#having a cheerleader in the background while you beat up your mother's murderer can be very healing sometimes

[ships-n-bats]

So hilariously hypocritical of some Kat//aangers to claim that Zuko was enabling Katara during her journey of grief and self-healing yet praise Katara for being an enabler towards Aang and never allowing him to grow as a character. At least with Zuko’s enabling, it led to Katara growing as a character and being able to get some closure over her mother’s murder, meanwhile Aang is stuck as a perpetual child because Katara can’t bring herself to upset him in any way.

I really don't understand how you can ship zutara? I understand that they feed of each other, but they do it in the worst way possible. In the Southern Raiders Katara was bloodbending and angrier than we've ever seen her, she nearly killed someone, and you know what Zuko was doing? Encouraging her. Aang is her rock, yes he screwed up in the Ember Island Players episode but in the end Katara choose him, because he brought out the best in her (visa versa) zutara is a great friendship but not ship.

This is absolute tripe. They “feed off each other in the worst way”. Katara’s anger in Southern Raiders was neither instigated by Zuko nor contrary to what you assert did he encourage her to violence. While he personally felt Yon Rha deserved to pay for the murder of Katara’s mother, Zuko never once told her what to do. He provided her with the information to find and confront the man and when Katara made the decision ultimately not to kill, he did not protest nor try to goad her into changing her mind. He accepted her decision. Contrast this with her supposed “rock”, Aang, who demanded that she forgive her mother’s murderer and just get over it. Katara could never just get over it. She needed to confront the man in order to find closure, something Aang never understood but Zuko did. 

And while we are on the subject of Aang, just how is he her rock? All the heartfelt discussions they had were one sided. It was always Katara acting as his support, encouraging him to fulfill his duties as Avatar and pulling him back from the brink of becoming a weapon of mass destruction.Aang didn’t help her resolve her issues or lend a sympathetic ear. That was, sorry to tell you, Zuko. It was Zuko whom she was able to bond with over the loss of her mother in the crystal catacombs and it was Zuko who accompanied her on her journey to confront Yon Rha, a journey Aang saw no point in and was actually compelled to let her go on because he realized after her attempted theft of Appa, she wasn’t going to give up on this. Aang didn’t bring out the best in Katara. Rather than subdue a man threatening Aang with a fireball using a nonlethal method in the Promise comics considered canon, Katara nearly kills him. This was something she couldn’t even do to avenge her mother. You know who stops her then? Not her so called rock but Zuko. 

On Aang’s end, his relationship with Katara was a double edged sword. While it is true that his feelings for Katara have as I mentioned pulled him back from the edge, they’ve also driven him to said edge, held him back from mastery of his powers and led him to commit many selfish actions. Aang could be instantly thrown into the destructive Avatar state if Katara was placed in danger. He refused to complete his training with the Guru because he refused to give up his attachment to her. Because he feared losing her, Aang hid the map to Hakoda’s location from Bato, his second in command, which could have potentially affected Hakoda’s ability to wage war against the Fire Nation because he would be devoid of Bato’s assistance had Aang not eventually fessed up to what he’d done. Katara’s “gentle nudge” approach is in many ways enabling. By telling him it was meant to be this way, Katara tries to keep Aang from feeling guilt for leaving the Southern Air Temple. While it is true that Aang could potentially have died had he stayed behind, having guilt over it was not necessarily a bad thing for Aang to have as it could have motivated him and drove him to hone himself into his role. Instead throughout season one, he continues to goof off. Aang is a ditherer by nature and only really steps up when pressured into a confrontation where something he values highly such as a friend is in jeopardy. Katara’s stroking of his ego did not drive him to learn earthbending. The threat to Sokka’s life is what did. 

Katara seldom outright confronts Aang on his bad behavior in contrast to her treatment of other characters. You will never see her shout at Aang no matter how crappy he acts and yet she has no problem telling Toph she’s selfish and unhelpful, Zuko that he is a terrible person or Pakku that he is a sour old man. But you will never ever hear an unkind word said to Aang. He is above reproach. She will disagree with him but it will always be in the form of gentle persuasion. In Legend of Korra, we really see the results of her inability to confront him directly. Aang’s tendency to favor his airbending son is never addressed and is allowed to continue throughout the childhood of Aang’s three children that Bumi and Kya grow up bitter, feeling themselves as outcasts from Aang’s legacy. 

Yes, in the end, Katara did choose Aang but it wasn’t because they brought out the best in each other.  It’s because that’s what the Bryke wanted, something they even admit now was contrived.

[acioo]

( PART ONE HERE ) & ( PART TWO HERE ) here are EVEN MORE NINE CHARACTER BASES ( label & background & personality ), all of whom i have played out in the past. they expand beyond ‘ the queen bee ‘ and ‘ the awkward nerd ‘ because i think as a community we’re all tired of the cliche bull, so have some of my most fun & most subversive times. these are for inspiration purposes as well as admin purposes. if you are going to use these in an rph setting, i request credit, but otherwise, it’s not necessary. ( all details viable to change ; pinterest board links available for all of them - if you are interested in my characters, see my muse page )  TW : violence, alcohol, drugs, child neglect, murder, death, abuse, kidnapping, adultery

001.      THE GOLDEN CHILD TURNED DARK — you grow up golden. you’re the oldest child of the best psychic in town and no one likes to remember it. your childhood is a string of choir practices and photoshoots and sleepovers only ever at other people's homes. ( you sometimes wonder whether your home is even a home at all, for it is vast and cold and unsettling ground at the best of times, and a war ground at the worst of times. ) your mother’s a showman and you are more party favor than you are human, most of the time. for you, they will forget her black cats and tarot decks and smoke screens. you are too good to ever be apart of such foolishness, right, sweetheart? you’d never put your hands in something like that, we know. you’ll smile and nod; you try not to think about the way that you share your mother’s same big eyes. the fact that as she gets older, the more sense she makes. how sometimes, inexplicably, more often than not, she is right in one way or another. that your mother is playing god and winning, and sometimes you let her take your hands and take your energy, and you are winning too. they’d never suspect the dirt on your hands like they suspect your little sister, who never had the patience for your mother's whims and wishes and stays bitter about the way people treat her. sometimes you can’t stand her for still being kind to you when you know it’s not fair that she’s on the outcasts of society when people treat you like a god. when you hear the blonde cheerleader with full lips call your little sister an ‘arrogant fucking occultist,’ you’ll beat the shit out of her until it takes two of the football players to tear you off. you’ll have a heart to heart with her about it later, where she stares at you in fear and you in guilt. she doesn’t press charges but you become the first class president to ever get expelled. you never tell your sister, even though she begs to know. hell, sometimes you don’t even know. it’s your mother’s work on you and you know it. some cosmic karma for playing with things she shouldn’t. your sanity for the sake of a little bit of power. you’ll don your mother’s long dark gloves. her heavy veils. you’ll become a fixture at the haunted home at the end of the block.

002.    THE FLIGHTLESS BIRD — your mother tongue is not your mother’s mother tongue and you never manage to remember this fact. your cousins are a world away, but you’re glad they are. they love to mock you and your shiny, pristine life away from everything that was once your mother’s pride and culture and family all wrapped in one. you’re not enough of an immigrant but this isn’t your homeland, either. you can’t help it, though. you fit in like a new dress. your whole life, all everyone has ever wanted to do was try you on for size. for what it’s worth, you’ve grown used to being tossed aside, even if it doesn’t make it hurt any less. your grandmother, who crossed continents because she missed your smile, likes to say that your curse is your love of humanity, but you think it’s that humanity doesn't love you back. no matter how hard you try you can’t hold on to that helium balloon called happiness and all your broken bridges trail behind you singing a siren song trying to take you home, but you don’t think you have a home. where would it be? your birthplace, where everyone looks like you but no one really gets you, or where you grew up, where you know everyone but sometimes wish you didn’t. your mother tells you to grow up. that you remind her so much of her sister, who weaves tales all marked with complicated, who your grandmother will reference with one finger to her temple in a swirled motion. your mother doesn’t do complicated, and you’ve never been anything but, which you think is probably why she spent so much time at work, and not with you. you’re okay. you adapt. it’s all you know how to do.

