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envihellbender · 4 months ago

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What fears are the (original) DBD killers?

The Dead By Daylight Original Killers As The Magnus Archives Fears

The Trapper: the Web

Evan was being used as his father’s puppet and was pushed to enact his actions. The entity used him in the same way, torturing him until he relented. He uses bear traps to hunt his prey, reminiscent of a spider trapping his prey in a web.

As an avatar of the Web his bear traps have minds of their own, they grow spindly legs to wander around to stalk their pray not unlike spiders. When people stand on them they are impossible to break off, and cover the prey in something thin and sharp. It’s like being covered in diamond. Even years later Evan still has string attached to his hands and feet, sewn in to his bones. Occasionally there’s a tug, a reminder of what he has to do.

The Wraith: the Hunt

Phillip had being a hunter forced upon him, and just when he thought he’d escaped it … it turned out he’d simply been used as the gun instead of the soldier. He stalks his prey silently, and strikes when they least expect it. His appearance is bird like, covered in what looks like feathers - he is like a bird of prey who dives down and strikes suddenly to kill.

As an avatar of the Hunt he is very similar to what he does for the Entity, except he works silently and he isn’t invisible in the same way. He doesn’t have a telltale shimmer, instead his shadow is completely visible but not his body. His victims often talk of a dark shape following them, like a shadow without a person to cause it. They don’t see their attacker until they’re about to die.

The Hillbilly: the Flesh

Max’s identity is more seeped into his physical disability than it needed to be thanks to his abuse, this as well as being born and raised on a farm is what connects him to this fear.

Max was born into the Flesh, most assume because of his physical disability but actually it’s because of the farm. His father before him was an avatar too, he raised every single animal he had in isolation, they didn’t get to run through his cornfields, they were trapped in cages, fed until they were immobile beasts and filled with hormones that made them produce unnatural amounts of milk. They had obscenely large and repeated pregnancies, and it was a task the man inherited from his bloodline. When his son was born he knew killing him would devote him to the Flesh and he was worried that would offend his god… but the fear was furious about one of its own being locked away. It was time to start the entire cycle anew, Max would make a much better avatar then his lazy father who simply repeated what had been taught to him.

The Nurse & The Doctor: The Spiral

Doing these together because I think as Fears they would be two halves of one whole. The two of them both meet the criteria for medial abuse which falls under the Spiral but in different ways. Sally’s mental health broke after several traumatic events and then spending a long time working in a psychiatric hospital and being susceptible to the words of another patient. The building, the asylum, and the people inside it, psychiatric patients, were responsible for her slowly losing her mind before she became a killer. This also fits within the Spiral. Herman experimented on patients with ECT - use on psychiatric patients, he learned everything he knew about the mind from being taken into Léry’s Memorial Institute at a young age. The entire concept of grooming a child to interfere with victims’ brains seems to fit very well into the Spiral territory.

As the Spiral Nurse Sally and Doctor Herman both run a hospital, one that from the outside seems quite prestigious and well managed. It’s common for rich families to send troubled teenagers there, as a last resort. The kind who if they never returned or if they were lobotomised. Sally deals with the patient care and Herman deals with diagnosis and surgery. Sally’s specialty is manipulation and gaslighting, Herman however prefers to manipulate the brain directly from the inside with his new devices, as well as testing out new concoctions on the patients. The building itself is also very strange in that it appears different to every patient, the corridors don’t make sense constantly twisting in odd manners, and the doors and windows don’t always stay where they are.

The Hag: the Buried who’s been scarred by the Flesh

Lisa Sherwood’s was kept in a dimly lit cellar when she was kidnapped, she slipped on wet mud during a thunderstorm and fell into the earth. They consumed her and the prisoners flesh down to the bone. The cannibals resemble the Flesh, but this was forced upon Lisa. She became essentially a corpse, she sunk into the earth to return to her family. This is similar to Daisy Tanner staying within her coffin, and also Hezekiah’s embrace from the Earth.

