#jasonjacinto

so in terms of Base Motivations, for me meyer’s number one priority is always always always his Drive to Survive/Succeed. in canon this is influenced by his traumatic childhood, because growing up in a place full of people trying to kill you and everyone you know constantly sort of makes survival the ultimate goal with everything that you do. but because i don’t like the idea that trauma and its effects are necessarily immutable parts of someone’s character, and because when we’re talking AUs the antisemitic violence the lanskys experienced in grodno was a very specific moment in history that can’t always be replicated perfectly when translating the character into an AU, i read a significant chunk of meyer’s focus on survival and security as an essential part of his personality. the circumstances around him can influence how he interprets survival and security, but in general, for me, his number one goal is “work towards getting to a position where no one can ever hurt me ever again.”

a sub-trait of this is that he is… extremely stubborn. he’s quiet about it, but he is next to impossible to win a fight with if he really digs his heels in, physically or verbally or whatever. the stubbornness has its roots in the survival motivation, but expresses itself in enough ways that aren’t directly related to survival/security that i think it can be counted as a separate trait. if he gets knocked down in a fight he’s gonna get back up again, he very rarely expresses uncertainty out loud or through body language, he very rarely asks anyone for anything as opposed to [politely, but without giving up ground by putting a question mark on the sentence] stating what he wants and what they’ll get out of it in exchange, and he never ever apologizes. for anything. like he might have apologized once ever in his life and if he did it was to his mom. like i said, this is related to his goal of survival and need for security, in the way that, like… if you can’t be sure of yourself, what can you be sure of? so in his view he is Never Wrong, because he doesn’t think he can afford to be.

trait number three doesn’t exactly help with Never Thinking He’s Wrong because trait number three is that he is Smart. whatever universe, whatever circumstances, he has an analytical outlook and an intellectual curiosity that is… pretty wide-ranging. he’s good at and enjoys math, which is the stand-out thing, because math is hard and it’s the easiest way to express being analytically-minded, so it’s what sticks out to other people the most, but he does just like to read nonfiction and absorb Facts in general. he’s also fairly good at predicting how people will react to things, so he has some degree of… emotional intelligence, i guess? in that he can use previous examples of people’s behavior and reactions to predict how they’ll react to other situations in the future, and he’s able to leverage that analysis of other people to his [and his partners’] benefit.

which leads into trait four, which is the emotional reservedness that i am always torn on how to explain, because to some degree i do think his tendency to limit his emotional expression is an intrinsic trait, but just because he doesn’t outwardly express his emotions as clearly as the people around him [in a way that people other than charlie can clock, anyway] doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel it at all. i guess sort of the delineation for me is that meyer’s emotional repression in canon is influenced by his trauma—his strong emotions tend to be a little muted because of his PTSD—but the limited emotional expression is a Pillar Trait—he might be more aware of his feelings in AUs where he has a lesser degree of trauma in his past, but he’s never going to be effusive about them. also he is… way more susceptible to outward expressions of anger in particular than he thinks he is, and he only gets better at restraining his anger after being around AR for a while, for whom that restraint comes a little more naturally. teenager meyer is a tiny ball of rage just waiting for some idiot to give him an excuse to let it out.

SO I THINK THOSE ARE THE BIG FOUR? i can go more in depth with sub-traits, particularly of number one, but suffice it to say that i think most of the sub-traits i can think of are all in service of Attaining Security—as an example, meyer demonstrates a higher consciousness of mainstream acceptability than any of the other baby gangsters do, with the acknowledgement that liquor’s only outlawed temporarily and gambling is also only on the fringes for now but Drugs Are Not Acceptable To Mainstream People, plus his interest in the land in tampa [and later havana] as a pathway to legitimate money via real estate development, and i think that for meyer has its roots not in a need to be Accepted [which i think charlie feels more keenly than meyer does tbh] but in an awareness that, basically, the less you stick out from The Norm, the safer you are. basically, “will it help me survive” will override almost everything else, in terms of “what motivates meyer,” and then the other traits filter in and influence and are influenced by the others.