003.     THE HEIR — before you are even born, you have a reputation. your last name is the brand you’re not sure you ever wanted. when your mother was twenty-five she inherited the title of head of the crime family she was born in. the crime family that runs the east coast. when you are twenty-five, you’ll drink until your heart beats thunderously in your chest. when you are twenty-five, your best friend will comment about how unfair it is that your life has never been yours, that tomorrow you will be gone forever, that you will have to dedicate your entire life to running something you weren’t even born to run, and you will beat her to death and live to regret it. when you are born, you are not mommy’s little heir. you’re second in line. your big brother’s love shines down on you. he’s different than you, or your little brothers who have a sickening taste for this kind of life. he’s kind. before you can grow to understand that he is the best of your family, your mother cuts him out with a single dinner party and you won’t see him again until you’re sixteen and he shows up outside your school with an expensive leather jacket on and tries to beg you to come with him and get away from this life you’ve been saddled with. you will look him in his eyes and ask him, trembling, fingers playing with the hem of your skirt, eyes blurry with tears, “have we met?” your mother raises you to be strong. unflinching in the eyes of adversity. knives nestled into your boots, blood dripping from your mouth, a smile on your lips, the first gift you ever get is the lives of the men who kidnap you when you are thirteen. you’re so angry in a way your brother never understood how to be. you’re so angry you don’t know what you’re angry about anymore. your lot in life? your family? your personality? the fact that you understand violence, deeply and intimately? that you invite violence into your bed? that it does not make you flinch and you cannot, will not remember a time that it did? you will never be normal. this is your normal. it’s an inheritance and it’s yours. an inheritance worth a life.

004.     THE GONE BOY — your mother tells you that you were born in the winter. she tells you that she thinks a piece of winter got into your soul. that she’s afraid you’ll never move past it. you’ll shrug your shoulders and smile at her. you try not to think about it too much and you do a pretty good job of it. she sees too much of herself in you to be happy. all her worst parts, the kind she didn’t bring into your parent's marriage. you’re the youngest child. the favorite, or at least you were until you got old enough to have a rightful personality. your older siblings envy the fact that your moms are still together while their parents don’t live in the same states. you’re supposed to be the best one yet because they’ve had a lot of practice by the time you rolled around, but all you’ve ever done is make problems for yourself. you take joy in finding ways to piss people off. when you’re thirteen, you’ll bleach your hair white and your mama’s face when she sees it is something you treasure so deeply. when you’re fifteen, you’ll come home from school high as a kite and telling your mother your eyes are red from crying is better than the truth. mama will understand crying, but you’re supposed to be the golden child with the pretty blue eyes. their perfect little experiment and you just want to scream because you know, you fucking know, but the fact of the matter is that you’ve never really cared. you’re more you than you will ever be them and half of them is glad but the other half is indignant and the bad side is louder. you can understand that. all your bad side is, is loud. they ask who you are, and you’ll always tell the truth. they just wished that you hadn’t.

005.     THE TSUNAMI — you hit the news at sixteen years old. the littlest heir of the biggest chain of luxury hotels across the west coast. your mother didn’t want this life for you, but you’ve never given it much thought. all you’ve ever cared about it is waves that crash just right and that marvelous feeling you get when it’s so early in the morning that no one else is awake but the birds are chirping and the sun is peaking out. you’re simple in that way. people like complicated, but for the first sixteen years of your life, you are anything but. you like surfing and you like kissing whoever you want and saying fuck wherever you want. your first best friend starts a smear campaign against you after you break her heart by outgrowing her. she’ll say whatever she likes, and most of it you can acknowledge has some truth to it. you’re popping pills ( adderall's a hell of a drug, baby, you’ll croon out to her, mouth spinning around the straw of your slurpee ) and you’re always crawling back to your mommy. people are enthralled by you. they want something from you that you never cared to give. you’re peculiar in a way they want to write about or scream about, but you don’t have time for any of it. you never meant to hurt anyone, really, ever at all. you’re more baby bird on the verge of flight than you are spoiled brat with hundreds in your wallet.

006.     THE GREEK TRAGEDY — you’re the og child prodigy. one of the most famous ever and if you had a normal childhood, you would come to understand the consequences of this. you wonder about it. would you have cracked under all that pressure or would you have been a diamond? some ivy league college before you hit puberty, saving the world, and making sure everyone knows it, all the while? you never find out. when you’re still a child, you’ll wander off. that itself is not a problem. you always wander. you live in the middle of nowhere because your parents are fancy, famous scientists with more money than you will ever need and your house is surrounded by nature. you prefer that to the marble columns. the problem is that you wander and you are found, but it’s not who you should be. by the time everyone realizes you’re missing, properly, milk-cartoon, headlines on the morning news missing, you’re out of the state. you’ll be everywhere. your face, your story. you won’t realize this until you’re seventeen, but they looked for you. everyone looked for you. no matter how many years had passed, everyone still waited for you with bated breath. you won’t get to be a child prodigy, but you will get to be something else. a killer. the man who finds you has hands coated in blood and he wants to make sure you do too. before you know anything, you know violence. your intelligence is no longer the most important thing about you. in fact, it’s not even mentioned. he wants to know how powerful you can swing, how silently you can sneak up beside someone, and with how much force you can dig in a knife. you forget your old life. your parent’s kind smiles. your sister's gentle hands. the way everyone knew your name. now, you have no name and you have no story, just someone to follow. there are others like you, who got taken away by him, but he doesn’t like you guys hanging around much. you’re not the favorite, and he never fails to tell you this. you’re too you. he will hit you and you will spit blood with a smile on your face. a part of you will always be free, and you tell him this. all he does is hit you again. when you’re seventeen, he’ll leave you in the city and tell you not to come home without blood on your hands. you go to a diner, sit at the counter and pray they don’t make your dirty self leave as you sip orange juice. the news plays. celebrity marriage. robbery. and, suddenly, an anniversary, eight years to the day since a child with your cheekbones disappeared off the face of the earth. it all floods back and you’re left reeling. in a short period of a few months, you will escape from his hand. you will also very, very nearly die by his hand. you will go home. they never stopped waiting.

007.     THE FALLEN PRINCESS — you don’t look goddamn anything like your siblings. it’s the first thing people say when meeting you and your mother's smile will always tighten around the edges. you’re tall and blonde and shining and they’re all pale skin and brown hair with the same roman noses and aura of power. you get the family's mossy green eyes but nothing else. your mother always dismisses it as a fluke and your father never mentions it, though you never fail to notice how his eyes always skim over you. you just attribute it to the wrongness in you. the one they never stop talking about. physical proof that you’re the black sheep of the royal family. it’s your eighteenth birthday when your mother sits you in her waiting room and tells you that almost two decades ago, she had a brief and passionate fling with one of their country’s soldiers before he went into the war and was never seen again. it all makes sense but you wish you could just go back to before she ever told you. everything pieces together. you’re a mar on the family's reputation and their dirty little secret in plain sight. your father is not your father and he’s only ever acted like it. you’re a living product of your mother’s whims, which he never fails to mention are his least favorite of your mother’s qualities. it only makes you worse. the royal terror, they call you. you’re the youngest of the family, the little asshole with a less than little drinking problem, and eventually, it becomes an open secret of your lineage. word gets around fast in a kingdom like yours, but it isn’t even yours anymore, really. one of your hands reaches out for a crown that will never really be yours but still sits heavy on your head.

008.     THE STORYTELLER — you’re five years old and your mother tells your uncle that one day, you two will have screaming matches loud enough to wake the neighborhood. you’re ten and your big sister tells you that sometimes she doesn’t even know who you are, that you’re a cycling door at best and a rolled dice at worst. you’re thirteen and the doctor tells you he knows you’re an intelligent kid, but he wishes you would act like it. you’re a rolling stone of your own. you like screaming and fighting and no one likes that side of you. the dirty, loud one, the one you really weren’t raised to have, but sometimes when your mother isn’t around to call bullshit you’ll say is a product of moving so much as a kid, or of your dad never being around, or of never fitting in the right way. but it’s quite possible that you were just born this way. with some kind of fire in your soul that has never been quiet enough for you to hear yourself think, or at the very least, hear before you run your mouth. your mouth which more often than not will leave you stranded in fights and in relationships you don’t know how to get out of. you like causing a ruckus. flirting with people you shouldn’t, drinking honestly excessive amounts of alcohol, saying fuck around your abuelos just to see the looks of horror on their faces. you’ve been told both that you have a big heart and that you’re a big bitch, and it makes sense because you’ve always been bigger than life in one way or another. too much for people to swallow with ease, so they usually just don’t try. you’re fine with that. you have enough try in your for both of you guys.

009.     THE RICH KID ADDICT — the first thing you remember is your mother. you must be four or five, sitting next to her on the fancy dining chairs, dressed in perfect little church clothes and your feet not reaching the floor. you asked her what daddy was talking about. all you hear is angry and death and destruction and revenge. your mother tells you in her soft voice, her matching eyes quivering with something that is not fear but rather pity, that your daddy has a curse. you learn much about this curse over the rest of your life. it makes your father not a father. an angry bitter man who shouts at you to get the hell out of his lab, to get out of his sight for a few nights, to stop asking so many questions. there are periods of reprieve that you never understand. your father’s happy again, hanging out with his best friend who you thought he loathed, wearing hawaiian print and having the same kind of smile you used to have before things got so hard all the time. but then it’s all over again. you’re sixteen, doing astrophysics homework in the living room while sipping on sangria in a stemless wine glass when things will come to a head. your father’s bad again, but he’s pleading with you, saying baby, baby, just come to the lab, just come see what i’ve done this time. this is new, so on even feet you’ll follow him in, until he wraps a handcuff around your wrist and puts the other one around his lab chair. you scream and you bang things, but no one’s there to hear you. your mother’s at a conference call in miami. your father tells you it’s fine, it’ll all be okay, and you beg him, please, daddy, please just let me go. he takes out a syringe and it’s green and big and you scream and thrash, and then you wake up in your bed. you feel the same and look the same, but you rip the doorknob off its hinges. when you cut your finger in engineering it heals up in seconds. you feel more awake, more real than you ever had, but worse than ever. he poisoned you and you’re not you anymore. you can’t cope with it, but his eyes shine with pride whenever he sees you around the house. you drink to forget it all and you become a cliche, but you’re never sober enough to be aware of it. a bit of beer on most nights and a lot on the weekends turns into pills and bottles and long nights, until your mother’s divorcing your father and it’s psychiatrist offices and failure notices and tabloids.

