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Younger! Ox and Lou Headcanon

A warning, this chapter went into darker territory that I thought it would when I started out.           

🟡🟡☢☣⚠ Possible trigger warning for death, murder, and abandonment.🟡🟡

This one is gonna apply when (if 😅) I start posting those oneshots I've been working on for [too long 😂😅]:

I hc that both Ox and Lou had different personalities before Uglyville was created. 

I've already hinted towards that a little bit when it comes to Lou. I honestly feel that he used to be a kind doll and a good leader, and that his friendship with Ox was genuine... up until the moment that Ox started begging to go to the Big World. The reality of never being able to fulfill the purpose that a doll is literally created for, combined with the fact that he's doomed to watch everybody he's ever close to eventually leave him and he's helpless to stop it, wears away at him. But he puts his hope in Ox. When the responsibilities of being a leader become too much, Ox is always his goofy self, there to cheer Lou up. When the realization hits that Lou is literally training people to leave him, he's still got Ox. Ox is the one person that he can invest in emotionally and expect some care in return. The one person who won't choose the Big World over him. Until suddenly he isn't. I feel that's the moment when Lou's personality began to warp, when he started to build up almost a cultlike fervor around himself, when he basically gave up on the human race (er... doll race? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ). When his sadness changed into bitterness, his envy into resentment, and his longing into hatred. And also when he started to obsess over every little detail needing to be "pretty", when he adopted his mantra: "Pretty makes perfect." I believe it's Lou's way of taking back some small portion of control in a world where he has none. He can't control that he was created a prototype. In fact there's hardly anything he can control about his circumstances. But he can control the pretty dolls. He can't stop them from leaving, but he can make it dang hard for them to. He'll never be loved by a human child, but he can make sure that when the dolls are in Perfection, they love nobody but him. (Not that I blame Ox for any of it, after all he never knew. It's not like he can read minds, and Lou never said a word. Also not defending his actions, murder/genocide is wrong for any reason--)

(Lol I kinda got sidetracked for a sec.. 😅 There I go again getting distracted and carried away by things that are a TED talk for another time 😂 Anyway, moving on...)

But I also hc that Ox has changed a lot as well in the time period between his flashback and the events of the movie. Ox gets overlooked in that aspect, but when you think about it, he went through some traumatic events as well. For one thing, his best friend, the only person in his little world to show him any basic decency, the only one EVER up to that point to not judge him purely on how he looks, tried to kill him. I think Ox probably must've figured out that Lou had tried to recycle him deliberately. Lou knew the factory, it was Lou who pointed to the path to the recycling bin as "a way out." It must've seemed so out of nowhere to Ox too. Ox had no idea what Lou was going through. Lou never shared the fact that he was a prototype and could never leave. Ox didn't know about Lou's abandonment issues, he had absolutely no way of knowing how much of Lou's fragile sanity was hanging on the fact that he stay with him. He was only following the desire that's inborn into the heart of every doll. Ox did nothing wrong by trying to go to the Big World. If Lou was able, he'd go too. (I'm going off on a rabbit trail again whoops--).

Even discounting all of that, can you imagine how it must've felt for Ox to find out that he was technically never supposed to exist? To find out that the humans he was so anxious to love knew about his existence, deemed him not good enough, and tried to destroy him? He probably witnessed death that day. The movie tones it down by only showing scraps and fluff going into the super shredder, but let's be real: there's no reason to shred plain ol' fluff before you reuse it. There's nothing to shred. What Ox really saw was probably other uglydolls riding the conveyor belt to their deaths. In that frame, suddenly his extreme reaction makes a little bit more sense. He holds himself and cries, he falls to his knees because whatever he just witnessed was so earth-shaking to him that his legs literally wouldn't hold up beneath him anymore. That's not the reaction of somebody who just saw some scraps of fabric go into the trash. It's the face of someone who just watched his own kind get thoughtlessly murdered, and knowing that he's supposed to be on that belt too.