#again sorry if mobile somehow does not cut this it is uhhh long

[drewsleung]

self para;

summary: drew remembers his first true love and contemplates the near future.

notes: for optimal atmosphere, pls listen to dreaming of you by the queen herself, selena. 

the sun would keep shining down on the golden star necklace permanently placed around celia chen's neck. it was drew's first and only gift and she treasured it like crazy. said that it made her feel so young even though she was. eighteen when she got it (and him!), nineteen when they knew they wanted each other for good, and twenty when they knew they were in it for the long haul (and teddy!)

life was good.

sure, celia had to stay home a lot and so drew found himself going to classes by himself and studying with few friends and being invited out by fewer friends ( ‘because he's busy now, with a kid, didn't you hear? him and celia. yeah, them! kid's cute i hear, but it's a darn shame..’ ) but that's alright. they manage.

sometimes, celia would bring up the m-word. drew knew what his answer would be, so did she. she just never wanted him to say it out loud because amidst the bills and the laundry and the chores and the baby's crying, oh god -- who has the time to get all lushed up in a dress and get hitched?

but when drew trudges back to his parents' house, celia's necklace heavy in his pocket after claiming it from the police officers that responded to the scene, he realizes he should've pushed it. tried harder. but he didn't. he carries the words of their last conversation together in his heart, in his head. ‘i’ll be back tonight, okay? you and teddy behave.’ ‘of course we’ll behave. we’re good boys, right buddy?’

when he trudges into his dorm at blackthorne, tired from another day of kicking other people's asses to keep them from kicking his. he realizes he should've kept at college. tried harder. but he didn't. he didn’t want to be in the same rooms that he and celia had often met up at. the study carrel they often tried to study together in. this one hallway where drew tried to be smooth by carrying around a bouquet and stood to wait for her, only for celia to actually be in the other hallway and drew had to call her after classes were done for the day to know where she was. ‘you’re such a goof! you could’ve given them to me at home, you know?’ ‘yeah, but i wanted to be a sweet boyfriend-slash-baby-daddy. and you love flowers.’ ‘yeah, i do. and you.’

midnight, after washing his face in the bathroom, he plopped down on the bed. the silhouettes of his roommates sleeping give him a specific kind of comfort; a feeling of family, warmth, safety. safety. which he thought gallagher had been the best in when he first stepped inside its walls and took in its breadth. 

safe became questionable after those bodies were found. and drew thought he’d feel so conflicted about whether he wanted to stay, but he thought of the people he’d met and made bonds with and he didn’t know if wishing for his past would help at all.

but it doesn’t stop him from doing it at all. from thinking how at home celia would feel like in gallagher’s computer labs, or how she would be in awe at the gallagher chefs’ ability to make almost anything you would ask them for, recipe or not. or they could play that library game they enjoyed when they first met ( also known as how one andrew leung entertained one celia chen enough for her to give him her number ): peeking through the shelves to make funny faces at her until she laughs. 

or if gallagher ( or blackthorne ) wasn’t a part of his life if celia was here, they’d be back home in san francisco. bringing teddy to all the places the child would like to go to. museums, arcades, adventure theme parks, and even the zoo if the little kid would say so. he’ll be the type to teach him all the things he liked: basketball, a little hip-hop dancing. sure it was a sneaky way to see if teddy had the same uncanny ability he had to learn things quickly, but it was just another way he had wanted them to bond.

drew grabbed his poem notebook from his nightstand and opened the back where a small cutout space housed celia’s necklace. staring at it for a second, he finally plucked it out to hold it close for the night. he tilted his head to the side to stare up at the ceiling. he’s heard of the berlin internship and while it sounds amazing and exciting, he wanted to go home. a sentiment he was sure he shared with the georgetown kids, for sure. a sigh, already accepting the decision he made whole-heartedly. he missed teddy too much to even think about going anywhere else for the summer, so he’s gonna go home.

“just one more month and then some..” he muttered to himself, before finally drifting back to sleep, the necklace clutched in his hand and resting on his chest.

