#so i'm not sure what the fuck her skillset is supposed to be for outside of her needing to be a better fighter than nat )

[informaticn]

the additions to the red room get more nonsensical as you go down the list when you think about it bc 

first we have the bl/ack widows,   the original   &   only was natalia   &   later yelena joined her rank.

then they added various miscellaneous bl/ack wi/dows that they very often don’t even bother to name much less give any kind of backstory or information on beyond   “ orphan, “   for some reason.   i can think of one that had a name but i can’t actually remember her name rip.

after them,   there’s the red widows,   of which there are i believe only two,   ava   &   a currently unnamed woman who’s part of the winter guard.   ava isn’t actually a confirmed member of the red room   &   it’s implied that her name came from the combination of her admiration of natalia’s strength   &   wanting to be more   “ reliable “   than her,   but the unnamed woman apparently was affiliated with the red room in some way.

we also have the wolf spiders which is the male equivalent of the bl/ack wi/dows that never gained traction bc nico,   the original trainee,   was too uncontrollable   &   they shut it down before producing any wolf spiders.

then we also have recluse who is more or less detached from the red room bc she wasn’t technically trained in or by it,   but who is still affiliated with it bc her mother was a trainer or something in it???

i don’t know what’s happening please marble stop this

#does marble know that it can stop at literally any time #we don't... they don't need to keep adding onto the red room they really don't #i don't fucking know how the red widow slots in bc that's not explained as far as i'm aware #& i'm 99% sure they completely forgot they even had ava when they came up with the unnamed lady #bc she's just nowhere to be seen & red widows were not a thing in the red room before #wolf spiders are fine i guess or they were until everyone started saying that nico had a bad reaction to the biochemical enhancements #which is literally not written in canon anywhere & only serves to remind me that cornell's writing exists still #( as a note on that sentence apparently people believe this to be what happened to nico #bc cornell wrote ivan losing his fucking mind & people attached him & nico together with their enhancements #that is also not written in canon tho but whatever i don't wanna talk about cornell's writing ) #i don't understand the concept of making a bunch of widows & then not using but like one or two in any significant way #like they might as well have left the story alone as nat being the original & only widow if they were still only gonna use her #recluse is just a mess top to bottom from her timeline to her skillset #( which is not a comment to my often stated belief that it makes no sense she could take nat & bucky without breaking a sweat #& more a comment to the fact that she appears to only have a handful of years in training #bc it's implied she didn't begin training until adulthood & she appears to have no espionage skill whatsoever #so i'm not sure what the fuck her skillset is supposed to be for outside of her needing to be a better fighter than nat ) #honestly it kind of feels like marble knows that the red room & the history of it is entirely irrelevant to stories at large #but they want to keep referencing it so people don't forget it so they just keep adding new shit onto it #but they don't bother to think about the shit they've already added onto it so everything all together just makes no sense at all #when will i finish this doc & be free of this nightmare #i haven't even started on the win/ter sol/dier bit bc i have to figure out how to make that vague but slightly informative #( well informative as far as his involvement in the bl/ack wi/dow & wolf spider ops goes anyway ) #for the sake of it making sense but not risking overwriting any specific canon for bucky #ooc / shit posting from marble's basement. #delete.

[ziracona]

😮 Oh man, with the insight on Frank, it has me so curious. What's going on in the heads of everyone in the Legion lately? I'm especially curious about Joey, after the quality time spent with the survivors (well, in the back seat with Susie driving) during "She's Like the Wind". Or, if you're tired of the Legion, what about Michael in "The Tower"?

I’m totally happy to do the Legion (and I actually wrote up a bunch of stuff on them before deciding p best to wait), but there’s a lot of Legion stuff in the chapter I’m posting in the next couple days with some sort of big status-quo changes, so I feel like I should wait until after that to give Legion updates, or it could be kind of a waste, so I’ll do Michael.

Oh boy Mikey. Let me see. Buckle up, because this is a long one. So, let me start by saying in this fic, the way I write him is based on the canon portrayal in the first film (and some influence from the others—especially 2 and H20), but with my honest best attempt at an accurate psychological take on his situation. Horror’s a great genre, but it does a really shitty job about using mental illness as some kind of blanket excuse for being evil. John Carpenter literally came up with Michael after seeing some 12 year old schizophrenic kid in a mental institution when he was on a field trip that he thought had really dead, evil looking eyes, like he didn’t have a soul. Which is a pretty fucked up way to treat mental illness. And, since there’s no reason I should accept ‘He’s got psychosis and the devil’s eyes and has nothing in him but evil” as an accurate take on an actual human being, I’m not. I’m taking what is canon, and interpreting it (to the best of my ability) like a normal psychologist or person who isn’t Dr. Sam Loomis would. Usually I wouldn’t give as much on a character psych take (because I really, really like seeing how people interpret things), but it’s kind of specifically important for Michael and me doing my best to write him responsibly that while he’s a lot of things, and a lot of them bad, he’s not a mindless wall of walking evil.

