#anyways. i dont stan him but i understand him and find him fascinating and also a little sad. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

baltears · 2 years

Note

hello spookyshai!! its cool if u dont want to, but i was wonderin if you'd elaborate on what you like about william? i just like thinking about/mentally rewriting westworld and its characters in my free time, and your fascination with william's got me fascinated, mostly bc i see him as a stinky bastard. so obvs you'd definitely have a more nuanced take on him, which i'd also like to develop for the imaginary westworld rewrite fic that i'm never going to write ;)) regardless if u answer or not, just wanted to say i'm a fan of your blog and i hope you're havin a good day!!

omg so first of all thank you so so much for sending this, especially asking unprompted about a character you don't even like and giving me a chance to explain my feelings about him which is just incredibly cool of you. i love and am obsessed with william so giving me any excuse to talk about him at length is like gifting me $1000. if you want to know more about my meta thoughts about him after reading this, (I'm gonna talk A Lot – sorry – but i can't possibly get through everything because he's just a very complicated guy and it's a very dense show), you can always look in my william tag. I have a lot of text posts about him, but I also often talk a lot in the tags of my own posts as well as reblogs. This is gonna be a lot of totally disorganized and unedited infodumping of a lot of different meta, but i've talked about all of it at length elsewhere too and I can also totally elaborate more if you have any specific questions (you could send another ask if you wanted, but also feel free to just message me about it anytime). I'll do my best not to get too emotional (lol) but it'll be tough because this character is so close to my heart. but I'll try!

this is a huge wall of text lol so i'll also be adding more bold and italics than i normally would just to make it a little easier to read.

so first of all let's be clear, he completely is a stinky bastard. he is a horrible, awful, faithless, pathetic specimen of a man. not liking him is totally justified. just wanted to get that out of the way. personally I think not liking anything for any reason is totally valid and justified, but there are certainly good reasons why a lot of people don't like william. he is not a good dude, at least not after a certain point. No one is obligated to relate to him, empathize with him, feel bad for him, whatever... like, no one's obligated to like anything, but especially this guy. sometimes people can get a little shirty about the fact that i do, like me liking him means i think they have to. I don't think that. I do love finding other william stans, and i am very unapologetic and open about my love for him, but him being widely hated makes complete sense to me.

sigh like why i love him so much though… it's kind of hard to even put into words. on one level it's just extremely personal, like, there are a lot of things about him that i really resonate with and identify with, although I know that sounds weird (it's definitely gotten some very shocked reactions before, lol). i'm a villain liker in general, i tend to be able to relate to those types of characters easily and it kind of takes a lot for me to really dislike one on a personal level (though that's true of any sort of character, i just tend to like the majority of the characters in any work that i genuinely enjoy regardless of how shitty they are – to me the only truly bad thing a character can be is annoying, like, the kind of annoying where you just want them off your screen). Characters being any degree of evil or shitty or problematic doesn't bug me at all, personally, I tend to feel no deep internal urge to have them 'held accountable' for the things they do, unless they exist in a narrative that genuinely doesn't seem to understand that they are in the wrong, which does irritate me when it happens. But anyway, I don't want to get too oversharey but there's definitely a very high level of just personal resonance to the character for me in terms of the kinds of conflicts he has, the things he struggles with, the dominant emotions of his life, etc. so that's part of it. also though he's just… a very complex and beautifully constructed piece of character work, so I also love him just on a technical level as a writer.

He has such incredible significance in the story too, being the thematic representative of humanity, both to dolores and to the wider narrative – his capabilities for good and evil are humanity's capabilities for good and evil, right. Dolores' opinion of humanity and feelings towards humanity are very colored by her opinion of him and her feelings towards him, and thematically their relationship is sort of a microcosm of the broader relationship between hosts and humanity and very much a central piece of the narrative. Even when it's out of direct focus it's being constantly referenced and pointed back to, such as with the caleb storyline in season 3 – caleb himself is basically one big callback to william in s3, parallels out the wazoo, and his function of turning around dolores' opinion on humans is very much related to him reminding her of william – hence why her storyline in season 3 ends with her remarking on how her memories of william as a young man indicate to her that humanity is capable of goodness, because caleb's capacity to choose echoes william's capacity to choose, caleb's goodness echoes william's goodness, it all goes back to that, etc.

