#reclaiming his identity after being forced to take on the ideal form someone else forced on him yanno

[aibouart]

apparently never posted these tiny guys from last year?? or i didn't tag it correctly if i had

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TOBY/Pastavee he/him Babyvee she/he/they Shitvee they/them

[agentsokka]

Nott’s Conflicting Narratives

[[Spoilers for Campaign 2 up to Episode 75]]

Man. D’you ever get the need to talk about how much you love your favorite character? Because I am feeling PASSIONATE for a specific little goblin girl right now.

I love Nott. She’s the peanut butter to my jam, the sugar to my spice, the awkward green butterball mushing around in my heart. She’s my absolute FAVORITE character of the cast and one of my all-time favorite characters in general. So, of course, I feel the need to bend over backwards, snap my spine into a pretzel, and projectile vomit my absolute love for this woman all over your dashes.

In this piece, I wanted to talk about her personal growth over the story and how she’s evolved from what viewers believed was merely a skittish, oddball of a green powder monkey klepto into an equally odd but emotionally resonant mother desperate to reclaim her life and family.

In my opinion, Nott’s overarching story revolves around a mother attempting to recapture her personal narrative from a world that has tried to tear it away from her.

Let’s first establish Nott’s position as the “mother” of the Mighty Nein.

Time for a recap.

As we discover in episode 49, Nott is a little goblin girl, who was once a young halfling woman, who was once a halfling child. In her desperate dash to protect her family from goblin kidnappers, the halfling woman known as Veth Brenatto is recaptured and put to death. Her corpse is then reanimated into the flesh puppet goblin suit we know and love today. In this process, her skin, body, and even mind are reconstructed to be more goblin-esque – a situation which Veth vehemently despises. To put distance between herself and her former life, she renames herself “Nott the Brave,” an anagram of Veth Brenatto.

“They made me everything… that I thought I was. Not pretty…not good. Just not.”

This event is significant for a multitude of reasons, primarily of which revolve around Nott’s relationship with motherhood.

In her essay The Symbolic Annihilation of Mothers in Popular Culture, Berit Astrӧm (2015) observes that mother characters are routinely devalued in popular culture via what she terms “symbolic annihilation.” Gaye Tuchman (1978) originally coined the phrase to describe the way in which media trivializes, condemns, or outright excludes mothers, but Astrӧm extends it to include the removal of mothers from narratives entirely.

We’ve seen this play out time and time again: for example, how many times have we questioned “what happened to the mother” in Disney movies? Often, we see that their exclusions leave little impact on the story and characters, with many media franchises unceremoniously minimizing the mother’s very existence as if it held no more meaning than an ironically titled paperweight.

Now, how does this apply to Nott?

Nott’s character is an inversion of this trope. Although she is killed by the goblins as per the trope’s wont, the narrative does not revolve around her son or husband trying to cope with her loss. Instead, the narrative remains centered on she the mother as this little goblin girl punches a fist through the earth and screams NOT TODAY SATAN. Her story revolves around her identity as a mother, and it takes shape in a plethora of different ways.

Nott exhibits many atypical characteristics that are not commonly associated with the idealized form of “motherhood.” She’s loud, she’s boisterous, she’s mischievous. She’s self-admittedly “strange” and eccentric. She saw it suit to dump a pitcher of cucumbers and proceed to eat them off the ground. Absolutely no one can convince me that this a goblin-specific trait and not just Nott being her weird little self.

And yet, Nott exhibits many typically feminine/motherly traits as well. In spite of her vulgarities, she’s gentle and kind towards Caleb, and it takes some time for their relationship to evolve beyond that. She likes dresses! She likes feeling pretty even though the situation rarely allows her to be. She likes to collect buttons and baubles and cutesy trinkets. And most of all, Nott expresses love. Beau’s the first person in the group to say it to someone else, but Nott is the first of anyone to emphatically express her love for this ragtag group of misfits they’ve wrangled together.

“I know we have things to do, and I want to do them, but the reason I want to find these people and rescue them is not to use them, or not because we’ve invested time in them. But it’s because… I love them.”

Nott is very much “the Heart” of the Mighty Nein, in spite of her idiosyncrasies and eccentricities. In this sense, she views herself as their mother – not just as Caleb’s parental figure, but the entirety of the group. It’s not just a meme, with adoption papers scrawled across a series of barbeque-stained napkins in chicken scratch. Over time, she’s genuinely adopted the M9 as her own, welcoming them under her stubby wings. Nott has said as much several times, but most significantly in episode 76, when she told Caleb that she wanted to protect everyone on their own individual quests.

