#max jagerman deserved a redemption arc

[amorhedera6]

((this turned out longer and more in depth then i meant for it to go, tw for abusive families, suicidal ideation, mentions of death, grief, and dismembering of a body))

headcannon that steph and max were best friends as kids. his dads an important man, one that solomon wanted on his side. so he pushed steph to spend time with his son. max was a super happy kid, very exciteable, loved musicals. they were on their own a lot, since neither of their parents really gave a shit, so they’d spend a lot of time at starlight theatre, watching all the different shows and things going on. max would tell her about how shitty his dad was and she’d do the same in return.

when they got to the 7th grade, steph got really depressed and pushed max and everyone else away. and max was little, they both didn’t really know what was going on. after that, they weren’t ever really close like that again. she got on the middle school football team and was deemed a prodigy, got popular, started getting all these friends that would do whatever he said. things with his dad got worse, and without steph to help him he started bullying to corral his emotions. steph knew what he was doing, but also knew it wasn’t serious. he pushed a few people around a little, that’s all. she didn’t think she had to be worried about her friend and now that he was super popular, she needed other people to spend her time with.

she also became cool, just because he said hi to her in the hallways, so she found herself in with his group. but she never truly felt she fit in, skirting along the edges. in high school, her friends all joined the cheer squad as she joined the smoke club and stop giving a shit about school. she never made sense in the “popular kid” crowd, but she assumed they kept her around bc she was the mayor’s daughter and pushing her out wouldn’t fly. it was actually max, making sure she got an invite to every party.

steph sort of floats through high school disassociatedly, in the my-home-life-is-terrible-and-isn’t-gonna-get-better-until-college-so-i-don’t-give-a-shit way, so she doesn’t see the escalation of max knowing no one will stop him doing anything, getting a total god complex, and ruling the school with violence, until pete. she’s probably the only person in hatchetfield high that doesn’t know, but it surprised her so much. bc max? the boy who would geek out over tech production of the musicals? the kid who let her be the captain when they were pirates bc he thought it was more fun to be the first mate? who’d stay up late with her when she had a bad day to read the books their moms were had promised to read to them? that boy is this horrible bully, and she didn’t even know it? it just doesn’t make sense.

she says she’ll go to the principal bc that’s the first instinct one has about this shit, but people started doing that in 8th grade, and all that happens is max has to go to an anti bullying thing every few months. she wants to talk him down, figure out what made him go this far, but she already knows it’s his dad. he wants to be the big impressive football star that his dad wants him to be, so maybe he’ll actually give a shit. he wants his dad to notice and tell him to stop, because then it would mean he was paying attention to what he did. daddy issues recognize daddy issues, and steph sees it in max, even if she did have prior knowledge. she goes along with grace’s plan bc she thinks it’ll be a good ego check to bring him down, but then. then.

she goes home and cries herself to sleep, feeling responsible for the death of her first real friend. she gets sick for weeks with flashes of her dismembering his body with the others, and while every one else’s seems to think the school’s getting better, all stephanie can think is “did no one else fucking care about him? even a little?” all his friends, the football guys, even her friends on the cheer squad, seem to not care about max’s disappearance as much as they care about his missing spot on the field. she starts to skip more until she decides to hang out with pete instead. he must be guilty too, be haunted by these images, but then he says “everything is objectively better.”

which she gets. people are free from his torment, they can do what they want, talk to who they want, etc. the hallways are brighter, people are happier, whatever. but max was still a person. steph wonders if the plan had gone right, maybe he would’ve come back down from his god complex and been more like she remembered him. if he would’ve done the spring musical like he’d always wanted to do but never felt like he could. if he would’ve hated her for it forever. she’d rather he hate her forever than her have helped kill him.

when they have to start talking about what happened, she tries to call him jägerman, tries to disconnect her friend from what happened, because he truly was drastically different, but it was hard. after richie and ruth, shut goes crazy and max is back, but he’s not really max. she feels like the worst friend in the world when she think “he looks like his dad”

because mr jägerman has always been a being full of rage and anger, not one to hide in his own home. she’d seen him scream and yell at max for being a regular little kid, not special at all. not the perfect son he wanted. max, this weird spector of max, is all rage, no heart. even when max was at his worst, he had some heart. he kept her in the “cool group” even though she made no sense there, let grace go unbullied bc he had a crush on her. this wasn’t max. this was a personification of his dying moments, the only thing the waylon place did was preserve, and maybe further his anger.

she wants to beg pete to kill her the way he begs her to kill him. she started all this, even if she denied it at beanies, it’s true, and she is probably the only one who could have helped max stay a regular guy instead of the egomaniac ruler of the school he became. but she can’t get the words off her tongue. so long she’s been thinking about how easier everyone’s lives would be if she just killed herself, and now she can’t even do this. he gets on his knees in the football field, she raises the gun from twenty yards away, and thinks about how many people this thing that isn’t really max has killed.

she forces herself to pull the trigger.