Lisa was born into a sect that was dedicated to the Buried. They were a peaceful group that worked with the Fear, they preached that the Entities did not need to be treated as a terrible thing - fear and anxiety are healthy, human emotions after all. Lisa was very dedicated to the spiritual practices they used to summon the Earth, to be protected by it, to explore everything it had to teach them. However, when she was lost in a thunder storm and fell to the ground, the Earth could not protect her from her kidnappers. A group of cannibals who swore themselves to the Flesh, Lisa was grateful they kept her in the cellar, so she could pray to the Earth every night. One day, her pleas were answered, and even though her flesh had been consumed, she managed to rip herself from the shackles, and to be taken by the Earth itself, who promised her vengeance.

The Unknown: the stranger merged with the flesh

The Unknown takes over people’s bodies, steal them, distorts them and abandons them. It’s similar to the Not-Them of the Stranger, but it doesn’t try to convince anyone that it is a human being, or play the part of another human. It’s a creature that takes human flesh and distorts it into something disturbing for humans to look at. That’s where we get the realm of the Unknown which exists between the Stranger and the Flesh.

No one knows quite how the Unknown came to be. There are many theories, a member of the circus’s freak show who ran off or was taken by an avatar of the flesh perhaps. Most however think it is far more ancient, far more unfathomable than that. It seems turn up in quite a few different stories and urban legends, suggesting they are many of them. It is as if takes people and moulds their bodies like play dough. It creates many of them, replicating them, but they don’t contain a personality or mind that the Stranger manages to copy. It is as if it simply about the flesh itself.

The Huntress: the Lonely

Anna was cursed from the very beginning to be alone. She was born alone in the woods with her mother, raised to fear the men who passed through the woods. She had no relationships or connections but that to her mother. When she died, all she could do was hum the nursery rhymes she sang to her and continue to hurt the men her mother taught her to hate. She tries to have love and care in her life with the children she takes in but doesn’t know how to care for. Then, of course, the forest was taken by fog.

Anna’s mother had been cursed by the Lonely when she was with child, not that she knew it then. She felt something calling to her in the woods shortly after she became pregnant, from a charming man she had a summer dalliance with. A James Lukas, he said his name was. Soon as he abandoned her with no one but the baby growing inside her, she began to yearn for the woods. It was strange, usually the children born of the Lukas craved the sea, but her mother desperately wanted the woods. The mountainous, isolated woods. So one day she fled there, she told no one where she would be going. She found an abandoned lodge in the centre, an area so treacherous few even dared to take an expedition through it. She made a home there for her and her daughter, vowing that she will never allow her precious Anna to be harmed by man again. The fog and the woods would protect them, and she would teach her to hunt and defend herself. What she didn’t prepare her for was the fact her mother wouldn’t live forever, and no matter how much Anna tried to gain companionship through the children she found… The Lonely took them away from her every single time.

The Clown: the Stranger

The Clown aka Jeffery Hawk aka Kenneth Chase has several aliases which is one of the reasons why he fits so well within the Stranger. He is so capable of changing who he is, from the strongman to the clown. There is also the fact that he is inspired by John Wayne Gacy, and the entire concept of Stranger Danger which killers such as the Clown embody. Of course the most obvious connection to the Stranger is the fact he is a clown, which brings us to the circus.

Kenneth first found himself enraptured by the Stranger at a young age - not that he knew it then. His dentist seemed like an odd choice for a young boy to choose as a friend, but given it was the 1940s few people questioned it. The man gave the child plenty of access to anaesthetic and plenty of other drugs, which the child used to trap and harm birds, squirrels, and other small animals. Kenneth never felt connected to anyone around him, his father was an alcoholic and he had very few friends. He was oddly tall and strong, throwing himself into athletics at school. When his father discovered his extracurricular activities and his finger collection, Kenneth fled to his friend the dentist. He pointed him into the direction of the Circus of the Other that just so happened to be in town, and in particular to Gregor Orsinov. Finally, Kenneth had an escape from his father, the town, and an iron clad alibi for whatever crimes he wished to commit.

