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taughtdefense · 4 months

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i'll need to update ethan's bio & whatnot, but it bears mentioning on both blogs that wade & vanessa claiming that they didn't "deem it necessary" to train ethan in martial arts - despite both of them being years past TAV & SK winners - is nothing more than a smokescreen to hide ethan's genuine strength/knowledge in the sport, & to some extent, his eldritch nature.

all three of the wilsons didn't want ethan's genuine knowledge to be displayed & potentially taken advantage of by anyone, nor did ethan want to be seen as a threat, because he's tired of accidentally hurting humans who don't deserve it, & he desperately wants to learn how to STOP, because he feels like he's proving his Creators right, that he IS the monster they think he is. which is why ethan pretends to be a novice. he sells it incredibly well throughout s1-s3, like he's breathing. he doesn't try getting on the wheel - sam nor robby could match his height, anyway, so there wouldn't be that fairness. No One knows he's faking literally anything, except for my own eldritch oc's, who know him inside & out. none of them will expose his secrets, though. none of them would do that to their closest friend. this chaotic eldritch motherfucker can & will ACT his ass off when the situation calls for it. it's something he very quickly picked up from the humans he would come to live among trillions of years in the future: the art of deception. how to lie, & sell a lie well.

ethan wants to "build up" his defense in a more peaceful setting, without the pressure of ck/johnny's expectations to be the Best looming over him. it's why he joins miyagi-do over cobra kai. he wants to protect himself, the people ethan would eventually come to view as friends or lovers, & find inner peace... something johnny & certainly kreese's cobra kai didn't offer. that balance & those more peaceful teachings are missing from cobra kai, & it's not something ethan wanted to pursue for various reasons. not to mention, going straight into offensive maneuvers, & showing off his knowledge/strengths with cobra kai would have set off red flags in kreese's mind ( when he comes around ). that was something he wanted to avoid at all costs, & he did.

that pretending is the very reason why there's massive inconsistencies in his strength later on, in s4/s5 - particularly after @taughtpain / robby joins cobra kai - to his growing, almost uncontainable bloodlust in season 5 because of his near death experience at the hands of silver ( either my own npc version or @opponentcompel ), to after said bloodlust subsides with silver's arrest & ck's takedown, making him revert back to "normal".

wade & vanessa being winners of TAV/ST - & them + ethan being from that earth - is a fabrication in & of itself; ethan used of his memory manipulation ability on the entire world prior to walker!ethan creating his leo!vessel self to exist in that universe, then entered the world ck takes place in, with both of his parents in tow. he basically inserted himself & his parents into the narrative - all for reasons ethan will never explain to anyone even in his eldrtich nature reveal verse... not even to his fiancés/fiancées. that's mostly to spare them the confusion & surefire existentialism that conversation would bring.

although, what ethan told daniel upon first meeting him remains true: he doesn't want to hurt anyone, he just wants to protect himself & his friends. it's all he's ever wanted.

that's his main motivation behind every single thing he does. doesn't matter if it's good or bad, right or wrong, smart or dangerous. ex: in a fit of protective anger, singlehandedly confronting robby & the rest of cobra kai directly after he finds out that hawk's mohawk was shaved off by them. sometimes directly stepping into a fight or keeping an eye on sam during any of the miyagi-do vs. cobra kai fights. defending robby from what the valley thinks about him in aftermath of the school fight in s3. putting an arm out in front of robby & tory to push them both behind him during the miyagi-fang vs. cobra kai rumble in 5x10, then once again when silver shows up at the dojo glares at them.

it's why he directly stupidly confronted silver alone after he found out about stingray's beating, & the way robby started acting in season 4 when silver came into the fold. the No Mercy mindset of robby really fucked with his head - not to mention the betrayal ( something ethan'd never really experienced before ).

that's who ethan wilson is at his core - someone who would do ANYTHING & EVERYTHING he can in a "human" way to protect his friends & loved ones from harm, especially if they've been hurt by someone else's actions, or if he feels like they've been wronged, used or manipulated somehow.

