Curious if you think Johnny, peanut, and Lola have/had siblings or if they're just only children. Personally I always hc johnny and lola as only children but felt that peanut had a younger sister who passed away.
why hi anon!!! this such an interesting question, thank you!!
i remember reading that hc, yep!!
i hc all the three of them, however, to be only children (i think they're the only greasers that i do??). in fact, for all three of them, this fundamental isolation is their childhood is, in the way i read it, what shaped some of the way they socialize and influences a lot their interactions.
as for johnny, the thing is that his parents were both in the drug dealing circles of new coventry, hence why they were in prison for a while- his father was actually pretty important in the neighborhood, while his mom mostly helped and did other legal jobs (which is also why she got out earlier). and johnny learnt both how to be a man and how not to be a man from his father- he taught him strength and roughness and to never take a hit but punch harder. but he also taught that johnny didn't want to hit his woman, didn't want to leave the house for a smoke to cool his head when she was crying and threatening to hurt herself because of him, didn't want her to be his slave.
in this framework, i think that him having, say, a brother would sort of... scatter the relationship his father has with him, the attention and, almost, the pressure to be worthy of being treated as a peer. which is something i really like to read for johnny. and i also like the idea of him having had his mother as the only woman in his life, before lola. call him a mama's boy, but he learned to take care of his mother before he even questioned how to deal with an eventual girlfriend. so he has learned to take care of the people he has around himself, such as peanut, almost in a way that replaces a paternal figure as protector of the house. but also internalized some very specific notions about masculinity and virility that he totally projects onto the relationship with lola.
ultimately, i think, the whole point is that the way he lives the relationship with lola in particular is basically a result with having grown up with the only reference in his house of close human interaction as his parents, and having to sort of step up where they lacked in the sole spousal relationship.
with peanut, my hc is that his mom had him when she was very young, sixteen years old, and she was... basically on her own, really; the boy she had had him with had fled as soon as he had a chance, her dad was on the other side of the ocean and her mom was basically mia (i still have to figure out the logistics of this, since, when i first elaborated it, i forgot for a while that Laws Existed, LMAO, and i was already too far in the creating process to change that), so she had to raise him on her own. and peanut spent most of his childhood in his living room, waiting for his mom to come back home, watching the vhs she had rented for him and reading the motors magazines. it's there that he fell in love with greasers, crushing on marlon brando and james dean, the shiny motorcycles and the raw leather jackets.
he basically had to live with himself, you see. also bc his mom, so young and unprepared, was very overwhelmed most of the time, and- i did post a quick snippet of a scrapped chapter of my fic already, actually, so you can get a broad but more detailed idea of their relationship if you want!! either way, point is. larry had to learn to tend to himself at a very young age, dealing with the loneliness and his own sensitivity, running from eventual kids of the neighborhood, who liked to take advantage of him being much smaller than most of them, trying not to take up too much space and upset his mom.
so of course, when he met johnny, older, proud, powerful as a sun, promising to take care of him, it felt almost unreal, something he never thought he could have wished for nor something he thought he deserved. some kind of care and protection hed never learnt to receive, and that he hang onto for dear life because suddenly... he wasn't on his own anymore.
(sometimes parents are just Contextual Objects. other time they are fully fleshed ocs with a backstory and a whole personality. turns out despite everything immacolata romano is really my child and i am so so fond of her and id have soo much more to say abt her relationship w peanut. but i digress)
and lola- i'll admit, shes the one i bounced back and forth about the most, in trying to imagine her family's situation. (in fact, if you see any reference to her family in my older fics/post, no you dont) at some point i even considered the idea of her having a much older brother who would sort of fill in for some absent father figure, but then i scrapped it. i think that, in her case as well, having grown up alone with her parents' relationship as a reference makes potentially much more sense than any other possibility i considered.
lola has a quote, in which she says "i'm so old, my life is almost over!" when... she's just?? sixteen??? seventeen??? i think it's because, see, her parents got married and had her when they were young, maybe nineteen or twenty- yknow, as soon as it was legal for the both of them without too many loopholes. however, the relationship was very unbalanced and fundamentally deteriorated, perhaps not from the beginning but very soon. her father being dominant, violent, arrogant and such. and her mother has always been bitter, subdued but angry and resentful at her husband, at the golden expectations she had, at her womanhood and, of course, at her daughter. she's always seen her as living proof of her own wasted beauty and youth; but, especially as soon lola started growing up to the age at which girls start being looked at by the boys, which we unfortunately know how soon it is, saw in her what she felt she'd lost. so she'd often remind her how lola was the reason why she is now a ruin of a woman, why she went from a beautiful and promising girl to an old and unattractive hag.
again- her being the only child helps focus on her the kingpin of this dynamic, especially on her mother's part. so lola grew up knowing what can happen to women, what remains when the fairytales of the princess marrying the prince crumble with the remnants of childhood. she realized at eleven, twelve years old how men were starting to look at her in the street and she knew what the next step would have been. she was reminded every day of her life. so, when she walked into bullworth, into the relationship with johnny, all she knew is that she wouldn't have ended up like her mother. knew that she wouldn't have fallen in love, wouldn't be tricked by the sweet words and the dreamy gazes. and she knew that she had no weapons to defend herself but the very thing that could've otherwise been the death of her, that being the male attention. and finding a way to use johnny's attention specifically, with his blind devotion mixed to the obliviousness, to her own advantage... well, that's what her whole arc is about, isn't it.
as i write this, i'm starting to realize that her having, perhaps specifically a brother, might function as a tool to highlight the difference in treatment between her, a daughter, and an eventual son. however, i stand my case that i really like the idea of this whole dynamic of her parents and her mother in particular resting on her and her only, creating this sort of... tunnel vision in which her very isolation in front of her view create her idea of how the world works.
thank you so much for the question!! it was a lot of fun to answer + it helped me make some order among some concepts i had in my mind <33
