swamp ophelia

my opinion on gender is “no thank you” but i identify as a woman as a political category so you can use she/her pronouns.

social media is the devil. i hang out on dreamwidth as lirazel if you want to relive the livejournal days.

all my ao3 fic is locked to keep it safe from big tech scrapers and snooping journalists who need to leave fandom alone. if you are just a fan and want an invite, hit me up: i have a ton!

in the past couple of weeks on my walk around the neighborhood i have seen: so many many many canadian geese, the huge local hawk, a great big turtle, two different deer, three rabbits, an egret, and of course a zillion squirrels and smaller local birds. there's also a fox and an armadillo who live in the area, as well as a coyote, but i haven't seen them in a while (which is good because for some reason my neighbors let their cats wander around outside even though everyone knows the coyote is there).

well i hadn't until this very moment! but now i'm thinking about it!

i haven't seen anything in canon to make me think he has religious trauma or that he's particularly devout himself (the two most common reactions to growing up as a pk) but we've only seen him on two days of his life! so why not?

everyone's guessing he's catholic just because of his name, and i do love a catholic take, but imo that's not enough for us to know that, so let's dive into protestant!frank.

some thoughts:

+ best case scenario, his mom or dad is a fairly liberal christian. if his mom is, like, an episcopalian rector or his dad is a mainline methodist, lutheran, or presbyterian minister, then he was raised to be accepting, open-minded, and emphasize god's grace and love. he would have grown up providing a lot of service to the community: food banks, interdenominational or interfaith programs (his church would almost certainly have been predominately white, but they would have good relationships with the black churches in the area and also would with the jewish and muslim communities, if those were present), probably local activisim around social justice issues.

if this is the case, he's probably spiritually well-adjusted and is either still that kind of christian or he's kind of drifted into agnosticism, but it's not that big of a deal in his family because we're all universalists here. or he announced when he was 12 that he's an atheist and he has had many long and thoughtful conversations with his parents about it and they hope he'll come back to the fold but they're not that concerned about his soul because--again--universalism, god's grace, etc.

+ then you've got the kind of medium-intensity option, where his dad (and it would be his dad) is the pastor of an evangelical but not fundamentalist congregation. this world would be much more conservative socially ("love the sin hate the sinner;" "women aren't less than men, they just have different roles!"; abortion is always wrong, etc.) and the pk role would be accompanied by a ton of expectations. preacher's families in this situation are expected to be super holy, so frank would have been held up as an example his entire life and felt a lot of pressure to be perfect (though his mom and sisters would have had it much worse). he would have been really involved with his youth group with it being his main social circle (bible camp, wednesday night classes in the teen room, retreats, lockins, etc.) and he'd be familiar with the media landscape of evangelicalism in the early 2000s (christian rock, veggie tales, purity culture, the left behind books, whatever). any problems in the family would have been kept carefully out of sight of the rest of the congregation, and if he got in trouble of any kind, it would be a Very Big Deal.

it would explain him getting married young (in order to have god-sanctioned sex; because everyone is expected to get married right out of college and start a family) and it would also explain why his conception of addiction is someone whose entire life is derailed by it (i always think about his "could an addict do what i do?" question that implies to me that he hasn't known many "high functioning" addicts, which would make sense because in this environment, there would be addicts who were high functioning, but it would be a VERY big secret for that family and no one else in the community would know about it. so if anyone else in the community DID know, it would be because the person's entire life had fallen apart).

if this is the case, he's probably got a strained relationship with his parents (his dad would be angry, his mom would be pleading and weepy) because i can't see him still being that level of devout, and anything less than that is putting his soul in danger, but they probably wouldn't cut him off entirely (unless he tells them he's bi or he actually cheats on abby). he's probably rejected 90% of what he was raised to believe, but he's also always battling all the stuff that was ingrained in him as a child and he'll never fully be able to rid himself of it (not that i'd know anything about that...).

if things are bad with his dad, then that would explain why he latches onto robby so much...

+ worst case scenario is that his family is full-on fundamentalist, which would mean religious trauma out the wazoo. take all the stuff from scenario two and crank it up about ten notches.

i kind of don't think this can be the case because if it were, i doubt he'd be in contact enough with his parents to be helping them move and also i feel like it would show more. he'd have been homeschooled, know nothing about pop culture, and his rebellion would have been listening to styx or something.

it would, however, explain his daddy issues!!! and the whole robby thing!!!