My Feelings About Derek Hale Are Complicated: An Essay.

[sapote]

Okay, so I posted kind of an incoherent flaily thing earlier about how Complicated my feelings are (after a full day of getting buffeted about by the winds of tumblr) and now I'm going to take it down and replace it with something that is hopefully but not definitely more coherent.

I've been coming around to the idea that I should actually take the interpersonal dynamics on this show seriously on a couple of fronts - that I was supposed to take it seriously when Matt was a grade-A creeper, that the way Scott and Allison kept miscommunicating would have consequences not just for their relationship but for them as people. The way that, if you think about it, Isaac Lahey's dad turns out to be a big bad of the season is kind of breathtaking.

I've loved this! I've loved that one of the major messages of the show with Matt and with Emo Teen Peter was "if your gut is screaming that someone's bad news, it's okay to listen." I love that acts of violence have consequences moving forward. I love that if something seems like a huge red flag? I'm supposed to take it as a huge red flag. This - happens less than it maybe should in things I watch. I really didn't realize that this was a show I should pay this kind of attention to, and now that I'm paying attention there's such a lot going on.

But this puts me in a weird place with Derek, because when I didn't think of this as the kind of show that would try to have intense, substantiated character arcs, I was honestly kind of sorting him in my mind into the category of a plot mover whose actions wouldn't have consequences and might seem morally incoherent depending on the broader needs of the season's plot.

And now that I'm taking into account that this is a show where characterization should be taken seriously, I'm realizing that Derek as currently stands is holy crap, really kind of a bad guy. His motivations are clear and interesting. He's clearly suffering a lot. But his reactions are often really really scary and red-flag-y and apparently I'm supposed to actually take this seriously, see again, Matt. And I want to take it seriously. Because every time I have taken a negative dynamic seriously in the show so far, it's really really been worth it.

But damn, it's a ship killer. Derek in canon is actually more of an interesting villain with a couple of good sides than an angsty hero with a couple of bad sides. He's targeted some really vulnerable people with promises of power and influence and belonging because he needs power and influence and belonging, and then he hurt them on purpose because he was frustrated and/or it was expedient. I can't believe that this particular show would show that Isaac's brutal father hit him and locked him up, and then go on to show that Derek hits him and locks him up, and not mean it. I don't think that this is irredeemable or irrecoverable - Isaac himself gets a grip on the situation, in a way that probably feels pretty damn cathartic to Isaac - but it's pretty intense.

Stiles has been telling everyone that his gut says not to trust Derek as he currently stands, and I learned from the thing with Matt that Stiles' gut is reliable and should be listened to. I honestly think that Scott did the right thing, in strict canon, staying the hell out of Derek's pack while he could, and Scott rarely does the right thing instinctively. I do think Derek's loyalty to Scott was a really redeeming, noble thing about Derek, but I also don't think Scott would have done well to put himself under Derek's power. And I definitely think canon Derek needs to not hit on teenagers until he's way, way better at dealing with power and feelings without breaking arms.

I do think that a lot of this can be explained by Derek being pretty self-loathing, taking it out on people he sees as extensions of himself, and making a lot of mistakes. But I also think that when the canon yells PAY ATTENTION HE DID A BAD THING I'm probably going to stop ignoring it, which is going to make things different.

In the meantime, fanon Derek is very lovable and damaged, but will come around after the application of sufficient cuddles and trust. (This is partially because there was a really, really long season break between s1 and s2, I think, and s1 Derek was not this intense.) This puts me in an awkward position, because I've both heard and read a lot about fanon Derek, and I want him to have cuddles and trust, but ONLY IF HE PROMISES NOT TO GIVE ANY TO CANON DEREK, who I think is going to have to go quite a ways to earn them. And I'm in a weird position right now where if I had to choose between canon and fanon, I would actually probably choose canon, which seriously has never happened to me before, I tend to only watch shows that are so uneven that you need fanon to even remotely make characterization work. I was not expecting this to happen to me.

... But I am worried that if I choose canon I will be forever alone, and damn I'm loving Sterek fanfiction so long as I remember that fanon Derek is kind of completely different. Is this my karma for being one of those McShep shippers who cut out after season 3 of SGA but kept writing anyway? It is, isn't it.

