#rest in peace unsweet prince. because god knows he needs some peace

[lakesbian]

okay i blinked and accidentally wrote 1.2k more words to correct/elaborate on a point in here. continued content warning for extended discussion of CSA and rape. trigger warning alecs childhood.

edit: changed some phrasing and added more detail. no idea how long this thang is now

i largely still stand by everything in the first essay but i do actually want to make one edit re "cape groupies, my dad's girls, people i used my powers on, towards the end." i think the "towards the end" implies that this is specifically in chronological order as he recalls it, and what he's referring to for each is:

cape groupies: as stated above, not actually cape groupies! there is no such thing as Normal Regular Cape Groupies for children living in an infamous and widely reviled cult. but rather than being pedophiles specifically drawn to alec's power (like i initially theorized), this actually most likely refers to alec being prostituted by heartbreaker prior to obtaining his power and reframing it through phrasing which implies he had some form of autonomy in the situation--he makes it sound like he was voluntarily choosing to sleep with (or maybe even coercing!) people who were fans of him specifically for being in a cape group, when the actual reality was prolonged CSA.

when taylor reacts with disgust to him saying that he "used to have someone in his bed every night," he says that "it was normal to him." i think prolonged CSA even prior to triggering/being given access to his father's adult victims was the reason why it was normal to him, and i think he's reframing it so heavily because 1. he can't currently psychologically handle acknowledging the extent to which he was violated and so instead he chooses to discuss it thru a lens that downplays his loss of autonomy and 2. it was effectively the only attention or physical contact he received that wasn't done with explicit intent to punish/hurt him for a perceived slight, so he recalls the sexual abuse as some of the better moments in his childhood.

additional context from ward details that one of alec's younger sisters--candy--triggered from fear of a man her father had sent her to spend the day with. beyond this confirming that heartbreaker prostituted his children, it confirms that the people he sold them to were allowed to take the children away from the cult location and spend time w/ them wherever they wanted. so add "the only time alec was allowed/able to leave the cult house was while being sexually abused" to the list of reasons why his recollections reframe it as a highlight of his childhood.

his dad's girls: alec details in 7.1 that heartbreaker's adult victims either ignored the children or actively disliked the children, and it's very safe to assume that heartbreaker wouldn't have allowed any of his children to rape one of his abducted women without his explicit permission, which he wouldn't give without strong reason. (it can also be safely assumed that, without his power, known runt-of-the-litter alec wouldn't have been able to overpower an adult woman anyway.) all of this is to say that alec would not have had sexual access to the women in the household under normal circumstances, so i think it's most likely that, after alec triggered or did something sufficiently cycle-of-violency to gain heartbreaker's "approval," heartbreaker emotionally tweaked women to ensure that alec would have sexual access to them--a "prize" for alec that he (desperate for care and physical affection) would immediately latch onto, thus further grooming him into enacting abuse towards others. it's especially worth remembering that when alec is talking about this in 14.1, the language he uses is all along the lines of "cuddled up beside me," "body contact," etc--nothing very sexual, a lot of focus on literally just having and enjoying physical affection. you would quite possibly not expect alec "irony poisoning & emotional repression" vasil to cop to liking cuddles, but he sure does cop to liking cuddles. it's extremely unambiguous that he was sexually assaulting the women, and also extremely unambiguously tragic that his memories of it clearly evoke the image of a 10-11yo being taught to only have his basic needs for physical contact satisfied in the context of being groomed to abuse others.

