#why did I start thinging about House of Wax?? couldn't tell ya

[murderboisblog]

I'm prepared if YOU'RE prepared to hear about how Andrew Lloyd Weber utterly shafted most of the characters in The Phantom of the Opera due to hyper-projecting on Erik and being in love with Sarah Brightman who played Christine, in exhaustive detail with several tangents about Philippe de Chagny and how he gets screwed over in every adaptation that remembers he exists

Bestie! I would love to hear about Phantom of the Opera, might actually kick my butt into watching/reading it so I can understand what you're on about

Also being in love with Sarah Brightman 🤝 I may not be a Broadway fan but I was 100% Repo The Genetic Opera trash

[barenecessiteas]

So I'm really not a writer on here, but I keep thinking of a bunch of headcanons about the Sinclairs in House of Wax. I think a lot of people aren't gonna agree, but I like adding layers and complexity to people' characters. And since I do mention Bo's abuse and scars I'll put it under the cut if people don't wanna see it. I'll do this in parts, but still this is gonna be long cuz I need to get all of this out of my head LMAO. First up is Trudy and Victor. Hope you enjoy 😊

Trudy & Victor

This section is mostly where I think people will disagree with me but here it goes - I don't think Trudy & Victor were *entirely* terrible parents. Don't get me wrong, it doesn't make the abuse any less horrifying or unacceptable, but like I said, I like to believe they're more complex than just plain evil

Now with my rant out of the way, onto the actual headcanons lol

Trudy picked out the names for the twins. She was VERY picky about choosing relatively uncommon names, or rather names that just weren't super popular

She picked Bo's name, Beauregard, because the first thing she said when she saw him for the first time was how beautiful his eyes were. Beauregard means "beautiful gaze" so she thought it fit well

Vincent's name was a compromise she came up with because Victor wanted a son named after him. Trudy adamantly refused because she thought "Victor Jr." sounded ridiculous 💀

Vincent and Victor both mean "to conquer" or "victory", so that's where she got the main idea. It wasn't a super common name, he would still technically be named after his father, and it just so happened to be the name of her favorite artist, Vincent Van Gogh

Victor picked Lester's name when he was born. He did not put nearly as much thought into naming his newborn child as Trudy did with the twins. He deadass just heard the name Lester somewhere and decided he liked it lol

Trudy had terrible postpartum depression after she had the twins. And it was exacerbated by the fact that they were conjoined

She couldn't shake the feeling that there must have been something wrong with HER body that caused them to be conjoined, like she must have done something wrong. She carried that guilt with her for the rest of her life

But instead of, ya know, seeking therapy and proper help, she ended up taking her frustrations out on the kids and Victor

Still, she does genuinely love all her boys, but love alone isn't enough to make you a good parent. She was a perfect example of that

Victor didn't tell Trudy that he was going to do the separation surgery himself. Trudy actually had some sense and wanted to take the babies to a doctor in the city that was properly qualified to perform such an operation

Yes, Victor was a surgeon, but we can see on some of the certificates and degrees in his study that he was only certified in general and vascular surgery. Those definitely aren't the right fields to separate two baby boys conjoined at the head

He waited until Trudy fell asleep one night, insisting that she should rest and he would take care of the boys if they woke up in the middle of the night. Once he was certain she was out cold, that's when he snuck the boys downstairs to separate them. Trudy was absolutely mortified

Both Trudy and Victor did genuinely worry about the boys' quality of life because of the way they were conjoined. But Victor was already used to doing sketchy surgeries on the side, and in his mind he was genuinely trying to help their boys

Trudy had a breakdown when she saw Vincent's little baby face completely wrapped in gauze after the surgery. That moment of holding him for the first time after the surgery was devastating because she felt powerless to help them

She was thrilled that Bo made it out of the surgery pretty unscathed, she never actually held that against him as they grew up. But he was still the victim of her anger anyway

The wax mask for Vincent was Trudy's idea, as I think most of us assumed anyway. When Vincent was around 3, he started asking why his face was so different from Bo's. His exact words as a toddler were "Why my face broken?"

His scars never bothered either Victor or Trudy in terms of appearance. The only thing that actually bothered them about it is that it was a permanent reminder of Victor's botched surgery that Vincent would have to carry for the rest of his life

The boys were identical twins, so she got the idea to start making masks of Bo's face to try to make Vincent feel better. She didn't expect him to become so dependent on it, and she never realized the damage it did to his self esteem

Trudy was kind of a hardass as a parent when any of the kids threw a fit or something. This was the 1970s, it was considered socially acceptable to spank or slap your kids from time to time as discipline. When she'd get overwhelmed with her depression or one of the kids was driving her crazy, that's when she would lash out

Obviously Bo's tantrums were the worst when it came to how she handled them. The highchair with the straps and tape was almost like their twisted version of a "time out"

It forced Bo to stay still, and they assumed that keeping him tied down was the only way to "calm" him because they were so unequipped to handle such frequent and and severe toddler tantrums

Once the boys outgrew the highchairs, Trudy and Victor would force Bo down long enough for them to just restrain him to a regular chair. It didn't have the straps anymore, so they just used a fuckton of duct tape

It did get a little better as the kids got older. Bo got better at hiding his emotions, so he didn't "act out" as much. She would still spank or slap him, Vincent, and Lester when they misbehaved

She did genuinely enjoy taking the boys out places, like the zoo or the park. It was her who took the majority of those pictures we see in the movie. It was partly a coping mechanism so she'd have reminders around the house that they did have happy moments as a family

*Most* of their everyday life was relatively normal, actually. Victor was usually busy with his medical practice, so most of the actual raising fell to Trudy (yet another reason she'd start feeling overwhelmed)

Most days Victor only really saw Trudy and the kids in the morning and in the evening at supper. On the occasional days off he had, he did genuinely enjoy teaching the kids different sports like football and baseball

All the boys do have genuinely fond memories of playing baseball together as a family in the backyard. They stuck with them so deeply because Victor was around so infrequently

Trudy didn't actually get a cyst in her brain, nor did Victor kill himself. Bo made that whole thing up

A clip from an interview with Brian Van Holt (Vince and Bo's actor) has him explaining that Bo pretty much just thought of it in the moment to string Carly and Wade along

I don't really have a headcanon for how either of them died tbh, but Victor did die before Trudy. He has a grave and headstone in the cemetery next to the church in town. The boys try to visit it (along with Trudy's... wax mummy disposition?) for things like Father's Day, Victor's birthday, and holidays

Welp, I think I've tortured you guys enough with my hyper fixation on this movie 🙃 Thanks for humoring me if you actually read this whole thing. I salute you lol