#and how it even infers a want and desire to father and care even despite his personal suffering

[satisaranea]

i think about each tribute from 12. for years, their deaths are no important means. their lives are stories told by no one, spoken by no one; whatever legacy they left behind is naught. that is until,

Haymitch finally joins us, contributing twenty-three years of tributes he was forced to mentor.

and how it solidifies his sharp mind and how after 23 years, the wounds of loss are never healed by time. they are open and pouring, and they're as fresh as a photograph. the fact that haymitch remembers each individual tribute leads me to believe that he kept track of each, their stories and lives, interacting with the people that loved them and ultimately keeping their memory alive.

[vampiricgf]

this is such a fantastic post about lycaons background with mockingbird and his agent story that I didn't want to derail but I do have my own ideas on what his experience with mockingbird might be and his vampire friends background

have you heard the tale of gamelyn? it goes roughly like this: a wealthy man's youngest son is left to the care of his wicked older brother that wants to cheat him out of his inheritance. The father is on his deathbed when he gets his youngest son and neighbors as witness to him dividing his lands up between his children before his death.

The neighbors leave, he dies, and gamelyn is at the mercy of his older brother. He grows up in his brother's hall, his share of their fathers lands held in trust by his brother as well. Except he's let his youngest brothers share of the land fall to ruin, he abuses gamelyn, they fight horribly over gamelyns ruined portion of the inheritance.

In the final scene of lycaon and the vampire we can infer the vampire is possibly wealthy himself at this point

Ornate, large gold trimmed window, the presumably high ceilings of the office he stands in having carved woodwork, even his clothing suggests by this time lycaons former partner has done quite well for himself. That could be from funds they acquired through their mockingbird "work" or because he has a similar background to the story of gamelyn.

The vampire is incredibly theatric, we see him making young lycaon recite an oath in very flowery language and we see his influence on lycaon as an adult despite their estrangement, from his accent to his strict adherence to his role as a dutiful butler. Wealthy people love theatrics and dramatics, and if the vampire is a sort of gamelyn inspired figure, background wise, it would make sense he would found a "steal from the rich give to the poor" sort of criminal organization. And perhaps a younger lycaon simply wasn't aware of the depth of his friends entanglement with wealth and inheritance at that point, maybe meeting after the vampire had already been cast out by his wealthy family, his inheritance usurped.

He tells lycaon family is a curse and a burden, essentially. It would make sense for him to have that viewpoint if he is inspired by the story of gamelyn to some degree, being betrayed by his family for status/material wealth and it might make him resentful of the wealthy as a class, making them his prime target. And perhaps it was a sort of betrayal to lycaon, who believed the organization had more upstanding roots in a real desire to take from those who have an excess and give it to those who do not, if he found out about this part of his friend and how deeply that would have impacted the creation of their organization. Maybe lycaon became extremely disillusioned with it all, realizing it was not what it presented itself to be and was truly a tool for personal revenge.

The final nail in the coffin so to speak may have been whatever happened to cause the loss of his left eye and his legs at the knee. If he lost those in service to mockingbird, his friend that was maybe not entirely truthful about his real motivations, it could have been the final straw for lycaon. unable to remain as loyal as he promised when confronted with the fact that he had suffered substantial losses in service to someone who is ultimately selfish and self serving, not who he believed he was. due to how lycaon stresses loyalty in himself to a "master" I believe it would take an extremely serious event like that to trigger someone like him into making the choice to abandon the object of his loyalty.

but that's just my silly lil ramblings and it's just as possible im wrong about all that but it is fun to think about

[ethanhuntfemmefatale]

I feel like you’re the only other person in the world who is as intrigued by the ethan/claire/jim dynamic as I am. It drives me crazy! I love that ethan, who is portrayed as a pretty flawless guy (he just cares TOO much) in the later movies gets this like crazy quirk of being in love with his father figure/boss’s wife and I love that you’re not always sure how much is manipulation and how much is genuine every time they interact. Severely underrated. Anyway loved the fic!

anon i am so so glad that you loved the fic and i am so glad to hear from another person fascinated by the ethan/claire/jim fuckery. (incidentally being a fellow ethan/claire/jim interested individual entitles you automatically to friend status should you so desire)

your ask touches on some things and it's giving me the urge to rant so please forgive me cause im probably about to get very off topic. I just love your point about the way that ethan (who is so steadfastly heroic in later movies!) starts out with this massive, like, to lean into the MI1 religious imagery, sin. And that sin isn't resolved in any satisfactory way--both of the people involved die, and no one is left alive who even knows what really happened, and this makes me feel rabid to think about. (Luther saw the cheek kiss, but has no context for it, and I feel strongly that Ethan has never told him anything else about that. I really think Ethan never breathes a word to anyone about Jim, Claire or Max. Kittridge is probably the closest to being able to infer some of the details, he knows Ethan loved Jim, he knows about Max's "entrapment," but he's too much of a self-absorbed bureaucrat to give a shit.)

But back to the point about the sin. For my money, Ethan's sin is the heart of MI1. The movie tells us that Ethan's sin is being in love with Claire--but in a queer reading of the movie, it's easy to read into Ethan's interactions with Claire and Jim and infer that his real sin is being in love with both of them, a sin that Jim will never openly acknowledge, but that all three of them are aware of to some degree. Ethan's sin is also portrayed as being...not actually his fault. He doesn't participate in any of Claire's "seduction moments," although from his expression after the cheek kiss IMO you can see that he has strong feelings about them. Ethan's sin is something that is done to him, and regardless of whether or not he wants it, regardless of whether initiates or even participates, he is corrupted by the experience. He's only (to some degree) cleansed by the death of claire, jim and krieger, the only people who knew about what happened.

(one of the reasons I drew from gawain and the green knight in the end of the fic is because--beyond the parallels of jim as the lord going hunting in the woods, claire as the lady going hunting for gawain, ethan as the knight just trying to make it out alive--that's a story that deals heavily in impossible moral tests and loss of agency. And Gawain emerges from it 'fey-touched', fundamentally changed despite the fact that most of what happened to him was unwanted and unavoidable. That's how i feel about ethan at the end of MI1)

It's important to note briefly that I actually don't think of the Claire/Jim/Ethan thing as his only sin in the movie. It's the only one that's remarked on directly, but the whole thing with Max feels like it's presented too similarly to ignore. It's another situation of power differences and emotional and sexual manipulation where Ethan is put in an impossible position and emerges morally corrupted (by the rules of the movie), but victorious.

In a lot of ways, I feel like the sin itself almost serves less as an indictment of Ethan and more as a worldbuilding device. MI1 establishes the world of the IMF really vividly without showing us hardly anything about it! we don't even know what the IMF is really, it doesn't have a headquarters, we don't get to know any other teams outside of the one that dies in the beginning, but the movie renders the world of the IMF through Ethan's relationship with Claire and Jim. I've talked before about the "sea of lies." The thing that made me love MI1 so much in the first place was the specific feeling that is so beautifully evoked, of gradually realizing that everyone you have ever loved wants to use you. That's the IMF! That's spywork, baby! Ethan doesn't realize it in the beginning, but he sure figures it out by the end. it's impossible for ethan to make it out of MI1 without becoming part of the corrupt world of the IMF, the real IMF that Claire and Jim and Kittridge are in, not the fantasy of the team in the opening. (to go back to the green knight metaphor--he has to take the sash in order to live--and even though that means compromising his morals, he's blameless. Corrupt, forever, but blameless.)

despite that--ethan is not the IMF. He believes in Claire. He believes in Luther. He avoids killing. he has an honor code that he sticks to even as he gets deeper and deeper into the sea of lies. that's what makes him the guy we see in the rest of the franchise, that at arguably his most vulnerable point, his most corrupt point, he believed in the people he loved and tried not to hurt anyone. The point of the sin, to me, is that Ethan is forced into the deep end of the murkiest grey moral waters and held underneath, and in the process he sacrifices moral purity for moral integrity and makes it out alive. and the movie doesn't hate him for it. He's a hero.

lots of thoughts for this ask lmfao thank you very much anon for indulging me. and thank you for reading the fic. i am so glad you liked it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[bestworstcase]

on ‘villainy’ and varian’s and cassandra’s moral codes

for all that varian’s and cassandra’s villain arcs get compared to death they’re really more different than they are similar, and i think one of the more interesting distinctions is the characters’ moral perspectives on their own actions--namely that varian recognizes his own choices as villainous and consciously self-identifies as a ‘bad guy’ and cassandra not only…doesn’t do that but appears legitimately taken aback when varian says she’s ‘become the villain.’ from this we can infer that varian is transgressing his own personal sense of right and wrong while cassandra isn’t.

and… well with varian i think it’s pretty straightforward: he’s a kid who desperately wants to make the world a better place and make his father proud, but his impulsivity and recklessness and general disregard for lab safety foil his plans and get him into trouble. then one of his accidents puts his dad into what is essentially a magical coma and varian becomes singularly focused on reviving him--and, when he realizes that the king is more invested in covering up the problem than fixing it and his only hope lies with a zealously guarded relic belonging to the kingdom, he decides that the only way to achieve this goal is to start breaking the rules.

so he asks rapunzel--his friend who promised to help him--to retrieve some information the king is trying to steal from him, and then persuades her to help him access the sundrop vault; then when she balks at stealing it he makes it clear that he no longer trusts her and escapes with the flower. at this point he’s in the morally dubious zone; being strategic about what he tells rapunzel to make sure she helps him, spiking cookies with truth serum to sow chaos and get information he needs, and doing things that are crimes on paper but also largely victimless. i think these were things varian could probably rationalize as okay--not exactly good, but no one got hurt and he got what he needed.

except the flower’s magic is gone. he drugged the palace, manipulated rapunzel and broke her trust in him, and committed treason all for something useless because the actual magic of the sundrop is in rapunzel herself. now he’s in trouble, because he needs rapunzel’s help but his desperate measures guaranteed she won’t be willing to help him again. and this is when varian realizes that his only options are 1. give up on saving his dad and turn himself in and hope rapunzel takes pity on him, or 2. accept that no one is going to help him now and do whatever it takes to free quirin himself.

so--mutating ruddiger, attacking the city, kidnapping arianna and threatening her with encasement in amber, building an automaton army to defend him while he works--these are all things that varian feels are wrong, but chooses to do anyway because he doesn’t trust that anyone else will even try to save his father. despite his anger and his rationalizations, at the end of the day varian sees himself as doing bad things for good reasons. (“Believe me, I know/I’ve sunk pretty low” & “I’m the bad guy, that’s fine”)

and when his reasons fall through--when he fails to free his dad--he falls quickly into guilt and despair over having hurt people for nothing. he stews for a year in how unforgivable and ashamed he feels, and even when he teams up with the separatists, he’s doing it in, basically, pursuit of a reset button: he wants to take back what he did. and when rapunzel shows him that he can be forgiven, he can have a second chance, he does have people who are willing to help him and trust him again, he drops the memory-wiping idea and his alliance with the separatists without a second thought--because what rapunzel actually does is give him a way to pursue his goals without sacrificing his conscience, which is what he really needed the whole time.

now, cassandra, on the other hand…

cass is an interesting character in this regard because, while she does want to be a hero, she’s not at all altruistic. she’s consumed by her lack of autonomy and she craves not only control over her own life but also respect from the people around her--her desire to be a hero is very self-interested, at its core. and moreover she has a somewhat fatalistic view of the world wherein some people (not her) matter and some… just don’t. 

moreover cassandra, despite her ambitions of becoming a guard, doesn’t so much as blink at eugene’s or the pub thugs’ criminal pasts--she is suspicious of lance at first, but on the grounds that he’s an unrepentant thief who showed up out of the blue under suspicious circumstances to ‘reconnect’ with his old partner in crime; eugene is also distrustful of lance, for the exact same reasons--and of course she doesn’t think twice about breaking the law herself. literally one of the very first things we see cassandra do is commit treason to make her friend happy. cass doesn’t care about the law, and she only wants to be a guard because she associates getting the job with having her dad’s approval and it’s also her ticket out of lifelong servitude.

on the other hand, cass does seem have a strong sense of right and wrong where people she cares about are concerned. she is constantly putting the desires and well-being of her friends ahead of not just her ambitions (e.g. in beginnings for rapunzel, or great expotations for varian) but also her own safety (e.g. risking her livelihood and home to sneak rapunzel out for the night in bea, or setting aside her misgivings about the sketchy bird people in freebird). 

which is all to say--cass isn’t exactly amoral but the moral framework through which she sees the world is… more complicated than varian’s. she doesn’t seem particularly motivated to help strangers but she’ll move mountains to help people she cares about; she doesn’t care much about rules or laws except insofar as she doesn’t want to get caught breaking them, and she has this hierarchical mindset that some people matter--meaning, they get to make decisions for themselves and have people care about what they need and want--and some don’t, and that she herself is stuck in the latter category despite her best efforts to climb out of it.

which brings us to the subject of the moonstone, and cassandra’s villain arc, and why cass, unlike varian, doesn’t consider herself a bad person.

i think what it comes down to most is this: taking the moonstone is an act of defiance against not only rapunzel but also fate itself. waiting in the wings sets up cassandra’s resigned acceptance of this hierarchical order and her own cosmic insignificance, and then in crossing the line she REJECTS that same order. she’s raging against rapunzel but also against the cultural and legal and destined systems that put rapunzel on top and forced cass into subservience. she is very literally fighting for her freedom against the universe itself.

and when cass was not an altruistic or heavily morally motivated or even particularly law-abiding person before, and when her conscience has always been predominantly oriented around taking care of her friends first and herself second, and when the thing that drove her to this breaking point was her friends spitting that back in her face… well.

it’s easy to say “cass literally tried to murder rapunzel a bunch of times, how can she possibly believe she’s the good guy?”--but rapunzel maimed cass, blamed her for it, and consistently prioritized her destiny over cassandra’s wellbeing; and rapunzel represents the cosmic order that cass is fighting to liberate herself from. and while i know that the -popular- take on be very afraid is “cass is terrified of hurting rapunzel,” i submit it’s actually “cass is terrified of having to fight rapunzel, because she still believes that fate is literally tilted in rapunzel’s favor and she can’t win a direct fight with rapunzel.” that’s why she’s so scared; that’s why rapunzel seemingly deleting the red rocks hardens her resolve; that’s why she marches into corona with maximum drama and bluster and builds a fortress and tries so hard to mess with rapunzel’s head before the battle begins. she’s trying to even the odds. and that’s why, when rapunzel stomps her into the curb, cassandra’s immediate response is “i need an army.”

cassandra isn’t scared for rapunzel. she is scared OF rapunzel.

we do also see cass trying not to harm people she considers to be innocent bystanders; she uses the truth serum on varian bc she needs the incantation, but afterwards she doesn’t even bother to restrain him until after he starts pestering her, she says flat out that she doesn’t want him to get hurt when she fights rapunzel; similarly she is willing to hurt calliope to force rapunzel to comply, but--despite her deep personal dislike of calliope--uses a minimum amount of force and again verbally expresses that she doesn’t particularly want to hurt her, that it’s a means to an end and nothing more. attacking rapunzel? that’s fine, rapunzel is her enemy. attacking eugene? of course, he’s rapunzel’s closest ally. mind controlling the brotherhood? that kills two birds with one stone--eliminating powerful enemies with a vested interest in taking the moonstone away from her and turning them into allies who can level the playing field between her and rapunzel. and when she does finally snap and raze corona to the ground? the people of corona attacked her first. i think cass ABSOLUTELY sees herself as fighting a purely defensive war against people who have or will hurt her.

and this is, of course, ultimately why varian failed to get through to her during ‘nothing left to lose’--he appealed to her sense of morality and her sense of morality shrugged. 

as for the thing that snaps her out of it? the moment that forces her to question whether she’s really as right as she thinks she is? it’s learning who her new friend really is. it’s the shock of finding out that she’s been allied with, confiding in, taking advice from a legendary villain, from a monster she likely grew up hearing stories about. cass takes it as a given that zhan tiri is evil--and if she’s friends with zhan tiri, what does that make her? and even then, cass is resistant to the idea that she might be a villain--“No, no, I’m nothing like you. Just because I’m pursuing my destiny doesn’t make me a bad person!”--which is, ultimately, very telling of her whole mindset. she’s not a bad guy, she’s fighting for her freedom. she’s not a bad guy, she’s protecting herself against people who want to exploit her. she’s not a bad guy, she’s just putting herself first for once.

and OAH generally, i’d argue, is not actually about cassandra trying to reconcile with rapunzel or redeem herself or be a better person, it’s… literally cass trying frantically to prove she’s NOT the bad guy. it’s “oh yeah? you think i’m a bad person? well could a bad guy do THIS? *lies and impersonates a former coworker and gets up on a stage to justify her own actions in front of a crowd*” it’s “a bad guy wouldn’t apologize, rapunzel never apologized for anything, and to prove i’m a better person I’M going to apologize! see? SEE!?”--and then everyone in corona attacks her and she goes “FINE, i’m the bad guy, fuck you all” and wrecks the place.

only then--only in plus est en vous--does cassandra get into a mindset similar to varian’s, of “i am the bad guy but if i can pull this off it will be worth it.” she’s not sorry. she still sees rapunzel as an enemy trying to get her under control again, and the only thing that’s really changed is cassandra acknowledging that she has in fact done bad things too.

and… i would argue that by the end of plus est cassandra… feels some guilt but isn’t sorry. “i’ve failed” and “i’ve done terrible things” and “i tried to prove i was more than everyone thought but they were right”--her anguish is not like varian’s anguish in RR, where he was consumed with despair because no one could possibly forgive him for the things he did. cassandra is upset because she did awful things and failed and she perceives that failure as proof of her own worthlessness. she’s right back to feeling how she felt in waiting in the wings but with a hefty new helping of self-disgust and shame for having been stupid enough to believe she could change anything for herself. 

she’s not sorry. she’s not pleading for forgiveness. she just wants rapunzel to give up and leave her alone--& then, after rapunzel convinces her that she’s wrong, and she does have worth as a person, and she does have a destiny of her own, cass does what’s necessary to clean up the crisis she created and then… just bounces. she gets the freedom she wanted and leaves without a backward glance.

