skygiants

You are in luck! I could not have done this if I had not reread over the summer. *giggling*

Torquil and Venturus is fabulous because Torquil loves to act out the spoiled brat, except Venturus is the actual spoiled brat of the family, and . . . I feel like, before Venturus lost his memory, they kind of tried to out-flamboyant each other a lot of the time. See: wardrobe of super costumes vs. GIANT SPACESHIP HEAD. And it is honestly no wonder that Erskine is grumpy, being stuck as the Responsible One in the middle of the two of them. (I sneak Erskine in here because he is secretly my favorite.) I think, when they were younger, Torquil was pretty jealous - that Venturus got all the attention for being youngest, yeah, but also that Venturus hero-worshipped Archer so blatantly. I mean, Hathaway and Erskine were no threat because fantastic as they both are they are neither of them exactly glamorous, and Venturus is such a boy that he was never going to fixate on Shine and Dillian, but Torquil is SO obviously SO MUCH MORE AWESOME than Archer, and closer in age to Venturus to boot. And I think he got very frustrated whenever Erskine or Venturus would call him selfish when Archer was in fact ten times more selfish than he was, he just passed it off better. And then proceeded to act out more selfishly as a result, just to be contrary.

Post-canon I think they clearly get along a lot better, because Venturus has had the experience of being the older one now, and of dealing with Awful to boot, and - I think post-canon Erskine and Venturus both treat Torquil like he's younger than they are instead of older sometimes, because they have the experience with Awful and Torquil is much more of a drama queen than either of them. And Torquil knows that's going on, and he's okay with that, as long as he still gets older-brother privileges of mocking and lording it over them and being generally more fabulous.