#headcanon. ( miyagi!ethan. )#saved.#im insane about him #dyn.: taughtpain.#dyn.: opponentcompel.

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taughtdefense · 3 months

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after his near death experience in between 4x08 & 4x09, ethan struggles with finding a sense of normalcy, & finding healthier ways to deal with his trauma. despite being a member of miyagi-do, internally-wise, he's essentially constantly thrown off balance throughout s5. he feels like he doesn't "fit anywhere" anymore, & tries to act like everything is okay on the surface level.

i hope you guys are prepared to read everything & have some snacks ready, because this is very long.

part one: ethan & the "Silver Voice"

something that is rather prevalent for his character arc in season 5 is the fact that he starts hearing silver’s voice in his head. this applies to @opponentcompel's silver specifically, or, to a lesser extent, my own version of silver ( npc ). this development is something that started a few days after he was released from the hospital ( timeline wise, he is released at the near end of 5x03, after being in the hospital from "4.08 point 5" until then ). that's approximately a week or two he spent in the hospital recovering, then he jump-started his healing with his powers.

please note that i'm guesstimating that recovery time of a week or two, because there's no way it takes one day for miguel to get to mexico by bus ( which takes maybe like ~7-10 hours irl ), for johnny to realize where miguel took off to, or for robby & johnny to drive down to mexico, find miguel on their own, then drive back to/return to the valley that same day, returning early in the morning. all of that can’t just happen in one/two days, in my opinion.

canon ck timeline /negative.

anyway….

the fact that ethan hears silver's voice in his head is a real occurrence that is found in people who have PTSD.

"Auditory Verbal Hallucinations (AVHs) are commonly associated with psychosis but are also reported in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Hearing voices after the experience of stress has been conceptualized as a dissociative experience."

ethan hearing silver's voice is a trauma response brought on by his PTSD from the event. he can't just ignore the fact that he almost died, alone & terrified for minutes before robby found him. he can’t just ignore the fact that he actually, clinically died two separate times, either. if you’re curious, it was once in the ambulance to the hospital ( he was resuscitated by the paramedic ), then the second time while on the operating room table. these two times are canon, & he is severely psychologically impacted by it, even post season 5.

as i mentioned in this headcanon, ethan confronting silver can be viewed by other people in-universe as a suicide attempt. he was more than willing to let himself die because he thinks he "deserved the punishment".

the development of his AVH is piled on top of his paranoid anxiety/personality disorder… which forms after the same event, too, but it should be noted the voice of silver doesn't correlate with his PPD. ( an explanation of what PPD is linked here, if you’re curious. please note that the bullet point of "Have persistent suspicions, without justified reason, that their spouses or romantic partners are being unfaithful." DOES NOT apply to ethan. )

he hears the voice of silver in every episode of s5. this is non-negotiable for interactions going forward, & i may mention it once or twice in from this point on. at first, ethan assumes that it's the work of his Creators ( which is semi-true, because they KNOW that he's traumatized ), & tries to push the voice out of his head.

he tries everything he can think of, short of killing "the source" ( silver ), but nothing works. ethan doubts that killing silver would even rid him of the voice. OBVIOUSLY, i wouldn’t have him kill terry, of course for plot reasons. but does he think about it occasionally when the Silver Voice gets bad? yes. but he very heavily internalizes these thoughts throughout s5. he decidedly doesn’t want his friends/family or robby to think he’s mentally slipping. ( even if wade, vanessa & damiana can sort of just Tell. )

part 1.5: the effects of ethan’s near-death experiences on himself & my version(s) of the canon characters/my ocs

ethan tries to pretend like everything is fine around his friends/family, because he doesn’t want them to worry. his efforts of trying to make sure that his friends don’t notice him suffering has the opposite effect, though:

wade & vanessa become increasingly more worried about ethan’s mental state with every s5 episode that passes, practically every scene they're in ( all three of them are in the episodes, trust me ).

