for other people’s benefit/approval felt a lot less awful and soul-destroying when he was sufficiently intoxicated, and if he got into what he called the, ‘Golden Zone’ of intoxication, then he could effectively pretend that some other, ‘better’ Pete who everybody likes better had come in and taken his place”

From, “Faking for his abusive shit paternal Grandmother because she was one of the few family members who didn’t compare Pete to his older brother constantly, so if he had to lie about everything and hate himself to keep her love, then so be it”

…to, “Lying to his parents about most things as a kid, because his dad was a nasty piece of work who berated his children for most of their interests and passions, berated them when they didn’t do well enough by his impossible, unreachable standards, punished them for some of their interests (meaning that he did things like destroying Salt n Pepa CDs that Pete had saved money for himself because Dad Arden didn’t approve of rap music), and punished them for lying but at least you could buy a bit of a lull in everything by faking like you were the model child he thought he wanted”

All of which can zero in on all kinds of different parts of Pete’s overall being, from his hair to his low tolerance for frustration to his dislike of being emotionally vulnerable to his weight or how his body looks

The mutability of his insecurities is actually one of the biggest things that gives Pete some protection here, which is a good thing because it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that he totally does care what people think of him. It takes paying more attention than his brother does, but even that isn’t especially hard because Jimmy and Pete are both guilty of taking each other at face-value. But have fun trying to pick out which specific part of himself Pete doesn’t like today.

07. Is there a catchphrase or sound that they tend to make a lot (likely without being aware of it)?

I don’t know that I’d call it a catchphrase exactly, but Sebastian says, “I don’t know” an awful lot. Which is sometimes fair enough, because he often doesn’t know things, but at the same time, he also says it by way of devaluing his own feelings on a not-irregular basis, so. There’s that.

He also says, “What’s the point?” and, “What’s the use of [fill in the blank]?” rather often, which is equally reflective of his problems, just different ones. In this case, the pervasive sense of helplessness and hopelessness that he hasn’t pegged as a symptom of depression until mid-morning of the day when he first turns into a nine-foot-tall wolf-man because of, tl;dr, internalized ableism.

08. What is, perhaps, their biggest flaw? Are they aware of this or oblivious to it?

Lucy’s biggest flaw is probably her habit of putting her ideas, ideals, and desires before those of other people, even when she’s trying to help.

Like, when I said that her Deadly Sin would be Gluttony, I had to clarify that I don’t mean Gluttony solely in the sense of eating all the things (which is a reductive understanding of the Deadly Sin that completely misses why it’s supposed to be a Deadly Sin, from a theological standpoint, and is pretty fucked up, from a humanistic standpoint, because it tries to make blanket statements about what all people should or shouldn’t eat, based on presumptions that can’t and don’t apply to everyone, which isn’t fair to anyone or actually going to help).

(Plus, historically speaking, the Catholic Church and some of the different Protestant denominations have used that definition of Gluttony to essentially shame poor people for wanting to eat because ~lmao if u were meant to have food, God would have given you food, duh doi!!~)

So, yeah, Lucy’s Deadly Sin is Gluttony because of how she willfully doesn’t listen in situations where she should, because she has such a strong moral compass and such strong commitment to her ideals that it can overwhelm her better judgment and lead to her doing shit that might work out in the short-term but that could create more of a mess down the line (and sometimes only doesn’t create that mess because she doesn’t get caught breaking the rules, or she manages to contain the mess before it spreads, or similar), because she goes, “DON’T WORRY, I TOTALLY GOT THIS!!” when she totally does not have this because she’s so determined to save everyone on her own or to at least play a major role in the saving people thing, because she wants to be a hero and doesn’t usually stop to think about what that means until after she’s already done something, because she’s doesn’t usually interrogate her ideas about The Greater Good or ask the right kinds of questions about what that means, and so on.

TL;DR: a lot of the less-than-positive aspects of why she’s such a little Gryffindor are why her Deadly Sin is Gluttony, and collectively, they make up her biggest flaw. She could stand to be more aware of this, but she’s also 23 and relatively sheltered, so she has a lot to learn in general

22. What kind of tattoos, piercings, birthmarks, freckles, and other such unique physical features do they have?

Piercings: Two in each ear, a “snakebite” set of lip piercings (option number four on this chart, the “two rings in the lower lip, around the locations of your canine teeth” one), and one in her left nipple.

She used to have nose ring and a septum piercing for a while, but she got sick of turning her septum ring up into her nostrils while at work and didn’t like any of the, “more professional” options for the side-of-the-nose piercing, so those holes closed up a while ago.

Strictly speaking, Margot isn’t entirely fond of the, “more professional” options for her lip piercings, either, but she’s a bit happier with wearing small, classy-looking studs on her lips than she was with wearing them in the fold of her nose, where it gets hard for people to tell if you have something on your nose or just a piercing.

Tattoos: She’s not quite as inked up as Sebastian, but yes, she does have tattoos.

Around her right ear and dropping onto her neck, she has a noose where the loop in the rope is shaped like a heart

On her left bicep, she has a Winnie the Pooh (Disney version, as opposed to the version from EH Shepard illustrations) that matches Seb’s tattoo of Tigger

“The two of you do quote-unquote, ‘extralegal imports’ — read: playing middleman to various smuggling operations — because you [*pointing at Margot*] won’t just let him (or really his parents) pay your tuition, and you [*pointing at Seb*] just nearly died six weeks ago because you took PCP and decided to fight five fucking skinheads at once — yes! I know you intervened to save the kids they jumped outside the bar but you got shot and you’ll understand why I might be a bit upset about that still! — and you just…… Neither of you notices any kind of oddity or disconnect here? Like, both of you can just shift, without missing a beat, from all that to making Todd take dorky pictures of you so you can show off your matching Winnie the Pooh and Tigger tattoos on Myspace and Facebook?” — Pete, right after Seb and Margot did that thing exactly, c. mid-September 2006.