“I protected you so that you could go on your journey and find yourself and fulfill your quest. I feel like I’ve got to do that for everyone now because, I don’t know, deep down inside it feels like my quest might not be done till everyone else has figured out who they are and what they want in this world. Everyone’s seeking something, you know?”

This protection – this overwhelming need to shield, to safeguard, to provide security and aegis – is crucial to recognizing what Nott is as a parent. A protector. A defender. Nott firmly believes that protection is representative of parenthood, its indistinguishable mirror image.

How do I know this? Nott confirmed it word-for-word in episode 13, when she explained her relationship with Caleb to the rest of the M9.

“Caleb and I have a very special…relationship. And it’s that of a parent and a child. But I am the parent, you do understand that, correct? I protect him. He’s my boy, and I keep him safe. … It’s my job to protect him, because I love him, and I am his protector.”

Nott clearly associates parenthood with protection. She reiterates it again and again. If you fall under her protection, you are her child. It doesn’t matter how old you are, how strong you are, how quick you are – she will protect you to the very last inch of her life. And over the course of the campaign, many, many times over, she’s nearly given said life to ensure the protection of others. An early example is when Nott threw her body over Caleb’s to shield him from attack. In 45, she drew the blue dragon’s attack to save Jester, shaving her hit points down to 1.

Nott again establishes this in 76.

“So I feel like, I need to be there to protect you all. To rescue you when there’s a dragon about to kill you and use my body as a shield; or to pull Beauregard out of the mouth of a worm; or to catch you when someone falls with a feather fall spell.”

This is a fundamental aspect of her character, and explains the majority of her actions. Even though she’s anxious and scared, Nott powers through her fears to protect her loved ones at any cost necessary – with a few nips to soothe her nerves, of course.

And as sweet as this gremlin of a goblin is, she doesn’t extend her protection to everyone she meets – she’s self-sacrificial, but only to her proverbial children, after they’ve spent more than enough time becoming comfortable with one another. In episode 75, for example, Nott suggested that Reani was expendable and thus should go first when facing the dragon. She likes Reani, sure, but if it came down to her and the M9? The outsider would be the first to go.

This further lends itself to the idea that Nott perceives protection as parenthood, self-sacrifice as motherly duty – she’s not just a nice gal throwing down her life in order to ensure the welfare of others, but only for the select few she deems in need of her protection.

However, Nott isn’t just a mother, which comes to the crux of this post. For the majority of the campaign, Nott has primarily identified as a mother figure – to Luc, to Caleb, to the M9 at large. But over time, she’s steadily developed into wanting to be more than just a mother. At the very least, she’s expressed her desires more openly over the course of the show as time has gone on. This development intersects with her identity issues as Nott struggles to reconcile two conflicting lives.

Throughout her short life – and I do mean short, she’s only about 25 (I’m turning 25 this month and the extent to which this little goblin has pushed herself through sends me into anxiety just by association) – Nott’s life has followed a very, shall we say, standard route. She’s always been someone’s daughter – someone’s wife – someone’s mother. Veth Brenatto grew up the small town of Felderwin with very few expectations of their people beyond the usual sort, assuming that said small town followed real-world small-town culture. As such, Veth traversed domestic paths in life, not straying far from those expectations. In spite of her intelligence and capabilities, Veth remained a housewife essentially, assisting Yeza when need be and taking care of Luc. This narrative held steady for some time.

And everything changed when the Fire Nation goblins attacked.

Veth’s narrative as a mother, as a wife, as a little halfling from the little hovel hole of Felderwin, was abruptly disrupted when she became Nott. Her narrative was stolen from her, manipulated and perverted into something she deemed grotesque. Forced to co-exist with the tribe, Nott becomes the torturer’s assistant – the absolute antithesis to motherhood in the representative forebearer of violence, depravity, and death. Her desire to nurture and protect is met with oppression and bloodshed.  

It’s no wonder Nott detests the narrative the goblins thrust upon her. Her goblin exterior fundamentally represents a life forced upon her, a narrative chosen without her consent.

“I just don't like how I feel when I see my hands or my feet. They just feel wrong. I want to be different.”

“I'll be honest. I've started forgetting what it feels like to be a halfling, to be me. I don't remember everything any more. I feel like every day I'm more and more goblin. I don't like it at all. I don't like myself at all.”