(which. good for her.)

tl;dr: varian’s villain arc explores his moral scruples and what it takes for him to be willing to ignore them, whereas cassandra’s villain arc explores her incendiary reaction to a lifetime of injustices; she isn’t amoral but her sense of right and wrong is, unlike varian’s, very contextual and personal. varian is a pragmatic idealist who wants to be lawful good but is capable of setting his own morals aside in pursuit of a goal he considers to be important enough, and cassandra is one radicalizing incident away from realizing that her grievances are not a unique personal failing but a systemic problem and then leading a class uprising.

[the-insomniac-emporium]

thoughts on Bela///Donna?

What a lovely can of worms you've placed in my inbox, dear nonnie. I cannot wait to open it and lose followers (regardless of what I actually say).

Since this is, uh, a subject of some debate among RE8 fans, I will be inputting my thoughts on the idea of the ship (and the possible controversy), as opposed to doing HCs or something for it (which I recognize might be what you were asking for, despite the excessive /s).

This is all based on my playthroughs of the game, as well as what I've managed to double check on the fandom/wiki for it. I know that a lot of people who read fanfic for the game haven't actually played it, likely having been lured in by Tall Vampire Milf, and so I hope that some people will be open to a reminder of, like, canon vs fanon? I've mentioned in a previous post that there's a lot of details for RE8 that are not made clear, and I feel the need to reiterate that in this post. Capcom left a lot of stuff up to people's imaginations, or kind of just hinted at in game or in concept art.

But more importantly, regardless of what game we're talking about, regardless of the conclusion I come to (and the one you come to) at the end of this post, I want to say that I absolutely understand the need/desire to have your own perspective/take on the characters from the game, as well as their dynamics. If a ship makes you uncomfortable because you see the characters as being family members, it's totally okay. Block the ship tag, or filter it out when you look through fandom stuff, don't follow people who post for it, etc, etc.

If you think of characters as being family-family (like, not just "we got married and are now a family" but, like, "we're siblings/parent and child") and still ship them? uh. sorry, bruv, maybe think of hitting that unfollow button. No, seriously, hit that unfollow button. This blog is anti-incest, thank you very much.

The last thing I'll say before putting it under a read-more (for both length and major RE8 spoilers) is that I recognize that I might have missed something, either in game or developers talking about things on social media, and so if you read through this and go "god, J, you're such a dumbass for forgetting *critical piece of media*" or even just "okay but have you seen *small but meaningful piece of media*?" please. Just. Please. Tell me. Link me to that shit. I WANT to know if I'm wrong. I've literally avoided talking about this for as long as I could in order to TRY and make sure I have all the context I need.

With that said, let's examine what context we are given for Alcina Dimitrescu, Bela Dimitrescu, Donna Beneviento, and their relations to each other. I will be leaving my personal thoughts on Bela///Donna at the very end of this, as somewhat of a conclusion, somewhat of just a "hey, this is what you technically asked me about".

Firstly, let me begin by explaining what I consider to be the 3 tiers of "canon"

In-Game/Direct: The highest, truest tier, the definitive canon. This is everything that takes place in game, excluding certain hallucination scenes (ex: Mia was not really in House Beneviento, but we can infer some things from what Donna made Ethan hallucinate about). Things either happen, or are directly stated by characters. There's some wiggle room for dialogue, as characters can lie, but overall we, as the audience, assume we are being told the truth. At the very least, games usually eventually make it clear when a character has been dishonest. Examples of Direct Canon include the following: Ethan is infected with the mold, Lady Dimitrescu drinks blood, Heisenberg wears sunglasses, Mother Miranda can shapeshift.

Concept Art/Developer's Notes/Indirect: Mid-tier and debatable, the "we think, but we're not sure" of canon. Resident Evil: Village contains lots of concept art that the players can browse through, all of which include notes from the developers about the game, characters, environments, and story. Sometimes the notes make something "direct", but oftentimes they do not specify whether the listed idea is still canon or if it was removed during development. This tier also includes information that is implied/can be inferred from tier 1 information, but is not directly stated. Examples of Indirect Canon include the following: Donna's mother died by suicide, Moreau was going to have his lover fused to his back, Duke was originally a fifth lord, Heisenberg was going to have a twin. As you can see, not all of the concept art ideas made it into the final version of the game, so it can be hard when some information seems like it might still be true (such as the matter of Donna's parents).

Fanon/"False": Sometimes collective ideas in a fandom become so widespread that people start interpreting them as actual canon. Sometimes it gets hard to remember what's just obscure lore and what's fanon. When we get a piece of fiction as overall vague as a lot of Resident Evil: Village is, there's bound to be some confusion over time. That's one of the main reasons I waited to talk about Bela////Donna until after I had recently replayed relevant sections of the game, as I wanted to remind myself of what we're actually told. Examples of False Canon are difficult to pinpoint, but might include things like: Hufflepuffs are good at finding things? The Avengers got along for awhile and all had their own rooms in the tower? There's a number scale for the danger level of ghosts in Danny Phantom?

For this post, I will be limiting the majority of my notes to the first two levels of canon, and will do my best to mark them as such. Now... let us... begin.

Alcina Dimitrescu:

Born no later than 1914, Alcina Dimitrescu was 44 years old when she was granted the Cadou by Mother Miranda. (1st Tier: Canon. Source: A note in the castle basement from a servant is dated 1958, and mentions both Alcina and her children. Secondly, Miranda's experiment notes state that Alcina was the 181st subject, and was given the Cadou at age 44. By doing math, we can then determine the earliest Alcina could have been born.)

Alcina refers to the other Lords as her family once without any disdain (when Ethan first arrives at the castle and is caught, Alcina says "you've escaped my little brother"). In a private journal (located near where she threw the infamous vanity) she insults the other Lords, and expresses anger that she is "treated like a sister to them". She argues with Heisenberg without any hesitation, and seems honest in her hatred of him (per Maggie Robertson's wunderbar performance). (1st Tier/2nd Tier: Canon with a sprinkle of interpretation for the last line)

Alcina openly refers to Bela, Cassandra, and Daniela as her daughters, and wrote in her experiment journal that she felt instantly connected to them (as mother and daughters). (1st Tier: Canon).

Bela Dimitrescu:

Likely born in the 1930's or 1940's, in order to be an adult by 1958 (the first dated appearance of the Dimitrescu daughters). (2nd Tier: Based on inference)

Dialogue shows that all three of the daughters do love their mother, and reinforces the bond Alcina's journal mentions. (1st Tier: Canon)

We are not given any information about how Bela feels about the other Lords, or even what she knows about them. Once can assume that she shares the ideas of her mother, either because Alcina tells her things directly, or because Bela (who is eager to please her mother) picks up on them over time. (2nd Tier: Based on inference)

Donna Beneviento:

No idea when she was born. If you've read one of my recent posts, then you know that it's almost entirely a matter of 2nd and 3rd tier canon.

Of the four lords, Donna seems to have the most story within the 2nd tier, and has very, very little in the 1st tier. Duke says she's somewhat isolated, and that her "playmates" never leave the house. Miranda's notes state that Donna is mentally ill, and the gardener's diary states/implies (bit of both) that Donna has severe social anxiety. (1st/2nd Tier: Mostly canon)

Supposedly, her parents committed suicide while she was still a child. This is indicated in concept art/the attached developer's notes. However, the only part that's also directly stated in game is that her parents (specifically her father) died while she was young. (1st/2nd Tier: Mostly canon)

While Donna only has one voice line in the game (and it's sad), Angie talks a fair bit. Angie seems to disapprove of the other Lords, or at the very least enjoys mocking them, as well as enjoys watching them fight with each other. As Angie is connected to Donna, and Donna has some level of control over her, one can assume that the two have similar (if not the same) opinions. (1st/2nd Tier: Mostly Canon)

Donna was adopted by Mother Miranda as an adult. It's unclear exactly how old Donna was, or what exactly Miranda did as her "mother", just that Donna was excited about it. (1st Tier: Canon)

Other Relevant Information:

Heisenberg refers to the other Lords as his siblings a minimum of 1 time. Similarly to Alcina, however, he openly insults them and seems to hate them. He just, you know, hates Mother Miranda the most. (1st Tier: Canon)

Mother Miranda does not actually give a shit about the four Lords, intended for them to die before the ceremony, and has been manipulating them for her own gain this entire time. Her notes and dialogue make it clear that she only cares about getting Eva back. Somehow mother of the year and worst mother ever. At the same time. (1st/2nd Tier: Mostly Canon)

It's unclear who treats Alcina "like a sister" to the other Lords. Were there cut lines of dialogue that cemented the idea of them being a "family"? Did Miranda call them a "family" as part of pretending she cared about them? I've done my best to dig around, but there's very little in game that treats them as a family of any sort.

As each Lord ruled their own section of the region, they don't have any mentions of interacting with each other outside of meetings with Mother Miranda. None of the notes for any Lord (and their relevant experiments) mention what the others are doing. In game, their environments are very separate, very well divided, though this is likely as much for gameplay as it is for story.

Conclusion:

I do not not believe there is enough in game evidence to suggest that Alcina and Donna consider themselves to be siblings. There's the possibility for a large age gap, Alcina was a fair bit older than Donna when she met Miranda, Donna is a social recluse whose closest bonds were with dead blood relatives and dolls, Alcina openly dislikes (if not hates) the other Lords, they seemingly lived very separate and distanced lives, and Mother Miranda does not enforce the idea of "family". Furthermore, the sheer contrast between how Alcina interacts with/speaks of the other Lords compared to how she interacts with/speaks of her daughters says a lot about her feelings. Even if Heisenberg takes the brunt of her anger, Alcina never once says anything remotely positive about anyone other than Miranda and her daughters.

As Alcina/Bela and Donna are not blood-relatives, the definition of what would count as "incest" does vary depending on who you ask. Personally, I do count non-blood relations as potentially incestuous. For example: Alcina "dating" one of her daughters would be incest, regardless of the fact that she's a mutated human and her daughters are weird swarms of flies.

Now, I do understand how popular the idea of the four Lords being a real, chaotic but still close family is. And as I mentioned above, it's totally valid to not like the Bela///Donna ship, whether it's because you think they're family or some other reason. I don't personally see them that way, even in my definitely-not-canon stories.

Do I personally ship Bela///Donna? Nope. Have I liked art for the ship? Admittedly yes, even if I thought some of it was, like, maiden x Bela because Donna didn't have her veil and I'm a DUMBASS who doesn't always remember to read tags. Would I ever write for it? Yeah, probably, assuming I didn't miss anything in game/that I don't eventually change my mind.

[pricklerick]

Okay, let’s talk about Beth.

I think the fandom tends to forget how fucking young she is.

Beth got pregnant with Summer when she was seventeen. Canonically, Summer is seventeen. That means Beth can’t be more than 35 in the pilot. At the risk of sounding like an old fart: dude, she’s just a baby. 

Let’s see what we can infer from this information. 

Did you guys know that the prerequisites for veterinary school and medical school are pretty much identical? Basically, it’s four years of undergraduate biology and chemistry, with maybe some math and physics thrown in for fun.

With this in mind, ti’s likely that Beth still planned to go to medical school after she had Summer. We know that Summer is Beth’s favorite child (Morty’s Mindblowers). On top of that, there’s evidence to support that Beth had a pretty big hand in raising baby Summer, while Jerry may have had more of an influence on Morty. Remember this little exchange in Raising Gazorpazorp?

Morty: What do I do if it cries?

Beth: Then you put it down and let it cry itself out.

Jerry: Yeah, right, we tried that technique on Summer, and she's gonna end up stripping, isn't she? Yes, she is. She's gonna strip for attention because she was denied it.

Beth: Stop filling it with your own insecurity! You're gonna turn it into Morty -- uh, mm -- more  -- more of you!

This suggests that Beth kept baby Summer at hime during the day while Jerry worked. It’s easy to imagine Beth taking night classes as the local university, studying like mad to keep a competitive GPA, and justifying her indifference to Summer as “good parenting.”

Beth has Morty when she’s about twenty. This falls a little into headcnon territory, but I think that Beth was a year ahead if her peers academically and probably started college at seventeen. Based on this headcanon, I’m going to say she’s a junior in when Morty is born. 

I think the show makes it pretty obvious that Morty is a mistake. If you really want to get dark, I kind of like the idea of Jerry sabotaging Beth’s birth control in order to get her pregnant because he’s resentful fo her desire for a career in medicine. He sees it as abandonment or some shit, and he also can’t handle the ego-blow of his wife being a doctor. But that’s just a personal theory. Regardless, I think it’s clear that Beth Smith didn’t want to be saddled with another kid.

She probably didn’t want to be saddled with the first. 

Making it through medical school with a toddler is a fucking challenge. Making it through medical school with a toddler and a baby, with a husband who is nebulously supportive at best; well, Beth is a smart woman. She knows an impossibility when she sees one.

Beth is twenty years old, and her dreams have been shattered by her husband and children. I’m sure Jerry makes her feel pretty guilty about how much their family would sacrifice if she continued to pursue her goal of being a surgeon.

Four years, Beth, and the five more years of residency! And you’re talking about fellowship after that! The kids would be teenagers! And how are we going to pay the bills??

Beth settles on vet school for several reasons. First of all - and you better believe she tells Jerry this - what the hell is she going to do with a bachelor’s degree in biology? Teach high school? Even Jerry knows that’s off the table.

But Beth’s already got the prerequisites for acceptance into vet school. Unlike medicine, there’s no residency required to practice as a vet, just four years of graduate study. Some of that is clinical rotations, a much better schedule for balancing family life and academics. Beth tells herself that being a vet is the same as being a doctor; after all, humans are just primates. Besides, there are less than one tenth as many vet schools as there are med schools in the United Staes - it’s just as competitive, more competitive, vein, to become a vet than it is to become a doctor. Sure, she’ll take a pay cut, but she’ll rack up considerably less debt in the process. 

Beth convinces herself that it will all balance out in the end.

She’s a competitive student with a stellar GPA. At barely 22 years old, Beth is accepted into one of the top veterinary promos in the nations, no problem. Jerry pretends to be proud. They don’t even have to move far from Muskegon, but Jerry takes a lower paying position that allows him to take care of the kids while Beth attends class. 

Summer is five years old and startlingly independent. Already, she despises her father. Jerry tells himself that he’s always wanted a son anyway. Morty is young and impressionable, and Beth is never around. 

“It’s just you and me, buddy!”

Beth finishes school in four years. She’s 26, Summer is nine, and Morty is five. She takes a job in a clinic, and for a while, things are okay.

But when she turns 29, something inside Beth snaps. Her twenties are gone. Here she is, mindlessly writing antibiotic orders and spaying cats. Summer is a preteen, Morty is whatever he is. Jerry got a promotion at work, despite his useless civics degree? And Beth?

Beth is bored. 

She briefly entertains the idea of returning to medical school, but dismisses it instantly. Her classmates would be so much younger. They’d find out about her background as a vet and they’d laugh at her. Jerry would whine incessantly. It feels too much like starting over.

So, again, Beth settles for the next best thing.

“I’ve applied for a residency program,” she tells Jerry one evening over a glass of wine.

Three years, she promises. Three years, and then I’m done for good. Equine Surgery, she gushes to Jerry. It’s prestigious, the highest paying specialty in veterinary medicine!

“We’ll have to move!” Jerry protests. Beth justifies it by saying that the salary for horse surgeons is highest in the northeast.

It’s surgery, she tells herself. It’s what you’ve always wanted to do. Horses are big mammals, just like humans are big mammals.

They move to Washington. Jerry takes yet another pay cut. Beth is 30. Summer is 13. Morty is nine.

Washington State’s equine surgery residency is tough. Beth is challenged. She wakes int he wee hours of the morning and falls into bed, exhausted, in the wee hours of the night. 

And for the first time in years, Beth feels alive.

