1.) Describe your character’s relationship with their mother or their father, or both. Was it good? Bad? Were they spoiled rotten, ignored? Do they still get along now, or no?
He had a decent relationship with his adoptive parents (although he doesn't know he was adopted). They were honestly pretty strict and no nonsense, which probably seems weird since Emmanuel ended up neck deep within a gang and arrested at least twice. But it's not. Damon's whole family, the Solomos', were completely involved in gangs. Emmanuel's grandfather Christoph was in prison for drug and murder charges and died there. He had been one of the older and more prominent members of the gang, and Damon for the most part took his place. And Salome's family were was a drug cartel from Mexico, so he really didn't have a choice but enter into a life of a criminal, but he didn't mind. His relationship with his father was better than with his mother; Damon felt like he had to protect Emmanuel from the harm that could come from people finding out who his actual parentage was. Damon had a sense of honor a lot of men lacked, although somewhat skewed from the typical sense of honor. He wanted to teach him as best as he could, and while making him into a man of his family, also making him someone that Garrett would have been proud to call his son.
Emmanuel's relationship with his mother was more complicated than that. Salome had always been a pretty selfish, fickle person and honestly had a really hard time accepting him for a long time. She was cold and standoffish even when he was very small, and she'd only hold him when she needed to. Much of this came from the fact that at the time she didn't have her own child, which she longed for, and after Maggie was born she was even more weird towards him, and he didn't really understand that. Salome had complained from the beginning that they should have given him to Bianca instead, since Bianca was so close to Garrett and Esther, but they couldn't because of Bianca's ties to Esther's family. This only made her more bitter, and she held that against him for a really long time afterwards.
Her relationship with her parents is weird. Both of them had very high expectations for their children, and honestly Cosima only half meets these expectations (which is better than her brother Antony, who meets like negative fifteen of them). But in their mind, she's as good as it's going to get. They never spoiled her, and were very straight with her: they laid out exactly how things were to be and if she didn't want to do them, then she could just leave. Cosima is a master at manipulation and cunning, but her parents aren't people to be manipulated, so for the most part she did what she was supposed to do to get by with them. So basically that I am saying is that her relationship with her parents is extremely professional. There is no lovely dove hugs and kisses with them.
Shiloh had normal, middle class parents who adored their son (at the time) and tried to do the best they could for him. When he became a she, that was a hard transition for them. Shiloh had told them years before she officially had her surgeries that she had planned to do this because she was not happy with who she was, but, as I said, actually doing this took years. She was well into her thirties by the time she had them, and her parents were in their sixties. They supported her, although they were somewhat hurt by the notion, but they didn't tell her she was wrong. They were more upset with the fact she had to stop being a priest to actually get this done, than the fact she was doing it in the first place. As a teenager and a child, they were very involved with her school and sports she played. They lived in a little town in Virginia and were basically the typical American family. Shiloh had always been more close with her mom, and bonded with her better than with her father, but overall the three of them had a really good relationship with each other, and that didn't change over the years.