[ziracona]

And I hate to do this- So on that thread, not that he's as bad, why do you think Michael is redeemable? (and also Frank) Especially by his main victim? :? I hope that isn't as bad or as judgmental as I think it sounds... - Sleepy (its like 5am here :3 living up to my name i see)

So, these I gave a short and a long answer for under cut, but forgot I’m on mobile and can’t do that. I can tag it “long post” but uhhh, sorry about this. Anyway, thats why Frank comes in two chunks. I wrote it expecting to be able to use a read more. :’-] also ya fine. And I hope you’re in bed 🤣 now. Okay so. Here’s my reasons:

For Michael, to start, Halloween is complicated af. You have to know what timeline people are talking about, because there are like 8+ and Michael has been written as a wildly different character by wildly different content creators, and I would not feel the same ways towards them all. They’re not the same character. When I talk about Michael, unless I’m going on about a specific other film, I mean either H20 canon, or DbD canon, which are in line with each other when it comes to characterization. (This also includes Halloween’s 1 & 2 in the H20 line, and Halloween 1 at least in DbD). In those timelines, Michael has like at best 2% agency and choice in his own life and what he becomes. That’s why I am sympathetic. I still root for Laurie to nail his ass to the wall of course, and everything he has done to hurt someone isn’t okay just because his life is unfair & awful & out of his control, but I still find him a very tragic character. He was canonically suffering violent psychosis his parents refused him treatment for, isolated with a monster as his doctor & only human contact for 15 years from age 6 on, overdosed on medications that when OD’d worsen psychosis symptoms and can cause permanent brain damage, and stuck like that until escaping briefly when he turned 21.

In Halloween canon, Michael tells his parents he hears voices telling him to do bad things like hurt people, but they tell him he is imagining stuff, and ignore his attempts to get help. The voices say they will be quiet, which is what he desperately wants, if he kills his sister Judith. So he does, at age six. Scientifically speaking, that’s literally too young to really have a complete grasp on death and mortality itself, let alone complex ethics. He immediately goes to his parents after doing the deed, so they can do whatever they need to do. Instead of getting him help, he is sentenced to 15 years in a 1960s American sanitorium (hell), until he turns 21 and can be tried for murder as an adult (fucking ridiculous and unfair?? Tried as an adult is for like, upper teens who commit heinous murders. How tf you justify trying a six year old literally too young to really understand murder as an adult for murdering someone??). They give him to Dr. Sam Loomis, a fucking horrible person, who says he spends 8 years trying to help Michael (a fkn lie), but canonically by only a few months of meeting the kid is thoroughly convinced he is evil, the devil or a demon in human form, faking his psychosis and side effect symptoms (trauma induced mutism from killing his sister, onset of catatonia/motion loss symptoms, etc, all of which are common with his disorder & trauma), desperate to kill again, and an evil mastermind doing the devil’s work, and says so. Spends four hours every day accusing Michael as a six year old child on, of planning to do horrible things and faking his illness and being a demon and not a human, and Loomis, from age 6 to 21, is this kid’s only human contact. And the staff knew it and how wrong and disturbed Loomis was, but did nothing. So from age 6 to 21—barring one or two visits from his mom & Laurie before his dad beat 4 year old Laurie for saying Michael’s, who he hated after Judith’s death, name—until she trauma blocked out having had a brother or sister at all, and then both parents died in a car crash—his only human contact in complete isolation was an adult man who told him for four hours a day he was an evil lying demon faking his symptoms and plotting murder and not a human and promised he would kill Michael and stop him, from childhood on, and that was it. He was never given an understanding of what was medically wrong with him, or that anything was at all. He was threatened and abused and kept overdosed on drugs for 15 years since early childhood, and his only understanding of the world taught in that absolute isolation, was that he was a demon who wanted to get out and kill again. And the violent psychosis, telling him if he killed both sisters, they would go away and leave him in peace with no more constant noise. With no normal understanding of the world or people or life like he was owed ever given to him, no understanding at all of what you were going through or were aside from the promise drilled into your head you were a monster who wanted to kill every day for 15 years while drugged up? Like, I’m a firm believe people are responsible for their own actions, but in a case as extreme as that, honestly, how else was that ever going to even be able to end? You forget, as a child. Who you used to be. That’s beyond grooming even, it’s being grown in a lab for the sole purpose of someday walking out, taking a large kitchen knife, and killing Laurie Strode. And it’s tragic. It’s unfair. Halloween is a tragedy, not a horror film. It didn’t have to be that way. He wanted help. He asked for help. Loomis is directly and pretty much solely responsible for the lives lost in 1978. You know he won’t even call Michael “him”? The only human he contact he had since age six on called him “it.” And no one stopped any of that. And even then. Even then, even with all that. With the drugs, and the lab grown killer, and all of it? Michael is pretty much the single least sadistic slasher killer there /is/.

