#in fact sorry if this is terrible it's 1am and i'm passing out any minute now

[masschase]

i’m really interested to see what Casey and Carlos relationship was like when he was alive. he’s such a fascinating character to think about purely because of how tragically his story ends and i wonder how that affected Casey too.

btw i hope you’re doing well :)

Phew sorry this took a while I dozed off at one point and all sorts 😅

Two SR characters ask meme

I occasionally worry about posting about these two because he's such a like... younger brother innocent bby type character for so many people including myself. But that's not how I wrote Casey and he's not particularly younger than her, maybe a year or so, so here goes.

Carlos was really the first person Casey had romantic feelings for (Shaundi was a little later during the sr2/3 gap). But she dealt with it about as well as you'd expect an awkward 16-year old who'd been thrown into the body of a 21-year old on a angst-filled power trip to react.

"Ugh, your aim's shit, let me help." (his aim was fine) "Hey, hey Carlos, betcha can't pick me up." (she was skinny *before* the coma, I think at this point a light breeze could pick her up) And the particularly egregious: *flirts in Spanish then asks what it means* (she's semi-fluent and worse, he knows that🤦🏼)

In terms of writing I wove this into her backstory fairly subtly because by the time we actually see her 5-13 years later I feel like she has got so used to her "love is dangerous" attitude that she doesn't really trace it back to Carlos. If anything she traces it back to Aisha's death, because she sees the way Johnny changes more than she sees any change in herself.

We see in chapter 7 her biggest fear is something she's not comfortable to admit. In chapter 10 we see that this fear is losing someone she cares about again. This could be about any one of the friends she's lost but the fact she says it in reference to protecting Matt suggests she lost someone she had feelings for. In chapter 15 she thinks about the fact she would comfort Johnny about Aisha and he would comfort her about Carlos, rather than just them grieving together, suggesting some sort of mirror between the two losses and that Carlos meant something different to Casey than Johnny.

In chapter 21 Matt asks her in 2021 if she's aromantic. Her thoughts on this are "She hadn't gone as far as falling in love, she’d never let herself get that close. But she’d had the feeling of starting to fall. Being just on the edge. Holding on by her fingertips and clawing herself right back. It was so terrifying that she avoided the precipice completely now.". This could mean Shaundi, and it does, but it also applies to Carlos, and he's the reason she classifies it as "terrifying". And although this is late on, it doesn't really spoil the plot, so; in chapter 32 when Johnny is (very accurately) calling Casey out on not being able to talk about her feelings, he asks her if she ever told Carlos how much she liked him.

She points out that is not cool rather than give an actual answer, but the answer is that no, she didn't. In fact the artwork I did of them together that I've not yet been able to fix enough for my liking... well I can describe it here actually.

Carlos is standing slightly behind long purple haired (main SR2 look) Casey, smiling and tapping/poking her on the shoulder while she turns her head and smiles back. Their faces are kind of close. A gradient starts around their shoulders that fades down to very dark grey where we see the words "I'll tell him tomorrow.". Then below the words, we see the barely visible black silhouette of their hands clasped together as per Red Asphalt.

Those words really sum up Casey's feelings around Carlos. Thing is though, it's not some really poetic or contrived thing where she thought it for the first time and that tomorrow was the day she had to mercy kill him. She thought it for a while. There were a lot of tomorrows. Yet still she didn't speak her mind, much as Johnny recognises 12 years later.

And because she likes to find meaning in all the shitty events she's witnessed in her life, her regret about that gives way to a belief that she may have actually made the right choice That's where her abandonment issues and fear of commitment tip over into a conscious choice to avoid relationships, into stuffing down those feelings deeper and deeper even as they grow stronger.

Obviously her highly "logical" views are complete bullshit when it comes to emotions. But if she didn't have those views, she wouldn't be her, and if they weren't bullshit, I wouldn't have a story. So at least that's something, right? 🙂