#post-emancipation tortured genius

[theunholyvirginemilyprentiss]

(requested by @i-live-in-spite)

SPENCER REID | post-prison aesthetic.

— post-emancipation tortured genius

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[bewareofchris]

I know, I know, every time anyone mentions Sass to me once I have to post random things about it for a few days but when you take a year of your life to write something (and how many spreadsheets?  word docs?  who knows, not I???) you are going to forever take every opportunity to talk about so lets talk about CHARACTERIZATION.

Specifically Altair.  Because we were chatting about him this morning

Altair starts out Sass as a 100 lb whiny baby with 0 aspirations in his life.  He is referred to and thought of as “the baby”  (And he is, at this point in the story, like a giant baby.  God I hated him so much.  I wanted to flush him down the toilet.)

Nobody was impressed by Altair.  Despite the fact he was the wealthiest person in the family.  Despite the fact he had gotten himself emancipated at 16 and had been legally an adult since then.  Despite the fact that is a Certified Genius.  

In fact the opposite is true.  All of his family considers him kind of a punchline.  (Especially his idiot Auditore Cousins.)  Some of them even actively dislike him based on how he was the clear favorite, and inherited all these things.

Altair also has NO IDEA what shit went down in his family despite the fact that he was alive, and about 10/11 and present during all of it.  Everyone in his entire family actively lied to him about The Drama

Also at this point his Mother, Father, and Grandmother have all died.  He’s only like 20.

In summation, Altair is a skinny, resentful, sullen toddler throwing fits over any slight inconvenience that happens his way.

ENTER CATALYST #1.  He sleeps with a high schooler, freaks out about how he’s gay and proceeds to up his level of denial by 1000.  

CATALYST #2 is very soon after 1, when Desmond (his closest cousin) gets angry enough at Altair’s whining to show him The Sett, a website that’s devoted to telling off Altair for all the stupid shit he does.  Altair is probably as delighted by the discovery as he might be angry.  Because it’s what he wants in life, he wants someone to take such an interest in him that it’s keeping them up at night.

(Altair is lonely.)

Altair realizes he’s unhappy so he starts going to the gym, he makes friends with the girl who wants to fuck Desmond (Lucy).  She also is like “I couldn’t be less impressed by you if I put effort into it.”  

He’s still a giant toddler.  He’s a massive, stupid toddler.  He stays a giant, ignorant, squalling baby for a while.  Because it’s easy to be, because it doesn’t take a lot of work and because he can.  He’s rich, he’s young, he’s healthy.  He has 0 obstacles in his life.  

the single most important catalyst for Altair is CATALYST #3, and that is Mrs. Finch, in the kitchen, spilling the beans about what happened to Desmond.  The moment that Altair is confronted with the truth about why he’s rich, why his family is divided, why Desmond is the way he is--  This is the moment that Altair changes the most as a person.  

Because the whining toddler was a punch line, but Altair flies to California just to punch his cousin in the face, and from that moment on he only gets steadily more feared by the rest of his family.  He was a stupid baby, a disgrace, an embarrassment up to this point.

Catalyst #3 brings about the fact that Altair really was raised by “a psychopath” because he is fully willing to hurt anyone at any cost just to get justice (vengeance) for what they did to his cousin.  

Now Altair’s still lonely, and he loves Sass (who by this point has become a friend and is developing into more).  

Catalyst #4 is when Altair realizes he loves Sass and he can’t have her.  He’s never been told he can’t have something in all his life.  He’s never faced obstacles before EVER.  This requires him to tap into his nonexistence patience.  This is most evident when Sass is in the accident and Altair can’t do a fucking thing.

One shouldn’t underestimate how much self-control it took for Altair to do nothing.  (”nothing” being relative since he paid for Sass’ hospital and sent his lawyers to handle everything.)  

Catalyst #5 is the fight with Leonardo.  This circles us back to Altair’s learned violent responses and his complete and utter disinterest in other people’s welfare.  He absolutely would have killed a man here and it takes him a bit to figure out that’s NOT A GOOD THING.  He does though.  He figures it out.  Good guy.

CATALYST #6, really the last one of the whole story for him, is figuring out what he’s known since the beginning, that Sass is Malik.  Here he is, violent, angry, lonely, being asked to think of others before himself, terrified of being gay (for a variety of reasons) and there is the person he has been in love with, the one that he can’t have but Sass is a man.  This is the moment that made Altair’s entire character.

He lashes out.  He stops.  He excuses himself.  

FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER, IN THE ENTIRE STORY, HE SAYS TO HIMSELF.  SELF.  THIS IS BAD BEHAVIOR.  SELF.  WE SHOULD STOP.  SELF, LET US THINK IT THROUGH.

After this there’s some other stuff about him convincing Malik to meet him, and him getting angry about being called names, and that time he DID NOT agree to kill some guys for Malik... you know minor things.

Altair starts out this story as an overgrown toddler child with 0 respect from anyone, he ends the story as the leader of the family, the boy who was his Grandmother’s Living Wrath.  (Also some other stuff, about him learning to connect with people and how he found his own family and etc)

There is NO OTHER CHARACTER in Sass that changes nearly this much.  There might not be any other character I’ve written thus far that changes this much.

For that matter there’s really no other character that exists with such stark contrasts.  Altair is deeply loyal, very loving, incredibly generous, and he probably had his Uncle buried alive in a dark basement for the last 6-8 months of his life.  Altair has four kids he adores and has tea parties with but also he set up a contract to keep his Aunt trapped in a fancy villa surrounded by reminders that he owns her as a form of torture that she would definitely understand.  Altair fights his husband over getting new kitchen cabinets and appliances by researching companies with good histories but also he asked his (abused) cousin if he wanted to have an old woman beat up in an airport bathroom and then he arranged for that to happen.

I hated this bastard the entire time I wrote Sass.  I hated him every minute of it.  And now I love him.  I adore him.  He’s the best for me.

[theunholyvirginemilyprentiss]

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