SLASHER U: A Tate McGillicutty Retrospective (SPOILERS) (Patreon)

Some of you may know I went through a lot of side characters picking my main 4, but Tate was ALWAYS on the slate. (Also on the slate since day 1: Laila and Hex! Hex was a waffle for me but I LOVE HIM SO MUCH. Headless Horsemike and Sawyer both got the chop to secondary characters!) Tate, obviously, besides being the Hot Nerd, is my storyline about, uh, child abuse. Tate, like me, has been through a lot (though I made the authorial decision to make Tate's dad a recovering alcoholic instead of a raging narcisssist). The reason why Tate's so much older (24) than the other students is that he's had to run away and fend for himself for the majority of his latter teen years - he actually came to SU early, and has been sludging through it.

It was REALLY IMPORTANT to me to have multiple ways of resolving Tate's storyline. In Dragon Age Inquisition, there's a similar story where Dorian (the only openly gay companion) confronts his dad, who basically tried to send him to magical conversion therapy. You can choose to snub his dad, or try to reconcile them; the game gives an assortment of affinity points based on how you handle it. However, the "max" number of points comes from reconciliation, and that ALWAYS struck me as wrong. Dorian's dad admits he'd rather have a dead son (in DA terms, an abomination) than a gay one; in DA2, Karl, another gay character, literally states he'd rather die than have the emotion taken out of him by being made Tranquil, which is a similar state. (So yeah - DA provides that subtext too!).

With Tate, there's no way to "reconcile" his dad - just to "Reconcile" with himself. I've written about 8 different ways this storyline can go, from Tate just walking away, to actual brutal Eldritch horror revenge. Tate's central character conceit comes from him summoning a demon to share his body at age 8 in an attempt to stop his father from beating him; the demon stuck, now Tate's stuck. The storyline is wrapped in Tate's need to either exorcise the demon from his body, learn to live with it, or let it destroy his father - it's Tate's choice. There's so many ways to deal with his trauma, but "forgiveness" isn't the top option. It never is, when a parent physically abuses their kid!

This might be why I put extra care into Tate's romance and aftercare scenes. He's my lil' hard caramel sweetie and I can't bear to see him torn apart. (Yeah, the breakup scenes are brutal. Enjoy bashing my baby if that's yer cup of tea. :0 )