his friend group ( my ocs & my versions of the canon ck characters ) start really looking out for ethan because they're worried about his mental, physical & emotional states in a near-constant way. both the adults & teens worry over him. they never want to see him get hospitalized, if they can help it.

they even ask ethan to put a sort of tracking app on his phone, so they can have his location to make sure he isn't hurt somewhere, or someplace where he isn't supposed to be. the group also implements what demetri calls a "buddy system", because that's what it is. it basically means that ethan should never be left to his own devices if out in public, & needs to be "babysat". ethan, because he’s ethan, complains & refers to the buddy system as a prison sentence. he knows they're making sure that he's never put in that life-threatening ever situation again, though. he commends them for that & their efforts in keeping him safe, he doesn’t condemn them.

part two: ethan & coping with his trauma / a tiny blurb: aka "How Did He End Up Here?", & "How Is He Throughout Season 5?"

the "silver voice" ( as i call it ) starts rearing its ugly head if ethan makes a mistake, no matter how small or big it might be. it also comes around if he accidentally hurts one of his friends. this especially applies to the secondary example. whenever ethan starts hearing the silver voice, he will essentially go catatonic & nonverbal in an attempt to cope, or reflexively mentally "fight back" against the voice, assuming its persistent enough in his head while reacting to a specific instance that either just happened, or happened in the past ( "failing" to prevent miguel’s accident at the school, "failing" to realize that robby was going to join ck/not doing "more" to prevent it from happening [even if that is a huge turning point for robby’s character/s4 as a whole, & erasing that won’t work storyline wise] ).

it doesn't matter what day of the week it is, or what time of day. the voice is present enough in ethan’s psyche to impact moments in his life. the silver voice mostly just taunts him & calls more attention to his "failures", like accidentally hurting chase during a friendly sparring match prior to 5x07.

ethan begins to lash out at his friends in s5, especially near the end of the season when the cracks in his mental health start to really show. this cracking unearths a lot of his genuine anger at silver, kreese, & the whole valley-wide karate war as a whole. he’s fed up during season 5. he hadn’t been angry in season 3 like sam was about miguel’s accident, because he’d been TRYING to not let himself get to that point. this is because walker!him in his deadpool universe getting angry = mass destruction of property & mass human casualties, including injuries & loss of life. he was trying to be Better.

( robby getting thrown into juvie by daniel ? VERY different story. he literally moves out of the larusso household without telling anyone, not even sam when it happens, or robby during one of his juvie visits. ethan’s feelings towards daniel switch pretty drastically during s3. there’s a lot of anger & tension towards him, even if he was only trying to help robby get a lighter sentence… but ethan is a teenager, & his friend/crush got put into juvie for an accident, of course he’d feel betrayed by mr. larusso. )

but in s5, his rage is palpable. he's furious over the fact that silver was the "cause" of everything ( for kreese & silver turning the students of cobra kai into miniature versions of themselves, for making them play solider because they're Old Men who can't let go of a 30 year old grudge. robby joining cobra kai, & ethan firsthand witnessing him choose cobra kai, was the main contributing factor to ethan just kind of losing his mind.

another - albeit smaller - factor of ethan finally having Enough of the evil karate senseis terrorizing the Valley & seemingly getting away with it… was stingray's hospitalization the morning after prom. ethan found out that happened unintentionally, when he physically brushed stingray's hand during a visit while stingray was comatose, just after getting beaten. ethan saw his final memory before passing out. he saw that entire stingray & silver scene play out, like he was right next to him, unable to breathe or move.

this enraged mindset only escalates further when daniel is beaten up by silver in season 5, unintentionally, perhaps, semi-paralleling his own run-in with silver. but whereas daniel went to mend a bridge with stingray & found silver, ethan willingly went after silver for both stingray's brutal beating, & the bridges robby's betrayal burned with his miyagi-do ( or eagle fang ) friends. ethan himself included.