[thevampirediariesdiary]

1.15 A Few Good Men

This episode features two of my favorite things: strategic technical non-invitations, and vampire pun double-speak.

We’re back to the hiker-in-the-woods leitmotif! Harper, the tomb vampire we saw escape at the end of the last episode, tells a hiker he seems like a nice person, and then eats him.  Harper, you seem like a nice person.  Too nice to be a vampire.  Also, why isn’t Harper’s hair longer? Why doesn’t he have a beard???  I knew Damon’s 1.05 stubble from three days in the Salvatore basement was exceptional.

Elena asks Jenna if she did any digging on her birth mother; Jenna found an old medical record for an Isobel Peterson, which led her to two high school cheerleaders, Trudie Peterson and Isobel Fleming.  Trudie has an address not far off.  And Isobel? “I couldn’t find anything about her,” Jenna says, totally unconvincingly.  Did everyone in this show skip school the day they taught lying??  But even though this is only a partial lie, Jenna, my hero in all things, can’t bring herself to keep Elena in the dark, and spills about Alaric’s wife having the same name and being from the same area…and being dead.

Stefan, on the other hand, is actually getting better at lying.  He asks what Elena knows about the circumstances surrounding Alaric’s Isobel’s death, and Elena says only that she was killed and the case was never solved. Stefan says Alaric told him “some things”, but then changes the subject, saying that it’s not possible the two Isobels are the same, the coincidence is too much.  “I should go,” he says, “I gotta go deal with Damon.”  “How’s he doing?” Elena asks.  “He’s dealing,” Stefan says, “…in his own way.”

Apparently dealing is an orgy-dance-feeding-party. It’s exactly like with Vicki, times four.  Stefan wanders in, looking half-amused, and flips the lights on.  “Ooooooh,” says Damon, “Buzzkill Bob.”  Stefan pulls him aside, but Damon remains stubbornly light and breezy: “You’re worried about me, that’s nice, don’t be.  There’s no need, I’m fine.  Why wouldn’t I be? I spent the last 145 years with one goal – get in that tomb – I succeeded.  Granted, Katherine wasn’t in there to be rescued, but why dwell.  It’s so liberating, not having a master plan, because I can do whatever the hell I want!”  “That’s kind of what I’m worried about,” Stefan says.  “Relax,” Damon tells him, “I haven’t killed anyone in too long.”  But even now, when Damon’s whole life has been turned upside-down, he can’t accept his brother’s concern at face value, and asks what the ulterior motive is – and he’s right.  Stefan didn’t come over for a pep talk, but to ask Damon about Isobel.  Damon says remembering her is a needle in a haystack, and nothing rings a bell.  “Think hard, it’s important,” Stefan insists.  Damon leans in and whispers in his ear, “Nothing is important.  Not anymore.”  

Mrs. Kelley Donavan interrupts Matt and Caroline’s makeout session before it turns into a sex scene and I have to think of a fun fact.  Caroline flees, Mrs. Donavan is very mean about both Caroline and Caroline’s mom.  “So she’s the one?” she teases Matt.  “No.  Probably not. But maybe,” Matt says, making me confused all over again about that relationship.  But he refuses to let his mom speak derogatorily about her, and that’s something.

Alaric objects to being raffled off like a Disney cruise at the Mystic Falls bachelor auction, but Jenna says fundraising is taken very seriously in their town, and he doesn’t have a choice.  They have their first kiss, and it’s very precious and normal and sweet.  “I can’t believe I’m going to do this…I’m totally going to ruin this moment,” Jenna says, and brings up the situation with Elena and her birth mother.  Alaric dismisses it as a coincidence, but when Jenna pulls up a picture, he says only, “She…uh…she never told me.”  The moment is well and truly ruined.

Elena drives herself to Trudie’s house.  Trudie invites her in by saying, “I was just gonna make some tea, do you want some?  The kitchen’s this way.”  Which is to say, she doesn’t actually invite her, but appears totally welcoming and polite.  It’s brilliant, and I love it.  If vampires were real, this is what I would be worst at – I would constantly be accidentally inviting people in because I couldn’t be careful enough with my words.  Trudie doesn’t offer up any information we didn’t already have, but Elena takes a sip of her tea and recognizes vervaine, so there’s something she’s not saying. Elena drives off, Trudie is promptly murdered.

Damon sits next to Alaric at the bar and orders a bourbon.  “Behold, the teacher,” he says, already very tipsily. “Don’t you have some papers to grade?”  Alaric responds, darkly, “It’s more fun with a buzz.”  “Well,” Damon says, “most things are.  Sober is…depressing.”  “You don’t strike me as someone who gets depressed,” Alaric says.  “You say that like you know me,” Damon answers.  “Nope,” says Rick, “it’s just a hunch. You have a good afternoon.”  “Not likely,” Damon sing-songs.  He is joined by Liz Forbes.  “Daytime drinking, huh?” she asks.  He answers, “It’s all the rage.”  “Listen, I need a favor,” she says, and convinces him to be a bachelor in the auction. He asks that she dig into Alaric, with whom Damon says there’s something a little off.  Liz, having absolutely no reason to distrust Damon’s instincts, agrees readily.

Elena wanders into Stefan’s room, calling for him.  “Better,” Damon answers, “me.”  “You look…” she says.  “Dashing, gorgeous, irresistible?” Damon supplies.  “Wrecked, you look wrecked.”  “No reason why,” he says, dismissive, even though she didn’t ask. “Did you know I’m one of mystic falls most eligible bachelors?”  Elena’s only response is “Huh”.  “Yep.”  She can’t resist, and asks, “How are you doing?”  “Never better,” he tells her, then moves on, “What can I do for you? I’m a barrel of favors today. It’s my newfound purpose.  How can I help people?”  “I’m just meeting Stefan,” she tells him, “we’re going to the fundraiser.” “Help a guy out will you,” says Damon, struggling with his shirt buttons in front of the mirror, “I can’t…get…this…” Sighing, Elena walks over and starts to do up his shirt for him.  “So,” she says, sweet, hopeful happiness starting to seep into her voice, “I found out who my birth mother is!” 

“Eeuughyuck. Who cares,” Damon says.  

She looks at him, insulted. 

“She left you,” Damon says, perfectly sincere, “she sucks.”  

Elena sees Stefan over his shoulder and extricates herself from dressing her boyfriend’s brother.  Abandoned, Damon does up his buttons perfectly while maintaining eye contact with Elena.  This, presumably, is his version of her pretending she’s going to dance with him. 

Elena stares after him, annoyed.  “He’s fine!” she says to Stefan, once he’s left.  “He’s Damon,” Stefan says.  “You know, maybe this heartache will be good for him, it’ll remind him that he has one, even if it doesn’t beat.”  “Won’t hold my breath,” Stefan tells her.  Now that he knows for certain that the Isobels are the same, Stefan finally reveals…that Alaric “believes” that Isobel was killed by “a vampire”, and then asks Elena not to talk to Alaric about it.  When she asks why, he says only, “I know it’s a lot to ask of you, but will you do this for me?”  Seriously, the biggest thing that has stood out to me on this rewatch is that Stefan has an issue with the truth, particularly telling it on any other terms but his own.  Like so many of Stefan’s other issues, it’s a control thing.  He likes to control the circumstances under which he lives his life, to make his actions and choices as easy and smooth as possible.  It’s not unreasonable in itself, but he takes it to such an extreme. 

Stefan tries one last time to jog Damon’s memory about Isobel.  He’s not interested in talking.  He does ask, “Where’d our girlfriend go?”

Which brings us to the main event: the bachelor auction.  Liz takes Damon aside beforehand and shares what she learned about Alaric – his background is clean, nothing but a couple parking tickets – and a dead wife Isobel.  It all comes together.

