Well, if you browse through my “dad Fabian” tag you’ll find that while Fabian is a very devoted, loving father, he’s still a toxic manipulative selfish person, and loving his children doesn’t change that. It just means he shows his love in toxic, manipulative, selfish ways, and doing things that he thinks are what’s best for the kids but is ultimately just a way to keep them close to him forever and under his control, unable to grow or get away or forge any relationships that might compete with the one they have with him. He’s a terrific dad when they’re babies and toddlers, but the older they get and more independent they become, the more conflict arises when what they want/need conflicts with what he does, which is something he takes very personally. In his mind, them disagreeing with him or trying to have their own lives is a hurtful betrayal and he doesn’t understand why his children “hate” him now. Adolescence is hard enough for a normal parent to deal with, but Fabian is probably going to be in literal actual tears a lot.But the ones you should feel sorry for are the kids. He’s going to smother and spoil and steer them, make them feel really Entitled and Special but also super duper dependent on him, play emotional headgames to get what he wants (like withholding affection until they do their chores like he asked or apologize for some argument), probably playing them off each other in competition for his love, etc. He’s not what people think of when they think of abusive because he’s not hitting them or insulting them, and he genuinely does not intend to hurt them or mess them up, but this definitely is emotional abuse, make no mistake.So, with that laid down in general, we can move on to gender. With girls, his smothering and over-defensiveness fits right into the established cultural norms for how fathers are expected to treat daughters already, so you can imagine how that goes, but with boys, there’s a conundrum. There’s a cultural standard of masculinity as powerful and capable, of boys needing to strike out their own, of it being fine for them to get hurt cuz it shows how tough they are, and Fabian has absorbed that and will project it on his own sons. Yet at the same time, as I’ve said, his style of parenting is over-protective and controlling and based on making every single choice for his children because he knows best and he will keep them safe….that doesn’t really fit with macho rough'n'tumble trailblazer shit, does it? I imagine he probably flip flops a lot between these two extremes, like putting his boys in contact sports and yelling like a nut from the sidelines at them to KILL KILL KILL and then running out on to the field and flipping his shit if they get so much as a scratch.So yeah, the boys are probably gonna get a lot of mixed messages. Be a man! No, don’t do that, it’s dangerous! I imagine it ultimately evens out to the idea of them “being a man” outside the home but still ultimately answering to Papa and always being his little guy at heart.…which could be sweet if the rest of the scenario wasn’t so fucked up.
