i love thiam so much and have been a fan of one sided sceo but i’ve also been loving your sceo fics recently!
ive always felt like theo had a one sided crush/obsession with scott. i see theo as having a childhood crush on scott that was the last normal, untainted relationship/memory he had (scott maybe being the most important person in his life at the time he got taken by the dd after his parents and sister of course (who’s memory is tainted because of whaat happened)) and he would think about scott every once in a while as the last happy untainted memory he had before his life changed. but then years later he finds out that the dd want to go back to beacon hills because they heard there’s crazy magic there and the first and only true alpha in centuries and his name is scott mccall and theo’s fondness turns into rage thinking about how they were basically the same back when they were 9 (2 sickly unpopular, unremarkable kids) but scott became in 3 years what theos been trying to be since he was 9. and theo spends s5 warring between rage and an obsession with wanting scott or wanting to be scott.
i think scott probably had a feeling theo had a crush on him (or was told by stiles who i think definitely knew. as a side note stiles is always so jealous and antagonistic towards the men that try and get close to scott lol) but never felt the same way about him and after theo’s betrayal, the skinwalker prison, and liam bringing him back he starts to see liam and theo get closer and he notices that theo seems to be falling in love with liam and becomes somewhat concerned knowing what theo ends up doing to people he loves.
sorry for the tangent, all that to say is i love one sided or unrequited sceo (with maybe a casual stress relief thing from scott’s side) but i can’t see them as a long term actual relationship but i was wondering how do you see them?
Oh boy oh boy. I sat on this ask for a bit bc my feelings and thoughts about sceo are Big Ones and quite difficult to articulate and contain on the fly.
First off, thanks for the compliment! I wasn't seriously into Sceo when I first stepped back into the Teen Wolf fandom around 2020, beyond seeing Theo clearly flirt with Scott in s5 and going "hehe. he got it bad for scott, basically everyone falls in love with the hot girl" and then giggling some more. And yeah, I totally agree that Theo had at least a one-sided childhood crush on Scott! Believed he would come save Theo from the Dread Doctors and all that! But then as I kept doing episode rewatches for research purposes for my Thiam fics, I started to see...so much actual potential. Not just with their chemistry, but with the tropes that their characters indelibly occupy.
In Scott, we have the reluctant Messiah, the flawed hero whose very flaws trace back to simply how good and selfless he is. Too trusting? He willfully chooses to see the good in people. Too loyal? He won't be the one to abandon someone in need if he can help it, not the way he's been abandoned in many ways by supernatural and human characters alike. Too self-effacing? I'm afraid that's the effect of him trying to be the exact opposite of every damaging leader or father figure that's ever been in his life and failed him (Rafael, Peter, Derek to an extent, etc.). Too kind? That's his brand of badass in his world where cruelty and inhumanity are the default.
In Theo, we have the thief on the cross whose life choices led him all the way to death but at the last moment saw the glimmer of hope and seized it, wanting to change, not knowing exactly how to do that but also knowing that there was no way he could possibly go on living with himself the way he was before he met his Messiah figure. Yes, it's all incredibly nuanced (he was eight or nine when he was taken by the Dread Doctors, depending on which timeline you adhere to; signs in his canon behavior leave it wide open to interpretation that he was probably emotionally neglected by his parents long before the DD's were in the picture; the DD's themselves were clinically abusive of his frail sense of humanity, morality, and self-worth; and his entire worldview shifted on its axis to equate choices and relationships not with right and wrong, or even with pleasant and unpleasant, but with success and failure. I could go on. We all know I could go on). But at the end of the day, what defines Theo's relationship with Scott in particular are his early affinity to another sickly, unpopular boy; his barely tamped-down rage and jealousy at the fact that Scott achieved all the supernatural and social power Theo'd ever wanted, naturally and--in his mistaken assumption--painlessly; and his literal murder of Scott in one of the most intimate scenes of violence on the show, bar almost none.
Sometimes I think that where Scott and Theo are coming from--opposite ends of a moral and developmental spectrum--is so beautiful that they can work, against all odds, and be endgame. I never imagine it being easy for them. It's one thing for Liam to have to explain how and why he loves Theo, the guy who murdered his alpha. It's another thing for Scott to explain to anyone how and why he fell in love with his own murderer. It's so deliciously complicated.
Other times, I'm with you and I think that Scott and Theo can only come back to a platonic understanding, with a bit of desperate physical action between them (stress relief, as you called it), but Thiam being endgame, and Scott thinking to himself, well, it was too late for anything, while Theo thinks to himself, well, there's no world where the killer can be in love with the killed, anyway. And however tragic that feels is also great to me as a reader or a writer.
Most of the time, though (even though I've only written two fics like this so far, I think), I like the third option: Scott/Theo/Liam. Even in canon scenes between Thiam, it's so difficult to separate Scott from either of their identities. His name comes up constantly in their arguments and conversations. To me, it feels like that is the most complete way to tide their arcs over into a beautiful new one 😌
(btw i highly recommend this post for your sceo-brainrot consumption)