#this randomly became delores meta for reasons unknown whoops

[number5theboy]

Why do you think five hates himself?

I think it's mostly because Five is pretty much a failure across the board.

I've said this before, but the fundamental difference between Five and the rest of his siblings is that his siblings can point squarely at Reginald as the reason why their lives are ruined. But Reginald didn't ruin Five's life. Five did.

Five had that one act of teenage rebellion/self-actualisation backfire on him and has been trying to do things right ever since, and all he's ever accomplished is making everything worse. He is very competent, he is very skilled, he is very clever, and it keeps getting him nowhere. Every time he manages to do something right, the consequences of his decisions come back to fuck him over.

So every time he comes face to face with a different version of himself, it's a reminder of his perpetual failure. Himself one week younger, about to jump forward to 2019 and try to save the world? Will fail, and will botch the jump while he's at it, condemning himself to Puberty 2: Corvette Stingray Boogaloo. Founder Five (ignoring, for the moment, that that plot point is a mess)? Literal representation of the fact that not only did Five fail for 45 years of his life, he will continue to do so for another 87 before dying alone and unfulfilled in the worst company - himself. And even discarding the other versions of himself that Five encounters, he does not care much for himself. He is willing to die if it means the world survives. He has accepted that there very well may not be any happiness in his future, but everything he's ever done is not about himself, not anymore. I don't think he attributes much value to his own life. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. And all that jazz.

And yet.

I don't know if Five truly hates himself. Maybe he does. I think he definitely doesn't really like who he is, what he's become, what time has changed about him, but he has the tendency to cling to life, even if he says he is done with it. There's a drive for survival in him that shows that whatever disdain he may hold toward himself, it's not complete apathy. And if it is hatred, it's a very passionate, fiery hatred that somehow still fuels him. Sure, he has fucked up a million times before, but what if. Just this once. It might work out. What if the worst person you know (yourself) could get it right this time? Because Five is still alive despite. Not only despite everything the world has thrown at him, but also despite everything he has done wrong. Despite all that, he is still there.

And there is one last puzzle piece - Delores. I love her, especially in S1, because she is such a good plot device. In S1, she was used to offset Five's brash, rude nature in talking to other people and show that beneath it all, he could love, even if the literal object of his affections is a mannequin. And the thing with Delores is that she is him. She is a psychological manifestation of the decades-long trauma that Five suffered, a symptom of forty years of solitude and isolation. She exists in relation to him, an extension to him. The way I always interpreted her was as the best part of Five. When we see him talk to her in S1, she seemingly chides him for his alcoholism, she told him beforehand that his botched equation was off, she has an edge on him because she is meant to represent, I think, the best parts of himself, the last shreds of his humanity. When the Handler offers him a way out in exchange for years of service as a killing machine, he looks back at Delores (the best parts of himself), but turns away and takes the Handler's offer. When Luther threatens to toss her out the window and gives him the choice between her (the best parts of himself) and the gun, when push comes to shove, Five picks Delores. There's a part of himself, a very, very fucked up part that has been hurting for decades, that fiercely loves himself and is not ready to give up on himself. And that's painful, as indicated by her name, a botched version of a word that literally means pain (plural).

And then he lets her go at the end of S1, because, on some level, he is aware what he has been doing. Aidan Gallagher said in the virtual panel released after S2 that Five knew that being alone in the apocalypse would drive him to lose his mind, so he used Delores to lose his mind in as controlled a way possible (x). Obviously he clearly did not do that perfectly (weird wedding hallucination/distortion of events proves that, if nothing else), but there was an awareness somewhere that she was a coping mechanism, and so he let her go, a first step to healing. That's why his language changes from using 'we' when talking about his time in the apocalypse in S1 to 'I' in S2. That's why he knows how he botched the jump, and can correct it for the younger version of himself. That's why he manages to be more vulnerable in S2. He has finally allowed himself to be all of himself again, even the part he loves.

Then S3 came along and made Delores a punchline and nothing else and kind of trampled on my nice interpretation without even giving Five the grace of having him go back to an old coping mechanism mean something. But I still want to talk about Five and self-loathing in S3, because we do get his reaction to Klaus telling him he's a good brother. He is surprised, genuinely taken aback, and Klaus was even reluctant to tell him, almost fearful of Five's reaction. Five doesn't like himself and the fact that someone else perceives him as good family throws him for a moment. And then there's the way he remembered his wedding speech vs. what it actually was. He remembers drunkenly spouting genuinely mean things at Luther while his entire family looks on, apathetically (except for Klaus, who is mildly more enthusiastically, meaning that at some level, Five's subconscious has understood that Klaus genuinely cares for him). In reality, he was sappy and loving, but his mind does not remember that. In his mind, he is not good, and he is not kind, and he can't connect to the people he loves the most - he fails at something as small and insignificant as a wedding speech. So, despite everything Delores may or may not have meant or symbolised, Five still has a lot of issues about his own self-image, his self-worth, how he is perceived by others and what he thinks of himself, all stemming, in some way, from that one act of teenage rebellion/self-actualisation that he failed at.