#biochem things

CASSIDY

ok some context first: to me, different key centers in music are different colors. i wouldn't call it synesthesia, per se, it's more of an association. i don't actually see the colors, but the music just reminds me of the colors, if that distinction makes any sense haha. i might make a chart or something with all of them on the future just for fun.

but basically i've decided Cassidy has a similar thing, and i've given her all of my interpretations of the colors of various key centers. when she was under the influence of Pokey, she tended to write and play in Bb and Eb, because i associate these keys with various shades of teal and blue. in the good endings, when everyone makes it out alive, she abandons composing for a while, because it reminds her so vividly of Pokey's grasp on her mind. but after lots of talking with Ruby and with the others (and lots of therapy) she realizes that she does actually miss composing, just not the "blue" vibe her music tended to have. because pokey was in her brain for so long, she had to actively struggle to compose in keys that arent "blue". and of the new keys she was allowing herself to compose in, she had more success with some than others. namely, she found herself drawn to C (yellow), Db (gold), A (red), and Ab (dark red), and she realized that those are all colors that remind her of Ruby.

so she goes to Ruby and is like "you're saving my music!! it's gold now!! YOU ARE THE MUSIC COLORS!!"

and meanwhile Ruby is all "love i don't understand any of this at ALL, but if youre excited im excited?!"

WYATT

in the bad endings, Wyatt becomes The Homeless Man after Ted dies, and it's this horrible, awesome, Freudian-shadow-self sort of situation. this all was inspired by a piece we studied this semester in my music history class: an arrangement of the poem 'der doppelganger' by franz schubert. (going to nerd out for a minute, hope that's ok!) this piece is part of the romantic period of classical music (in the 1800s ish, hard to draw clear boundaries as some elements of romanticism were present in, for example, Mozart's later compositions, and persisted into modernist conventions despite their efforts to free themselves of the past, but a good approximation is Beethoven thru Mahler with some wiggle room. this movement put a lot of emphasis on horror and awe and the supernatural and the sublime over the simply beautiful. it's also my favorite period of music if you can't tell haha) and more specifically from the Lieder movement in Germany (rising German nationalism led to increased appreciation and pride of folk songs and poetry, which led to composers arranging/incorporating these things into their music, and a general increase in vocal music. fun fact, this sentiment absolutely affected other art forms, which is how we get things like Grimm's collection of fairy tales. not-so-fun fact, these movements tended to hold a few types/genres of art as "truly representative of x culture" and tended to demonize the rest to add to "common enemy" sentiments, which is surely not applicable in this day and age at alllllll). anyway, der doppelganger is a poem originally written by heinrich heine, about encountering a figure on a dark night, staring at a house that your past lover used to inhabit, and then the clouds shift and the moonlight shines on their face and gasp!!! it's you!!!...hence the name doppelganger. schubert explores this sort of awe and horror and disgust in really cool ways, with some crunchy chord voicings, melody lines, suspensions, and resolutions to keys the main piece isn't centered in (i havent taken music theory yet so i don't know all the fancy terminology but i can definitely tell you Something Is Up with the music in the best most haunted way). anyway i just really loved the idea of Wyatt-but-not-Wyatt staring at his old home, his old school, the graves of his friends with haunted eyes, his breath rattling in and out of tired lungs, desperately trying to recall a part of himself that existed before this curse. he is not the narrator of the poem, but the pallid doppelganger staring back at the ghost of his childhood.

ough i just love torturing him hehehe :)

anywayyy in the good endings, Wyatt makes a giant bucket list of everything he missed out on as a kid that he wants to experience with his siblings. he's rightfully furious at Blinky for so thoroughly messing up his childhood, but he wants to reclaim it any way he can. his siblings had always been concerned about him, and tried to help him any way they could, but because his introduction to Blinky happened so young they never really got to know Wyatt for Wyatt. they're starting over and kind of meeting each other for the first time, and redefining their sibling bonds on their own terms, outside of a god who stole Wyatt's childhood from him. this is accomplished by a plethora of pillow fights, movie nights, ice cream, pranks, stargazing, dares, playing bad music too loudly, impromptu road trips, late night talks during slumber parties, and other wholesome sibling shenanigans. a very well-deserved happy ending.

