Retrospective on Steve Leonard: the essay
There are some notions I want to make before I deep-dive into the subject itself. First of all, this is a retrospective focusing on the manga version of Steve. From what I heard, Takahiro Arai clearly wrote and drew Steve in a more sympathetic light. If you are strictly a novel reader, take everything I write with a grain of salt.
Second, I have never read novels. I don't have all the details of the character, interests, and past. I use the details that I have heard of, but I try to keep this mainly focused on the manga version of Steve. An exception to this is the short story “An Essay on Vampires by Steve Leonard” which I have read and will refer to.
Third, this touches only on Steve shown in the first volume and alternate timeline. My sympathies don’t apply to the adult Steve for very obvious reasons.
With all that said, I hope you understand that this is my retrospective and is colored by my personal experiences and how I have understood Steve’s character.
Part 1: Establishing Steve’s personality and building the road from there
Steve is a 12-year-old boy who is admired by his peers for his smarts and witty words, but also a bit feared by his friends and foes alike due to his unpredictable and occasionally violent nature. Steve is also a headache to adults and teachers due to not fitting into the mold, but he is also shown to be a bit of a teacher’s pet.
Smart and good at reading social situations, but also a sore thumb out who nobody can predict. I’m pretty confident to say that this is what you get when you read the first volume of the manga. Now, what do these personality traits mean together?
He is someone who revels in his obsession with monsters, particularly vampires, and doesn’t hide it. However, this can’t be counted on ignorance, as Steve is better at lying and reading social cues than kids normally are at his age. The more likely option is that Steve is actively aware that his heavy obsession with his interest isn’t normal, and is something people look at him weirdly for. This interpretation is the brick that I will base this house on that is this Steve analysis.
Steve is also hard to predict. It could mean that he will do things that would go over the heads of his peers and adults, even if Steve himself has a reasonable thought process for them. This could also mean that obvious rules and manners taught to other kids by adults are absent in Steve’s thought process, hence he thinks out of the box and breaks the invisible moral barriers easily. I’m betting on the mix of both of them, so put a pin on them too.
So now we have picked up Steve’s base traits and the implications of those together. I think we are good to go.
Part 2: Establishing Steve’s home life and continuing the road
Steve’s family doesn’t get much of a spotlight, and a lot of things are left up to interpretation. However, combined with the previously established personality traits and some known facts, we have enough to get the general gist of things.
It’s clear from the get-go that Steve and his mother don’t have a warm relationship. Steve outright says that his mother doesn’t care about him. She doesn’t clean Steve’s room by the looks of it and isn’t too keen on pressuring his whereabouts. Steve has seen at least 50 vampire movies and he is only 12 years old: any other parent would be mildly concerned over the content that he consumes. As we also earlier discussed, Steve’s actions show that there was no one to scold him whenever he did something inappropriate. However, it is shown that the mother is thoughtful when Darren comes to visit and is deeply upset when Steve gets taken to the hospital.
So Steve’s mother is thoughtful but neglectful. Then, for Steve to think that his mother doesn’t care about him means that his mother has not shown interest in the sole thing that’s important to Steve. To top all of this, Steve is shown to be highly imaginative and troublesome because of that (as the ketchup and plastic bat on sheets prove). The discussion on Steve’s thought process being obscure also comes into play here.Â
So, his mother finds Steve hard to handle because she doesn’t understand her son. If the mother doesn’t have the energy or time to try to understand her son, no wonder Steve might misunderstand her being dismissive and non-caring of him. This ends up with Steve distancing himself because their interactions end in miscommunication and the mother giving more space. After all, she doesn’t want to upset Steve more. It’s a vicious cycle that has made Steve resent his mother and his mother give up on him. They have never talked heart-to-heart.Â
There is barely anything told about Steve’s father. However, the final volume has Steve treating Mr. Tiny as his father the moment he learns the truth and he pleads for help. For him to do something so vulnerable and “out of character” shows how Steve had yearned for the visible affection of a family member until the bitter end.
Part 3: Steve lives in society too, the road continues still
Steve is smart to notice societal cues, so it would be clear that he knows how different other families are. Steve has around him people who have caring families: Tommy goes to box with his father and Darren’s father is supportive of his son’s dream of a soccer career. Even Allan’s family cares about his whereabouts. How would it feel for Steve to see other families show interest in their children’s hobbies or overall want to even know where they are? Good to assume not great for someone as young as him. It only empathizes with the feeling that he is not loved. It doesn’t help that other adults around him find his interests weird and morbid.
Feeling unloved by adults around him and then seeing others be loved must have awakened thoughts in him. Why is it like this? Is it my fault that I’m unloved? It’s hard to live with such loneliness and no way to vent it out: no wonder that he has created such elaborate delusional thoughts in his head.
Part 4: Steve’s coping mechanisms and delusions, we are at the end of the road
We have established that Steve feels unloved and like nobody would care about him. This has done numbers on his self-esteem to a point where he believes that nobody would truly miss him if he were gone, even if he hides it quite well. He has no control over if somebody loves him or not. However, he can control how he reacts to this feeling of being unloved.
Steve resonated with the monster media because of his loneliness and he started to build up his delusions. Steve resonated with the lonely creatures that could never be loved by anyone. It’s very clear in the essay he wrote, as he had empathy towards the monsters being killed and hunted for just existing.
However, rather than trying to become a people-pleaser and garner love, he started to resent humanity and become enamored by the thought of inhumanity and becoming a full monster. Thinking of killing people or sacrificing others truly showed how Steve tried to gain control and power over his feelings of abandonment and humanity betraying him through fantasies. As a monster, he would have control over the people, even the adults.Â
Despite wanting control, I don’t believe that Steve tries to control his friends (or at least two of them…we will come back to that later). He genuinely likes hanging out with his friends and works as a leader of the group only because he has the most imaginative ideas and clear goals. Steve is a bit self-absorbed and eccentric, so he has a clear idea of what he wants to do and doesn’t care if nobody else wants to join him. That kind of purpose attracts those who go by flow and don’t have too high of ambitions: Tommy, Allan, and Darren.
