Alright fine I'll make this stupid post.
Spoilers for Amanda the Adventurer 3 down below.
Let me start off by saying that the statement "Marcus exhibits very clear signs of past trauma and abuse in his behaviour and gives major neurodivergent vibes in the way he loses himself in age regression, doesn't read the room to know when to tell jokes, and how he thrives on being told what to do" and the statement "Marcus is a bad person" CAN and DO co-exist. These are not mutually exclusive takes.
Like- unhealthy attachment to a literal child not included, I hate how many traits I share with Wooly. I acted EXACTLY like him as a kid in the sense of being an obedient people pleaser who wasn't very good at helping other people feel better. I myself am an abuse victim, and it set me back a lot. Unlike Wooly I actually sought out help and grew as a person, but if the theory he was raised in the cult is true, I don't think he'd really get that opportunity.
The way Wooly acts is blatant to me. He needs to follow a story. He loses himself in this role that was built for him, to an unhealthily obsessive degree. He's supposed to be the voice of reason to this child character, they're supposed to learn and play and live in a simple world. A world where no one can hurt them and no one can boss them around. They can just be friends, living however they want. In the sense that Wooly is the sidekick of Amanda, Amanda is also companionship for Wooly. But Rebecca isn't just a cartoon character, she's a real person, and I don't think Marcus always remembers that.
His life outside can't have been good if he's so desperate to stay in this place where he can safely rest and not worry about adulthood. Plus Amanda is a kid, giving him an excuse to be able to play and be childish. So when she doesn't want to, she wants to leave and grow up, it scares him, and he panics. He also has obvious anger issues, something I despise relating to, but he has no filter to not take it out on a kid.
I admit it, I've lost my shit around kids too. Working as someone who takes animals to school events and birthday parties, kids don't always listen. Sometimes they ignore you and hurt you (or the animal) without even really realising it, because they're kids. Sometimes they'll outright ignore you and yank on a tail seconds after being told no, sometimes they'll kick you because you told them not to touch something, kids can be little assholes sometimes, and as an autistic person who plans everything out in their head beforehand, it gets extremely distressing when things happen that aren't in the script. The most important factor, though, is you DO NOT EXPRESS THIS IN FRONT OF THE CHILD. If you have anger issues, you don't get abusive, YOU REMOVE YOURSELF. You make sure the kid is safe and then you step away until the episode is over. And THEN you try again and try expressing why what they did can be bad.
Amanda acts like a brat towards Wooly sometimes. I absolutely adore Amanda, she's such a tragic character and absolutely the main victim here, but she does still have a childish mentality and can be mean. That's normal. Kids are assholes sometimes. The issue is Marcus doesn't act like an adult about it. He doesn't try to leave then calmly explain after the fact, he just explodes in front of her, treating her like another adult on the same wavelength, when she's not. She's a kid. She makes mistakes. But he's so caught up in his own delusion that he just doesn't think rationally. Likely due to never being taught otherwise. He treats her like they're both adults playing child roles, and it's not just him. Granted, while Rebecca is physically an adult now, she isn't mentally, and neither is Amanda. She's still a child and lacking an adult's mentality.
And Chicken Scratch. The sweet baby oh my god I love him so much he's my stinky son-- anyway. For Amanda, the addition of Chicken Scratch is great! He's a new friend, something different and exciting, he's someone she can take care of herself instead of feeling like she's being talked down to, similar to the way a child may grow attached to a younger child or a baby doll. She needs someone who does what SHE wants. Wooly, without really realising all the time, doesn't really give her that freedom. "This tape is about this, so we need to do this". Whereas Chicken Scratch really doesn't care about how things are SUPPOSED to go. Amanda needs that. She's a kid. Following a routine like that must absolutely suck. But someone like Wooly NEEDS it because he needs to be told what to do and he needs it to make sense. Amanda's way of thinking doesn't make sense to him.
The kitchen tape is what hit the nail in the coffin for how I saw just how determined Wooly was to stay on topic. Amanda doesn't understand things like overfeeding, or health, because she's too young to really piece things together. It's up to the adult of the situation to explain, no, this is bad, we shouldn't do that because it'll make our friend sick. Instead, Wooly just jumps on the train of thought, going as far as to purposely make Chicken Scratch sick out of pure pettiness, without the excuse of not knowing better. He really doesn't see himself as an adult despite having adult knowledge. He follows Amanda's example without actually letting her pick what they do. He's controlling and toxic in his approach.
While we see Amanda actively communicating with Anomaly, we never see Wooly and Shepherd interact. I like to think this is because Rebecca has those odd psychic abilities, while Marcus doesn't. Amanda's mind goes beyond limitations and it makes her connection to her spirit stronger. Whereas with Wooly, the demon seems to respond to his emotions to the extreme. Wooly feels a resentment towards Chicken Scratch, and Shepherd feels that, prompting it to take it upon itself to kill Jordan. Wooly starts to get afraid of losing his sense of community, so Shepherd gets territorial and attacks Joanne and Riley. It seems to be more a manifestation of his insecurities and immaturity personified, a monster that does the extreme to keep the delusion alive. Even the way Shepherd destroys the tapes Wooly resides in feels like pure instinct with no rational thought behind it because it doesn't directly affect the demon itself.
It's almost poetic how it's Wooly that's still left behind in the end. With Shepherd killed and Rebecca free, it feels almost like the stone cold reality that she's escaped his toxic positivity and he's been left all alone because of it. He was so unwilling to make sacrifices for her mental health that he ended up pushing her away completely, and his attack on Chicken Scratch means he can't even fall back on him for companionship. He really allowed his own mental health to kill everything around him and now is facing the consequences, stuck in his isolation in the little fantasy world he clung so hard to.
In my kinda- alternate ending but not really, when the good ending happens, one of the tapes is taken with Rebecca and Riley. Maybe while Riley helps Rebecca with her injuries and helps her catch up to adulthood so she matches the age of her body, they can also try to teach Marcus what he never learned growing up. Without freeing him, letting him reap what he sowed, but not completely abandoning him at the same time. While he was an abusive loser, he was, at the same time, a victim on some level. Who knows?
However I will never forgive Shepherd for killing Chicken Scratch how fucking dARE YOU--