So when Mrs. Lockwood asks Damon if he likes to travel, he answers into the microphone, with Alaric and Elena and the whole bar listening, “Oh yeah, LA, New York…couple years ago I was in North Carolina near the Duke Campus actually – I think Alaric went to school there, didn’t you Rick? Yeah, except…I know your wife did.  I had a drink with her once.  She was…phew…she was a great girl, did I ever tell you that?  Cos she was delicious.  Mmm.  Mm mm mm.”  

“Are you okay?” Jenna asks.  “I just need some air,” Elena says.

Stefan follows her out.  “He killed her?” she says. “Damon was the vampire that killed her?”  “I don’t know what happened, Alaric said they never found the body,” Stefan says, miserably. “I’m sorry, I wanted to tell you, but I just, I wanted to know more.”  But Elena’s not concerned about Stefan’s silence: “I was feeling sorry for him.  Hoping that this whole Katherine thing would change him. I’m so stupid.” “He doesn’t know about the connection to you,” Stefan tells her, “I thought about confronting him, but he’s already so on edge.” “Why are you protecting him?” she asks. “Because you’re not the only one hoping that he might actually change!”  The shoe is on the other foot now for sure, and I love it.  Elena has been hurt too personally now to be able to hold onto hope – but Stefan is there to pick it up, because of what she saw first.  Look at this agonized hopeful face:

Plot distractions take place, in the form of the man Elena saw outside Trudie’s house. Elena goes inside, and runs smack into Damon.  “Whoa, easy there.  Buy a ticket like everyone else,” he says.  “Did you enjoy that, in there,” she demands, “rubbing it in to Alaric Salzman?”  Damon is genuinely bewildered: “What?”  

“Just as I was starting to thing there was something redeemable about you,” she snaps. “Elena,” Stefan says, and shakes his head at her from behind Damon, who turns around.  “Am I missing something here?” he asks.  “Did I forget to mention, earlier when we were talking? About my birth mother.  The one that gave me up.  Her name was Isobel.”  Damon goes through the quickest ‘oh shit’ face change I have ever seen.  “Go ahead,” Elena tells him, bitterly, “Reminisce about how you killed her.”  Damon proceeds to experience the whole range of human emotion. It’s interesting, Stefan made sure to be clear to Elena that Damon didn’t know about the connection to her, and in fact kept both of them in the dark about it for as long as possible – but this is the tack Elena takes.  She immediately chooses to make the crime personal – an offense against her – because she knows this will get through to him.  And oh, does it.  But maybe not the way she intended.  

The plot distractions crop back up.  The man tells Elena he has a message for her: Stop looking.  She doesn’t wanna know you.  She doesn’t wanna talk to you. Then he steps into traffic.

Alaric flashes back to his wife – his memories getting less and less idyllic.  What began as professional pride in research, wanting to be the one to prove something’s true, has clearly turned into something else.  “You don’t want kids, you’re never home.  What’s the point of this? I just want us to be normal people,” he tells Isobel.  “Maybe I don’t want that,” she answers.

And despite all of Stefan’s warnings, Alaric follows Damon home. “Where’s Isobel? What have you done with my wife?” Alaric says.  “Do you want me to tell you I killed her?” Damon answers. “Would that make you happy?  Because I think you know what happened.”  “I saw you feeding on her,” Alaric says, clinging to this version of events.  “Yeah I did, and I wasn’t lying, she was delicious. Oh come on, what do you think happened?” Damon says, impatient.  “Not an inkling?  You never considered the possibility?  I turned her.”  “Why?” Alaric says, desperate.  “She came to me!  All pathetic, looking for vampires.  There was something about her, though, something I liked, special.”  “You turned her because you liked her?” Alaric asks.  “No, I slept with her because I liked her, I turned her because she begged me to.  But you knew that too, didn’t you.  Guess she wasn’t happy at home, wasn’t happy with life in general, wasn’t happy with you.” Alaric rushes him, and he takes Alaric’s stake and stabs him with it, murmuring, “This is a shame.  We’re kindred spirits.  Abandoned by the women we love.  Unrequited love sucks.  Sounds like I got a lung, which means I get to sit here and watch you die.” Which is what he does.  And if this episode has shown anything, it’s that he’s not wrong about the rest of it – he and Alaric are kindred spirits.  Even their conversation at the bar, on the surface, could have been the beginning of an understanding.  Both of them were on a mission, only to find out that the missing person who gave their life purpose and meaning never cared about them in the first place.  Sure, Damon was annoyed at his brother for manipulating him and keeping him in the dark, which is certainly partly why he lashed out at the bachelor auction.  But it’s fitting Rick into the picture that pushes him all the way – because he knows what Rick is doing, knows how he feels and what he’s going through, and Damon already knows the end of his story – knows it’s exactly the same as his own.  And Damon is not one to let people labor under delusions.  This, it seems, is also part of Damon’s reaction when he finds out Isobel is Elena’s mother – because that means Elena is a kindred spirit, too.

Stefan gets home, Damon is unapologetic.  “All I did was tell him the truth.  His wife didn’t want him anymore.  It’s not my fault he couldn’t handle it.”  “Like you’ve been handling Katherine?” Stefan retorts.  “I’m handling it fine,” Damon says, and then proceeds to spin this whole disaster into a way of connecting Elena to Isobel back to Katherine – “it can’t be a coincidence”.  He leaves Stefan to clean up the body – which, all of a sudden, is twitching, and then sitting up and gasping.  Alaric hypothesizes that it was the ring Isobel gave him.

Elena calls a number on a dead man’s phone.  Her birth mother answers.

Two notes: when Elena says “I was feeling sorry for him”, Nina slips into her Canadian accent big time.  And I prefer to forget that Damon slept with Elena’s mother, because that’s weird and gross.

Eyebrow Watch: “Is this what you do when there are no...vampires?”

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[officialmccall]

“Believe It or Not.” Part 23/?

(Based off episode 2x11 “Battlefield”)

Imagine taking your last breath. Imagine one day feeling powerful, feeling the ground beneath your feet. And then imagine it being taken away from you by someone way too cold to deserve that feeling of power. It’s hard to imagine isn’t it?

Everything was different. Matt was dead, and it wasn’t like Y/n was super torn by his death, he did more harm than good. But he was 16, same as her. He didn’t know what he was doing, none of them really do.

Scott hadn’t talked to Allison, although it seemed like that was more of her choice. Her mom dying hit her pretty hard, though it did seem to bring her and her dad closer.

But, Y/n and Scott had their own problems to deal with.

She stood straight, looking at herself in the mirror. Her hair laid flat upon her shoulders and she pulled the hem of her shirt down before gaining enough strength to even walk out her bedroom door.

As she exited, Scott exited his room too. Immediately upon their arrival, they caught glance of Melissa. But only slightly as she shut her door behind her leaving her children in the bitter silence. The twins looked at each other, and Y/n offered Scott a sympathetic smile watching as he went up to the shut door.

“Mom,” Scott began, “Mom, we’re gonna have to talk about this eventually. Okay. I’m going. I love you.” Scott let out a sad sigh, continuing down the narrow hall of their house, not having the confidence to look his sister in the eye as he walked past her.

She watched him leave, feeling completely helpless and not knowing how to fix this, her family. So much about it was broken right now.

After a few seconds of Scott being gone, she heard a small creak of a door coming from her mother’s door. She looked in the direction of the noise to see Melissa hesitantly stepping through the frame.

“He’s your son, that hasn’t changed.” Y/n muttered, attempting to comfort Melissa, knowing that her mom was in fact struggling with the process of what happened.

“I just-” Melissa chuckled through her sigh, “I can’t believe you two kept this from me- for who knows how long. I never thought you, either of you, would lie to me. I thought we were closer than that, Y/n.”

Now it was Y/n’s turn to raise her eyebrows towards her mother and laugh mockingly, “You really don’t want to be lecturing me about lying right now, {mom}.” Y/n emphasized the last word dramatically.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Melissa challenged.

“It means when were you going to tell me I wasn’t your daughter,” Y/n took a few steps closer so that she could see the completely bewildered expression on Melissa’s face, “I thought we were closer than that.” She snapped, she waited patiently for her “mother’s” response. Hoping, pleading silently that Melissa would tell her she was crazy, that she was a full-blooded McCall. She wanting so badly for her to reject the idea and to hold her and tell her that it wasn’t true.

Y/n swallowed sadly, after a few seconds of not hearing the words from her mother that she desperately needed, “You’re not going to deny it?” She gave her mom one last opportunity, but Melissa continued to stay silent, blankly staring at her feet. Y/n shook her head, storming down the stairs and out the door, she knew where she needed to go. She knew where she could finally get the answers she deserved.

---

Deaton was in his office early that morning, preparing for the day. He was cleaning off multiple syringes when he heard the sound of a bell, meaning that someone was here.

“I’m sorry we’re not open yet-” He began as he headed around the corner to see who the guest was, but he cut himself off when he saw the young McCall girl standing there.

“We need to talk.” She stated with pleading eyes, “And by talk I mean you’re going to tell me what I want to know, and I’m going to listen.”

