Formative childhood experiences are so fucking wild, in retrospect.
I let a bunch of 8-year-old schoolchildren decide for me whether I was "weird" or "normal." And I believed them FOR DECADES. Children I would not trust to order a fucking pizza!
It was a mentally ill 14-year-old me that decided I was fundamentally unlovable and would always have to scramble desperately to provide enough value to make people like me. I didn't even have a learner's license! I knew absolutely fuck-all about psychology! But somehow I was qualified enough to lay down a core belief that has haunted me ever since.
Like, ok boomer babies. Y'all decided some objectively wild shit 30 years ago. That should not play a starring role in my life decisions today.
YOU TAINTED ME.
( WARNING: this is a personal piece with some potentionally triggering themes/implications! )
a quick sketch that i had to get out of my head. i'd rather let this piece speak for itself, as it is more personal work on art whilst still relating to obasi and her story.
obasi may be a powerful and well-kept on the surface, but what lies beneath is rotten, and it still festers. but how? how much longer can she keep going like this?
because of the nature of this piece, i turned off reblogs. however if you have any thoughts on the art, do feel free to reply! :)
hc. (v: old things have old hungers / aka the vampire verse)
He tends to see others in similar positions to him as weak, pathetic creatures who had it coming/deserved what happened to them - particularly if they (like him) were beguiled by someone and lured into their fate. It's very likely that he either believes he chose to become a vampire (though whether he did or not is up for debate; his memory is deeply unreliable, especially the farther back you go) and asked Morpheus for the gift, or that at the very least, he "willingly" let himself be manipulated/lured into Morpheus' clutches.
Obviously as outsiders we can see that he had very little choice in the matter either way--and he certainly will talk about it as if that's what he believes too. But it becomes evident when you witness the way he talks about other people that he's projecting some of what he deep-down-secretly feels about himself onto them.
I want to talk about Ingrid’s C-PTSD related to her work. Like emergency aid dispatchers in real life, Ingrid is hearing, seeing and experiencing a lot of what field agents do.
Just think about what she goes through with Leon Kennedy alone. She hears and probably sees everything he does in real time. The B.O.W.s, the death, the violence, the torture. She’s experiencing all this with Leon, but she is forced to compartmentalize her feelings and emotions because in that moment she has to stay calm and vigilant for Leon’s sake. Like, this man’s life is in her hands. One wrong directive and he could wind up dead. That’s soooo much pressure on just one person! I headcanon that the FOS does usually have eyes on their agents either through aerial visuals (like we see in the beginning of RE: Damnation) or they have body cams of some sort by the time we get to RE6. So, Ingrid is seeing what Leon and the other agents she supervises see. She is getting a front row seat to all sorts of awful shit, and even though she’s just seeing that through a screen, that shit is still traumatizing.
Let’s look at what happens in RE4. Ingrid is trying to help keep Leon alive while he’s being essentially hunted by Los Illuminados, and the president’s daughter is at risk. That’s two people Ingrid is responsible for, but she has no control over them or what’s happening. She can’t go in and save them. She just has to helplessly watch and listen. Then she fucking loses all contact with him not once but twice (once when he’s infected, again when he gets to the castle). I mean, can you imagine the horror and dread of that situation? Someone you are personally responsible for in the middle of literal hell on earth has gone MIA. The last time you heard from them, they were in trouble, so your mind just starts going crazy with worst case scenarios. That’s enough to traumatize anyone. But Ingrid has to keep her emotions at bay and stay calm. She can’t healthily process what’s happening in that moment, so she has to deal with all that shit later.
I headcanon that just before RE4, Ingrid lost an agent in Algeria. She was helping them try to disable a bomb, and then their communications failed. She couldn’t see anything. Just all of a sudden, when she’s telling them which wire to clip, she gets static. When she tries to get an aerial visual, she just sees this massive crater with pieces of the agent all over the place. Like, that shit will change a person. And then to go through that again with another agent? Ingrid was on her last leg mentally that day.
Then there’s RE: Damnation. Leon is in the middle of a warzone, and she can see him. She sees rockets nearly take him out, sees gunfire, sees B.O.W.s everywhere. Dead civilians, soldiers being shot up. And then when she tries to guide him out of danger, he just disconnects her. So, after the hell of the disconnection in RE4, Ingrid gets another hefty dose of traumatizing fear and anxiety. Leon is blind on the ground, and she has no way to help him or warn him if she sees something coming. And he is her agent. Her responsibility. I think in those moments, she was probably just imagining all the agents she HAD lost. All the deaths she had to oversee or witness. The torture of having to declare someone MIA or KIA. That shit is hard to deal with for anyone, and Ingrid has no military training. A few sessions with a government offered therapist isn’t going to do jack shit for that.
Then there’s the horror of RE6. She loses contact with Leon and Helena, that’s, again, TWO people she oversees, when they go underground in Tall Oaks (which is, in her words "hell on earth"). This poor woman has been through the emotional wringer. On top of that, Simmons blames Leon and Helena for the death of the president and declares them enemies of state. Now Ingrid has a big decision, does she salvage her job so she can protect hundreds of other agents or does she risk her life for these two? Suddenly her coworkers and superiors can no longer be trusted. They’re all potential threats and enemies. She has no safety net besides these two now-criminals, and she can’t be in contact with them all the time. She can only offer snippets of help when she can call in and watch what’s unfolding from her desk.
Ingrid’s symptoms are usually that she frightens very easily. She can’t watch movies with jump scares at all, even if she’s warned what will happen ahead of time. The sudden scares trigger her. Her triggers are usually audio-oriented. So, for example, if she hears a scream in a movie, she’s going to suddenly remember that time she watched an agent eaten alive during a T-virus outbreak. Or if there’s a sudden blaring music, she’ll remember that time she watched an agent turned into a pulp by a semi truck or the agent killed by a bomb. Stuff like that. Halloween is not a fun time for poor Ingrid. She also struggles with pretty nasty insomnia right after being exposed to a new trauma. Sleep makes her vulnerable to night terrors. And the overwhelming guilt and shame she feels about some of this stuff could be a post all on its own.
“I miss the old you.” if you can make it work for metamorphosis?
“Oh, Ava, you poor thing,” Maria’s condescending tone burned their ears, “You’ve let him get to you.”
“I did not,” Ava muttered into the empty air, “I didn’t do anything.”
Her old mentor’s image was clear in their mind, glaring at her mockingly when she squeezed her eyes shut, “You did. You let Satan into your heart the second you left.”
“You pushed me away. You ruined me,” she spat back, covering her ears to block out the bible verses being thrown at her like a whirlwind.
“I miss the old you, you were such a good girl back then. You’ve given you life to sin, Ava, you’ve broken your family’s hearts.”
“Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off!”
“How vulgar,” Maria crooned, “What happened to you?”
“You did!” Ava couldn’t stop shaking as she curled into herself on the floor, “Get the fuck out of my head!”
The flashbacks didn’t stop for a while, paired with that nagging voice filling her with anxiety. She felt like she was suffocating, thrown back into that freezing cold back room of the church she hated so much. Everything was clear as day, from the painted handprints on the ceiling to the stale scent of the shitty space heaters. She was 12 years old again, being berated for holding her best friend’s hand, and she had never felt so small.
“Please stop,” she begged as shifted and accidentally bonked her head off the frame of her bed, “I left, I fucking left that church and I’m never going back. God, if you’re even fucking listening; why are you doing this to me?”
