teen wolf thingie
(it's also on my society6...if-if you care - www.society6.com/xxdanaja )
The one thing I love about Teen Wolf is how it subverts a lot of expectations and tropes of teen television. Particularly the male gaze. I'm not gonna lie and say that there's no sexualised women, because Lydia is the epitome of sex appeal, but more often than not it isn't intended to draw the male gaze in 'subtle' ways that degrade the women and disempower them. sex is an open topic and the women are usually the one's in power when it comes to sexual activities; Scott always lets Allison take the lead when it comes to physical activities, and he is always making sure that he is never putting her into situations she doesn't want to. It's rare to see a teenage show where female teenagers are so in control of issues of sex, and Teen Wolf does it well. Furthermore, the female gaze is far more powerful in this show. From the beginning Scott has been seen with his shirt off any time he's not at school, so has Derek and Jackson. The female gaze is so strong in this show that it's both surprising and mildly delightful. It's rare for girls to see themselves in positions of power with sex, and to see themselves not overtly sexualised in television. Teen Wold may be terribly cliche and over dramatic, but it does well in empowering females and tackling the fact that sex is a norm that should be equal in power and consent, at least to me.
scott mccall is the ultimate simp send tweet
Okay this might sound weird, but I’ve been reading a lot of Teen Wolf fic lately and it always puts a heavy emphasis on what the character smells like. Because...werewolf senses and everyone has a natural scent. I personally love this so here are my headcanons for what each characters natural scent would be!!!!!
(I give reasons for why I went with those things but some of the reasons themselves are headcanons, and some just came to me and have no reason at all besides that fact that i love it that way)
So background info: I headcanon some scents are from birth, while some are added/change based on experiences, temperament and emotions. You have your own scent and it does its own thing, even when you’re human. Humans cant smell them since they aren’t necessarily real, they are more a smell supernaturals pick up that’s a cryptic reflection of ones personality.
Stiles: Gotta start with the main boi!!!! He smells like spicy chili peppers, honey and everything spicy. He is wild and loud and so so sharp. He uses cutting anger and snark and sarcasm as a defense mechanism, this reflects in a scent that burns your nose. But he cares and loves a lot and is super soft, hence the honey. If you focus on his scent too much your eyes water with the chili. When he gets angry he send tears down everyone’s faces and even reddens the cheeks and burns the tongues of the supernatural pack members in his anger, his scent becoming physical as his spark acts up.
Peter: He smells like cold. Like cold, and petrichor and mint toothpaste. He always has. He smells like the cold of ice, the cold you smell when you open a freezer in the cold isle of the grocery store and like Vick’s Vaporub but 10x as strong. As the left hand of the pack it was his job to kill, to eliminate threats, his job to bear all the blood on his hands, to have his hands permanently stained sticky red and his eyes glow blue, so that no one else in the pack has to live with the guilt of murder, even when justified. His first kill was at 8 years old and he would never forgive the fact that he had been given that burden. So he became unmovable ice and unending cold. With the thick smell of rain for the warmth he would always keep hidden.
Theo: His scent is that of fresh, right off the smoker, BBQ sauce-soaked ribs and apple juice. Its a scent he was born with, one that reflects the gooey warmth of his soul and his innocence before he was manipulated and tortured. His scent always throws people off since it usually reflects ones personality and he’s not a good person by any means, he is amoral and cruel; and such a warm, soft scent doesn’t make sense. But his soul (though no longer pure) would always hold his original innocence. The apple juice isn’t actually his scent, but his sisters, her heart such a part of him that his guilt manifested her soul in his scent. And if you focus hard enough, underneath all that you can find the sting of bleach. His time with the dread doctors (and the fact that he was surgically tortured into being a chimera) leaving part of his scent mangled and altered into the artificial tang of bleach. The fact that he forced his scent to remain mostly unchanged throughout his life (which was worse than hell on earth) is Very Very Impressive, even more so when in the beginning he wasn’t even supernatural.
Scott: Our ever-sweet true alpha. He smells like overly sweet pink and blue cotton candy and hot, buttered, movie theater popcorn. He’s literally sugar and spice and everything nice. His morals and warmth translating to the hot popcorn and his perpetual smiling and niceness coming though as cotton candy. He smells like fairgrounds and the laughter of children. Underneath all that he bears the subtle scent of rust, a permanent reminder of his forced change to the supernatural and permanent resentment of the burden he must bear (and the guilt about that resentment)
Derek: He smells of Sandalwood, Patchouli, and Frankincense. He always smells like incense and spices, like the inside of a stereotypical fortune tellers shop. He becomes heat, warmth, and flame. Something that pulls at his soul since the fire. Something that is a comfort to the wolves around him. He also smells heavily of smoke (something that makes Peter unable to be in the same room as him for longer than 30 minutes unless forced) because of his never-ending guilt about his family, something that seared the event into his scent. When he’s angry (which is a lot) his scent gets stronger and the incense smell becomes extremely heady and makes his betas lethargic.
