vanillalime

[Do you ever experience the utter inability to properly organize your thoughts and transcribe them into words? I actually tried writing most of this post several days ago, but for some reason my brain kept short-circuiting. Ugh. I hope the end result is here is relatively coherent.]

As most of you probably noticed, there were several new pieces of Oz fic posted at

hardtime100 last week! Yay!

Interestingly, a couple of them focused on Toby's relationship with post-parole "girlfriend" Marian (and a third one invoked the infamous Socks Visit). Although Marian is a never-seen character who's mentioned only a couple of times (and only once by name), her mere existence has always rubbed me wrong way. So, when

trillingstar's story portrayed her in a relatively sympathetic light, I commented on how unnatural it was for me to be feeling sorry for her given how much I hate her. To which she replied:

What did Marian do that was hateworthy? Like I know some people think that she gets in the way of an OTP. But was she actually, actively horrible in some way?

Which got me thinking (probably a little too much)... Why DO I hate Marian? What exactly DID she do that was so hateworthy?

And the short answer is... nothing. Except siphon Toby's affections away from Chris, I guess, but Toby's feelings toward Chris were bound to fade away anyway, new girlfriend or not, as Toby tried to move on with his life. I suppose the worst thing you could say about canon Marian is that she showed really bad judgment by dating the father of one of her students, which is, yeah, not very professional, but hey, maybe I'd find it hard to resist Toby's charms too. *g* I guess the person I really should be angry with here is Toby, but it's easier to push those feelings onto someone else.

[I think, too, that I sometimes mentally confuse Marian's persona with that of Katherine McClain's, as the two characters raise some of the same questions. When I first watched Oz, I wondered why an intelligent, educated, professional woman like Katherine would allow herself to get mixed up emotionally with someone like Toby, who had SO much baggage. I developed a theory, one that I've long held in my head, that Katherine was most likely a gold-digger who was primarily interested in Toby for (1) the Beecher family money and/or (2) a position in his father's law firm (and the fact that it was established in canon that she was a rather incompetent lawyer lends real credence to this latter possibility). So when it comes to Marian, I think I tend to project the qualities of evil!Katherine onto her, making her evil!Marian by default. Although, it's also possible that Marian was just as much a gold-digger as Katherine was. In which case, my dislike of her, as with Katherine, is therefore completely justifed.]

HOWEVER... I also have a theory (one that I remember briefly discussing with

drsquidlove at some point last year) where paroled!Toby presented a lot of things much differently than how they actually were, including his so-called relationship with Marian. So when

trillingstar went on to say:

I have a headcanon that Toby made her up entirely, or at the very least made up 98% of their interaction. HAH!

... I was like "Yes, yes! YES!!! Theory twins!" *high-fives*

I developed my Make-Believe Marian theory long ago after several painful viewings of the Socks Visit where I analyzed both what was said and how it was said:

Toby is clearly lying when he gives in to Chris's request and says that he'll bring his kids in to meet him sometime, as he's obviously uncomfortable with the idea.

Right after that, there's an awkward moment when Chris looks at Toby and asks him if he's been drinking, and Toby answers no. But based on (1) the way that Lee played that scene and (2) the way the camera was directed, I have always assumed that Toby was lying there, too, or at the very least we were supposed to wonder if he was. (And with Toby's addictive personality, it would make complete sense that he would fall off the wagon once his brain was no longer preoccupied with getting Chris off death row.)

Chris then digs for information about Marian and, after a weird, nervous deflection, Toby acknowledges that he's dating her. After further pushing from Chris, Toby admits he's slept with her. But if Toby is lying about wanting Chris to meet his kids, and the drinking, I don't think think it's much of a stretch to believe that he was also lying about the true nature of his relationship with Marian.

Now, why would Toby lie and want to pretend that he and Marian were together? Well, maybe Chris put him on the defensive with the question about the drinking. Maybe Toby lied a lot before he was sent to prison and was falling back into his old ways. Maybe he just wanted to hurt Chris.

But mostly I tend to think that Toby wanted to convince himself that he was moving on, and that he thought this was the expected, acceptable, "normal" behavior for someone in his situation, whereas his reality was something entirely different. When you think about it, between the sudden loss of his father (for which it could be said that Toby is partially to blame) and the sudden inclusion of Harry, his family life has to be a bit of a mess. Rather than the sanitized version of paroled!Toby that we got from Fontana, I'm inclined to believe that Toby was a big ol' basketcase, completely freaked out by what was going on, and using his old crutches (drinking, lying) to get by. At least, it explains Toby's surprising behavior of (supposedly) fucking around with first young woman available to him and spending his time at a cocktail party.

Whoa, this got long! Anyway, I felt like I needed to get this off my chest and just thought I'd share.