Canonically, Michael’s had psychosis since he was at least five, and heard voices that told him to do bad things, like hurt people. He told his parents, in an attempt to get help, and was ignored. When he was six, he did what the voices told him to in an attempt to get them to stop, and killed his sister (without looking at what he was doing while he did it as much as he could [canon]), and then went downstairs to wait for his parents to get home (probably in the hopes that they could fix it, because he was six years old, and when you’re six, your parents can fix everything). Instead of anything getting better, he got sent to court, sentenced (to be tried for murder as an adult in fifteen years when he turned 21, which is absolute bullshit because by no stretch of human logic can a 6 year old child have committed a crime as an adult), and then left in an asylum for the next fifteen years of his life. His psychosis worsened, and he gained other symptoms, such as mutism and catatonia. His mom only visited a few times, with his little sister, and then she vanished off the face of the planet from his point of view. Completely abandoned by his family and everyone he knew, the only human contact he had from ages 6-21 was Doctor Sam Loomis, his psychiatrist, who had decided within a couple of months, that Michael was the human personification of evil, faking his mental illness like the evil genius six year old he was, and a demon in human form hellbent on murder. Now, the human brain doesn’t stop developing until the mid 20s, and it sure as hell isn’t done when you’re six. Kids that age don’t even really have a fully developed understanding of mortality and only a basic grasp on ethics. Emotional empathy doesn’t start really forming well until age seven, and abstract reasoning isn’t until preteen years. When you’re six, you’re not old enough to be evil. You just aren’t. But, if you grow up from age 6-21 with only one constant in your life, isolated in a tiny white room, hearing over and over from said only constant, an adult and the source of authority in your life, that you are evil, and soulless, and you are a killer waiting to kill again, you are dying to get out and commit murder, and they’re onto you, how exactly can you expect a human being to turn out?Especially when they’re already dealing with violent psychosis. You’ve basically convinced a mentally ill child that they are the bad voices in their head, not the person, and their goal in life is to commit lots of murder.

Michael’s personal goal, as much as he has one left, has pretty much solidly always been to do what the voices want so they’ll stop and he can be at peace. What they want is for him to kill his family, meaning his sister, Laurie. Kill Laurie, be at peace. That being the case, ending up in the Entity’s realm is about as shitty for him as it is for her, because no matter how many goddamn times he kills her, he can never, ever kill her for real, so he will never be able to stop the voices. He’s about as tired of being here as she is, which is saying a lot. But it’s been forty years of shit for him too.

I think Michael forgot he was a person a long time ago, because nobody’s treated him like one since he was baby. Since he was six. If you treat someone like a monster their whole life, that’s what they’re almost certainly going to become. In the Entity’s realm, it hasn’t really been any different. I don’t think he thinks about things very complexly, because he’s sort of too tired to, and he doesn’t have a real reason. He never learned a lot of normal human behaviors, including any attempt at even the most basic social contact. It’s like that really depressing scene in Lilo & Stitch when Jumba’s commenting on what it must be like to have nothing, even memories, to visit at night. He has memories, but they’re basically all the same—white room, fifteen years of Dr. Loomis. None of that’s a real human experience. Dr. Loomis didn’t even think he was a human—called him “It” instead of “Him.”

With Laurie suddenly acknowledging he’s her brother, it’s weird to him. Canonically, every time someone in a film reminds Michael he’s related to them, it’s like he gets smacked in the face (it’s actually kind of hilarious. He even takes his mask off for his niece in 5 when she calls him “Uncle”). A family member doing this always metaphorically suckerpunches him with the reminder that he has a name and an existence outside of killing people and there are human beings who know who he is and are related to him and have a lasting concept of him as a person. It’s not like he ever forgot they were siblings, but he didn’t remember to think about it. He spends all his time being the Shape, because Michael hasn’t really existed since he was six years old (not in a Dissociative Identity Disorder way, just, it’s an aspect of who he is that no one has been willing to acknowledge since he was a baby. He puts on the mask and kills because that’s what he’s supposed to be. It doesn’t really matter if he wants to, or if he likes it, or even if he still doesn’t have a completely developed concept of mortality, because he’s known for years now that it’s just what he does. It’s what he is). I don’t think he really knows how to think or feel (which he’s not used to doing period) about his sister or about that and being spoken to. He was definitely relieved at the prospect of having a way out of this, and since then it’s been kind of agonizing that she reneged on him and won’t commit joint suicide, but she’s also just been…weird. Been different. She talks to him like a person, which no one has ever done, and he does remember her from when they were little. I think it’s very confusing. He really doesn’t have the normal human skillset to be able to emotionally understand this. Which doesn’t mean he’s some emotionless zombie, just, he didn’t learn how to properly interpret or respond to things. He doesn’t have a normal human emotional or social skillset, because he never got to develop one. He didn’t get the chance. He hasn’t had a positive physical interaction, a hug, a handhold, a pat on the shoulder, since he was six--he hasn’t had any kind of social contact outside of the hostile psychological hatred and threats from Dr. Loomis period. There’s just not a normal set of human understand-the-world mental structures developed in him at all. Instead he’s got like…just all this shit—this really fucked up way of understanding the world built from fifteen years in isolation with just Dr. Loomis that’s completely separate from a normal human experience or mental scape, and the mental set of tools he would use to try to understand his sister is like, the dusty old normal human set that stopped growing when he was six years old that he kind of forgot about.

