ok i need to talk about alastair for a (long) moment bc i love him.
this got a lot longer than i expected it to btw so ig it’s just for the alastair stans bc it’s basically just a character study lmao
first of all, there’s obviously this:
“I wanted you to have a childhood, a thing I never had. I wanted you to be able to love and respect your father as I never could. Every time he made a mess, who do you think had to clean it up? Who told you Father was ill or sleeping when he was drunk? Who went out and fetched him when he passed out in a gin palace and smuggled him in through the back door? Who learned at ten years old to refill the brandy bottles with water each morning so no one would notice the levels had sunk—?”
like he put so much energy into making sure cordelia could grow up loving and adoring her father in a way he was never able to. from age ten he was hiding his father’s alcoholism, even before he started at the academy.
“Alastair never acknowledging any of it, laughing it off, turning her attention in some other direction, always, so she did not dwell. So she would not have to.”
and then he got to the academy and had bullying and beatings added on top of all that.
“They … let’s just say that by the end of the first week, I had been made to understand my place in the hierarchy, and I had the bruises to remind me should I ever forget.”
like… does this excuse bullying? no, it doesn’t, but it does explain it, especially after he had taken all that for a year:
“After about a year of being knocked around,” Alastair went on, “I realized I could either become one of the bullies, or suffer for the rest of my school days.”
and as he says himself no, he didn’t beat anyone, didn’t get his hands bloody, but yes, he was a bully to save himself from the beatings.
and again, this does not excuse the bullying because of course that’s still bad. i just feel like a lot of people really fucking underestimate how much growing up with an alcoholic parent can affect you. especially when 1) you actually know about it, and 2) you’re the one who has to deal with it from age ten, and 3) they verbally attack you when they’re drunk (as we also saw when elias talked to james)
“Then you lot arrived, a bunch of boys from famous families, too well brought up to understand at first what went on far from home. Expecting the world would embrace you. That you would be treated well. As I never had been.” Alastair pushed back a lock of hair with a shaking hand. “I suppose I hated you because you were happy. Because you had each other—friends you could like and admire—and I had nothing like that. You had parents who loved each other.”
and does this excuse the way he treated them? again, no. but once again, it does explain it. alastair had dealt with so damn much since he was a kid so of course he’s gonna feel jealousy. alastair isn’t white, he’s never been able to go anywhere and expected that the world would embrace him as he put it, so that’s yet another thing he was more than likely jealous about.
and he knows what he did was wrong. he knows there’s no excuse, he knows they would all be well within their right to hate him for the rest of their lives if they wanted to, and i feel like so many people forget that?? alastair never expected to be forgiven for any of this.
and then we get to his sexuality and charles.
if i did the math right, alastair would’ve been either 16 or freshly 17 when he started dating a 23-year-old charles and to quote cc:
“it was a bad and unhealthy relationship, and i think the age gap is part of that.”
anyway, there’s one quote i’ve had in my mind ever since chog, and it’s when alastair asks charles, “If this is not what you came for, then why are you here?”
this implies that charles is only ever there for one thing. like, alastair is in love with this man and he wants to show that but charles isn’t letting him.
not to mention that charles is also dismissing alastair’s wishes:
“And I thought that you would agree to marry too.”
“That I would marry?” Alastair sprang to his feet. “I have told you over and over, Charles, even if I did not have you, I would never marry some poor woman and deceive her as to my love and regard.”
alastair having to tell charles over and over again that he’s not marrying a woman and charles still assuming that he will like… sir 🤨 he said no 🤨
anyway. then there’s to how he felt about his sexuality:
“Father’s weakness is not your weakness.”
The fire in the grate had nearly burned down. Alastair’s eyes were luminous in the dark. “I have my own weaknesses, as you well know.”
and after this when cordelia tells him that love isn’t a weakness, he responds with “isn’t it?”
like this man is comparing his own sexuality to the way his father treated him. you cannot tell me he was always okay with being gay because he so clearly was not, especially not with charles trying to keep him hidden and trying to make him marry a woman.
“I can’t mourn,” he said in a choked voice. “I cannot mourn my own father. What does that say about me?”
his relationship with his father was so ruined to the point where he couldn’t mourn him because he wasn’t able to love him in the way cordelia was, likely because he mourned his father already when he was 10.
and there’s also some of cordelia’s observations in choi:
Some months ago Cordelia had learned the emotional cost of Alastair’s interventions, the invisible scars he worked so diligently to conceal.”
the emotional costs being this:
“She knew Alastair was not always like this—she knew he could be kind, sweet, vulnerable even. She knew her father had broken his son’s heart a dozen different ways, and Alastair was doing the best he could with the pieces.”
like. elias has been breaking alastair’s heart over and over basically in every possible way since he was at least 10 so he’s really just doing what he can to stitch himself together at this point, the exact reason he put up walls.
“But it didn’t help for Alastair to behave like this, to retreat behind a cold facade as cutting as glass.
The way James retreated behind the Mask.”
alastair is basically just one big defense mechanism.
we also have thomas’ observations about alastair:
“There was only one other person Thomas had known with eyes like that. Not golden eyes, but dark, and so sad—he had always been drawn to that dichotomy, he thought, of the cruelty of Alastair’s words, and the sadness with which he said them. Sorrowful eyes and a vicious tongue. Tell me, he had always wanted to say, what broke your heart, and let such bitterness spill out?”
the answer to his question: elias.
elias broke alastair’s heart and left him to respond to everything with defense mechanisms.
alastair is such a complex character and he’s also one of my absolute favorites because of that. his relationship with his father is so realistic, and him distancing himself from everyone else because of his father is also so realistic. i just love this character with my whole heart ok
this is so long but istg i could write a whole essay about this man and ykw? maybe i will.
