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Apr. 4th, 2013 06:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
smilederekUser Name/Nick: Catherine
User DW: nah
AIM/IM: stoptheworld26
E-mail: michael heroin at gee mail
Other Characters: Prefect!
Character Name: Derek Hale
Series: TEEN WOLF
Age: It's not entirely clear. Apparently this is something that we're going to find out ~officially~ in season three, but roadmarkers point to him being 22 for me. (In the tie-in novel On Fire, he's sixteen years old in flashbacks from six years ago. So yes, I think 22.)
From When?: At the end of series two, after Scott makes him gnaw on Grandpa Argent, when Derek's p. sure he's about to die.
Inmate/Warden: Derek is an inmaaaate. Most of the time he's basically working towards his own survival and in the interests of the greater good, but he's extremely callous about how he achieves those ends, and has cheerily paralyzed and attempted to murder teenagers in the pursuit of that greater good. There's also the morality involved in offering a permanent change of species to vulnerable teenagers who can't really make an informed decision on it, but as with so many things, this one is something of a gray area...
Item: N/a
Abilities/Powers: Derek is an Alpha werewolf.
General Teen Wolf Werewolf things:
On a full moon they get super angry and tense and get all worked up and turn into monsters. They can only stop themselves by holding onto a mental anchor which connects them to their humanity.
They become spry motherfuckers, all month around. They can prance along on all fours, do parkour, backflip at will, and they get really good at Lacrosse! Reduced! Derek will only be as spry as your average olympic gymnast.
They have exceptionally good senses. Smell and hearing are the ones most emphasised (sight seems pretty standard), to the point where they can smell illness, and more experienced werewolves can detect lies by listening to the heartbeat of the person they're talking too. NOT REDUCED, but a note: I'd like to keep these abilities for a handful of reasons. Mainly because Derek has always been a werewolf, so losing these enhanced senses would be akin to a human losing 90% of their sight or hearing, and probably would be way more traumatic than losing most other stuff. That said, it is something that his warden can take away if needed, and obviously NOT something I'll use to godmod/without approval from other players.
Illnesses they had before turning are much less symptomatic after becoming a werewolf, to the point where they initially seem to have gone away entirely.
They can leech pain from others with their claws. Just... claw at a cancerous dog, suck up some of the black goop, and the dog is in less pain. Don't know if a dog is cancerous or not? SNIFF IT TO FIND OUT!
They can punch other monster's through walls. - Reduced. Derek will only be able to punch as hard as the human maximum will allow
They have an exceptionally fast rate of healing, and if they're suffering from some other affliction (poisoning, having a seizure, etc) then injuring themselves physically will trigger that healing process and fix both things. REDUCED: Derek will still heal more quickly than a human, but not at a pace that makes him UNDEFEATABLE IN BATTLE. It'd take maybe an hour for cuts and bruises to heal entirely, and two or three for broken bones to repair.
With enough emotional control, werewolves can change their form at any time. (Basically they just turn into people with hairy faces, big teeth and very sharp fingernails.)
Things that only THE ALPHA!!!11 can do:
Make other werewolves. Apparently getting the bite from an alpha will either turn you into a werewolf, or kill you. That said, out of the seven people on the show who've gotten the bite, literally none of them have died. I think this might be something that was a touch exaggerated. You can also make werewolves with an especially deep scratch. I WOULD LIKE TO KEEP THIS. So Derek can make a shitload of werewolves to be his substitute family. I make no apologies for wanting to run this plot.
The number of baby werewolves you make? The stronger you become! REDUCED! SORT OF! There might be some vague advantage to having more werewolves (faster healing? higher pain threshold?) but Derek will not become stronger than the human maximum.
You can scratch people to give them visions, or memories, OR to take their memories away. REDUCED: No giving people visions, or stealing memories. He can still share his own memories in this way though.
You can like, brainwash your Betas and make them do what you want? The former Alpha uses this power to force Scott out of bed and off to murder a bus driver with him, but we only see Derek use it to prevent one of his Betas from hurting someone when out of control. LOL GONE.
TECHNICALLY THE ALPHA CAN TURN INTO A PROPER WEREWOLF. Like, a big scary one who actually looks like a wolf monster and not just a hairy guy with big teeth. GONE! Derek doesn't do this anyway because of budget restrictions. GONE EVEN MORE.
Glowy red eyes. NEVER REDUCED.
