#unprettiers

[brothersgrim]

ONE WORD HEADCANON ASKS

@unprettiers asked so long ago it was on a different blog aches + mind for both boys 

aches: does my muse have any frequent aches? ie, muscle aches, joint aches? how do these affect them from day-to-day? 

mind: does my muse have any mental conditions that affect their lives? what are they? how do they handle them? what coping methods do they use most? 

For the aches, oh boy. I was going to say I think Taker has it worse, but the more I thought about it, the less sure I am. They’ve both been through some pretty horrific things. Kane was set on fire, and that was never properly treated. Taker’s died repeatedly, and I don’t think WebMD has anything for that. That's outside of the literal decades of abuse (much of it physical - remember, the beatings and betrayals Paul performed on TV was just the behaviour he was willing to let other people see), starvation, fights, even the suboptimal sleeping conditions the boys had contributed to their fair share of aches and pains.  So I'm mostly going to talk about the worst ones here. 

Obviously, Kane's worst chronic pain comes from the fire. Firstly, he was burned alive. The residual scarring isn’t as bad as Paul/Kane’s BDD makes him think sometimes, but it was still bad (and we’ll get into the BDD later). He does have a bit of nerve damage left over from the fire itself, though it mostly manifests as a sort of tingling numbness that flares up every now and again. Of course, he has worse days, too, where it all just hurts. This can be especially bad if he’s been pushing himself physically for too long. Some days, it hurts (or just generally feels stiff) too much for him to really want to do anything. Taker, being the overprotective brother he is, does what he can to look after him when Kane’s feeling like this. Paul is– Less sympathetic. (That’s partly the reason it’s so bad.)

It wasn’t just the actual fire itself that scarred him, either. (It did, and the burn scars are the worst - even when faded - on his calves, left arm, shoulders and face.) There was debris involved, too. There are lingering scars from falling boards on his back, too - mostly around his shoulderblades, but a little lower down, too. There was a lot of bruising, a few fractures… It took a long time to heal. It’s frankly some kind of miracle he survived at all (though my thoughts on that are for another post). When he’s young (post-fire), his shoulders bugged him a lot. If he were to think back, he’s not sure how much of the discomfort was caused by the injuries, or the fact that he was in a cold, sometimes damp basement, with only a thin blanket to sleep on. That certainly didn’t help. Neither did the growth spurts. Those were pretty rough for someone who ended up as big as he did. 

The good news is, the shoulder aches mostly faded with time. … Or, with time and leaving the hospitals, basement, and Paul. Getting away from Paul truly does fix most of the brothers’ problems. Early on, he gets pretty bad aches and can need to lie down for a bit in order to function. Pain meds help, sometimes, but he generally dislikes having to take any kind of medication. It’s another thing the hospitals ruined for him. He also sometimes has to watch himself when he’s working out, training, or fighting. He’s been known to push himself too far on more than one occasion.

The interesting thing is that this kind of goes the other way, too. Kane has a lot of nerve damage, and a lot of psychological damage (which we’ll touch on later). Taker has a similar deal. Sometimes they just don’t feel pain. Or, at the very least, they don’t realise they’ve felt pain. This can make both of them push beyond what’s reasonably safe for them and aggravate injuries to a pretty nasty extent. At times, it can be a long while before they even realise what they’ve done - even up to a few days. Of course, when it does finally set in, it tends to set in bad. 

Another injury Kane has is his eye. This one doesn’t hurt so much once he’s an adult, but hurt a lot when he was a kid/teenager. It felt like a cross between itching and a migraine for the longest time. It didn’t help that his vision is constantly blurred through the damaged eye, which also gave him some nasty strain migraines until he adjusted. It wasn’t fun. 

Speaking of adjusting - and speaking - there’s also the issue of his throat. Yes, Paul lied about him being mute. We all know that Kane is, in fact, capable of speech (most days). Kane didn’t know that. And early on, smoke damage made it so that it hurt to try. Even when he did try, he couldn’t get a lot out. So he gave up. Sometimes, even swallowing or breathing hurt. He probably should’ve been given a lot more water than he actually was. … And more everything, but that’s besides the point. Unfortunately, if you won’t use muscles for a long enough time, they start to deteriorate. Kane didn’t speak for twenty years. While he ended up not needing the electric larynx to speak, for a while, it was vital. It took a long time for Kane to be able to make any sound on his own again, and he was known for pushing himself too far too fast. It was a process. 