Deaton stared at the girl for a second, her desperate stares convincing him that he simply had no other option than to tell her the truth. Who her family was, and what she was.

---

As Y/n exitted Deaton’s workplace, she felt her phone vibrate in her back pocket. She quickly took a deep breath, regaining her composure before answering Scott’s call.

“Hi.” She said simply.

“We have a problem.” His voice sounded defeated through the phone.

Y/n stopped walking, “What now?”

“I think I have to give Gerard what he wants, I think I have to give him Derek.”

Y/n started shaking her head listening to his words, “Scott-”

“He threatened mom, Y/n” Was the last thing he said to her before he hung up.

---

Derek stood with the palms of his hands pressed against the cold metal of the table in the Hale house. He has holding a piece of broken glass in front of his face, studying the formation of the deformed object. While studying it, he saw the reflection of someone he was certainly not ready to deal with yet.

Immediately, the alpha chucked the piece of shiny material backwards towards his uncle, Peter Hale.

“I expected a  slightly warmer welcome,” the egotistical psychopath joked as he caught the shard of mirror between his fingertips, “But point taken.” He began to walk closer to his nephew.

“It's quite a situation you've got yourself in here, Derek. I mean, I'm out of commission for a few weeks and suddenly there’s lizard people, geriatric psychopaths, and you're cooking up werewolves out of every self-esteem deprived adolescent in town.” The old alpha cocked his eyebrow.

Derek just rolled his eyes at the criticism he was receiving from a psycho murderer. “What do you want?”

“Well, I want to help. You're my nephew. The only relative that I have left. You know, there's still a lot that I can teach you. Can we just talk?”

“I'm not the only family you have left…” Derek regretfully admitted, not sure if he should tell Peter or not.

Peter’s eyes grew wide, there was no way Derek found her. “Derek, if you're talking about who I think you're talking about-”

“I am,” Derek cut him off again, “but she doesn't know, not yet and not ever.”

“How do you- how did you find her?” Peter inquired.

“I didn't have to find her, she never left Beacon Hills.”

---

Scott hesitantly knocked on Y/n’s door as she finished zipping up the skirt to her cheerleading uniform.

“Hey.” He sighed as she turned around.

She gave a small smile, “hey.”

“Are you ready for the game tonight?” He asked biting his lip, knowing you could cut the tension in her with a knife.

Without saying anything, y/n revealed to Scott the daggers that were hiding inside her pom-poms.

“Ready,” she replied, “whatever Jackson tries to do.”

“Look,” Scott started awkwardly approaching her, “Besides all the crazy supernatural stuff going on, I know something else is going on,” Y/n stopped fidgeting with her uniform to look at him, “and I want you to know, no matter what it is you can tell me. You don't have to now, because I know we’ve got a lot coming our way tonight. But after this is all done, we’ll figure it out together okay?”

She just nodded with a tight-lipped smile plastered on her face. And before she could even comprehend it, she was being pulled into her brother’s arms, the one that would always be her brother.

As she stayed in his embrace, everything Deaton told her about her true identity echoed inside her head. She wanted to break down and cry with Scott right there and tell him everything. She wanted to scream. But right now, he needs her to be strong. So she will be.

---

As all the all the lacrosse players made their way on to the field for the game, Y/n plastered a smile on her face and threw her hands in the air cheering like the rest of the girls there.

Y/n saw Scott and Stiles sitting on the bench next to each other, knowing she had time before the start of the game she approached them from behind.

“You know what’s going on?” She said in Scott’s ear as she leaned down next to him.

“Holy- god.” Stiles muttered, jumping at the sound of her unexpected voice.

“Not yet.” Scott sighed.

“It's going to be bad isn't? I mean like, people screaming, running for their lives, blood, killing, maiming, kind of bad.” Stiles’ voice wavered.

“Looks like it.” Scott confirmed.

“That's the spirit,” Y/n sarcastically yet optimistically replied, “go cyclones!” The two boys just gave her an odd look of disapproval at her cynical humor.

“I’m gonna leave now.” She said as coach blew the whistle, she placed one of her hands on each of their shoulders, “uhhh have fun, good luck, don't die.” She smiled widely at the both of them.

“Thanks,” stiles sarcastically replied as she walked away. And Stiles watched her retreat on Scott broke the silence.

“When are you gonna tell her you're in love with her?” Scott teased his best friend.

Stiles eyes widened as he questionly looked at Scott, “what’re you- I’m not- what-”

“Dude,” Scott laughed, “your heart is beating like crazy right now.”

Stiles dropped his shoulders in defeat, “and, you're okay with it?”

Scotts mocking smile now turned into a sweet one, “Who better for my sister than my best friend?”

---

Scott laughed the most genuine laugh in a while when he watched his spastic best friend run out onto the field, stumbling all over the place and dropping a different piece of equipment every time he got ahold of a different one. Coach was putting Stiles in the game, he had to because Gerard apparently had changed Scott’s grades, making it so that coach had no choice but to bench him. But now, Stiles finally got a chance to play. However, that could be a really good or a really bad thing.

Suddenly ruining his rare moment of joy, his werewolf senses started to take over for his human ones. More specifically his hearing, and he froze when he heard the voice that called his name.

“Scott, can you hear me? Ah, you can. Good. Then listen closely because the game is about to get interesting.”

Scott looked out of the corner of his eye to see Gerard standing about 50 yards away from him in front of the bleachers full of students and supporters. Oblivious to the danger being consumed in the background of a simple high school event.

“Let’s put a clock on this game, Scott. I’ll give you until the last 30 seconds. When that scoreboard clock begins counting down from 30, if you haven’t given me Derek, then Jackson is gonna kill someone. So tell me, Scott, who’s gonna die tonight? Should it be your mother, who so bravely came out to support you? Or the sheriff, your best friend’s father? Or how about the pretty little redhead who managed to survive the bite of an Alpha? It could even be your charismatic sister, who you so selfishly got involved in your life. She’s human Scott, an innocent, but not anymore being associated with you. So her death, that would be on you, and so would Stiles’. The teenage boy with his whole life ahead of him.”

Scott swallowed harshly, feeling his claws start to erupt from his fingertips, “Or should I do everyone a favor and kill that ridiculous coach? It’s up to you, Scott. But you are going to help me take Derek down. Because if you don’t- I’ll have Jackson rip someone’s head off right in the middle of the field and drench everyone you love and care about in blood.”

---

Y/n blindly ran through the cheers as the game was finally in play. She couldn’t help but cringe every time the ball was passed to Stiles and he either dropped it or tripped over himself.

“Come on, Stiles.” Y/n whispered under her breathe.

As her and her squad took to the bleachers for a five minute break, she took the opportunity to head over to where the benched players  were sitting, and for this game that was Scott. When she approached she realized it was during a heated argument between Scott and coach.

“Sit down, McCall.” Coach rolled his eyes, not even glancing in Scott’s direction.

“But coach, we’re dying out there.”

“Oh I’m aware of that,” Coach snapped sarcastically, “now sit.”

Defeating, Scott let out a sigh and turned around to head back to his original seat, Y/n took the empty space next to him.

“So what exactly are we dealing with right now?” She asked, keeping her eyes on the game and on Stiles’ awful playing.

“Gerard’s here, and if I don’t give Derek to him, he’s gonna make Jackson kill someone.”

Taking a deep breath, Y/n just shook her head and smiled, “You know I never thought I’d say this, but right now I feel really bad for Jackson.”

Scott nodded his head agreeingly, and they continued to sit there in silence. Until another body draped in a lacrosse uniform sat themselves down next to Y/n.

Both Scott and Y/m raised their eyebrows at the sight of Isaac, fixing his gloves.

“You came to help.” Scott stated in disbelief but also in relief.

Isaac just smirked at him, “I came to win.”

Then holding the same smirk his eyes flickered to Y/n who was smiling at him.

“Thank you.” She whispered, only for him to hear. He just winked at her.

“Okay, I gotta get back.” She assured both boys as she retrieved her pom-poms and ran back over to where the squad was.

15 more minutes had passed of the game, and Isaac had just about injured every single person on the Beacon Hills lacrosse team at an attempt to get Scott into the game. His plan was working successfully, however Y/n still felt like something was wrong, and something bad was going to happen.

Almost as if her thoughts wanted to betray her, She watched as Jackson ran towards an oblivious Isaac, knocking him off his feet and down onto the ground. You could hear the collective ‘oohs’ of the audience as Isaac’s body came in contact with the wet grass.

Immediately and without hesitation Y/n let whatever she was holding fall to the ground and she ran towards where Isaac was ignoring the calls from the girls on her team for her to come back. She slid to a stop as she dropped on her knees down to his side, Scott kneeling across from her and on the other side of Isaac.

“Isaac,” Was the only word she could will herself to form as she leaned over him.

He met her eyes, wincing, “It’s not broken. But I can’t move it. I think Jackson nicked me ‘cause I can feel it spreading.” She couldn’t even reply as the paramedics carried him away.