WEAKNESSES:
WOLFSBANE! Wolfsbane sucks. Having it near will weaken a werewolf and may make it difficult to breathe. Having it shot into them will poison their blood and kill them in about a day, and being gassed with it will kill them a lot more quickly. Wolfsbane is no good.
MOUNTAIN ASH! Werewolves can't cross mountain ash. Don't want a werewolf in your house? MAKE IT OUT OF MOUNTAIN ASH! Don't want a werewolf getting into your party? ENCIRCLE THE PARTY WITH GROUND UP MOUNTAIN ASH! Mountain ash sucks.
ELECTRICITY! Electricity is the actual worst. Certain levels of voltage in a cattle prod, or across wires, will take away all a werewolves natural advantages. They become weakened, they can't heal, and they can't change. They just become like really delicate humans.
BEING CUT IN HALF. Don't cut werewolves in half :(
BEING SET ON FIRE. This also seems effective :(
EMOTIONAL PROBLEMS MAY TURN WEREWOLVES INTO KANIMAS. Which is a shame because all werewolves have emotional problems.
EXAMS. Werewolves hate exams.
Okay I'm going to stop there, sorry.
Personality:
Derek Hale is not a nice person. Let's just put that out there right from the beginning. He is not a pleasant person to know. He's hostile, threatening, and mistrustful of others to the point of undermining his own agenda by appearing to be the most suspicious person in the universe. He doesn't want to be popular, doesn't want to be loved, and in some ways he actively pursues the opposite.
Derek's inability to trust others is probably the greatest influence behind this kind of behavior, since his chief objectives usually tend to be fairly reasonable ones. For instance, not wanting a teenager to transform into a werewolf in the middle of a crowded lacrosse field? Reasonable. Responsible, even. Threatening to murder the teenager if he tries to play lacrosse, on the other hand? Not so reasonable.
This is a pattern that emerges in a lot of Derek's attempts at persuasion. Do as I say, because if you don't I'll kill you. Work with me, or I'll leave you to go crazy and murder all your friends. Don't leave me in the street to die, or I'll tear your throat out with my teeth.
Eventually this reaches a point where Derek is trying to barter for things that the relatively normal, non-sociopathic people surrounding him would willingly do for him anyway. In series two, episode four, there's a scene where after being paralyzed by a monster and dropped into a swimming pool while attempting to protect another character, he essentially tries to blackmail that same character out of letting him drown. On the basis that once they get out of the pool and he is done being paralyzed, he'll be the best defense against the monster waiting for them. His exact argument is: "You don't trust me, I don't trust you, but you need me to survive and that's why you're not letting me go."
The trust issues are obvious, but even to Derek's mind this is less about the other character than it is about him. He doesn't think they'll drown him because they're an especially bad person, he thinks they'll let him drown purely because without his supplying one, there is no compelling reason for anyone else to want to keep him alive. The thing is, Derek has a pretty serious survivors guilt complex.
In his teenage years, Derek trusted someone outside of his pack, and was rewarded with the extermination of his family. To his mind, he was responsible for their deaths. His desire to be loved, his desire to forge a bond with someone outside of his immediate family, cost almost all of his loved ones their lives. He still had a sister who loved him, and who he loved. Still had someone who had seen to his survival, and in doing so had in her mind placed a value on his life. When Laura was gone, so was the last person who had ever cared for him, ever sacrificed for him, or ever had any reason for wanting him to live. To some degree, Derek is incapable of looking further than this evaluation of himself.
Related to this is the fact that Derek almost never openly does things because he wants, or needs to do them. He throws up a pretense when he needs help, turns his request into a deal, an offer, or a compromise, to avoid ever having to seem vulnerable or desperate. Even when it comes to expanding his pack. After he's bitten a bunch of teenagers, Derek admits that he did it because he needed the power, but before this? He makes them an offer, gives them a choice, finds people who are vulnerable, and makes it about them needing him rather than the other way around.
This pretense is partly because honestly, Derek knows he's a huge jerk. His acerbic personality is likely as much deliberately cultivated as it is a natural response to having a horrible life. He can't trust other people and he can't trust his own judgement about them, so to some degree, he does want to drive people away. More than this, it's a survival mechanism.
Derek is in a position in Teen Wolf where he's shouldering a responsibility which he isn't ready for. He's isolated, way out of his depth, and his only way of getting people to help him is to come across as more dangerous, informed, and generally more useful than anyone else they have access too. As an alpha, he has to seem like he knows what he's doing, and if he opens up and talks about his feelings, then that's not an act that he's going to be able to keep up very long. A lot of the time, Derek's constant bad temper thinly veils the fact that he doesn't really have a plan. He faces down unconquerable odds with the stoic determination to survive, and very little else.