So… I guess I'll just jump in lol. William's Thing, the fulcrum of his character, the main feeling or sentiment that underlies all of his evil actions and kind of his general turn away from the kind and gentle person he used to be, is alienation, right. He lives his whole life (as he tells dolores in 1x07) not fitting in anywhere, not making connections anywhere, not having any sort of community or any experience with love or companionship of any kind… he's just been totally alone and alienated his entire life. like, the closest thing he had to a friend was logan, and he hates logan. I think this is the major thing people miss about him – there's this perception that his turning evil was out of some form of entitlement, that he was just angry that this woman he liked didn't like him back and it's just an issue of wounded masculinity, but to me that completely misses the mark. Like yes wounded masculinity is a piece of his character (the way he performs and weaponizes masculinity in general is… really fascinating, I'll go into a bit more detail about it, but the kind of showy machismo that he displays is definitely a tool that he intentionally developed for his own use rather than a really integral part of who he is) but it's not at all the core emotion happening there.

To William, Dolores was not only a person he was in love with or a person he was attracted to. She was also his first and only genuine human connection ever. She was his first true friend, she was his first love, she was the first suggestion anywhere in his life that it was even possible at all for him to experience a sort of deep mutual understanding and care, that somebody could actually genuinely see him and let him see them. He literally just had not ever experienced any level of real emotional intimacy before, which is a feeling i actually think a lot of people relate to if they grew up feeling very lonely. And then ultimately not only was that relationship taken away, but it was kind of retroactively deleted. When he saw her again back in sweetwater, his thought was not, "i don't have this relationship anymore," but "i never had this relationship," and further, "the single person i've ever thought i could have this kind of relationship with is actually not capable of having any kind of relationship with anyone, including me, and i literally just made all of this up in my head." After losing Dolores he is not just sad and lonely – he literally comes to the conclusion that he can never have any kind of intimate human connection or be genuinely loved, ever, because the one person in his entire life he thought he connected with is not even a person at all, but just a thing. It's very much a rug pull moment on a level that's hard to describe, it kind of takes some thought-experimenting to get to that emotional place because it's a level of shock and hurt and betrayal and like, paradigm-shifting that most of us don't regularly experience (which I think might be part of the reason why a lot of people don't seem to really understand his character or be able to parse what's going on with him emotionally). Suffice it to say it's a wound deep enough that he was pretty much never going to recover from it.

After that happens he is completely destabilized, he loses all sense of meaning and self, and he never gets a grip on it again. He had totally reconstructed his idea of his life to include the genuine possibility of meaning, and meaningful relationships, when he met Dolores. And with the loss of her, all of that suddenly went away and he basically was just left with nothing. So that alienation that he grew up with is now not just a part of his life, not just a thing that he suffers from, but he starts to feel that it's inherent to him and that it comes from him, which is partly why we start getting all the anti-social behavior he displays later in life. He develops and kind of fosters that lack of empathy in himself not because he's truly incapable of empathy (as we see when he's a young man and at a couple of later points here and there, he is in fact very capable of it) but because he feels fundamentally cut off from other people – he can't reach them and they can't reach him.

So that fundamental sense of alienation is really what informs 90% of the things he does after that point. He starts building this persona, inside and outside the park. The real world feels meaningless to him at this point because the only hint of meaning he's ever had in his life was in the park, so he buys the park, and simultaneously starts trying to "win" at life in the real world like he would in the park. The real world honestly doesn't feel any more real to him than the park does, he just knows rationally that it's different and so he behaves differently outside the park… he builds all this wealth and power for himself, he becomes a famous philanthropist. Inside the park he starts creating this character for himself, this sort of hyper-masculine, hyper-competent, totally emotionally composed, merciless, badass villain. And he makes a very concerted effort to stay in this persona as often as he can.

