Edited by Alloe Mak and Liam Mason

1.

Contrary to the claim made by hit 2010s show Teen Wolf, the International Churchill Society maintains that the British Prime Minister never actually said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Like many motivational posters and Tumblr edits, I had taken this as fact for the last several years, and I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised to find out that I had been lied to. 

Airing in 2011 and running for six-and-some-odd seasons, Teen Wolf is the loosest adaptation of a piece of source material that I have ever seen. It is based on a 1980s film of the same name, and follows Scott McCall (Tyler Posey) as he navigates life as a freshly bitten werewolf alongside his ragtag pack of high school classmates. Among his friends are fan-favourites Stiles Stilinski (Dylan O’Brien) and Derek Hale (Tyler Hoechlin), Allison Argent (Crystal Reed), and Lydia Martin (Holland Roden).

The aforementioned Stiles Stilinski, our main character’s best friend and human sidekick, is easily the most popular character. Dylan O’Brien’s performance stands out—Stiles is sarcastic and wary to balance Scott’s open and trusting nature. He offers needed comedic relief between tense scenes, but maintains the range to deliver some of the most emotionally devastating performances of the show. 

Teen Wolf can hardly be described as a reliable piece of media. It cuts supernatural corners at every turn, failing to be faithful to the lore it draws from real-world legends, and falling perpetually short of internal consistency with its own mythos. Most magical rules established in the first season (though ‘established’ might be too strong a word) have vanished by the third. When the writers grew bored of werewolves cobbled hastily from incongruent fragments of folklore and poorly conceived original material, they resorted to throwing darts at a board covered in random animals they could ‘were’-ify and bastardizing Japanese mythology.

Nothing emotional seems to stick, either. We are told that the characters are going through hell, and we watch them wade through literal bodies, breaking down as the original cast dwindles. Then, the story moves on. Certain traumas leave a trace (if that trace can produce a plot-relevant response), but for the most part, the blood seems to slide right off the characters’ hands at each season’s end. Some things are not even suffered in the first place—these tend to be experiences forced upon girls. An epileptic fifteen year-old is coerced into accepting ‘the bite’ after an adult man steals her out of her hospital bed and runs his hands down her legs. Another girl is harassed by the ghost of the (even older adult) villain, who basically abuses her into resurrecting him. He remains evil for a few seasons, she is shown to vaguely hate him, and he is redeemed before the show’s end. Neither original instance of trauma is ever mentioned again. 

Though I obviously understood how this was a consequence of bad writing, tonal dissonance, and misogyny, I envied the main characters. Compartmentalization is a skill my body is currently forcing me to unlearn, swiftly and in overwhelming increments. I have known for a long time that it is a short-term fix; pretending only takes you so far. As I watched the cast move through the plot sustaining only temporary damage, I used to wish I could contain my life in an episodic format for the duration of its runtime. I could have benefited from that kind of inconsistency.

2. 

Anyone who has been on Archive of Our Own (Ao3) for longer than twenty minutes has likely read a 5+1 fic. Put simply, something will first occur five (or four, six, etc.) times, then manifest differently one additional time, subverting the course of the plot thus far. Each ‘time’ makes up a different scene in the plot; the string of scenes itself tends to span an extended period, forming a comprehensive account out of brief snapshots. This trope will often appear in the title, e.g. “5 Times [Character A] Almost Kissed [Character B] and 1 Time They Did.”

My first significant foray into Ao3 followed two weeks of crying after the Merlin finale. I spent the next several years reading everything, from character studies to whump, imagining alternate worlds. My experience here is not unique—I stayed up late reading, using fanfiction as a way to escape, and eventually started writing my own.

I have since deleted my account and everything on it, but I can’t deny that it was a formative experience. I spent more time agonizing over my author’s notes than I did over my actual writing, trying to present myself this way or that. This online community was a fresh start. These other writers had talent in spades, their works bound together in what seemed like an inextricable web of references to past conversations and each other’s stories. Almost all of them were older than me, and I wanted them to think we were the same.  

At the same time, I held nothing back from the actual content of the fics. The characters drank the same two-dollar coffee as me. If I was struggling with a subject, a friendship, a breakup, so were they. Every day I came home from school, I put on a shitty Dylan O’Brien costume, and I wrote. 

Stiles was my favourite character to write and read about, but the fandom had a strange way of portraying him. I don’t think it’s productive or kind to bash each other’s renditions of the canon indiscriminately (though it’s obviously normal to dislike and disagree with some interpretations), but I do want to talk about tropes that confused me. While there were many elements of fanon I held dear, I saw these particular tropes as antitheses to the aspects of Stiles I loved the most. 

I came across the ‘Pack Mom Stiles’ tag frequently. In canon, this was a character whose loyalty bordered on rabid, who suggested or threatened homicide more frequently than any villain, and who didn’t have a nurturing bone in his body. Fiercely protective, sure. Deeply caring, definitely. But a mom friend? Not in the slightest—yet here he was in fic, a motherly masterchef and occasional sex god (the two went hand-in-hand) coddling both his peers and full-grown adults. 

More bewildering still, ‘Spark Stiles’ was one of the most popular tropes in fic that took place in the show’s canon universe. A Spark in this case is analogous to witch or sorcerer—uses of the trope vary across authors, but typically signal that Stiles possesses some sort of inborn magical power and occupies an advisor position in the pack. Here, we return to the show’s woefully inconsistent magic system. In the first season, we learn that mountain ash repels werewolves the same way that a salt circle might keep out demons and ghosts. As a druid explains to Stiles, it must be ignited (figuratively) by a ‘spark’ to work. Later in the episode, the mountain ash runs out before Stiles has finished constructing a barrier with it, and he uses his sheer force of will to extend the line.

