#serenefig's idea was that it was the face to face confrontations with his killer that Mike didn't remember (clearly or at all)?

[dire-kumori]

Oh and i had a question about, like, logistics of the reaper au!

Assuming there's a possible ending where reaper Mike dies and young Mike manages to live... do you think it would change things? Would it matter, in the end?

Or is Evan still fated to die at Mike’s hands, is Liz still fated to die, too? Is young Mike still fated to grow up and get scooped before ultimately dying while trying to kill his younger self? (Which is just... very, very sad and horrific in so many ways)

Because if none of these things happen, it could create a paradox; where would reaper Mike have come from if Evan and Liz never die, and Mike never gets scooped?

...Very good question.

Okay, so I like to think that Reaper Mike's mission is ultimately doomed to fail. Obviously he's never going to successfully erase his past self. But after a while, it's stopped being about 'making things right' and 'protecting Evan' and more about 'hurting (kid) Mike as much as possible,' so that doesn't really matter to him. At a certain point he just kind of stops being 'Michael Afton' and just becomes 'the Reaper.'

But Reaper Mike isn't the only one who's changed by the repeated loops. Even with the memories fragmented, young Mike is living out... weeks? Months? Hell, maybe even years in this loop. He's growing up, essentially, but without aging. I mean, of course his emotional and mental maturity is skewed because - [vague gesture at the blood-soaked death parade he's trapped in] - but after a certain number of loops he isn't quite the same person who would have thoughtlessly shoved his brother's head into moving machine parts. Especially not when he still has the broken images of Evan sobbing hysterically and begging the somebody to stop hurting his brother (the Reaper turning its fury onto Evan for daring to get between him and his target, past Mike throwing himself over Evan's little body in a vain attempt to at the very least save Evan's life, if not his own) floating around in his brain.

Can you tell I'm just word vomiting at this point? I kind of lost track of the original question.

I'm not 100% what this would mean for the Reaper Mike because with past Mike growing and changing, the Reaper would inevitably change as well. I like throwing characters up against forces or circumstances beyond their control, but I don't like saying things are just fated to happen. If things play out the same way again, it's because factors leading to those events are still the same. It might actually be that so long as Reaper Mike is stuck outside of his own time, he's largely unaffected by changes made to his past aside from some ripples in his memories. He was pretty shocked when his past self made choices he was certain he never would have made, such as seeking vengeance for Evan's sake after the loop where the Reaper killed them both. So scratch what I said above, past Mike is growing, while Reaper Mike stagnates, wallowing in his self-loathing.