Board Thread:Creation Box/@comment-4199666-20141224124407

Gender: Male

Birthday: April 6, 1985

Face claim: Michael Mando

Family/Housemates: He lives alone

Address: 47/A Waterbury Street, Blackwood Mountain

Personality:

In situations where Tyler isn't required to make an emotional decision, he can be very clever, quick-thinking and sharp. He's charismatic and persuasive and is very good at convincing people to follow his lead. However, once emotions become involved, that's when Tyler starts to freeze up. He's very logic-driven, and after being neglected by his father, who was also an alcoholic, he finds it hard to express negative emotions without anger and violence.

Any sign of weakness or insecurity when he was younger, was pounded out of him, quite literally. He was constantly belittled for not 'manning up' and 'having some respect for himself.' Tyler was conditioned to believe that this was a normal part of growing up and that he was the one who needed to change, and as a result he became more and more like his father. Things did look like they were changing for him when he went to uni and met his girlfriend (now ex-wife) Tia, who opened up a lighter and happier side of him that he'd never experienced before. However, once stress began to get to him, and with the death of his mother, he slipped back into his old habits.

Despite his hatred for his father, he became somewhat of a clone of him. He knows how to put on a smile in front of people and act like everything is happy, but when he's left alone to his own thoughts, he'll try to drink until he blacks out to avoid dwelling on what he's done. He has very little regard for his life, or others, and would be lying if he said he cared about what he'd be doing in a few years.

History: yeah i'm sorry this is almost 2000 words

Tyler was born in a small town called Fayham, about an hour outside of Barfield, in 1985. He only ever had a small house growing up, living with his mom, dad and his older Simone, who he shared a room with until she left home. Tyler’s father, Antonio was never very active in Tyler’s childhood, instead choosing alcohol over his family at any given opportunity. His father was also very aggressive while he was drunk, and Tyler had learned better than to step out of line with him, although his sister seemed more game than he was to push his father’s buttons. On the off occasion that Tyler did muscle up the courage to stand up for his mother or sister, he was conditioned to just accept his punishment, and he was taught that crying was weak and girly. At the slightest sign of emotions, Tyler’s father would grow angry at him and would tell him to grow up and get over it.

It wasn’t until Tyler started school that he actually received some positive encouragement in his life. Tyler showed amazing focus and a great attention to detail that was uncommon for his age. He’d become a sort of perfectionist, and praise only encouraged him more. Tyler also strove to make his parents proud, bringing home tests with one hundred percent and being told that he should be getting one hundreds all the time so it’s not a big deal, and bringing home his artworks and being told that art was gay. The main memory Tyler has of his sister is that she would occasionally slip notes into his schoolbag on days where his parents yelled at him, with inspirational messages like ‘I’m proud of you’ and ‘Keep on trying’.

Tyler mostly kept to himself in school, and even though he tried to make friends, it was hard for him to shake the image of being the chubby, nerdy kid whose dad beats him up. He led a mostly lonely life at school, which only prompted him to study more and pick up a hobby of building model planes after his teacher brought in a collection of them and showed him. While Tyler didn’t think it would make his father proud, he was taken by surprise when his mother helped him out and told him stories about her father’s service in the war and the types of planes he would fly. Tyler started asking more about his grandparents seeing as he’d never met them, and his father’s behaviour started to make sense when Tyler found out that his dad’s father was schizophrenic and tortured his family for years before killing himself when his dad was only thirteen.

Being only nine at the time, Tyler was worried that his father might have done the same, but his mother assured him repeatedly that everything was fine with his father and that he just drank more than some people did. This sentiment lasted for a little while until Tyler noticed his parents fighting even more than they had ever done when he was a child. He asked his mother why she continued to stay with him when she could just get a new house for the three of them and leave their father behind, which copped him a scolding and the explanation that ‘If you love someone, you don’t just leave them. That’s not what love is. You have to stick by them.’ Tyler still couldn’t understand the things she was saying, but believed her when she told him that he’d understand it when he was older and met a girl.

Although the anxiety of his father repeating his grandfather’s actions had been looming over his head, Tyler certainly wasn’t expecting the family member who did leave would be the one to go when he was twelve. In the summer break of 1997, Tyler’s sister Simone randomly left in the middle of the night after having an argument with her father where she warned him that if he laid another finger on her, she would be gone. Things escalated quickly and needless to say, Simone stayed true to her word and never appeared back in the Castellano household, or anywhere in Fayham. Tyler’s parents had taught him exactly what he had to say to avoid raising people’s suspicions. He had to tell them that Simone had decided to move out with her aunt and uncle in Ohio so she could help them with their failing farm. Tyler wasn’t even sure if he had an aunt and uncle in Ohio, but he told the lie anyway.