She has a lower back tattoo of Judith beheading Holofernes, based on Artemesia Gentileschi’s painting of that scene

She has a clutch of violets on the inside of her left wrist (she’s thought about adding a line or two from Sappho to it, to make it more obvious why she has this tattoo, but she hasn’t been able to pick which lines, and as Pete’s pointed out, it might not be more obvious to most people)

And on her left ankle, she has the, “Darwin fish” variant of the Ichthys symbol (but without the word, “Darwin” in the center of it), with the subtitle, “this is not a ghoti” (the idea for which she totally and knowingly ripped off from René Magritte’s La Trahison des Images — the, “this is not a pipe” painting — and mashed it up with an alternate spelling of, “fish” that is only possible because English is a bullshit language)

Freckles, etc.: She does freckle in the sun, but they’re mostly faded at present because she doesn’t get a lot of sunlight. More noticeable is the mole on her left cheek, and the mole on her back, by her right shoulderblade.

29. What is one of the most courageous things your character has ever done for a loved one?

If asked, Pete would probably tell you that he is a grade-A selfish bitch who has never done a single courageous thing for anybody ever in his entire life and he is offended that you would even suggest such a thing

This is absolute nonsense, and the general response that he gets to it (at least from Seb, Stephen, and Margot) is, “*nods* Of course not, honey. Do you want your eggs sunny-side up today or something else?” or, “*nods* Of course, Pete. I’m sure that the people you’ve ever helped just imagined that” — so, deadpan at him and let him get it out of his system until he’s calmed down

Because he’ll be fine if you just let him get this shit out of his system and calm down, instead of trying to argue with him like Todd does

In fairness to Pete, though, this isn’t entirely coming out of him trying to overcompensate for his messy feelings re: self-worth. Part of this comes out of how his particular approach to being courageous isn’t always one that’s easily understood as such, because of how people tend to devalue things like emotional labor and more understated visions of bravery and being there for someone. So, it’s not right, but he’s working based on the ideas he’s been raised around

But some examples of Pete’s brand of courageousness for his loved ones include, but are not limited to:

Deliberately breaking one of his Dad’s old trophies in order to draw attention off of his big sister Cora, because she was sixteen and she’d just gotten dumped and the last thing that she needed was Dad Arden digging at her about everyone, and Pete was willing to be the scapegoat instead

Standing by Seb during the fiasco that ensued after he took the fall, outed himself at Catholic school, and made it sound like he’d seduced an unwilling Damian, rather than how they were actually dating on the sly — and more than just giving up most of his own popularity to stand by his friend, Pete did it without outing Damian, which was a lot of effort for him because he really wanted to do the “spiteful but satisfying” thing instead of the, “probably less wrong” thing

(Granted, Pete doing the right thing in this situation was less out of any moral or ethical objections to outing people, because he’s generally against it, yeah, and these days, he would probably smack his 18-year-old self for even thinking about it doing it.

But if you’d asked Pete for his opinion at the time, Damian threw his right to ask for consideration out the window when he decided to help spread it around the grapevine that he’d been totally unwilling in all of this when he’d usually been the one going, “Oh, who cares that we could get caught, just kiss me already” while they dated.

Really, Pete didn’t out Damian mostly out of loyalty to Seb — because it was important to him not to out Damian, since his parents were bad enough and his uncle was their school’s priest — and knowing that he wouldn’t want to get outed at Catholic school either)

Going with Margot during the one incident where Seb dropped off the radar and Todd eventually found him in the vicinity of a gutter, because she was enough of a mess that she really shouldn’t have been out looking on her own. After Todd found Seb and middle brother Ambrose dragged him up to their parents’ place, Pete then went to Seb’s place with Margot, again so she wouldn’t need to be alone.

Granted, he was high himself, and drinking from a hip flask while talking about how Seb had a problem, and she eventually kind of lost it and chewed him out for that, but:

1. Pete still tried to be there for her during a Really Bad stretch, when he really needed someone to be there for him too and unfortunately, the person he most wanted to be there for him was Seb, so…… that was a mess;

and 2. high and drinking though he was, Pete was also trying to moderate it and only get intoxicated enough to not start detoxing or be non-functional, which was a hard balance to find and something he only would’ve done for a handful of people

and going to rehab. Also, admitting that he needed help more generally, but going to an inpatient rehab took a lot of courage for Pete because there were a lot of reasons why it sounded like Hell on Earth to him.

35. Is your character afraid of death? If they got to choose how to die, how would they want to go?

Margot…… has a messy relationship with her fear of death. Like, she is afraid of death, and when she tries to sound tough, she says that her only fears are fear itself, “the crushing inevitability of death,” hypothetically being rejected by any of Seb’s dogs, and the possibility that the Loch Ness Monster might be real.

Which are, in order: a lie (Margot thinks fear is useful and valuable, its entire purpose is to help keep you from dying, so shut up and be grateful that your ancestral beings developed the capacity to feel fear) (which, context, she says as someone with an undiagnosed anxiety disorder); messy; a true fear for her, but none of Seb’s dogs has ever disliked her and Angel, his incredibly skittish “mutt with strong shades of Labrador Retriever and German Shepherd,” likes Margot better than she likes most other people, which is a big deal; and a straight up lie because Margot thinks Nessie being real would be cool.