Y/n walked over to the now standing Scott only to see that his focus was elsewhere, and elsewhere was Gerard’s voice.

“You want to play chess, Scott? Then you better be willing to sacrifice your own pawns.”

Gulping, Scott looked up towards his sister. And seeing the expression on his face, she knew they were running out of time.

“McCall, either you’re in or we forfeit!” Coach yelled in the distance.

“Hey,” the twins turned around to see their mother standing before them looking panicked, “something’s happening, isn’t it? Something more than a lacrosse game?” Melissa asked Scott.

“You should go.” Scott attempted to persuade her.

“Oh, I’m not going anywhere. And, if you can do something to help, then you do it. You have to.”

“We will.” Y/n interrupted their moment, she met Melissa’s eyes then and saw the sadness and regret projected through them. As angry as Y/n was, and she deserved to be angry. She loved her mom, and new that this woman standing in front of her, {is} her mom.

The tension filled glance between Melissa and Y/n didn’t go unnoticed by Scott as he awkwardly stood between them.

---

“You owe me a new bow.” Allison said to her father, mustering up as much attitude as she could. She had a chance tonight to kill two betas, Erica and Boyd. Before her father so willingly shot the bow from her hands.

“You owe me an explanation.” He countered back.

“For what?” she rolled her eyes, “ I caught them. Me.”

Chris shook his head, “‘caught’ came very close to kill. And that’s not the way we do this.”

“Maybe it’s not the way you do it. I think my way worked pretty well.”

“Allison-” As her father began to speak she held her hand up towards him cutting him off so that she could speak into her phone.

“Hey, grandpa, it’s me. We got our two runaways. Call us back.” As she hung up she could feel her father’s gaze burning into her side profile.

“What?” she snapped.

“It’s just the first time I’ve heard you call him that.”

---

Y/n watched nervously as Stiles caught the ball. He was standing literally like 3 yards away from the goal, and he just stood there. He honestly had no idea what to do now that he actually had it. He looked behind him, seeing all the other players running towards him, but he still couldn’t bring himself to move.

“Stilinski! Shoot it. Shoot the ball! Shoot it, you idiot!” Coach was screaming from the sidelines, everyone in the stands was shouting his name, he found his dad in the crowd waving his arms back and forth probably shouting similar things.

It wasn’t until he continued sweeping his eyes across the field that he heard one voice.

“Shoot it!” Knowing exactly who it was, his eyes snapped to Y/n smiling at him excitedly with gleaming eyes. She was holding her hands together in anticipation, he smiled back before shooting the ball like she had told him to.

To- literally everyone’s surprise- the ball went in.

“I scored a goal? I scored a goal! I scored a goal!” Stiles was screaming as all his teammates swarmed him to congratulate him and pretty much thank him for saving their asses from losing the game.

“We did it! We won!” Coach yelled, eyes and smile wider than anyone had ever seen.

Y/n had started running out onto the field to find Stiles when suddenly, all the lights surrounding the field shut off, one by one leaving everyone that had come out tonight completely in the dark.

Screams immediately filled the air around them.

“Scott! Stiles!” Y/n called out as she stood exactly where she was, occasionally being pushed and shoved by those running and trying to find their way out. Y/n wrapped her arms around her ears and let her body sink down into the ground to avoid the ringing in her ears.

Even with her eyes squeezed shut and after what felt like minutes, the lights flickered back on, illuminating the now almost empty area.

Two arms grabbed Y/n and lifted her off the ground, she panicked until she noticed it was her mom.

“Are you okay?” Melissa asked, concerned.

“Yeah, yeah I’m good. Are you?”

“Yeah I’m fine, I’m fine. But somebody is hurt. Somebody is down on the field.”

Y/n glanced over to where her mom was pointing, seeing a group of people surrounding a lacrosse player on the ground.

Melissa and Y/n quickly hurried over to the body, to see that it was Jackson.

Melissa knelt down beside him immediately beginning to perform CPR after checking for his pulse and not finding one.

“Jackson!” A high-pitched voice made their way through the crowd, “What’s happened?” Lydia pushed until she was standing directly over his body.

Y/n stood next to Isaac and Scott as she watched Lydia bend down behind Jackson, tilting his chin up and helping Melissa. She watched the tears stream down Lydia’s face, knowing that no matter what Lydia was still in love with him.

And even as she was watching Lydia, she wasn’t really watching what was happening between Lydia and Jackson. She was realizing. Realizing that when she first saw someone down on the field her mind immediately went to Stiles. Realizing that she was so afraid, not of the kanima or gerard or anything other than having to be in the same position as Lydia, but with Stiles.

Isaac watched her face and listened to the beat of her heart as she watched Lydia break when Melissa confirmed that she couldn’t save him.

Lydia’s tears had become streams and she draped herself over Jackson’s body as the paramedics tried to lift her off of him.

“Y/n,” Melissa called to her daughter, “I need you to get her out of here, get Lydia out of here.” Y/n nodded her head as the sheriff pushed his way through the crowd with wide eyes and a worried expression on his face.

“Stiles. Where’s Stiles? Where- where’s my son? Stiles? Where the hell is my son?”

Y/n whipped her head around in all directions searching for the boy who finally scored a goal, and when she couldn’t find him, she was now afraid that her fear was coming true.

[lodelss]

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2020 |  9 minutes (2,284 words)

I hate jocks. Like a good Gen X’er, I walked around my high school with that patch on my backpack — red lettering, white backdrop, frisbee-size. A jock high school. It’s impossible to overstate the contempt I had for sports as a kid. I hated what I took to be phony puddle-deep camaraderie, the brain-dead monosyllabic mottos, the aggressive anti-intellectualism. More than that, there appeared to be a very specific cruelty to it. The way there were always a couple of kids who were always picked last. The collective bullying if someone didn’t measure up to the collective goals. And none of the teachers ever seemed to be as mean as the coaches. They strutted around like grown children, permanently transfixed by the ambitions of their adolescence, actively excluding the same kids they had mocked in their youth.

When I hear about sports stars who kill or commit suicide or generally behave antisocially, I always think: no wonder. In a culture that destroys your body and your mind, no wonder. It’s something of a paradox, of course, because, as we are repeatedly told, physical activity is often essential to psychological health. But why is it so rarely the other way around? I watch Cheer and I watch Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez and I watch former NBA star Delonte West get callously thrashed and I wonder why these athletes’ inner lives weren’t as prized as their motor skills. That’s not true; I know why. It suits a lucrative industry that shapes you from childhood to keep you pliable. And what makes you more pliable than mental instability? What better way to get a winning team than to have it populated with people for whom winning validates their existence and for whom losing is tantamount to death?

* * *

There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in the Hernandez doc when there’s an unexpected crossover with Cheer. A childhood photo of the late NFL star and convicted murderer flashes on-screen as we learn that his female cousins made him want be a cheerleader. It was the same for Cheer’s La’Darius Marshall, who is shown in one snapshot as a young cheerleader, having discovered the sport after hanging out with one of his childhood girlfriends. Both men came from dysfunctional backgrounds: Marshall’s mom was a drug user who ended up in prison for five years. He was sexually abused, not to mention beaten up by his brothers; Hernandez found his own mother distant, and he was also physically and sexually abused. Both found solace in sports, though Hernandez had the kind of dad who “slapped the faggot right out of you,” per one childhood friend, so he ended up in football, his dad’s sport, instead. But their similarities underscore how professional athletics, when so closely tied to a person’s sense of self, can simultaneously be a boon to your mental health and its undoing.

Killer Inside is a misnomer for a start. Everything pointed to Hernandez’s conviction for murdering another footballer (semipro linebacker Odin Lloyd) — or at the very least a fair amount of psychological distress. (I’m not certain why the doc chose to focus on his sexuality — besides prurience — as it seemed to be the least of his concerns.) As he said himself to his mom, who almost immediately replaced her dead husband with Hernandez’s cousin’s husband when he was just a teenager: “I had nobody. What’d you think I was gonna do, become a perfect angel?” The way he fled from his home straight into the arms of a University of Florida football scholarship, having wrapped up high school a semester early, is telling. Football made him somebody. He depended on being a star player because the alternative was being nothing — as one journalist says in the doc, at Florida you had to “win to survive.” 

If the NFL didn’t know the depth of his suffering, they at least knew something, something a scouting service categorized as low “social maturity.” Their report stated that Hernandez’s responses “suggest he enjoys living on the edge of acceptable behavior and that he may be prone to partying too much and doing questionable things that could be seen as a problem for him and his team.” But his schools seemed to care more about his history of drug use than his high school concussion (his autopsy would later show chronic traumatic encephalopathy) or the fact that he busted a bar manager’s eardrum for confronting him with his bill. Physical pain was something you played through — one former linebacker described a row of Wisconsin players lining up with their pants down to get painkiller injections — and psychological pain was apparently no different. “It’s a big industry,” the ex-linebacker said, “and they’re willing to put basically kids, young men, in situations that will compromise their long-term health just to beat Northwestern.”