Despite all of this negativity, Derek does have a strong survival instinct. He may punish himself emotionally for living when almost his entire family is dead, but that doesn't mean that he'll try and stop. After the death of his family, Derek and Laura focused only on their own survival, but with her gone, he finds himself confronted with a new prerogative. With no pack left to protect, Derek moves to rebuilding it. It is not insignificant that Derek's first reaction to finding out that Scott had been bitten was to tell the teenager that the bite made them brothers, and although Scott never bought into this idea, for Derek it has never ceased to be the truth. When he was in danger, he went to Scott, and on multiple occasions when Scott has been in danger, Derek has gone to help him.
Derek was raised with pack and family being synonymous. On the same night that his last family member died, Scott was brought into his pack. This is why Derek is pretty much completely incapable of ever dropping his obsession with trying to get Scott to be his bro, even though Scott clearly does not rate Derek as acceptable bro material.
This is also, to some extent, why Derek made such incredibly shitty decisions about who to bring into his new pack. Again, it doesn't seem coincidental that the first person Derek bit was a character who had been orphaned, and who hated the lack of identity he perceived to come from this, or that the second character he bit was one whose mother had passed away, and whose father had betrayed the duty of care that a parent has to their child.
Certainly with Erica and Boyd, Derek was clearly more deliberately manipulative in his approach to winning over new recruits, and eventually he was maybe just enjoying his ability to cut loose and make some werewolves, but his initial motivation was, I think, about rebuilding a lost family.
Perhaps the least obvious thing about Derek (forever obscured by his serious, brooding attitude, and sensational car) is that he's actually kind of socially awkward. Or really, awkward in general. His first romantic relationship ended with a mass killing, so it stands to reason that in the 5+ years since, Derek has never blossomed into much of a people person. He knows how to be a pushy alpha-male jerk around people, and he knows how to threaten their lives, but he really doesn't know how to respond to more normal social situations. He's not stupid, but he's not especially quick thinking or witty either, and there's a kind of constant veil of discomfort over him when he's trying to be.
This is mostly evident in his scenes with Stiles, where he occasionally tries to keep up with the witty banter for a few lines, while Stilinski basically runs rings around him. Eventually he just goes back to threats of bodily harm, because that's his safe place. Another time when this arose, was when Derek was hiding out in Stiles's bedroom and had to be explained away to another classmate. Stiles cobbled together a lazy story about Derek being his cousin, and instead of smiling, nodding, or playing along in any way, Derek sat perfectly still, and stared at them both, with eyes full of hatred.
He lives in abandoned buildings and hangs out with teenagers and just materializes in people's rooms and is basically a huge weirdo.
In conclusion, Derek Hale is not a nice person at all. He's paranoid, self hating, socially awkward as hell, manipulative, dishonest, not the best of decision makers, and really kind of needy.
Barge Reactions: I think Derek's biggest problem with the Barge will be that he won't fully understand why he's there. He doesn't really buy into the humans vs. werewolves/good vs. evil narratives that have been imposed on his life, but he still recognizes that they've been been ever present in the way he's treated, and he will see the Barge as a part of that.
He will interpret the fact that he is on the Barge, but not Kate, or Victoria, or any of the other hunters who killed his family? As a cosmic confirmation that he'll always be seen as a monster, and that the people who hunted him will never be held accountable.
I think his first instinct will be to search for some kind of kinship on the Barge, just as he did when left without his family.
Path to Redemption:
Derek needs to fucking chillax and allow himself to be vulnerable for just long enough to let him question his judgment once in a while. His mistrustful nature and unwillingness to compromise has allowed him to cast himself as one of life's villains.
He's tried to do some really really bad things in his life, usually out of a sense of misdirected justice or a belief that the ends justifies the means. In some ways, his experiences have left him much more fatalistic than they should have, which means that he often doesn't bother to even try for a solution without a body count. Having a little more faith in the decency of other people, and learning that not everyone has it in for him would really help with this.
He also really needs to DEAL WITH THE DEATH OF HIS FAMILY. Derek currently uses anger as the emotional anchor which keeps him in touch with his humanity on the full moon. We never see him mourning his sister, his uncle, or anyone who he loses over the course of the series, not because he doesn't feel grief over losing them, but because he never allows himself the catharsis of mourning. He channels his pain into anger, and has never progressed any further through the stages of loss than that.