“There's still something that's not right about this. This is not my body. It's just not me. And people liking you is nice, and people accepting you is nice. But if you feel wrong inside your own skin, then, well, you can't be a good mother or a good wife, or a good anything, really.”

Upon escaping, her narrative again changes: she’s no longer anyone’s assistant, but existing for herself. And only herself. Before she meets Caleb, she’s alone, unwanted by the populace at large and unable to return to Felderwin. She’s no longer a mother – just detested vermin looking to steal and connive, so people would believe.

That is partially why, in my opinion, she adopts Caleb as her own so quickly. Of course, Nott sees him as a means to an end in the beginning, as does he. They both admit that they had ‘other intentions’ in staying together than purely out of goodness of their hearts. However, it is evident that well before the campaign started, these two forged a bond that went beyond that of convenience. Nott fills the hole in her heart, the hole in her very narrative, by becoming Caleb’s adoptive mother, assisting him in his ventures and protecting him whenever need be. By doing this, she is able to choose for herself, to differentiate herself from the goblin’s narrative of pain and misery. She is no longer just “not,” she is Nott, Nott the Brave.

As was aforementioned, Nott’s motherhood narrative grows to include the rest of the M9. However, with time, she reaches a conflict within herself: while she hates being a goblin, she enjoys her new lifestyle. Is she afraid? She’s fucking petrified. Yet like the rest of the group, she’s fallen in love with adventuring, the highs and lows that demonstrate the extent of her capabilities. Nott isn’t just an assistant anymore – she can do magic! She can fight, she can pick locks, she can adapt firearms and create explosive weaponry. Hell, she can wield a crossbow with the dexterity of an Olympic gymnast and liquidate giant spiders into bloody pastes on the wall. With the M9, she’s seeing the world, far beyond the borders of Felderwin and her small-town life.

And suddenly, Veth’s narrative as a stay-at-home mom isn’t so appealing anymore.

Is there a problem inherent to existing as a housewife and full-time mother? No, of course not. Nevertheless, Nott has found herself in a strange position – she longs for her old life and family, ripped away from her by the gnarled claws of fate, yet remains enthralled by the wonders this new narrative can offer her.

In 36, Nott reveals to Cadeuceus that she believes the M9 could be representative of a new life for her – a new narrative.

“I’m not a religious lady, but I will tell you that, for me, this journey with the group has been a bit of a sign. … A sign that there could be, for all of us, another chapter.”

It’s a new chapter, a new narrative, a new life for Nott. One she could never have imagined possible for her in the confines of her small town. And by god, does she want to live it. Nott expressed this desire to live this life to its fullest, to live this new narrative to its fullest, in 27 after Molly’s death.

“Mollymauk was a rainbow man who represented life at its fullest. And. That’s what I want, even more than… even more than what we’re going for before. Together, we’re sort of living life now, aren’t we? And before, we were… in the darkness, so. … I want to find them so we don’t go back to the way it was, when we were hiding in the shadows and, and ducking into alleys to get away from people. We were safe, but we weren’t really alive, right? With these people, we’re having fun and winning contests. And. And killing bad guys, and rescuing children…it’s amazing.”

I’m of the opinion that Nott’s speech is reflective of both her experiences with Caleb as well as her own in Felderwin. She was living before – and she enjoyed it, yes! She obviously loves Yeza and Luc. But now, she’s seeing what life can be like when lived to its fullest, seeing what life can be like when she spearheads her own narrative. She gleans inspiration from Mollymauk, who decided to head his own narrative and remain unrepentantly unconcerned with what his past might have been like. With his death, Nott becomes convinced that she needs to truly lead this life, lead this newfound narrative with this family she’s amassed.

But with that realization comes conflict once the dredges of Nott’s previous life begin seeping into her narrative. This is especially once Nott reunites with Yeza in Xhorhas.

“Caleb, I’m feeling uneasy. … I, because. What the fuck am I doing here? I just was reunited with my husband, and I’ve – I -- we were given a chance to go on an adventure and I jumped at it like that. Am I a bad person? I just left him, I ditched my husband in a den of monsters to go adventuring with you.”

