Hi, how are you? Can I ask you a question? Why do you think that Jonathan Byers is a Virginia C. Andrews's character?
Thank you so much for asking! I've been meaning to write about this for a while.
The three original V.C. Andrews heroines--Cathy Dollanganger, Heaven Casteel, and Audrina Adare--all share certain qualities. They survive truly fucked-up childhoods involving staggering parental betrayal. They're unusually talented, smart, and/or psychically sensitive. They're eldest daughters who are left to raise their younger siblings. And they cannot move on from the past, even when multiple people urge them to.
Jonathan, of course, is poor and has a cruel, callous father who (a) despises Will yet tries to exploit his death for financial gain, (b) gaslights and berates and tries to undermine Joyce as a parent, and (c) shows no compunction in battering Jonathan physically or psychologically. Jonathan has a talent (photography) and (pre-S4 depression) educational ambitions, plus he senses his mom in the Upside Down that one time. He's the oldest child and, while he's not left to raise Will on his own, he has responsibilities beyond what's typical or developmentally ideal. And he's absolutely swamped by the past. He's the only one in his family who talks about his father post-S1, always with distress. He feels he can't leave his family, even to go to college or be with his beloved girlfriend. He may have had scraps for subplots since S2, but he is always quietly having the worst fucking time.
When you look at the V.C. Andrews girlie he resembles the most--one Heaven Casteel, heroine of Heaven and Dark Angel and I guess a sequel that Andrews didn't actually write--there are even more parallels. For example:
Their families are poor and disdained by the entire town (the Casteels are "hill trash" and the Byers are "a disgrace" and "a bunch of screw-ups").
They have charismatic but sleazy fathers who neglect the family for a long period of time before turning back up in a time of crisis, ostensibly to help but really for financial gain (Heaven's father sells all the kids, including Heaven, to adoptive families with various degrees of sketchiness).
They have well-meaning mother figures who nevertheless are out of commission following the loss of a younger child (Heaven's stepmother loses it after her youngest is born dead).
They have younger siblings whom they must care for, including a sensitive boy with a close-in-age sister named Jane.
They have well-meaning middle-class sweethearts who don't completely get it (not that Nancy's anywhere near as disappointing in this regard as Logan Stonewall).
Their fathers' girlfriends are weird at them.
I don't like saying it but their fathers are weird at them.
An abusive parental figure traumatizes them via animal death (Jonathan and the rabbit, Heaven and the hamster).
They try so hard to stay with the family they feel needs them, only to find that their family is more willing to move on than they are (partly speculation on my part re: Jonathan, of course).
They move to a new town where their material conditions are better and theoretically they should have a new start (Heaven does this twice), yet find that they cannot leave the past behind and eventually return to their hometown (where nothing is quite the same).
At the end of Heaven, our heroine is convinced to go to Boston to live with her wealthy relatives and get a good education despite her misgivings about leaving her family. You know what's in Boston? Emerson.
Anyway, that's the reason for my URL, because I was joking one day about how Heaven should've gotten to smoke up in her fancy Boston boarding school.