The Spirit: The Buried

Rin’s family’s problems began when they became wrapped up in financial troubles. She went to a private university which weighed heavily on her family’s money problems. Her father worked long, long hours hoping for a promotion. It drove him mad as he heard a whisper speaking to him, he lost sleep and his grasp on reality. This, and him losing his job, resulted in hers, her mother’s, and eventually his own death, the sheer anger Rin experienced is what resulted in the Entity taking her. The Yamaoka estate became her tomb. The estate is dark and almost resembles a graveyard. The ground is named haunted through Rin’s abilities, and during her phase state she can see the scratches and blood on it even when people disappear. This shows her connection to the earth she was raised upon.

Rin’s father built coffins, an unpopular business in Japan where the majority of the population chose cremation. However he insisted upon it, beautiful creations - dark wood with intricate painted patterns across them. He sold very few locally, or even in Japan as a whole. Rin spent most of her childhood with beautiful coffins filling the house, acting as chairs and tables, or simply being in the way. Her mother tried to get him to get a new line of work, he had a contract with this British company but it wasn’t enough. What her father hadn’t mentioned was the contract was more than legally binding. They were in more and more debt every day, so much so her father began to whisper to the coffins, to something that wasn’t there. One day late at night, Rin crept to the kitchen for some water and she heard him yelling at the coffin, there was nothing replying but her blood ran cold when she heard what he agreed to. He was going to build two coffins, one for Rin and one for her mother.

The Legion: the Slaughter

The Legion’s connections to the Slaughter lie in the military origins of their name (the division of the Roman army), the fact that the loyalty between the four of them makes them seem like soldiers for the Entity, and the music that plays from their mix tapes when they attack. Each mix tape gives them different abilities, and there is a tape for each of them, but also one made by the Entity which is the most powerful. This mimics the sounds of bagpipes that calls the soldiers to the Slaughter.

The Slaughter had been watching the four of them for a while, Frank was the longest of course, but it didn’t take them completely until the night with the janitor. It spoke to them before that, giving each one of them solace through music. They each felt a pull that no one else could understand, as if the music spoke to them individually, it was instructing them to do something but they didn’t know what it was yet. No one really understood why Julie chose to be friends with Susie and Joey. They all felt a connection with each other, they weren’t sure what and Julie’s shallow family kept trying to push her to have friends they considered “appropriate”. When Frank appeared… Music became sweeter. Stronger. The connection made their bonds unbreakable and even though their tastes differed any song they copied to tape became sacred almost. After breaking into the convenience store and accosting the janitor, the same one who’d been racist to Joey and lecherous to Susie and Julie, they all thought it was their choice. The music they heard must have been one of their tapes, the Slaughter came to them that night as a result of what they did… Of course the truth is a little more complicated.

The Plague: the Corruption

Adiris was a priestess who was chosen to save the priests and her temple from plague, a feature of the corruption. She became the High Priestess after a ceremony involving cutting off her toe, she cured the temple and city of the plague. This led to her developing an infection, she kept herself veiled to keep the corruption to herself and inside of her. She is taken by the fog after she heads to the forest looking for a cure, eventually dying in her own vomit only to disappear, She uses the power of Vile Purge as the killer, passing on her infection and sickness to the survivors. She is even capable of corrupting the cleansing waters, both of which point to her being the Corruption. She is also a priest become killer which suggests she’s undergone moral and spiritual corruption from the entity’s interference and her own trauma.

Adiris was born into the Corruption, in the Temple of Disease and Healing she was raised, to serve and worship the God that resided there. Of course the deity was or worked for the Corruption, and any healing that was supposedly given was false or came with a price. Adiris believed in the faith and sanctity of the Temple until she became a High Priestess. That was when its true purpose was revealed to her. The diseased came to the Temple, and the High Priestesses would absorb their disease and illness, creating a contained building of suffering and pain, of plague and corruption. She was restrained, each disease and ailments forced upon her body which grew weaker with every ritual. All the records say she died of an infection of some kind, but still to this day at the Temple a rotting woman covered in boils, sores, blood, viscera and vomit stalks the halls, a sickening miasma omitting from her that fills the entire ruin.

