Does shifter or simon struggle with animal instincts, urges or go feral sometimes?
Okay, so I think I briefly mentioned in another post that Sam does experience slightly more primal instincts than he did pre-exposure. We can even see this in effect a few times in the fic, most notably when he’s defending Joel. I imagine that those instincts might still be present in human form, but they’re a lot more easily ignorable and are typically also just things normal people would think about during the apocalypse.
His instincts definitely become more pronounced when he’s transformed but it’s not like he’s possessed by them or anything. They’re more like things he’ll absentmindedly do. Burbling when he’s relaxed, scratching at things to shave down his claws, stuff like that. He might even have some weird nest building instinct? Like, he’ll look at a blanket, a pillow or a mattress and think “I should bring that home”. But then he’ll stop himself and think “wait, why do I need to bring that home???”
The only time he ever really goes feral is when he’s up against a big threat, when he and his friends are in extreme danger. It’s a protection instinct, and he never turns that aggression onto his friends.
Simon, however, is a different story.
in the case of animalistic urges, he doesn’t get as many of them. The closest thing he has to that is a persistent craving for meat that he just tries to ignore.
However, he has a lot more than just weird cravings to worry about. Because Simon has been seeing things and hearing voices ever since he was pulled out of the blood ocean.
Now, it might be a bit easier to understand some of the stuff I’m talking about if you already have some context from the movie.
he’s been connected to a sort of hive mind, every soul that’s been lost to the blood ocean is whispering to him.
He thankfully isn’t hearing the voices 24/7. But when they are talking to him, well…. To put things lightly, the people down there are not exactly sound of mind.
sometimes they whisper sweet things to him, beckoning for him to return to the blood ocean. Telling him that it’s his home, and that they miss him and that he’ll never be alone again if he returns to the blood.
but other times, the voices are angry. Yelling at him, demanding to know why he left them and making venomous remarks about the horrible things he’s done in his past.
occasionally they’ll even appear to sound confused and scared, as if experiencing brief moments of clarity in the absolute chaos that they’re mutated minds had become. They tend to scream a lot in those moments.
all of this, paired with horrific and often times gory hallucinations, is obviously quite distressing for him.
And not only that, but the hallucinations also become worse when he’s stressed out. And then that only causes him to panic more, and then he starts feeling his body warping and growing and all of this just keeps adding up until he can barely hear himself think over the whaling voices in his head.
Obviously, when a person is having such an extreme episode like that, they can be a bit unpredictable.
Take all of that and shove the person into a large monstrous body that they barely know how to move around in? Yeah, that’s a recipe for disaster.
it’s not like Simon has some insatiable bloodlust when he’s like this. It’s not like he wants to hurt people. But he’s so overwhelmed and afraid that almost anything that moves can be mistaken as a threat to him. Even if someone genuinely means well. If they approach him just a bit too quickly and catch him at just the wrong time, well…. He’s bound to swipe at them. And that can be very dangerous.
yeah, homeboy’s going through it lol. If I ever decide to turn this into its own fic it would definitely be leaning a lot more into the phycological and body horror vibes of the movie than my Bloody Maple au does.
Bit of a long post. What can I say execpt I’m professional yapper and happen to have a lot of thoughts on this.
Thanks for the ask! Have a nice day!
