#this blog always and forever will be a fan of fucked up and evil delanceys!

[we-are-inevitable]

disclaimer: all of this is my PERSONAL opinion. if you believe something different, that’s completely fine and i support that! however these are just my thoughts bc ive gotten a lot of delancey asks recently and i think they are FASCINATING but not for the (recently) popular reasons

real talk though: i personally think the delanceys are less compelling and fun when theyre redeemed tbh. i think, if you’re going to like the delanceys or use them in fics or make fan art of them, you can’t sanitize what they’ve done. THATS what makes them compelling and fun- they’re ruthless, they’re mean, and they don’t give a fuck about the newsies. they can have whatever backstory you want them to have but they are not The Delancey Brothers if you take away the one thing they have in canon: brutalizing children and having fun with it.

you can absolutely blame their actions on a tragic backstory. i’m not saying you can’t. but taking that fanon backstory and turning them into redeemable, lovable characters is frankly disrespecting the source material, and it doesn’t make sense in regards to canon. you can humanize them without sympathizing with and redeeming them, essentially.

and to me, that’s the fun part! the delanceys are good characters because they’re awful characters. they’re fucked up. they have no remorse. they help ruin lives and they brutalize children and they never show any guilt, or any indication that this isn’t exactly what they shouldn’t be doing. the delanceys are fascinating characters that i truly love, but only because they are irredeemable and dejected and downright brutal. that’s what they are. you can’t change that.

and before anyone says that you can change it in an au: you can! you can absolutely do that- but they won’t be a Delancey if you do. they won’t hold the same weight. if you treat them like they’re “uwu sweet boys”, you’re actively going against everything in the source material; at that point, they aren’t The Show’s characters. they are Your characters. if you want to change them up, that’s fine and wonderful and a lot of iterations of their characters are really interesting, but the driving force behind the delanceys as characters is their codependent brutality. there has to be an aspect of that for them to be recognizable, and i think that’s fucking INCREDIBLE.

basically, there has to be some Essence of their canon characteristics to make out-of-character things work. i’m known for my love of david jacobs, so i’m going to use that as an example. is my davey accurate to the show? no, because i love giving him my own backstory and character traits. but i have reasonings behind the traits i give him, and those reasons are based pulled from canon and expanded on. you can’t just completely ignore canon for everything because then- like i said above- they aren’t The character anymore, they’re Your character, and it’s not the same.

the delanceys are a masterclass in the fact that trauma (though completely fanon- there’s no canon evidence of it) is not always something you can overcome, because you continue to perpetuate it. at that point, they’re no longer victims. they’re just as bad as who created them.