Indeed, Steve has a disdain towards humanity as a big concept but regards his friends differently. If somebody tries to pick a bone with any of them, he is ready to go and scare off the bullies. He might have grand ideas, but it’s important to remember that all of these are thoughts inside a 12-year-old boy’s head. No matter how he tries to become detached from humanity, he still holds his friends in high regard because all of them want to hang around with Steve for who he is - especially one of them.
Part 5: Let’s FINALLY address Darren Shan
The fact that Steve is unabashedly obsessed with Darren is the big element that drives the plot of the manga and books a good amount of time. It has been hard to avoid Darren as a topic, but it’s important to establish Steve and his mindset before going to explain what Darren means to him.
We know that Steve feels abandoned and wants someone to show interest in him. Surely, his friends are fun to hang around with and they like Steve, but if that was all it took then he would be as obsessed with Tommy and Allan. What sets Darren apart is that he knows how it feels to be interested in something to an extent that you can’t think of anything else.
For boys at that age, and at that time, it’s easy to assume that they don't talk about their feelings over topics like loneliness (nor they might actually understand how they are feeling). So far there has been nobody else that actually understands how Steve feels about monsters. He only gets a few laughs and remarks about how weird it is, but nobody takes him seriously.Â
However, Darren is the only one who genuinely asks about them and is willing to consume comics and movies. He remembers the things Steve tells him and shows that he is invested in what Steve likes. That’s the single thing that Steve ever wanted from his mother and any other possible adult. In a world where he feels alienated and mistreated by humanity as a collective, Darren is the only person that he feels genuinely seen by. He can be enamored by what he loves and Darren would listen.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration that Darren is the most important person in Steve’s life. A 12-year-old as invested as he wouldn’t want anything as much as somebody to listen to him seriously and even offer their own insight into the topic. Even if Darren’s existence in his life doesn’t heal the root of his loneliness and won’t change his mindset, Darren is the only one Steve can be around truly himself and still feel understood. Steve is at this point emotionally dependent on Darren.
Part 6: Steve is emotionally dependent on Darren and that is no-good
Remember when I mentioned Steve's need to control one of his friends? It’s not exactly as straightforward as actually controlling Darren’s movements. Steve trusts Darren a lot to the point where he confides his actual fantasies and wishes to him. However, all of this thought of being unloved and unwanted has sent his self-esteem to rock bottom. He doesn’t believe that Darren would even miss him that much in the end if he were to be gone, as he would have people to replace Steve. He wouldn’t be able to do that though if Darren were to go.
This is why Steve panics notably when he notices that Darren is acting weird and distancing himself. He had never expected such a situation to happen and it makes Steve act irrational. What would he do if the only person he can confide in abandons him? It makes Steve lose control and feel powerless simply because he is that much dependent on Darren’s existence in his life.Â
Because of this, he ends up trying to strangle Darren to gain some sense of control over his situation. However, he ends up breaking into tears when he realizes what he did to his best friend who was just as scared and confused. Steve jumping to conclusions immediately and regarding Darren as someone against him is simply his reaction to regain control over the new, looming abandonment. Spinning an idea that Darren was rotten from the start, as was everyone else, would make Steve feel like it wasn't the fault of his own actions that Darren abandoned him. Rather, Darren had bad intentions from the start and Steve was just a victim. This idea is especially reinforced by how Steve tries to egg Darren to “show his true self” during the showdown in the theater in the 11th volume.
The reason why Steve doesn’t spin this sort of idea over anyone else is simply that he is too dependent on Darren. As mentioned, he couldn’t take the hit if Darren were to abandon him. There would be nobody else to blame but himself for it: no matter how he dreams to become a monster, all Steve truly wants is acceptance and understanding. Darren going out of his way to abandon Steve would be too much for Steve whose self-esteem is in the deep end already. This inability to fully trust Darren because Steve has no high regard for himself is what makes their relationship unbalanced and Steve so desperate to have control over Darren.
Part 7: Why things went as they did
Things wouldn’t have spun so out of control if Larten Crepsley hadn’t rejected Steve so harshly. For someone who had dreamed of becoming a monster for so long, it hurt Steve to an extent where he even shed some tears. The thought that his best friend sided with a monster who rejected Steve harshly just sounds too much of a convenient accident in his head. All the things discussed before lead to this moment where Steve spun a story in his head out of desperation and panic. Because of feeling contempt towards those that had abandoned him rather than looking for their approval, his resentment only grew.
Later on, he had expressed that the story he made up sounds unbelievable, but at that point, it wasn’t about if it was true or not. No matter the reason, Steve would’ve been hurt over Darren leaving him and feeling only anger. With this reasoning, he at least personally felt like he wasn’t at fault and gained some control over the situation.
On the other hand, in the alternative timeline, Darren’s worry and clear panic were the things that sobered Steve from his hurt and anger. It shows that he only needed some assurance that there would be someone who would be genuinely hurt like Steve would be if he were to leave. We don't know how things went on from there, but I would like to believe that maybe Steve would be able to let go of his contempt towards humanity and finally start the process of gaining self-esteem and healing from loneliness. At least he could trust Darren more if nothing else.
Thanks to low self-esteem and the feeling of being unloved, Steve started to feel contempt towards humanity and coped with that by fantasizing about becoming a monster and killing people. Throw in too much dependency on his dense best friend and one insensitive vampire, and you get a hotpot of a horrible man who just needed one decent adult in his childhood.
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