Rather than hold down the fort with her newly reunited husband, Nott instinctively leaps at the chance for adventure, the chance to go out and see more of the world. She doesn’t even think about it, it’s just oh? A side quest? Well fuck me rosy, time to knock my crossbow. Because that’s what Nott would do, not Veth. And once she realizes what she’s done, Nott begins wondering if she’s a terrible person for living her life. She begins questioning her intentions, wondering whether her actions are the ploy of some subconscious desire to remain free, remain independent of her responsibilities. 

“You don’t think I’m just…delaying the inevitable? Scared of going back to my old life, or anything?”

Nott further recognizes the disparity between her two lives and how wide the gulf between them yawns. 

“It’s just, I just don’t know like. Is he gonna…even like me anymore, I’m so different. Not just physically, I do different things now. … Will I like it? I’ve gotten a taste of adventure and, and seeing the world, and now I’ve gotta go back and be a…a housewife again?”

Nott doesn’t even know if she wants to be called Veth anymore. Not by people who have come into her life since Veth’s apparent demise. When Caleb asks her in 59, she dismisses the question and asserts that they should just go with Nott for now.

She asks Caleb to tell her what she should do, in a desperate plea for someone else to give her direction in life. Because driving your own narrative is hard. It’s a painful, painful process, full of ups and downs and mistakes and setbacks. But Caleb fundamentally cannot decide her narrative for her -- it’s Nott’s narrative, not his. He can help her along and support her, but he will never be able to direct it. She has to do it for herself. 

(As a side note: I love, love, love how far Nott and Caleb’s relationship has come. Prior to the Xhorhas arc, Nott never bothered him with her problems, drudging on ahead as she didn’t want to “distract” him from his personal quest. She’s exactly like a mother, masking her insecurities and fears from her young child so that they won’t worry about what they can’t control. And now, as her child has grown up and become more aware of his mother’s struggles, she’s leaning on him more and more for support. It truly mirrors parent-child relationships and is representative of how far these characters have grown over time.)

With these conversations, it becomes evident that Nott is seeking more than family, more than the life of a housewife. And yet, simultaneously, she embodies the narrative of a mother, loves being a mother, and loves the people in both her immediate and found families. To merge these narratives will be an almost insurmountable task, from her perspective -- how can you raise a family when you’re constantly adventuring? You can’t endanger their lives. Conversely, is it responsible of a parent to endanger their own life, potentially risking everything for adventure’s sake? To widow your husband and orphan your child if something goes horribly wrong? If she becomes a housewife again, how long can she keep up the charade pretending she’s a halfling? If she stays, will she forever remain uncomfortable in her own skin? How long will she even live? Nott is juggling so many plates, and dropping even one could result in the partial devastation of these narratives she’s cultivated.

And she’s scared. She’s really, really scared. Nott is petrified of what comes next -- she knows it’s inevitable that she’s going to have to face these conflicting narratives in the future. She knows she can’t ignore it forever. And that prospect terrifies her. She says this explicitly in episode 69.

“I'm just scared, that's all. I'm scared of...I'm scared of what happens next. You know? I don't know what's going to happen after this. I found my husband. I found my son. And I want to go back with them so much. ... But I'm worried that if I go back, that'll be it.”

This overwhelming, paralyzing sense of fear has driven Nott to drink. Even more so than usual. Over the course of the show, Nott has made no secret of her drinking habits. She’s a drunkard -- she knows it, the M9 knows it. You, me, and the NSA agent watching you behind the screen know it. But it’s no accident the M9 has begun commenting more and more on her habitual intoxication. She simply is more intoxicated than usual. She’s depending more and more on her alcoholism to get through each day.  

Nott is of course afraid of enemies, of secret dangers lurking behind every corner. She’s a perpetually anxious person, constantly filled with frenetic energy. But these anxieties have worsened ten-fold with the inclusion of her intersecting narratives and responsibilities. And honestly? With all that going on in her brain, Nott just flat out doesn’t want to think about it. She wants to live in the moment -- not in the past, not in the future, but the present.

“I'm thinking about things. And I don't want to think about things. I don't want to think about anything. I just want to be on an adventure with you guys and that's all I want and I don't want to think about anything else past that.” 

And so, she turns to drinking. As she tells Caleb, drinking is her own form of self-care. While she may protect others, she herself needs protection too -- from her own thoughts, fears, and inner demons. From the physical dangers that manifest in front of her very person. 

“I know you all have my back, I know you all care for me, but no one has my front. So this flask that I drink from, it’s not for fun, I’m not taking nips because I’m looking for fun. If I wanted fun I’d be in Nicodranus with my family. This flask is my shield. It allows me to do these things, to go forward and to protect all of you.”