I am hoping for a long, awesome redemption arc, personally, where Derek is able to both admit to his mistakes and in some way heal the giant emotional wounds that make him make mistakes like this. I am definitely rooting for it way harder than I rooted for Spike on Buffy, who was not really my boo, and frankly even having said this, Derek is kind of my boo. I just - he's kind of a villain boo. I've never had one of those before, I completely missed Harry Potter fandom.

It seems best to have a big thing in my teen wolf tag that says "my feelings about Derek Hale are... complicated and I apparently kind of think he's a villain" because I have real trouble not talking about Teen Wolf ALL THE TIME because I LOVE IT SO MUCH and I also don't want to be a giant joykill outside of my journal.

I tell you what, I ship fanon Derek/canon Derek. They would be really good for each other.

Comments

[tacit]

Wow.

I really hadn't thought about much of this at all, but you are TOTALLY RIGHT. We've been patting Derek on the head and saying never mind, boo whenever he does something awful, because he's so damaged and fandom feels bad for him (plus his hotness makes us apologists), but YES! When he bit Erica it full-on skeeved me out, but I just put it down to uneven characterisation and chose to ignore the sketchiness. He just keeps on making villainous choices. And if Matt and kid!Peter were the other two of my three red lights this season (discounting Mr Lahey, because I think that's pretty clear cut) then maybe Derek is actually doing a Lex Luthor arc a la Smallville, rather than a Spike/Angel arc a la Buffy. D:

I would be really interested to see what Mr Stilinski makes of Derek, armed with all of the facts.

And I will give you A MILLION IMAGINARY DOLLARS if you write some Canon Derek/Fanon Derek redemption fic.

[sapote]

Oh man, I'm not sure whether I'm pleased that we agree and can talk about morally ambiguous Derek, or I'm sad that it's contagious, because I love Derek the Fandom Boo, I'm just not seeing him on screen much.

Yeah, I was making the argument for a while that while he WAS skeevy towards Erica it was because of his skill set, but after Lydia and Allison. I think there's a parallel plot happening. But you know, one guy screamed IF I CAN'T HAVE YOU NO ONE WILL and then died and one guy's a zombie ghost, and surely those aren't the only options. (Maybe this is just my shipping tinhat, but I feel like right now if Derek was going to yell IF I CAN'T HAVE YOU NO ONE WILL at anyone it would actually be at Scott, who he definitely wants with him on any terms.)

I really am still on the fence as to long-term villainy - I think Derek might be headed towards being season 2 Spike, only to later be post-soul Spike. I am not sure he's Lex Luthor yet.

... Lex Luthor was good at planning. OH SNAP.

Haha if you want Derek/!Derek I might post in this thread, though I'm worried about over-exaggerating fanon Derek, who really is a well-drawn character.

[tacit]

Don't feel bad, it's just that I now have two distinct characters to glomp all over rather than one!

See, I think that early-Smallville-Lex was in a similar kind of position: lonely, messed up, getting betrayed a lot, with nobody who would properly communicate with him. Although yes, as far as dumb plans go, Spike and Derek are certainly plan!buddies.

Haha if you want Derek/!Derek I might post in this thread, though I'm worried about over-exaggerating fanon Derek, who really is a well-drawn character.

Eeeexcellent! /Mr Burns

But really, fanon!Derek has more of a chance to be well-drawn, given the number of words devoted to him in comparison to canon!Derek's screen time.

[sapote]

My memories of Smallville are pretty faint because I wasn't formally in the fandom, which is what fixes things in my mind, but I agree with your interpretation. Which makes the parallel sad! Poor Derek. Stop doing terrible things for internally-consistent reasons!

[zeegoeshere]

Oh god, I apologize for my constant apologia for Derek, but I just can't stop it. /o\ But on the violence thing--okay, this is a supernatural show. And one of the tropes that I love about this kind of thing (and about genre media, in general) is that it almost always makes people who love each other do horribly violent things to each other. Derek broke Erica's arm because he was trying to heal her and maybe save her life (his first reaction when he was paralyzed was to hurt himself, too), and he chained his three wolves up to try and protect them. We saw Stiles try to chain up Scott on a full moon, too, and it didn't work and Scott got away and almost killed Allison and Jackson--I'm pretty sure that, had Stiles had access to Derek's horrifying chest of chains and torture devices, he would have been happy to use it if it meant keeping Scott from going berserk and killing people. Derek absolutely uses more pain and intimidation with everyone than he needs to, and you're right, it's an alarming characteristic. But it's so different from the way Matt and young!Peter's actions were framed (the creepy things about those characters, at least when they first started hitting on Allison and Lydia respectively, were entirely unsupernatural) that it's hard for me to interpret it as a sign from canon that I should distrust this character or that this character wants to hurt people; for me, it's more of a sign that violence is one of the only ways that Derek knows how to interact with people anymore.