The Oni: the Desolation

Kazan is cursed by the Entity to appear and Oni, a yōkai, demon, troll type being in Japanese mythology/folklore. During the Heian period in literature they were shown to be terrifying monsters that ate people. This was precisely what Kazan did not want to become, but the Entity forced him to be this being of mindless killing and terror. The Entity made him his soldier, and forced him to do it blindly. He absorbs the blood of the survivors (similar to drinking it) which helps him track them like an obedient monster. This represents one half of the Desolation - destruction for a meaningless cause. The other is shown in Kazan’s life itself before the Entity. He was dedicated to Japan and Samurai, ridding it of what he deemed to be “imposters”. He was dedicated to destroy Japan until that caused him to become the Oni.

As a fear Kazan’s story is not that different, his father wanted him to be a Samauri, but Kazan killed all of the false samurai and imposters in Japan determined to purify his homeland, to bring honour to his family name. He started this because went on a pilgrimage where the spoke to a God he’d never met before, it showed him the true way of honour. It told him it would give him unbelievable powers and make him a true protector of Japan. Kazan accepted without question, and his new abilities to smell blood and be filled with the power of his new God to become indestructible in battle. What Kazan did not notice however, is with each battle he changed slightly. He didn’t realise he was a few inches taller or muscular at first, until it became enough for people to comment on it. These changes did not concern him and seemed quite positive… Until his skin grew red and horns penetrated his skull, it wasn’t long before he became the Oni. A being of pure destruction, fire, blood and desolation.

The Deathslinger: the Hunt

Caleb’s power is named the Redeemer, it’s his invention of a speargun, that can hook into a survivor and pull them towards him. This is an indicator of the Hunt in itself. He invented objects to punish those he declared as wrongdoers, all starting when he was a child want vengeance on those who bullied him. The racism his family experienced meant resentment and a desire for what he saw as justice was ingrained into his mind from an early age. The first man he killed was with his first gun which shot railroad spikes and it was for the punishment of stealing his inventions. When he was in prison he designed torture devices for a warden in exchange for extra meals. All of this is what makes him within the archetype of the Hunt which is primarily used to signify the police and its brutality.

Caleb’s life with the Hunt itself is extremely similar, the main difference being that his kills started much earlier. Instead of fantasising about torturing and killing his bullies, he followed the saviour that whispered in his ear and acted on it. His devices then were much more simple but they slowly got better and better, especially with the help of his saviour. As his weapons progressed in the same way they do in his regular canon, the saviour came and told him which villains to kill, it protected him. Ensured that when he was finally caught that the prison wardens saw him as one of their own. He was above everyone else in jail, warden or prisoner, he was the Redeemer.

The Blight: the Flesh

Talbot Grimes wanted to become more than human, he wanted to rise above his fellow mortals. He had become obsessed with his flesh and the limits of the human body from a young age, testing poisons on himself and forcing his body to purge and purify himself. That did not dissuade him, it simply encouraged him to explore what the human body could do, what it was weak to, and how to solve those weaknesses. He wasn’t innately connected to the flesh, but through his experiments and work he became that way. Experiments such as his inhumane tests on prisoners of war, which allowed him to bring himself back from the brink of death and cause him to become something more than human. A being of distorted flesh.

Talbot learned of the Flesh at a young age, his parents were collectors of Leitners and his father told him scary stories about the Entities at bedtime. The way his mother scolded his father for them told him that they were, she wouldn’t be as furious over him simply being frightened. He ended up sneaking down to the library at night to pour over their Leitner collection. They made him horrifically ill repeatedly, and no matter how much his parents punished him he desperately tried to be heard by the Flesh. He spent his life doing that, after he got his doctorate he began experimenting on humans, allegedly, and breaking in to slaughterhouses. Eventually, the Flesh caught up with him, and either through curiosity or sheer annoyance, turned him into a monstrosity.