If pressed to be honest, she would claim that that her fear of death doesn’t count as, “a real fear” because she allegedly only fears it in an abstract and primal way that she shares with most other animal organisms on the planet, because on a very deep level, right down to our genes, living things generally want to continue being alive and generally fight tooth-and-nail against death.

The biggest linchpin in her argument here is, “Well, but I haven’t been confronted with the reality of my own potential death” — which is a big lie. Margot has definitely been confronted with that. She just hasn’t had any experiences that ended in her nearly dying herself, in part because some of her confrontations with it were not actually that dangerous but they seemed to be at the moment, and largely because most of these experiences, for her, have involved her 6’3” best friend, who dives into harm’s way for her, gets her out of the way with the full intent to take a literal bullet, and otherwise lets the harm fall on him so it won’t fall on Margot.

So, ultimately, Margot’s, “I only fear death in a primal, instinctual way that is shared by most if not all living things” nonsense is something she tells herself to try and distance herself from how visceral the fear actually is here, and to try and get out of dealing with the fact that her fear of death applies more to someone else than to herself

(which, in fairness, it probably wouldn’t if her best friend had fewer near-death experiences and fewer self-destructive tendencies, but as it stands, Seb has racked up sixteen brushes with death, two of which did involve him briefly dying, and has a habit of putting his fingers in his ears and going, “La la la, I can’t hear you, this is normal and fine” when confronted with how this is neither fine nor normal)

If given the choice in how she dies, Margot would pick, “I don’t want to die, fuck you”

If she had to pick, then…… Nah, she’s fine dying at an advanced age, while asleep in bed but not after a prolonged painful struggle with cancer or something. You can keep your cool, heroic deaths, she wants to live and accomplish shit before she kicks it, thanks

38. What kind of weather does your character like? Cloudy skies, rainy days, sunshine, etc?

Sunshine, but not too warm. Pete likes spring, basically. He doesn’t actually mind the heat as much as he says he does, but he does mind that summer makes it harder for him to wear some of his most favorite pieces of clothing, like the longer and heavier and more dramatic pieces, and his, “totally not a hipster scarf because Cora made it for him, it’s not some fake pashmina bullshit like Todd wore for way too long a few years back” scarf

He won’t argue with a free excuse to wear some of his hot pants or booty shorts, though, even if he can usually only do that on the weekends because if he wore them to the theatre: A. he might end up getting hurt; and B. his boss, Mitch, would object because he could get hurt

40. Does your OC have any guilty pleasures they enjoy? Hobbies, past times, music, etc that they wouldn’t want known by others?

Long story short: yes, she does, but she also insists to most people that she doesn’t believe in guilty pleasures, and she also doesn’t really have any semblance of secrecy about any of these things

Like, she may not appreciate you finding out that she likes to binge watch Scooby Doo cartoons when she feels stressed out and sad, because she doesn’t want to be teased about it like her big brother sometimes does, but Lucy also doesn’t go out of her way to hide any of this

She’s way more likely to #Nope out of a situation where she really just can’t with this anymore by going, “Okay, I can’t do this right now, I’m gonna go play Final Fantasy 7 for a few hours until I either finish the game again or regain my ability to do this”

43. Does your character have a switch that changes aspects of their personality whether they are around friends, family, etc. Is there someone who gets to see their true self?

Eh, it’s less that Seb changes anything about his personality for the benefit of other people, and more that he emphasizes some parts of it with some folks while downplaying others, which makes him about as out of the ordinary as oxygen (which is to say, “Not at all”)

—I mean, think about it: do most people act the same around their parents as they do around their friends? their coworkers? friends of their friends whom they don’t know very well? random strangers on the bus? etc.

Like, I’m not trying to be an edgy mcedgelord and say that all people are lying bastards, or trying to channel Holden fucking Caulfield to call everyone ever a phony.

I’m just saying, as a human person who likes to make up stories about other human persons and write them down, that most people have different patterns of behavior around the different people in their lives, and it doesn’t make them fakes or liars or whatever. It means that people are, in general, affected by their environments and choose how to behave based on who they’re with, what’s going on, etc.

Someone doesn’t become a wholly different person just because they try not to cuss around their younger cousins or because they’re more comfortable with their friends so they can be less high-strung — but as I was saying.

This behavior on Seb’s part only gets to be any different from most people’s habit of doing the exact same thing because some of the contexts in his life make his patterns of doing this more unhealthy — not because the underlying behavior is inherently unhealthy, but because of how he uses these behaviors to hide things from people, including himself

One of the worst ways in which this comes out is with regard to Seb’s extroversion. Strictly speaking, he’s an extrovert less because he’s super-social and wants to be where the people are (though those things are also true), and more because he’s more attuned to the world outside of himself than to his inner life. This can be a problem because he ends up being hypersensitive to other people’s feelings (hyper-empathy, if not to the same extent as genuine mutant superpowered empaths like Josie and Julian), and he misconstrues a lot of things as potential rejections.