RUBY

I mentioned before that Ruby, due to Tinky's influence, doesn't experience time in the same linear way we do, because Tinky constantly moves her from timeline to timeline, so she gets glimpses of different scenes from different parts of her life from different versions of herself. it's like asking a random number generator what order you should read the chapters of a book in, but surprise! you're actually reading multiple unrelated books and also the random number generator hates you and just loops the chapter numbers of various death scenes.

this is, of course, devastating and tragic and stuff, but one of the things that causes her the most pain is that because of all the skipping around, Tinky purposefully never let her see her thirteenth birthday, which was her first kiss with Cassidy. Ruby knows it's a small thing, in comparison with the knowledge of a thousand different ways she and her friends can die, but it still hurts. really bad.

in the good endings, Ruby eventually gets all the memories she missed out on back, albeit really slowly. she also is the only member of the group who even vaguely remembers Miss Holiday (btw going to refer to her as Holloway/Holiday interchangeably). so, 20-30 years later, after everyone graduates high school and moves on with their lives, Ruby runs into Holloway. depending on Ruby's age and Holloway's visible age (cause i think there's gonna be some weirdness with her whole eternal youth thing because of "miss holloween"? idk don't quote me on that) the conversation may sound slightly different, but because in my soul i believe every single person in Hatchetfield played by Kim Whalen is related in some way, Ruby senses that Holloway is a long lost Hatchetfield Redhead TM, and invites her to one of the Barnes family gatherings. (i mean, she's more right than she realizes, cause Holloway is her mom, but Ruby has no idea about THAT whole ordeal. nor does anyone else in hatchetfield)

so it comes up at one of the gathering things that Holloway has some history with music and Ruby is like "OMIGOSH!! my wife is a musician!!!! you guys need to meet!!", so Holloway "meets" Cassidy, and they start chatting about music. Holloway starts alluding to her past, and she half expects Ruby and Cassidy to snap out of it and forget everyithing at any moment, but they don't.

Because Cassidy and Ruby are so closely connected, and Ruby remembers Holloway due to some Ethereal Plot Device loophole in the contract Holloway signed, i have Decided that means Cassidy can remeber bits and pieces about Holloway too. and, as Holloway discovers a few jam sessions later, this lets Cassidy remember Holloway's music as well. Holloway gives Cassidy all of the music that has been building up in her head for, what, seventy years?, under the guise of "hey, i'm not doing anything with it, you can use as much or as little of these ideas as you want". she leaves their lives, becuase she's not sure exactly what loophole is letting her do this, and she doesn't want to push too far and ruin everything. eventually, Ruby and Cassidy forget most of what they learned about Holloway. except for her music. and every so often, when Cassidy is stuck on part of a song, Ruby remembers thos mysterious old notebooks she found, full of scratched out lyrics and half-written melodies, and they pore over them until they find something that breathes with the music like it was meant to be.

after so many decades, a daughter that Holloway initially thought of as a curse is the catalyst that lets people hear Holloway's music once again. the music itself is changed, of course, and isn't quite what Holloway had initially envisioned. then again, neither is Holloway herself.

MACKENZIE

i dont remember if i've said this before but she's probably like a niece of Linda Monroe. I think Nibbly is rather attached to that family, like Tinky with the Spankoffskis.

when Mackenzie survives in the bad endings, she becomes a deranged, serial killer-esque figure that murders and consumes more and more. becuase of Nibbly's strength, her hunger becomes a force that literally cannot be contained through any mortal means, so she breaks out of any and every attempt to arrest/capture/jail her, wreaking gory havoc as she goes, until she is inevitably killed.

also, I really really heavily considered giving her a prion disease in all the endings she survives, whether good or bad, but i looked up various prion diseases and how they work, and decided against them because:

1. they are GNARLY and terrible and gross and really really disturbing and i dont want to think about incurable fatal progressive neurodegenerative diseases more than i have to

2. idk if i want to kill her in a supposedly happy ending. yes, i know it could be a sort of thought-provoking, fair, narratively satisfying ending, little shop of horrors style, about how some actions cannot be undone, a parallel for nibbly's lasting impact on her life, social circles, and her own psyche, but. have you considered. wholesomeness and fluff? i have. yes please.

