The final meta and headcanon post of this short series is here! This was prompted by @zenmasterspalace / @buckybarnesisnotafuckingvillain ~
One of the many constant jokes in t70s is the question, “From where is Fez?”, a question we are NEVER, not even in extra material, ever answered.
We are told Fez’s country is an island and people’s phisical appearence and accent changes from where side they are from. In season 8, we meet Fez’s best friend from his country, who is blond and has a different accent.
Fez came as a exchange student to the USA, stayed with religious foster parents until he finished High School and his VISA expired. We are told around this time that he is, in some sort, his family’s hopes and dreams, since they expected him to become someone in the USA.
This has give most fans the idea that his country must be a third world one, probably with a poor family and very native costumes as we are told every racist joke of the show.
Between the laugh track, we can hear Fez has a little sister and both his parents are still together, and alive. He doesn’t seem to register when people makes fun of him for his accent, culture and color until it’s make too obvious like it happens in season 5 when he meets the racist parents of his girlfriend Nina.
Fez, to me, comes as proud of his origins even when he has admitted he wouldn’t go back to his country. As a part of a third world country myself, I can understand that and seen from the context of the time, the USA was, and still is to some, the dream for kids that grow up with nothing.
I believe Fez still loves his family, but has lost most contact with them. Seeing his old friend in season 8 prompted him a desire to go back home and see everyone. He ultimatelly decides to stay because of Jackie *rolls eyes*, but he misses home and again, I can find myself in that feeling.
My headcanon for Fez’s family and country is that he misses the island dearly and tries not to show it because if he does, and someone makes him talk about it, he may end up crying or wanting to go back home.
He saves money to one day visit again and has the dream of bringing his siter to the States so she can have better oportunities, too. Once he starts working, he starts sending money to his parents and tries to mantain contact with letters and a phone call at least once a month.
The relationship with his parents is one of respect, he appreciates the sacrifices both did for him and sometimes feels like he has no way to give them back all they gave him. He is closer to his mother and is very sweet with her.
Fez is also a sweetheart to his little sister, she is the light of his world and the first love of his life. He is protective of her and only wants what is better for her.
He also has a looot of uncles and aunts, and cousins, and grandpas, and grandmas, and in-laws. His family reunions are quiet the event, but he enjoys it more once he gets to visit them at least once a year.
Also, he is godfather of half his nieces and nephews.
Michael & Brooke: A guide to a big ass family, part 1.
Next on the meta and headcanon posts about the character’s that aren’t Formans or Pinciottis family, we have the Kelsos. And with Kelsos, I mean the married-in-my-mind Michael Kelso and Brooke Rockwell Kelso.
This is part 1 of 2, in which we are going to talk about the long ass list of Kelsos and their relationship with both, Michael and Brooke.
PS: For this one, I’ll be calling Kelso by his name, Michael, since I’m going to be using his lastname a lot.
We are told Michael has lots of siblings and this makes his parents put little attention to him. In season 1, we see him interact with his father who takes him to his job for Career Day, while in season 4 we get to see one of his older brothers, Casey who is a damn disaster.
Another thing we are told is that Kelso has only one (younger) sister who is chubby and who he seems to love enough to be angry at his friends for calling her a “cow”. He also shows anger at them talking about his mother, which makes me believe he has a good relationship with the two women.
He also didn’t seem to have a bad relationship with his father.
Now, what is intriguing is the fact that we are told having so many kids made their parents ignore them as they took care of the younger ones. When seeing separately, they doesn’t seem like bad parents, but once you get to see the great picture, one starts to understand from where Michael got to grow up to be selfish and jealous.
If their parents never got to control their children and find a way to put the deserving attention to all of them, one can only wish Michael would had grown in a better house. This also keeps the theme of absent parents so present in the show.
This was probably thought this way not for ddeper reasons but to having an excuse for the gang to be always with and at the Forman’s, having always permission to go out and do stupid shit without furter consequences. But it gave The Formans a compassion no other TV family has, and also hints of characterization to the rest of the characters, since their types of abandone are so different from the other’s, but abandone no less.