Between that, how much he does genuinely want to be where the people are and wants for people to like him, and how much he wants to make people feel better and avoid hurting them, he gets super high-strung when he’s talking to people. He used to be even worse about that, like back in high school, when it was easier for him to try and escape his undiagnosed depression

—and it led into one of the biggest reasons why he started drinking in earnest and liked it so much. Namely: when he was drunk, he was less high-strung and other people thought that he was fun to have around, instead of regarding him as, like, “well, he’s in the theatre club so we have to tolerate him, and he got matched up with Pete in Sister Mary Ignatius’s weird ass peer mentorship thing, and Pete kinda likes him, so we have to be nice”

—and because Seb was fourteen and already pretty down on himself as a general rule, and prone to assuming that there is nothing good or worthwhile about him, he concluded not that people liked him because he loosened up and stopped trying so hard to fit in and be just like them and doing a really bad job of it because, in that situation, he WAS legitimately trying to be someone he wasn’t (and he wasn’t as good at it as Pete)

Instead, he concluded that alcohol was a magical potion that made him cool and made people like him

(In retrospect, he is definitely ashamed of how he did exactly what he was warned not to do in all of the, “drink responsibly, here is how you do that, here is what alcohol is and isn’t, here is what it does and doesn’t, ffs don’t drink to make people like you, it doesn’t really work, etc.” talks he got from his parents, but he would also rather not talk about it, please and thanks)

Likewise, Seb doesn’t mean to be a manipulative little shit and often doesn’t even notice that he’s doing it, or think he’s manipulating any of his loved ones, but his attitude toward a lot of this is, “Well, okay, I didn’t tell the whole truth, but I didn’t lie” or, “Maybe I stretched the truth a little bit, but it’s still technically true, right” or, “Okay, I left out a lot of shit just now, but I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true, so it’s not the same as lying”

Unfortunately, he usually justifies that behavior with rationale like, “But I only told them what they wanted to hear and what would make them happy. Telling them the whole truth wouldn’t make them happy; it’d just make them get upset and worried about things that aren’t their problems and that they can’t help with. Isn’t it better to let them be happy? Isn’t that what they deserve?”

Which makes it really hard for him to break this habit, for a lot of reasons, which include but are not limited to:

1. His rationale largely lets him get out of acknowledging and dealing with the “understandable but still selfish and potentially very Not Good” aspects of his behaviors (e.g., how his habit of letting people believe things are better than they are lets him off the hook for dealing with things that actually need to be dealt with; how he wants to connect with people, so he tells them what he thinks they want to hear, which doesn’t always reflect reality or allow a genuine connection to develop, so if and/or when things fall apart, he takes it as confirmation that he was right about being broken and unlovable, etc.)

—Like, there are a lot of reasons why he didn’t forge that many meaningful connections with anyone during the years that he would call his, “downward spiral” period (which ranges from either age 15 to age 28, or age 18 to age 28, depending on who’s asking and how Seb feels about it today).

Some of them are due to circumstances beyond his control and/or can’t really be termed, “his fault” without getting into victim-blaming territory.

For example, Seb didn’t make a lot of friends in his last two years of high school because he spent them at his Dad’s, Max’s, and Addie’s old boarding school, where he almost immediately got outed (thanks to some other students overhearing the faculty talking about it, because Seb was from a legacy family and his abrupt transfer at the start of junior year was a big deal)

……and where he spent a lot of time getting bullied for being gay and “imperfectly” masculine (not that his bullies used that term, but they also had a hard time trying to accuse him of being exactly feminine, and usually went more for the insults like, “sissy,” “queer,” and the homophobic slur that starts with F), accused of being a predator for not outing himself (which he really wasn’t keen on doing because he came to Saxon fresh off of getting outed at Catholic school), and most looking forward to the weekends when he could get on a train and fuck off down to Pete’s campus and spend time with someone who actually liked him

Or for another example: while Seb hasn’t handled the fallout from some of his abusive relationships well (which is to say that he largely hasn’t handled it and would rather act like these relationships had no lasting effects on him whatsoever), you can’t exactly fault him for not keeping in touch with any of those guys after the respective breakups (or after three of them wound up in prison for various reasons)

But otoh, some of the reasons why Seb didn’t forge a lot of lasting and meaningful connections go back to his bad habit of telling people what they want to hear in order to make them like him, not because he’s consciously being a manipulative little shit but because he wants to connect with people and feel like he belongs somewhere and have friends

Seriously, that is the biggest difference between him and Jeff, “I would say anything to get what I want and I want you to like me” Winger, when it comes to telling people what they want to hear. Both of them do it on purpose. Both of them do it because they care an inordinate amount about what people think of them.

But Jeff wants to control what people think of him so he can use it to his advantage, and even after being with the Study Group starts to open him up, he has a habit of devaluing interpersonal connections (largely because he’s terrified of them, yes, but still) and kind of continuing to see them as tools, rather than as relationships.

For Seb, those interpersonal connections are pretty much everything. He loves love, he loves friendship, he loves community and connecting with people and making people feel good by being friendly and kind, he just loves people in general. At heart, he is a big sap, a hopeless romantic, a marshmallow made of affection and rainbows, and a kids TV show platitude about the power of friendship given human form.

But because he hates himself and loves all of those things and probably venerates all of them more than is good for him, he feels like he doesn’t deserve any of them and like he has to constantly tailor how he presents himself until it perfectly fits what he thinks everybody else wants from him

Which makes it sort of hard to form connections with someone, especially when Seb was pretty good at deflecting suspicion, distracting people, and caring about them, but less than good at sharing himself enough to make the connections last, which often works for a little bit, but ultimately runs afoul of that Perks of Being A Wallflower, “you can’t just just sit there and put everyone's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love” problem

Like, you have to at least share something with other people so they feel like they’re getting something out of the relationship (aside from you always catering to them and to their needs, expecting them to be open when they have little to no reason to feel like you’re reciprocating)