Finally, he could really do with surrounding himself with people who actually give a damn about him. He could do with having people acknowledge that he is still very young, and recognize that while he projects an air of "DANGEROUS MONSTER!" most of the time, in reality he's just kind of inept and very isolated.
History:
Derek was born a werewolf, into a whole family of werewolves. He had a large, close family, and grew up in a big house out in the woods of a small American town called Beacon Hills. His immediate family were his father, his mother, who was Alpha and matriarch of their pack, and his older sister, Laura. He was a solitary teenager, constantly aware that he would have to lie to any friends he had about his identity. He was close to his family, and closest of all to his sister, who he was only a few years younger than.
In high school, he was an athletic youth, but didn't participate in competitive sports because his natural advantage put him at risk of being revealed as inhuman. Instead, he swam, and was on good enough terms with the school lifeguard that she would let him stay late and swim after school regularly.
When Derek was sixteen, Beacon Hills High hired a new lifeguard. Kate Argent.
The Argents were a family of old school werewolf hunters, and over the course of several weeks, Kate seduced Derek and began a sexual relationship with him. Derek quickly became completely infatuated with her, to the point of believing that he was in love. Kate slipped him some wolfsbane to test her suspicions that his family were werewolves, and once confirmed, she continued their relationship until the night of an important event in the werewolf calendar, when the extended Hale family would all be together in their house. Early in the morning, she and some other hunters went to the house and bolted and chained the exits shut, before dousing the house with gasoline and setting it alight.
Derek and his sister were spared due to her school commitments meaning that they'd had to go in especially early that morning, but the rest of his family were killed in the blaze, save for his uncle, Peter Hale. Peter was badly burned, and reduced to a vegetative state. He was hospitalized permanently, and while Derek and Laura still visited him, they ultimately left Beacon Hills, to live in New York City. With the death of their family, the role of Alpha fell to Laura, and Derek became her Beta.
They lived in New York for several years, before Laura was called back to Beacon Hills. She disappeared, and Derek went after her, and holed up in his burned out family home hoping to find her.
Then canon happened.
Sample Journal Entry: [note: because Derek is antisocial as pee, introductory posts from him probably won't break five sentences. This sample was written on a prompt from another player, and the setup for it is that Derek has been accused of murdering another inmate during a food fight.]
Does this actually work? Ever, on anyone?
[Derek's sitting in level zero, staring dully at the camera. There are dried beans mashed across his shirt, and a fistful of hummous has been shoved through his hair. He reaches forward to touch the bars of his cell.]
Everything else about this place is insane. There are no restrictions on the warden's power, no control over what they can do to us, but the punishment for murder is just a week in solitary? [He drops his hand back down, and snorts incredulously.] Even taking away my ability to change is just a meaningless show of force. You don't need to be a werewolf to drown someone in a tray of beans. So none of this changes anything.
[Sigh, and Derek moves away from the bars, dropping his hand to his side.]
Anyone could have done it.
[...And anyone probably did.]
Sample RP:
Derek isn't an optimist. Doesn't dream of family reunions or eternal paradise. If there really is a god, then the term abomination might have had some meaning that he isn't prepared to let himself think about. He didn't have a plan, like Peter had had a plan. Like everyone else in the world seemed to have a plan. All Derek wants from death, is nothingness. Peace, for want of a better word.
He wakes up to phantom pain in his lungs, gasping for air. He's flat on his back on the dirty mattress he keeps in the shell of what used to be his bedroom. Out the windows there's a vast expanse of night sky, and the whole house is dark. No lighting. He'd disconnected the remains of the electricity a good few months back.
This could be a million things. Claws in the back of his neck, one last thorn in his memories. Could be his whole, directionless, painful life flashing before his eyes before he goes. It might even be hell, and wouldn't that be apt? For hell to be completely indistinguishable from just waking up at home.
There's something that looks like a phone on the floor beside his mattress. It's unfamiliar. Doesn't smell like Derek. Doesn't smell like anything. He picks it up, and just holds it for a moment, not looking at the screen. He can't smell the forest outside. Can't hear distant cars or smell the fumes of beacon hills. He can't hear a single heartbeat, or a single voice, even in the furthest distance. He feels deafened, and isolated and part of him would rather just be dead than have to get up and find out why right now.
The phone is like a leaden weight in his hand. He could just put it down. Roll over and try to sleep again.