Rick shows up on the doorstep on Morty’s thirteenth birthday. It’s a day of dual-celebration. Morty is finally a teenager, and Beth is finally finished with school.

Beth already feels like she’s in mourning. She’s 33, and she’s at the peak of her career  (you’ll never be smarter than you are in this moment, her favorite mentor had reminded her the day before boards). She starts a job and the horse hospital next week. She’s signed a contract, already received her hefty sign-on bonus.

Then Dad shows up, and all of Beth’s accomplishments fall hollow from her lips. 

She thought he was dead, for christssake.

She introduces Rick to her family: Jerry, her loser husband (cringe, cringe, cringe); Summer, basic teenage bitch (does poorly in school because the would rather be popular than smart); Morty, the fuckup with some learning disability that Beth had never bothered to pay attention to (the real reason that I never lived up to the potential you saw in me, Dad).

It’s enough to drive any woman to drink.

I don’t think I’m too far off the mark here. Beth is so tetchy and self-conscious about her job because she’s relatively new at it - remember the “we’re losing him!” scene in the pilot? She’s incredibly resentful fo Jerry, for all of the reasons. Summer is her favorite child because Beth spent more time with Summer when she was a baby, and she is independent and self motivated - traits that Beth values. She regards Morty with vague disdain, to the point that she hardly remembers his existence, because she was absent for the majority of his childhood. Beth view Morty as “Jerry’s child,” and Summer as hers.

(Quick headcanon that Beth thinks of Morty as looking like Jerry, which just adds to her aversion, when actually, he looks a lot like young Rick. Beth has no way of knowing this, though, because there are no photos of kid Rick Sanchez).

I don’t mean for this post to sound sympathetic toward Jerry, because I’m really not. He’s a hot mess, too. I just wanted to flesh out Beth a little bit, and maybe justify Rick’s choice to clone her. Beth is young; she still has a whole life to live, and she never got the chance to be the woman she wanted to be, or the mom that her kids deserved. 

Rick chose to give her the opportunity to succeed at both.

[prince-of-elsinore]

On the Weechesters that could have been

Or, Supernatural has a flashback problem

So, I've been thinking a lot about Dean's confession ("I didn't know what I would've done if I didn't have you," "it was always you and me") and how it shapes my view of season one and my pre-series headcanons. On the one hand, it really only confirms what we could already infer, but on the other, it enshrines as canon, beyond a doubt, just how big a deal the events of the pilot were to Dean, how much he wanted and needed Sam in his life. Meaning Dean already knew back then that Sam was it for him. It's possible he didn't fully examine or accept this until after Sam had left, but either way, the groundwork for that need was laid in their childhood. Despite various complaints Dean has voiced over the years (either jokingly or seriously) about having to look after Sam, all he wanted at 26 was to have his brother at his side again, and that could only arise from true affection and attachment--and yeah, an unhealthy dose of codependency.

And we know the affection and codependency run both ways, even if it wasn't as explicitly stated on Sam's part, especially in season one. Personally, I trust Jared Padalecki to understand Sam best, and he's said that Sam's happiest moment was committing to getting back on the road with his brother--despite the fact that back then, Sam's assumption was that he would return to his normal life after they found Jess's killer. Jared has also said something to the effect of "Sam loved his father and brother so much he had to leave" which definitely reframes his decision to go to Stanford--because of, rather than in spite of, his love. How to make sense of these statements? They only track if Sam really is just as smitten (in the platonic sense) as Dean. In spite of whatever resentment he had towards Dean, he loved him (keep in mind, the deeper the love, the deeper the potential resentment) and, importantly, liked him, and was intrinsically tangled up in him. Everything Sam does and says makes perfect sense if you accept that Sam loved his family, but hated hunting. Of course he's upset that the father and brother he loves and needs go out and risk their lives all the time. He's right to be. And of course he would be especially upset that his brother doesn't even try to imagine a different life for himself, that he takes their father's word as law despite the damage it does to Dean. And, when Sam finally does leave, it hurts him that Dean doesn't try to understand his decision because it would shake Dean to his foundations to consider that Sam might be right, let alone to consider following him out of the life (as I believe Sam would have preferred, though he probably knew it was a lost cause). Dean can only see it as Sam abandoning him, even though for Sam it was always about leaving hunting, never about leaving his brother. Sam wanted nothing more than his brother on his side, by his side, and it broke his heart when Dean seemed to choose John over Sam. The tragedy of the Stanford split is that Sam and Dean each thought their worst fear was confirmed--for Dean, that Sam didn't need him, and for Sam, that Dean hated him--even though this really wasn't the case.

So, why this digression about the old Stanford grievance and the boys' headspaces in the pilot? Because I wish so much we got to see how they got there--and the flashback episodes, for the most part, do not show us. In fact, there's a frustrating pattern of flashbacks that don't really corroborate this textually-supported characterization of young Sam and Dean. Almost universally, the flashbacks concentrate on the brothers in isolation from each other, either physically or emotionally (or both). That's not to say that they're all bad episodes or that they don't reveal other important information about Sam and Dean. It does, however, give an overall skewed impression of their "normal" as kids, and presents something of a paradox in considering the Winchesters' childhood. We see, textually, that the brothers must have been extremely attached to each other growing up, beyond just Dean's sense of duty to look after Sammy (which is hammered home again and again, and again...), but this isn't the impression most flashbacks give. Let's take a closer look:

1x18 Something Wicked--Sam is too young to be much of player. It's all about Dean and his sacrifices/responsibility for Sam--all important stuff, but aside from Sam offering Dean the prize in the cereal box, there isn't much evidence of actual affection between them. Dean appears only put upon--fair enough for a young kid given such (way too much!) responsibility, but it's to the complete exclusion of any potential positive emotion, even fondness, for Sam.

3x08 A Very Supernatural Christmas--This flashback is the exception, and it's why it's my favorite! This was a crucial moment for the brothers in their young lives, when they chose each other over anyone else. Sam trusts Dean, not his father. Dean tries to put on a nice Christmas for Sam because he feels it's his job, yes, but he then experiences genuine gratitude when Sam gives him the pendant. They lean on each other. They comfort each other. In short, we see the why and the how of their relationship. I wish every flashback accomplished what this one does.

4x13 After School Special--The focus is mostly on Sam and his relationship with Barry and that English teacher, with a big emphasis on Sam's dissatisfaction with his life. That's super important, but I can't think of any moment between Sam and Dean that reads like anything other than pretty average brothers... which they are decidedly not. The episode drives home the diverging desires of the brothers more than anything.

5x16 Dark Side of the Moon--Not strictly a flashback episode, but we do glimpse important memories in Sam and Dean's heaven. Dean's 4th of July memory is iconic for a reason--it's one of those rare moments we really see why these brothers feel the way they do about each other. They're having actual fun together--the only time we get to see young Winchesters doing that! We all know which of Sam's memories were in heaven, though, and how that made Dean feel. Now, it makes sense that Sam would cherish moments when he was getting away from The Life, but the fact that the writers again chose to prioritize this (beat a dead horse, one could say), over showing a single good memory Sam had of the family he supposedly (actually, really!) loves, feels wrong and motivated solely by the plot's need for more artificial brother drama. Could anyone really blame a casual viewer for believing that Sam doesn't love his brother as much as Dean loves him? And yes, one can make excuses--Sam probably had lots of heaven memories of Dean that weren't shown! Zachariah was messing with them!--but it's still on the writers to make that clear.

5x23 Swan Song--I'm including this one for the flashes we get of little Sam and Dean in the Impala. These are beautiful moments, but it amounts to telling, not showing: we get toy soldiers and legos, and a brief shot of Sam and Dean carving their initials. What we don't see is the impetus behind that action. We are essentially told how to feel about these things. (Don't get me wrong, I think it's still a really well done episode and I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel exactly what it wanted me to feel--I'm just pointing out a pattern.)

7x03 The Girl Next Door--Dean is only present as a voice on the other end of a phone call (do we even hear him? Can't remember. Don't think so). Oh, and Sam has doubts, yet again, about hunting monsters. Hm, I think we've been here before. Sam has an instant connection with a girl he just met and he seems ready to put her before his family. I get that he doesn't want her to die, which is sympathetic. But again, one would be forgiven for thinking he does not care about--or even actively hates--both John and Dean. Maybe he does hate them a little bit in this moment, and wouldn't that be interesting to explore? (Cue Jared saying Sam had to leave because he loved John and Dean so much! He couldn't stand the thought of it all turning to resentment! It makes so much sense!) But, alas, the episode just doesn't go there.

9x07 Bad Boys--This time it's the Dean show, and we get to see Dean finding happiness away from his family, even if he needs some time to warm to the apple pie life. Okay, cool to know this about Dean. And the moment at the end is interesting, and gratifying for brothers fans, since Dean doesn't seem pulled back out of a mere sense of grudging obligation to Sam--he gives such a genuine, loving smile when he sees him. He wants to go back to Sam. But it's just a gesture, telling rather than showing again. We don't know why Sam makes him feel that way.

11x08 Just My Imagination--The only brother interaction, over the phone, doesn't reveal much about how the brothers feel about each other, though it does hint that Dean would ultimately come down on their father's side when John and Sam were at odds. Dean asks John, on Sam's request, to bring Sam along on a hunt, but he doesn't press the issue when John refuses. If anything, this leaves me more curious than ever about what the good in their relationship looked like, if Sam was so often disappointed by Dean's kowtowing to their father.

Sully seems a bit like English Teacher 2.0, encouraging young Sam to figure out what he wants for himself and reject the family business. I think it's quite well done and sweet, actually, and it's nice that in the end Sully actually thanks adult Dean for looking after Sam (how rare for anyone to acknowledge that), and Dean likewise comes to appreciate Sully. In the flashbacks, we learn that Sam was eager to join in hunts when he was little, which is interesting and sad when you think about how that changed. Already, though, he must feel pretty ambivalent, because he's seriously considering running away at the same time. Ultimately, Sam chooses his family--articulating that what he wants is to be with his dad and Dean--and rejects Sully's message of self-determination. He makes the decision that may not be best for him, but he's motivated by love. It seems in character, and hints at the claustrophobic pull of the Winchester family. Yet again, though, we are left to fill in the blanks ourselves about why Sam wants to be with his dad and Dean. In fact, the motivations for his two apparently conflicting desires--to stay or run away--are never very clearly laid out. We don't know what, specifically, Sam doesn't like about the hunting life, when part of him also wants to hunt, and we don't know what it is about his family--what good memories, desires, or needs--that draws him back to it.

15x16 Drag Me Away (From You)--It's unfortunate that the young actors had no chemistry whatsoever, but the script also didn't do them any favors as far as displaying their dynamic. Dean has a moment of vulnerability (if you squint) over Sam thinking about college, but aside from that, it's almost amazing how little the brothers interact, given that they're staying in a motel together, on their own. What a missed opportunity. Can you imagine if the episode had focused even a little more on Sam and Dean, rather than on their interactions with those other random kids? If it had given us just a fraction of the relationship "A Very Supernatural Christmas" managed to show in such an understated, poignant way? You wouldn't know these brothers liked or loved each other from this episode. When Dean said "We made a good team" I was honestly baffled because they barely did anything together. You could argue Dean was reaching with that statement because he was desperate, but again, there's nothing actually shown to back that up.

Ultimately, what these flashbacks show can all be true--it doesn't negate what we know about Sam and Dean from the show's present. Of course, like any brothers, they teased and annoyed the hell out of each other. Of course they had vastly diverging desires for themselves and their lives--that's sort of the premise of the show and characters in the early seasons. These aspects of their relationship are true, but these aspects are not the whole story, which is why it's frustrating that almost every flashback focuses exclusively on these things. From the flashbacks alone, you might think Dean is only about "protect Sammy" (and later, "order Sammy around") and Sam is only about "I hate my life (and by extension, family)." Most of us could tell all along--and the finale confirms--that there's another story underneath this one, though, of two brothers who are soulmates, destined to find each other like magnets again and again.

But this requires the astute viewer to do a lot of legwork in characterizing the brothers' childhood dynamic beyond what's shown--partly as a result of some logistical and practical issues (especially with child actors), to be sure, but mostly of lazy writing. There's a difference between respecting your audience's intelligence enough not to spoon-feed them every detail, and expecting them to pick up the slack and make excuses when your characterization and plotting is inconsistent or one-note. This is far from the most egregious example of this in Supernatural, but the finale had me thinking more closely about what is canon for the pre-series era, and it drove home how much it applies to the flashbacks.

So what would I have liked to have seen? What it comes down to is interaction between the brothers. The only flashback where we have both brothers in equal focus, interacting with each other rather than outside characters, is "A Very Supernatural Christmas." It's impossible to show the progression and significance of a relationship when you consistently show only one side of it at a time (or don't even focus on said relationship when both parties are in the same room--looking at you, 15x16). Sam and Dean are the heart of the show, and they should have--together--been the heart of the majority of flashbacks. It's not that Sam wasn't a lonely kid, but as Dean says to Sam in "Just My Imagination": "You had me!" Of course, Dean's memory is skewed--he isn't thinking about all the times he went off with John on a hunt and left Sam behind, and hell, even when Dean was supposed to be babysitting, we know from "Plucky Pennywhistle's Magical Menagerie" that he sometimes dumped Sam. But I can't believe that Dean is totally wrong, either. Sam and Dean must have been each other's best--only--friends, living the life they did. What we see rarely looks like friendship, and it certainly doesn't track as a basis for the codependency we see in the series present, starting with the pilot. That didn't come from nowhere, though.

I would have loved to have seen that first hunt Sam went on in Milwaukee, after he left Sully. I would have loved to have seen Dean, proud of his little brother becoming a hunter. Or Dean, looking out for Sam on a hunt (and treating Sam's peril like a bigger deal than he does in 15x16, where it barely phases him). I wish I'd seen the moment that made Sam reject a future as a hunter, after his initial excitement. Did something happen on a hunt? Was it the violence of it? The brutality against a monster with a human face? Or the peril? Was there a moment when Sam's life was in danger? Or perhaps, a moment when John's or Dean's was, that scared Sam even more? I wish I'd seen Sam grappling with how leaving hunting would mean leaving the family he loves. I wish I'd seen him mention it to Dean, try just once to convince him to try a different life, and get shot down. I wish I'd seen more of the Dean who wants to give Sammy the world, struggling with the increasingly impossible task of balancing Sam's wants and needs with John's orders. Dean, caught in the middle of their arguments and torn apart by it. Sam, hurt when Dean doesn't back him up. Dean, terrified that Sam might actually follow through with that college pipe dream. Perhaps all of this would have been indulgent (not to mention difficult to film, with the right child actors and JDM), but even part of it would have allowed for some nuanced characterization.

More than anything, though, I would have liked to have seen a few more of the good memories, because they are actually important to understanding the characters and the story. It's not about fluff; it's about showing rather than telling. What are the good memories that made Sam love Dean and even his dad? Sam's anger towards their father is all the more compelling and believable if there is a fierce love underneath the layers of resentment and betrayal. And you know what's even more sad than a kid whose dad didn't make it home for X occasion? A kid whose dad did come home, just once, and the kid who enshrines that one perfect memory because they don't realize how messed up it is that it's such a rarity. Or, if it wasn't John making it home for one holiday, maybe it was the one time Sam remembers getting John's approval in some way--it could be any number of small things. The good that a character holds onto, no matter how small a scrap, says a lot about them. And the same goes for Sam and Dean. Where was Sam the social outcast, wanting but struggling to fit in, grateful that at least he doesn't have to put on a pretense of normality around his brother? Dean, feeling the same, though he'd never admit it? Dean, talking Sam up rather than tearing him down? How they felt safe, comfortable, only with each other? Even if they both had to act a certain way to earn the other's approval or admiration, that act must have felt worth it for the reward. Where was the Sam that looked up to and tried to emulate Dean, and the Dean that cherished that more than anything? Where were the moments of fun, the contentment Dean felt when he managed to put a smile on Sammy's face? The small acts of rebellion that united them, however briefly, against both their father and the world? The fireworks scene has to do so much heavy lifting all on its own, in the face of all the flashbacks that repeatedly give the opposite impression.

People are complex, of course, and we're fortunate to have two such complex characters as Sam and Dean. Both the good and the bad of their childhood, and their relationship with each other, are true, but the writers chose to emphasize one side much more than the other when it came to the flashbacks. As much as I'm a believer in the power of the audience's imagination and of transformative works, it is still up to the writers to guide that imagination in a certain way. Unfortunately, in the case of the flashbacks, that guidance is off-track and unbalanced at best, and negligent misguidance at worst. The story of Sam and Dean only makes sense with a more balanced picture. It only works if it really is about two brothers who love each other more than anything. It only makes sense if there's much more to their childhood relationship than we were shown. Now that the series is over, we won't be getting any more flashbacks (unless prequel series? Unlikely haha), so we're left to fill in these gaping blanks on our own. At least the finale gave us some good crumbs to work with.

[cerberus253]

Mind going into detail about Drago's toxic/maybe abusive qualities from him growing up around his family and other demons?