You can even share something that is some kind of untrue, like Conrad (who mostly shares lies but doesn’t see them as lies because they have some basis in reality, they’re just ““enhanced reality””), Pete (who’s spent a lot of his life playing different versions of himself to get people’s approval, which is different from Seb’s approach because when Pete does this, it has the appearance of being open and sharing, rather than a lot of deflecting and hiding)

But Seb’s approach was more, “bury everything and pretend it isn’t there and try to make it look like I am exactly what these people think I am”

It doesn’t help that he has a lot of trouble knowing who he is without someone helping him, and easily slips into a way of thinking where he feels like he’s a blank slate and nothing more so why is it a bad thing for him to just let people project what they want him to be onto him

which is partly a depression thing for him, and partly the result of how Seb has spent most of his life denying, repressing, refusing, and trying to erase or ignore huge parts of his own identity and his own sense of personhood because he feels like he’d be better and everyone would like him more if he were someone else

which…… is a mess. Like, he figured out early enough that he’s not very good at being other people outside the context of the theatre club — the classic example for him is how much he’s hurt himself by trying to be Max and fit the exact same standards as Max, which has never worked because they’re different people, and they can do and need very different things

—but Seb’s still wound up with very little stable sense of his own identity and who he is, and a lot of his questioning tends to end up back at, “I’m a broken mess, I’m kinda like God spilled a person but considering how many things I’ve lived though, I’m too amusing for Him to let me die, I guess”

He’s working on it. But it’s still a mess.

This mess of shit is one of aspect of the bag of emotional and psychological wet cats that makes up, “La Bête” — i.e., the part of his mind that is vaguely analogous to the Hulk, except that La Bête isn’t really a separate personality inside of Seb like the Hulk is often portrayed with Bruce Banner, and superpowered though she is, La Bête isn’t fueled by anger and destruction so much as protective impulses, the desire to live, love and the desire to form connections and defend those connections, the pack-building impulse

Basically, La Bête is more like actual irl wolves than most ideas of how wolves are that you find in werewolf or werewolf-themed fiction. Destruction isn’t really her endgame goal or a thing she particularly enjoys, so much as a side-effect of some of her other impulses since, once she decides to go and do something, she is admittedly not quite so good at being 100% careful

If she ever seems to be fueled by anger (which, in fairness, she is going to do, early on), it’s less about actual anger and more about either that protective impulse again (such as when Seb’s first full transformation gets triggered by one of Conrad’s lackeys inducing three simultaneous heart attacks, which would manage to kill him if La Bête didn’t take over, so she wanted to save him, and then their immediate impulse was to run and get Margot out of harm’s way)

……or it’s like the story of St. Francis of Assisi and the Wolf of Gubbio, where the titular wolf only looks angry and violent and dangerous to the villagers he’s been in conflict with because he is starving and they’ve been treating him like a monster

Or, in other words, the whole, “hey, maybe your superpowered transformation is triggered by anger and fear, so maybe you need to do more work on controlling that” idea leads to Seb trying to muzzle La Bête, which goes Not Well, largely because it means he’s not learning how to control his transformations, while also being a complete dick to himself and her, which makes her feel threatened and then makes her lash out

Not that I have any particular issues with the literal millennia of misrepresentation that wolves have had to suffer in Western literature, art, and culture, or with how all of those gross caricatures have affected werewolf fiction, or with how different layers of sociopolitical nuance, usually involving shades of misogyny, homophobia, and/or ableism, have been more explicitly woven into the figure of the werewolf in recent decades, only to come up with deeply mixed messages, like JKR casting lycanthropy as an HIV/AIDS metaphor and making Remus Lupin a sympathetic character but also keeping up this idea that the thing that subtextually ties him GBQ men… has an uncontrollable appetite for destruction, makes him a complete monster one night a month and must be repressed and controlled, and otherwise perpetuating a bunch of homophobic bullshit (to say nothing of how she did that even worse with Fenrir Greyback)

……Except, y’know. I totally have issues with all of that stuff I just said, and a big part of the struggle in working out La Bête and writing her has been trying to keep it from getting too preachy and pedantic, whoops

(also, for the record: La Bête gets called, “she” and “her” because:

1. the French noun is feminine, and Seb starts calling her, “La Bête” because he decides to take, “Gévaudan” as his nom de spandex, so he figures, “La Bête” would be a thematically consistent name;

2. Josie gets assigned to help guide Seb through the, “how to have mutant superpowers and not kill people or break the law or anything” stuff, and they try to approach the issue of how to understand and control Seb’s transformation with a bit of a Jungian-influenced approach, so they try to examine La Bête through the lens of the Shadow and the Anima

—which Josie does admit is sort of a mess with regard to gender roles and ideas about how gender even works, since Jung was a product of his culture and his time period like that, but since the Anima is talked about in she/her terms, Josie slips into doing the same to La Bête, and neither Seb nor La Bête particularly object to this;

(personally, Seb doesn’t see it as being any different from Pete’s nickname for him being, “[my] Princess,” and to him, it’s all like…… okay, La Bête is a part of his mind and psyche that’s been rather abruptly crystallized into a more cohesive entity by sudden onset superpowers — though she hasn’t been rendered separate from him, the way that a lot of depictions of Bruce Banner like to imagine the Hulk being more or less entirely separate from him, just cursed to inhabit the same body — and we’re apparently going to call La Bête with she/her pronouns now, okay cool)

3. “I don’t know? She-wolves usually get a bit more sympathy when you look at how they’re depicted in art and stories, like? Yeah, okay, you can easily find them being just as maligned as he-wolves, if not more so, but you also have stories like the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus, or stories of she-wolves adopting abandoned babies of other species, so like? I don’t know, it just feels nicer to call La Bête a she-wolf?” — Seb, before he’s completely put it together how his transformations work, but when he’s at the middling point of realizing that the overwhelming emotion that La Bête brings with her is never anger)