He could.
But he doesn't.
Special Notes:
User DW: nah
AIM/IM: stoptheworld26
E-mail: michael heroin at gee mail
Other Characters: Prefect!
Character Name: Derek Hale
Series: TEEN WOLF
Age: It's not entirely clear. Apparently this is something that we're going to find out ~officially~ in season three, but roadmarkers point to him being 22 for me. (In the tie-in novel On Fire, he's sixteen years old in flashbacks from six years ago. So yes, I think 22.)
From When?: At the end of series two, after Scott makes him gnaw on Grandpa Argent, when Derek's p. sure he's about to die.
Inmate/Warden: Derek is an inmaaaate. Most of the time he's basically working towards his own survival and in the interests of the greater good, but he's extremely callous about how he achieves those ends, and has cheerily paralyzed and attempted to murder teenagers in the pursuit of that greater good. There's also the morality involved in offering a permanent change of species to vulnerable teenagers who can't really make an informed decision on it, but as with so many things, this one is something of a gray area...
Item: N/a
Abilities/Powers: Derek is an Alpha werewolf.
General Teen Wolf Werewolf things:
On a full moon they get super angry and tense and get all worked up and turn into monsters. They can only stop themselves by holding onto a mental anchor which connects them to their humanity.
They become spry motherfuckers, all month around. They can prance along on all fours, do parkour, backflip at will, and they get really good at Lacrosse! Reduced! Derek will only be as spry as your average olympic gymnast.
They have exceptionally good senses. Smell and hearing are the ones most emphasised (sight seems pretty standard), to the point where they can smell illness, and more experienced werewolves can detect lies by listening to the heartbeat of the person they're talking too. NOT REDUCED, but a note: I'd like to keep these abilities for a handful of reasons. Mainly because Derek has always been a werewolf, so losing these enhanced senses would be akin to a human losing 90% of their sight or hearing, and probably would be way more traumatic than losing most other stuff. That said, it is something that his warden can take away if needed, and obviously NOT something I'll use to godmod/without approval from other players.
Illnesses they had before turning are much less symptomatic after becoming a werewolf, to the point where they initially seem to have gone away entirely.
They can leech pain from others with their claws. Just... claw at a cancerous dog, suck up some of the black goop, and the dog is in less pain. Don't know if a dog is cancerous or not? SNIFF IT TO FIND OUT!
They can punch other monster's through walls. - Reduced. Derek will only be able to punch as hard as the human maximum will allow
They have an exceptionally fast rate of healing, and if they're suffering from some other affliction (poisoning, having a seizure, etc) then injuring themselves physically will trigger that healing process and fix both things. REDUCED: Derek will still heal more quickly than a human, but not at a pace that makes him UNDEFEATABLE IN BATTLE. It'd take maybe an hour for cuts and bruises to heal entirely, and two or three for broken bones to repair.
With enough emotional control, werewolves can change their form at any time. (Basically they just turn into people with hairy faces, big teeth and very sharp fingernails.)
Things that only THE ALPHA!!!11 can do:
Make other werewolves. Apparently getting the bite from an alpha will either turn you into a werewolf, or kill you. That said, out of the seven people on the show who've gotten the bite, literally none of them have died. I think this might be something that was a touch exaggerated. You can also make werewolves with an especially deep scratch. I WOULD LIKE TO KEEP THIS. So Derek can make a shitload of werewolves to be his substitute family. I make no apologies for wanting to run this plot.
The number of baby werewolves you make? The stronger you become! REDUCED! SORT OF! There might be some vague advantage to having more werewolves (faster healing? higher pain threshold?) but Derek will not become stronger than the human maximum.
You can scratch people to give them visions, or memories, OR to take their memories away. REDUCED: No giving people visions, or stealing memories. He can still share his own memories in this way though.
You can like, brainwash your Betas and make them do what you want? The former Alpha uses this power to force Scott out of bed and off to murder a bus driver with him, but we only see Derek use it to prevent one of his Betas from hurting someone when out of control. LOL GONE.
TECHNICALLY THE ALPHA CAN TURN INTO A PROPER WEREWOLF. Like, a big scary one who actually looks like a wolf monster and not just a hairy guy with big teeth. GONE! Derek doesn't do this anyway because of budget restrictions. GONE EVEN MORE.
Glowy red eyes. NEVER REDUCED.