but that ^ hc is gonna be expanded on at later date. back to this one...

with this unearthing of ethan’s rage, comes a "sudden" surge of his genuine knowledge/strength in martial arts - whereas prior he'd been pretending to be weak/not as trained in marital arts, despite his legacy status of being wade & vanessa’s son. he stops holding back so much, especially during any fights. whereas someone like emma might attempt to de-escalate the situation verbally, ethan is pretty much ready to throw himself headfirst into battle.

which kind of brings me to my next point.

part three: ethan & co-dependency towards robby throughout season 5, formed as a byproduct of shared/collective trauma ( defined as "experiencing a traumatic event together" )

with ethan nearly dying in the back room of the old cobra kai dojo & robby walking in on that, i genuinely think that ethrobby have shared trauma. not to mention all of the drama/big group fights that happens throughout the show, with the school fight is another big reason why i think they have shared trauma. the show pulls no punches, & for any of them to just walk away without severe impacts on their mental health is very unrealistic. sam’s ptsd storyline throughout s3-s4 was great.

"Strong links between psychotic symptoms, including AVHs (Auditory Verbal Hallucinations), and dissociative experiences have been demonstrated in a number of studies, in both clinical and non-clinical populations (see Moskowitz, Barker-Collo, & Ellson, 2004 for review). Allen, Coyne, and Console (1997) argued that dissociative detachment deprives individuals of “internal and external anchors”."

personally, i interpret "internal & external anchors" as a means to ground oneself to reality, or to "pull" oneself out of a nightmare/PTSD flashback. that is just my own interpretation, though.

during season 5, ethan's quote — unquote "external anchor" is @taughtpain . robby is who grounds him to reality, as well as any thread set post season 5, too. i don't think he'd ever disclose that fact to him, even if he does let him know about the silver voice in his head… or if robby somehow finds out about it on his own. the ‘external anchor’ part is Very Obvious to everyone else in their friend group ( potentially robby himself recognizes this, @mads? ).

as of the posting of this headcanon, i don’t think he’d tell robby or his other partners ( my miguel, my tory or mads’s sam ) about the silver voice, mostly due to internalized fears of rejection/the stigmatization of mental health disorders. he wants to avoid ‘losing’ his fiancés + fiancées at any cost possible.

"The absence of anchors is proposed to increase an individual's sense of feeling disconnected from the world, interpersonal relationships, and within their intrapersonal self, resulting in a sense of confusion and disorientation, and critically, in an impairment in reality-testing."

ethan’s co-dependency towards robby is wildly rooted in the their shared trauma. he loves robby to pieces - he’s not obsessed with him. it is not a stockholm syndrome situation. i want to make that distinction very clear. in practically every shot of season 5 that robby is in, ethan is right next to robby, or in the background someplace, watching over him, or physically holding his hand. he feels compelled to be near him because he is his ‘anchor’ - or someone who tethers him to reality - & his boyfriend. robby makes the silver voice less severe. he’s allowed to be clingy with robby because he saved his life.

"In this way, Moskowitz and Corstens (2007) proposed that for individuals hearing voices when exposed to high levels of stress, AVHs should be conceptualised as dissociative experiences. Similarly, Longden, Madill, and Waterman (2012) proposed that voices could be conceptualised as dissociated or ‘disowned components of the self’, arising from the failure to integrate adverse and traumatic sensory and psychological experiences into the context of the self. Hallucinatory experiences might therefore reflect directly or indirectly dissociated traumatic content (e.g., the voice of an abuser) impinging on conscious awareness (e.g. Anketell et al., 2010), rather than a psychotic symptom."