But anyway, I was saying something about him and his patterns of connecting with others

Like, seriously, here are the meaningful and lasting connections he’s made from ages 15 to 28(ish): Margot, Todd, Fr. Teddy (one of the priests at Seb’s cool, socially progressive LGBTQ church, who technically isn’t a priest in the Vatican’s eyes because he dropped out of seminary and hasn’t actually gone through the ordination process, but he serves at a church that the Vatican kinda doesn’t acknowledge anyway, so… yeah, that’s a thing), and Julian kinda (if you stretch your definition of “meaningful and lasting” a bit)

If you expand a bit, you could add Pete (though they got to be friends before Seb’s “downward spiral” period, i.e. most of his adult life and all of his late adolescence), Nick (his and Pete’s sponsor, who Seb technically met after the “downward spiral” period), Stephen (who Seb met after he met Nick, so…… yeah), and Genevieve (his and Pete’s therapist, who they didn’t start seeing until after both of them had been to rehab, so hey)

—apparently, before I went off on that tangent about how La Bête fits into all of this, I was working on a better organized list of reasons why it’s hard for Seb to break his habit of playing up the parts of situations that he thinks people want to hear while hiding all the stuff that actually needs to get dealt with

The other reasons I was going to go into sort of got danced around in that huge tirade, but to make them a bit more explicit here: despite the selfish parts of this behavior, Seb genuinely does want to protect the people who he loves and make them happy, and getting him to understand that it would make them happy for him to be well, which means he needs to stop hiding things like he does…… well, that’s been an uphill struggle for a lot of reasons, including Seb’s assumption that he’s too broken to ever be well and he’s probably never going to get better so the best he can do is keep the people he loves from realizing it and blaming themselves for his problems;

(which he has decent enough reason to be afraid of them doing, since everyone he loves has had at least one big moment of what I call, “acknowledging how they might have shaped circumstances here and didn’t exactly help, but are still not actually responsible for shit anything in this because Sebastian made his own choices” but Seb feels like it’s more, “blaming themselves for his problems, and unfairly so because he made his own choices and the burden of responsibility shouldn’t fall on them”

—the major difference between the two approaches here being that Seb wants to blame himself for everything, and feels like it’s justified because of the, “he made his own bad choices and now he’s accepting responsibility” thing, but he doesn’t entirely get the difference between, “really accepting responsibility” and, “using acknowledgment of his fuck-ups as an excuse to be an overly self-punishing dick to himself and cut himself off from most things”

and there are some circumstances that he legitimately can’t take responsibility for.

They’re largely situations that had problems but that aren’t anyone’s “fault” — like, how his parents tried their best with him and were unconditionally loving, supportive, and accepting, but they’re still only human and didn’t always know what the best approach was. So, they did things like overly praise him so he wouldn’t feel overshadowed by his three older siblings, or like he was terrible and they were all awesome — but instead of feeling reassured and self-confident, Seb noticed the disparity and felt like his parents were lying to spare his feelings because he was actually terrible, and then felt like he couldn’t tell them so because they loved him enough to try and make him feel better about being probably worthless, and it’d be super ungrateful of him to

Or they had situations where Abe and Marceline didn’t know that some of the things they accepted as, “just odd little Sebastian things” were really how depression can manifest in children — and frankly, given that it was the late 1980’s to early/mid 1990’s, they couldn’t have known this. Hell, juvenile/adolescent depression is still not understood very well and still faced with a lot of nonsense about how it’s not possible for kids to have depression because we don’t want that to happen to kids. (The same goes for pretty much all juvenile/adolescent presentations of mental illnesses, too.)

All of this was even less understood when Seb was a kid, and it would have taken a lot of ridiculously implausible shit for Abe and Marceline to even think that, “Maybe our youngest has a mental illness” was on the table as a potential explanation for some of Seb’s behaviors, most of which seemed different from other kids but nothing to call a doctor about.

Like, okay, he was very emotionally sensitive and he cried easily and did things like insist that they could only adopt dogs from the ASPCA anymore because he saw different news specials about how shitty puppy mills are and how some people abuse their dogs, who end up getting put up for adoption — big deal, some kids are just more sensitive than others, shaming him for having emotions would be a bad idea, and shaming him for caring about the welfare of other living beings just doesn’t make sense, doesn’t that mean they’re doing a good job of raising a kid who cares about others

(Well, yes, but the problem there wasn’t actually the caring so much as how distressed Seb got about this, but unfortunately, by that point in his early life, Abe and Marceline were already pretty used to him being sensitive and maybe a little bit dramatic, and his level of distress about abused animals who really needed loving homes didn’t actually register as odd by his standards)

So, yeah. Ultimately, Abe and Marceline could have done a lot of things differently while raising Seb, and they could have put his depression together sooner, and so on — but nobody can be faulted for the situation because based on the circumstances and the knowledge that they actually had available to him at the time, they tried to make what they thought were the best choices in raising their son, like not shaming him for having emotions or putting him in therapy that they weren’t sure he needed — since, to be fair, any of his early self-destructive patterns of behavior looked either like he was a curious, energetic kid who was just being a curious, energetic kid, or like he was a good kid who, being more sensitive than his siblings, needed a bit more approval, and worked hard at school because he wanted his Mom and Dad to be proud of him — which, if he hadn’t needed it, might have made him feel like having feelings was some kind of pathology, which would also be pretty bad

Either way, they can’t be blamed for that situation, and Seb can’t be blamed for it either, but this does not stop him from trying to blame himself for, “being ungrateful” or, “being too broken,” when the actual problem is that no one has gotten to the root cause of a lot of his issues until recently, so they’ve been throwing different solutions at all of this and cobbling together different ideas for how to help that don’t fully address the cause and will, as such, always end up being incomplete)

—also, there is the problem of how Seb doesn’t really have the best idea of who he actually is, and trying to make him reflect on that… has a history of ending badly.

