Alright here we go! before anything else i wanna say. im a gay man whos survived csa so im not just pulling any of this out of thin air. and also obviously tw for mentions of abuse, murder, childhood sexual abuse, and just whatever else u would expect in an essay abt eddie gluskin.
Eddie is clearly gay and repressing his feelings in a very very violent way. obviously i do not condone the murder and mutilation of so many people in and out of the asylum, as it stands by the time he died he was an inherently bad person, but a) all of this was brought about through circumstances that couldve been avoided and b) i think he could have been a genuinely different, better person if he lived thru waylon exposing murkoff.
So. eddie was born in 1966/1967 according to the wiki. this means he grew up in the 70s, was a teen in the 80s, and most likely was already in custody before the 90s. growing up in a time when it was still illegal in parts of america to be gay, and being a teen during raegan and the aids crisis, if eddie was gay it would make perfect sense to say that he would most likely repress any gay tendencies he might have, but thats not all. he had, at some point, been sexually assaulted by his father and uncle. that really, really warps a childs perception of sexuality, whats right and wrong, he would have attributed anything between men with what happened to him so getting feelings for other guys wouldnt exactly make him happy.
He clearly has an attraction to men. regardless of if hes trying to 'turn' men into women, hes still showing an attraction to men and expressing that he finds men pretty. hes only the bare minimum of what he thinks it takes to make a woman (which obviously is a whole can of worms on its own) but even then, he really only trying to do what is absolutely necessary for children to be born and raised. i dont doubt that if eddie ever magically succeeded in at least not killing one of his victims, for the most part they wouldnt look any different. he doesnt try to change anything else on his victims as far as we know, which indicates he likes the way men look.
Now lets go a little further! eddie hates women, his dialogue and his file express that he is misogynistic which is also bad and i also dont condone. again, hes a bad person as far as canon goes. i theorize that its a combination of growing up at the time he did with the type of family he had, as well as another form of repression. hes taking his own internalized homophobia and taking that self-hatred out on women, who he resents for not being attracted to like he thinks he should be.
Now for the type of family he had. eddie is the poster boy for good old fashioned 50s husband in his head, he tries to play the part of the perfect suburban nuclear family but kills all of his brides. eddie was born in the second half of the 1960s, by the time he was old enough to start actually comprehending life it already would have almost been the 70s. He had to pick up that perfect ideal from somewhere and most children, obviously, at least start out modelling themselves after their parents OR their parents expectations. which means either his family was the perfect, 50s style nuclear family, or they pounded into his head that he needed to aspire for that. theyre old-fashioned based on eddies age would likely have gotten married in the 50s. if thats true, that only gives more reason for eddie to repress gay tendecies. i seriously doubt a family like that wouldnt be openly homophobic.
Now. eddies file says that his csa was well documented. there was evidence on film and yet he believed his childhood was 'leave it to beaver' like. repressing memories can work like that, but usually it doesnt. you just have a block of time thats completely gone, or youll remember things that happened leading up to an event but not the event itself. even when a survivors brain does warp their perception, its usually not that drastic without outside influence. eddie had to be straight up gaslit by his parents/uncle while his brain was repressing those memories, probably as an attempt to keep him quiet and keep him from going to the police or getting the attention of social workers. on top of that if film from his childhood was presented to him as an adult who had already murdered multiple people, that meant that whoever owned the film kept it, for a long time. He didnt just suffer from sexual abuse once, it had to be multiple times and it had to be humiliating, scary, painful, and worst of all he had to be gaslit into thinking nothing was wrong.
So what would have happened if eddie lived? Well eventually murkoff would have gone down, eventually all of the variants would have been removed from mount massive and take been given actual help. and i think bc of the morphogenic engine, for the most part the variants wouldnt even be considered for going to court, they would have just worked on rehabilitating the variants and then seeing how they do from then on out. the obvious first steps for eddie is getting him to calm the fuck down and not kill anymore. then work on his really fucked up hero complex, wanting to bring a child into the world just to protect them and give them a better life than him. i could honestly see him being given a psuedo-child to take care of, like an animatronic doll, while he worked through a lot of his emotional issues. he could find comfort in the doll, and it would give him motivation to actually be a better person and not have violent outbursts.
i think the next big step from there would be addressing his homosexuality and his hatred for women. this would also have to involve his childhood, so of course that would have to come after eddie already had a base of mental stability so he wouldnt fly off the handle like he did after his arrest, when being presented with the evidence of his csa. hed have to learn that what his family did isnt his fault, that he isnt gross or wrong for experiencing feelings and attraction to men, that it isnt womens faults he doesnt love them, and most importantly that what he feels towards men is not comparable to what his father and uncle did to him. this would be a very difficult time for him and would involve a lot, a lot of backpedaling with his progress, it would make him volatile again, it would probably be one of the hardest parts of eddies healing. during this time he would most likely swing between violently hating anyone he felt like he had the wrong feelings for (women hes not attracted to as well as men that his is attracted to), and being borderline obsessive towards both men and women. on top of that, theres no way around that to get over his internalized homophobia and his misogyny he would have to unrepress his memories of his csa.
But do i think eddie could ever heal? well. yes and no. nobody ever fully heals from traumas like that, and he has a lot of traumas to deal with even without the morphogenic engine fucking with his head and drawing the worst out of him. hed always have to live with the guilt of what hes done, too. but i think he can get better. i think anyone can get better if they try, and i see so much potential for eddie to try. he does, genuinely care about children and that could be a huge motivation for him, as i said. it would take a long time and hed still struggle for the rest of his life to keep himself stable but yes! i think eddie could, at some point, be stable enough to live in an apartment, have friends, have a life. he just needs to constantly be working for it.
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