Otis_Traffic_Cone

You hate it.

It looks terrible on you and you've always thought that. When you were really young, you thought that's just what everyone thought about their hair colour. When you were a teenager, people chalked it up to hormones and wanting to be unique and follow the trends of dying your hair. It wasn't.

You've seen people with brown hair. It looks so good. You start imagining yourself with beautiful brunette hair. What if you could be that? And then you hear someone talk about you, call you 'that blonde over there' or someone telling you, 'your blonde hair looks so good!' and you're reminded all over again.

Your parents talk about something. Something you've never heard of before. "All those young kids, dying hair everywhere," they say. You ask them what it means. "Oh, that's when someone with one hair colour thinks they're better off with another hair colour." Your heart lights up. There's more people like you. You're not insane. And then- "Fucking insane. They just want to feel special. All this ridiculousness over trends." It hits you in the heart. You say nothing, just mumble an 'okay' and turn your attention back to your food.

That night, you're scrolling on your phone, and one video pops out. It's talking about dyed hair. You see people not just with natural-coloured dyed hair, but blues and greens and so many other colours. It looks beautiful. You remember your blonde hair. Could it finally be brown? These people are like you. They might be able to help.

You do research. You reach out to people online. And finally, you have your hands on a box dye from a store. it's not the highest quality, but you have it. At midnight the next weekend, you do it. You dye it brown. It's messy and tricky, but your heart is swelling with joy the entire time.

You expect people at school to be happy. Your hair is beautiful. You're beautiful. You finally feel comfort in your hair, confident in the way you look. Instead, you get side-eyes. People whisper and glare. One of your friends pulls you aside. "What happened to your hair?" You tell her you dyed it. Asks her if it looks nice. She grimaces. "Yeah... it looks fine.... but your blonde hair was your natural hair colour and it looked fine as well." You tell her the truth. How you've always hated it on you. Found brown to be so, so much prettier. Looked so much more amazing on you, and felt it too. "Yeah... but blonde is still your natural hair colour, right? No amount of dye is going to change that." Your confidence starts to sink. Will everyone think this?

Turns out, they will. You hear people still refer to you as "that blonde there". New people express confusion. "But her hair's brown? It's very clearly brown." "Well, yeah, but she dyed it. Her natural hair colour is blonde." "Oh... okay."

Your parents don't like it. "Your blonde hair was so beautiful," your mother sobs through her tears. "Why did you have to ruin it? My beautiful blonde child is gone! Gone forever! Why did you do it?" And you tell her that her child is not gone, her child is right here, just with different hair. She doesn't listen to a single word. Your father is mad. He yells at you to get out of his house, that you're a fucking disgrace, that you're mentally ill and brainwashed by trends and so many other hurtful things. You can only leave.

You try to go to another friend's place. She answers the door with a scowl. "Why are you here?" she seethes. She's angry. Why? You tell her about your situation. "Serves you right," she spits. "You're incredibly offensive to everyone with blonde hair." You ask her why, puzzled. "You clearly hate blonde hair. Why else would you dye it? Do you find blonde people disgusting?" No, no, that's not it. Blonde people are fine, you try saying. It just didn't suit me. I wish it did, but it didn't, so I changed it. "Stop twisting everything," she says. "I don't want to see your face." The door closes and you're left there on the steps.

You don't know what else to do. Were you truly lying? No, blonde hair has never suited you. Brown looks better. Brown makes you feel secure. You feel it's what makes you feel like yourself. But why can no one grasp that?

You search up more on your phone, and you find a community for similar people. People thrown out, disowned, abused for dying their hair or expressing wants to. When you get there, you find that they accept you with the warmest smiles and the coziest hugs. You find people that bleached their brown hair to blonde and dyed their blonde hair to brown, just like you, and they look so amazing. You find people with all sorts of coloured hair too, red, blue, yellow, purple, multicoloured and hair that gets redyed differently depending on the day. They all have similar stories. You've finally found a place you belong.

Outside, people are still outraged. They scream at the community that they're brainwashing their kids, that they're grooming every kid to dye their hair until there's no natural hair kids left. You don't feel hurt anymore. You know now they make no sense. They push out their own children, and this is the result. They don't want people with dyed hair banding up together.

Brown hair has always suited you. You're rather tired of people trying to pretend it doesn't.

I know a lot of the fandom like to headcanon that Finn and Robin had been friends for a long time, but I think the evidence points to the opposite. I think they were newer friends.

We see Robin tell Finn’s bullies not to mess with him again. And they listen (until Robin gets taken). It’s obviously the first time he’s done that, which points to their friendship being newer (although I think Robin probably also tried not to immediately get involved because it would only make Finn look weaker).

We also get Finn asking Robin about his fight with Moose. The conversation is about this fight but it also feels like it’s about fighting in general. Finn’s just now asking because they’re just now close enough for the conversation.

I say all of that to say, that in the basement, Finn didn’t hold back on Robin being his best friend. He said they’d be together again, that he missed him. And Robin rebuffed him. Finn wasn’t going to go out like him, Finn needed to get out for him. It’s what he needed to hear in the moment, but…

But later he thinks about it. Because he starts to wonder if he meant as much to Robin as Robin did to him. He wonders if he was important to him, or just a man like several others who he didn’t want to leave behind because Robin was a good person.

He’d wonder even more as he got older because the Grabber never goes away. Finn sees him in his nightmares, in the corner of his vision, looking straight at him across the way. But there is no Robin. The Grabber feels like he’s haunting him, but Robin is just gone.

He starts to feel stupid, guilty, humiliated by his feelings for Robin. Because Robin was his best friend but he starts to think maybe he was just someone Robin liked well enough.

Finn can’t stomach seeing Ernesto. He looks like Robin, but even if he didn’t, Finn feels like a fraud. He doesn’t look out for Robin’s younger brother because the thought of it makes him feel desperate, like he’d be fighting to feel like he mattered to Robin.

So instead he settles for trying to be like Robin. Because even if Robin hadn’t actually seen him as a best friend, he was still someone Finn admired. He was still the reason he got out of the basement.

When he tells Ernesto at Alpine Lake that if Robin is looking over anyone, it’s not him. He doesn’t say it to comfort Ernesto. He says it to drive the knife into himself. He says it because maybe Robin does watch his kid brother and he doesn’t want to embarrass himself, like Robin’s ghost might be there watching and wondering why Finn ever thought they were close.

It’s not until everything finishes at Alpine Lake, when the one message Robin leaves is to him that he finally feels relief.