His relationship with Casey is weird. It’s very cliché sibling-like in the sense that they see each other and Casey immediatelly pulls his triggers and bothers him as much as he can, but other than that, we never see him bond in any ways.
This makes me believe Michael may not have a good relationship with most his older siblings, which also makes me believe he must be around the fourth kid, only having his sister and another baby brother behind him. Here is where we start with the headcanons.
I have chosen names and professions to all of Michael brothers and sister. I’ll list them for you before we start talking about Brooke’s entrance to the family.
John, is the older one. By the time Brooke comes along, he is already married and has a kid.
Tom who is married to Lily, and have a baby only a year older than Betsy. This is the brother Michael actually has a good relationship with, and he likes expending time with him and his wife Lily. He was excited when they announced Lily was pregnant, ad they were his major support from their family when Brooke got pregnant.
Casey, who we know is a damn disaster and a complete asshole. Michael will probably never be able to have a better relationship with him.
[Michael]
Kimberly, “Kim”. The only sister. She is chubby, a little bit dumb, but sort of cute and incredible spoiled.
Christopher, “Chris”. Super spoiled, pretty young still.
Brooke was pretty welcomed to the family, and so was Betsy. What she doesn’t know is that Michael’s parents rolled their eyes at him getting someone he isn’t even dating pregnant, while John had to pay Casey for a bet they did years ago, about if he [Casey] or Michael would get someone pregnant first.
She [Brooke] felt a little awkward at the beginning because she comes from a smaller family and she heard from Michael how distant his parents can be, and how much crap John and Casey give him. But it went good since the beginning.
His mother was kind of excited once she met her, since Brooke is so different from her son and her daughter. She believes something good will have to come from this, that Betsy will be smarter or something. While his dad was fine with her, actually is nice to her and talks to her a lot.
Yet, Mrs. Kelso is more present all the time, always calling to know how Brooke is feeling and then to know how Betsy is doing.
When she had to leave to Chicago, she was actually surprised at how the family reacted wanting her to stay. She was even offered to live with them, but as she talked with Michael before, going to Chicago was the best for her and Betsy, and so they left only to be followed by Kelso a few months after he finished his preparation as a cop.
For her wedding, she was given her somethig old from Mrs. Kelso and her something borrowed by Kim, who absolutely adores Brooke. She sees her as an older sister and admires her, wants to be with her, as pretty and cool, as she sees her. Michael gives her shit about it, but he is happy to have Kim over with them.
They also carry a lot with little Chris, since his parents usually can’t afford a babysitter and Brooke is terrified of the stories Michael has told her about Casey being his babysitter. So Chris and Kim are usually with them and are sent to Chicago to spend the summer with them, or at least a week with them.
Betsy grows up fond of her uncle Tom and Aunt Kim, and plays a lot with Uncle Chris. She has a good relationship with her cousins, too. Tom’s son, Marvin, is only a year and half older than Betsy, so they are very good friends.
Tom and Lily are always hanging out with Brooke and Michael. They are their plus couple when Hyde and Jackie can’t hang out, and they are always invated to couple’s gathering when Jackie does them at her place. They are almost always the older couple in the reunions, when Mr. and Mrs. Forman can’t attend, but it’s always fun.
Casey still enjoys bothering Michael, but after Brooke slapped him in front of everyone, he has learned to keep his shit away from her. Funny enough, he fell in love with little Betsy and she has him eating in the palm of her chubby, small, baby hand.
He’ll do anything for little Betsy, even when he is still shitty to Michael and his friends when they get reuinited during Betsy’s or her sibling’s birthdays.
Jackie Burkhart headcanons: Uncle Richard edition. Richie came from this post, and these were asked by @zenmasterspalace and @preciousmila :)
Richard loved Jackie the second he was told he was going to become an uncle. Even hen he never had a good relationship with Jack, he tried to spend as much time as possible near his sister even before his niece was born.