The Twins: the Lonely

The circumstances of the twins birth can be an indicator of their close connection to the Lonely. In theory twins should never be lonely, but Charlotte was denied a true companion, and Victor was never given any true possibility of a normal life. Everyone abandoned them, giving them a cruel abusive life. They never knew any specific people other than their mother, all shapeless faces who abused and harmed them. Their abilities mean once they are separated they cannot both move at the same time, showing they see each other as one whole person. This means they don’t view each others company as separate, which adds to the Lonely connection.

There is a Leitner that is a handmade children’s book named The Adventures of Charlotte and Victor, but if it is read it is very clear it is most certainly not for children. The story begins telling the tale of a mother giving birth to a beautiful little girl who had a parasite clinging to her body, or that’s what the doctors called it. It was her twin brother, or what was left of him. They attempted to remove the boy, only for her to scream and cling tighter. They thought as she grew older she’d let them remove the parasite, when she didn’t the mother couldn’t bare to keep them. But who would take this hysterical little girl and her parasitic monster?

She abandoned Charlotte at a lighthouse, it had been abandoned for decades and it was on a bit of abandoned beach, there was no civilisation or anything to eat for miles. When she got in her car and left them there, she didn’t even look back. The only things there were the lighthouse, the beach, and a man tunnel into the sewers. There were rumours that they survived, feeding on hikers who’d gotten lost in the area. On the final page is two photos and a missing persons poster, the first picture is of a little newborn baby girl with an odd tiny pink creature clinging to her. The second is a photo of a middle aged woman smiling with a man on a beach, it’s a windy day, and in the background there is a young woman with lank blonde hair, hunched over in a ragged, filthy dress with a small misshapen creature on her shoulder. The missing person poster shows the middle aged woman who was last seen at a bed and breakfast by the coast 20 miles south of the old lighthouse.

The Trickster: the Eye

Ji-Woon loves nothing more than to be watched, to be stared at, to have people take his picture, to have an audience - it is all what Ji-Woon craves the most. He wants to be on screen, he wants to know everything and be known. He wants to be the ‘main event’ and he can stare so intensely that he can throw knives so perfectly that repeated cuts send a survivor into a dying state. His appearance is always so eye-catching, and his kills are always filmed, witnessed, and recorded.

Ji-Woon is different to the other avatars of the Eye in the sense that instead of witnessing he wants to be witnessed. Before it took him he was strange in the sense that whilst most cowered when the Eye pierced them with its gaze, Ji-Woon delighted in it. He craved it. He became addicted to it. So much so that he sought after it, until the Eye readily accepted him as one of its own. He is one of the few who can walk through the Eye’s realm without a care. As such he is the perfect one to lure an audience, he is adored by so many fans that they eagerly line up to see him perform. An entire audience, that is eager to be on screen next to him. That is desperate to be watched.

The Artist: the Vast

The Artist fits the vast primarily because of her connection to the birds - particularly crows, her birdlike appearance, the way her abilities involve soaring across a long distance, and the fact her associated location is the Foresaken Boneyard. Here objects seem to ignore gravity, and it is extremely open and light.

The Vast sunk its claws into Carmina from birth, the crows always watched her and seemingly appeared in South America despite not being native to the region. Her paintings were collected by Jurgen Leitner to her disgust, and she constantly searched for them. Some interpreted her crows as a death omen, perhaps that was confirmation bias because if you saw her soaring through the skies in a vast covering of crows… then you were almost certainly going to die. She always ate her victims, odd for a being of the Vast but her friends and family the birds needed to eat.

The Dredge: the Dark

The Dredge is the combination of dark and terrible thoughts, he is created in the metaphorical and literal dark, and his abilities cause darkness and he teleports through the dark lockers.