I’m not sure if I’ll answer this properly, but here it goes...

Growing up around his father, and most likely lack of mother, he had poor guidance and doesn’t know how to properly express his feelings. The only guidance Drago was ever given was to “take over the world, no matter the cost; you must come out on top above all else or you’re useless.“ Because of this, he would have gained the tendencies to be controlling, egotistical, malicious, apathetic, and racist. With the lack of mother, not only are these qualities even more so, he would also have difficulty in expressing any kind of sympathy for others, unless it’s mockingly. I’m not sure what exact environment he grew up in, but I’d like to believe he was “raised“ by his Dad for a little while in his young kid years. It has to be enough time for him to understand “his destiny,“ taught closed mindedness, and to always look up to his “perfect” Dad, but also time, when left, to learn a lot about the changing world on his own and to adapt with the times. Anyway, here comes some headcannons for the relationship of child Drago with his Dad!

Being born half human, he was a small baby bean, especially coming from his Dad, who is huge. This size difference might have already carved some prejudice into Shendu about his son, “This is so tiny! I asked for a warrior! A prince! Not this... pea bean!“

His power, compared to other demons, was probably lackluster, and thus he was disappointing to his Dad even more

Shendu was just loads of anger and disappointment because he didn’t get the “warrior prince“ he desired, and because of his demonic character, he probably expressed it a lot to baby Drago in various ways, leading to his self-hatred. I wouldn’t be against Shendu trying to get Drago to “do better,” but I don’t think it would have worked and only just did damage rather than repairment to their relationship

Me, introducing Drago: “Oh yeah, his Dad’s awful. Mentally, emotionally, verbally, wouldn’t-surprise-me-if physically abused him, that sort of stuff.“ - Drago: *right in the childhood*

I guess on the rare occasions IF Shendu wasn’t disappointed in him, he wouldn’t acknowledge it and just say, “Yeah you did that, but you should have done this“ or “This would have been better“

I honestly don’t believe Drago was around a lot of other demons, aside from his Dad and his sentient-but-not-sapient demon minions. He most likely was told and/or read up on his history and heritage, either being forced or out of curiosity

Despite all this abuse, I do not believe Drago would start smoking, doing drugs, and self-harm (cutting, whipping, etc) because it would inhibit his physical and mental performance. He would self-isolate and beat the shit out of innocent people, though.

Legit I don’t think Drago and his aunts and uncles have ever seen each other, Drago would have totally learned about them, but they have no idea he exists. Well, until he was trapped in the Netherworld with his Dad. - The Family: “Uh, who is that with all our demon chi??“ - Shendu: “My traitorous son who stabbed me in the back. TWICE“ - The Family: “What the fuck, you have a son?! How did that happen? Why does he smell like a hu-- no. Brother, we knew you were were pathetic, but having an offspring with a human is a new low. This is disgusting and we will NOT have this mistake live in our name, let alone house our chi; KILL IT!“

Fast forwarding through the future years, it wouldn’t surprise me that Drago was despised and hunted by humans for what he was and what he was “raised“ to do, which then lead his hatred for humans to go past the cultural difference to the personal. Maybe as he grew older he got teams of henchmen (before his debut episode) to work under him, but it was commanded out of fear and zero out of “I think this guy is alright; let’s all rule the world together, Drago sir!“ So, basically his entire life was all ‘you’re a disappointment‘ and ‘we hate you,‘ never, not even once, touching on who he is as a person and only judging on what he is and his surface-level actions.

Anyway, we already know a bunch of his toxic/abusive qualities: Controlling, malicious, and greedy, to name the overall big ones. Each of these can go back to somewhere in his childhood (or more like his childhood can lead back to these qualities, since we actually don’t know about his past and can only infer from what he gives us). He was abused for what he was, his needs were never attended, and the world acted (to him) like it was against him and would never be in his favor. So, grab what you can, hurt who you can to get it. Yeah there may be consequences, but the world never liked him anyways, so what is there to lose? Him against the world. Nobody cared, nobody will try, I’m 14 and this is deep. Being in any relationship, if he even gets a whiff of feeling abandoned or like he disappointed someone, he gets pissed and blames everyone around him for what’s happening; HE’S the perfect one, everyone else is imperfect.

Appearance appearance appearance is all he is concerned with, whether it’d be looking tough or acting tough; no soft, mushy feelings here, folks! Only anger and murder on the mind! However, no matter how hard he tries, those feelings he tries to bury deep within him (sorrow, loneliness, needing to be loved) are only going to pulsate and scream to be exposed. Releasing them or keeping them a secret, they will always “taint“ his mask no matter what he does in attempt to prevent their escape. He is human, after all, and humans are emotional beings that yearn to be loved, not from their title or what they can give, but for who they are as an individual. People and demons only care about what he can do, never how he’s feeling within his heart.

Any sign of tender kindness from him would define him as worthless and unneeded in this world, so he must resist. He must resist enjoying hugs and kisses, for it softens him up for this cruel world to pound him into despair. He must resist having friends and lovers, for they will only hold him back and use him for their wants. He must resist expressing forgiveness and that people make mistakes, for he will be taken advantage of for giving second chances. He must resist being human, for being human is the enemy and must be buried into submission.

This answer came off more about childhood past trauma, but I feel like that would have been better than just typing those last few paragraphs.

[sinnhelmingr]

tma au rundown. revised from the old blog and updated for new lore from rp. warning. long with too many bullet points.

BASICS:

her name is leah lindqvist. no, this is not her birth name, not even a name in any official records, but it’s what she goes by and what the majority of characters will know her as. the only exceptions to this are those who knew her in her human life and those who have stumbled upon her in statements – more on that later.

appears to be in her early 30s, with an old world aristocracy look under her gothic leanings. has a propensity for elegant/historical looks in her day to day life, being rather more put together than the setting’s usual cast of characters. notable for her bloodless complexion and bright green eyes. tall and thin.

has lived in london for the last seven years, with occasional travels onto the continent. looking for an in to the institute to further her own research. changes living arrangements at around season 3 to better stalk keep an eye on ongoing plots.

originally scandinavian, specifically danish, though her accent seems strangely lax for someone who claims to have only left her motherland a few years before. speaks multiple languages fluently. 

is an avatar, though her exact ‘patron’ is a question she’s been trying to answer for a long, long time. the circumstances of what she deems her ‘becoming’ seemed to involve at least 4 separate entities, only one of which could have won her. add in her upbringing beholden to being a good agent for the beholding and, well, the waters do get muddied. 

BACKSTORY:

was born the youngest of three children in a happy copenhagen home, her father a prodigal from good stock and her mother a force to be reckoned with in the community. at some point, the house of cards crumbled for the couple, and their children were shuffled off to what relatives would take them. leah, or whoever she was before, went to her paternal grandparents specifically.

said grandfather, odin, was a proper gentleman, a pillar of the community, worldly and wealthy. he had a particular fondness for the macabre, and venerated an englishman known as jonah magnus and his various associates. this man about town had such dreams for his latest acquisition, for this bright and tender child who wanted the whole of the world in her hands. he would introduce her to his world over the coming years, training her not only as a proper heir to his legacy, but a perfect sacrifice for whatever esoteric entity he had turned to for patronage.

leah was raised to be a proper academic and globetrotter, groomed for something beyond her understanding. she was expected to read and recite, to observe others, and to mind her ps and qs more than her cousins ever would. as she grew towards adolescence, odin took to traveling the world with his ward with deeper intent, haunting locations of past or ongoing fear activity. leah was meant to observe the world beyond humanity, and to be seen by his associates.

that was a perilous thing, and got her on the wrong side of various avatars and monsters more often than she cares to remember. she has had confirmed run-ins with the spiral, the stranger, the desolation, the corruption, the vast, and the dark through these ‘misadventures,’ and has had at least one brush with the lukas family in her youth that leaves open the possibility of later lonely interference.

carries scars from the spiral, stranger, and the corruption at least. said corruption incident is in fact the cause of her limited mobility from her early twenties onward -- and no, she doesn’t want to talk about how she got her cane. what a fucked up question to ask.

odin referred to her in his records as his martyr, going back to the proper root of the term. martyr, meaning witness, meaning a girl forced to stare unblinking at the influence of the fears upon the world. that these moments of martyrdom occasionally caused her to be physically harmed was an inevitable coincidence. it should be noted, however, that leah’s moments of martyrdom over active instances of fear were almost invariably fatal for the subject of observation. while odin perceived her as witnessing the world and following the path of the eye, leah herself was chasing death.

the dawning realization that her life was to be given solely in service to this all-seeing eye led to brief fits of rebellion or anxiety that her grandfather worked to combat with subtle manipulations. these only worked for so long, as the situation came to a head at some point in her twenties when she managed to escape for a number of months. the event led to her run in with the corruption and an attack that left her severely limited in terms of mobility. recovering in the hospital under her grandfather’s tender, doting visit, it was made clear to leah that he could have stopped this at any point and taken her home. he instead chose to teach her a lesson: she was only safe under his shelter, and that of his patron. 

the realization didn’t stop her. her fate might be inevitable, but she could choose how she would meet that moment of sacrifice. eventually, her diligent composure and simmering disdain boiled over into open rage, an event that lead to an attack on one of her uncles. the exacts of the event have never been put to paper or spoken of, but it rattled odin deeply enough that he ended his pet project immediately. leah was ousted from the family, abandoned to a distant property. the outside world, however, would receive the fiction that she had gone missing, and this time she would never be recovered. it was clear to odin that he had created a monster, but not one he or his patron could control and use.

left to a rarely-traveled locale on the norwegian sea, stripped of the protections her grandfather offered under the sheltering eye, those entities who marked her soon came begging their pound of flesh. locking herself into a small cabin on the property, she endured bouts of darkness and mist rolling over the outside world, a constant knocking or clawing at the cabin door, and an apparent loss of self. after some perceived days of this isolation, some hallucination or dream came to her in which she perceived her patron reaching out and taking all of the fear away. it was always going to come to this, for someone that had never lived. she didn’t fight the inevitability. these eyes that were made only to see would now wither the world around her.

once awakened, she was discovered by a passing ship and returned to the mainland, walking and hitchhiking her way back to the main family estate. she found her grandfather badly aged in the weeks of her absence, striking when he was alone and demanding answers from him : what was her intended purpose? what did the eye have to do with this? what had she become? why did he choose her? at some point, her interrogation became too much for the old man, and he passed before she received the answers she sought. after disposing of his body, odin became another missing person’s case in the family, and leah made her way across europe for the next few years seeking the answers she had not received from the source.

has a past attempt to breach the institute under her belt. lasted a good few days keeping a low profile and dodging anyone who might question her cover story. was eventually found out, however, and was made to escape. all the way to the mainland, in fact, due to whatever she uncovered about the place rattling her deeply enough to keep away from england for some years.

eventually, with all other avenues of knowledge running dry, leah was forced to return and consider that the answers she sought lie in the institute itself. to that end, she had taken up residence in a london apartment complex and tried to decide how best to enter the very seat of the entity she fears the most.

RECENT EVENTS: 

has been an accomplice in several unsolved disappearances of young men in the london area. it’s an open secret among her peers that she makes offerings for her ‘partner’ out of these human sacrifices. this has rendered her something of a laughingstock to those who know her partner and its nature, as leah is fighting a losing battle.

had a s1 run in with her old nemesis the corruption, saved only by the timely intervention of a door. she never specifies where she had this stand off but it’s easy to infer she tried to find another way into the institute.

has developed a growing fascination with the latest archivist, including a desire to reach out to him if at all possible.

keeps her options open as far as interacting with her own kind. through rp she has proven herself an ally to the spiral-aligned figures of the narrative, and has passing association with the lonely, desolation, and stranger.

SPOILERS:

has been completely divorced from the concept of time as it flows for others. many of the discrepancies about her story as she tells it can be explained through this: her days abandoned on the island actually took place over a year, her time spent combing through the european continent took more than a decade, and she can no longer remember her birth year because it does not align to her perceptions of self. even those she knew in humanity, such as gerry, register as oddities for having aged in accordance with real time rather than her own.

her patron is the end, who had indelibly marked her at some point in her youth and seems to have intervened and claimed her once she was in serious danger. her exact role as an avatar of this fear is muddled by her decades of self-serving pursuit of knowledge rather than living up to whatever she was meant to do.

odin really stumbled into getting an intended avatar of the eye marked by different fears. it was not his intention, but rather a result of caretaker negligence in trying to make a witness of the girl. he never expected that it could have meant something in the grand scheme of things.

despite appearing all of 32 at most, leah was already in her twenties by the 90s. she’s actually far older than her body implies though her general issues with time mean she has not realized this fact and her status as an avatar has left her pretty ageless.

ABILITIES:

if looks could kill. a potent bit of irony is that the end turns leah’s intended purpose into a strength. leah has proven on two separate occasions to be able to kill with a glance and focused willpower. the look tends to induce some form of fatal medical problem in the subject, and she tends to use it sparingly, usually to generate more potent fear for her entity rather than her personal needs.

ghost interaction. as established through rp, leah has some affinity with the ghosts occasionally seen within the narrative. through roleplay with sittimoranimiinterfectorem, her presence seems to give them a fullness, making them more as they were in life than at the moment of death. one character in particular notes that he feels lesser if too far from her, like he’s losing himself. this accounts for the various dead things that have cleaved to her over the decades -- which leads to a demonstration of leah’s secondary ability of banishing the dead to oblivion if she so chooses. it’s a threat she holds over the heads of those she cannot do away with for plot reasons. one assumes she could manage the opposite, and call up a lingering soul for her own purposes, but why should she?

immortal. unchanged since the day she accepted the touch of the end, leah has neither aged nor weakened since. unlike some who require regular sacrifice to maintain their unlives, leah seems particularly resilient, feeding more to keep up her strength than anything. this doesn’t mean, however, that she couldn’t be killed by outside means, and has proven capable of being injured by other avatars or fear-adjacent creatures.

RELATIONSHIPS:

alliance/partnership/friendship with sittimoranimiinterfectorem‘s michael. michael was the first of her kind leah met in any serious capacity, and one she looked up to as a potential font of answers. instead, michael has been toying with her for years, as a liar ought to. there’s a lot of ways this relationship can be interpreted by outsiders, not helped by recent revelations about their patron.

former companion/occasional ally of bookburnt‘s gerry. the two crossed paths every once in a blue moon during the years, given odin and mary were associated with one another in their travels and overlapping ideals. leah tried to take on a supportive role for the teen, sometimes sending gifts, while gerry in turn tended to cut loose with someone who actually gave a damn about him as a person. in adulthood, the two sometimes ran into one another in the weird world in which they inhabited, though leah had no idea this man was the same boy she had bonded with years before.

potential acolyte/student of medisinals‘s blackwell. we’re still plotting it out but the two have each other’s acquaintance as avatars of the end.

RELEVANT STATEMENTS (whether to leah or the wider narrative of her grandfather’s legacy):

statement of frida [redacted], concerning the work, achievements, and disappearance of her husband odin. first mention of the family and leah’s original identity. (2001)

statement of olaf agner, concerning his time working for the family in north zealand. a less rose colored view of odin’s ‘visionary’ work and his ‘creepy’ granddaughter. (1987)

miscellany statements referencing a one eyed man and dark-haired girl/young woman at or around the scene of various incidents involving the fears across europe. sometimes references the girl in question reaching out to those that are marked, though those she touches are never saved. (80s-90s)

statement of torsten [redacted], concerning the personal records of his father and the disappearance of his niece. (2007)

reference to leah’s invasion of the institute archives in an incidental post-statement discussion with a certain assistant about his allowing a certain young woman into the archives. his boss proves decidedly unforgiving even after being made aware he had been deceived.(2009)

miscellany statements establishing odin as a sort of chessmaster invariably working with the eye before, during, and after leah’s part in his life. he’s part of the evil senior citizen’s union and actually kept professional ties with a lot of them. (60s-2001)

statement of james berger on the subject of his friend ethan hamilton going missing. first clear picture of leah and michael working in tandem. (2014)

statement of eve hall concerning the sudden and televised death of her employer at a political debate. another incident of leah and michael scratching one another’s backs, this time while mutually spiting the eye. (2014)

statement of anthony farrell on his interrupted night shift duties at a fast food restaurant. establishes leah as being nonplussed with the activities of her peers so long as no one is getting seriously hurt without reason. the hypocrisy. the audacity. (2015)

statement of leah lindqvist concerning her personal history and… ‘becoming.’ statement recorded direct from subject. (2017)

[linkspooky]

Where do you think the story will take Geten? He was built as a huge ideological foil to Dabi and now they're on the same side.

iThe most interesting aspect to Geten is how he and Dabi had such similiar upbringings and turned out to be such opposite ideological foils. Both of them were raised not as children to be loved, but instead they were raised to have strong quirks and use those quirks for people other than themselves. Their entire lives are determined by the quirks they are born with. They were never raised with any consideration for how they would grow up and develop into healthy individuals and people, they were tools for their father figures ambitions from the start. 