It's all a performance, though, right. As early as 1x05 we have Ford pointing out (to his face! legend) that his barely-hidden desperation to find meaning in the park is giving the game away. In that flashback near the end of 2x02 we get a glimpse of what's underneath, because he's performing this cold, heartless persona in front of Dolores literally while his voice is shaking because he's having to try hard not to start crying as he's talking to her. Deep down he is still very wounded, he still loves her, he still desperately wishes deep down (as jimmi simpson explained) for her to just tell him that all of it was real, for her to be real and truly be a person the way he thought she was. When he's an older man that wish is still in there, it's just been buried very deep, covered up with a lot of other things, twisted. But it's always there, it's his most closely held desire, the only thing he truly wants, and it comes out all the time in the things he does. All his tormenting of dolores, and especially his desire to make the park "real" in order to find meaning – that's that. That sense of deep confusion that's always there in his character too, the constant inner monologue of "who am I, what does this mean, does anything mean anything, what is real or not real, what is going on," that's that too, that's his destabilized sense of self and reality and meaning that came out of losing Dolores. And by this point he has also come to feel, as he says in 2x09 to his wife, that there is something very fundamentally wrong with him, in a way that's kind of at odds with how we as the audience have historically understood him.

The thing is, we saw him be a kind, loving, gentle, thoughtful person. He certainly was not perfect, for instance his later narcissism started out as a sort of basic self-centeredness, but he was a fundamentally good-hearted person who put most of his energy into trying to do the right thing. But he starts saying that he feels like that wasn't the real him, that he thinks deep down he was evil and poisonous all along, that his turn to darkness was inevitable, and that there's a sort of helplessness to his evil. There's this deep sense of shame that permeates his character along with his loneliness and alienation and resentment. He hates everything, he hates the world, but above all he hates himself – kind of amusing considering the god complex he's developed over time. But that really does seem to be the underlying emotion, that he truly thinks that deep down he was always bad. It's very heavily implied that his philanthropy outside the park and his attention to his family, his kind of good-guy persona, is something that he constructed to try and make up for his true nature, and all but stated that he doesn't feel like he's succeeded. To him, no amount of good he does will ever balance his level of evil, evil that as he says doesn't come from anything he's done but something deeper than that, something immutable, something he is. So that's why we eventually have him getting to the point of going "I might as well not bother with this anymore. I might as well just be evil, because I can't change what I am."

I've also said in other posts that the things Juliet says to him come off as obviously abusive. Like, she's technically correct that there's some sinister things going on with his private life, but listen to how she says it. You're a virus, not a person, a thing that mindlessly infects and destroys and has no other purpose. And he agrees with her! He doesn't question it at all, he just says, yes, you're exactly right, I'm not a human being with good and bad attributes, or potential to do both right and wrong. I'm a virus. Like, again, I know people get weird about having empathy for villain characters, there's the whole "cool motive, still murder," thing, because we don't want to be excusing anyone's bad actions with a sad backstory (personally I don't really care, but I understand where the concern comes from). But when he said that to Juliet it just… like I don't know how else to put it, it broke my heart. He really believes that about himself. And later he starts to question it because he's not sure anymore if he actually chose to do any of the things he did… but the way his hallucination of Emily puts it, these are his two options: you are evil, or you had no choice. One or the other. He never puts aside the idea that he is a monster that does not deserve to live, and his suicidality persists from season one (when he encourages Dolores to shoot him in the head and reacts with honest disappointment when she can't) to the end of season four when he actually does manage to engineer his own death. He is deeply, agonizingly, pathetically miserable existing the way that he is, he seems to see his even being allowed to live at all as some sort of cosmic injustice. But he doesn't know how to change back to the way he was.

All that having happened, though, we also keep getting these repeated suggestions in the story that he actually is still capable of goodness somewhere in there. The narrative keeps asking what William is exactly, what his fundamental nature is, and keeps refusing to land on one answer, instead choosing to keep things ambiguous in a way that would be sort of odd for your garden variety villain. In 2x04 we see him experiencing regret, feeling empathy and pain on behalf of others, and acting genuinely heroic, only to later backtrack and say it didn't mean anything. In 2x09 Emily tells him he is in his essence "a lie" but makes no attempt to locate what the "truth" of him would then be. In 3x06 he tries to figure out the answer to what's going on with him again only to decide he still doesn't really know, in 3x08 we get this reminder that he still stands for Dolores as a representation of both humanity's evil and its goodness, in 4x05 when his host duplicate asks him what he is, he says "Jury's still out." He is too far down his current path to turn back, but he still does not and cannot definitively and finally choose evil, because despite his self-loathing it seems like he senses deep down that his other side is still in there. All that to say I think he's getting a redemption arc in season 5, if we get a season 5 – season 5 is supposed to be the do-over season, and the character who most desperately needs and could most benefit from a do-over is William.

