A list of characters from The Sun Will Come Up And The Seasons Will Change.
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Mary Summers
Mary Summers
A nine-year-old girl and the protagonist of the story. Originally from the Pittsburgh area in Pennsylvania, she runs away from home after seeing something on her mother's blog.
- Animal Motifs: Rabbits. Her father nicknames her 'bunny', she owns a stuffed rabbit plush named 'Mimi', back home she had a lamp with rabbits on it, and rabbits are one of her favorite animals (including the rabbit Pokémon Buneary). Rabbits are also associated with spring i.e. tying into the seasonal motifs.
- Animated Tattoo: Her arc number (on her hand) is '120'. It zigzags through the story, going from 116 to 124 to 110 to 115, then 92. In chapter 10, it goes down to 70, then 55 in chapter 11. It dropped to 20 at the end of chapter 12, then 4 at the end of chapter 15, but jumping back up to 12 in Chapter 17.
- Brainy Brunette: Has black hair, and she's academically smart (gets high grades on tests when she puts in the effort).
- Cheerful Child: She's pretty upbeat and cheerful, which is more pronounced when she's on the train and out from her mother's thumb.
- Companion Cube: She carries around a rabbit stuffed animal named Mimi.
- Does Not Like Spam: Hates the taste of mint/peppermint.
- Fatal Flaw: Two.
- Self-loathing. Growing up with a mother who has no problem telling her that she's the cause of all the family's problems simply because she's autistic has made Mary believe everything she says, even with evidence proving otherwise. Chapter 21 has her go into a "The Reason I Suck" Speech about how she believes everyone would be better off if she never existed, which results in her number shooting up.
- Internalized ableism. Once again, Dana's desire to cure Mary and hold her responsible for every problem in her life has made Mary develop a habit of harshly judging herself whenever she doesn't "act normal." Having to deal with Nora and the revelations behind why she's on the train did not help matters.
- Freudian Trio: She's the middle-ground Ego (in the middle between Blanca's calm Superego and Vic's blunt Id).
- Genki Girl: When she's not constantly being micromanaged by her mother, she's a fairly chipper and cheerful kid, leaning more into this when she gets onto the train.
- Girlish Pigtails: She wears a pair of braided pigtails and is a cheerful young child when placed in a supportive environment.
- Girls Love Stuffed Animals: Mary has a ton of plushies in her bedroom, and is always carrying around a stuffed rabbit she named Mimi.
- Hates Their Parent: Mary hates her mom for constantly abusing her over her autism. After the events of Chapter 12, Mary effectively disowns her.
- Heroic BSoD: Mary falls into a pretty big one at the end of chapter 20, after she fails to save Blanca from Nora, on top of Nora also shooting her (non-fatally), stepping on her, and pressing her Trauma Button, which sends her to the Despair Event Horizon.
- Heroic Self-Deprecation: Chapter 17 subtly reveals this to be the reason why Mary is on the train. Due to her mother and the ABA doctors beating it into her head that she absolutely has to appear normal and stamp out her autistic traits, to the point of yelling at her if she makes any kind of mistakes at all, Mary is quick to blame herself for any problem that happens or hold herself responsible for others' actions towards her, even if it's something out of her control or not even her own fault. Dana destroying any remnant of self-confidence she could have had didn't help matters, causing her to develop an unhealthily self-berating attitude and an equally unhealthy dose of Internalized Categorism.
- Hidden Depths:
- She has a lot of knowledge about archery and wants to try it out someday, along with extensive knowledge about flowers for a nine-year-old.
- Chapter 19 has her mention that she studied a little bit about the Holocaust by reading about it in her sister's high school level textbook. While she doesn't quite grasp everything about it, she is able to give Blanca and Vic a brief summation about it and Hitler's atrocities during World War II to explain the swastika's association with it, and by extension, the implications behind Nora befriending someone who identifies as a Neo-Nazi.
- Important Hair Accessory: She loses one of her pink bows before leaving for the Train. It's the one thing left of her back in the regular world. In chapter 13, she gives up her other bow and puts it on a snowman in the Snow Car.
