#gusnacho

Victor and Tyrus!! and Tuco!! my beloved henchmen and my dearest crackhead <3

Christmas would come early for me if there was a sudden boom in the fandom of wanting to invent backstories and layered personalities for Victor and Tyrus, I'd love it if I could open their tags and see all kinds of unique interpretations for them! and I'd also be thrilled if people started writing meta about Tuco and what his personal history might be like, what flavor of childhood trauma created a guy like That. what a dream...

those three are for sure my number one underrated faves! as for episodes, none really come to mind (I remember specific scenes and characters more than full episodes lol), but rarepairs? ohhh, I have some Agendas, absolutely

any ship involving Victor and/or Tyrus. them with each other, one or both with Nacho, Gus, Mike, or some bed-breaking combination of all of them. let those henchmen fuck!

any ship involving Mike. pair him up with Nacho, with Gus, with Vic & Ty as previously mentioned... obviously we can do Jesse (though I'm focusing on BCS here), and of course there's toxic fun to be had with Walt and Lalo. let that old man fuck!

tucho. There Was Love Between Them Once, no one can dissuade me of that. Tuco is so emotionally fragile, yet so violent even towards the ones he loves and clings to, and Nacho has known him for years and earned his trust and feels a some sympathy for this guy who he knows is Not Alright, but he has to protect his own life... ahh, the angst and drama of it all!

gusnacho. I've talked about it before so I won’t get into it here, but yeah. hateful and tension-filled enemies-to-lovers, plus an age gap, plus blackmail, plus the one with the most power in the situation is the one with the most Emotional Issues to exploit >:)

mikenacho. pseudo father-son, their daddy issues and son issues match! they can experience a father's/son's love through each other like they want and desperately miss, with the added bonus of Fucking Crazy

I don't have an agenda about these two, because I've only considered them very vaguely, but I kinda think gustuco and gusmingo (domingus?) could have some potential under the right circumstances! I've talked about the former, but for the latter, it'd be a 'stealing a Salamanca asset for himself before he can really become Theirs' sort of thing. or maybe I just think it'd be funny if Nacho had to watch the guy threatening and blackmailing him romance his best friend lmao

oooh okay I'm NOT going to be actually ranking these (except for number one) because what I consider 'more of a favorite' changes with my mood and how much I've been thinking about a given character recently! with that said:

lacho takes the gold lmao. it's my first BCS ship and I got into it pretty much instantly! I've mentioned before how I like enemies-to-lovers, and lacho is that but deliciously one-sided for most of canon; Lalo doesn’t consider Nacho an enemy! to him, this is either coworkers-to-lovers or friends-to-lovers, depending on how much you think he liked Nacho in the very beginning

another aspect I like is how differently they feel about their work; Nacho is desperate to get out of the cartel by the time Lalo arrives on the scene, whereas Lalo has been cartel his whole life and is perfectly comfortable with it, feels no great moral turmoil, has no disappointed loved ones (his family are right there with him, rather). such oppositional views on their shared profession makes for great friction (lol sorry)

alright, for the rest of these, disregard the order. I'm just gonna go alphabetical by ship name

gusnacho is, again, enemies-to-lovers lmao. come on, do I need to link the "you are mine" scene? how about the "a dog who bites" scene? there's so much outright dominance from Gus onto a terrified and cornered Nacho. he already blackmails him into working for him, who's to say he wouldn't ask for something else as well? it's definitely been a long time, and Nacho is completely under his control, which makes him safe... conversely, given Nacho's intelligence, desperation, and skill with manipulation, who's to say he wouldn't offer himself in an attempt to win favor (and therefore safety) or find an opening to strike? it's always an interesting situation when both characters in a ship have much more reason to want to stay ten miles away from each other than to want to fuck/get close in any capacity; makes the process a real treat to think about, write, or read!

lalogus and this will be the only ship on this list that does not include Nacho lmao. enemies-to-lovers strikes again! call me a predictable bitch. with the intense cat-and-mouse game these two play in canon, it's not hard to imagine things going further, turning sexual. and a lot of interesting conflict arises from the obvious resistance Gus would have to that, what with his undying devotion to Max's memory and his hatred of all Salamancas. plus, they are narrative foils and as such have plenty in common, and it's a big deal that Lalo is able to scare the normally unflappable Gustavo Fring

tucho is our only entry on this list that isn't enemies-to-lovers. do I have a problem? perhaps. anyway, isn't it fascinating that Tuco - the guy who will eventually beat a member of his own crew to death for verbally backing him up - has so much trust in Nacho? Jimmy was the one who talked Tuco down from double homicide to two broken legs, yeah, but Nacho was the one who got him to accept Jimmy's original statement that he's a lawyer and convince him to let Jimmy go. there's a crazy amount of trust and respect there, considering the kind of person Tuco is. also, we can't ignore the fact that, at some point, something about Tuco's lifestyle (maybe even Tuco himself) was attractive enough to Nacho that he decided to join the cartel. MM says he thinks there was genuine affection between them, and I wholeheartedly agree!

vicnacho time yaaaay!! a pairing with a single-digit number of shippers but by God am I one of them. the best quick explanation of this ship is that situationally it's like gusnacho, but in terms of characterization it's more like tucho. the logical reasons for these two to end up fucking/getting close is about the same for Gus and Nacho, but Victor is more like Tuco in temperament; that's not to say he's actually like Tuco, it's just that... well, pretty much no one is like Gus, lol. also, their very different - and yet, heartbreakingly similar in the end - relationships with Gus can serve as both a source of conflict and something that can bring them together and give each of them a better understanding of the other :)

(now seems as good a time as any to reveal how I got into this ship: a friend and I like to do smutty BCS rps, and we started exploring an omegaverse scenario - yes, omegaverse - between Victor and Nacho. we both were surprised by how much we got into it, and that's how I developed my view of Victor's characterization and backstory! I'm actually considering adapting that rp into a fic; we'll see if I end up doing it lol)