He let her eat whatever she wanted and watch any cartoons she liked when she visitd him or he babysat her. He knew his sister and husband weren’t exactly stellar at being present, but always eager to say “no” whatever Jackie asked.
This is also why Richard always tried to answer whatever questions Jackie may had, even when they were kind of obvious or too hard to answer by his own. He did his best to mantain an honest relationship with her.
His honesty was tasted a lot when she confied in him to keep his mouth shout about her parents fighting or how often her dad was out of town. Yet, he did talked to Pam once about it. At the beginning, she reacted by trying to do things better for Jackie, but eventually went back to shitty.
Once Jackie entered school, Richard offered himself to driver her home since Pam was working and so was Jackie. They had a choufer, but Richie thought Jackie would like it better if family went for her. Her parents said yes.
Two times a month, Richie would take Jackie out to grab fast food, go to the park, cinema, whatever she wanted and they had a lot of fun. Usually, she ended going home with a new stuffed animal or something.
She copied this technique when she became an aunt herself, this is why Donna and Eric’s kid love spending the day with her and Hyde so much.
Half or even more of her stuffed animals collection come from Uncle Richie. Some of her favorites dolls do, too.
Jackie was a little bit nervous of introducing Hyde to her Uncle. When she was little, she thought she wanted to marry a man that would be like both, her daddy and her uncle, so it was important for her to have her two favorite men in the world being ok with her dating Hyde. Lucky for her, Richard liked Hyde immediatelly since he saw the way he looks at his niece.
He used to read to her to sleep and always got her books when he visited. Part of why she stopped reading so much was because she was angry that Uncle Richard stopped visiting her.
It made her angry to find out why her parents had separated her from Richie, and she went to yell to her father and then some more to her mother. She swear she wouldn’t had minded him being gay since the beginning, but she sometimes wonder if that’s true, since she was rised by the people that decided he wasn’t apt to babysit a little girl.
She will never know for sure, so she just supports Richard and his partner and will look bad at anyone looking the wrong way at them or saying something about them.
Her protectiveness of Richard may take him by surprise, and he will explain to her that he is a grown ass adult and has lived with this all his life. She will answer that he doesn’t have to, that she only wants him to be happy and she doesn’t want anyone to hurt him for loving. He thinks she’s the sweetest.
Jackie and Hyde’s older daughter’s middle name is Rachel in honor of Uncle Richard, he is also her godfather. She says that Uncle Griner is his other godfather “at heart”.
When he re-connected with Jackie, he smoked. Jackie is always trying to make him quit. She helped Hyde quit and she wants him to not smoke either, always saying his life will be longer and healthier if he does so. When Griner found out, he started to pester him into quitting, too, until they got him to.
He thought Jackie how to skate, iceskate and drive a bike.
And he bought her her first pair of earrings when she was a baby. She still has them.
At the end of season 6, Hyde and us find out he has another person listed as his biological father in his birth certificate, some William Barnett he has never heard of. Turns out, yes, Bud Hyde was never his father.
We learn next, in season 7, that Hyde is about to meet this William Barnett. He turns out to be a very rich man whose money comes from music, and the show did the disgusting thing of using his color as a joke. As we find out, W. B. is also black.
This makes Hyde biracial and whitepassing. An interesting thing to explore in fics, something the show used the wrong way, and that will mean a lot to the headcanon part of this post.
At the beginning, W. B. believes Hyde is going after his money and that’s why he wanted to meet. Once he is shown that’s not Hyde’s intentions, I believe they get to bond pretty well.
One of the very, very, very few little things done right in season 8 is Hyde’s relationship with his father. We see him in season 7 working for him in his comapny, then getting the chance to own the Grooves store at Point Place with his sister (I’ll later about Angie).
But in season 8, we see them bonding. We see W. B.’s house and his offic a little bit more often (not much, but is there), and what I got from the scenes with him is that, even if on the cover he and Hyde have nothing but their ‘fros in common, Hyde does share some things with his father.
They bond over music and W. B. ultimatelly gives him the complete ownership of Grooves and the hint at him starting what he had with his Music Company. W. B. sees potential in Hyde and his love for music and encoragues it the best he can (and as much as the writers allowed his character).
