Andraste

One of my resolutions for 2023 is to find the rest of the stuff on my hard drive that is finished but never got posted to AO3 for whatever reason and put it there. So here, have something I wrote for an FFA 100 word prompt that turned out five times as long because I am unnecessarily verbose.

Procedure (496 words) by Andraste
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Number Five | The Boy (Umbrella Academy), The Handler (Umbrella Academy)

Summary: There's just a few things to be taken care of before Five starts Commission training.

... but maybe you would like to! Netflix's drama about a family of former teen superheroes has reached it's third season, and IMHO it's well worth a look if you like this sort of thing. But what sort of thing is it, exactly?

The premise: "on the twelfth hour of the first day of October 1989, forty-three women around the world gave birth. This was unusual only in the fact that none of these women had been pregnant when the day first began. Sir Reginald Hargreeves, eccentric billionaire and adventurer, resolved to locate and adopt as many of the children as possible. He got seven of them."

... and then he abused them trained them to be superheroes abused them while training them to be superheroes. This ends about as well as you'd expect, and soon enough the surviving children go their separate ways. In 2019, they grudgingly reassemble for their father's funeral, but then everything gets a lot more complicated when their long-lost time-travelling brother arrives, trying to stop an apocalypse he saw in their very immediate future.

While it's often described as a superhero show and does indeed involve a bunch of people with superpowers, I'm not sure that really prepares people for the tone. It's better approached as a family drama where the family members include a talking chimpanzee and a robot and there's more action scenes than you'd probably see in Succession. Nobody is really trying to fight crime here most of the time. If you want the world saved, call the Avengers. If you want to watch a family constantly snark at each other and occasionally hug while also trying not to get killed by time-travelling assassins, that's when you need the Umbrella Academy.

This is not a show for you if you hate complicated puzzle-box plots or misunderstandings that could be sorted out in ten minutes if any of these people every actually talked to each other properly. I love it to bits, however, and even more after the third season. (General verdict on the latest season: some of the plot is slightly nonsensical in a way that makes me think they might have frantically rewritten chunks of it after realising they would need to film during lockdown, but the character stuff is so amazing I do not care. All I really want from this show is for two or more Hargreeves to stand in a room and talk to each other about literally anything, and we sure got plenty of that.)

In its heart this is a show about a messed-up family that's trying to fix itself in a way that everyone can live with (literally) and making plenty of mistakes along the way. One of the things I find habitually fascinating about it is that the Umbrellas all had the same awful childhood, and yet it was in fact seven completely different awful childhoods stacked on top of each other, in such a way that means that they can never agree about exactly what went wrong or whose fault it was. Even in a happy and functional household no two siblings ever have the exact same experiences, and both Reginald Hargreeve's A+ parenting and the inherent weirdness of their superpowers just add to that effect. At this point most of the characters have done awful things, both to one another and other people, and yet in the crunch they all choose to love and belong to each other despite it.

That makes the show sound either depressing or sappy or possibly both, but the Hargreeves' other saving grace is that they are very funny. Especially when they are insulting each other. The show juggles action and black comedy along with the drama in a way that makes it sparkle.

This extremely dysfunctional family includes:

- the one sibling who never left home and spent his whole life trying to live up to his father's expectations, only to get injected with chimpanzee DNA and sent to the moon without ever being told he was a good boy :(.

- his brother, the vigilante - 'think Batman, but aim lower' - who is really just a sweet himbo in leather. (I think fandom overuses that word, but this season Diego suggested they solve their problems with the Large Hardon Collider. If the shoe fits ...)

- their sister, the movie star who has learned the hard way that having the power to control the minds of the people around you doesn't actually make life as easy and fun as you might think it would when your actions might actually have consequences.

- their other brother, who instead of trying to fill his inner void with the quest for parental approval, justice or fame went straight to the heroin. And the meth. And the booze. And the sex. And the ... paint, apparently? Describes himself as sexy trash. Is not wrong.

- their other other brother, now a grumpy fifty-eight-year-old man, as played by a fourteen-year-old boy because he had an unfortunate time travel accident and is stuck in his own teenage body while he tries frantically to untangle the plot, save the family he loves but cannot stop insulting, and/or just get another scotch before the world ends. Again.

- a completely ordinary violinist who doesn't even have powers and had to grow up surrounded by all these absolute weirdos while being ignored by their father. Wrote a tell-all biography that did not prove popular with his remaining siblings.

- their dad's butler the talking chimpanzee, whose belatedly-revealed back story will break your heart.

- their mother, a slightly malfunctioning robot.

- and of course who could forget [REDACTED FOR SPOILERS]! Also of course [REDACTED FOR EVEN MORE SPOILERS FROM LATER]. And [WOW SO MANY SPOILERS].

- ... all brought together the world's most comically awful fictional dad. (I have seen Reginald described as Charles Xavier without the psychic powers, but what he's actually like is if a more dapper version of Morrison-era Niles Caulder was allowed to be in charge of seven kids, i.e. he is the absolute worst and I love him.)

The first three seasons are a hell of a ride and I am starting a prayer circle to the Netflix Gods that they get renewed so they can go and fuck up the timeline all over again. At least they always look good doing it!