i truly hope no one reads this because i couldn’t help myself
it’s the craziest thing ever to see people defending the actual spawn of satan while accusing a mentally troubled but still human kid clearly influenced by demonic forces. i’m not even making this post to hate on anyone because i love both of them (let’s not talk about what that makes me...), i’m just really surprised that people would rather defend the antichrist in this case. their journeys parallel each other in many moments, but in essence they’re far from similar.
unless i’m reading the show all wrong, which is always a possibility, tate was manipulated by the evil forces of the murder house to do the things he did. even madison realized that. (sidenote: i used to be part of the fandom back in s1, so i remember many people believed in a theory that claimed tate had an evil alter ego or twin, whom he actually saw as a bloodied version of himself behind ben in the noble war speech... his character has been fragmented and incoherent from the beginning, which is AMAZING for storytelling. i’m not saying i believe that, but i wouldn’t completely discard it, either).
back to the point: tate had zero powers to make someone’s soul cease to exist, for example. from the little we know about him before everything went downhill (aka constance saying he had “the soul of a poet”, and the school teacher saying he “didn’t seem like a bad kid” before the shooting), he had concrete chances of having been a normal teenager. (i know that’s what most people say about psychopaths too, but i’m giving him the benefit of the doubt because we have no direct evidence of his behavior from before, which is not the case with michael, because there was never a before... i’ll get back to that in a bit). he was already vulnerable and conflicted when the langdons moved into the house, as most teenagers tend to be, but his mother’s... poor conduct, to say the least, made it much worse because it gave him a very solid reason to be angry. so the malign forces there took advantage of those ideal conditions to use him as a vessel, and that would explain why he seemed to act so differently in 8x06 than he did in the entirety of s1. damn, he even rejected michael, his hella cool killing machine of a child who was almost begging to get to know him?? if he truly were a remorseless psychopath, he wouldn’t have done that, nor would he have saved vivien from annihilation. so yeah, tate’s lack of remorse is debatable.
now, if you really believe in ben’s diagnosis, you’ll read this and roll your eyes because you think i don’t get it at all. and that’s okay, we all have different readings. but it’s hard to deny that every ghost in that house followed a sort of dark “script”. let’s take moira as an example. she was essentially good as a human, she was not to blame for the circumstances in which she died (as far as i remember, it’s been a while since i’ve last rewatched), but she was still involved in the murder of innocent people. because that’s what the house will do to whoever gets trapped there. the harmons were an exception because the whole family ended up dying together, so it was relatively “easier” to stay sane and fight the evil there. they were special in that sense because they broke the pattern of hate and resentment the house was filled with.
another undeniable fact is that michael was born with only one purpose: to bring about the apocalypse. there was no way that the child of a human and a ghost could have been good. shortly after coming out of the womb, michael had already killed the other baby and vivien (i refuse to say she was his mother because she was nothing more to him than what a host is to a parasite - hence how he tried to kill her later on with no remorse whatsoever, even though he knew his own story). even if he wanted to be good - which he did, i truly believe that, and that’s what makes him a compelling character (even in his final glorious antichrist moments, he still cried for ms. mead 2.0) - it would never be possible because he had evil within him; it was part of who he was (after all, they didn’t give us an exact reproduction of little michael’s first kill featuring little antichrist 2.0 just for the lols, did they?). his surrender to the dark side would happen one way or another, and his humanity was merely getting in the way of his mission. or do you really believe the devil could only control his own child, while everyone and everything around him would remain untouched? i wouldn’t doubt it one bit if all the people michael had ever loved had been stripped away from him on purpose, to lead him where he was supposed to go all along. remember cordelia’s words: “you’ve been led by the hand, coddled, the entire way”.
TL;DR: in my opinion, tate’s evil came from external influences and left him after he was used to bring the antichrist into the world, while michael’s was inside him all along and would only grow stronger as he got older. although i enjoyed watching both develop on screen tremendously, i do think the latter’s actions are much harder to justify due to the proportion of his actions (oh, yeah, remember how michael killed BILLIONS?) and the inevitability of his fate. but that’s just me.
(i’m not trying to convince anyone, just blabbering, don’t mind me lol)
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