In fact the flashbacks of the way Enji raised his children allow us to infer a lot of what Geten’s upbringing was like. We know that Geten was not allowed to go to school and instead has been working on his quirk since a young age far longer than most hero hopefuls. 

We have already seen what subjecting a child to quirk training at a young age looks like through Shoto’s flashbacks. It’s highly likely that child!Geten was not as willing as adult!Geten was to undergo this training, and even if he mentally thought he was willing a child’s body isn’t meant to endure such harsh training. 

Shoto in his training is not allowed to fail either. He’s not allowed to show any kind of weakness despite being five years old and having a weak body. If he is not able to do what his father asks of him, his father accuses him of pretending to be weak on purpose. He is continually told he should be able to endure this kind of training by now. He’s expected to endure it all because he has a strong quirk. 

Geten’s attitude reflects being raised in an environment where a person is not allowed to show any weakness. He literally says that for him powering up is no different than survival. It is likely that just like Shoto, every time he failed, every time quirk training was too much for his childish body, he was told the exact same things, that he had to be strong, or he would be punished, or he would be thrown out, that he should be able to do these things because he was born with a strong quirk. 

Geten and Dabi were raised for two reasons, one to have a strong quirk, and two to devote their strong quirk entirely to fulfill somebody else’s ambitions and not their own. They were raised for this purpose, but that way of raising did not work on Touya, or on Shoto. 

It did not work with Touya because despite literal quirk breeding, Touya’s body was unsuited to his quirk. In this case Geten being born with a strong quirk that he can control so well in regards to his body is almost a disadvantage because it means that they were taken advatange of and used by the adults around them. it’s likely Endeavor intended to use Touya in the same way, but then he stopped being useful so he was thornw out with the rest of the failures. 

Endeavor’s attempts to groom Shoto did not work either because Shoto had other people in his life. Because Shoto had his mother he was able to see what his father was doing to him was wrong. Because Shoto had All might he was able to have a role model for what a good hero acts like and started to desire to be something outside of what his father wanted him to be. 

The thing with children is that they internalize abuse. Shoto who had his mother’s support to help him realize what his father was doing was wrong still internalizes a lot of his abuse. He’s far less mad at his father for what he did to him, the training sessions, being forced to use his quirk until he puked, then he is about what happened to his mother and how she was victimized alongside him for standing up for him. Children internalize abuse and often think it’s their fault for what happens, because the abuser isolates and controls basically their entire intake of information.

Shoto is isolated because Endeavor was attempting to control every aspect of Shoto’s life in order to groom him into being the successor that he wanted him to be. Shoto was not allowed to be his own person, or anything else besides what Endeavor wanted for him. However, Endeavor failed and was not able to control everything about Shoto’s life to the point where he would live for his father, and only care about the strength of his quirk. 

What is so fascinating with Geten is he really is a case of what would have happened is Endeavor completely succeeded with his plan. 

Geten is completely indoctrinated with the Meta Liberation Army’s beliefs. He believes his only reason for living is to have a strong quirk, and to be the strongest, just like Endeavor. Not only that but Geten is not his own person, he believes wholeheartedly that his quirk exists only for the sake of the man who raised him Rikiya. 

Apocrypha lives to be used by the Liberation army. Not only that he wants to be used by them, he thinks it’s a good thing he was born with such a powerful and strong quirk to make him able to fight for the people who are using him. He is the perfect result of the indoctrination. He is ironically what Enji wanted when he tried to control Shoto and Touya. A child that existed entirely to serve his purposes, that was perfectly loyal to him, and therefore has no individual wants and needs of his own. Geten even apologizes for making Re-Destro worry about him because he was not the perfect soldier that he was meant to be. 

And when we see in Geten, the perfect result that Enji wanted to badly, we see exactly how terrible it is to raise children that way. Apocrypha is barely a person. He wants nothing for himself, he nevershows his face, he could care less whether he lives or dies. He’s obsessed with the supremacy of his quirk because it’s literally the only thing he’s been taught has value in his life. His life is utterly empty and devoid of connection, and because of that he lets himself be used by the person who stole everything away from him in the first place. 

Geten reflecting Enji’s desired perfect result has a lot of foiling potential with Dabi. Hopefully, in their interactions we’ll see Dabi realize what is wrong with Geten because he has been through something similiar in the past and we’ll see Dabi encourage Geten to be their own person even if it means violent rebellion. 

There’s a lot of potential there in development especially when it comes to Dabi. If Dabi’s reason for turning into a villain is because of how powerless he was to help his own family from Endeavor, it would be really meaningful to show him realize another person is being abused in a similiar way to him and reach out. 

Geten also reflects Dabi so much that their antagonism of each other makes perfect sense. Geten is Dabi, and Dabi’s way of fighting has always been self destruction. The person Dabi is always fighting against the hardest is not Endeavor, but rather hismelf, because he’s a dead boy walking and every time he uses his quirk he’s killing himself slowly. He pushes himself to those great heights because despite how different their beliefs he’s been taught the same thing as Geten, that a powerful quirk is literally the only worthwhile thing he has. He is otherwise a failure, he is weak, the only thing that matters is brute strength. 

If Dabi and Geten were to stop antagonizing one another and Dabi were to actually try to help Geten, that would be a symbolic form of allowing himself to heal rather than continually trying to destroy himself for the sake of his goals. Not only does Geten need to learn to be a person, but at the same time Dabi is still struggling and learning to be a person even with the scars his father has left on him.

[bluephoenixdruidicprincess]

it's funy how cas and sam want to save people inseason 15 and all dean want is to kill... maybe the mark of cain tainted him forever.

What I really love about Sam and Cas is the dichotomy between their personalities and what the universe and fate (i.e. Chuck) made them to be. Sam was destined to be this vessel for essentially what Chuck deemed as the great evil of the world and indeed, he is that, he has the whole demon blood thing and he is supposed to be the ultimate vessel for Lucifer so you would think his personality would reflect that. But instead, we have this character who receives no joy from enacting violence and just genuinely wants to help people and be there for others in whatever capacity he can be. And Cas is this warrior angel who's purpose is to follow orders under the guise of protecting humanity but in reality I think we can infer that Chuck uses the angels as essentially plot devices to help move the story he's trying to tell along (yes, Chuck is THAT kind of writer, the kind of writer I absolutely abhor). But instead, Cas actively goes against his role Chuck gave him in order to help protect humanity. He's still technically doing the purpose Chuck created him for but where he was initially supposed to only have a "barely there" desire to protect humanity, he actually loves humanity, wants to protect humanity and because of that, actively goes against what Chuck had written him for while still kind of doing what he was written for. This whole thing kind of makes me wonder that when Chuck was creating these characters for his "story" did he anticipate the personalities Sam and Cas would have? Or is this an example of the saying "characters taking on a life of their own"? Or another intriguing question...do Cas and Sam have the personalities they do as a result of their own freewill? And is it possible that this may be the only universe in which Chuck gave his creations freewill? Is that why this universe is Chuck's "favorite tv show"? Because freewill added an element to his writing to where he found he couldn't quite predict what they were going to do next. Just some food for thought, there.

*takes a deep breath* and then we have Dean. Who ironically enough is supposed to be this protagonist and is the vessel for the protagonist for the adjacent story going on and somehow he's the character who is the most like his counterpart in every way, including personality. He loves his father without question, follows his father's orders without question, and killing is basically a state of being for Dean. You mentioned that perhaps the MoC influenced Dean and that's why he is the way he is. That's something I actually disagree on as Dean's desire for hunting and needing to kill I feel has always been a part of this series even before the MoC. Chuck did say the MoC doesn't change anything about you, it just emphasizes what's already there (although, Chuck is an unreliable narrator here so we should probably take that with a grain of salt). After Dean returned from purgatory in Season 8, he tells Sam that he actually enjoyed his time there. The raw feeling of being able to hunt and kill indiscriminately, he no longer had to be held back by these moral standards that he kind of forced himself to adhere to in his life with Sam (and the irony is not lost on me that somehow even though Dean doesn't want to live his life by these high standards of being a selflessly good person, he still expects everyone else to). We can even go as far back as season 2 where we met Lenore's vampire nest that only fed on animal blood. Despite Sam telling Dean there was no reason to kill these vampires as they hadn't hurt anyone, Dean refuses to accept it because he's being denied of what he really wants to do. And even after Sam proves everything true, this is something Dean still has difficulty wrapping his head around. He's always "shoot first, ask questions later". And even during the whole demon blood scenario with Sam, he tells Sam that if Sam were not his brother, he would want to hunt Sam. And despite Cas making some very bad decisions in season 6, he actively turned his back on Cas and treated Cas as if he were a monster that needed to be hunted instead of trying to understand what Cas was trying to do, why he was making the decisions he did. It's like, these are not normal responses to be having when people you supposedly care about are going through a rough patch, you know?

But definitely, I feel that Dean has this innate joy for killing and the hunt, he's not too terribly concerned about saving people, if he saves people in the process, then he'll take it but at his very core, that's not the reason why he chooses to be in the game. Whereas Sam and Cas choose to be in the game because they do feel the need to help as many people as they can in whatever capacity they can (Sastiel forever, bitches).

So it is irritating that such a heavy protagonist-level focus is placed on Dean who really doesn't have all that much to him as a character. I'll come right out and say it, I have ALWAYS thought Dean was a bland and boring character and I don't understand why the narrative spends so much time with him. Is this supposed to be some sort of meta on how Chuck places Dean in a protagonist role with a protagonist level focus despite him not being a super strong protagonist? Is this supposed to be some sort of commentary on how "cliche writers" put a microscope underneath their very underwhelming protagonists but still totes them around as if they're the best thing ever? More food for thought, I guess.

But my issues with season 15 being centered around the writers using their own bland writing as commentary for their show is a rant for another day.

[dokk-fukuro]

Tea Party [Abbacchio x OC] Pt 1

A/N: mention drugs, rape mention, violence

          Not much time has elapsed since the enrollment of Vittoria Marino in the Buccellati’s gang. Capo was very interested in the girl, especially in her inexhaustible sense of justice, which originated from a grim past that did not let her go even after six long years.

     Her story isn’t much different from the story of hundreds of other people. In childhood, she encountered the problem of her father's drug addiction, he incurred large debts to Passione, and this was the reason for his elimination. Mother didn’t grieve for long and soon married a second time. It would seem that the family has an idyll: the husband loves his wife, gives her presents, takes her to the cafe on weekends, but he also “loves” his stepdaughter.

   The stepfather, in fact, turned out to be that scumbag, allowing himself to touch the stepdaughter when Vittoria grew up. Mother didn’t know what was happening, and was firmly convinced that her second husband would never do that. And Senorita Marino became the one who sent her own daughter to prison, seeing how she was panting over her husband’s already cooling body. Toria had enough time to think about the injustice of the world, the impunity of people like her stepfather, and Marino decided: she would try to restore order in Naples on her own. This did not go without the attention Buccellati’s gang, because Vita was taken under the wing of Bruno.

     Marino was not perceived by anyone as a feminine figure in a gang. She herself did not give anyone a reason to think about herself in a similar vein. Her way of life and her activities didn’t come into contact with all the “female gadgets”, so there were no people who wanted to spend the rest of their days with her. She is a mafioso, she is a killer, no tenderness and no “romantic snot”. Toria is prudent, intelligent, caring for her Squadra and always thinks critically. Perhaps she rushes from one extreme to another, but most often it plays into her hands. During her stay in Buccellati’s gang, she took leaps and bounds to get everyone... Except Leone. No matter how many conversations Bruno had with these two, how many times she tried to talk normally with Abbacchio, nothing came of it. Inside, everything literally began to boil; it can’t go on like this.

    The girl more than once saw the strange looks that Leone threw at her, but preferred to pretend that there was nothing special in all of this. He is a strange man in his own right, rather somber, trying to show with all his appearance that he doesn’t care at all, except for the affairs that Buccellati entrusts him with, one look more, one less, this will not change anything.

     Deep night put the headquarters in a dream. Couldn’t sleep only Toria, Abbacchio and Buccellati. The girl thought for a long time about how to improve the state of affairs between her and the white-haired man. Not only for herself, but for Bruno, she respected him, although she didn’t fully understand why she was to become their colleague. The time was late, Toria didn’t want to sleep at all, so she was decided to drink tea.

   “Tea ... Idea! it should work,” a dim little light of hope lit up in cold gray eyes, Toria left her room and moved towards the kitchen, stopping in front of the door to Abbacchio’s office. A quiet knock on the door. Vittoria, despite her crazy idea in her head, didn’t fully understand why, for no reason, she decided to offer him a cup of tea with her. Given his attitude towards her, it was just right to ignore Leone, communicating with him only at the time of completing tasks. Communication with him didn’t go smoothly from the very first day, when the girl just passed the test, having received a Stand.

    The silence of Abbacchio's office was cut by the subtle notes of mysterious songs coming from the headphones peacefully lying on the broad shoulders. Leone honestly tried to work. He honestly tried to think about how to kill a small gang of drug dealers beautifully and without unnecessary cries. It was a very responsible task, at least - due to the fact that such groups have a bad effect on the lives of civilians, at most - this task was entrusted to Bruno, to whom Leone had a strong sense of respect. But respect almost cracked when a new member appeared in the gang. A girl with a bitchy character (and not that Abbacchio did not consider his character as such).

     A new member of the gang, a new comrade didn’t receive the confidence of the former policeman at all. Her arrogant disposition was not combined with Leone's bitch character at all, so nothing more than anger and discontent Vittoria Marino didn’t cause. However, there was something in her cold eyes that made it clear that she came here not to play the mafia, as Giovanna did, Toria came to act. At least Abbacchio wanted to think so. He wanted to think so in order to come up with a reason for Bucellati to take someone else under his cover.

     Someone else who, by her very appearance, could put out the flames of malice inside Leone... or, conversely, add fuel to a fire and make his heart beat against his chest, when nothing more than discontent loomed on his face. He fell in love? Abbacchio rejected these pitiful feelings from himself when he just joined the gang. But there was something about lady Marino, and that made him frown.

“Open” he said at a sudden knock on the door. But the unexpected guest didn’t want to rush to the door.

“Shy little” thought Leone, eloquently rolling his blue eyes and rising from his workplace. Headphones remained at the table, and the man, rubbing his temples, opened the door wide. And what was his surprise to meet the reason for his unusual soaring in the clouds. Abbacchio raised his eyebrows significantly, twisted his lips painted in black lipstick in a subtle, but very nasty grin.

“Marino,” he says in a sign of reluctant greeting, “what brought you so late?”

     Seeing him in front of her was quite unnerving, because Marino retreated half a step back so that the distance allowed her to feel comfortable. The girl folded her arms over her chest and tried to give her face the most relaxed expression. Vita looked at Abbacchio.

     “I decided to invite you to drink a cup of tea with me,” she rapped out, her voice was even, without nervousness or sarcasm. Vittoria really felt that if all their interaction with each other will limited to “We have a task, so we work together, and after that you can send me to hell,” then nothing good will come of it. As a result of simple inferences, the only possible option was precisely when there would be no prying ears. “But, if you don't want to keep me company, then all right.”

     Marino grunted, averting her gray eyes, making it clear that she wasn’t calling Leone for anything, and giving him the right to choose whether to agree or not. The girl felt a certain guilt about Buccellati for the fact that he, inspired by her desire to help, is faced with such an unpleasant situation that two of his comrades create. She wanted to establish contact with a man, but did not know which side to approach him in order not to aggravate the situation.

     Everyone was asleep, so Vita more than once mentally yanked herself, thinking about why she did not become like the others and now stands in front of Abbacchio, offering to keep him company. Toria doesn’t like his character at all, but something else was caught in all this disgusting behavior. Something that screamed: "He’s not such an asshole as he seems," but it all shattered into fragments about what the man showed in public.

      Her convictions that the “civic” feelings that people experienced that are not connected with the mafia, were strong, but something inside her kindly and mockingly whispered: “Don't lie to yourself”. It was annoying, but outwardly Marino remained calm, even managed to give sharp jokes about this. She doesn’t feel love, she simply can’t, she doesn’t need it... Or is the girl lying to herself?

“Have tea?” Leone, almost without blinking, carefully looked into the girl’s gray eyes, looked for a catch or secret meaning of such a very unexpected proposal. He glanced briefly at the clock, lonely hanging on the wall. Late hour - at such a time, Leone would be glad to drink one or another glass of dry red wine (for clarity of mind and no more!) in splendid isolation, knowing full well that no one from the gang would bother him... But cruel fate today was definitely a different opinion.

     It’s not that the former policeman desperately wanted to roughly shut the door in front of Toria’s nose and to retire with himself and his thoughts soaring like a bee swarm... No, that would be extremely impolite to someone, who, despite all  disagreement, decided to make contact first, so as not to irritate Bucellati with eternal skirmishes.

"Commendable," the man thought, closing the door behind him, which meant a meager agreement to lady Marino's proposal.