- Internalized Categorism: Various chapters of the story subtly reveal this to be the reason why Mary is on the train. Whenever something goes wrong, Mary is prone to blaming herself for it via harshly judging herself for being autistic or for not knowing better even when she couldn't have known, often via replaying in her head all the times Dana scolded and criticized her for all the times she didn't "act normal."
- Most Writers Are Writers: Mary wants to be a writer when she grows up.
- Nice Girl: Mary is very sweet and kind, and her family, friends, and teacher know it. Unless you’re Dana.
- Pink Means Feminine: She wears a lot of pink, and is a cheerful young girl.
- "The Reason I Suck" Speech: After the events of chapter 20, Mary has hit the Despair Event Horizon and she goes into a rant about how she feels Dana and Nora are right about everything they say about her, feeling like everyone would be better off if she either was born normal (i.e. not autistic) or if she just never existed, which causes her number to shoot up.
- Sweet Tooth: When she gets into the Sweets Car for the first time, she wastes no time trying to eat as much sweets and candy as possible, though she stops when she gets sick from it.
- Terrible Artist: By her own admission, Mary isn't very good at drawing, especially not compared to Greg, though her drawings are at the very least comprehensible.
- Token Human: Downplayed. Other humans exist in the story (in the half about her disappearance), but she's the only human in her group on the Train until Nora joins her.
- Trauma Button:
- Anything from bringing up her experiences in ABA therapy to even hearing the three letters strung together reminds her of the time she was made to spend in said therapy, which was not pretty.
- She does not respond well to getting yelled at in any capacity. Not just due to being sensitive to loud noise, but having dealt with both her mother and ABA doctors doing so whenever she did anything regardless of whether it was right or wrong, for years, harshly scolding her for every slight, has not done her psyche any favors.
- Trauma Conga Line: Mary was forced to attend ABA therapy for three years straight from ages 2 to 5, and the experiences she had traumatized her, as shown in chapter 12. Chapter 20 is NOT kind to her. Nora tries to make Mary believe that by leaving Nora behind, she's no different from a murderer, and successfully blackmails her into being her bodyguard by threatening to show Dana's blog to the school. Mary is consistently degraded and bullied afterward, with Nora then attempting to feed her to a kaiju by using her as a Human Shield to ensure her own safety. If that wasn't enough, when Mary tries to save Blanca from being kidnapped, Nora shoots her (though not fatally), steps on the wound, and presses her Trauma Button by telling her she's worthless. This sends Mary over the Despair Event Horizon.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Bananas are her favorite fruit (she eats them several times through the series). The story later reveals potato au gratin is her favorite food.
- Two Girls and a Guy: She's part of two groups like this:
- Back home: Her two best friends are Caitlin (the girl) and Leo (the boy).
- In the train: Her two traveling companions are Blanca the marshmallow (the girl) and Vic the hamster (the boy).
- The Unfavorite: Zig-zagged. Mary has a supportive father and big sister in Todd and Reagan, not to mention an excellent teacher (Mr. Bryant) who does all he can to support, teach, and protect her. Dana, however, is completely terrible to Mary (she's told countless times by people online, people in public, her neighbors, her child's teacher, the police, her daughter and her husband that she's a bad parent and that her ableist beliefs are no help to anyone).
- Western Zodiac: Her birthday is May 16 (making her a Taurus). She's stubborn but has an artistic side that's expressed by writing.
Blanca
Blanca
A shapeshifting marshmallow who joins Mary in chapter four.
- Anthropomorphic Food: She's a sentient marshmallow.
- Expy: of Toriel. Both are white-colored maternal figures who watch out for a lost human child.
- Fantastic Racism: Chapter 15 reveals that, originally, Blanca was prejudiced both passengers and any denizen outside the Sweets Car because they didn't look like sweets. She sheds her prejudices when she finally talks to other passengers when they come through the Sweets Car, becoming the kind mother figure she is today.
- Massive Numbered Siblings: Blanca is the mother of twenty children.