Michael’s also never done anything he wasn’t supposed to in the Entity’s realm, and I don’t think this has been explicitly stated in the fic, but he’s been punished now, for trying to break the rules with Laurie these past few trials. I don’t think he knew how to handle that or feel about it or think about it either, because it was a new experience for him. It’s very hard to hurt him at all, and it’s never happened with the Entity before this.

During The Tower, Michael wanted what he’s wanted since it was on the table (a way out by killing her), and when she said she couldn’t do it yet, genuinely misinterpreted that as her meaning she had to help the others finish the trial first. I don’t think he entirely understood why she kept running away from him, but he’s used to that kind of behavior, so it wasn’t that strange. What was extremely weird to him was getting jumped by two kids (when usually survivors wouldn’t touch him with a fifty-foot pole if it was up to them), who proceeded to tell him be was being a really crappy brother and should be nicer. It was. Surreal. I think when Laurie showed up and told him she hadn’t meant ‘in twelve minutes’ when she said later, he didn’t just attack her because he was mad she didn’t want to do suicide yet, I think it also kind of hurt his feelings that she made fun of him when he genuinely was trying to understand and thought she meant something else. Since what he wanted was off the table, he was upset (which was especially volatile becaus he doesn’t often experience hugely strong emotions) and on instinct just did what has been programmed to come naturally instead and went fucking lethal on them all, but got a surprising amount of resistance.

When she came back to fight him alone, I don’t think he completely understood everything she said, but he got a lot of it, and he didn’t like it. He didn’t like losing the chance to get out of the realm for good with her, but I think he also didn’t really like being basically told that he was dead to her from here on out. I don’t think he’d exactly think of it that way, or put it into words—I don’t think he’d had long enough or the emotional growth enough to appreciate her caring about him, or to want it, but at the same time, he’d had someone treat him like a person for the first time in fifty some years, and I think it was probably briefly nice to be called by his own name and talked to like a person—I think it would be hard for that not to mean a little bit, even if you didn’t understand way. And then he had it reaffirmed by her before their fight that what Dr. Loomis had always said was true, and he’d fucked up so bad with her that he wasn’t ‘Michael’ anymore to her either, and even if he wouldn’t really think of it like that, I think subconsciously, that kind of had to hurt. 

At the end of their fight, when he was out on the floor, and Laurie didn’t kill him, while he was genuinely unconscious for some of that, he was awake for some of it too—the bulk of it, actually. Michael in film canon routinely not only has genuine resets where he passes out and heals and gets back up, but plays dead as well, to protect himself. So, he did hear a decent chunk of what Laurie said to him. She kind of poured her heart out, and some of it was pretty complicated stuff, and a lot of it was stuff he doesn’t really have the emotional complexity developed to understand right now, but he understood some of it. I don’t think he expected things to end like they did (and not just him getting his ass kicked by her). She basically flipped on him, and said she was wrong, and even like this he was still her brother, and because she remembers how he was when he was six she can’t make herself not love him, even if she knows she shouldn’t, and that she wasn’t going to kill him like that, even if it meant he was going to come after her again and kill her. I don’t think he gets why she would say those things, but it did make him want to know, and I think he’s aware that it should mean something to him, regardless of if it does or not on an emotional level, and it is at least something that interests him. Probably his most intact human emotion is curiosity (and it’s no wonder—he’s basically never seen anything, or been anywhere, or done anything—he’s barely gotten a chance to live, period. Any social interaction where someone isn’t running from him screaming or threatening him and telling him he’s a monster is uncharted territory). What that would mean for him going forward as far as Laurie is concerned is very complicated, though. Laurie interests him and there are things he wants to understand, but he’s just got so little ability to function like a normal human being. So much of him is so awfully mangled and maladapted, and the rest has been stagnating since he was 6 and he’s so very, completely, depressingly isolated. He’s a serial killer, but he’s really also kind of a tragic character. It’s fucked up what happened to him, and most of it isn’t really his fault. It didn’t have to be like that.

#In Living Memory #In Living Memory (fic) #Michael Myers #Ask #Long Post #(Super long I'm so sorry ToT) #dead by daylight #He held his hand out because he was curious and thought she might come back