Oh god, that's just. Like Cora not really being Derek's sister and being a part of the Alpha Pack makes a lot more sense than what the show actually gave us, but that is honestly just a heartbreaking thought. Like, Derek in s1 & s2 with no family left except for Peter is awful, but imagining him thinking that he got someone back only for him to find out none of the memories are even real is just. 3 I can't even think about the look on his face when Stiles figures it out and tells him.
It’s such a completely crushing thought but it’s also so good that I’m kind of obsessed with the idea now.
For those just coming in, this is in regards to an alt!meta theory about TW 3A, wondering what if Cora hadn’t been Derek’s sister, but a member of the Alpha pack? What if Derek’s memories had been twisted by Deucalion at some point, so they could use Cora to infiltrate his pack?
And this makes sense for a lot of reasons. First off, we’re never given a clear answer as to how Cora would have escaped the fire, while no one else in her family had, and how she would have ended up in South America, of all places. Why would a scared eleven year old possibly end up there? That’s the kind of thing that just almost sounds like a lie, like they’d just picked somewhere super far away so Derek wouldn’t question why they’d never run across or heard from each other until now. And this would also solve the discontinuity caused by Cora’s survival vs the number of bodies found after the fire. They knew how many people died, how many bodies were recovered. If there had been one fewer body than there was supposed to be, wouldn’t Derek and Laura have looked for the survivor?
But they didn’t, because there wasn’t one.
But I have another question for you all: did Cora Hale even exist? Because, despite the fact that Cora was supposedly the same age as the rest of the teens, I don’t recall any hint of recognition or familiarity from any of them throughout 3A. Cora would have been eleven years old, in approximately fifth grade, when she died. That’s five years (or six, counting kindergarten) that she would have been in the same school, the same grade, some of the same classes, as Stiles, Scott, Lydia, Boyd, and Isaac, and while that doesn’t guarantee that she would have been friends with any of them, I would expect some hint of recognition from some of them. But we got nothing.
So, was there ever a Cora Hale? And if there wasn’t, if she was just a random stranger recruited by the Alpha pack, it would still crush Derek to lose that idea of family when the truth came out, but it wouldn’t be as devastating as thinking he had a sibling back only to realize she’d been dead all along.
But I’m going to take this further. Because why would a random beta decide to do any of this? To risk her life to infiltrate the Hale pack for the Alphas; a group she’s not even technically a part of since she’s still a beta, herself? What would she be getting out of it?
Her life, maybe? If she was threatened into it? Or maybe she was bribed? But… there’d always be the risk that Derek (and Peter, etc) would sense her dishonesty, or that she would turn on the Alphas/ask the Hales for help… and, really, why trust her to play a role for you when you can just… make her believe it, herself?
So imagine the Alphas taking a random beta –– maybe a stray omega they happen across, or maybe they let one member of their former packs live –– and incept her into believing she’s the fictional Cora Hale? Make her everything they need her to be to be the perfect spy, completely unaware of the fact that she’s not who she thinks she is? And they’d set it up so every few days she’d go out on a run and find herself standing in front of the Alpha compound, where they’d pull whatever information she would have gained about Derek and Scott, and then go back to the loft again, none the wiser.
So then the season ends, the Alpha pack is defeated, and the false memories start to chip away for both Derek and Cora… but they still feel like they’re family. They still feel irrationally protective of each other, still remember flashes of growing up together and even though they know it’s not real… it’s still a part of them now. And it’s the closest thing to family either one of them has.
…So what are they supposed to do with that?
