It’s Nellie ( @shegotbored ) and this is my original bby Ian!
Back and revamped to death. BIG THANKS to my actual senpais @saintjimmys and @maxbronte for helping me come up with his new story and change him from anti-villain to anti-hero~
His story is still crazy, but a lot more realistic than the original LOL.
Single mother walked out on him when he was about 13 and never looked back. (She had her own reasons for abandoning Ian, but he took it really personally, and this whole thing gave him a vendetta against people who “don’t take responsibility” that will eventually lead to his motivations for coming to Plath.)
In his mom’s absence, he was taken under guardianship by the only person in the family with more baggage than Ian’s mother: his crazy conspiracy theorist uncle, Roger.
Roger Moon lived mostly in isolation on the outskirts of a mountain town in Arizona, right on the border of the desert, where he did what he thought was crucial decryption of government files and UFO research, and he definitely thought Ian’s mother was abducted by aliens when she skipped town, and he has his own theories on the identity of Ian’s dad. (spoiler alert: it’s aliens.)
Since Roger didn’t trust the government school system, he pulled Ian out and homeschooled him until he was old enough to “legally” drop out (age 16 in Arizona).
While Ian never completely bought into his uncle’s beliefs, he did take up an interest in more concrete investigative journalism. He would fight 999,999 bees for Edward Snowden and take a bullet for Michael Hastings even though Michael Hastings is already dead. But Roger always said they were doing bigger work than those guys when he would drag Ian along to trespass on restricted government property to take blurry meaningless photographs or make the kid stay up all night with him overanalyzing the random patterns that the wind left in the desert sand trying to decode imaginary alien messages.
In fact, Roger was so sure that they were onto something huge, he was paranoid that government agents were out to get him before he could uncover something. So when random hikers or teenagers would come “too close” to his property (meaning, twenty minutes from where his property line began), Roger would shoot them dead, drag them into his house and tell the cops that they were breaking and entering and he only shot in self-defense. This happened once when Ian was 13 and didn’t realize that his uncle was doing something illegal, once when he was 14 and the event made him too afraid of his uncle to report the incident and he tried to tell himself it wasn’t happening, and one last time when he was 16, and Ian finally worked up the courage to tell the police and get Roger arrested.
Over the course of living with Roger, (and especially after he was 14 and his uncle’s crime sparked his secret interest in people who got away with murder), he did a lot of research on cold cases and found some leaked information and speculation on a suspicious boarding school called PLATH ACADEMY, the monkeyhouse where judges seemed to send troubled kids who they didn’t completely trust but couldn’t get enough evidence to convict as murderers.
When Ian realized that he was going to need a new place to stay after he reported Roger, he decided to kickstart a career in investigative journalism, and decided to go undercover as another unconvicted killer at Plath to infiltrate the network of them, gain their trust and get enough evidence to reopen their cases and finally get the serious criminals on campus sent to prison.
Since his uncle already had membership on a lot of dark web leak sites and conspiracy forums, Ian staged a conspiracy theory against himself, and spread rumors online from an “anonymous” insider source that would frame himself as being a part of his uncle’s murders, and also inflate the story to be more “interesting.” He leaked stories that he and his uncle were both crackpot UFO chasers, kidnapping and interrogating the hikers and planning some sort of ritual to get them abducted by aliens.
Since aliens are just really entertaining, the stories gained a lot of traction online and the mystery and mythos around Ian’s case blew up. Ian would support his own anonymous leaks during his public appearances but never backed up enough evidence to warrant serious government investigation of him. (I’ll go more into how he did this later on in character development questions and headcanon posts.)
So BASICALLY the general public would believe that he and his uncle were up to some SERIOUS LUNATIC SHIT but that Ian managed to get off the hook because there wasn’t enough evidence to try him, making him another murderer at Plath Academy. In reality he’s just a boy who’s about to get in way over his head and doesn’t realize what he’s getting into.
THAT WAS LONG SO REALLY HERE’S ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT HIM AT PLATH:
BIOGRAPHY TL;DR: he was raised in isolation with a government-hating uncle for the last 4 years; his uncle used to shoot and kill anyone who came too close to his property because he was paranoid that they were agents coming to steal his research; he got away with killing people by dragging their bodies onto his property and saying they were trespassing; Ian had Ian snitched and got his uncle arrested; Ian requested to be sent to Plath to infiltrate the network of murderers on the campus and expose people who faked insanity plea or got off the hook on serious crimes when they should have been sent to jail and not to boarding school; Ian used his uncle’s access to the dark net and conspiracy websites to make a viral story that made the public believe that he and his uncle were in cohoots in murdering the trespassers and that it was all a part of some bigger, suspicious plan involving aliens. The mystery and hints of alien/UFO-themed “sacrifices” made the story more sensational and garnered a big following online, but Ian never faked enough concrete evidence to garner a serious government investigation in any way.
IN SHORTEST SHORT, your characters would probably know Ian as the kid who helped commit mysterious murders in the name of aliens and got away with it. Not because that’s true but because that’s how he meticulously staged it to look like so he would have Serial Killer Mastermind Cred when he came to Plath.
I know I dropped him but instead of saying he left and came back with two weeks left in the year let’s just say... he’s been at the school since February and mostly keeps a low profile, and has only been quietly observing so far. (This leaves room for anyone who wants to plot out already knowing or having a relationship with Ian! I’m gonna say he is familiar with most characters through observing them but it’s up to you if your characters have noticed him too.)
There are definitely RUMORS about him being involved in the interrogations and murders of the trespassers in the desert and it’s very possible that your character has heard about him getting away with it the same way they hear that actual criminals at the school got away with murder on the insanity plea.
While Ian is a very bitter and angry boy, the person he presents as at Plath is NOT. He acts quiet and a little quirky, and very anti-establishment (like the way I used to play him, but a little more sane). He seems like he would be an agreeable, reliable partner in crime for any murderers who want to network with him. He seems a little off, but people who don’t know about his undercover work would probably chalk up his suspiciousness to him being homeschooled and awkward.
All threads I did before dropping him are still canon!! The only one I put any narration with was in the hospital one with Max, and while his thoughts behind what was happening would be slightly different, it’s still in character for him to sneak into her room to investigate her. And the stabbing plot is too good to drop. He still has a scar on his shoulder from her jamming the scalpel into him.
Fin! Hit me up for plots bbies!!! owo