3. it's also really unlikely that she would have gotten a prion disease because of where in the body they tend to accumulate (nervous system tissue, especially in brain! horrifying stuff, really) and the fact that the person she cannibalized wasn't eaten in entirety, and also it's pretty rare for a person to develop prions on their own as they are proteins so misfolded that they become dangerous to the person themselves (rare because prion disease cases are rare at about 1 in a million.. but not compared to other people with prion diseases... wikipedia says 85% of documented creutzfeld-jakob disease occurrences are from unknown reasons and not genetic or mad cow disease reasons... yippee...). the reason they're so sensationalized is when cannibal cultures happen some prey on both victims outside the group and dead members of the group, so if one person were to at some point consume/develop prions, it would be spread throughout the group, especially if nervous system tissue is consumed along with the rest of the body. this is what happened with kuru, i'm pretty sure, and how it spread through so many members of that community.

i don't know as much about her future compared to the others, but I know that she has the option to become a professional athlete doing Sports Things TM, but chooses to become a personal trainer instead, making sure her clients have a healthier relationship with sports and fitness than she did. also, she's vegan. for obvious reasons.

BEN

in the bad timelines, he comes to terms with what he's done to the people who took a chance on him and trusted him, and spends sleepless nights wondering if he and Max were just destined to be terrible people, and dies tragically somehow idk im still working this one out.

in the good endings, Ben asks Holiday to teach him everything she knows, and becomes a school psychologist specializing with teens and supernatural stuff in Hatchetfield, kind of taking over some of the weight she's been carrying. even though he eventually forgets Holloway, he remembers what she taught him, and continues researching supernatural things in the Waylon's library that Liam discovered, because Liam is a little bit... busy... in these timelines. he's a big advocate for the whole "people can change" thing, because he knows it was the support from his friends and their faith in him that kept him back from the edge, and that stopped him from descending into the madness Wiggly had planned for him. he still wonders what life would have been like if this one thing had happened, or if that other thing hadn't, but it doesn't drive him insane like in the bad endings. in these good endings, he knows that there comes a point in everyone's life (or death) where you have to choose where your allegiances lie. it gives him peace, knowing that the Jagerman name is not synonymous with "failure", becuase both he and his brother chose well.

LIAM

fun fact my guy is the epitome of bi panic and i love him for it

(um what do you mean im projecting? who said anything about projecting? uhh not me...even though i'm very much looking forward to writing this... WHO SAID THAT)

another fun fact in the scene webby greets him in the Waylon library for the first time, he realizes she's a good four to six inches shorter than him. she is an immortal spider goddess with eight eyes and eight limbs and fangs and has been here since the dawn of creation and has devoted her very essence to combating the dark forces of the world. and when she grabs his shoulders all imposingly he has to crane his neck to look down at her. and that makes me very happy

Liam isn't present in the group in most of the bad endings, but there are stray timelines in which he is called by Webby but things go *awry* and he, along with the four losing champions, dies tragically. There are also a few timelines where he and Holiday succeed in breaking the curse, but all five of the champions still die, leaving him alone and traumatized. I think in these timelines he becomes a sort of hermit in the Waylon library, reliving the horrors he witnessed over and over again, blaming himself for not having studied hard enough to save his peers, reading more and more, searching desperately for a way to bring them back.

in every single timeline, he and Wyatt still have some complicated *feelings* for each other that they need to work through. sometimes they do, sometimes they dont. sometimes they get together before they die, sometimes they loathe each other before they die, sometimes one of them dies before either of those things can happen. but in all the good endings, Wyatt realizes that he was being a bit clingy, what he really needs is space to figure out how life works without the crushing stares of a thousand eyes, and he can't string Liam along for that. and oh sweet irony, Liam is the one who dumped Wyatt back in middle school, so although they part ways as friends and still stay connected, Mr Woodward gets a taste of his own medicine and it SUCKS.

in the good endings, he gets out of Hatchetfield like he always planned, and studies library science at Insert Dream School Here, which just so happens to be in California. There, after some prodding and manipulation from Webby, he runs into one Hannah Foster.