Cheerleading, the billion-dollar sport monopolized by a company called Varsity Brand, has a similarly mercenary approach. While the money is less extreme — the NFL’s annual revenue is more than $14 billion — the contingent self-worth is not. A number of the kids highlighted in Cheer had the kind of childhoods that made them feel like Hernandez, like they had nobody. Morgan Simianer in particular, the weaker flyer who is chosen for her “look,” radiates insecurity. Abandoned by both her parents, she was left as a high school sophomore in a trailer with her brother to fend for herself. “I felt, like, super alone,” Simianer said. “Like everyone was against me and I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t important to anyone.” Though Marshall’s experience was different, his memories of growing up are almost identical to his fellow cheerleader’s. “I felt like I was really alone,” he said. “There was nobody that was gonna come save me.” Like Hernandez, sports was all they had.

And if a competitive sport defines you, then its coach controls you. Hernandez’s father, the ex-football heavyweight, was known as the King; Monica Aldama, the head coach on Cheer, is the Queen. Describing how she felt when Aldama remembered her name at tryouts, Simianer said, “It was like I’m not just nobody.” For her ability to literally pummel a bunch of college kids into a winning team in half the regular time, Aldama has been characterized as both a saint and a sinner. While she claims to be an advocate for the troubled members of her team, she fails to see how their histories skew her intentions — her position as a maternal figure whose love is not unconditional ultimately puts the athletes more at risk. Aldama proudly comments on Simianer’s lack of fear, while it is a clear case of recklessness. This is a girl who is unable to express her pain in any way sacrificing her own life (literally — with her fragile ribs, one errant move could puncture an organ) for the woman who, ironically, made her feel like she was worthy of it. “I would do anything for that woman,” Simianer confesses at one point. “I would take a bullet for her.” Jury’s out on whether Marshall, the outspoken outsize talent who regularly clashes with his team, would do the same. His ambivalent approach to Aldama seems connected to how self-aware he is about his own struggles, which affords him freedom from her grasp. After she pushes him to be more empathetic, he explains, “It’s hard to be like that when you are mentally battling yourself.”

That Cheer and Killer Inside focus on the psychological as well as the physical strain faced by athletes — not to mention that athletics have no gender — is an improvement on the sports industries they present, which often objectify their stars as mere pedestals for their talents. The Navarro cheerleaders and Hernandez are both helped and hurt by sports, an outlet which can at once mean everything and nothing in the end. This is the legacy of the 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams, which followed two teen NBA hopefuls and was as much about the intersections of race and class as it was about basketball. Not to mention OJ: Made in America, the 2016 ESPN miniseries that explored how the story of the football star and alleged murderer reflected race relations in the United States in the mid-’90s. Conversely, mainstream film and television continues to be heavily male when it comes to sports, focusing on individual heroics, on pain leading to gain — the American Dream on steroids. Cheer and Killer Inside expose this narrative for the myth it is, spotlighting that all athletes have both minds and bodies that break, that their legacies as human beings are not about what they have won but who they are. But the climate in which they’ve landed cannot be ignored either, a social-media marinated world in which sports stars are no longer just players but people who are willing to be vulnerable with their public, who are even further willing to sign their names next to their problems for The Players’ Tribune, the six-year-old platform populated by content provided by pro athletes. “Everyone is going through something,” wrote NBA star Kevin Love in an industry-shaking post in 2018. “No matter what our circumstances, we’re all carrying around things that hurt — and they can hurt us if we keep them buried inside.”

Fast-forward to that new video of former basketball pro Delonte West, the one of him having his head stomped on so hard in the middle of the street that I still wonder how he survived it. He also came from an underprivileged, unstable background. He chose the college he did for its “family atmosphere.” Like Simianer, he fixated on his failures and played with abandon. Like her, he also had trouble verbalizing his feelings, to the point that they would overflow (in anger for him, tears for her). Though he says he was diagnosed with a bipolar disorder, he considers his biggest problem to be “self-loathing.” But why? He was a sports star who signed a nearly $13 million contract in his prime — what better reason for self-love? A study published two years ago in the Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, profiling the psychological well-being of 99 elite athletes, may provide an answer. The study found that those with high perfectionism, fear of failure, and performance-based self-worth had the highest levels of depression, anxiety, shame, and life dissatisfaction. Those with a more global self-worth that did not depend on their performance had the opposite outcome. As if to provide confirmation, a subsequent study published in Psychology of Sport and Exercise that same year revealed that athletes with contingent self-esteem were more likely to burn out. When sports become your only source of value, your wins ultimately don’t come to much.

* * *

The irony of all of this is that I came back to sports as an adult for my mental health. Obviously, I’m not an elite athlete — whatever the opposite of that is, I am. But having no stakes makes it that much easier to use physical activity for good. Nothing is dependent on it; that I’m moving at all is victory enough. But my circumstances are different. My jock high school was a private school, sports were (mostly) optional, and elite academics were where most of us found validation — and financial stability. “Conventional wisdom suggests that the sport offers an ‘escape’ from under-resourced communities suffering from the effects of systemic neglect,” Natalie Weiner writes in SB Nation. “If you work hard enough and make the right choices — playing football being one of the most accessible and appealing ways for boys, at least, to do that — you should be safe.” This reminds me of Aldama telling a room of underprivileged kids with limited prospects, “If you work hard at anything you do, you will be rewarded, you will be successful in life.” This is the American Dream–infused sports culture the media has traditionally plugged — the one, ironically, dismantled by the show in which Aldama herself appears. As Spike Lee tells a group of the top high school basketball players in the country in Hoop Dreams: “The only reason why you’re here, you can make their team win, and if their team wins, schools get a lot of money. This whole thing is revolving around money.” 

In the same SB Nation article, which focused on how school football coaches combat gun violence, Darnell Grant, a high school coach in Newark, admitted he prioritized schoolwork, something both Cheer and Killer Inside barely mentioned. “My thing is to at least have the choice,” he said. Without that, kids are caught in the thrall of sports, which serves the industry but not its players. Contingent self-worth does the same thing, which is why mental health is as much of a priority as education. The head football coach at a Chicago high school, D’Angelo Dereef, explained why dropping a problematic player — which is basically what happened to Hernandez at U of F, where coach Urban Meyer pushed him into the NFL draft rather than taking him back — doesn’t fix them. “They’re not getting into their brains to figure out why,” Dereef told the site. “It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a big cut — that’s not going to stop the bleeding.” While the NBA was the first major sports league to address mental health in its collective bargaining agreement in 2018, in mid-January the WNBA signed its own new CBA, which only vaguely promised “enhanced mental health benefits and resources.” That the sports industry as a whole does not go far enough to address the psychological welfare of its players is to their detriment, but also to their own: At least one study from 2003 has shown that prioritizing “athletes’ needs of autonomy” — the opposite of contingent self-worth — as opposed to conformity, has the potential to improve their motivation and performance. In sports terms, that’s a win-win.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

[lodelss]

Be a Good Sport

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2020 |  9 minutes (2,284 words)

I hate jocks. Like a good Gen X’er, I walked around my high school with that patch on my backpack — red lettering, white backdrop, frisbee-size. A jock high school. It’s impossible to overstate the contempt I had for sports as a kid. I hated what I took to be phony puddle-deep camaraderie, the brain-dead monosyllabic mottos, the aggressive anti-intellectualism. More than that, there appeared to be a very specific cruelty to it. The way there were always a couple of kids who were always picked last. The collective bullying if someone didn’t measure up to the collective goals. And none of the teachers ever seemed to be as mean as the coaches. They strutted around like grown children, permanently transfixed by the ambitions of their adolescence, actively excluding the same kids they had mocked in their youth.

When I hear about sports stars who kill or commit suicide or generally behave antisocially, I always think: no wonder. In a culture that destroys your body and your mind, no wonder. It’s something of a paradox, of course, because, as we are repeatedly told, physical activity is often essential to psychological health. But why is it so rarely the other way around? I watch Cheer and I watch Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez and I watch former NBA star Delonte West get callously thrashed and I wonder why these athletes’ inner lives weren’t as prized as their motor skills. That’s not true; I know why. It suits a lucrative industry that shapes you from childhood to keep you pliable. And what makes you more pliable than mental instability? What better way to get a winning team than to have it populated with people for whom winning validates their existence and for whom losing is tantamount to death?

