One of the things that really made me fall for White Collar was the sense that Neal just could not turn off the part of his brain that looks for how to work a situation to his advantage. It's instinct, it's reflex, it's the only thing that makes consistent sense to him.
I jotted down an observation a bit ago that I really need to expand into fic, which is that by the time he was in second grade Neal was already having to forge city bus passes to do things like stay in school. He grew up being forced to break the rules in order to stay inside them. This system did not work for him, and that cynicism remains with him. Whereas Peter... very much comes across as someone who can see the grey spaces, and doesn't completely sublimate his own sense of right and wrong to the letter of the law, but still has never been failed by the system in any permanent/meaningful way. And neither one quite groks why the other can't see what to them is completely self-evident.
[Neal isn't a child. He's an adult with a different, slightly skewed set of values formed by a very different set of life circumstances, and he and Peter love each other but their moral codes overlap only in some places but not in others.]
The impression I get from Neal is that in certain ways, he's never really matured past his teenage years, because he's never had to. He was able to run at eighteen and make the world work for him, and it worked for him until Peter caught him, and even that wasn't the kind of great catastrophe that would impress on him any requirement for change. And in other ways... well, he's had to be responsible for himself from a really young age, see above re: second grade, which means he kinda leapfrogged out of childhood before he had a chance to have one, and has all the attendant skills and self-reliance and intelligence. And a lot of the default assumptions you're supposed to have about the nature and role of family and the entire phenomenon of having people to rely on got smudged, altered, or completely wiped out by that.
Which leaves him in a really strange place. Which is a lot of fun to poke at, and also probably why it's good that Elizabeth has enough emotional intelligence for three people because her husband and her weird de-facto adoptive son figure are all incredibly bad at this.
And thank you for the welcome! So far, everyone has been lovely. ^_^
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One of the things that really made me fall for White Collar was the sense that Neal just could not turn off the part of his brain that looks for how to work a situation to his advantage. It's instinct, it's reflex, it's the only thing that makes consistent sense to him.
I jotted down an observation a bit ago that I really need to expand into fic, which is that by the time he was in second grade Neal was already having to forge city bus passes to do things like stay in school. He grew up being forced to break the rules in order to stay inside them. This system did not work for him, and that cynicism remains with him. Whereas Peter... very much comes across as someone who can see the grey spaces, and doesn't completely sublimate his own sense of right and wrong to the letter of the law, but still has never been failed by the system in any permanent/meaningful way. And neither one quite groks why the other can't see what to them is completely self-evident.
[Neal isn't a child. He's an adult with a different, slightly skewed set of values formed by a very different set of life circumstances, and he and Peter love each other but their moral codes overlap only in some places but not in others.]
The impression I get from Neal is that in certain ways, he's never really matured past his teenage years, because he's never had to. He was able to run at eighteen and make the world work for him, and it worked for him until Peter caught him, and even that wasn't the kind of great catastrophe that would impress on him any requirement for change. And in other ways... well, he's had to be responsible for himself from a really young age, see above re: second grade, which means he kinda leapfrogged out of childhood before he had a chance to have one, and has all the attendant skills and self-reliance and intelligence. And a lot of the default assumptions you're supposed to have about the nature and role of family and the entire phenomenon of having people to rely on got smudged, altered, or completely wiped out by that.
Which leaves him in a really strange place. Which is a lot of fun to poke at, and also probably why it's good that Elizabeth has enough emotional intelligence for three people because her husband and her weird de-facto adoptive son figure are all incredibly bad at this.
And thank you for the welcome! So far, everyone has been lovely. ^_^