#sandyfrank

Oh man, where do I even start? Well, here goes, I guess. Hunker down, it’s gonna be looooong (and disjointed and rambly).

I always imagined that Mike has another, younger brother, because Mike just oozes middle-childness, and he falls so easily into the older brother-type role with the bots. In my head Eddie's like four years older than Mike, and his little brother (I've been calling him David? I don't know, that's very subject to change) is like four or five years younger than him. So growing up, they were all sort of awkwardly far apart in age, like not enough for one to be "the much older sibling who kind of acts like another parent", but enough so they were never in the same stages at the same time, so they never got super close.

Eddie and Mike would actually play together when they were pretty young, but once Eddie hit like 12 or so, he really spiraled off into his rebelliousness and he was way too cool (read: a huge jerk) to spend time with his little brother, unless it was to bully him. David was always too much younger for him to ever really concern himself with.

Mike, being the squishy sensitive baby that he is, was actually way into being a big brother and always tried to be protective and supportive (a.k.a. Not like Eddie) so he and David were actually pretty close when he was little. Once David hit junior high/high school, though, he started getting the “Oh, you’re the youngest Nelson boy. I had your brother Eddie, he was a nightmare. And oh, the other one, too- Mark or something?” and that kind of thing, and got bitter, not wanting to be constantly compared to “the delinquent and the screw-up”. So when that started happening, he really distanced himself from Mike without ever really telling him why, because on some level he knew it wasn’t really fair to be mad at him for it, but he couldn’t help it.

On the one hand, being the middle kid between a problem child like Eddie and the baby of the family/golden child meant that Mike was semi-ignored while still being expected to do things right. On the other hand, it meant that he was free to some degree to develop in his own weirdness un-impeded, at least as a kid. I think as he got older, though, that got harder, because people started expecting him to “grow out of it”- “it” being his actual personality.

Mike comes from a super Midwestern, non-touchy-feely family- not that they didn’t love each other, but it was always about meeting expectations rather than about being a safe place to be yourself and express your feelings. In fact, being yourself was not really a good thing if you didn’t fit the mold of what they thought you were supposed to be. It wasn’t intentional, but it ended up being that way.

The different kids reacted to this in different ways. Eddie dealt with it by going too far in the other direction and basically saying “Screw you, I’m doing whatever I want, neener neener”. Eddie never tried to fit himself into the mold. He saw it and said “#$%@ no!”.

Whereas Mike is a sensitive puppy who just wants to be loved and not cause problems, so he tried to meet the expectations set for him, but was never really able to, because those expectations were essentially based on him being a completely different person. And those expectations were actually heightened by Eddie’s failure to meet them, like, he was supposed to pick up the slack and be “the good kid” and not screw up, because Eddie had already taken that option.

David, on the other hand, was naturally practical and ambitious and all of that stuff, so he fit that mold because that’s just who he actually is, and was sort of hailed as the “one they got right”, although nobody would ever say that out loud, at least not to anyone’s face. Among the less kind people in town it was more like “That’s why they had to have three kids- the first two were duds.”

Mike tried to squash himself into the mold, because he felt- maybe not even consciously- like that was the only way he could get the approval and affection that he desired. But he’s not the practically-minded, dutifully-accomplish-real-world-things kind of person that everybody wanted, so he never felt like he was doing anything right, no matter how hard he tried. Not just in his family, but also in school, and in the small town community, he was kind of an oddity, just never quite fit anywhere.

Eddie was “that Nelson boy” in slightly scandalized whispers, at least among the Gossipy Mothers League, whereas Mike was “the other Nelson boy”- *Wisconsin accent* He’s really a nice boy, nothing like his brother, thank goodness, but he’s a little different.” And “different” was always kind of synonymous with “wrong”, though nobody ever said that out loud either. And because Mike’s a sensitive puppy who just wants to be loved and make people happy, never quite being able to just made him more desperate to please.