#Because the narrative tells us that Peter is evil constantly while we see Scott as the main character

[sparkwhorunswithwolves]

So, anyway, the narrative choices and parallels between Peter&Lydia and Scott&Liam are weirdly similar and i don't know what to do with that.

[noyzinerd]

Derek Hale: The Goodest Bad Boy

Derek was a villain in season 2...kinda.

Bless Jeff and the writers' little hearts, they honestly really tried to make Derek out to be menacing but all of their efforts just made fans feel more sympathetic to him and his pack.

Go ahead, watch season 2 again, but try to pretend like you're seeing it for the first time and you don't already know that Derek is actually a decent guy, and listen to the show's main narrative which is supposed to be Scott. You get the sense from the dialogue that Jeff&Co. want you to think Derek making a pack is a bad thing, that Derek is basically a replacement Peter. However, it didn't seem to occur to the writers at the time that the fans were definitely not going to see it that way. At this point, Derek had been given way too sympathetic of a backstory, making a lot of Derek's 'failures' come off less like "Scott, the good guy, thwarted Derek, the bad guy" (like when keeping Derek's pack from killing Lydia) and more like "Derek, the well meaning guy, hesitated and keeps making mistakes because he doesn't truly know if he's doing the right thing and is just trying to do his best".

But what about Derek's betas? The boy beaten by his father, the girl with epilepsy, and the boy that sat alone every day, they couldn't possibly be bad guys.

All of Derek's pack got sympathetic backstories, yes, but so did other villains like Matt, Peter, the Darach, Deucalion, even Gerard Argent having cancer. I honestly believe Isaac, Erica, and Boyd were meant to be well-rounded villains but the writers upshot too far and accidentally made them too endearing to fans. If you watch the ice rink fight in season 2 or when Isaac and Erica test the kanima venom on Lydia, their over the top smug grins, the menacing music that plays whenever they show up, the super antagonistic dialogue about killing Lydia and Erica stealing Scott, it all plays like the writers are in the back waving a big sign saying "You should not like these guys! They are evil!" In the ice rink battle, Scott (again, the main point of view we're supposed to be taking here) tells Derek's pack that Derek gave them empty promises of power only to strengthen his own power while turning them into nothing more than guard dogs, to which Derek responds "He's right. It is about power." We were supposed to fear and be disgusted by Derek's actions, but instead, we were all "Awwww, but Derek saved these hurt kids and wants to stop the lizard from killing people!" despite the actual dialogue saying otherwise. Jeff Davis took a sad, man-shaped, broken boy who was essentially raped and had his entire family burned alive and tried to somehow make us hate him. But how could we, when, let's face it, most of us were broken little girls and boys, ourselves.

They have him angry and tyrannical and constantly making bad calls, but instead of coming across as someone drunk on power that needs to be stopped, he comes across as young and struggling and just frustrated. There's a reason why the tag 'failwolf' is a term of endearment. Usually, when Derek is tagged as a failwolf in fics, it's never meant in a 'look at this stupid idiot' way and more like a 'awww, buddy, you poor disaster of a man'.

This plan backfired so spectacularly that Jeff didn't know what to do with Derek's character anymore, in the face of millions of fans demanding more of him, that Derek essentially had less and less to do as the series continued until Hoechlin eventually left.