Like, if he doesn’t end up going down a rabbit hole wherein he starts feeling like he might not be anybody and might not even be real, and then goes and does something self-destructive in the name of remembering if he’s real or not

……then he’s liable to hit the point of going like, “Do I like this thing because I really do enjoy it or because everybody else does? Do I act this way because it’s true to being me or is it because I’m trying to fit into this or that idea about how gay men [or any other identity marker he might apply to himself; it’s usually either gay men or, something like, “the best friend Pete deserves,” “the uncle Marie deserves,” “the son my parents deserve,” etc.] act, or because I realize that I can’t ever be that for them and do the exact opposite? How much of me is really me and how much of it is dictated by culture and other people’s expectations of me? Who?? Am??? I, really???? Who are ANY of us????? Are any of us real or are we all just ideas of each other interacting in a void onto which we project meaning that might not actually mean fuck anything??????”

And if he gets there, he is going to short-circuit

Personally, Pete doesn’t like it when Seb goes and does any of his old self-destructive shit, but in a way, it’s preferable to the latter option, because trying to talk Seb down or trying to clean it up if he punched out a window or cut himself? Sucks. And Pete isn’t going to deny that it sucks. Arguing about whether or not he should go to the ER sucks, picking glass out of his hand with tweezers sucks, all of it really fucking sucks.

But trying to get Seb out of an existential crisis that usually ends with him flopped out on his sofa, or in his bed, staring at the ceiling in abject terror, probably with music or the TV on but not really listening to it, and where any answer could potentially have really unpleasant effects, either now or at some point down the line, because this has gone beyond the realm of Seb’s own issues and his own demons, and while it is still really about those things, it’s gotten into debates about very the nature of existence, and before you can do literally anything else, you first have to drag him out of the ontological and/or metaphysical rabbit hole?

………Yeah, that’s way more stressful, if you ask Pete. Not that he feels he can really talk, considering how many times Seb’s ever talked him down from something, or pulled him out of one of his own rabbit holes, or at least come with Pete while he was doing something stupid and self-destructive so he wouldn’t be alone — and at least these existential crises have been getting much less frequent and less severe since Seb started going to therapy — but still.

Okay, I’ve lost the plot of this way too many times, I’m going to shut up now

TL;DR: Yes, Seb does kind of do the personality switching thing with the people he loves, but at the same time: 1. If not for all of the other pieces of context here about why him doing this is really Not Good, it would be no different from the typical amount of switching that most people do based on who they’re with and what situations they find themselves in;

2. In a way, it’s even less of a complete personality-switch thing — e.g., acting reserved and polite around your parents, but then being rowdy and snarky and party-happy with your friends — and more of a situation where he shows more or less the same behaviors and personality traits to everyone he loves, including the same pattern of “I’m not technically lying, I’m just not being 100% truthful either and that’s different,” and the variance comes from what he chooses to hide or not (e.g., he’s more willing to admit to his friends than to his parents that he’d really like to have a drink instead of dealing with any given stressful situation)

And even given that variance, very few people will hear him say something like, “Is, ‘I want to down six shots of tequila at once and go 90 MPH down an open stretch of highway’ a feeling? Because I think I feel that.”

A large part of why he does that is to make other people happy, but an equally large part of why he does it is so he can get out of dealing with shit that is scary and complicated and ew, how about no, why can’t he just repress it and fake a smile and act like everything is fine

and 3. He’s trying to hide his behaviors, feelings, and impulses, yes, but it would technically be inaccurate to say that Seb is trying to hide his true self from people, because in order to deliberately hide his true self, he would need to know who the fuck that is, and he is not entirely sure (which is one of the many bones that La Bête has to pick with him, but that’s another rant entirely)

Either way, Pete is consistently the best at getting Seb to be honest with himself and, consequentially, with everyone else.

True, Max, Adelaide, Ambrose, and their parents have known Seb longest and arguably seen his more of his tricks than Pete has…… but the funny thing about that idea is how it assumes that blood family will always trump found family, and how it assumes that, “We’ve known him for longer” is automatically going to mean they know him better when… uh, no.

Max and Seb prove that pretty well, given that they’ve spent most of their lives not knowing how to best communicate and deal with each other, which totally spilled over into Max kinda developing a resentment toward cousin Jeremy for a while, because Jeremy was between Max and Adelaide, age-wise, and he got on Seb’s level better than Max ever did, apparently without even trying, so from Max’s perspective, it felt a lot like he was getting stuck with all the crappy parts of being Seb’s big brother while Jeremy got promoted to Replacement Max and got all of the good parts

Bad parts meaning, like, having to take him to the ER because he didn’t listen about being told not to climb one of the trellises at their grandparents’ place and he fell off, and getting the, “why didn’t you keep a closer eye on him” talk when Abe got there — to which the appropriate answer was apparently not, “Have you EVER tried to tell Sebastian NOT to do something? Has he EVER listened to you when you did?” — until Seb backed him up and agreed that Max had done everything he was supposed to do and Seb climbed the trellis anyway

While good parts meant, like, having Seb confide in you. Having him trust you. Having him look up to you, but not in a way that turns you into some unreachable ideal that he uses to be a jerk to himself (though at the time, Max would’ve just said, “Having him look up to you” because he didn’t really get that Seb did look up to him, just… not in a good way).

