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Unnamed Uncle (Teal) Blog Entry |
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May 2, 2025, 12:01:08 AM 5/2/25: r/SketchDaily theme, "Free Draw Friday." This week's characters from my anthro WWII storyline are Unnamed Father and Unnamed Uncle. The first is Gold Rat's estranged father (he basically relinquishes custody of him as a child) and the second is Teal Rat's uncle (he raises Teal after his mother gives him up). They're both not terribly nice people, though they aren't monsters either, just really lousy with kids. There'll be more about them later in my art Tumblr and Toyhou.se. Regarding their design, Gold's father has shaded/bloodshot eyes as he has a problem with drinking, while Teal resembles his uncle more than his mother or father. TUMBLR EDIT: Individual entries beyond this point. Details about the relationship between Teal Rat and his uncle are in Teal's entry, Teal's mother's entry, and Teal's father's entry. Similar to Gold's father, he's a drunk, though not as much of one. He has a more spiteful personality though, and this ends up influencing Teal--young Aaron--in bad ways. Unlike Gold's father, Teal's uncle never beats him, never calls him stupid or slow or anything like that. He just convinces him that his father is a horrible person and instills a good strong dose of antisemitism in his nephew to boot. Teal eventually learns the truth--part of it, at least--but never takes the chance to meet and get to know his father, the one person who genuinely loves him, largely because his uncle convinces him it isn't worth it. I don't know Uncle's past, how he quite ends up in the situation he does. He and Teal's mother, his sister, are not close. In fact, they've been estranged for years (I have yet to determine why) by the time she shows up with newborn Aaron and begs him to take the baby. Uncle may have had some experience with children in the past--a wife, a divorce?--as his initial reaction isn't like Adel's (see Gold's father's entry), to freak out and insist he knows nothing about babies--rather, his reaction is confusion--why is his sister suddenly back in his life, and why is she giving him her baby?? They have literally not talked in years. He wants to tell her hell no, yet she's so desperate, tears in her eyes--she doesn't want to keep the baby, the result of an affair, but she doesn't want to simply abandon him to an unknown fate, either--that he relents, and she hands over the infant. She tells him the identity of the father--Uncle fights a scowl to learn that he's Jewish--and has him promise not to reveal this info to Aaron when he's older. "Make something up," she snaps when he asks what to tell him if he asks, though her eyes are wet again. "Are you going to say goodbye to him...?" he asks; his sister hesitates, wavers as she stares at Aaron, then steels herself and steps back. "Take...just take care of him, all right?" she says, "And I promise I won't bother you again," and with that she hurries off. Uncle might be a bigot and a liar but even he thinks it's cold that a mother wouldn't even kiss her child goodbye. He does his best to raise Aaron--he really does. But he's not a good father figure, he's full of hate, and he passes that along to the boy, in a twisted effort to convince him not to seek out his parents. His hateful lies about Aaron's father are meant to make him believe that his mother WOULD have kept him, if she could--it's terrible and misguided, yet he really does just try to shield Aaron from knowing the truth, that his own mother didn't want him. Unfortunately, the lies also convince Aaron to never try contacting his father, either; he ships out to Germany without ever meeting him, and goes the rest of his life believing no one has ever loved him. Uncle dies while Aaron is still present; this triggers his nephew's search for information. He keeps his promise to his sister to never tell Aaron the truth. Similar to Gold's father, he's not a completely awful person, just is in cruddy circumstances and makes cruddy choices; frankly, they're a couple of drunk, bitter old men, who might have been relatively decent people if things went a bit differently. Who knows. [Unnamed Uncle (Teal) 2025 [Friday, May 2, 2025, 12:01:08 AM]] |