Nott needs to shield herself from fears that she may not come back to her family. She needs to shield herself from fears that she won’t find a remedy to her situation, that she won’t ever be Veth again. She needs to shield herself from fears that these conflicting narratives will never reconcile, thereby isolating her from either family she’s come to love as her own. 

All in all, Nott is currently torn between two lives -- one whose existence is linked to traditional motherhood, and another whose fate is yet undecided. And yet, by continuing with the M9, Nott has found herself on the path towards potential self-realization. This route she treads has the potential to shed the narrative the goblins thrust upon her and totally make one anew, one that is her own. In that sense, it’s representative of what this narrative means as a whole: Nott is more than just a mother. She’s a mother with autonomy. A mother with hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Unlike Berit Astrӧm’s (2015) analysis of symbolic annihilation, she is more than just a paper cutout of idealized motherhood left to be abandoned.

Indeed, Nott can be a mother without being the mother archetype.

Nott will certainly struggle to reconcile these narratives. She loves being a mother, but she clearly wants to love herself too. She wants to be more than just a mother, and thus she quests to recapture her personal narrative -- one where she can be both a mother and retain her personal autonomy. 

I love the nuance and complexity Sam has demonstrated with this character, and I’m sure we’re only going to see more in the future.

[daresplaining]

Elektra was a highlight of Defenders, but is basically doom for Matt. I was hoping that we’d finally see a reason, by the end, for Matt to be able to reject her, but instead we got more “I can make you good” conversations. The only way Matt will ever be able to move on would be if she becomes fully evil. We had some hints in IF that with Harold’s resurrections, each time, he came back worse. Do you think they will do this with Elektra to make her a full-on antagonist?

    It’s really tough to say where they’ll go with Elektra from here (we’re still not even 100% sure she’s alive, but we didn’t see a body so we’re at a hopeful 98%). Matt is always going to have feelings for Elektra because of the power of their time together and due to the fact that Matt, as a person, has a hard time letting people go. The solution here is not for Matt to outright reject her– which would be out-of-character and negate all of the time that’s been spent solidifying their bond– but to give them some time apart so that they can focus on their own lives. Elektra’s presence should not overrule everything else in Matt’s life, and he needs to accept the fact that she is who she is, that maybe having a long-term romantic relationship with her won’t work, that she needs to be able to live on her own terms, and make his peace with that. Otherwise, yes, they’re just going to have the same interactions over and over again. We’re also not fans of the idea of Elektra being analyzed (within the show in particular, but also in general) based on concepts of “good” and “evil”. That is a massive oversimplification of a character whose appeal comes from her comfortable existence within a moral grey area. (For this reason, we’d also hate for her to be reduced to a purely antagonistic role.) Matt’s continued use of “good/bad” terminology in The Defenders suggests that he doesn’t fully understand her yet, and still wants to change her– something we’d thought he’d realized was wrong back in DD Season 2.

    But part of the problem here, of course, is that we don’t fully know who Elektra is, and the fact that the Black Sky concept was never explained makes it tough to analyze her identity. All of the rhetoric surrounding Elektra suggests that the Black Sky is a force within her that gives her the capacity to kill. But is that inherent to Elektra? Who is Elektra without the Black Sky? Have we ever seen her? Has Matt? Where is the point of separation, if there even is one? When Matt talks about there being “goodness” within her… what, exactly, is he talking about? And when Elektra says she knows and accepts who she is… what is she talking about? There are three different factors at work here: Elektra’s “real,” possibly “good” self (whoever that is), the Black Sky (whatever that is), and the negative psychological influence of being resurrected that was introduced in Iron Fist, (which is never brought up in The Defenders). By the end, Elektra is a knot of these elements and it is impossible to pick them apart.

    This means that we’re having a really hard time figuring out Elektra’s status toward the end of The Defenders. Her progression is possible to track during the rest of the show, however. Just as we saw with Harold Meachum, her knowledge of her past life and sense of self return gradually. For Elektra, it’s a particularly slow process. It’s possible this has something to do with how long she was dead, but there’s also a hint that Alexandra might have used Hand magic to do some extra tampering with her memories.  

    By Episode 4, after her first encounter with Matt (someone who isn’t Alexandra and knows who she is!), Elektra starts to become interested in uncovering her identity, and reclaiming the memories that she has been assured she no longer needs. Having met someone from her past, achieving this suddenly seems possible, and so she starts questioning Alexandra’s lessons.