* * *

There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in the Hernandez doc when there’s an unexpected crossover with Cheer. A childhood photo of the late NFL star and convicted murderer flashes on-screen as we learn that his female cousins made him want be a cheerleader. It was the same for Cheer’s La’Darius Marshall, who is shown in one snapshot as a young cheerleader, having discovered the sport after hanging out with one of his childhood girlfriends. Both men came from dysfunctional backgrounds: Marshall’s mom was a drug user who ended up in prison for five years. He was sexually abused, not to mention beaten up by his brothers; Hernandez found his own mother distant, and he was also physically and sexually abused. Both found solace in sports, though Hernandez had the kind of dad who “slapped the faggot right out of you,” per one childhood friend, so he ended up in football, his dad’s sport, instead. But their similarities underscore how professional athletics, when so closely tied to a person’s sense of self, can simultaneously be a boon to your mental health and its undoing.

Killer Inside is a misnomer for a start. Everything pointed to Hernandez’s conviction for murdering another footballer (semipro linebacker Odin Lloyd) — or at the very least a fair amount of psychological distress. (I’m not certain why the doc chose to focus on his sexuality — besides prurience — as it seemed to be the least of his concerns.) As he said himself to his mom, who almost immediately replaced her dead husband with Hernandez’s cousin’s husband when he was just a teenager: “I had nobody. What’d you think I was gonna do, become a perfect angel?” The way he fled from his home straight into the arms of a University of Florida football scholarship, having wrapped up high school a semester early, is telling. Football made him somebody. He depended on being a star player because the alternative was being nothing — as one journalist says in the doc, at Florida you had to “win to survive.” 

If the NFL didn’t know the depth of his suffering, they at least knew something, something a scouting service categorized as low “social maturity.” Their report stated that Hernandez’s responses “suggest he enjoys living on the edge of acceptable behavior and that he may be prone to partying too much and doing questionable things that could be seen as a problem for him and his team.” But his schools seemed to care more about his history of drug use than his high school concussion (his autopsy would later show chronic traumatic encephalopathy) or the fact that he busted a bar manager’s eardrum for confronting him with his bill. Physical pain was something you played through — one former linebacker described a row of Wisconsin players lining up with their pants down to get painkiller injections — and psychological pain was apparently no different. “It’s a big industry,” the ex-linebacker said, “and they’re willing to put basically kids, young men, in situations that will compromise their long-term health just to beat Northwestern.”

Cheerleading, the billion-dollar sport monopolized by a company called Varsity Brand, has a similarly mercenary approach. While the money is less extreme — the NFL’s annual revenue is more than $14 billion — the contingent self-worth is not. A number of the kids highlighted in Cheer had the kind of childhoods that made them feel like Hernandez, like they had nobody. Morgan Simianer in particular, the weaker flyer who is chosen for her “look,” radiates insecurity. Abandoned by both her parents, she was left as a high school sophomore in a trailer with her brother to fend for herself. “I felt, like, super alone,” Simianer said. “Like everyone was against me and I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t important to anyone.” Though Marshall’s experience was different, his memories of growing up are almost identical to his fellow cheerleader’s. “I felt like I was really alone,” he said. “There was nobody that was gonna come save me.” Like Hernandez, sports was all they had.

And if a competitive sport defines you, then its coach controls you. Hernandez’s father, the ex-football heavyweight, was known as the King; Monica Aldama, the head coach on Cheer, is the Queen. Describing how she felt when Aldama remembered her name at tryouts, Simianer said, “It was like I’m not just nobody.” For her ability to literally pummel a bunch of college kids into a winning team in half the regular time, Aldama has been characterized as both a saint and a sinner. While she claims to be an advocate for the troubled members of her team, she fails to see how their histories skew her intentions — her position as a maternal figure whose love is not unconditional ultimately puts the athletes more at risk. Aldama proudly comments on Simianer’s lack of fear, while it is a clear case of recklessness. This is a girl who is unable to express her pain in any way sacrificing her own life (literally — with her fragile ribs, one errant move could puncture an organ) for the woman who, ironically, made her feel like she was worthy of it. “I would do anything for that woman,” Simianer confesses at one point. “I would take a bullet for her.” Jury’s out on whether Marshall, the outspoken outsize talent who regularly clashes with his team, would do the same. His ambivalent approach to Aldama seems connected to how self-aware he is about his own struggles, which affords him freedom from her grasp. After she pushes him to be more empathetic, he explains, “It’s hard to be like that when you are mentally battling yourself.”

That Cheer and Killer Inside focus on the psychological as well as the physical strain faced by athletes — not to mention that athletics have no gender — is an improvement on the sports industries they present, which often objectify their stars as mere pedestals for their talents. The Navarro cheerleaders and Hernandez are both helped and hurt by sports, an outlet which can at once mean everything and nothing in the end. This is the legacy of the 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams, which followed two teen NBA hopefuls and was as much about the intersections of race and class as it was about basketball. Not to mention OJ: Made in America, the 2016 ESPN miniseries that explored how the story of the football star and alleged murderer reflected race relations in the United States in the mid-’90s. Conversely, mainstream film and television continues to be heavily male when it comes to sports, focusing on individual heroics, on pain leading to gain — the American Dream on steroids. Cheer and Killer Inside expose this narrative for the myth it is, spotlighting that all athletes have both minds and bodies that break, that their legacies as human beings are not about what they have won but who they are. But the climate in which they’ve landed cannot be ignored either, a social-media marinated world in which sports stars are no longer just players but people who are willing to be vulnerable with their public, who are even further willing to sign their names next to their problems for The Players’ Tribune, the six-year-old platform populated by content provided by pro athletes. “Everyone is going through something,” wrote NBA star Kevin Love in an industry-shaking post in 2018. “No matter what our circumstances, we’re all carrying around things that hurt — and they can hurt us if we keep them buried inside.”

Fast-forward to that new video of former basketball pro Delonte West, the one of him having his head stomped on so hard in the middle of the street that I still wonder how he survived it. He also came from an underprivileged, unstable background. He chose the college he did for its “family atmosphere.” Like Simianer, he fixated on his failures and played with abandon. Like her, he also had trouble verbalizing his feelings, to the point that they would overflow (in anger for him, tears for her). Though he says he was diagnosed with a bipolar disorder, he considers his biggest problem to be “self-loathing.” But why? He was a sports star who signed a nearly $13 million contract in his prime — what better reason for self-love? A study published two years ago in the Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, profiling the psychological well-being of 99 elite athletes, may provide an answer. The study found that those with high perfectionism, fear of failure, and performance-based self-worth had the highest levels of depression, anxiety, shame, and life dissatisfaction. Those with a more global self-worth that did not depend on their performance had the opposite outcome. As if to provide confirmation, a subsequent study published in Psychology of Sport and Exercise that same year revealed that athletes with contingent self-esteem were more likely to burn out. When sports become your only source of value, your wins ultimately don’t come to much.

* * *

The irony of all of this is that I came back to sports as an adult for my mental health. Obviously, I’m not an elite athlete — whatever the opposite of that is, I am. But having no stakes makes it that much easier to use physical activity for good. Nothing is dependent on it; that I’m moving at all is victory enough. But my circumstances are different. My jock high school was a private school, sports were (mostly) optional, and elite academics were where most of us found validation — and financial stability. “Conventional wisdom suggests that the sport offers an ‘escape’ from under-resourced communities suffering from the effects of systemic neglect,” Natalie Weiner writes in SB Nation. “If you work hard enough and make the right choices — playing football being one of the most accessible and appealing ways for boys, at least, to do that — you should be safe.” This reminds me of Aldama telling a room of underprivileged kids with limited prospects, “If you work hard at anything you do, you will be rewarded, you will be successful in life.” This is the American Dream–infused sports culture the media has traditionally plugged — the one, ironically, dismantled by the show in which Aldama herself appears. As Spike Lee tells a group of the top high school basketball players in the country in Hoop Dreams: “The only reason why you’re here, you can make their team win, and if their team wins, schools get a lot of money. This whole thing is revolving around money.” 

In the same SB Nation article, which focused on how school football coaches combat gun violence, Darnell Grant, a high school coach in Newark, admitted he prioritized schoolwork, something both Cheer and Killer Inside barely mentioned. “My thing is to at least have the choice,” he said. Without that, kids are caught in the thrall of sports, which serves the industry but not its players. Contingent self-worth does the same thing, which is why mental health is as much of a priority as education. The head football coach at a Chicago high school, D’Angelo Dereef, explained why dropping a problematic player — which is basically what happened to Hernandez at U of F, where coach Urban Meyer pushed him into the NFL draft rather than taking him back — doesn’t fix them. “They’re not getting into their brains to figure out why,” Dereef told the site. “It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a big cut — that’s not going to stop the bleeding.” While the NBA was the first major sports league to address mental health in its collective bargaining agreement in 2018, in mid-January the WNBA signed its own new CBA, which only vaguely promised “enhanced mental health benefits and resources.” That the sports industry as a whole does not go far enough to address the psychological welfare of its players is to their detriment, but also to their own: At least one study from 2003 has shown that prioritizing “athletes’ needs of autonomy” — the opposite of contingent self-worth — as opposed to conformity, has the potential to improve their motivation and performance. In sports terms, that’s a win-win.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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