Everyone he kills in Halloween? He kills fast. It’s actually kind of boring if you’re expecting a scary slasher, because there’s no chase until Laurie. He just appears, runs you through, and you die. Very fast. And if there is any emotion expressed towards the act of killing or aftermath, it’s not pleasure or hate or happiness, it’s curiosity, because literally everything is something he wasn’t allowed to experience growing up and just has no practical experience with yet. And on top of all that, he also just doesn’t kill people he doesn’t have to. He kills one man for clothes, kills Annie to re-do Judith’s murder since it didn’t work the first time and he needs both sisters for the voices to stop, and he kills Bob and Lynda becuase they stumble onto where he is & are a threat to success. (This + Judith 15 years prior is all the deaths in Halloween period, btw). Michael routinely only kills his target, and anyone who is a threat to success. Literally doesn’t even jump out to kill Bob or attack until Bob opens the door to the closet he was hiding in, and he has been seen. Walks past a security guard and lets him go in H20 becuase he doesn’t see him, steals keys from a mom with her 4 year old kid and doesn’t even hurt them because they don’t see him really either, steals a knife from an old lady making a sandwich who is one foot away but looking the other direction, so he lets her go. Even with all the possible stakes against him, really, Michael is like, the least cruel and most sympathetic and merciful version of that lab grown killer possible, which can only be a testament to the person he was initially/still somehow has managed to keep faint traces of alive inside.

As for Laurie finding him redeemable, answer is threefold I guess, and I’ll start with the most important. 1: in Halloween canon, Laurie cares for Michael and is incredibly sad about what he turned into and wishes he could be different (once she remembers who he is). That’s established canon, not a choice of mine. In Halloween 2, she tries to talk him down before shooting him, and he hesitates when she says his name and lowers his weapon for a moment. In H20, she talks about him a lot & even asks her boyfriend (a psychologist) if he thinks something so traumatic can happen to someone that they can never recover, bc even though she hasn’t seen him in 20 years, he’s still on her heart. She hesitates to kill him once she has him helpless in the finale, and when he reaches out for her hand, she almost cries and starts to reach back because it’s what she has truly wanted for so long. 2: Michael & Laurie are siblings, and that’s a very important relationship to me. Obviously, there’s lines where you cross, it’s fkn over, but it is special, and I’m weak for it. They were both cheated of the good family life they could have had, and I like characters I care for getting recovery and rehabilitation, and I would like them to be able to recover and have whatever fragments of the lives they wanted which are still possible. And then 3: Laurie is his victim, but they’re also both victims of Loomis, and the system, and her parents, and if she does /wish/ for him to be okay and things to be like they were, which was canon before me, so she does, then I think them finding happiness and her relief and new hope in regained family and him redemption and rehabilitation through the quite literally only person he has /ever/ known who treated him well or like even a human at all & is still living, that’s so good. It’s sweet, and it makes sense. I like broken people putting the pieces together and finding ways to be okay. None of the shit that happened to either of them was okay, and Michael sure did fucking do it, but it’s about as “it’s complicated” as literally possible, and Laurie wants him to be her brother again, and Michael deserves a chance to experience personhood enough to want anything like that again too, and I think it’s sweet. To be able to find happiness and peace and a new life in that rubble. It shouldn’t be possible, because Halloween is a tragedy that never gets a happy ending, no matter how many timelines they create or versions they tell, but I wish it could have one. It needs one. At least one, among all the fated tragedies for those two cruelly cursed siblings. They both had their lives stolen. Michael by Loomis, and Laurie by Michael. And I want them to find those stolen lives again. And if they can do it together, that’s a very odd and unusual set of circumstances for that kind of thing, but it’s a very complete way to tell the story. He tried to kill her, but if she asked him to stop and he stopped, if he himself chose to change on his own, when it really, really mattered—decided that it was what he wanted more than all the things he was before, and she decided that was enough, and they could both have a future as family? I like that. It’s a happy ending stolen back.