WEAKNESSES:
WOLFSBANE! Wolfsbane sucks. Having it near will weaken a werewolf and may make it difficult to breathe. Having it shot into them will poison their blood and kill them in about a day, and being gassed with it will kill them a lot more quickly. Wolfsbane is no good.
MOUNTAIN ASH! Werewolves can't cross mountain ash. Don't want a werewolf in your house? MAKE IT OUT OF MOUNTAIN ASH! Don't want a werewolf getting into your party? ENCIRCLE THE PARTY WITH GROUND UP MOUNTAIN ASH! Mountain ash sucks.
ELECTRICITY! Electricity is the actual worst. Certain levels of voltage in a cattle prod, or across wires, will take away all a werewolves natural advantages. They become weakened, they can't heal, and they can't change. They just become like really delicate humans.
BEING CUT IN HALF. Don't cut werewolves in half :(
BEING SET ON FIRE. This also seems effective :(
EMOTIONAL PROBLEMS MAY TURN WEREWOLVES INTO KANIMAS. Which is a shame because all werewolves have emotional problems.
EXAMS. Werewolves hate exams.
Okay I'm going to stop there, sorry.
Personality:
Derek Hale is not a nice person. Let's just put that out there right from the beginning. He is not a pleasant person to know. He's hostile, threatening, and mistrustful of others to the point of undermining his own agenda by appearing to be the most suspicious person in the universe. He doesn't want to be popular, doesn't want to be loved, and in some ways he actively pursues the opposite.
Derek's inability to trust others is probably the greatest influence behind this kind of behavior, since his chief objectives usually tend to be fairly reasonable ones. For instance, not wanting a teenager to transform into a werewolf in the middle of a crowded lacrosse field? Reasonable. Responsible, even. Threatening to murder the teenager if he tries to play lacrosse, on the other hand? Not so reasonable.
This is a pattern that emerges in a lot of Derek's attempts at persuasion. Do as I say, because if you don't I'll kill you. Work with me, or I'll leave you to go crazy and murder all your friends. Don't leave me in the street to die, or I'll tear your throat out with my teeth.
Eventually this reaches a point where Derek is trying to barter for things that the relatively normal, non-sociopathic people surrounding him would willingly do for him anyway. In series two, episode four, there's a scene where after being paralyzed by a monster and dropped into a swimming pool while attempting to protect another character, he essentially tries to blackmail that same character out of letting him drown. On the basis that once they get out of the pool and he is done being paralyzed, he'll be the best defense against the monster waiting for them. His exact argument is: "You don't trust me, I don't trust you, but you need me to survive and that's why you're not letting me go."
The trust issues are obvious, but even to Derek's mind this is less about the other character than it is about him. He doesn't think they'll drown him because they're an especially bad person, he thinks they'll let him drown purely because without his supplying one, there is no compelling reason for anyone else to want to keep him alive. The thing is, Derek has a pretty serious survivors guilt complex.
In his teenage years, Derek trusted someone outside of his pack, and was rewarded with the extermination of his family. To his mind, he was responsible for their deaths. His desire to be loved, his desire to forge a bond with someone outside of his immediate family, cost almost all of his loved ones their lives. He still had a sister who loved him, and who he loved. Still had someone who had seen to his survival, and in doing so had in her mind placed a value on his life. When Laura was gone, so was the last person who had ever cared for him, ever sacrificed for him, or ever had any reason for wanting him to live. To some degree, Derek is incapable of looking further than this evaluation of himself.
Related to this is the fact that Derek almost never openly does things because he wants, or needs to do them. He throws up a pretense when he needs help, turns his request into a deal, an offer, or a compromise, to avoid ever having to seem vulnerable or desperate. Even when it comes to expanding his pack. After he's bitten a bunch of teenagers, Derek admits that he did it because he needed the power, but before this? He makes them an offer, gives them a choice, finds people who are vulnerable, and makes it about them needing him rather than the other way around.
This pretense is partly because honestly, Derek knows he's a huge jerk. His acerbic personality is likely as much deliberately cultivated as it is a natural response to having a horrible life. He can't trust other people and he can't trust his own judgement about them, so to some degree, he does want to drive people away. More than this, it's a survival mechanism.
Derek is in a position in Teen Wolf where he's shouldering a responsibility which he isn't ready for. He's isolated, way out of his depth, and his only way of getting people to help him is to come across as more dangerous, informed, and generally more useful than anyone else they have access too. As an alpha, he has to seem like he knows what he's doing, and if he opens up and talks about his feelings, then that's not an act that he's going to be able to keep up very long. A lot of the time, Derek's constant bad temper thinly veils the fact that he doesn't really have a plan. He faces down unconquerable odds with the stoic determination to survive, and very little else.