I also think that Derek doesn't think of being a werewolf as a curse at all. Being hunted sucks, sure, but I don't think he hates what he is and I think that he turned Isaac, Erica and Boyd to try and help them. And yeah, in a lot of the scenes he has with them he's way creepier than he should be, but I guess I give a lot of that stuff a pass because of the whole genre/supernatural thing? Which is totally ymmv, and i understand why other people *don't* handwave it. In The Vampire Diaries, we're supposed to still find Stefan Salvatore sympathetic and heroic after he reverts to being a serial killer more than once, so I guess that's the terrible scale I'm coming from.

In my mind, the two worst, least forgivable things that Derek has done this season were 1) killing Peter before Scott could, and 2) deciding he was going to kill Lydia. I think 2 was definitely a symptom of Derek being scared and overwhelmed and totally in over his head as an alpha and therefore just making the wrongest decisions as possible because he thinks that he has to be Tough, but that doesn't excuse the fact that he came awfully close to ordering his wolves to kill an innocent girl, who was also their classmate. The scene where he and his pack are waiting outside Scott's house with Scott and Allison staring at them out the living room windows was just horrifying.

As for killing Peter Hale, it makes me angry because I think that, unlike a lot of Derek's terrible decisions, it came from a completely selfish place. I don't think Derek wanted power, but I think he desperately wanted to not be alone, and the only way he knew to keep Scott around was to cut off his metaphorical escape route. He didn't want to lose Scott and he didn't want to let someone else have that specific revenge on Peter. It's 100% a real dick move that he shouldn't have made if he really wanted to gain Scott's trust.

All of this is really me spitballing, though, because one of the reasons that Derek is so polarizing as a character is that he's so freaking cagey and enigmatic in canon that we only get these occasional glimpses into his head. I feel like we can make educated guesses on what his motivations are a lot of the time, but the show writers have seemed torn over whether they want to write a good guy or a bad guy all season, and all my defensive apologia could be made moot next episode if they decide, hey, bad guy after all! But personally, this is why I, personally, don't see him as a villain. Ahahaha, sorry for writing a Very Srs Essay about this stupid brooding character in your comments.

[sapote]

I do not mind apologism at all, as long as our apologia can coexist! I feel apologetic for posting negative things about the Handsomest Man in Fandom anyway, so.

See, I think Derek Hale is hitting the fandom id in a couple of different ways. He's clearly hitting some people in the pain! forgiveness! trauma! healing! place, and he's also hitting me in the "people *often* have good reasons to do bad things! boundaries! step away!" place, which I really like from a character I find basically sympathetic. I totally buy that violence is one of Derek's major tools, but I don't think that's consequence-free or should be met with instant forgiveness, or that it's necessarily good for people to plunge in there with him. I love how transparent Derek's motivations for doing unpleasant stuff is, it makes it much more interesting than, say, Kate, whose motivations were always kind of evil-for-evil's sake.

There are a lot of interpretations going around of how he seduced Erica into joining the pack. I tend to lean towards "it was creepy, but from his perspective he was offering her one of his two life tools, which are violence and hotness". But I've definitely seen the idea that it was a third creepy line-crossing (to parallel Matt and Peter's).

Hilariously, the scale I was using for not taking characterization seriously before this was the Barney Stinson Scale of Creepiness, which I think is actually probably worse than the Vampire Diaries scale because it doesn't have the excuse of genre excesses.

I don't think Derek wanted power, but I think he desperately wanted to not be alone, and the only way he knew to keep Scott around was to cut off his metaphorical escape route.

SEE that's the thing: Derek's determination to do what it takes to keep Scott with him just makes me feel like Scott is making a good choice trying to keep himself out of Derek's power, even if he's making it instinctively and even if the Gerard thing was also bad. And I absolutely agree that Derek keeps making mistakes because he's in over his head, which I find so incredibly sympathetic, I just think that with the tools and decision-making power he has he's already verging over into doing actively bad things, and he needs to either find a way to turn himself around or he's going to wind up a hardcore villain instead of an ambiguous guy.

See, in my reading I am really really pleased that he's around and think he's fascinating. And like to watch him glower. We can agree on the glowering for sure!