#also I'm saying 'One' thoughout this post because I just don't know what to call this guy anymore. but ykwim

[givehimthemedicine]

that massacre blood won't let me rest

(bloodstain pattern analysis)

warning, this will contain some graphic explanations of how blood stains get made and a couple pictures of real blood (no people) as I attempt to apply my modicum of education on this subject to the HNL massacre

I'm mostly focusing on that main blood stain that goes across One's chest, but toward the end I'll touch on other stains in the RR.

tldr: I think that chest stain leaves plenty of room for doubt about whether One was the attacker.

so. bloodstain analysis crash course.

your main types of blood stains:

active - blood flying and landing on a surface as a result of force/motion. this includes spatters, splashes, arterial sprays.

passive - blood falling from plain old gravity. stains like drops and pools.

transfer - a surface coming into contact with another surface with blood on it. smears, maybe a hand or shoe print.

two lovely volunteers to demonstrate:

One's neck bleeding on his collar is an example of a passive blood stain. if any of those larger vertical blood drops on his shirt are supposed to be nose blood, (his nose barely bled but his shirt looks like it dripped) that's also passive. victims' eye blood is passive.

One mopping the floor with El leaving her with blood smeared on her gown is transfer.

that main pattern of blood droplets across One's chest is an active type stain. all the blood on him, apart from his own, appears to have flown through the air and landed on him.

the costume dept clearly put effort into depicting those types differently, going as far as to actually drag someone around the floor to find out what El's gown blood should look like as a result of the actions that put it there. I think it's fair to expect a similar level of research went into designing One's stains.

but discussing those methods in the interview might have revealed too much.

some types of active blood stains

arterial spray is when a vein or artery is cut and blood squirts out, flies through the air and lands on nearby surfaces. it's not usually just a little blood. here are two real examples of arterial spray:

to me, it seems like a severed artery would produce a more blood than is on One.

impact spatter is created when an object forcefully hits exposed blood and little droplets fly. forward spatter is made in the direction of the force, backward spatter is thrown back toward the direction the force came from.

in many cases forward and back spatter look much the same, so the main distinguishing clue is location.

back spatter is, without us even thinking about it, the type of stain we assume is on One's chest, because we also assume that he is the attacker. that he did something violent to someone and their blood splashed back on him. that is one valid explanation, but not the only.

see, spatter flies in all directions from an impact, 360. it looks like this (simulation). not all spatter is automatically back spatter. if it's forward spatter, it suggests One was facing the impact from opposite where the force came from. it's hard to imagine a scenario where the attacker gets forward spatter on himself.

castoff is another type of spatter typical of repetitious stabbing or beating where a weapon that's covered in blood, when swung back for another blow, flings off an arc of small blood droplets.

examples:

the attacker virtually never gets castoff on themselves. rather they fling it on the walls/ceiling around them, depending on the arc of their swings.

telekinetic blows cannot possibly create castoff because there would be nothing for the blood to stick to.

so if the stains on One are castoff, A) there was a bloody physical weapon/object involved and B) he seems very unlikely the attacker.

to me, the main stain on One looks consistent with either impact or castoff spatter. let's consider some more characteristics:

blood velocity

droplet size can also tell the speed at which the blood was moving, which helps reconstruct what amount of force and therefore type of injury it came from. generally, the smaller the droplets the higher the velocity.

One's chest spatter looks medium velocity. no surprises here.

blood directionality

the shape of droplets helps determine the direction the blood came from.

a drop onto a 90 degree angle, like if you're just standing there and your blood drips on the ground, leaves a circular droplet. an elongated blood droplet shows that the blood was flying through the air at an angle.

blood tails are what you call the pointy end of an elongated blood drop, which points in the direction of the motion. the bottoms of these more acute examples are the tails, indicating the blood was moving toward the bottoms.

now look at One. he definitely has multiple spatters on him, but I'm focusing on the main spatter that goes diagonally across his chest.

note how blood tails go in a consistent direction (bottom screen left moving towards upper screen right). this creates a strong idea of the spatter having originated low around One's right hip and flown upwards across his body.

of course we can't get too into analyzing this as legit forensic evidence, because it isn't. but the fact that they kept consistent with the direction of the blood tails when recreating these stains by hand multiple times seems like that detail mattered to them.