Despite all of this negativity, Derek does have a strong survival instinct. He may punish himself emotionally for living when almost his entire family is dead, but that doesn't mean that he'll try and stop. After the death of his family, Derek and Laura focused only on their own survival, but with her gone, he finds himself confronted with a new prerogative. With no pack left to protect, Derek moves to rebuilding it. It is not insignificant that Derek's first reaction to finding out that Scott had been bitten was to tell the teenager that the bite made them brothers, and although Scott never bought into this idea, for Derek it has never ceased to be the truth. When he was in danger, he went to Scott, and on multiple occasions when Scott has been in danger, Derek has gone to help him.
Derek was raised with pack and family being synonymous. On the same night that his last family member died, Scott was brought into his pack. This is why Derek is pretty much completely incapable of ever dropping his obsession with trying to get Scott to be his bro, even though Scott clearly does not rate Derek as acceptable bro material.
This is also, to some extent, why Derek made such incredibly shitty decisions about who to bring into his new pack. Again, it doesn't seem coincidental that the first person Derek bit was a character who had been orphaned, and who hated the lack of identity he perceived to come from this, or that the second character he bit was one whose mother had passed away, and whose father had betrayed the duty of care that a parent has to their child.
Certainly with Erica and Boyd, Derek was clearly more deliberately manipulative in his approach to winning over new recruits, and eventually he was maybe just enjoying his ability to cut loose and make some werewolves, but his initial motivation was, I think, about rebuilding a lost family.
Perhaps the least obvious thing about Derek (forever obscured by his serious, brooding attitude, and sensational car) is that he's actually kind of socially awkward. Or really, awkward in general. His first romantic relationship ended with a mass killing, so it stands to reason that in the 5+ years since, Derek has never blossomed into much of a people person. He knows how to be a pushy alpha-male jerk around people, and he knows how to threaten their lives, but he really doesn't know how to respond to more normal social situations. He's not stupid, but he's not especially quick thinking or witty either, and there's a kind of constant veil of discomfort over him when he's trying to be.
This is mostly evident in his scenes with Stiles, where he occasionally tries to keep up with the witty banter for a few lines, while Stilinski basically runs rings around him. Eventually he just goes back to threats of bodily harm, because that's his safe place. Another time when this arose, was when Derek was hiding out in Stiles's bedroom and had to be explained away to another classmate. Stiles cobbled together a lazy story about Derek being his cousin, and instead of smiling, nodding, or playing along in any way, Derek sat perfectly still, and stared at them both, with eyes full of hatred.
He lives in abandoned buildings and hangs out with teenagers and just materializes in people's rooms and is basically a huge weirdo.
In conclusion, Derek Hale is not a nice person at all. He's paranoid, self hating, socially awkward as hell, manipulative, dishonest, not the best of decision makers, and really kind of needy.
Barge Reactions: I think Derek's biggest problem with the Barge will be that he won't fully understand why he's there. He doesn't really buy into the humans vs. werewolves/good vs. evil narratives that have been imposed on his life, but he still recognizes that they've been been ever present in the way he's treated, and he will see the Barge as a part of that.
He will interpret the fact that he is on the Barge, but not Kate, or Victoria, or any of the other hunters who killed his family? As a cosmic confirmation that he'll always be seen as a monster, and that the people who hunted him will never be held accountable.
I think his first instinct will be to search for some kind of kinship on the Barge, just as he did when left without his family.
Path to Redemption:
Derek needs to fucking chillax and allow himself to be vulnerable for just long enough to let him question his judgment once in a while. His mistrustful nature and unwillingness to compromise has allowed him to cast himself as one of life's villains.
He's tried to do some really really bad things in his life, usually out of a sense of misdirected justice or a belief that the ends justifies the means. In some ways, his experiences have left him much more fatalistic than they should have, which means that he often doesn't bother to even try for a solution without a body count. Having a little more faith in the decency of other people, and learning that not everyone has it in for him would really help with this.
He also really needs to DEAL WITH THE DEATH OF HIS FAMILY. Derek currently uses anger as the emotional anchor which keeps him in touch with his humanity on the full moon. We never see him mourning his sister, his uncle, or anyone who he loses over the course of the series, not because he doesn't feel grief over losing them, but because he never allows himself the catharsis of mourning. He channels his pain into anger, and has never progressed any further through the stages of loss than that.