Long Frank Answer, in case you /have/ read ILM & thus short answer did not answer your question: So. Again, for me, I always talk about Frank as in the version of him I myself write, and I wrote ILM before the archives retcon, and also just ignore them because they’re usually dumb and blatantly contradict well established and longstanding canon. Even then, I usually don’t like Frank though—didn’t like him when I started writing ILM. But Frank has very little established canon character. All there is for sure is he was a foster kid that went through some bad stuff, he met Julie and changed his mind about desperately trying to be homed somewhere other than with Clive bc he liked Julie a lot, he met Susie and Joey, they became a gang chilling in Ormond’s abandoned lodge, then tried to rob a store Joey was fired from, were surprised by a cleaner who grabbed Julie, and Frank impulse stabbed him, freaked, and ordered the others to finish it with him and be in it together. Then before they’d even really finished burying the body, they got snagged. That leaves a whole lot of personality and thoughts and motivations and future choices and person wildly undetermined. Writing, sometimes characters just do their own thing completely out of my control, and I have to adapt. Frank chose not to kill Meg at the end of Tenacity, Adrenaline, & Grit, which surprised me, because he’d been nothing but a dipshit asshole bastard till one minute ago, but I knew it was because he recognized what she’d tried to do at great pain to herself because she wouldn’t bow down and die, and he connected/empathized or sympathized on some level. He also couldn’t go through with killing Quentin immediately after being helped by him in Distortion/Iron Maiden. Neither was like, planned. It’s just who the character was. I was frustrated. I did not want to like or feel sympathy for Frank at all. Then in The Lost, Jeff just fkn hijacked the whole plot and added 20 pages not in the outline because he wanted to be kind to Frank & it’s not like I can stop characters when they do whatever they do. And while writing it, I got to know that the version of Frank Morrison in the world I was writing—which is always the version I refer to/think of him as & write now myself—was not somebody past saving. He’s a piece of shit and he’s done fucked up and inexcusable stuff, and he pays for it. In many ways, Frank gets away with a lot over the course of ILM, but it’s always because characters choose on their own to forgive him, not because they or he doesn’t think it was fucked. And Frank suffers—a lot—for his choices, and has to live through appropriate and large amounts of regret and remorse about stuff he did before the end. He gets the chance to make better choices several times, and mostly he doesn’t. He continues to fuck up. But right near the end, he makes a couple good decisions when it’s down to the wire, sees where his bad choices got him and what he has to live with, and then he does live with it. He almost dies, and then ends up falling on Jeff’s mercy, which he knows he doesn’t deserve and doesn’t expect to get, for a last chance to make it, and because Jeff is an ungodly kind and forgiving soul, he makes it.