Lydia: She smells like metal, like your hands after handling handfuls of change. She smells like she bathed in pennies, her standoffish coldness bringing the bitter smell to her scent. Since she became a banshee she also smells strongly of spider lilies (also know as hell flowers), japans flower of death. You would think the contrast between bitter metal and floral scents, so strong you choke, would be bad but its actually strangely comforting. And while bitter its the only thing that can get Jackson to relax some days. The scent of the only person there for him for over a decade-and-a-half sometimes even more comforting than the scent of his boyfriend.
Isaac: His scent is of strong cologne even though he never wears any, he smells like he bathed in the Mahogany Teakwood candle from Bath and Body Works, or lived in an Abercrombie & Fitch for 50 years. He always had that smell, even as a child, but it just gets stronger the more confidence he gains. His childhood innocence and cleanliness of soul translates as a strong laundry soap smell. But hidden underneath there's an undertone of metal, plastic, and cold; that takes over his scent when he's scared and overwhelmes everything in a mile radius. It takes the Pack far too long to realize it smells like a freezer and metal chains.
Allison: She smells strongly of ozone and static (not rain though, never rain). Her anger and righteous fury making her scent like electricity and making the static-y-ness tingle in everyone's nose - sometimes making Scott sneeze. Nothing in her scent is pleasant or comforting to everyone's confusion. Its only when she feels negative emotions that she smells like roses and summer. Its like a warning but in reverse, the opposite of what it should be. Bad scents usually mean bad emotions or feelings or memories, and good scents mean good moods and positive things but for her its the opposite. Just like how she took the opposite path then what was laid out for her.
Jackson: He smells very very heavily of cherries, his scent so strong and sweet its like he took a bath in a hot tub filled with cherry cough medicine, chloraseptic cherry sore throat spray, cherry pie, cherry starburst, cherry Jell-O, and maraschino cherries. Its thick and sticky and strong enough to drown out the scent and stick for hours on anyone standing near him or touching him and it lingers on the Pack members even if they haven’t seen each other for years. Case-in-point: Jackson left for England after the kanima thing and Isaac left for France not long after. When Isaac came back 6 years later (2 years after Jackson came back) he still had the smell on him pretty strongly. Why cherries? No one knows. But its thick as hell and stronger than epoxy when it binds to things together forever. The Pack thinks it stems with his identity and abandonment issues, but once he claims you he wont let go, not even his scent. He is very self conscious and embarrassed about it so its never discussed, and he’s been friends with Danny for so long that his scent almost drowns out Danny’s own.
Ethan: Ethan’s scent is subtle and barely there. He was the one who always stood in front of Aiden to protect them, and took the beatings when possible so his scent became as bland and barely-there as possible. The Pack can only smell his scent with intense focus and at least an hours meditation (unless you’re Aiden). He smells of freshly baked bread and homemade jam, comforting smells that easily calm Aiden down. In times of distress he smells of burnt toast, he scent twisting with negative memories. A reminder that all good things have eventually turned bad for him and his twin.
Aiden: Aiden on the other hand smells strongly like curry and lavender. An odd combination but one that speaks of his guarded- but angry, headstrong and stubborn- nature. The abuse left him angry and twitchy and paranoid, everything setting him off and his moods turning on a dime. His scent fluctuated wildly between spicy curry and calming lavender which indicated his mood and Ethan was the only one able to calm him down, doing so with a single touch between his shoulder blades where they merged.
Danny: Danny smells like he lived in a Eucalyptus oil factory for 50 years, the scent soothing and calm like he is. Its always the same and never changes, not even when his emotions do. It was concerning at first, since everyone else’s scents changed throughout the day, even when their mood didn't (the only other scent that barely changed was Peter’s but that was because the man hand an iron grip over his emotions, even in his scent. Which is super impressive). He was just that calm at all times, even when annoyed. The one time he got angry- and I mean really angry not just the pretenses he kept when ‘annoyed’ with Stiles who he more endeared with than anything- his scent overwhelmed the entire apartment complex ( the one Derek had bought out for his loft) with the horrible, strong, pungent scent of burnt rubber. No one angered him again.
But they did have a chat about his witch ancestry.
Erica: Her scent was that of a bonfire. A blazing bonfire, gasoline, and the smell of the world when it was so hot outside the air above the tar street shimmered. She was competitive, and fierce, and pure heat and burning. If she wanted something, she would take it she had always been that way, even when she was sick. And while her sickness may be gone she had a subtle distortion to her scent, one like poison, that made her always smell slightly sick. (Peter almost had a panic attack when he first met her because of her scent, he now never came within 10 feet of her).
Boyd: He smelled like a flower garden. He was so stoic that the floral scent took many by surprise. He had always smelled like soil and dirt, his down to earth personality manifesting as a calming and grounding scent. He also smelled like the ocean, like salt and brine, and waves. But that was all drowned out by the overwhelming smell of flowers, a scent that used to be his sisters, one that he subconsciously adopted after her death when he was still human. He empathized with Theo and would exchange heavy glances when the pack discussed their natural scents as a ‘pack bonding exercise’, they were both drowned in guilt for different reasons, but both over lost sisters. They never discussed it. That was all folks!!! Feel free to add on to this and/or use it as a fanfic reference!!! Do you agree??? What are your headcanons???