max stops the bullet.

grace fucks the ghost, and all is well. except she’s met gods who seem like they want to eat her, and now her father’s dead too. he was an asshole, he never really cared about her, but she sobs for hours n the big empty house on pinebrook, and wishes desperately that she had made pete do it.

she and pete check on each other, because he also lost two people important to him, and they hold each other up. get each other through it. help each other mourn. she meets his older brother, he helps her clean out her father’s office. they go to funerals together and hold hands, and don’t talk about it.

it takes her a little while to realize his homecoming offer is still up, since things are technically different now. she buys a dress and tells him only the color, and he wears a matching bow tie. it’s such a ridiculously peter thing to do, and it makes her laugh for the first time in a while. they laugh together a lot that night, and she helps him breathe through a panic attack in the bathroom when ruth’s favorite song comes on.

she tells him about the images she can’t get out of her head, maxs body in pieces, the blood everywhere, that she burned the clothes she wore that day bc she couldn’t get the smell of blood and bleach out no matter how often she washed it. he tells her that he’s having flashbacks like that too, and that he wishes he could talk to his therapist about it without being sent to jail or a mental hospital.

she talks to detective shapiro and gets her to send a letter to peters therapist that he’s not gonna be arrested so pete can talk his shit out. at least the non-ghost and demon stuff. the dismembering a guy stuff, though, he can talk about.

it gets her thinking about therapy and getting some. she’s 18, she’s got more money than is necessary from her father, and she thinks she’s going crazy. she looks into it and finds one, starts going once a week. he tells steph he things she has adhd, sends her to a psychiatrist who confirms the diagnosis. she gets some drugs to take, and she feels weird about taking them. she’s done drugs, but like the cool ones. she knows not to do drugs you’re unfamiliar with when your alone, and she feels like she’s a lot of that.

homecoming was fun, but she and pete still haven’t out any label in their relationship. they haven’t said i love you, even though everything that went down means the both know it. she wants to be his girlfriend, but she doesn’t want to ask. wants him to ask. she tells her therapist as much, and then complains that she’s paying him bc she’s got daddy issues and trauma, not to hear about her high school drama.

but miraculously, he does ask her to be his gf. and then they’re dating, and it’s great. she spends more time at his apartment with his brother, less time alone in the big empty house just thinking about max and her hand in who he became. he and her therapist together convince her to start taking the meds, and it helps with some of her problems, but not all of them.

she forces herself to keep living, even when she doesn’t want to, because that’s what max (her best friend, the kid who was too scared tontry out for the musical, the asshole, the boy she knew better than herself, the adult she apparently hardly knew, the spector she could only half recognize) would want from her.

#max jagerman deserved a redemption arc #so im giving it to him #post mortem #bc this is cannon compliant im afraid #steph and max were best friends ik it #nerdy prudes must die #npmd #steph lauter #stephanie lauter #max jagerman #peter spankoffski #brief lautski bc i have no control #starkid #hatchetfield #The Rambles

[foxspotz]

OPINIONS about Max Jagerman under the cut.

MAX. JAGERMAN. DIDN'T. DESERVE. TO GO. TO HELL.

"Fox he literally killed people."

Yeah AFTER his soul was corrupted by some messed up evil black magic nonsense!! Maybe you can make an argument for it needing to feed on something that was already there, but ultimately the guy was just a jerk and it was probably because he was lonely and afraid of the future. He said himself that he knew he'd peak in high school.

I don't think anything he did when he was alive didn't come from some deeply scared KID, y'know? I mean we all saw how earnestly DELIGHTED he was when he thought everyone got together and did something cool and fun for him.

Given the space for it and some people to trust and encourage him, I honestly think he would have totally turned over a new leaf and never messed with the nerdy kids again, and we saw that without that toxicity that everything improved so even if he struggled, he'd only be met with positive feedback to propel him forward.

He was a jerk, but he was a normal jerk, no evil and not a killer. I wonder what was going on with his homelife, y'know?

Everything he did post death... what arguments are there to be made about him being truly evil and deserving of that kind of punishment? His cruelty went up to ten, he showed like NO murderous or evil or even particularly power hungry tendencies prior to his death, and Solomon even said that he was 'something else' now. He said he wasn't doing any of it out of revenge because he didn't care about them killing him and defiling his body, and his wrath went so far outside the scope of those he MIGHT have had a grudge against... yeah there just wasn't any real Max left in there, I think. Or at least it was ONLY all the worst parts.

Anyway, I'm 100% happy with how the musical went, and I wouldn't change it, but man that sappy part of me TOTALLY wants to just SEE that Max redemption arc, y'know what I mean? Maybe I'll make a doodle or two about it. ANYWAY, if you got through my rambles, THANKS FOR READING!! Let me know your thoughts if you got any!!

#nerdy prudes must die #starkid #NPMD #richie lipschitz #max jagerman #starkid npmd #npmd spoilers #npmd fanart