ethan hears the silver voice a lot. if he was counting the amounts, he’d have surely gone past 10 times per episode, typically not per scene, because that would be too many times to calculate. especially depending on the context of the episode’s plot-line. with 10 episodes per season, that’s ( at the very LEAST ) a minimum of 100 pieces of dialogue the Silver Voice says to ethan. he feels physically sick ( or a little violent ) when silver even looks in his general direction during the sekai taikai qualifying matches in 5x08. he wants to fucking run out of the dojo. he doesn’t, although it’s obvious by his facial expressions he’s uncomfortable.

is that a lot of silver dialogue running around in ethan’s head? yes. i’m fully aware of it. but ethan’s severely traumatized, he’s an eldritch being. he doesn’t know how to properly cope with anything that happened to him in the past, & the Silver Voice isn’t ( mostly ) meant to appear during his happy moments. he’s not really genuinely happy or calm during s5. he starts to get his bloodlust up, the desire for revenge. he can’t just sweep his trauma under the rug.

if ethan is away from robby for a prolonged period of time ( ex: a few weeks for whatever reason ), the silver voice can & does routinely say nasty things to him about everything that happened in between 4x08 & 4x09.

some examples of the voice include, but are not limited to:

the miguel+johnny+robby trip to & back from mexico, because ethan was recovering in the hospital

the miguel+robby+johnny apartment fight because my johnny kept him away intentionally ( something that REALLY pissed him off )

when robby confronts silver with tory, the rest of the ck students & sensei kim present in 5x09.

while ethan doesn’t at all feel ‘insecure’ with his romantic relationship, or doubts his faithfulness ( or anything like that ), the silver voice reminds him that if robby was more like ‘him’… specifically: both real-life silver or kreese, he may have put ethan out of his misery. it’s what his creators firmly believe, so they kind of put that thought in ethan’s head.

in an attempt to completely halt the silver voice from making more of a worse impact on his already somewhat fragile impacted psychological state, ethan feels the need to constantly be surrounded by his friends, family or robby. just being around them will typically lessen the voice, or quiet it completely. i’ll admit, he was clingy before his near death experience, but after? that clinginess becomes a bit amped up in its severity. my muses might make a joke out of it with robby, or sam, or everyone else, but they’re all aware that he’s clearly traumatized - understandably so. his friends are ready to help him out with whatever he needs, whenever he needs it.

by the way, his clinginess doesn’t just extend to robby, even if he’s the main person ethan will naturally gravitate towards. for example, if you see ethan w/ his hand on hawk’s shoulder during 5x09, please don’t call him out on it. he’s anxious enough already, & he will react negatively.

part four: closing thoughts ( aka: how the Silver Voice impacts him throughout post season 5 )

post season 5 & with silver’s arrest + ck takedown, the voice no longer comes around nearly as often. there are moments when he can hear it, & that can be deliberating on ethan. sometimes, he’ll just freeze up, his breathing will get heavy, he’ll have a small panic attack, then calm down enough to continue on with his activities. the nightmares are the worst part: they usually involve seeing robby get hurt, where he’s just out of reach from ethan. but the silver voice is no longer consistently whispering in his ear, like it had been in every episode of season 5. he’s healing… or trying to start healing, anyway.

for season 6, i think that the silver voice will once again become MORE of an issue for ethan. if/when terry gets out of jail because he’s Rich, & starts enacting his revenge on the miyagi-fangs, the silver voice will make its return.

ok, i think that’s everything for now! if you’ve read this far, i thank you from the bottom of my heart! :). i hope this made sense & it wasn’t just me making a fool out of myself! if i think of anything else, there will be a part two to this headcanon… or maybe a part three when season 6 drops. let me know if you have any questions or comments! thanks again for reading!

-bows & exits-

#headcanon. ( miyagi!ethan. )#saved.#// self harm #// suicidal thoughts #dyn.: opponentcompel.#dyn.: taughtpain.#// long post #silver quite literally living in ethan’s head rent free… & with a severity level that impacts him daily…#my son :(

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