Then we have the general workout aches and pains. Like his brother, even though he’s naturally huge and scary, Kane is rarely satisfied with what he already has physically. You don’t get far in their line of work by settling. He also, when they get along, helps his brother in and around the Yard and workshop. That adds to it all, too. 

Oh! And the elbow. I almost forgot the elbow. The one that Steve and Hunter broke three times in a row. That one bothers him a lot, both while it’s healing and after the fact. It’s more of a dull ache, and usually only if he over-exerts himself too much, or if it rains. That upsets him sometimes, because he likes the rain. As I mentioned, he doesn’t like taking medicine either, so pain meds every time a storm approaches is out. He finds some topical rubs and massages help a bit, especially against the stiffness, but it never really goes away.

Also his ankle. Seth broke his ankle in the middle of a mental breakdown that, admittedly, Kane did cause. I love that segment, but Kane didn’t exactly set the bone in a healthy way. This is a newer injury, but it has been healed up. It still hurts sometimes if he pushes himself too hard, but he was better about letting that one rest - both because Paul wasn’t around anymore, and because Taker was very strict about him sitting down when it hurt. Big brother is protective. 

I could go on, but those are the main ones, and I think it’s time to move on to his brother now. 

Taker is equally a mess, just in different ways. I mean, like I said, first and foremost, he’s dead. That causes a bunch of issues for him - including body temperature. Taker canonically does not generate any body heat. He’s consistently described as being ‘cold as ice’ when people touch him. He’s literally always freezing. This means he gets achey way more easily than others. Even when he has a pulse (ABA era), his circulation is awful. This leads to general stiffness and soreness, especially when he wakes up. It’s one of many reasons that, even though he gets up early every day, he’s not a morning person.  

He also spent the majority of his life a slave, and doing hard labour. He’s a patchwork of scars. Obviously, he has some on his knuckles. These are mostly from fighting, or from training to fight. They hurt a lot more early on than they do later in life. One of the lasting impacts is that it’s hard, and eventually impossible, for him to fully straighten his fingers. It can be a bit annoying, but he deals with it. 

He also has scars on his palms. These are from years and years of overworking himself, voluntarily or otherwise. Shovels and various other tools wore the skin away, and now he has to live with it. These also contribute to how hard it is for him to fully open his hands. Interestingly, this means that it’s harder for him to really get more cuts or splinters on his hands, as the skin has toughened up quite a bit. That didn’t stop his palms from scarring over when he got crucified, though. In the middle of each of his hands are circular scars. Broader circles on the palms, smaller circles on the backs of his hands. These hurt a lot while he was getting them; they hurt less now. 

Then there’s the neck! He has ligature marks around his neck. That’s from the first time he died, back when he was fourteen. For a long time, his neck was very stiff and sore. Then, it was only stiff and sore after he exerted himself a lot, or after he just woke up. Now, it’s mostly if he just wakes up, though aches tend to linger there more than other places. It also means coughs or sore throats tend to linger a bit longer with him. It’s annoying, but he deals with it. 

He has a lot of back pain, surprising nobody. This is from the hard labour he does, all of the fighting, and carrying the company for so long. You know how it is. Sometimes it makes it hard to work, or train, or fight, but he’ll do it anyway. He’s a stubborn man. It doesn’t help that he tends to take cold showers, and not linger in them. Once again, he deals with this by not dealing with it and powering through. He keeps going until he can’t anymore. 

Oh, and his knees. His knees are also really, really bad when he gets older. This is from his work in the yard, his work in the ring, and how many times he’s knelt in his life, voluntarily or otherwise. 

Most of it was otherwise. 

This one is a bit harder to ignore, because if your legs don’t work, it’s hard to go do physical labour. Again, a lot of the time, Taker would just keep trying to power through regardless - that’s just how he is - but if it got bad enough, and Paul wasn’t around, he might take a seat and rest for a bit. That’s usually a sign that it’s gotten really bad. His hips bug him, too, but this ties right into the knees thing. 

He also gets headaches sometimes, but I don’t know if that’s because of how many times he’s been hit in the face, or because he stresses himself out a lot, but it happens. He also usually just powers through these, too. 

I mean the long and short of it is, the boys hurt all over all the time, and for the most part they’ve been taught to ignore it and keep going.

They only have the healthiest of coping methods at the Valdis Funeral Home and Mortuary. 