- Meaningful Name: "Blanca" is a Spanish word for "white", and she is a white marshmellow.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Chapter 15 reveals that Blanca was prejudiced towards passengers and any denizen outside of the Sweets Car, and when her son Shiro expressed interest in leaving the Sweets Car, she was vehemently opposed to it, and it drove a wedge in their relationship to the point where her attempts to forcibly confine him to the Sweets Car wound up driving him away and making him want nothing to do with her. It's not until she finally talks to other passengers and learns their stories that she realizes the error of her ways.
- My Greatest Failure: Blanca considers her actions towards her son Shiro and driving him out of the Sweets Car to be her biggest mistake. She does try to reconcile during Chapter 17.
- Parental Substitute: Blanca is the gentle motherly figure Mary needed in her life.
- Team Mom: The motherly one of the trio, makes sure Mary and Vic get along.
- Voluntary Shapeshifting: Her main ability is to shapeshift. While she can't change color, she can change her form and size. But if she engages in too much shapeshifting or stays in a different form for too long, she shrinks and has to conserve energy for a while before she can return to her normal form.
Vic
Vic
A talking hamster who joins the trio in chapter five.
- All of the Other Reindeer: The other hamsters don't like him because he's interested in exploring life outside the Hamster Car. They even have the nerve to destroy several of his belongings.
- Badass Adorable: An adorable hamster who's outgoing and knows his way around weapons (even gives Mary her own umbrella spear).
- Berserk Button: For the love of God, don't EVER claim that Vic enjoys being miserable in any way whatsoever. Mary claims this after she doesn't give him any space, and he bites her in retaliation.
- Brutal Honesty: Vic's main character trait is he's incredibly blunt and absolutely refuses to mince words.
- Overly Long Name: Vic's real name is Victorino Achilles Isidoro Liberatore VIII.
- Resourceful Rodent: A hamster who knows his way around the slug market.
Nora McDonald
Nora McDonald
A troubled teenage girl who meets and joins the trio in chapter thirteen.
- A Day In The Lime Light: Chapters 18 and 19 explore her backstory as Mary looks into her memories.
- Addled Addict: She’s clearly unstable and does what is implied (later confirmed in Chapter 19) to be cocaine. In the end, Nora does a Spiteful Suicide, falling into the Train's wheels when Mary tries to save her, due to hallucinating her as Julius.
- Alas, Poor Villain: Her death is treated as a somber affair, as even though the heroes were nearly killed by her, they had tried to save her life only for her to choose to kill herself out of spite. Mary in particular is broken up about it, as she laments that now Nora will never be able to get the chance to try and reconnect with her family, and her parents and brother having no idea what has happened to her.
- The Alcoholic: Nora frequently drinks beer even though she's 17, therefore underage, with Xander enabling her.
- Ambiguous Situation: All that's known about her is that she ran away from home a week before Mary got on the train, claims her parents don't love her and force her to babysit her little brother, and owns a gun that her boyfriend supposedly gave her. Her backstory is explored in chapters 18 and 19.
- Axe-Crazy: By the end of Chapter 20, any shred of reason and rational thought is completely gone, and keep in mind, she's sober throughout the entirety of said chapter.
- Beyond Redemption: Chapters 18 to 22 ultimately show her to be this, from the reveal of her being corrupted by a Neo-Nazi into becoming a Politically Incorrect Villain that nearly killed her brother twice, to her shooting Mary and leaving her for dead in the Kaiju car and kidnapping Blanca in the process, and ultimately tries to kill Mary while in a drug-fueled psychotic rage. And the whole time, she actively fights back against others trying to get her to see what she did wrong and change for the better, with even Mary being forced to admit that there's no way to get her to change her ways.
- Big Bad Ensemble: Is one of the two main antagonists of the story, right alongside Mary's mother Dana. While Dana's abuse of Mary is what caused her to end up on the Train to begin with, Nora proves to be a more direct threat to the young girl, especially once her Politically Incorrect Villain status gets revealed and she proves to be willing to attempt to murder Mary.
- Big Sister Bully: After Xander convinces her that her family favors Julius over her, she starts harassing and abusing Julius for whatever slight she can come up with, even resorting to attempted murder when he walks in on her and Xander drinking and doing drugs.
- Bullying the Disabled: After her boyfriend Xander gets his hooks into her and fills her head with ableist rhetoric, she starts to treat the disabled like garbage. She beat up a wheelchair-bound student for "hogging up the halls", and grew to hate her autistic younger brother (being led by Xander to believe her parents were turning her into her brother's caretaker) to the point of trying to kill him twice. And after finding out Mary is autistic as well, she plans to kill her as well. Chapter 20 has her verbally abuse Mary and shoot her and leave her for dead.
- Chekhov's Gunman: She's foreshadowed as early as chapter one, and appears in chapter thirteen. Doubles as a pun since she owns a gun.
- Childish Older Sibling: When Xander manipulates her into believing her family favors her brother Julius over her, she begins acting more immature and volatile, often resorting to tantrums when she doesn't get her way.
- Deadpan Snarker: She hardly ever has a line where she isn't snarking about something, even when it isn't warranted.
- Evil Counterpart: To Reagan and Lianna. Reagan and Lianna are both the older sisters in their family and get along with their younger siblings. The latter is a Jerkass to everyone around her and is implied to have injured her brother.
- Eviler than Thou: Proves to be this compared to Dana. While both women have a hatred for autistic individuals, Dana proves to have the capacity to realize she was wrong to treat Mary the way she did and undergo a Heel Realization, while Nora proves to be Beyond Redemption with her refusal to change and ultimately tries to kill Mary in Chapter 22.
- Fatal Flaw: Her bad temper, inability to let go of ideals even if they’re bad such as the hateful ideals her Neo-Nazi boyfriend implanted in her and refusal to talk things through.
- Green-Eyed Monster: Not at first, but later in life, she becomes jealous that her little brother Julius somehow gets to do whatever he wants whereas she's not allowed to go to parties with friends or hang out with Xander, which festers and culminates in her becoming a Big Sister Bully towards him to the point of attempting to kill him twice on the same night.
- Hair-Trigger Temper: Nora is very quick to anger, which interferes with her ability to think rationally, as her behavior in chapter 16 shows.
- I Die Free: A very dark example, as she chooses to commit suicide rather than accept Mary's help, falling to her death so she won't be forced to go back to what she perceives as life as a slave to her autistic little brother.
- I Just Want to Be Free: A dark take on this; thanks to the toxic influence of Xander's views on autistic people, she came to believe that her parents were trying to force her to be a slave to take care of her autistic brother Julius. This caused her to heavily lash out at her family and eventually run away from home, finding herself on the Train. She ultimately commits a Spiteful Suicide, her last words were an ecstatic "I'M FREEEEEEEE!" before she's crushed by the Train's wheels, choosing death over the idea of returning to become a "slave" to her brother.
- Knight of Cerebus: The story turns far darker after she joins the group, to the point where the author put up a Content Warning in chapter 20.
- Lack of Empathy: When her mother texts her, begging to come home or at least talk about what happened to her brother and telling her that she is loved, Nora reacts by coldly deleting the texts and swearing.
- Never My Fault: She always refuses to accept responsibility for her mistakes and blames others for them. For instance, she blames Julius for telling her parents on her for having Xander over when her parents forbid it, conveniently forgetting that he called them because she locked him out of the house in freezing weather with no coat.
- Nonconformist Dyed Hair: She's the rebellious type, and secretly dyed her hair purple with pink streaks.
- Parental Favoritism: This is why Nora claims to run away: being saddled by her parents to constantly babysit her little brother. In reality, her parents care about her enough to text her when she's missing and from what we see at the end of Chapter 16, they’re very worried about her.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: As Chapters 18 and 19 reveal, she fell in with a bunch of Neo-Nazis and became a spiteful young woman to the disabled, to the point where she is willing to try and kill her autistic little brother and has begun to contemplate killing Mary upon discovering she is autsitic.
- Sanity Slippage: After kidnapping Blanca and splitting off from Mary, she starts heavily abusing her alcohol and drugs to the point of becoming an Addled Addict. This, combined with learning from the Clairvoyant that her boyfriend Xander had been arrested by the police, caused her sanity to heavily deteriorate. By the time Mary catches up with her, she is so far gone in her psychosis that she is hallucinating Mary as her brother Julius.
- Secret Test of Character: It's hinted that the Train put her and Mary in relatively close proximity so that she'd be forced to interact with the latter and hopefully start to shed her hateful views. Unfortunately, she fails the test.
- Sibling Yin-Yang: When her personality changes under Xander's influence, she becomes more domineering, immature, and volatile in contrast to her sweet, earnest, caring younger brother Julius.
- Spiteful Suicide: Hallucinating Mary as Julius, she ultimately willingly lets herself fall and be ground under the Train's wheels, not wanting to go to jail or be Julius's "slave".
- Stupid Evil: She blindly trusts Xander, believes every word he says, and even joins in on his Neo-Nazi ideology without question, refusing to listen to anyone who tells her that he's bad news, not even her own family.
- Teens Are Monsters: Initially, Nora doesn't start off that way when she's first introduced, and in flashbacks she was revealed to be a nice kid who loved her family. But after meeting Xander and becoming his girlfriend, Nora became more volatile, rebelling against authority for fun, breaking several laws, doing drugs, drinking underage, physically attacking her parents on several occasions, and attempting to murder her younger brother twice on the same night.
- Troubled Teen: Doesn’t begin to cover it.
- Unreliable Narrator: From her perspective, her parents hate her and favor her little brother, and had tried to break her up with her boyfriend for no reason. In actuality, her parents deeply care about her and were scared for how she was turning out thanks to Xander corrupting her, and wanted to get her away from him to give her a chance to get his brainwashing out of her head.
- Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Chapter 18 reveals that Nora was once an adorable and friendly little girl and adored her little brother. Up until she met Xander, her Neo-Nazi boyfriend, she was a Nice Girl like Reagan.
Dana Summers
Dana Summers neé Fitzpatrick
Mary's mother, and the main antagonist of the story.
- Abusive Parents: Emotionally and verbally abuses Mary and by the time Mary runs away, she’s starting to physically abuse her as well.
- Allegorical Character: Dana Summers represents how toxic Autism Warrior Parents can be. At her best which is not often, Dana treats her youngest daughter Mary Summers, who is autistic, like a baby that can't think for herself. At her worst, she's utterly abusive to her daughter and obsessed with making her normal and curing her daughter's autism. While Dana ultimately thinks she's in the right of her treatment of her daughter, everyone around her, including her husband Todd and eldest daughter Reagan, sees that her behavior is unacceptable, and while Dana may complain about her daughter acting out, she is the one making a scene. Things come to a head when Todd and Reagan read Dana's blog and discover to their horror, how much she hates Mary, that not only does Dana not miss Mary when she ran away and considered forcibly sterilizing Mary once she turns 18. According to the story's author, Dana is based on parents of autistic children who have written memoirs on how much of a burden it was to raise their children and how they don't respect their children.
- Big Bad Ensemble: Ultimately proves to be only one of the two main antagonists of the fic, with the other being Nora McDonald. While Nora is a direct threat to Mary's well-being (especially once her Neo-Nazi and ableist ideology becomes known), Dana is the one who forces Mary to run away and end up on the Train, with the fallout of that putting serious strain on the whole family.
- Doesn't Know Their Own Child: One of her major problems is that she doesn’t really know who Mary is as a person and treats Mary based off a meltdown she had when she was a toddler and her own assumptions. She was also encouraged not to try by Dr. Goldman and refuses to listen to the people in Mary’s life who try to explain that Mary is a bright, sweet and creative girl, not a tantrum-throwing brat or manipulative jerk.
- Exhausted Eyebags: Her most defining feature.
- Evil Counterpart: To Blanca. While both are mothers who were over-controlling to their children and tried to tie them down, Blanca realized what she did was wrong and tries to reconcile with her child, while Dana refuses to see the error of her ways and destroys her relationship with her family.
- Fatal Flaw: Several.