Tyler became quieter without his sister around to give him encouragement. His mother also grew quieter while she tried to deal with losing a child and the fact that she would never know if her daughter was still alive, and it became hard for her and Tyler to talk to each other without mentioning Simone. Once Tyler got over the initial shock and grief, he decided that his sister would have wanted him to continue trying his best at school, and to do something to make his parents proud, so he studied his hardest, and even tried his hand at a lot of technology subjects. He graduated top of his engineering class in high school and was offered a scholarship to study and live at BIST (a scholarship only offered to one student in Fayham each year).

Unexpectedly, Tyler was more used to living on his own than he thought he would be. He still called up his mother from time to time, but the longer he spent away from home, the happier and friendlier he became. In his senior year at BIST, he met a girl in the grade below him named Tia, and the two of them became close quickly. Tyler was sweet, and even though he didn’t always have the money, he wanted to spoil her with anything he could. He finally thought he was starting to understand love like his mother had explained, and he couldn’t see himself ever leaving her.

After graduating, he spent a year working on and off wherever he could get a job. Although he had a degree in engineering, he had found it harder than he’d expected to land a permanent job, but he realised early on that it would have been a smart idea to save up whatever money he didn’t need to spend. He eventually saved up enough money to buy Tia an engagement ring, and he proposed to her after they had been dating for two years, and she said yes, with the two of them getting married a few months later. He also moved with her to Lebeaux when she needed to study at Lebeaux University, and things started to look bright, like he was ready for a normal suburban life with his beautiful, loving wife.

Things spiralled backwards for him after he realised just how expensive living in Lebeaux was, and how hard it was to support Tia and himself living in the most expensive city he’d ever been in. He became increasingly stressed in the months where he didn’t have work and they’d had to borrow money from Tia’s parents to avoid being evicted. As the stress got to his head, he started to become more controlling of things, constantly trying to control how much money was being spent and how much and if there was a way for things to get cheaper. He also started drinking on more stressful days, not realising he was drinking to bite the stress, and slowly becoming addicted. He noticed Tia’s change of attitude with him and started to become paranoid that she’d lost interest in him, or that she’d started an affair with someone else, and he became needy, wanting to know where she was and who she was with at all times.

This led to more arguments between the two, which only increased tensions between them. Tyler figured that things would be easier if Tia stopped going to university and the two of them could move to Miduna where they could both get full-time jobs, but Tia was insistent on graduating university and becoming a vet. After his mother died in 2009, Tyler started to drink even more than he previously had, and although he would never tell Tia, he’d started smoking whenever he was at work on a construction site. Tia found out shortly after, but let him continue after she noticed he was acting a lot calmer and more like the man she’d met at BIST than the one she’d seen recently. Whenever he had a job, he would use the money to buy Tia the nice things he’d always wanted to get for her, but once he finished that job and had to wait for the next one, he’d grow angrier at himself for spending money which could have been saved for something important.

During Tia’s final semester at university, she fell pregnant, hopeful that a child might solve their problems, and Tyler’s excitement seemed to suggest that it would. They took out a loan on a house in Lebeaux complete with a nursery, which they painted yellow because they wanted the sex of the baby to be a surprise. Tyler remained positive that this was the thing that he and Tia needed to fix their marriage problems, until he started falling behind on loan repayments and he started buying baby furniture and realising how expensive everything was. After trying to bottle all of his worry up, it came out as anger, and he lashed out at Tia one night while he was drunk. He blamed her for putting them in all this debt with all her university fees and her decision to live in Lebeaux and Tia fought back for a change. She blamed him for not being able to save money and spending all of his money on cigarettes and alcohol. She took it a step too far by comparing him to his father, which caused Tyler to snap. He shoved her a few times, the first time he’d ever physically hurt her.

Tia told him that she lost the baby because of him and she left shortly after while he was passed out drunk. He didn’t hear back from her until her lawyer sent him the divorce papers. Tyler became very depressed after the fact, thinking back to the thing his mother had told him about why she never left his father. After getting drunk one night and trashing the nursery while grieving, Tyler decided that he couldn’t spend any more time in Lebeaux, blaming the city for his problems. He brought a few friends over from work and they helped him repair the damage in the nursery and Tyler put the house up for sale and moved into a smaller apartment in Blackwood Mountain where he still lives to this day. The smaller apartment is cheaper on him, but unfortunately, Tyler spends the extra money that he saves on rent on alcohol instead.

He still has trouble keeping a job for a while – he’s been offered a few trials since Tia left but was fired after showing up hungover or late. He’s made a few friends down at the local bar, and a few friends who occasionally hook him up with construction project jobs, but other than that he spends most of his time alone. He also doesn’t care much about what he’ll be doing in the future, he only hopes that he can win Tia’s affections back.

Describe your character in a word. Damaged

How your character would describe him or herself in a word: Useless 