Finally, he could really do with surrounding himself with people who actually give a damn about him. He could do with having people acknowledge that he is still very young, and recognize that while he projects an air of "DANGEROUS MONSTER!" most of the time, in reality he's just kind of inept and very isolated.
History:
Derek was born a werewolf, into a whole family of werewolves. He had a large, close family, and grew up in a big house out in the woods of a small American town called Beacon Hills. His immediate family were his father, his mother, who was Alpha and matriarch of their pack, and his older sister, Laura. He was a solitary teenager, constantly aware that he would have to lie to any friends he had about his identity. He was close to his family, and closest of all to his sister, who he was only a few years younger than.
In high school, he was an athletic youth, but didn't participate in competitive sports because his natural advantage put him at risk of being revealed as inhuman. Instead, he swam, and was on good enough terms with the school lifeguard that she would let him stay late and swim after school regularly.
When Derek was sixteen, Beacon Hills High hired a new lifeguard. Kate Argent.
The Argents were a family of old school werewolf hunters, and over the course of several weeks, Kate seduced Derek and began a sexual relationship with him. Derek quickly became completely infatuated with her, to the point of believing that he was in love. Kate slipped him some wolfsbane to test her suspicions that his family were werewolves, and once confirmed, she continued their relationship until the night of an important event in the werewolf calendar, when the extended Hale family would all be together in their house. Early in the morning, she and some other hunters went to the house and bolted and chained the exits shut, before dousing the house with gasoline and setting it alight.
Derek and his sister were spared due to her school commitments meaning that they'd had to go in especially early that morning, but the rest of his family were killed in the blaze, save for his uncle, Peter Hale. Peter was badly burned, and reduced to a vegetative state. He was hospitalized permanently, and while Derek and Laura still visited him, they ultimately left Beacon Hills, to live in New York City. With the death of their family, the role of Alpha fell to Laura, and Derek became her Beta.
They lived in New York for several years, before Laura was called back to Beacon Hills. She disappeared, and Derek went after her, and holed up in his burned out family home hoping to find her.
Then canon happened.
Sample Journal Entry: [note: because Derek is antisocial as pee, introductory posts from him probably won't break five sentences. This sample was written on a prompt from another player, and the setup for it is that Derek has been accused of murdering another inmate during a food fight.]
Does this actually work? Ever, on anyone?
[Derek's sitting in level zero, staring dully at the camera. There are dried beans mashed across his shirt, and a fistful of hummous has been shoved through his hair. He reaches forward to touch the bars of his cell.]
Everything else about this place is insane. There are no restrictions on the warden's power, no control over what they can do to us, but the punishment for murder is just a week in solitary? [He drops his hand back down, and snorts incredulously.] Even taking away my ability to change is just a meaningless show of force. You don't need to be a werewolf to drown someone in a tray of beans. So none of this changes anything.
[Sigh, and Derek moves away from the bars, dropping his hand to his side.]
Anyone could have done it.
[...And anyone probably did.]
Sample RP:
Derek isn't an optimist. Doesn't dream of family reunions or eternal paradise. If there really is a god, then the term abomination might have had some meaning that he isn't prepared to let himself think about. He didn't have a plan, like Peter had had a plan. Like everyone else in the world seemed to have a plan. All Derek wants from death, is nothingness. Peace, for want of a better word.
He wakes up to phantom pain in his lungs, gasping for air. He's flat on his back on the dirty mattress he keeps in the shell of what used to be his bedroom. Out the windows there's a vast expanse of night sky, and the whole house is dark. No lighting. He'd disconnected the remains of the electricity a good few months back.
This could be a million things. Claws in the back of his neck, one last thorn in his memories. Could be his whole, directionless, painful life flashing before his eyes before he goes. It might even be hell, and wouldn't that be apt? For hell to be completely indistinguishable from just waking up at home.
There's something that looks like a phone on the floor beside his mattress. It's unfamiliar. Doesn't smell like Derek. Doesn't smell like anything. He picks it up, and just holds it for a moment, not looking at the screen. He can't smell the forest outside. Can't hear distant cars or smell the fumes of beacon hills. He can't hear a single heartbeat, or a single voice, even in the furthest distance. He feels deafened, and isolated and part of him would rather just be dead than have to get up and find out why right now.
The phone is like a leaden weight in his hand. He could just put it down. Roll over and try to sleep again.
He could.
But he doesn't.
Special Notes:
