History

Golden Boy

Tyler was born on September 30, 1998, to Patrick and Eloise O’Neil. He was their first ‘planned’ child, but not their firstborn. The dubious honor was taken by his sister Gemma, born a decade earlier, the result of a teen pregnancy that had necessitated a shotgun wedding for mother and father’s straitlaced Irish Catholic families.

The result of Gemma’s untimely birth and her unruly childhood meant that Tyler had lots of expectations heaped upon him from the start. Patrick and Eloise were on him every second, watching his grades, seeing him on as many youth sports leagues as possible, and generally ensuring he stayed on the right track to not be a burnout.

Things weren’t helped by Gemma deciding to become a domestic terrorist on the eve of her high school graduation. The rebellious hellraiser torched the principal’s office and was subsequently sentenced to a year in prison, after which she promptly cut off all contact with her family and faded into obscurity.

As far as Tyler was concerned, the absence of his sister was a good thing. Gemma was a cruel bully, and had subjected him to torments of all kinds throughout his childhood. Her being gone gave him a degree of breathing room, even as his parents’ pressure continued to tighten.

Second Fiddle

By the time he started high school, Tyler was on the path that had been painstakingly paved for him. He was a well-rounded scholar athlete: an Honors student and the point guard on the Lakewood Lancers basketball team. His good looks and swaggering charm earned him his fair share of admirers as well, and he was quite popular.

But not popular enough to ensnare the attention of his class’s most popular girl. Tyler had been fascinated by Nina Patterson since middle school. She was beautiful, charismatic, and controlled every room she walked into. Unfortunately, she never took any notice of him, despite the fawning affection of several of their classmates, including Nina’s own friend Stephanie.

Things changed in the summer before their sophomore year. Nina threw a party to ring out the last days of vacation and invited several of their classmates. Tyler and Nina hooked up at the party, but Nina took off before afterglow had even set in, leaving Tyler confused and frustrated. Once school began, he continued his pursuit of Nina, trying to capitalize on their encounter, and coming off as increasingly desperate and pathetic to his friends.

Adding insult to injury, Nina’s attentions weren’t just directed elsewhere, but to a freshman. Not just any freshman: Will Belmont, a farmboy who performed so well during basketball tryouts that he took the point guard position, bumping Tyler to second string. Tyler was so incensed at the humiliation that he quit the team in protest, which his father wasn’t at all happy about.

Meanwhile, Nina courted Will’s attention, inviting him into her friend group. Unluckily for Nina, however, Will wasn’t in any place to return her affections, having just begun dating Emma Duval, a pretty girl-next-door type who Nina had no choice but to befriend to avoid stirring the pot.

For his part, Tyler tried to distance himself from Nina and her makeshift royal court, but old habits die hard.

Insurance Policies

It wasn’t long before Tyler was drawn into Nina’s orbit again. On Halloween night, 2014, GW High senior Amanda Steele was crushed by a malfunctioning lift platform at the garage where she worked. Her legs had to be amputated at the knee.

As it happened, Amanda’s accident wasn’t an accident at all, as Tyler soon learned from Nina. Nina, acted on a grudge against Amanda, had conspired with Robbie, a resentful coworker at the garage, to sabotage the lift as a prank, intended only to frighten Amanda. They hadn’t anticipated how badly it would go wrong and now Robbie was in a panic over Amanda’s condition and was having trouble holding himself together, hence Nina confiding in Tyler at all.

Despite everything, Tyler couldn’t resist the chance to play the hero for the girl he still held a torch for, using his technical know-how to hack the security cameras at Big Mike’s garage, erasing the incriminating footage of the sabotage. The surviving copy was saved to a flash drive, which Tyler entrusted to Nina. Nina promptly dangled the drive for Robbie, threatening to have him sent down for attempted murder if he lost his courage and blabbed about what had happened.

The gambit worked so well that Nina immediately began scheming how to turn a profit off it. She proposed to Tyler that, with his tech smarts, there was nothing stopping them from repeating the security camera trick elsewhere: raiding the data of prominent Lakewood residents for juicy tidbits they could convert into blackmail currency.

Nina called their project Lakewood Eyes. Though Tyler was skeptical about sticking his neck out, he couldn’t deny the thrill and the prospect of lining his pockets…never mind having Nina’s approval on top of it. They began dating shortly after.

Cross Purposes

Rather than bringing them closer, Tyler and Nina’s shared “business” complicated their relationship. By the end of 2014, Tyler broke things off with Nina, disgusted over her choice of clientele. The end of their romance didn’t spell the end of Lakewood Eyes: they were in two deep to be fully quits of each other.

Before long, Nina has rebounded with none other than Jake. It was an obvious sham relationship, but it got under Tyler’s skin nonetheless, not least because Jake was promptly brought in on Lakewood Eyes. Perhaps predictably, it was only a matter of time before Jake spilled the beans on the blackmail operation to Will, who was hanging all his hopes for the future on securing a basketball scholarship as a ticket out of town.

Overriding Tyler’s objections, Nina offered to bring Will in, but only if he could provide collateral: something she could use to ensure he wouldn’t stab her in the back. Nina challenged him to have sex with Emma before her 16th birthday, a little over a month out. Whatever reservations Tyler may have had took a backseat to the chance to humble the upstart who’d taken his spot on the team.

Will completed his task, consummating his relationship with Emma and ensuring every second of it was recorded on his webcam, the video promptly ending up part of Lakewood Eyes’ growing arsenal.

Rumors and Reunions

On the afternoon of October 17, 2015, Tyler was hanging out with the rest of the in-crowd at the Wren Lake Overlook, showing Riley some code he was working on so she could troubleshoot it.¹ Emma recognized a car pulling up at the other side of the summit. The others watched as Audrey Jensen, Emma’s childhood best friend, made out with another girl.

Nina took special pleasure in this bit of gossip, whipping out her phone and recording the girls’ intimate moment. Emma, offended on her old friend’s behalf, told Nina to delete the video. Nina promised to “take it off her phone”, and honored this exact words defense by deleting it from her phone, after uploading it to YouTube the next day, where it rapidly went locally viral.²

This was the same evening as Brooke’s Beautiful Bash, a house party thrown by Brooke Maddox. Tyler attended, arriving alone and ahead of Nina.³ The party was crashed by a furious Audrey, who’d seen the video and immediately connected it to Emma and her new friends. Nina and Tyler were conveniently out of the way for Audrey’s confrontation with Emma, which was broken up by Brooke on Emma’s side and Amanda and Noah Foster on the other.⁴

Audrey had stormed off by the time Nina and Tyler resurfaced. Amanda wasted no time going after Nina for uploading the video, though Nina denied any knowledge. Exasperated, Amanda turned to Tyler and wondered why he was defending her so adamantly, given all Nina had taken from him, insinuating Nina was being unfaithful. Tyler, never not insecure about where he stood with Nina, jumped to the conclusion that Nina had gone back to Jake and confronted him, ignoring Nina’s disgusted denials. Jake laughed off the notion he’d ever go back to Nina, provoking Tyler into tackling him into Brooke’s pool.⁵

The fight was broken up by a furious Brooke. Tyler hauled himself out of the pool, errantly splashing Derek Jackson as he went, and sulked away without explaining himself, grabbing a Maddox monogrammed towel as he went. Nina had conveniently vanished in the fracas, only deepening Tyler’s conviction that there was truth to Amanda’s claim.⁶

Tyler tried to get in touch with Nina on his way back from the party, but she remained unresponsive. Making matters worse, Tyler returned home to find a visitor waiting on his doorstep: Gemma. Tyler’s sister was flippant, ignoring Tyler’s questions about why she’d come back, instead making jibes about Nina, concluding she was the reason he was dripping wet. When Tyler claimed their parents would freak out if they knew she’d returned, Gemma called his bluff, already knowing they were in Singapore.

Caught in a bind, Tyler let Gemma into the house, where she made herself at home.⁷

Punching Bag

Tyler went to Nina first thing the next morning, catching her as she arrived in the school parking lot. The place was buzzing with bad news: two freshmen, Stacy Winters and Brock Carmichael, had been killed the previous night, and sheriff’s deputies were stationed at the school’s entrance.

Nina was furious to learn about Gemma’s return, particularly that Tyler had failed to keep her away. With Gemma mysteriously absent from the house by the light of day, Nina ominously declared they both knew what she’d returned for. Tyler, for his part, wondered if there was something going on that Nina had neglected to tell him. She refused to entertain the question.⁸

Appearance

Tyler was a tall young man, towering over his friends at 6’4. He had a lean, athletic build and was generally considered very attractive. He has chestnut-brown hair religiously maintained in a fashionable coif,⁹ and striking pale blue eyes in an aquamarine shade.¹⁰

Wardrobe

Tyler’s outfit at Brooke’s Big Beautiful Bash included jeans and sneakers, which were thoroughly soaked after he tackled Jake into the pool.¹¹

Personality

Tyler was an outwardly cocky young man with a bold streak and a cool, unruffled demeanor, enabled by his looks, athleticism and intelligence.

Inwardly, he was plagued by deep insecurities about his masculinity and an increasing sense of emptiness and guilt over his adolescent cruelty. The return of his sister Gemma at the onset of the Lakewood Slashings forced this schism to the forefront, bringing Tyler to a reckoning with which version of himself he wanted to be.

Skills

Tyler was proficient in computer science and considered himself an amateur software developer, writing code in his free time.¹² He parlayed these skills into helping Nina build the Lakewood Eyes information database.

Equipment

Tyler drove his own car.¹³

Development

Tyler was part of the 2015 Season 1 AU, and had a much larger presence than his canon equivalent, who was killed offscreen in the opening scene of Scream the TV Series’ pilot episode, in a send-up of the film series’ Steve Orth. In the Season 1 AU, Tyler was spared this ignominious fate, which instead went to original character Brock Carmichael.

Tyler was portrayed by forum moderator Celebrity01, and was one of only two playable characters to be killed off during the game, sharing the same fate as his canon counterpart: beheaded offscreen, with his severed head used to terrify Nina right before her own murder. Tyler and Nina were killed at the end of the game’s second “episode”, effectively outliving their canon counterparts by the equivalent of two episodes.

Tyler’s death was adapted in one form or another in all later games. However, neither previous iteration of his murder was adapted to the SRU. When the 2015 forum was adapted to The Story so Far in 2019, Tyler wasn’t killed at the end of Chapter 2, but remained alive and imperiled for a few more chapters as part of the reveal that his sister Gemma was one of the killers.

When Lakewood: Year One launched in 2023, ThePlotMurderer recast Tyler with former The Bold and the Beautiful leading man Pierson Fodé replacing Max Lloyd-Jones for admittedly entirely aesthetic reasons.

Other Interpretations

Season 1 AU

The Tyler of the Season 1 AU, while introduced as an aggressive bully,¹⁴ is quickly humanized by contrast with his tyrannical sister, Gemma, who torments him at every opportunity. He also finds himself spooked by a (by all appearances) baseless rumor started by Amanda, claiming Nina is cheating on him with Jake.¹⁵

Amanda’s lie was evidently inspired by Tyler committing an act of senseless vandalism, slitting Noah’s tires three days prior to the start of the game. Notably, Tyler never admits to culpability for this and the incident is not mentioned again.¹⁶

Trivia

Tyler is one of only two Scream the TV Series characters whose SRU faceclaim differs from his canon counterpart, the other being Howard Jensen.

Tyler aspired to attend MIT for computer science. He shared this ambition with Riley and Noah.¹⁷

Quotes

Look, Steele, I know you’re operating with too much anger and half the body to hold it, but do you really want to do this?

Tyler taunts Amanda

Nobody says ‘priss’ anymore. It makes you sound old. Maybe homophobic too.

Tyler bristles at Gemma insulting Nina

She’s not a fucking vampire, Nina! I couldn’t just nail some garlic to the door and hope for the best.

Tyler, on letting Gemma into the house

Gallery

1. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 5 ↩︎
2. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 2 ↩︎
3. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 7 ↩︎
4. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 1 ↩︎
5. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 4 ↩︎
6. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 5 ↩︎
7. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 9 ↩︎
8. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 14 ↩︎
9. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 4 ↩︎
10. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 2, Scene 24 ↩︎
11. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 9 ↩︎
12. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 5 ↩︎
13. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 9 ↩︎
14. Season 1 AU: Pilot, Post 11 ↩︎
15. Season 1 AU: Pilot, Post 16 ↩︎
16. Season 1 AU: Pilot, Post 36 ↩︎
17. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 5 ↩︎