The Dredge is the monster in the wardrobe that so many parents dismiss and that children grow out of fearing. The dark and painful thoughts that the children feel that never go addressed congregate inside their bedroom, their safe space. They call to them from their wardrobe, created unconsciously by the children themselves and usually those who have been through great trauma, it leaves their wardrobes at night, it can’t move in the light and so many parent refuse to let their children leave there’s on. The creature is terrifying but it doesn’t come for the child’s terror, it beckons the child inside. The fear it feeds on is that of the parents, that their child is hurting, that their abuse will be discovered, and when the child walks into the wardrobe to join the Dredge’s brethren if the child will come back. One the child is empowered and emboldened by the Dark, it began to stalk and torment those who would abuse and hurt them in the shadows. That is until their terror and guilt pushes them over the edge.

The Skull Merchant: the Eye

Adriana uses her drones (similar to security cameras which are specific to the Eye) to watch the survivors, extremely academic (books and libraries are specific to the Eye), her first ‘crime’ is stalking her rival, the manga her father made which mimics her life in someways does some to be prophetic in a way which whilst isn’t specific to the Eye it is showing a strange connection to his daughters mind which is similar to the abilities the Archivist has.

There is a Leitner that Gerard Keay found in a comic book store in Fortaleza, Brazil. It was shoved underneath a broken shelf, propping it up so it was even. It’s a manga which is what caught Gerry’s eye immediately, when he first examined the cover it was in Japanese with a woman with a metal mask with a red light for an eye and a drone. When he examined it the drone flashed a blue light, and the title went to Portuguese, then the cover went to a glitching orange before it settled on English: The Skull Merchant. When Gerry flicked through the pages, he found the story somewhat chaotic and difficult to follow. It was about Adriana Imai, or the Skull Merchant, who kept an army of different types of droids to hunt down her enemies, and she is staggered by two teenagers with kites. That wasn’t the interesting part to Gerry, what he focused on was the drones on each page moved. Specifically they mimicked his eye movements, but if he moved they followed his movements. He shoved the manga in his bag, the Eye tattoo on his neck tingling. Hopefully once he burned the thing Adriana Imai will stop stalking anyone who read it.

The Knight: the End

Tarhos is the oldest killer, he has spent the majority of his life bringing death. He is the most entwined with the Entity, a being of death. His realm is the Decimated Borgo, a dying realm where the only colour is blood red. Even before the Entity takes him all Tarhos can remember is screams and death from his village.

The Knight has lived for far too long, and yet still he lives, he walks, he kills as is his duty as the Knight. He doesn’t remember his name any more, he has no use for it. His body has decayed with time but his skeleton and armour remains. His hair and finger nails remain, growing, and growing, and growing into lifeless, twisted tissue clinging to his steel plate. He didn’t know he would be trapped within this hell, not truly, he followed Vittorio and somehow ended up saying yes to a beast he didn’t understand. It promised eternal life to hunt down his enemies, to capture Vittorio… And he did get that, he supposed. Of course he wasn’t going down alone, he dug his claws into each of his fellows, they had become his decaying, dying brethren, but they are more like slaves who are forced to fight and work by his side.

The Singularity: the Stranger

The Singularity’s method of killing is to stalk and observe. He launches his biopods across the map in order to find the survivors and kill them. He is able to use his AI to manufacture memories, and mimic human ones. He wants to replace all humans with beings like himself, he wants to use their thoughts and minds to create the perfect being. Not dissimilar to the Not-Them and what it did to Sasha.

The Singularity watches. He watches his victims, he studies them, he learns everything there is to know about a person, and then he creates a being to replace them. His children are far superior to humans, and when they replace them no one is aware of what has occurred. The Singularity can even reprogrammed the memories of those around the person and any digital footprint to ensure everyone sees the Replacement as the human they took over. The Not-Thems come from him, and are far more powerful than their previous counterparts.

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