And yeah, Seb was a weirdly honest teenager who asked permission to take some of his parents’ booze to theatre club cast parties, and who knew he was loved and supported enough at home to come out when he was twelve, but he also didn’t tell his parents about the shit that fell on him after he outed himself to spare Damian because he didn’t want them to think he couldn’t handle it on his own, and had it not been for Pete and Ambrose telling them some of it (though not all of it, out of respect for Seb’s wishes), Abe and Marceline might have remained ignorant of what was going on, beyond, “He says that he’s stressed about final exams, and for some reason, he doesn’t talk about Damian or Allison anymore, but won’t talk about why”

So, it’s not for nothing, because Pete does realize that Seb’s family is actually pretty tight with each other and that, for all they’re a bunch of human beings and thus messy by nature and prone to screwing up, they all actually love each other and try to more or less do right by each other — which he is totally jealous of, by the way, though he would be more so if not for how Seb considers him basically a brother and he’s pretty much always invited to Moncrieff family gatherings or parties, since the family inexplicably (in Pete’s mind) likes him

—but at the same time, he’s pretty sure that he knows more about his Princess and in more contexts than the blood family does.

And he’s right.

Not that this means Pete’s awareness and his powers of Seb-related deduction are literally ever perfect, but…… y’know. He’s working with a more comprehensive playbook than Seb’s blood family.

This was a really pathetic excuse for, “I’m going to shut up now, TL;DR summary time”

Whoops

48. Is there anything in particular that would ignite your character’s jealousy? Or does your character not get envious?

Yes, but also no?

I mean, I feel like saying that any character never gets envious is at best disingenuous, though I’m biased because I’ve literally never met anyone who doesn’t experience jealousy, whether it dominates them like it does with Todd or not, and like…… The fact that Seb isn’t as overwhelmed by jealousy as Todd doesn’t mean much

He definitely experiences jealousy; it’s just that he doesn’t really focus on it or do that much with it beyond let it simmer and possibly use it as an excuse to be a jerk to himself

(—which is also a bit because he usually doesn’t feel it strongly enough to do much with it, but that’s not really a, “Seb is a good person who doesn’t let his jealousy consume him” thing; it’s a, “Seb is seriously depressed and doesn’t feel most things strongly enough to do much with them, which is going to change somewhat when he gets medicated and his brain chemistry starts getting evened out, but that’s another matter”)

His biggest envy buttons tend to be things like:

“Pete and Todd have had it easier than I have at staying sober, why can’t I do that, what is wrong with me that makes it so much harder for me than it is them”

(To answer his question: neither Pete nor Todd has actually had it easy with their sobriety — which Seb does know and he feels bad about even remotely feeling like they’ve had it, “easier,” but asking emotions to be rational is a losing game for everybody — but they’ve had more success than he has because they haven’t been doing the psychological equivalent of trying to fight Ganondorf with a butter knife)

“My dumb older brother has a good relationship with his wife, who is a good person and loves him, and I’m never going to have anything like that”

“My sponsor and his husband are so in love with each other even after so long together and it’s so beautiful and I wish I could have something like that, but it’s never going to happen for me because why would it”

and so on.

And here we see one of the reasons why he’s spent the past year and a half doing the psychological equivalent of fighting Ganondorf with a butter knife: he looks at these patterns of thought and doesn’t see them as indicative of anything beyond him being, “broken,” so he hasn’t been entirely open with them, and his loved ones and therapist haven’t had all the knowledge that they need to figure out how to help him

Some of them have put it together that all involved parties have been missing something that means all of their approaches aren’t working as well as they could do, but most of them don’t know what that is. Pete has the best idea (because Seb’s too attached to all his denial to have an accurate idea and he pretty much stops at, “I am broken, that explains everything”), and even he isn’t entirely right

Right about Seb being a mutant, right about thinking like, “Maybe he’s depressed? I mean, we keep overlooking that option for all kinds of reasons, but maybe that’s part of it all,” right about thinking that Seb is more affected by some of the shit he’s been through than he wants to be, right about Seb needing to try something new since a lot of his previously attempted ideas haven’t helped in the ways he needs, right about going, “You’re flatbacked on the sofa, staring at the ceiling like it just threatened to kill your dogs, and listening to ‘Last Christmas’ in the middle of June. It’s not hard to figure out that something’s wrong”

—but Pete is somewhat less than right about, for example: Seb’s emotional trigger for kicking into Beast Mode probably being fear and/or anger (but in fairness to Pete, he hears, “my best friend can hulk out into a nine-foot-tall wolf-man” and concludes that it’s most likely going to work like the Incredible Hulk or in-universe heroes like The Myrmidon of the All-Stars and Dr. Lydia “Promethia” Yates of the Wardens); reacting to sudden-onset superpowers by going, “HI OMG I’M YOUR SIDEKICK NOW FUCK YEAH LET’S ROCK THIS BITCH”; Seb’s confused feelings after his date with Stephen (because Seb ends up genuinely unsure what he wants to do about his situation with Todd vs. starting something new with Stephen, and Pete’s initial reaction is, “Oh, bullshit, you’re just trying to chicken out on this because you’re actually interested someone NICE for once, you just learned that he likes you back, and now, you’re SCARED”)

……Granted, he’s also not entirely wrong on that last point, but Seb being scared doesn’t negate the fact that he’s also confused about his feelings

1 note · View note