Okay first, wordspeaking.
Me and will probs be sharing an account at some point in the near future. During the summer, I actually might be able to even post some art, hers and mine. Then I'm going to purge my gallery of those atrocities (or yanno, put them in scraps or something.)



Now that that's done, it's time for pointless angry rants about how certain characters work mentally!

I really, really hate fandom!Tavros, because none out of none people actually seem to realize he isn't Tavros in any way at all. Tavros is not a stuttery pathetic mess that will piss himself if you so much as threaten to call him a bad name. He will not simply sit there and let someone walk all over him. He gets mad, he gets irritated, he gets depressed, and he can be kind of a dick sometimes. He is not this innocent little angel who needs to be coddled and spoon-fed happy things or he'll break. Let's just put that there on the table where everyone can see it.

Now then, if Tavros isn't the same as his fandom interpretation, what is he? It's, as you may have guessed, complicated.
First off, there's the factor of his shyness, which has been flanderized to hell and back. The fact of the matter is that while he may be shy, it doesn't stop him from doing anything significant. Again, he will not dissolve into a puddle of goo because you say something unkind to him; he was friends with VRISKA for god's sake. True, he's more sensitive than the rest of the trolls. True, he has a habit of stuttering and pausing when he talks which may make him sound highly uncertain. But he isn't a wibbling little baby that needs to be coddled; he's a teenage boy with self-esteem issues. He's going to pause and uHH, sometimes, but if he really has something he feels strongly about or needs to say, he's not going to beat around the bush, he's going to say it. As innocuously as possible, true, but he'll say it nonetheless. It certainly doesn't help that he's paralyzed and therefore looked down on by other trolls for being useless, but he notably refuses to apologize to Vriska for it when she's in a position where she could do anything she wanted to him. That takes serious guts. Also, a good bit of fandom doesn't seem to recall two things:
1) He went through the entire game without being able to move from the waist down.
2) He challenged a God Tier to a fight knowing full well he could die but did it anyway because it was the right thing to do.
Maybe it's just me, but that doesn't seem like the behavior of a coward, does it? He's not pathetically weak. Hesitant, yes. Childish, yes. But not weak.
Second, there's the maturity factor. Tavros is possibly the only one of the kids who truly seems to be his age, i.e. a preteen. He's still in that awkward transition phase between 'everything is pretty great and i have no responsibilities' and 'i have to grow up and do all the things society wants me to and be productive'. He doesn't WANT to grow up, because growing up is hard and no one understands. He's afraid of that change, and instead of dealing with it like the others have, Tavros opts to ignore it and try to make the best of what time he has. He's very avoidant when it comes to things that he doesn't necessarily want to change, as evidenced by his lack of a real answer to Gamzee. That was not the face of a disgusted person, rather, it was the face of a boy who was slowly realizing that everything, even his best friend, was changing and he didn't want to deal with it then. They're still obviously on fairly good terms afterward, so it's not like Tavros completely rejected him. Instead, he avoided the topic in favor of keeping his constants and keeping his best bro just that. Not only that, but he's childish in regards to feelings as well. He stumbles over his confession to Jade (right after admitting to killing her grandfather no less), he has absolutely no answer for Vriska in regards to his feelings towards her, and as I just mentioned he couldn't even say anything to Gamzee when he confessed to him. He isn't emotionally mature enough to handle it, so instead he distances himself from it for the most part.
Third and finally, he's not all rainbows and unicorn farts. Just because he smiles almost constantly doesn't mean he's HAPPY almost constantly. Actually, it's basically the opposite. His whole life is a crushing reality; he's second-lowest on the caste system which means he's likely to get treated like shit, he's paralyzed which probably means he'll be culled when it comes time for their generation to be enlisted in the imperial fleet, he has few friends who both like him and have time for him (they're Gamzee and possibly Nepeta; Terezi and Kanaya look out for him, true, but they don't really have as much time to devote their full attention to him.)

tl;dr for every fandom!tavros i see i will punch +50 puppies because no
think of the puppies guys
think of the puppies