- Dana’s desperation for perfection and her inability to stand up to her mother result in her being manipulated by Dr. Goldman and being resentful of Mary, to the point where she barely sees her daughter as human and Mary is shocked to see her mother love her as a baby in a past memory. By the current events of the fic, a once sweet woman has become a miserable shrew.
- Her self-pitying nature. Due to believing all the lies Dr. Goldman told her about what raising an autistic child entails without question, on top of being on the receiving end of her mother's scolding yet again after the funeral incident, along with years of trying to unsuccessfully get out from her mother's thumb, she's convinced herself that she has no other options but to put Mary through ABA and be extremely strict with her over every slight, whether real or imagined. For as much as Todd tries to support her, he also calls her out on this attitude, telling her that she could have easily done things like rely on Todd and her other, nicer family members for help, but pushed them all away in favor of pursuing a non-existent cure. This also contributes to a refusal to even try to look for solutions to her problems, or better solutions than the one she found for Mary, i.e. ABA.
- Her It's All About Me mentality means she refuses to take responsibility for any problems she causes, and she'd rather lash out for perceived slights and convince herself that everyone else is making mistakes than admit she did anything wrong.
- Her inability to move on from the past. Because Mary had a sensory overload-induced meltdown at her uncle's funeral, which resulted in Irene berating her for her poor parenting, not only does this one incident shape her entire perception of Mary as a whole, she constantly holds it over her head long after the fact, even using it as a reason to forbid Mary from going to her friends' houses and not letting her develop some degree of independence. Todd and Reagan frequently call her out on using past events to justify the way she treats Mary.
- Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Dana's mother Irene abused her for decades. This, however, does not excuse Dana's treatment of Mary.
- Heel Realization: Once Todd realizes what Dana has been doing and repeatedly confronts her over it, she is ultimately forced to realize that out of her twisted desire to keep her family safe, she had been the one responsible for tearing it apart. In Chapter 22, she believes that she is too far gone to be able to make up for her horrific abuse, so she cuts herself out of her family's life, hoping they can heal without her around to ruin everything.
- Like Mother, Like Daughter: Despite Dana's denial, she's an abusive hyper-controlling figure just like her own mother. But while Irene was fueled by the outdated misogynistic values her parents drilled into her, Dana's form of bigotry is ableism.
- Motherly Side Plait: She is described as having one, but her personality and treatment of Mary are anything but motherly.
- My God, What Have I Done?: She ultimately comes to realize just how horrific of a mother she has been to Mary, and that it was her own actions that have resulted in her family being torn apart.
- Psychological Projection: Dana often tells people that Mary is self-absorbed and refuses to consider how her behavior impacts others. This is blatantly untrue about Mary, who cares deeply for her family and friends, but describes Dana quite well.
- Resentful Guardian: Her dislike of Mary is so strong, she can’t even smile at her daughter.
- Troubled Abuser: She's an abusive mother who's also dealing with her own abusive mother who's still hot on her tail to this day.
- Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Until both Irene returning to her life and Mary’s autism diagnosis, Dana was a kind and funny woman and cared about her daughters. As the years went on, she became bitter and hateful to the point where she frequently abuses Mary. It was also driven by Dr. Goldman and Autism Speaks manipulating her.
Todd Summers
Todd Summers
Mary's father, and Dana's husband
- Good Parents: Todd is an excellent father who supports both of his daughters in their interests, talks to them when they have problems, and has fully accepted Mary for who she is. The only real problem he has is that he's married to a woman who sees Mary as the root of all of the problems in their life, and her insistence that autism can be cured (and that Dr. Goldman's practice is said cure). He can't be around Mary all of the time to protect her from Dana, causing him to feel immense guilt later.
- Papa Wolf: When he came to bring Mary her lunchbox, he saw first hand what kind of "treatment" Goldman had been subjecting his daughter to, and what his wife had allowed to happen. He raced in, comforted Mary, screamed at every doctor in the room, threatened to sue Goldman (turning the man into a sniveling mess in the process), and confronting Dana about the ABA (scaring her so bad that she was forced to agree to end the ABA sessions).
