thegirlnamedcove replied to your post “I cannot the only one who remembers that in s1 (I think it’s s1, might…”
Wait, abusive grandfather? Did I miss something?
Not anything you’d want to see.
If you didn’t watch that season (don’t blame you), this is all in 6a. Stiles has been taken by the Ghost Riders and no one remembers him, but there are gaps and inconsistencies. The pack are starting to put things together and figure out they’re missing the same person, they have the word “styles” to go off of, and the Sheriff mentions that it’s a family nickname that his father Elias Stilinski went by during the war. So they go see his father.
His father is in a nursing home with dementia, and when he gets agitated, he starts insulting everyone and yells at the Sheriff to “go back to your dead wife and your loser son”, so even when everyone else was confused by the Ghost Riders, he remembered reality. And in reality, he apparently hated the Sheriff and Stiles. So why the hell would Stiles choose to use his grandfather’s wartime nickname?
The Sheriff shows Scott a scar from his dad pushing him through a glass table while going after his mom, the guy was not nice. And the “loser son” bit implies that he didn’t ever try to make up for the abuse by mending things with his son or loving his grandson. He’s just been the terrible grandparent who happens to live in town and they feel obligated to take care of in a horrible way.
Can you see Stiles wanting to name himself after this man?
No, so fully in denial, I had an entire alternate theory laid out:
In season 5 the chimeras attacked the Sheriff to get to Stiles, right? They were trying to force him to choose between his dad and Scott. But if Stiles never existed, and the Sheriff still had the scar, there would need to be an explanation for it to keep him from questioning his reality. Easiest explanation? Abusive dad. (Even though logically being hurt on duty or in the military would make way more sense, I’m working with what I’ve got!)
So poor Elias Stilinski in a nursing home, has a good relationship with his son and grandson, his only family, kind of starting to slip mentally, and suddenly things change.
His previously dead daughter-in-law is walking around and holding his son’s hand, there’s no sign of his energetic grandson, and no one seems to be concerned about this.
“Dad, we never had kids,” his son tells him, but Elias knows they did! He remembers telling his grandson stories about the men he served with! He remembers taking his grandson to the park while Claudia was having tests done! He remembers the funeral and trying to be supportive while he could see both his son and grandson crumbling with grief!
Things are changing more than they should, he knows this isn’t normal, but no one will believe him. So he gets angry. His own son has accused him of abuse, all but cut him out of their lives, of course he would lash out. And sometimes in his more confused states, he gets angry at himself, at his own memories.
He feels like they’re real but everyone is telling him they’re not. He never had a grandson. His son hates him, his daughter-in-law rarely ever visits but even that is wrong because she should be dead–he doesn’t know what to trust anymore. Does he trust the happy memories of being there for both his son and grandson’s births? Or the scar he can see on his son’s chest that he’s told is from abuse he doesn’t remember? Is the grandson he remembers even real, or a figment of his overactive and untethered imagination?
I just really love the idea of his dementia somehow protecting him from the Ghost Riders and their influence, but he’s too mixed up to know it. He’s near death and only Lydia can work with him because she’s a banshee, knowing he’s going to pass on soon, but desperate to find Stiles and so conflicted.
It’s what I was hoping would happen when I first saw that episode, but because it’s Teen Wolf, they just left it there, and made Stiles name himself after the man who abused his father. Maybe it was supposed to be implied, but they never mentioned the guy every again. So fuck that.
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