(I don't wanna shoplift directly from em's jumpsuit blood post but that has the best collection of pics and you can see that all iterations are in agreement with the direction of motion suggested).

here's a quick video showing a guy creating a bloodstain that illustrates both castoff and blood tails:

how'd homeboy get blood on his back?

I wish I could get a clearer look, but those are absolutely active spatters and not transfer. do you wanna tell me how, if you are the attacker, you'd manage to get your victim's blood to spatter onto your own back? like, even if he can Vecna someone behind his back, why? was he showboating like shredding guitar behind his head?? was it like the champagne in that one kim kardashian photo??

whose blood is on him?

neither castoff nor impact spatter makes sense for the bodies we see.

as I've discussed in other posts, none of the ways we saw anyone get killed in the massacre, nor any of the dead bodies in the RR, should produce blood stains like the ones on One.

the only external bleeding that getting Vecna'd™ produces is passive drips from the eyes. nobody got stabbed or struck repeatedly. even the eyes getting sucked out (or whatever?) doesn't result in any spatter. you can watch One kill Two, and there's no new blood on his face or on the floor between them. you can watch him throw guards into walls without a speck of blood on the walls or on himself.

for the amount of blood around the scene, there should be at least one much, much bloodier wounded person around here somewhere.

what is telekinetic force shaped like?

I'm unclear on what kind of spatter to expect when the weapon is telekinesis because I have so many unknowns about the nature of the impact. it really seems up to the person what shape and force of power they want to use in each instance (think the brute force of flipping a van vs the fine motor skills of turning a tv knob).

what I want is to picture the telekinesis used in the massacre as an invisible physical object so I can draw conclusions about the impact spatter it might create, but I can't.

ST has given us a couple great visuals of what impression telekinetic force actually creates when impacting various substances, revealing its "shape," and it varies a lot. my ruling is that telekinetic force has no default shape, so this is kind of a dead end.

but regardless, here's the curious thing about spatter:

(and that IS spatter on One, whether it's impact or castoff): spatter is the result of force upon exposed blood.

and a bunch of blood is not exposed yet until after a victim has been struck/stabbed/whatever at least once. meaning the victim that One's bloodstain belongs to was likely struck in the same spot repeatedly. twice minimum.

"well, blood is already exposed from the eye thing, couldn't it just be that?" yes, but striking victims after the eye thing isn't the MO. watch Virginia, Two, Chrissy, Fred, and Patrick die - after the eyes, they simply drop in place. he doesn't throw or hit them in any way.

if that is castoff, what was the blood cast off OF?

if there was a physical weapon, it's either missing from the scene or not shown.

I'd love to finish this section by suggesting an object in the lab that would make a thematically fitting murder weapon, but nothing jumps out at me.

it would be unlike them not to have brought our attention to the murder weapon before it's revealed as such. like, we need to be able to go "ohhh, they killed everybody with the 8 ball!" or whatever later or else it's not as fun.

the blood being castoff from a weapon would tend to suggest that the attacker wasn't telekinetic (or wasn't currently able to use their telekinesis). I mean, would you bother doing the manual labor if you didn't have to?

I don't see any very bloody objects lying around the RR, but I do see extremely clear evidence that there were very bloody hands.

hands are absolutely a thing that can cast off blood.

and there's only one person I know of who was ever shown with bloody hands in conjunction with the massacre.

let's talk about hands, then

we've got a diagonal thing going on here:

this bottom-left-upper-right orientation that would tend to result from a right-handed person casting off blood from an upward swing of either a weapon or their bloody hand. a lefty's swing would most likely create a bottom right-upper left diagonal castoff.

so which lab folk are what-handed?

lefties:

righties:

(I found only 2 lefts from El: manipulating the helicopter and stopping Vecna from killing Max. I could do a whole post on that. stop me)

ok, but what if that's backsplash, not castoff? same logic.

One is left handed, and when he throws someone with telekinesis, say like if he slams them downward, he uses his left hand. the way the arm swings naturally seems more likely to create an impact on that same side of the body. but the spatter originates from his right hip.

(NOT saying otherwise is impossible, it's totally possible, just seems less likely. go ahead and pretend you have telekinesis for a sec and see what direction of arm sweeps feel most natural.)

this is why when I look at the stain on One, I'm not totally convinced it's back spatter.

so what are some possible scenarios that might be consistent with blood like that?

where One is the attacker:

One strikes Victim with either a physical weapon or telekinesis. either from the strike or from falling and hitting some surface, their blood back spatters onto his shirt.

where One is not the attacker:

Attacker is striking Victim with a physical object or telekinesis. One stands opposite Attacker. forward or sideways impact spatter flies onto One's shirt.