Um, closing thoughts… I think he's really funny. Sometimes intentionally, like, I do laugh at his little quippy comments, but I also just think it's really funny how pathetic he is and what a mess he is and how he basically imploded his entire life on accident. I do feel a lot of very genuine care and empathy for him (obviously), but he's also such a garbage fire of a human being that you sometimes just have to laugh. He's just my funny little guy, also he sucks, also I love him and he's my lil angel, also he's the worst man ever in history and deserves to be drawn and quartered (said with love). You get it. :) There's dimensions.

Trying to think of other characterization notes for your imaginary fic… oh, did you notice he puts on an accent in the park? He does this fake Southern drawl when he's playing his park character, but it's not his real accent and he drops it at other times, kind of like how Dolores sometimes does or doesn't use her "rancher's daughter" accent when she's being Wyatt in season 2. Uh… Total nerd, at heart, seeing as "all he had as a kid were books." (I kind of suspect that childhood memory might not have been totally real, by the way… made a post about that recently that's a little ways down in my tag if you're interested.)

There are more things I could say, but I think I've probably gone on long enough for the one ask lol so I'll cut it off here. Thank you again, so much, for sending this. I hope you enjoyed and got something out of this response, but if not I still do very much appreciate you asking and being curious. I hope you had a great day too!

#westworld #his brain is a conference call #william westworld

10 notes · View notes

jewpacabruhs · 6 years

Note

I was reading your tags and please, for the love of God, write a Mafia AU. I haven't been able to find any good ones.

i wanna so bad! i find organized crime fascinating, & i’m also a big movie nerd, with crime films being my fav genre, so im super into that sorta thing. definitely would love to see it, but o boy, maybe ill jus write it myself?? gotta do everythin myself haha

i’d def go the historical route, so it’d be interesting to try to both apply characters that are firmly rooted in 90s/2000s behaviors & beliefs, and stick them in the 1900s. oh, boy, writing historical stuff is a pain. so much research. worth it tho, if it’s done well. aye, and it’ll be cool to try to keep it as nonfictional as possible. like, attempting to insert the kids (as adults, obvs) into crime history. i wonder if i could do tht? it’d be fun. it’s definitely uncharted waters. there’s a lot of potential there.

but, hmm, i think mafia aus are so rare in fandom (not just the sp fandom, but across the board) bc they contradict everything that’s popular in fanfic. mob aus would feature violence, business, finances, and corruption. whereas fics prefer cuddles, leisure time, a world where money aint an issue, and wholesomeness. and considering the majority of fic is written by horny and/or love-starved teenage girls who dont know or care about the aforementioned subjects, it makes sense. kinda a bummer, but understandable. in the defense of like everyone, lmao, those sorta fics take a lot of planning, & aint nobody got time. so i get it.

oof i think a major thing too is how gay-centric fic/fandom is, when the mobster world is undeniably a heterosexual one. thats an issue. shit, i wonder how many gay characters i could get away with while keeping it realistic. i mean, im sure there were gay mobsters, in fact i’ve read about a couple, but the lifestyles did not go hand in hand, lol.

IM STUPID NO ONE CARES ABT THIS DUMB SHIT HERES IDEAS

i’m thinking 1940s new york. im inclined towards kyman, as u probs kno, but again, the gay thing. huh. maybe i can figure it out. maybe theyre young bachelors, and theyre business partners & fuck around sometimes. we’ll see. anyway. if we’re gonna include all characters….