“I just need a break,” Abbacchio, with a faint squint, glanced briefly at her, relentlessly repeating the question in his white-haired head: “What does she need?”. No, former policeman’s soul doesn’t trust (or, more correctly, doesn’t want to trust?) with such ideas. Where is the catch? Where is the evidence that Vittoria Marino came here for a reason, to drink tea, as with her best friend? After all, it can’t be that she came here, under the door of Leone’s office, in person after he, like a schoolboy in love during an important exam, try to chased her out of his head.

[eshithepetty]

One of the many things that I love about Mob Psycho 100 is how it shows so little, but implies so much about it's characters. This is essential for a relatively short series that's focused mainly on it's protagonist, managing to make every character besides them feel just as complex and important to the story. Some examples:

We're never shown much of how Teruki's parents' absence and dealing with claw members alone has troubled him, but we can infer those causations and consequences from the way he acts in the present, building a coping mechanism out of making himself superior, relying on his powers for support because that's what's saved his life countless times, not to mention his overall moral ambiguity that comes from encountering life-threatening situations without any guidance on how to deal with them. The effects that his fight with Mob had on him are a bit difficult to understand at first, leading to it seeming ridiculous and amusing, but the way he takes on Shigeo's morals in a surface level way, since he admires him for the power he has held in such high regards his whole life, as well as Mob's contradictory, yet undeniably superior outlook to his own, but struggles to understand it deeper since his moral baseline has been so removed due to his circumstances, makes sense and is quite interesting to explore in further detail.

A lot of Shou's actions might be confusing to a viewer not paying attention. He's a fun character for sure, acting like every type of shonen protagonist mashed into one while also wearing a likeness to Johnny Test, but in the world of MP100, the implications of his behaviour and worldview are actually quite tragic. In a series that places utmost importance on portraying kids as kids, here's a boy who's found his life's purpose in taking down an enemy he has come to see as a typical villain, seeing himself as the opposing hero. While he does have a relaxed attitude, he seems to operate on survival mode most of the time, growing up around people who's entire personalities are intervowen heavily with the fact that they distance themselves from society and ordinary life. Despite this, he knows what kindness looks like from his mother, knows that what his father is doing is evil, and is trying to fix it, cause there seems to be noone else sensible or aware enough to do it. This focus on this one monumental task, coupled with the enviorment he lived in, made him skip past his childhood far too quickly, resulting in him getting stuck in a toxic mindset, the only one he knows how to have. It's essential, however, to note that that doesn't make him any less of a child - in fact, his way of thinking is quite immature, despite how self sacrificing it is. And this is wholly because the adults he has grown up along are fundimentally childish.

Reigen is a mash of contradictions. Out of all these characters, he's probably had the most ordinary life, so it makes sense that he's also the character who is most grounded in reality. Despite this, his entire bussiness is built on facade and masquerade, and his personality is reflective of that in his habit of pretending. He's selfish, caring a lot about his own desires and image, and yet he can be downright reckless when it comes to his life with how willingly he enters deadly situations. His firm roots in society often make him seem very lawful good, and to an extent he is, but when it comes to protecting society and dealing with danger that could impact the whole of it, he's a firm believer in being able to just sit it out as long as the issue doesn't involve you specifically. In a lot of ways, Reigen is very relatable to the average person watching. Most people don't take very radical stances on one side or another. We certainly have strong opinions, but those opinions often contradict one another, because we don't usually have the time nor the outlook, or even the need to monitor those opinions to make sure they're in favor of one another. Because noone is ever perfect. Everyone has flaws and cracks and nuances that are really hard to explain, and Reigen definitely showcases all of that.

Upon first impression, Ritsu seemed like he was just going to play a minor supporting role - like the rest of Mob's family, he popped in occasionally, acting as a simple nurturing brother to Shigeo. So when he started his dramatic heel turn, supplying the arc with seemingly planned speeches and story beats that seemed to lead to a cliche rivalry, fans were quick to label him as the token edgy boy. But as fun as it is to lovingly make fun of him, his actions follow a logical progression, from a boy traumatized by his brother's power that he previously admired and expected to become his own, to someone trying his best to deal with those complicated events, starting a diary and trying hard in school as to not worry his family any further. While we all aknowledge that Shigeo supresses his emotions, Ritsu supresses his feelings as well. He doesn't have dangerous fluctuating powers of his own to worry about, but he was terrified of those exploding from his brother, so he cages himself in, not really forming friends at school, avoiding confrontation at all cost, especially around Mob. And, by the point of the anime, he was just so tired. Their parents, as I percieve them, seem to be very average, which fits nicely with Mob's character and how he's just an ordinary middle school boy, but it does lead me to think that, while they supported their sons as best they could after the ???% incident, they weren't well equipped and didn't think to bring the boys some proper therapy, which is why Shigeo had to come to Reigen by himself. And, to an extent, it's understandable - the boys are still sweet to each other, they check in on each other, they don't even fight about it, seems like they're handling this surprisingly well! Right? But conflicts are essential between sibling bonds, or any bonds, really. They're a way to relieve tension, to adress problems that need to be fixed. And Ritsu could find no way to do that in a healthy way by himself.

I could easily go on. There's a lot more stuff to talk about concerning these characters, and it's just so incredible to me how ONE has managed to make them all so fun and ridiculous, and yet so multi-dimensional as well. It makes this series easy to enjoy for casual viewers, ones who just like the main plot, action, humor etc. and don't want the story to be dragged out more than necessary, but still offers tons of insight to gain that more invested and perceptive fans can talk about and discuss for hours on end. Not to mention, I think it adds a lot to the humanity and authenticity of the characters - in real life, people don't get to know every detail of the ones they meet and familiarize themselves with. Instead, learning about and starting to care for someone usually comes through random moments of insight and clarity, of jokes and scary moments of intimacy, of little confessions. And Mob Psycho 100 is essentially all about the ways that people interact with one another, isn't it?

[callumd1001-blog]

Why do some People become Parents? Results from a Reddit Survey [Serious]

Abstract

Parenting—defined as the act of raising a child as one's own—is perhaps the oldest societal tradition of human beings.  Judging from related animals species, such as the Great Apes, we have likely been raising children longer than we have been growing crops.  That being said, the choice of having or adopting even one child—that is to say, the choice to become a parent—is a decision which has great impact upon one's life, arguably one of the biggest choices a person can make.

There is a large and diverse group of people—around the whole world—who deliberately go their entire lives without having children.  The reasons for this are quite varied: some consider children an obstruction to completing one's goals in life, others harbour a disliking of children, while still others avoid having children out of fear that they might turn to be an abusive and/or negligent parent.  Throughout present day media and society, on both an interpersonal and global scale, the childfree population is subject to a significant amount of misunderstanding, under-representation, and—in some cases—discrimination.  In particular, the majority of outspoken, self-identified childfree people are female, highlighting how commonplace gender roles affect the roles that parents have in society, which also impacts the decision of whether or not one wishes to eventually become a parent at all.

Introduction

First, the technical, functional definitions of the word “parent” must be fully understood for the purposes of our research.  Merriam-Webster has multiple definitions of the word, ranging from “one begets or brings forth offspring” [14], to “a person who brings up and cares for another” [14]. This second, somewhat looser definition is the one that will be used for this paper; while the different ways of becoming a parent (birth, adoption, parenting of kin, etc) were accounted for in the survey, it is the motivation that was ultimately focused on more than the method.  

One possible explanation for the root cause of deliberate parenting is offered by the field of evolutionary psychology.  To quote researcher Helen Fisher, “Humans and other mammals have evolved three primary emotion systems for mating, reproduction, and parenting”, with those being lust, attraction towards potential mates, and attachment to them, forming close social bonds [16].  The study of parenting's evolutionary origins has brought to light how parenting is a drain of resources on behalf of the parent, which trades those resources to give one's offspring a better chance of survival [15] [17].  Research has found that human fathers tend to invest more time and energy into taking care of children who closely resemble them in visual appearance and smell: an outcome predicted by evolutionary psychology [15].  However, the evolutionary need to pass on one's own genes is an insufficient explanation for the motivation behind parenthood: alloparental care—defined as an individual temporarily caring for another's child [2]—has been reported in 270 mammalian and avian species [1], including humans [18].  This is despite the fact that alloparental care, particularly that provided by aunts and uncles, has been found to only negligibly improve the child's chances of survival [18].  These findings hint that perhaps an evolutionary perspective does not entirely provide all the answers into why parenting is still an extremely popular trend in human society, necessitating an inquiry into the thought processes of people who themselves engage in parental care, and those who willingly abstain from it.  

A plausible, personal, non-evolutionary reason for having children—that might strike one as being obvious—is that having children is supposed to bring joy to whomsoever takes care of him/her.  Objectively, however, factual data on the impact that children have on personal happiness is mixed, with different researchers making radically opposed statements on the matter.  A joint University of Texas/University of Denver study found that, “Compared to pre-birth levels and trajectories, parents showed sudden deterioration following birth on observed and self-reported measures of positive and negative aspects of relationship functioning.” [11].  This was compared to couples who had spent the same amount of time together without having children—who suffered a more gradual deterioration in relationship functioning—indicating that many of the changes may stem from the birth itself [11].  These changes were mostly the same across both genders, although mothers were found to struggle more with problem intensity and conflict resolution [11].  However, it was noted that parents and non-parents are not equivalent groups, and some of the deterioration in parental couples may be for reasons not directly caused by the children.  For instance, having a child may serve as a barrier to divorce, but not a cause of the initial relationship dissatisfaction [11].  In regards to how couples are affected by the burden of child-rearing, a professor from Binghamton University noted, “'Parents often become more distant and businesslike with each other as they attend to the details of parenting.'” [12]. “Mundane basics” that arise from taking care of a child's basic needs take priority in the lives of parents, changing their verbal interactions to be focused more on topics related to domestic duties—such as coordinating a grocery shopping trip and changing the baby's diapers—with less time spent socializing in a casual, friendly manner [12].  It should also be noted that children place a burden on any form of romantic relationship, regardless of income level, marital status, gender orientation or national residence [12].    

In contrast to these findings, however, is another study conducted between the London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE) and the University of Western Ontario, which claims parenting to have the opposite effect upon couples. According to the researchers, “Consistent with existing work, we find that happiness increases in the years around the birth of the first child, then decreases to before-child levels.” [13]. Happiness was found to increase with the first 2 children a couple has, with additional children correlating to no increases in relationship satisfaction.  Couples who were older and/or more educated also enjoyed a larger rise in personal happiness.  These findings were similar between both Britain and Germany, indicating that parents who postponed child-bearing received the most significant emotional reward for doing so [13].  

As to why these studies make different claims, there could be a number of reasons.  Excluding potential researcher bias and flaws in the ways that experiments and/or surveys were designed, it is possible that demographics can majorly alter the results that researchers in this field have not yet effectively managed to notice and control for.  However, it can be tentatively stated that scientific evidence points to couples which become parents can either experience improvement or decreases in their mood, largely depending on their specific circumstances, while changes to personal dynamics are both significant and permanent.  It can also be said that any statements which claim a universally true life alteration granted by childbirth—either desirable or otherwise—should be met with considerable skepticism.  

Given that objective changes in parenting-related happiness are not the same as the perceived possible benefits, this research has some limits in understanding why people choose to have children.  However, it can be inferred that if a single parent or couple experiences a decline in life satisfaction immediately following the birth/adoption of a child, they will be unlikely to willingly undergo the experience again.  

In relation to the potential drawbacks of having children, there is the concept of people who simply never have children in the lifetimes, particularly those who are childless by choice.  These latter people are commonly known as the voluntarily childfree [22] [23] [24].  Voluntary childlessness is a social issue [23], with those who are childfree by choice experiencing pressure from society to have children [24].   An example of this societal pressure is how women in their mid-to-late 20s are denied access to sterilization procedures on the basis that they are too young for it, even after explicit requests for said procedures [20].  In North American culture, it is a social more that married couples should both want children and actually have them [22], while people who willingly abstain from having children are regarded as social deviants, and looked down upon accordingly [10] [22] [23].  Negative stereotypes about the voluntarily childless can be traced back to the 1970s, and are consistent from then to the 21st century [10].  

A commonly stated line of reasoning, held by the voluntarily childless, is that children interfere with career ambitions [10] [20] .  It should be noted that most young women plan on having children, and say as much in surveys [10]. However, most young women also wait before having children—effectively being childless by choice during their prime reproductive years—and some become childfree by choice due to holding off on reproduction for so long [10].  The reasons for this are likely quite variable.  A 2002 Italian survey tallied 859 childless, Urban residents into different categories of being childfree.  36% of the women were always single, 22% were either sterile or avoided reproduction due to physical problems, and 30% of the women chose not to have children for “other reasons” [22]. The diverse scope of childfree women shown in this survey can be used to help understand the circumstances of women outside of Italy, and how the reasons for being childless are neither simple nor ubiquitous.  However, because statistics on the voluntarily childfree do vary greatly between nations of the European Union [22], this would be better served as an example of how there could be a multitude of different reasons for a North American woman to be childless, rather than a direct demographic estimate of Canada or the U.S..

On a global scale, the Total Fertility Rate—which is the average number of children born to women of a given country—is going down [31] [32].  One possible correlation is the rising age of marriage, meaning that people are generally having children when they are less fertile [32].  In the developed world, the TFR is noticeably lower: in the U.K. and many nations in Western Europe, the TFR is 1.7, when the Total Fertility Rate needed to maintain a population at the same level—the replacement rate—is 2.1 [31] [33].  The United States also has a TFR below its replacement rate, but only for the native born, while immigrant residents actually have a Fertility Rate above replacement levels. However, TFR declines drastically in immigrant populations by the 2nd generation, presumably due to an increased access to education and income [31].   Currently only half of Earth's countries have a TFR above the replacement rate, but as nations economically develop, they experience a corresponding decrease in fertility rate [33]. According to the CIA's World Factbook, as of 2017, 118 out of the 224 nations catelogued have a TFR below 2.1 [34].  

In short, having children is a conscious choice that many people in modern day society have decided, for any or all of a number of reasons, not to partake in.  On both a personal scale and a global one, the reality is that a social change is underway, one which sees a reduced presence of children in adult life.  

Methodology

This research paper was written to ask the question, “Why do people have kids?”  Bearing in mind that some people never have children of their own, it also asked the question, “Why do some people not have kids?” Distinctions between planned parenthood and unforeseeable pregnancy/circumstantial adoption were also considered.  Similar distinctions were kept in mind as to why people remain childfree: for some, it is a deliberate choice, while others do not come around to having children due to circumstance.  Along with external factors, it could be surmised that the primary reason people do or do not become parents is because of their own predictions on how children would impact their own futures, from a more or less self-serving interest. The hypothesis being tested here is that people generally make the parenting choice prioritizing their own happiness, followed by perceived duties to their family, society as a whole and in order to fit in with their group of peers.  

The originally planned methodology of this research project was to have 2 separate surveys—one for parents and guardians, the other for childfree people—to do a compare/contrast analysis.  These surveys were titled Why do People become Parents?: Survey For Parents and Guardians and Why do People become Parents?: Survey For People who Currently Do Not Have Children respectively.  Both surveys shared some questions and were designed to gather the same kind of information, with some parts of them adjusted to their target audience accordingly.  In the beginning stages of this project, the hardest part of conducting research was finding a sufficient sample population to partake in these studies.  Given that the project's head researcher has limited funds and very little influence in the social science community, the best that could be done was to post the surveys online in the hopes that enough people would take interest in them.  Reddit was used as the primary site for this: with an explanation of the surveys and the research project being posted to Reddit's r/parenting thread and its r/childfree thread.  Both surveys were linked to in these posts, along with the incentive that the research paper will be published online after it has been marked by the head researcher’s school.  

Due to differences between these two Reddit communities, and the inherently random process of garnering attention from strangers on the internet, the post and accompanying survey on r/childfree gathered significantly more responses than the survey for parents.  429 responses were accumulated in the Survey For People who Currently Do Not Have Children, which is written in a Google Drive document designed to collect aggregate data for this exact kind of survey.  The rising number of responses experienced a number of spikes in the following 2-3 days after it was initially posted online; after the survey's attention started to die down, further responses to the survey were denied in the interest of making the collection of data easier.  At this same time, the Survey For Parents and Guardians was automatically banned from r/parenting for breaking the subreddits rules, which meant the survey only got 2 respondents who came from a link on the r/childfree post.  Keeping in mind this gross imbalance between the two surveys, and the potential difficulty in making the Survey For Parents match the success of the Survey For People who Currently Do Not Have Children, it was decided to continue only with the data gathered from 429 voluntarily childfree responses.  

Like all surveys, the participants' anonymity and volunteered consent were kept in mind.  No personal information any more intrusive than general demographic data was specifically asked, and all participants were made aware of how they could skip any question which they felt uncomfortable with answering; some participants elected to do this accordingly.  The Reddit post was also updated with a notification on how many results were gathered, the fact that further responses were turned off in the Google Drive, and a rough estimate of when the research paper is likely to be published.  No detailed information on the head researcher’s school or how my work was marked is going to be published; this was also made clear in the Reddit post.  