I firmly believe he has a good relationship with W. B. and with time, it can become a ral father-son relationship like Hyde dreamed to have with Bud in season 3. And what’s more important is that this doesn’t overshadows his relationship with Red. Red Forman will always be Hyde’s father, but like I got to learn by being adopted by my own daddy, you can have as many. Father is the one that raises you and supports you from the heart.
Angie is Hyde’s older sister, W. B.’s daughter from a marriage we don’t know nothing about. She is a total daddy’s girl like Hyde’s girlfriend is, an intelligent woman that will not stand anything getting in her ay to be successfull in what she is passionate about: the music industry.
Hyde and Angie have a very rocky start and slowly gets to become better. Like with W. B., Angie get sproven wrong about Hyde, and we see her more often interacting with him and the gang.
Turns out they couldn’t be more different, but like with W. B., music drives them together and a bond is born from it.
He starts showing interest and care for his sister early on. He jokes in the office about how they are like a family of awesome ‘fros, to what W. B. smiles and seems genuanely pleaset at. Angie shows no interest in this, but later when she starts dating Kelso, we see Hyde upset over this over the course of an entire episode.
Because he knows the kind of crap Kelso is to woman, he doesn’t want his sister to date such a fuck up like his friend, and with his best friend [Eric] being an asshole about it, things aren’t looking fine for him. Eventually, this gets solved and peace comes back to them.
We aren’t told much about the Barnetts away from W. B. and Angie, so the next I’m telling is pure headcanon of mine.
The Barnetts is a family I have a lot of interest in. I understand the fear some writers may feel at working with POCs, but as a poc myself, I find it important and interesting to talk about. Yet, I’m always being careful, since it’s a culture that doesn’t belong to me, it’s a theme that is important to real people beyond the fiction I love.
I have the Barnetts as a hard working family. W. B. is an only chield but, his was Steven Barnett, who died when he was younger. His mother, Isabella ‘Izzy’ Barnett, re-married many years after Mr. Steven Barnett’s death, to a man named Nethan, also known as only Nate.
He has plenty of cousins that he sees as brothers, so his children call his nephews and nices cousins themselves, too. From them, comes Uncle Tim who married Aunt Eunice, and got George, Alice and Tom. Tom is around Hyde’s age, a few months older than him, and also the first of the cousins to welcome him.
Tom constantly invites him and Jackie to hang out with the other cousins. At first, Hyde didn’t feel like going, but Jackie managed to convince him most times. Later, breakfast on Sundays and the cousin night out once a month become something they attend all the time is required.
She’s happy to see Hyde being accepted in the family and both enjoy their place at Barnett’s table and the importance they hold in the house as members of the family.
Other uncles, aunts and cousins: Aunt Lila that married uncle Jon, and had Lily and Daisy, both around Angie’s age, just a little bit older. And Aunt Gina that married uncle Al, and had Vicky, who is Angie’s age, and Diego, who is Hyde’s and Tom’s age.
Diego, Tom and Hyde hang out a lot when they have the chance. He sometimes takes Eric with him, and other times, even Kelso and Fez get invited, alongisde the girls if it’s not boy’s night.
Hyde and Jackie later become Diego’s kid, Jonathan, godparents. While Tom’s younger kid was named Jackson after Jackie. Hyde and Jackie chose for their second daughter’s middle name to be ‘Tami’ for cousin Tom.
While Hyde’s name was not chosen for his late grandfather he didn’t had the chance to meet, when the family is asked if it’s because of him, no one makes an attempt at saying ‘no’. He likes it that way, too. Deep down, it makes him feel included.
Izzy was the first member of the extended family he got to meet alongisde Nate. They being his grandparents welcomed him warm and happy, since Izzy has always said she wanted more grandchildrens.
Her love for Hyde and Angie can be seen from space, she would do anything in her hands for them and is always there for Hyde. He feels safe talking to her and having her accepting him so easily and so quickly into the family helped him shape his security for when he met the rest of the family.