cartman would pull a goodfellas - he’s of, what, german descent? hell, considering his parents, he probably wouldn’t even exist in this universe. eh. well. he’d def be from yorkville, manhattan, cuz tht was a german neighbourhood. anyway he’d weasel into the italian mob, bc he’d be into the idea of 1) exorbitant amounts of money, and 2) being feared/respected. his authoritah! psh. and someone would notice how smart he is & mentor him, regardless of nationality. he’d quickly make enemies, though, because he’s rude & brash. he’d also quickly become one of the most respected young dons (would he reach that level, without a family? doubt it. he’d have to become a made man, which i believe is reserved exclusively for italians ….. ehhhh ill figure it out. maybe he’d branch out, start his own crime family. that’d be interesting. ooo.) damn, ukno, i think the 40s would make a real interesting character out of cartman. huh. yah, that’d be cool to explore, how that time period would shape him. like i said, he likely wouldt even exist. did the denver broncos exist back then? doubt it

kyle would get wrapped up in the jewish mob (which existed, and which i’d personally l o v e to be a part of lol - if i was born 100 years ago), maybe while trying to protect ike from getting involved? that’d be cool. maybe he’d demonstrate his brains & be offered a job as an accountant or an attorney, and he’d be forced to comply, either bc 1) his fam was threatened if he declined, or 2) his fam was doing bad financially & needed it. maybe both. hell, maybe he avoids the jewish mob & gets involved with the others. MAYBE IKE IS THE ONE IN THE JEWISH MOB & WANTS HIS BROTHER BACK FROM THE ITALIANS. OOOOOOOOO also they’d be from brooklyn, likely, bc that’s where jews were primarily located back then. u kno there was 400k jews in new york in 1899?? including my great great great grandparents. that’s a shit ton of jews lol. lil fun fact for ya.

wait ok so oof this is hard now, bc the mob was primarily divided into three chunks - the italians, the jews, & the irishmen. there was also the puerto ricans, but that was, like, a different division. i’m mentioning this because nationality was important to mobsters, to all organized crimes groups actually, but south park doesn’t make a habit of mentioning what countries each character’s ancestors came from, lol. so it’d be a lot of writer interpretation. and that’s cool and all, but doesn’t give me much to work with, considering most of the kids are white and likely german/england-descended.

i could make kenny & butters irish. that’d work. i think kenny’s last names irish, actually. they could be from hell’s kitchen, which had a p hefty irish-american population. maybe i could make stan irish, too. wendy might be able to pass for italian (little italy manhattan??? maybe the bronx??? im tryna think geography lol. for scale.). that’d work, if i wanted to put some stendy in there, bc i love making stan the token het guy, haha. maybe wendys dad marries her off to stan to form an alliance between the italians & irish. that’d be interesting. maybe cartman was rallying to get wendy to marry him, bc he needed to marry someone bc of, like, societal expectations, & she was the only girl who caught his interest. maybe he declares war on stan, to win back the bride he wants. maybe kyles best friends w stan, tht happened somehow, & interjects. goes to meet cartman to discuss a way out - ohhhhh theres my kyman babay!!! oooooo!!!

omg. plot forming. this is def an interesting concept. maybe i can use it as a chance to write a plot-oriented fic that doesn’t rely heavily on ships. that’d be awesome. i’ve wanted to do that for ages.

maybe we can squeeze christophe in as a french immigrant, maybe an associate of someone. same with gregory, but, like, british. that’d be fun. craig & tweek can be somewhere in there, too. associates of cartman or something. maybe they own a brothel. oooh. who else. bebe! maybe she can be a cabaret dancer who someone falls for. nothin wrong w hetero nonsense if it’s done right & if it aint nonsense. yah? maybe she can be ken’s love interest. also maybe token & nichole can be in there somewhere, from harlem?

this sounds fun as fuck, though, def. im really obsessed with new york right now, so maybe writing this could be a love letter to its history. that’d be dope. ooh, and im from las vegas actually, born & raised, so maybe i could do a chapter set there, considering the mob was very influential in the strip’s development. that’d be rad. holy heck. im excited abt this now. gotta finish oboitd asap & get into this, haha.

o shit. i jus realized, like, just how much research i’d have to do. like, not only about organized crime, abt 40s slang & dress, abt new york, abt everything. oooh boy this is a Project

ill get on that eventually haha, im into it now. it’s 4am rn tho so ima sleep, gnite anon

#anon #fics #ref #save

17 notes · View notes