I find this request really amusing because I cannot express how much I struggled with this fic. It was not the story I originally intended to write and more than anything else that I've ever written, I felt an intense embarrassment about what I was writing. I struggled with it until I realized that Bobby, for all that I love him, is not good at keeping his emotions secret and he's also not the most socially graceful person alive. He was embarrassed and I was embarrassed for him.
And you picked the second most difficult passage in terms of writing it for me to discuss. (The first being when Hank and Bobby finally spoke to one another.)
Sure, his life was a little more complicated than the average person, but the average person couldn't freeze their body and singlehandedly win a snowball fight against three opponents, one of whom was a telekinetic.
This may just be my personal canon for Bobby, but I think that more than the other original X-men, Bobby wishes he wasn't a mutant. He suffers more from internalized racism than the others do – and this is an idea that I only recently have learned how to discuss, thanks to the many intelligent posts I've read on LJ.
In my mind, Bobby is embarrassed to be a mutant, and he is ashamed to be embarrassed about it. (Much the same way he feels about his sexuality, and for the record, I do ascribe to the idea that Bobby is bisexual, attracted to men, and hates that about himself.)
This is a lot of blathering to lead up to reason I wrote that paragraph. I think that Bobby rarely, if ever, thinks of himself in terms of something other than his mutation. So, he wouldn't think of himself as gay. He would think of himself as a mutant gay person.
Poor Bobby. He has issues. :(
He'd ruined everything. Any idiot could see that Hank was just stunned by the fall. Bobby's ice slide had cradled him from most of the impact and he was just gasping for breath. Any idiot except Bobby, who had landed beside his best friend in the world convinced that Hank was gasping his last breath.
It's canon that Bobby had a hard time making friends with the X-men at first. He's younger than they are. It's what I love about the Hank & Bobby friendship – it's illogical at first. Bobby is smart, but he's not Hank level smart and he knows it. Plus, Bobby is the most likely (again, in my opinion) X-men to react on emotion alone, especially at this early point in their lives. I would guess that he berates himself quite a bit. Behind his jokester personality, he's terribly unsure of himself and has pretty much no self-confidence.
Plus, he's mortified and second guessing himself. Also, I would imagine he's still a bit in shock from the entire event himself. Saving someone with a fall via ice slide happened in Marvels, I just borrowed that idea, but I think it's fairly indicative of Bobby's instinctive reactions.
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I find this request really amusing because I cannot express how much I struggled with this fic. It was not the story I originally intended to write and more than anything else that I've ever written, I felt an intense embarrassment about what I was writing. I struggled with it until I realized that Bobby, for all that I love him, is not good at keeping his emotions secret and he's also not the most socially graceful person alive. He was embarrassed and I was embarrassed for him.
And you picked the second most difficult passage in terms of writing it for me to discuss. (The first being when Hank and Bobby finally spoke to one another.)
Sure, his life was a little more complicated than the average person, but the average person couldn't freeze their body and singlehandedly win a snowball fight against three opponents, one of whom was a telekinetic.
This may just be my personal canon for Bobby, but I think that more than the other original X-men, Bobby wishes he wasn't a mutant. He suffers more from internalized racism than the others do – and this is an idea that I only recently have learned how to discuss, thanks to the many intelligent posts I've read on LJ.
In my mind, Bobby is embarrassed to be a mutant, and he is ashamed to be embarrassed about it. (Much the same way he feels about his sexuality, and for the record, I do ascribe to the idea that Bobby is bisexual, attracted to men, and hates that about himself.)
This is a lot of blathering to lead up to reason I wrote that paragraph. I think that Bobby rarely, if ever, thinks of himself in terms of something other than his mutation. So, he wouldn't think of himself as gay. He would think of himself as a mutant gay person.
Poor Bobby. He has issues. :(
He'd ruined everything. Any idiot could see that Hank was just stunned by the fall. Bobby's ice slide had cradled him from most of the impact and he was just gasping for breath. Any idiot except Bobby, who had landed beside his best friend in the world convinced that Hank was gasping his last breath.
It's canon that Bobby had a hard time making friends with the X-men at first. He's younger than they are. It's what I love about the Hank & Bobby friendship – it's illogical at first. Bobby is smart, but he's not Hank level smart and he knows it. Plus, Bobby is the most likely (again, in my opinion) X-men to react on emotion alone, especially at this early point in their lives. I would guess that he berates himself quite a bit. Behind his jokester personality, he's terribly unsure of himself and has pretty much no self-confidence.
Plus, he's mortified and second guessing himself. Also, I would imagine he's still a bit in shock from the entire event himself. Saving someone with a fall via ice slide happened in Marvels, I just borrowed that idea, but I think it's fairly indicative of Bobby's instinctive reactions.