next year’s words

big fan of liars. big fan of characters whose entire existence is a facade. love it when everything's stripped away from them and the lie is the only thing left of their identity. love it when the lines between an act and the truth are blurring. are they even them without the lie? the lie doesn't become the truth per se, but it's now such an intricate part of them it might as well be.

i want to surgically remove chance treize from my mind and make him someone else’s problem. unfortunately i love and cherish him deeply and ultimately i don’t think i want to lose him. which is wild because that’s literally exactly how every character in the book feels about him too

thing about chance is that the most important part of his story in deep six, no matter what shape that eventually takes, is that he does not do anything to ‘deserve’ being saved. things about redemption arcs is that they tend to be constructed in such a way that, at the last minute, the redeemee suddenly makes a change, stands up to their own bad choices, and does the good thing instead, allowing their friends to rush in and rescue them without guilt, welcoming them back into the fold. which is fine. that’s a fine way to do it

but the thing about chance is that it’s just. very important to me that he doesn’t have to redeem himself before being saved. he doesn’t have to save his own soul before it’s acceptable for others to save his body. he doesn’t have to “deserve” rescue to be rescued. at the end of every draft of deep six but the first, he’s been kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, and been turned against his family — as a consequence of turning on them by choice first. and in every draft, he’s been too afraid to “stand up to” the people who hurt him. he doesn’t get to say he’s sorry, he doesn’t get to even try a sacrifice play, he wouldn’t even if he could. he’s been too afraid for too long.

but his family saves him anyway. because they love him. they want him, apology or no, sacrifice or no. they don’t care if he “deserves” it, that’s not a question that matters — what matters is that they love him. and they know that somewhere in his broken, abused, tired little liar’s soul that he loves them too. so they save him when he’s given them nothing, no reason to do it

and that’s when he redeems himself. when he sees them come to save him when he’s done nothing to deserve it and everything to deserve abandonment, and he decides that if he lives, he’s with them forever. no more betrayal, a slow and cautious end to the lies and half truths — a thaw. he believes that he can’t afford to “redeem himself” before that point, but this final desperate act of love gives him the courage to face his worst impulses head on and see that they don’t protect him better than loving lev, sixes, and sevens back will.

love when characters have to have a domestication arc before you can even consider giving them a redemption arc

in all the previous drafts of deep six, it's always lev or sevens who kills the gang's assassin leader guy, often in a sense that it's "for" chance, who was arguably the most abused/objectified by the guy, but it's never been chance himself. but there have been a couple characters who remind me a lot of chance and who DO get a moment of real catharsis and now........ i don't know! on one hand it would be SO satisfying to let chance finally seize his own agency and put that part of his life behind him with his own hands. but on the other hand it's soooooo Like Him that chance would prioritize his own security up to and past the point of freeing himself from his situation and only after the act was done by someone else would he realize that that could have been him. he could have done that. but he was afraid. he was so afraid, not of being hurt but of being hurt in new and unfamiliar ways, that he let go of that opportunity. I DON'T KNOW, i have and apparently always will have thoughts and feelings about chance's agency and i never know what to do with them!!!

and i don't want it to be taken that i think chance is cowardly or that he is Wrong for being afraid, because he was like. comprehensively abused and groomed. he IS a coward and a shithead and kind of a garbage sibling but that's like. that's the point. there is Nothing else he could have been. the sadness of a version of his story where, even when he is handed the gun and helped to aim it, he can't finish it because he's so afraid of what would happen if he still somehow fails, is not that he's a Bad Person but that he has been trained out of seeing a way out. it's not that he should have somehow Been Better but that he was ever put in that position at all.

and also i cannot emphasize enough that he's a shithead. he's a mean selfish little coward who would sell you to satan for one corn chip. i can't guarantee that none of that would have been there had it not been for the abuse. it wouldn't be nearly as bad tho! that's on them!

Obsessed with characters who portray themselves as worse than they are. Who are lying to everyone including themselves about it. People generally assume if someone's lying about themselves they're trying to look better but sometimes they're trying to look worse. They attribute agency to where they had none, add intend to accidents, try to convince everyone that this is something they did instead of something that happened to them.

sexy character concept to me: liars who lie & perform and when they are told to stop performing they start lying in a different way and you try to get to the bottom of the layers upon layers of half-truths to find The Truth and when you think you’ve finally gotten to it it’s a blank piece of paper that says 404 not found

I think this is the funniest onion headline bar none

I ❤️ self-loathing characters, characters who struggle with monstrosity (either fearing or embracing it), characters who are so lonely, who have a gaping hole in their chest, who bottle up & repress their feelings, who claw their way up & have ambitions, who fall down & lose everything, who search for identity & purpose yet can’t see themselves outside of what others want from or expect of them, who are hurt & hurt others, who long & grieve, who lie & pretend. characters who are messy & flawed & human

tag the oc that thinks they are the sexiest ever BUT they also hate themself

absolutely sucks to know, clear-headed and fully aware, that lestat is a garbage manbaby supreme and that I hate him, but because I have a cherished oc who is also a pretty bitchy (scifi) french disaster extra pansexual, I’m always going to have a tiny little soft spot for him anyway. the monster

hi, hello, this post was written pre-episode 5. I have no soft spots and lestat has no rights. stay dead. chance treize supremacy