It should be mentioned that, while diverse, Reddit's r/childfree community is not a perfectly random selection of childless people.  For instance, given that this is an online forum for people who self identify as childfree—as opposed to those who are childfree without actively discussing this fact amongst their peers—there is already a potential factor that could influence responses to questions asking why they are childfree.  Furthermore, the fact that these participants were gathered from an English speaking community accessible through computers also unbalances the sample population: most respondents claimed to live in the U.S.A., the U.K., or the E.U., with smaller or singular groups stating residencies in other nations of the world. This sample bias manifested in other, less easily explainable ways, such as how more of the survey's participants identified themselves as Pagan rather than Hindu, despite the fact that Hinduism is the world's 3rd largest religion, after Christianity and Islam [25].  The key thing to note here is that while the survey's sample group is culturally diverse and it is global, it is not a balanced representation of the Earth's childfree population.  

Some of the survey used multiple choice questions that asked users to assess their own feelings and/or mental states, available options used terminology such as “None at all”, “Average”, and “Very high”, instead of a potentially more concrete rating such as 1 to 10.  This is because numbered ratings, while more precise, also carry a degree of subjectivity: one person's “6” may be another person's “7”.  Multiple-choice questions had followup questions for participants who felt that their real answer was not included in the multiple-choice segment, along with those who wished to elaborate upon their answers.  These questions allowed participants to write whatever answers they wished, without restriction.  The final question also asked participants to freely state any personal experiences, aspects to the parent or childfree decision, along with any other topics of interest that may have been neglected in the original survey.  Fortunately, many of the participants took this opportunity to significantly increase the depth of their answers, providing a much greater bevy of information.

The self-purported happiness of participants was also investigated, along with if their children or lack of children could have had any major impact in parts of life such as career, education and relationship status.  Given the complexity of gender, racial and ethnic identification, respondents were asked to freely state their identification in these demographics, rather than selecting from a multiple choice (such as “Are you White, Black or Asian?”).  The same approach was taken with questions regarding gender orientaion, gender identification, and disability.

Results

(It should be noted that, due to 2 responses which mirrored the answers of the responses immediately previous to them—in both cases using the exact same wording in freely-spoken answers—it was assumed that there were 2 incidents during this survey wherein a participant accidentally sent in their answers twice, possibly due to being unsure if the first response went through.  Thus, despite the survey having 429 answers, only 427 respondents will be referred to from here on out)

Out of the survey's 427 respondents, the majority were female, with 341 (81.3%) participants identifying as such.  74 (16.66%) of the participants identified themselves as male, while 5 identified as non-binary—including one non-binary female—2 genderqueer individuals, a single person identified as a Transgender Male, and finally 2 people listed their gender identities as “other”.  

Age varied across the board, with the largest age group being those in their mid-to-late 20s, followed. by individuals in their early 30s and teenagers.  10 participants answered that they were between the ages of 13 and 18 (13 being the youngest age of all 427 respondents), while 82 people said they were between 18 and 23.  125 individuals were of the ages between 23 and 28, and 104 participants were between 28 and 33.  60 were aged 33 to 38, 23 between 38 and 43, with 5 participants aged 43 to 48.  8 people were aged 48 to 53, and 4 were between 53 and 58. Beyond this age, there was a single participant aged 60, an individual who was 71, and 2 people who have lived 72 years.  

  In regards to race, since participants identified themselves as they wished, “White” and “Caucasian” were tallied separately in respect to the distinctions between the two; “White” colloquially refers to those of European and occasionally Middle Eastern heritage, while Caucasian is a larger ethnicity which encompasses traditionally white people along with other racial groups, such as those of South Asian, Central Asian, or North African descent [26].  That being said, both groups made a clear majority in this survey, both individually and especially when counted together.  

216 participants identified themselves as White, while another 122 claimed Caucasian heritage.  The other racial groups were: 30 Hispanic and/or Latinx people (3 of whom were White Hispanics), 16 individuals of Asian descent, 13 Mixed Race people, 7 Black people, 5 participants of recent European heritage, 4 Native American people (2 of whom were mixed race with White ancestry), 3 Jewish people (2 of whom were also White) and 13 participants who gave identifications that were unclear or otherwise non-applicable.

Separately from race/ethnicity—and further down the line of questions to further distinguish the two—participants were also asked of what nation they were currently residing in at the time of the survey.  277 respondents were living in the United States of America, with another 42 living in the nation's northwards neighbour of Canada.  These two nations made a clear majority of the survey respondents, followed by 31 residents of the U.K. and 13 from Australia.  After these 4 countries were 9 people living in the Netherlands, 5 from Germany, 5 from Sweden, 4 living in Japan, 4 in Poland, 3 in India, and 3 in France.  Additionally, there were 2 people from Ireland, 2 from the Czech Republic, 2 from Denmark and 2 from Scotland.  The remaining 15 answers were all from people who were the only members of their respective nations represented in the survey.  These nations are: Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Columbia, Panama, Hungary, Ukraine, Italy, Romania, Norway, Singapore, Philippines, the United Arab Emirates, and Kenya.  

As for sexual orientation, the most common responses were identifications of being heterosexual/straight, followed by identifications of bisexuality. 240 respondents identified as straight, 93 participants were bisexual, and 12 stated they were gay/lesbian.  Other identifications included 17 asexuals, 14 pansexuals, 4 queer people, 3 people with gray sexuality, and 6 people who gave other non-heteronormative identifications.  

Regarding Disability, subjects were given the option to describe—in their own words—any and all disabilities they identified as having.  Some participants described their conditions as “mild” or even questioned their status as a disability, while others described conditions that are chronic and noticeably impact their lives: disabilities of all manner of severity and manifestation were recorded for this survey.  A total of 79 individuals reported having at least 1 disability; 25 of these participants reported having 2 or more disabling conditions.  31 participants reported physical disabilities—such as Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, Diabetes, Endometriosis, among others.  15 instances of Depression and 14 cases of Anxiety were reported, with 6 individuals stating that they had both conditions.  17 participants described having other Mental Health conditions which they were the only one out of the 427 to experience, conditions such as Misophonia.  14 participants described having ADHD, and 20 people said they had a form of Autism Spectrum Disorder.  It should be noted that this last number may not be proportionate: the head researcher described having Autism in their description of the research paper and its goal as a school project (which may have made Autistic r/childfree members more inclined to take the survey than others), although the paper was only made accessible through the disability-blind online community of r/childfree, and was not posted on any Autism forums.  3 individuals described having learning disabilities, 2 experience Tourette's, and 1 person said they are deaf.  

Participants were asked what their religious identifications were—if any—followed by a multiple choice question querying how much their beliefs impacted one's decision making in life: ranging from “Not at all”, “A little” “Noticeably” and “Significantly”.  260 participants described themselves as having no religion or faith, while 38 additional people referred to themselves as either Atheist or Agnostic.  Both these counts include people who formerly ascribed to a particular belief system and/or were raised by it, before they lost their faith.  38 participants identified themselves as Christian—of any denomination—along with 6 people who affiliated themselves with the Pagan faith, and 3 Hindu individuals and 1 practitioner of Reform Judaism.  4 people described themselves as Satanist, with 1 Agnostic Satanist and 2 people who affiliated themselves with the Church of Satan/LaVeyan Satanism.  Founded by Anton Szandor LaVey, the Church of Satan is an Atheist organization which uses Satan as a metaphor, and does not consider him or any other religious symbol to exist in the real world [27] [28].  Given that one person did not specify which form of Satanism they follow, it is unclear what their actual religious stance is, although it is likely that all 4 individuals were referring to the Church of Satan.  Other religious identifications included a Buddhist, one follower of the Druid faith, a Wiccan, one follower of Hellenic Polytheism, a person who believed in a higher power but subscribed to no particular religion, and an individual who followed a “self made” religion; these latter participants all selected “None at all” for the survey's question on faith and life choices.  3 Pagans said that their faith had “a little” influence on their decision-making, while 2 said that it had no impact and 1 found the influence noticeable.  

As for how much religious faith impacted the participants' life choices, 347 (83.2%) said that it had no impact whatsoever.  With this number, it is important to bear in mind that while the majority of participants had no religious faith or belief in the existence of deities, some irreligious/atheistic people did say that their beliefs had an impact on their life choices.  8 irreligious people said their beliefs had “a little” impact on their choices in life, while another 2 said the impact was “noticeable”, and 2 said it was “significant”. With the Atheists respondents, 3 said the impact was “noticeable” and 2 answered that it was “significant”.  6 Christian participants said that their faith had no impact, 16 answered that it had a little effect, 11 that the impact was noticeable, and 2 said that it was significant..  2 of the Satanists said their faith had a “significant” impact on decision-making in life, with a third describing the impact as “noticeable” and another saying that it had “none at all”.

Despite the fact that religious influence on life choices was understandably higher among those of religious faith, it is still worth noting that the majority of participants said religion had no impact on their decisions.  This could possibly mean one of two things.  The first interpretation of this data is that religion tends to encourage people to have children, which would make childfree people who lead a life influenced by faith a minority, as represented by the demographics of this survey.  The other interpretation is that religious teachings are irrelevant to the decision on whether or not one should become a parent, and the discrepancy between religious and irreligious participants is caused by an additional factor, perhaps related to Reddit not being an entirely representative sample population of Earth's population.  Given the sheer amount of diversity, and rigidity, of religious principles and rules, it is possible that both interpretations are equally too.  

The relationship statuses of participants were also tallied, opening the conversation up onto that topic should it be a relevant factor as to why or why not a person may choose/be able to have children.  171 (40.3%) of participants stated they were in a romantic relationship equivalent to having a boyfriend or girlfriend.  134 (31.6%) of volunteers were single at the time of the survey, and 112 (26.4%) identified as being currently married.  12 participants (2.8%) were engaging in polyamorous relationships.  Additionally, 8 (1.9%) participants stated to have experienced a previous divorce, while 31 (7.3%) respondents stated that they have never been married.

However, the influence of a romantic partner(s) might not be as great as initially thought by the research team.  When asked by multiple choice, 389 (90.9%) of the respondents stated that their desire to have a child is completely independent from the wishes of their current or future romantic partner(s).  Only 24 (5.6%) participants stated that such influence could be possible, answering with “maybe”, while 15 (3.5%) responded “yes”, indicating that their partner's desires would impact the participants' own decision on whether or not they would have a child.  

Related to the above, when given the multiple-choice question of “How strong is your current desire to have children?”, with answers ranging from “None at all”, “Low”, “Average” and “High”.  382 respondents (89.3%) stated they had “none at all”.  36 (8.4%) of participants claimed to have a low desire for becoming a parent, 3 (0.7%) had an “average” desire, and 7 (1.6%) had a very high desire to have children.  Comparing the results from these 2 questions, there is perhaps something to be said for how strongly people feel about the correctness of their choice on whether or not have to children, and that most people are strong-willed enough to make the decision for themselves instead of defaulting to the wishes of a romantic partner. If nothing else, the answers to this question prove that the vast majority of the self-identified childfree community—at least, those who join the conversation via Reddit—are indeed childfree by choice, negating the possibility that most people who never become parents are so merely because of circumstance, not intention.  

A low or non-existent desire to have children would seem to be a primary motivational factor—or lack of motivational factor, as the case may be—for the majority of people who identify themselves as childfree online.  When given the question, “Is there any particular reason why you have not had a child?”, and asked to select any and all answers which may apply to them, 388 (90.7%) of participants stated that one noticeable reason was that they simply had no desire to.  367 (85.7%) of the respondents additionally claimed to have made a deliberate choice to not have children.  21 (4.9%) participants said that they are only childfree currently, and are waiting to have a child once their life affairs (education, career, etc) are in order.  5 (1.2%) respondents said they were waiting for the right romantic partner to raise children with; the same number of participants also said they were waiting until all participating family members—including future grandparents and so forth—were prepared to have a baby.  4 (0.9%) participants were struggling to have children either due to infertility, issues with adoption, or other circumstances, while one (0.2%) respondent did have a child who has unfortunately passed away.

Participants were also asked to select between a number of potential influencing factors—if any at all—with the question, “Do you feel like your choice to have children is largely commented on, influenced by and/or attempted to be influenced by any of the following?”.  Given that participants were allowed to select any number of options, the goal behind this question was to see which influence had the most impact on each individual person, and rather to determine which influences were the most prevalent, according to the individuals who profess to have had personal experience with them.  422 of participants chose to answer this question, selecting any number of the available answers.

249 (59%) of participants cited society as a whole as a social factor which judges and/or impacts their status as childfree people, making it the most predominant influencer as voted by the survey's volunteers.  The second largest influencer/commentator described was family, with 177 (41.9%) of respondents selecting it.  In regards to other interpersonal influences in the childfree life, 121 (28.7%) of participants stated that their peers—described as classmates, coworkers, and so forth—became involved with their childless status in some way, compared to only 78 (18.5%) of respondents saying the same about their friends.  This could potentially mean one of two things: either a childfree person's friends are more understanding and tolerant of his/her choices (perhaps as a consequence of the more intimate knowledge friends have of each other compared to coworkers), or that childfree people tend to select friends who do not judge them for their life choices, and likely have less freedom being paired with colleagues in a work and/or school environment.  

The third largest social factor to impact the lives of childfree people was the media, according to 168 (39.8%) of people who took the survey.  116 (27.5%) of respondents stated their local culture was a noticeable factor, and 37 (8.8%) stated that other factors not otherwise specified impacted their lives as well.  Furthermore, 149 (35.3%) of participants stated that no outside factor affected their decision to be childfree.  

On the topic of how social influences impact one's child-making decision, participants were asked the following question, “If any of these factors are influencing, or attempting to influence, your decision to have a child, how does that make you feel?”.  Participants were allowed to answer in their words, with similarly-written answers being counted in the same groups and tallied together for the purposes of this paper.  Some participants had short, concise answers, others made multiple statements that were similar to what their peers had made; each form of answer was tallied individually, in order to see which thoughts and feelings were the most commonly shared among all group members.  

Of the 226 participants who wrote a response to this question, 36 said that they were ignoring outside factors which attempted to influence their decision—and otherwise made little to no impact on their lives, while another 18 said that the judgments passed onto childfree people and the pressure put on them to have children actually strengthened their motivation to remain childless.  42 participants were quoted as feeling “annoyed”, at persuasive comments regarding their status as childfree, 61 people said they felt angry and/or frustrated when their decision was judged by others, 3 people said they felt isolated and 2 reported feelings of anxiety on the matter.  A separate 15 individuals made statements indicating the social pressure made them feel upset in some other manner.  9 participants stated that the social factors listed in the preceding multiple-choice question made them feel guilty and ashamed of their decision to not have a child; in direct contrast to this, 15 individuals were of the opinion that this pressure to have children is disrespectful.  Furthermore, 49 participants made complaints that they did not feel a true freedom of choice in the decision of not having a child, and 13 people described personal questions and/or criticisms of their childfree status as an invasion of privacy.  14 people said that they felt a lack of acceptance and understanding from those who were informed of their childfree status.  37 participants stated opinions that society at large harbours and encourages prejudice towards childfree individuals, 21 of whom making specific comments on how societal expectations of parenthood are misogynistic, such as by enforcing traditional gender roles.  8 participants recounted being personally discriminated against directly because of their choice of remaining childless, while an additional 6 female volunteers told stories of how they were denied medical procedures—even after request—because their doctors prioritized the patients' fertility over personal desire or ambivalence towards becoming sterile.  Another 14 participants reported feeling a lack of understanding and/or acceptance on the behalf of those made aware of one's chidlfree status.  

Some of the most interesting results of this survey were not the answers given to specific surveys, but the information that participants volunteered in sections given for those who felt that the multiple-choice questions failed to address their situations.  Indeed, several participants gave similar volunteered statements in regards to several subject matters that pertain to being childfree, which shall be listed here.

One topic—which was admittedly overlooked during by the questions in the survey—was that some women avoid having biological children as a consequence of a deep-seated aversion to the intense processes of pregnancy and/or labour.  43 participants—42 of whom were female, the other identifying as “Nonbinary/female”—all voluntarily described, in way or another, wishing to avoid the process of undergoing pregnancy. 19 of these women either said they had a fear of pregnancy and/or labour, or explicitly diagnosed themselves with Tokophobia.  A further 15 participants explained that they were unwilling to go through the—often permanent—bodily changes that result from pregnancy, and another 3 wished to avoid the mental affects that childbirth can have on a person such as Post-Partum Depression.  6 women stated that pregnancy was too dangerous for them to consider the process worth it, and 4 cited personal medical complications reasons against pregnancy.  5 women expressed that they considered pregnancy to be disgusting and/or painful, and the remaining 7 women simply stated that they wished to avoid becoming pregnant.  

62 individuals professed a disliking of children as one of their reasons for being childfree.  Perhaps this number could be seen as surprising: either that so many people could dislike children, or that so few of the respondents had this as their primary reason for being childfree, indicating that the choice to become a parent—in many cases—is much more complex than whether or not one enjoys the company of children.  50 of these individuals identified as female, 8 as male, 3 as non-binary/agender/genderqueer, and 1 gave a not-applicable answer.  