The ‘spark’ is never mentioned again, though several other human characters are seen using mountain ash in a nearly identical fashion. This is treated in-fiction as unremarkable. Scott’s mother, throwing down a line of ash to keep monsters from her home, is no more or less supernatural than Stiles, but there’s no fanfic about her posing as the magical emissary for her son’s pack.

This, and adjacent ‘BAMF Stiles’ headcanons, always seemed to me besides the point. Stiles is the only member of the pack who stays human until the series finale; he is squishy, vulnerable, clumsy, and distinctly non-supernatural. He outwardly refuses the bite in the first season. His subsequent stint as a victim of possession imbues him with temporary power, but that power is parasitic in and of itself. The demon (or, nogitsune—see: bastardization of Japanese mythology) wears his face and wields his hands. Magic is a violence that is thrust upon Stiles; in canon, his reclamation of autonomy is only possible through complete avoidance of supernatural potential.

Teen Wolf is not a show about monsters masquerading as people. It is a show about people masquerading as monsters. Stiles lies, cheats, and steals; he is not a nice person, he doesn’t like who he is, but he point-blank refuses to endure metamorphosis. He is, in many ways, Teen Wolf’s most honest character. Somehow, in a story where life necessitates lying, this honesty does not come at the cost of his survival.

3. 

I should contextualize my preoccupation with Dylan O’Brien.

When I was twelve years old, I joined my first writing forum. Much like my Ao3, I have since wiped all evidence of my involvement on the website, leaving another piece of myself stranded in some corner of the internet below the banner of ‘[Deleted User]’.

Here, I embarked on various misadventures peppered with odd and sometimes ill-intentioned users. One adult, let’s call him Shawn, faked his death on three separate occurrences. We (the pre-teens Shawn associated with) were convinced that he was actually two people due to his wildly inconsistent writing style and impossibly frequent online status. I spoke to another user, who I’ll call Ellen, every week for nearly two years, and I’m not sure I ever learned a true thing about her. One day she had a cat, the next she had a dog. Some mornings, she was on her way to her retail job of five years, and other times she was on the bus to school. 

The first lasting friend I made on the forum (and one of my oldest friends to date) goes simply by C. She is brilliant, resilient, and patient with me. She writes things that make me cry. Eight years later, we still reform and add to the same stories. We have constructed a sandbox of considerable size, which I find myself returning to whenever I can. 

The night she changed my life, I was procrastinating a Math assignment during one of the later, shorter lockdowns of the pandemic era. We had planned a movie night, her choice. The next hour and fifty-three minutes of mid-2000s dystopia sent me on a Maze Runner spiral that lasted months, and once I had finished watching every single cast interview and behind-the-scenes snippet available on the internet, C directed me to another franchise where Dylan O’Brien played a prominent part.  

I remember rationing the episodes. If I got out of bed, I could start Season 2. If I ate lunch on three days of the week, I could watch another episode on Friday. It stopped mattering whether I wanted to do anything necessary to maintain my normal functions, because I wanted to watch Teen Wolf, and I had managed to make one a necessary precondition of the other. 

I am still trying to understand what it was about this carelessly assembled werewolf drama that made me try to live again. I hope that it is starting to become clear to you.

4. 

We return, finally, to Winston Churchill. 

One of Dylan O’Brien’s most memorable scenes falls in the penultimate episode of Season 2. We open on Stiles’ session with the guidance counselor, shortly following a huge loss and just preceding the climactic conflict at the season’s end. A classmate has drowned, and Stiles rambles about apnea to the counselor, finishing on this note: “But when you finally let it in, it stops hurting. It’s not scary anymore. It’s actually kind of peaceful.” 

She replies, “So, if you’re drowning, and you’re trying to keep your mouth closed until that very last moment, what if you choose to not open your mouth? To not let the water in?”

“You do anyway, it’s a reflex.”

“But if you hold off until that reflex kicks in, you have more time, right?”

“More time to be in agonizing pain.” 

“If it’s about survival,” she insists, “isn’t a little agony worth it?”

“I mean, what if it just gets worse? What if it’s agony now, and it’s just hell later on?”

“Then think about something Winston Churchill once said: if you’re going through hell, keep going.” 

There are four seasons left—it’s not like he and his friends have any other choice. Whether by their own tenacity or the writing team’s incapacity to keep hold of emotional threads for more than a few episodes, they do.

+1

Even here, I find it difficult to talk about the versions of myself that have existed offline. Before Stiles Stilinski there was Arthur Pendragon; before Arthur Pendragon there was a School for Good and Evil self-insert I made at age ten for Soman Chainani’s website. This communicates something in and of itself that I don’t quite have to articulate. I explain and avoid it in one go. 

The screen is the next evolutionary step of the mask; it disguises by separation, not concealment. Strangers meet on opposite ends of the world. Plot ferries weary characters forward, comedy warps the fictional fabric, and no amount of shouting at copper and glass produces a reaction. Stiles Stilinski cracks a joke and hefts a dented baseball bat over one shoulder.
I started re-watching Teen Wolf as I was writing this article. I wanted to make sure that everything was as I’d left it, that Scott and Stiles were still running around after dark or conspiring in the back of some classroom. Now that I’m almost done writing, I’m not sure that I’ll watch the next episode. I might make myself a sandwich or pick out tomorrow’s clothes. I might see if my friend is around after class on Thursday. If you’ve made it to the end of this, I hope you had a Dylan O’Brien when you needed him. I hope you don’t need him anymore.