She got to see all her great grandchildren, and that’s something that always calms Hyde’s heart when later, when she’s gone, he misses her.
Hyde has three families. He has the one he grow up thinking was his, the Hydes, then he got the Formans, and finally the Barnetts. I won’t be talking about the Formans because we see in the show a lot about them and well, the family he interacts with is the main we see.
This means I’ll be talking about the Hydes and the Barnetts. In this first post, I’m going to focus only in the Hydes + Edna’s family.
In several ocasions, Hyde mentions the kind of family he grow up. He was constantly abused by both his parents, both were alcoholic assholes that couldn’t care less about him.
Bud, his stepfather, didn’t knew Hyde wasn’t his biological son, but mentions to doubt it in season 3 when, once Hyde sees him at the bar he has been working in, he is introduced as Hyde’s father and he says something among the lines of, “or that’s what his mother said”.
You can argue it was make for the laughs, but in context and seeing what happens at the end of season 6/beginning of season 7, we can assume Bud did suspect Hyde wasn’t truly his son.
Hyde’s relationship with Bud is painfull to look at. He left when Hyde was nine years old, an age most kids tend to look up at their parents, and for what we are told and what we can see, this affected little Hyde deeply. His anger when he finds out his father has been in Point Place for a year and hasn’t reach out to him is also an indicator of this.
Once he accepts to go with his dad, we can see that he is trying hard for their relationship to be “normal”, one of father-son like the one he has seen his friends, espcifically Eric, to have with their own parents. But once again, Bud abandons him. We know that relationship sucks.
Then, is Edna.
Edna Hyde can be seen as one of the biggest turn points for Hyde. She is his mother and like any child, there was a time when Hyde loved her, he probably still does deep down. He understood at a young age that he wasn’t wanted and that his ma wasn’t exactly the best.
He used to take offense when someone trash talked his mother, even when we do know the nickname ‘gross Edna’ was well put and that she was just-- horrible. In a way, I feel like this is that way because Hyde still cares about his mother at that point, even when later that season she abandones him, too.
Edna leaving him changes everything. He goes to a better place but with a broken heart and crashed spirit. Hyde changes from season 1-2 because of inconscistent writing, but one can find subtext characterization in a shift between the moment he realized his mother had abandoned him and the rest of his life.
This relationship is rather complicated than just not good. It’s unhalthy and one sided, to put a level to it. And had Hyde the chance to comfront his mother, he may had been able to finally move on from her, the impact she had in his life, and else.
But he didn’t.
Most his trust issues come from seeing his parent’s marriage going to hell and them leaving him behind so easily like if he was nothing, a replasable object they couldn’t care about at all.
In the show, we are told Bud leaves Hyde again to get together with Edna. They leave together without telling him, without wanting him. Some fans don’t take this as canon, but for this meta and headcanon we will. And with this, I can only say that Hyde’s relationship with his parents suck.
What he mentions about the rest of his family is having an uncle in jail, and that the other two Stevens in his family are also in jail. Other than that, we know nothing.
The Hydes sound like an unlikely family, troublemakers that probably thought they didn’t have a future but to become criminals or something of the likes. This would explain why he thinks his future may lay on being in jail at some point, and also why other people seem to believe that (”we believe he may be the smartest guy on his sell block”, reads a report an actual teacher wrote of him in junior high).
We can say that his relationship with them isn’t good.
Now, my headcanons? Well, I share lots of these with my good friend Lisa (those70scomics / MistyMountainHop), so these may sound familiar to you all.
I have thought of an uncle from Bud’s side that cared about him and he had a good relationship with him. The man is still problematic in the sense that he also has an alcohol problem and probably will be up for a flash robbery, and so.
He has other uncles and aunts, mostly on Bud’s side. He doesn’t had many contact with Edna’s side because she had a bad relationship with them, but knows Edna’s older sister, who wasn’t that bad but still he never liked her that much.
Honestly, I’m more interested in the Barnetts, so be aware of that long ass post.