Moral and ethical considerations were also volunteered by some participants as additional reasons why they have decided not to have children, or at the very least, not give birth to biological children.  Some participants stated more than one ethical reason, and the vast majority considered the morality of childbirth alongside the other—more interpersonal—factors that were also discussed in the other answers to this survey.  Again, these answers will be tallied individually, with the emphasis on which moral reasons were the most popular or commonly stated, without going into the specifics of how many people cited each type of answer individually.

31 participants cited their and/or their partners' genetics, which were perceived as undesirable, onto another person.  20 of these people also either identified as having a disability which profoundly impacts their lives—such as a significant physical disability, or Autism Spectrum Disorder—or mentioned having mental health problems such as anxiety and depression, that they felt would be cruel to pass on to an unwilling newborn.  Another 8 were concerned of passing on an inheritable condition that runs in the family bloodline.  Outside of genetics, 10 participants cited a familial history of domestic abuse, instilling an aversion towards raising either biological or adopted children in order to stop the cycle of abuse.  17 participants expressed concern that they would turn out to be ill-suited as parents for other reasons, 3 of whom citing their disliking of children as a possible instigator of this.  

4 participants stated that they felt bringing new life into the world is inherently cruel and/or selfish, with another 3 specifically citing “anti-natalism” as one of their reasons.  “Anti-natalism is the view that it is (almost) always wrong to bring people (and perhaps all sentient beings) into existence.” [29].  Another common anti-natalist argument against bringing new humans into the world is the impact our species has on Earth's climate [30]. Outside of anti-natalism and the belief that childbirth is inherently cruel, several participants did cite human overpopulation and anthropogenic impact on the environment.  19 participants stated a desire to protect the environment as one of the reasons they have chosen not to have children, while another 13 cited the human population crisis as their moral problem; an additional 26 participants described both of these moral considerations as factors contributing to their childfree decision.  This totals to 58 individuals who felt that either one or both of these long-term, global trends were significant enough to their personal lives to at least be a partial influence in the childfree decision.  Finally, 14 participants expressed the fear that their region's current political situation would curse any children they raise with a life of hardship, persecution, or even danger.  

The monetary cost of raising children was cited by 51 participants as a factor against their wanting to have kids, with another 6 people stating that their financial situations made parenthood impossible.  

Finally, the impact that newly introduced children have on a person's life—in particular, personal happiness and self-satisfaction—were also brought up by participants as factors influencing their decision.  47 people described a desire for freedom, sufficient free time, or otherwise wished to avoid the restrictions in life that parenting naturally creates.  18 participants felt that having a child would interfere with their career goals and another 8 said the same in regards to their life goals and hobbies.  Particular activities which participants felt child-rearing would interfere with include travelling, as cited by 11 people, and sleeping, according to 8. Finally, 24 participants stated that they were content in their marriages/romantic relationships,and decided to not have children in order to preserve this comfortable dynamic.

Conclusions

When analyzing all of this data—both the survey's questions that were answered, and the information that participants gave without prompt—there are certain conclusions that can be drawn in relation to why people decide they are better off avoiding children of their own, why many prospective parents consider biological children a poor choice for themselves, and how society as a whole interacts with the childfree population.  

First off, it needs to be made clear that the reasons behind many childfree decisions are both diverse and complex, with some individuals making their choice based largely on a single factor, with others citing dozens of reasons behind their aversion of parenthood.  It could be surmised that some of the more commonly stated reasons—such as wishing to fully commit to one's romantic partner, devoting oneself to a satisfactory career and personal life, or simply disliking children—do all have personal happiness and potential changes to it as a central consideration.  This partially confirms this research paper's original hypothesis: which is that people primarily make the choice of whether they will become a parent based on if they believe children will bring either a positive or negative change to their lives.  However, the second part of the original hypothesis—that the choice is also made based on how a person wishes to serve their family, society and fit in with peers—has been largely disproved. Many of the survey respondents made it very clear, both in answering the multiple-choice questions and writing their own answers, that their decisions were often made not because of outside social factors, but regardless of them.  In fact, while local communities, peer groups, media and society at large often attempt to persuade people into having children, these attempts at influence do not easily succeed, and serve little more than to create tension between parents and childfree people.  Perhaps this research paper could be used as evidence of the fact that all types of people in the world, including those who are raising the next generation of humanity, and those who have good reason not to do so, need to find a common ground, in order for childfree people to be better understood in the modern era.  

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[halfgap]

Some extensive, tangly headcanons / extrapolations of canon regarding Beau and her parents under the cut... extremely wordy and still not Complete (I always have more to say about this kid!)

I doubt her family is anything akin to nobility or aristocracy. Sure, they own a winery in Kamordah (a town renowned for its fine wines) but from Beau’s comments about her father’s desperation to impress the Empire higher-ups, I get the sense that Beau’s parents are sorta the Wildemount equivalent of ‘New Money’. They accrued their wealth through being very industrious and growing their business into something presumably quite successful, but despite being financially secure her father more than anything still wants very badly to gain the respect of More Important People.

Beau says her father “made a lot of sacrifices” in an effort to impress those people, and tbh that could mean anything from “devoted his time to brown-nosing and working instead of to his family” to “literally selling out close friends/family to the Reapers to gain Empire goodwill.” He also probably let the Crownsguard deal with some of Beau’s law-breaking in the past instead of bailing her out, considering Beau’s strong personal reaction to Toya being left with the Crownsguard.

I’m thinking her father is a very intelligent guy who values book smarts a lot. Marisha’s implied on Talks that he made Beau study a lot of crap (even before the Cobalt Soul) which he insisted would be valuable, and Beau is kind of pissed whenever that education actually does come in handy during her adventures today. I think her knee-jerk rebellion against All Things To Do With Her Father is why Beau insists that she hates studying, hates books and history, is TOTALLY a jock and NOT A NERD AT ALL, even though it’s become apparent that her natural curiosity does extend to a lot of nerdy things and she retained a lot of useful stuff from her studies. She loves learning, period, but it’s that thing where you don’t want to enjoy something that your asshole parents forced on you since a young age.

From a meta perspective, abusive parents are too often depicted as ignorant & uneducated with nothing of value to offer to their kids. In reality, perfectly intelligent + highly educated people can still VERY MUCH be abusive. They can have good taste in books or music, they can instill some savvy business acumen in their kids, etc.. Beau likely owes a lot of her education & cunning to her dad. Part of him probably did have her best interests at heart. That doesn’t mean he’s any less of an abusive shithead.

As far as I remember, Beau’s never actually said she hated her parents. There’s clearly a lot of resentment & anger there, but she also makes a lot of excuses for her parents: she says her father’s “not a bad person,” says he could have even been a good father if he made different choices, repeatedly calls him “protective” (as opposed to “horribly controlling and overbearing,” which I think is more accurate tbh), and admits several times that she herself was “a rebellious dick” and how that contributed to her parents’ rejection of her. Beau doesn’t hate her parents and hasn’t claimed to hate them; I’d wager instead that she cares about them despite everything and *still* craves their acceptance and approval (something Marisha supports on Talks). The bulk of Beau’s feelings toward her parents are HURT, not HATRED.

That just makes her whole situation a lot sadder, imo. In ep.1 she comes off as a rebellious drifter who ran away from her rich asshole parents, but in fact she’s a rebellious drifter w/ nowhere to go because she was utterly rejected by her parents *twice*. She disagrees with everything they stand for & won’t change herself any more for them, but she no doubt still cares about them (god, it’s her very nature to care deeply about Everything she touches); she’s just utterly convinced that they don’t give a single damn about her.

Somewhat related- as a child, at least, Beau did try to be what her parents wanted. This is made apparent by Marisha’s playlist commentary and some of her TM answers. Moreover, Beau has the ‘Prodigy’ feat, which I bet only stoked her parents’ expectations of her, expectations that kid!Beau would naturally strive to meet. But as Marisha rightly points out, when someone’s held to an impossible standard like that of the “The Perfect Daughter,” eventual rebellion is inevitable. From personal experience, I can say after trying so hard for so long, failure is addictive. Once Beau gave up trying to be the perfect, obedient kid who was still never enough, she probably found comfort in and clung deeply to her new role as the Problem Child, the Disappointment, the Slacker.

This always confused me but... Beau was only w/ the Cobalt Soul in Zadash for a few months. It’s possible she was at some other training monastery prior to that, but from Marisha’s early-campaign TM comments about “suddenly & recently becoming a monk” and a lot of other confusing shit Beau’s said, it sounds like Beau was only with the Cobalt Soul during that short time she was in Zadash...? And I can’t imagine it’s been THAT long between her running away, and her meeting Fjord and Jester in Game 0. Zeenoth still seems familiar enough with her when finding her in Ep.4 that I think Beau probably only ran away a few months to a year ago, at most? (Enough time for Beau to have wandered through a lot of places in the Empire at least, since she says in Ep. 8 or so that she’s traveled a lot within the country.) Beau is currently 22 or 23, so working backwards, that means Beau was abducted by the Cobalt Soul when she was probably 20 or 21. A young adult. Not a rebellious teen getting sent to boarding school.

I guess it might make sense that an unmarried young daughter is still in the authority of her parents at that age (although gender politics in Exandria have always been ‘???’ and sorta inconsistently represented so...) But it’s more significant that Beau stayed, living under her parents’ roof, doing the bookkeeping for the winery... I don’t know if she was staying purely to continue profiting off her bootlegging operation w/ her family’s wine, or if because even after all that Teen Rebellion she never fully escaped her parents’ influence over her and her own buried desire to earn their respect/affection. I’d say it’s leaning towards the latter, with her using the former as an excuse to herself (or maybe the thought of leaving just. Never even really occurred to her. Which I wouldn’t be shocked by tbh.) Either way I think it’s interesting that she herself never left that small town she hated & that family she resented, until her dad blatantly kicked her out via monk abduction.

I don’t know where I’m going with this other than saying that Beau is a twisty, painful mess of contradiction who nevertheless makes deep sense to me (& hopefully others) in a way impossible to articulate...?

uh I meant to talk more about her mom but prior to more recent episodes the only thing we knew of her is when Beau said “My mother always said nothing in life is free.” Now we also know she gave birth to a son Very Late & once wouldn’t let Beau have a pet rat, but Beau’s overall difficulty with/reluctance to talk about her mother can mean a lot of different things. Two possible interpretations are : a) in some twisted way Beau was a lot closer to her dad, as in... he was a bigger influence on her, more involved in her life and thus in more conflict with her, and her mom has always been more a footnote.. or b) maybe Beau actually had a more.. tender relationship with her mom than she did with her dad (not saying much tbh) which only made her ultimate rejection sting 100x worse to the point that Beau hates even thinking or talking about it.

You could go a lot wilder with the theories here (maybe her mom was the ‘bad direction’ that misguided her dad..? etc) but I think the above two are most reasonable and what I usually go with right now for the sake of simplicity

As for Beau’s personal hang-up with tarot cards, and the (possibly unrelated, but probably related) Mysterious Beliefs of her dad that made him so “protective” and intent on isolating her... that shit is too open-ended and I can’t land on a solid theory yet asjdjsljfjf

Also very conflicted about the whole MY PARENTS WANTED A SON thread but I won’t get into that here

I’m Very Behind on CR and have only caught clips and tidbits of episodes 43 onwards so please talk to me about Beau and let me know if there’s any other interesting hints she’s dropped in recent episodes or if any new info has contradicted these long-held, rambly inferences I just listed

[kkglinka]

I really love the complexity of the parents we see in RWBY, because every one of them is presented with both positive traits and countering flaws that affect their children in different ways. See, you can be a great person, but have lousy parenting skills in some area, or even overall. Likewise, you can be a mediocre or shitty person but have great parenting skills. Because like all skills, they require education and practice which, in this case, is typically acquired from their own parents or extended family. I'll start with the easy ones:

Jacques Schnee is socially well-regarded, has productive business acuity, demonstrates high self control, but is a horrible. He provided for all of Weiss' material needs to excess, along with a vast array of complex social skills — though limited on the interpersonal front. He ensured his child was well-educated and wanted for nothing, so long as she obeyed extremely rigid and limiting household rules that created a highly intimidating atmosphere. This type of extensive control and manipulation is what makes his otherwise supportive parenting abusive in nature, chiefly affecting Weiss' emotional development and sense of autonomy — the latter being her chief motivation to become a huntress.

Raven Branwen is a skilled tribal leader/chief, highly capable individual, perceptive, displays strategic intelligence, but poor adaptability. She is demonstrably intolerant of any display of emotional vulnerability and has an excessive need to save face. We can only speculate on the specifics, but drawing on common real life scenarios, she was young when she had her daughter, Yang, and in a highly stressful period of life. Based on what we know, I believe she was aware of her poor parenting skills, her inability to be emotionally available/supportive, all of which conflicted with what she felt were social obligations to her tribe.

She made the correct choice to do what was best for her child and surrendered her to her father. I know there are people who assume that she would have been a great mother if she stayed with him, but some people just can't and shouldn't be parents. If that was the case, it was admirable that she recognize her flaws, even if it was overwhelming fear of being a mother. Unfortunately, younger children and teens often fantasize about absentee parents, creating unfair expectations rooted in a desire for love. When those hopes are dashed, the child may become depressed or resentful, psychologically rejecting that parent...who is a source of some of their own character traits. Consequently, this can become a form of self-hatred that only time and perspective can cure.

Taiyang Xiao Long is a steady, reliable man who emotionally withdrew following the dissolution of his huntsman team, loss of one partner, followed by a loss of a second. This would have been a powerful series of emotional traumas for a very young man, and his resulting depression and severe withdrawal were completely natural and predictable. He was in a position where he required extensive emotional support but was forced to care for two young children instead. We can see from how both daughters grew up to be confident, socially adept, friendly and capable that he has relative good parenting skills.

Nevertheless, his withdrawal was a form of benign neglect that affected his older child more severely than the more psychologically malleable and therefore adaptable younger one. His older daughter was forced to shunt aside her own emotional needs and personal goals to partially assume the role of caretaker for some significant but unspecified period of time. In the long term, this resulted in his eldest daughter demonstrating high degrees of altruism and supportive behaviors, but at the expense of her own future goals and desires. She has repressed those to the point that she feels aimless.

Finally, while in a state of acute ptsd following a severe set of traumas, Taiyang's own aversion to dealing with further trauma leaves him incapable of offering emotional support. As his own response was withdrawal, he lacked the skills necessary to guide Yang to a healthy recovery. Instead, she further repressed her own emotional needs to fulfill her expected responsible and self-sufficient role. While there was no malice in Taiyang's actions, it doesn't change a series of belittling and dismissive comments he made about Yang's behavior, along with some uninformed reductive judgments.

Which leads straight into Qrow Branwen, who we know took on a primary mentoring role for his niece (in-law), Ruby Rose. We see Ruby demonstrate open love and admiration for him, which tells us that he was a very positive and encouraging influence on her. We know very little of Ruby's relationship with her father, beyond his protective nature, but she respects Qrow a great deal. At the same time, she is deeply frustrated by his alcoholism. Qrow has socially stagnated to the point that even his alleged semblance has failed to change or develop in any way. He's an example of a kind of shitty person with good parenting skills.

Which he mostly devoted to his niece, because we see little evidence of a similar relationship with his sister's child, Yang. From their very first exchange playing video games together, he is subtly contemptuous toward her (and her team mates). At the time, this was played as a humorous challenge, but when coupled with his continued lack of attention, along with a dismissive attitude toward any anger and hostility from Yang, his attitude is troubling. I'm forced to wonder just how much Yang reminds Qrow of his own sister. Regardless, we see from both father and uncle an unwillingness to assist Yang when she displays stress or unhappiness.

In an almost complete inverse, we have Ghira and Kali Belladonna. We retroactively know that their daughter, Blake, was in the throes of acute ptsd during volume one of the show, meaning much of her antisocial and avoidant behavior was not representative of her base personality. But we now see that Blake is decisive, highly devoted, emotionally expressive and driven by a strong sense of justice and compassion. She was comfortable speaking to her parents about her interests and concerns and they responded immediately with supportive actions and attitudes. They gave no recriminations, prioritized forgiveness and, unless I'm mistaken, the only parents we've seen hug their child.

Unfortunately for them, they raised a headstrong child, teaching her to question and challenge whatever she found just, including their decision to withdraw from a political organization that they saw was going off the rails. They did not have Blake's full respect and had somehow left her vulnerable to an abuser's manipulation. Abusers such as Adam begin by offering false emotional support or otherwise providing for a victim's unmet needs to lure them close. (Because narcissists make up the majority of abusers, and they're emotional attention vampires, they tend to seek out genuinely supportive wellsprings). I infer that Blake's parents were, despite their very strong emotional skills, frequently inattentive workaholics. This is another form of benign neglect and it caused their daughter to seek out another source of attention, during a period of her teen development when she needed more stability than they could provide.

Just as with real life, while the shittiest people were good parents in some ways, even the best parents had blind spots resulting in long-term consequences for their children.