Attacker is beating Victim with a physical object. One stands opposite Attacker. blood is cast up onto his shirt on one of Attacker's upswings.

One stands near Attacker or Victim who swings a bloody hand upward and casts blood across his shirt. (I'm liking this best)

now that I've been serious for a whole post, let me go insane about the scene overall (I'M JUST BRAINSTORMING DON'T SNIPE ME):

what if, by timeline shenanigans or I don't know what, some versions of Henry, Edward, and El are all present in the RR during the massacre.

Edward is doing some or all of the killing in such a way that impact spatters are being sent onto Henry. the bloody face of one of Edward's victims hits the floor while Henry's back is turned, causing that small spatter on the back of his pant leg.

El's hands are covered with blood. she makes a sweeping motion like this, up and to her right, to throw Edward, and blood casts off her hand onto Henry's shirt.

if an action like the above gif happened, we'd expect to see damage and/or blood on the walls or ceiling of the RR. there are multiple drippy blood impacts on the RR walls. we assume them to have come from the kids (even though this is not consistent with their injuries). what if some or all of that is Edward's blood?

whoever hit the walls would have needed to already be bloody when they hit the wall. (we know from the hallway guards and Two that neither getting thrown against a wall nor Vecna'd up against a wall leaves blood.)

another explanation for already-bloody-Ed and Henry shirt castoff/forward spatter from a physical weapon is if Brenner comes in and tries to stop Edward by beating him with [?object]. but I feel like Ed would overpower Brenner too quickly to get very bloody. this isn't a strong one, I feel better about the bloody hands idea

re: the blood pools on the floor all being smeared even before El gets dragged... you know how El has some way-too-different-to-be-accidental variations in the blood transfer patterns on her gown? could we have multiple Els in play? like, by the time we see our El arrive in the RR, other-bloody-handed-El has already been mucking around the scene?

varying El blood and multiple El concept plays well with the way there are also at least two different crime scenes.

"Nat you idiot, that shot is filmed in the mirror, you're just confusing two different sides of the room. why are your green and purple circles on the same bookcase when they're clearly on two different bookcases on opposite sides of the room?":

YEAH I SURE AM CONFUSED! BC WHY WERE THOSE TWO BOOKCASE STAINS BOTH SHOWN ON THE RED-TOP-RAINBOW-BEND-ON-THE-WALL SIDE OF THE ROOM? the side with that pyramid thing and the plinko board has a red-top rainbow bend. the opposite side, with the benches and the drawing tables, has a purple-top rainbow bend (see below). like, whatever mirror tricks you wanna pull, shouldn't the side of the room with the bookcase corner stain be purple-top-bend? seriously, am I picturing this wrong??

anyway, many of those RR bloodstains could be explained by at least one unaccounted for person being thrown repeatedly around the room. telekinetic people really seem to like doing this to each other.

say El makes that hand motion, which makes One's shirt castoff and throws Edward. Ed hits that bookcase hard enough to get bloodied. Edward gets thrown around some more, leaving various stains around the walls and floors. El or Ed stomps in the blood puddle by the bookcase, resulting in the purple-circled splatter and the spatter on Henry's pant leg.

but if we're allowed to have multiple Els maybe some of the blood is other-El's too. or One's. or Brenner's

I DON'T KNOW. I'M DONE. END MY SUFFERING

#I don't care anymore!!!!! (throws up and dies from caring) (will make another post about this) #I have SO MANY MORE QUESTIONS about the other blood stains in the RR but Im also SO TIRED OF THIS POST #did they MIRROR the BLOOD in the rr? am I having a STROKE? #lab stuff #massacre stuff #analysis #tw blood #mine #givehimthemedicine analysis #a few forensic science classes do not an expert make but there's my five cents (adjusted for inflation). it just looks more castoffy to me #Ive got it: El freezes Edward like Troy and makes him pee his pants while Brenner beats the crap out of him #also I'm saying 'One' thoughout this post because I just don't know what to call this guy anymore. but ykwim #I didn't even get into the monster attack concept I'm just so weary #everyone (me) is just waiting waiting for it all (this post) to be over