people he used his power on towards the end: i think this is the only one that's more in line w/ what most people are actually imagining when they think about sexual violence during alec's childhood (i.e. stereotypically callous sexual assault with alec unambiguously in the position of abuser vs one of the abused.) at this point in his life, he's been forced to do an uncountable amount of atrocious, soul-crushing things. he's thoroughly used to having to regard the autonomy of others & his own as meaningless to survive, and he's thoroughly used to hypersexual behavior (& drug usage) being effectively the only things in life that console him thru horrendous daily abuse. he has no reason to see sexual violence as particularly bad or unique in the grand scheme of the abuse regularly visited upon everyone victimized by the cult--he was groomed for years to see sexual abuse happening to himself & others as just something that happens. because someone has power over someone else and wants to hurt them, or because someone is having a bad day and wants to feel better, or just because, with no mental map of a life without sexual violence. it's not even possible for him to fully recognize the atrocity of sexual violence without fully recognizing the emotional damage of how heavily he's been (& is still being) abused and then crumbling. so at this point, numbed to human suffering in all its forms and desperate for any fragment of positive psychological stimulation or comfort, alec starts raping the people he's already being told to use his power on.

this is the part cherish mentions where he was throwing orgies for himself. it's what his power represents coming to a head: his desire to step out of being alec and playact at being someone else for a bit, because being alec is miserable. his desire to get the fuck out of his own body, the body that he's been violated and hurt in over and over and over again. his desire for contact, to be as close to someone else as humanly possible. but no matter how many people he was hijacking at once, he was always still just--as it's phrased in his interlude--sleeping with himself. he could pretend to be someone else, and he could force people to touch him, but he could never actually be anyone but alec, and he could never actually force anyone to care about him. in fact, he could always feel how much they resented him the entire time.

it's noteworthy to recall that during the fugly bob's convo in arc 4 he outright says that he "doesn't see the difference" between what sophia did to taylor (the locker) and hypothetical sexually violent revenge (leaving sophia naked on the side of the highway w/o regard for if she gets raped). this is the textual indicator we have that, at the point where he was raping people he used his power on, sexual violence was so ubiquitous in his life that he literally had no ability to read it as markedly different or worse than nonsexual/generic physical violence. because to reiterate, not seeing it as different or worse is a good step no. 1 for repressing any devastatingly negative emotions one might have about being sexually assaulted for their entire childhood--being out of the cult for just two years doesn't mean that he's ready or able to start unpacking the experience.

he was a late 12yo/a 13yo during this final point, because he specifies that it was towards the end of his time in the cult. (he ran away when he was 13, and joined the undersiders when he was 13 1/2.) i can't imagine blaming alec as a person for any of it as opposed to wanting to strangle out his father, particularly given that:

1. he was 13 at the oldest. do you know how small 13yos are. theyre pretty small. there is certainly a transitional period within a heartbroken's shift from "abused child in cult" to "someone perpetuating abuse onto other children within that cult" where how much culpability they have is brought into question, but 13yos are still pretty fucking small.

2. we see a variety of implications that it was in part his moral discomfort that led him to running away from the cult, meaning that he did literally decide "not doing this shit anymore" more or less the second he reached the age where many people stop being fully comfortable in recusing groomed children as "not knowing better" when they perpetuate what they've been taught onto others.

I left my father because he was trying to control me and force me to be someone and something I wasn’t. It wasn’t even remotely interesting or fun any more.

read: he left his father because didn't want to be the abusive person his father was turning him into. the drugs and hypersexual behavior he had been introduced to as a very young tween initially felt like an interesting/mature/enjoyable distraction from the abuse he was facing, but they lost all of that appeal as he realized that hurting others was 1. doing nothing to fill the gigantic void inside him and 2. actually only making it bigger.

i think we see the first Reaaaally Bad Incident he has moral culpability for onscreen in his interlude. that one is something he needs to interrogate himself over to avoid backsliding every time he's upset, but everything prior to leaving the cult was, while obviously disturbing and not something he was literally being held at gunpoint for every step of the way, the result of intense coercion of a severely abused child in an actively traumatizing environment. thus concludes "here's what actually happened in alec's shit childhood and why you should be nice to him about it" part two

so i blinked & accidentally wrote 2.4k words of alec analysis, content warning for extended discussion of child sexual abuse

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