#also when i say breakthrough i mean him dismissing his truth in orde to find some sense of normalcy

[fnalguy]

headcanon 04 || canon divergence ramble. 

so a lot of my canon divergence comes in the form of a timeline. in canon, tommy goes to pinehurst when he’s 17 & resurrects jason when he’s 18. I’m going to kind of stretch that out over a longer period. I think he goes to pinehurst at 18 because he’s desperate to get out into the world & find a way to function. He’s in permanent fight mode during that time & can’t keep his emotions regulated to any capacity --- it’s all or nothing baby. after the massacre i feel like it gets worse when he’s convinced he’s becoming jason. I think the massacre caused him to regress a lot more because it drove him to question his truth. 

Ever since he was a child, people have told him that jason was just some guy in a mask. jason voorhees was dead, a legend. The fact that the killer in Pinehurst was just a guy in a mask would make him wonder. The memories are fuzzy & they come in brief & terriyfing moments of clarity. He remembers the way he felt, but the rest of it is sort of hard to sort through. He was young & ill-equipped to deal with the scenario at hand. Anyways, what I’m getting at is that I think it would take at least a couple of years to straighten out his perception of things. To filter through the hallucinations, the medication, the memories & everything else in between. 

I think he was right on the verge of a ‘ breakthrough ‘ when he decided he needed closure on the subject. He had been told Jason’s ashes were buried but it wasn’t enough to be told. There was still this gap in understanding that the man he had killed was dead, if that makes sense??? He never forgets the way Jason’s hand moved after being stabbed in the face & the fear that drove him to ( double tap ) make sure the job was done... which btw is also i think the first ‘ extreme ‘ reaction that triggers all the ones to follow, but that's a conversation for another day. 

I think he’s 21 when he decides to dig up jason’s body & ( attempt to ) burn it. I think finding a friend in therapy who believed him really fed that fire. He was the first person to ever really believe tommy ( other than trish --- bcs she lived it ) & tommy hits the ground running with that connection. It’s not rational but he’s sure it’s the only thing that's going to bring him peace. He has an extreme reaction when seeing the maggot-eaten corpse--- his psychiatrist had lied to him. she had told him that jason was cremated, but his remains were still intact. that’s when he impales jason & this whole scene goes down, resulting in jason’s revival. lowkey i like the idea of the whole thing happening on his birthday as it would give him a friday the 13th birthday & i’m dramatic. but we’ll see after i sleep.

he goes back to the unger institute by the end of it all. after he defeated jason, he expected it to be over, but it just meant he was put under closer watch. he had proof, witnesses to what he had experienced & it still wasn’t enough to convince anyone. he’s stuck in unger for a year before they decide that his ‘regression’ can only be fixed with medication & he spends the next several years convinced that it’s intentional. that this was all done with the purpose of keeping him quiet--- which to a dregree, it was. he was literally threatened by state police for tbeing so adamant about it all. i want to emphasize that he was right about enough things to make him feel like he had the whole picture, even if a lot the conspiracies in his head were made up. yes, they were trying to keep him quiet but not to the degree he thought.

when he’s 24  he enters a very extreme paranoid episode when he attacks his psychiatrist & flee’s unger. i think what may have triggered this was a change of medication, though i’ll think a little more on the subject. It’s shortly after he flee’s that the events of the friday the 13th game goes down & he shows up at crystal lake. though i know there’s no real ‘ storyline’ i love the idea of him coming back & playing hero & maybe the cops helping him fly under the radar because of his part in defeating Jason ( twice ) when he was younger. It sort of leaves him with the impression that he may not be as alone as he thought & helps kind of break his ‘ everyone is against me, tread carefully ‘ mentality.