Some of my favorite fics are when people acknowledge that soaps probably been through some shit.
Bigger ramble
Like, I don’t mind people giving him a good home, specially when they’re using it as a way to highlight how ghosts traumatic childhood makes him behave around a legitimate normal family and the lack of tension leaves him in a vaccume of anxiety.
Nor to do I fault fic where it’s explicitly stated: yeah, no, John MacTavish is from a lower middle to mid middle (and very notable in on fic upper middle) class family and there’s just something deeply wrong with him as a person. Theres nurture to make him this way, its all nature and no one knows where to came from.
But then there’s the fics where soaps been through the wringer, where he hides all that nasty cracks and his humor and snark is a way to keep people close but firmly at an arms length. And I eat that shit up.
Like yessss, give me soap who is a so good at pretending nothing has ever happened to him, and whatever did happen was completely and utterly his fault and due to his shame over error and perfectionist nature, he will NOT being bring that shit out ever. Becuase he’s not normal, he’s the youngest to ever passed selection(at least in the reboot, I just realized I never checked OG about that.) he’s full of piss, vinegar, and a very misguided sense of revenge. He holds grudges and is kept on a short leash, becuase Jesus fuck, the temper is demonic on that boy.
And it makes for so much potential, dialogue and forced hands… like ghosts is grade A fucked up in the comics(people have varying views on reboot having the same, I honestly dgf if someone’s writing good. I’m always curious if they give him something different for reboot. Play with the dolls.) and when people are trying to write ghost and soap in a romantic way, or honestly, anyway. They have a tendency to sunny up soap through ghosts eyes, or any of the 141 eyes really.
And I find the 141 trying to reconcile what they thought they knew about soap with what they know now. One of my favorite and few fics I know that do this have soap killing his own father in self defense, being a foster kid and the like as part of his reason to try and fake his age into the military. It’s *fascinating*.
There’s some good fics out there bout soap having to reconcile what he thought he knew and what he learns about ghosts(also soooo fascinating to me.) but I see even less of the inverse and it’s got me this close from picking up my laptop to write a fic. This close.