Frank isn’t a good person, and he does a lot of stuff that isn’t remotely okay or justified or excused, but he /is/ a kid—the upper end of it, but he’s not a full grown adult. He has every reason to believe nothing of himself or others, a fucked up childhood and life which isn’t his fault, and the Entity got all four Legion kids before they’d even had time to process the one and only violent crime they did (which was unplanned), and it is historically running a PHD in psychological warfare vs everyone. Absolutely none of that excuses or justifies him, but it is an explanation for some of it that is not as bad as say, doing that shit for fun or cruelty or hate or what have you, which makes him a bad person, but one with a lot more humanity left than say, Kenneth. Who is at -100 or something. If he’s still got a lot of humanity left, that means he could be redeemed, and he eventually chooses that path for himself and hits the appropriate “I did something horrible. Fuck. It was really bad. I should not have done it.” “I am really sorry I did this. I feel awful. I’m sorry.” “I cant change it, but I can try to do better and make whatever reparations I can.” “I want to be better, and I am going to try.” necessary stages of actually trying to improve. So, I like him. He did a lot of really awful shit that wasn’t okay, but he was never without sympathetic elements. He does love his friends and his girlfriend, he is a good boyfriend to Julie and selfless towards her and his crew (overall anyway—has even risked death for them very willingly, even the one who was fighting with/kinda hated him), will keep his word in deals and has some semblance of both sympathy and honor, feels guilt, is a kid, did not choose this life but was rather catapulted into it and too weak to climb out once he landed in the mud. All of that together makes him someone I feel sympathy towards and find quite redeemable, so long as he will decide he wants that, which, in ILM, he does. If you just meant Frank in general then idk how to answer because there’s not much established Frank period it’s kinda a shell like all original dead by daylight characters, and I have no thoughts on it by itself because it’s not a whole person, and so I really only think of Frank as ILM verse Frank now.

[lucienladamned]

Uhhh,,,, Alois through the years??? What a cold old man I love hIM ◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇ anyways I feel the need to explain each state of his life lmao so like,,, uhh sorry for the long post I'm only on mobile so I can't do fancy stuff ◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇ 10 yrs old- He was a small child at this time whom lived on a farm in Morrowind. It was honestly surprising that his family could barely support themselves because like the ash wouldn't let anything grow?? He was like a normal kid at this age, but kind of weird. Like a violent weird?? Like a "you should get help weird." He had these dreams that were sent by Sithis of... yeah lmao it'll probably be a tw if I say what. And he'd wake up in cold sweat and stuff. Also he had a weird ugly mullet thing going on?? Like it was a bowl cut but he also had a long pony tail ◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇ 32 yrs old- He left his years earlier and became a self taught bard!! He was poor because honestly he played in the streets. Somehow managed to rent inn rooms however. He loved his lute a lot. In fact, playing is how he met his husband, Qadir. Qadir was a traveling Redguard merchant and had stopped in Vivec City for a rest and he like,,, heard Alois playing? And loved it a lot. So he stayed a little longer than anticipated. ◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇ 45 yrs old- He's a farmer again after getting married to Qadir. The pair moved to Cyrodil where the soil was much richer for planting. Qadir was still a merchant and he often traveled the roads to sell their crops. It was around this age thay Qadir was ambushed by bandits, killed, and stripped of everything. The news took about as long as he expected Qadir to be away and instead of flinging open the door to his husband it was a courier instead,,, bringing news of Qadir's death. ◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇ 50 yrs old- five years later he's homeless in Skyrim. After crossing the border he settled down wherever he cpuld lay his head, whether it be in a cave or hiding in a barn. He was homeless from during the time his husband died until he was 56 years old. He was extremely bitter and took every chance he could to brutally murder those he deemed unfit to roam the roads. He had heard of Grelod in Riften and went to slaughter her. I do think yall know how the rest of it goes. His last assassination job was of the Emperor of Tamriel. ◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇ 82 yrs old- He is the listener of the Dark Brotherhood. He does not do the jobs himself but gives them to Nazir to fish out to initiates. He is cold, bitter, narcissistic, and very closed off from others, except Cicero and Nazir. He spends all his time in his living quarters in the Dawnstar Sanctuary. The only person he allows in is Cicero, and that's only to his quarters, not his feelings. Cicero often tries to jest around with the old man but to no avail does it work.