    It’s a small act of rebellion, but the first hint of Alexandra’s weakening control over her. She begins acting on her own. We see her examining the sai in the weapons room unaccompanied. (She does this again two episodes later, right before skewering Alexandra with them.) And of course, in Episode 5 she nearly kills Murakami in order to protect Matt, and because he interrupts what could have been a breakthrough moment for her. Evidence suggests that she doesn’t fully know Matt yet at this point– those memories have yet to surface completely– but she is now aware that there is some deep connection there, and that he is the only key she has for unlocking her past.          

    This is the point at which Elektra starts deceiving and undermining Alexandra. While maintaining the illusion of obedience while around other people, she ventures out on her own, going so far as to sneak out of the Hand base and break into Matt’s apartment in her quest to recover her memories. Alexandra knows something is up, but remains confident in her ability to keep Elektra under control. This overconfidence, and lack of perspective of how quickly the brainwashing is unraveling, weakens her against Elektra, who– as of Episode 6– has recovered her memories/love of Matt, and enough of her identity to solidify her conviction to free herself from the Hand.

    Learning that Alexandra is growing weak and can be killed empowers her to take the next step. Her delivery of Danny to the Hand is a power play not for Alexandra, but for herself. It seems that she wants three things at this point: power and autonomy, to avoid ever dying again (via acquiring the substance), and to be with Matt in some capacity– as her happiest memories are likely associated with him, and he’s one person she knows she can trust.  

    She brings Danny down into the hole and starts manipulating the heck out of him in order to get the substance. She asserts her dominance over the surviving members of the Hand to solidify her power. And when Matt shows up… we would expect her to try bonding with him, rather than trying to kill him. We could argue that she sees her attachment to him as a weakness, and thus wants to destroy that– but there’s no evidence of that during their fight. She wants to be with him… but she also wants him dead, and is in fact willing to die alongside him rather than escaping with him. We’ve talked before about the fact that this negates her desire to avoid death, which is the only reason she went down into the hole in the first place. 

    The reading of her final fight that makes the most sense to us is that Elektra is raw and conflicted, and operating based on pure emotion. She wants to live, but she doesn’t want to have someone else engineer her survival. She wants to be with Matt, but remembers her death and his involvement in it and is still processing that horror.

    She has achieved power and freedom, but doesn’t know where to go from here, so she follows her most basic instinct: she fights. And when death seems imminent, she accepts it, because ultimately it’s her choice, and at least she’ll be with Matt, so it might not be as horrific this time.

    We should highlight the fact that we don’t know if all of her memories have returned by this point. Since Matt and Stick are the only reminders of her past life that she has available, those memories would be easiest for her to access and the first to return. But we lack to information to discern if the rest of her past returned with them. There’s no evidence to prove either option. Elektra could very easily be back to her normal self, but in a raw, frantic, uncontrolled form (as you’d expect, considering what she’s been through and the fact that she’s literally just had to rebuild herself.) And again, we return to the question of who Elektra actually is. As mixed-up and confused as she seems at the end, she’s confident in her identity. Matt tells her she’s Elektra Natchios, not the Black Sky– but she already knows that. That’s been the whole point of her narrative arc in this show.  

    This can be read two ways: that she has been completely consumed by the Black Sky (whatever that is– we still don’t know!), or she has finally overcome her identity issues from DD Season 2 and embraced who she has always been: Elektra Natchios, someone who’s really good at murder. We far prefer the latter reading, since it creates a much more satisfactory bit of character development and aligns with what we personally want for Elektra. She herself states that she’s embracing her true identity. But since her point-of-view is unreliable thanks to the hypothetical Black Sky influence, and since Matt seems so convinced that she is no longer herself (and claims she is lying), it’s really tough to figure out El’s actual status in this scene. If we knew more about the symptoms of being the Black Sky, and could thus separate those out from the rest of Elektra’s personality, it would be far easier. As it stands, this scene is vague and completely up to personal interpretation.   

    We’re expecting Elektra to have a reduced presence in Daredevil Season 3 (if she appears at all), if only because she has dominated the story for the past two DD-relevant shows and they’d likely want to move on to new material. We’re okay with this. We love Elektra, but Matt needs different stories. But at the same time, we are desperate for this to be a beginning for her, not an end. This would, in fact, be the ideal time for Marvel to *cough* give her her own show…