But, now we get on to the really messy stuff. Their mental state. 

Both of the boys have really horrible PTSD, stemming from both the fire and their treatment after it. It was twenty-something years of horrific abuse in various forms. 

For Kane, this manifests in mood swings, loyalty complexes, attachment issues, obsessive tendencies, BDD, and mutism. It also works as claustrophobia, food insecurities, and altering between touch starvation and touch aversion. It’s also implied in at least one segment that he has some kind of hallucinations, but I don’t know if this is canon or just Paul’s manipulation - it’s kind of hard to tell. 

The mood swings get better with time, but they can be really bad on bad days - I guess ‘mood swings’ isn’t even the best words for it. It’s periods of mania, depression, and aggression. I’m not a psychologist, so I can’t say for sure, but I think it’s in part because of his PTSD, but also part because he spent so much of his formative years in total or near total isolation, and that had an impact on how he learned to process/didn’t learn to process emotion or handle social situations. When I describe Kane as ‘feral’, I do mean it. Initially, he doesn’t deal with this well at all, but he does go to therapy later in life. (There’s a great example of how he becomes more socialised in his Team Hell No run, where Daniel is mad because Kane wants to eat a puppy - I said MORE socialised, not completely socialised - and Kane asks if they can talk about it instead of just being mad, but I could go on about his growth for ages and that’s not what this is for.) 

Now, I have to say here, a lot of the times Kane’s called unpredictable or overly violent, it’s more than justified. Like, oh no, Kane is lashing out against this man who’s called him slurs and insulted him to his face for over a decade. He’s attacking the guy who tried to set him on fire, abused him and his brother, and tried to steal his mask, how shocking! 

But, at the same time, some of the mood shifts were pretty extreme. For the most part, Kane learned to deal with these either through therapy (actual therapy), and through figuring out grounding methods on his own.  As with most of Kane’s struggles, being around his brother makes things easier. Part of this is because Taker is someone who - as long as they’re getting along - makes Kane feel safe; the other part is the huge difference in body temperature. Taker is so cold - even when he’s alive - that it’s like holding an ice cube, and it’s enough of a jolt compared to Kane’s above-average temperature to help him recenter himself. Taker also just knows how to talk to Kane, and that helps, too. It also just helps to have outlets, if that makes any sense. Venting aggressive periods at the gym or in the ring, for example, or being allowed to pester and goof off around/with his brother or the few genuine friends he’s gathered, or just being allowed to spend the day in bed if it’s a downswing. Surprise surprise, accommodating peoples’ needs in an understanding way helps them heal. 

Shocker. 

Next on the list is Kane’s massive loyalty complex. This shapes a lot of his relationships - and by extension, is the framework for a lot of his development - throughout his post-release life. He has a very hard time saying ‘no’ to people he feels he’s supposed to like/be aligned with/have care about him. Like most things, this is Paul’s fault, and stems from Kane’s time in the basement. He had complete control over everything that happened to Kane, and he was also the only interaction the poor kid had aside from various rodents and vermin that would sometimes find their way in. He learned very quickly that if he didn’t do exactly as Paul asked, he got punished, and punished severely. It could be anything from yelling or screaming at him to denying food, water, or just completely ignoring him, which was even worse. No conversation, no interaction… At times, Paul would come down to the basement to rearrange boxes and things out of Kane’s reach, and just play dumb to any attempts to get his attention. Just to make a point. 

This was made worse when he was in the hospitals. He wasn’t treated as a person there. Oftentimes, he wasn’t even treated as an animal. He was an object at best. Something to talk about, poke, prod, run experiments on, then toss away when you got bored. The fact that he couldn’t talk made it even worse. A lot of them just took that as carte-blanche to talk like he wasn’t there. They’d do that about a lot of the patients, sure, but especially those that were nonverbal, and their comments were rarely ever kind. On top of that, he was moved around very frequently. He didn’t get to put down roots. He didn’t get to have a routine for very long. He only had two constants: Paul, and the desire to kill his brother. He latched on to both of those things. When he was in the basement, Paul being there meant he got some kind of interaction. It meant he got spoken to, even if the words used were rarely kind. It meant that he got food or water. In the hospitals, it meant someone would acknowledge him as human (even if Paul was just acting, and even then, was known to let the mask slip from time to time). It meant he could have someone who understood what had happened to him. And of course, Paul being Paul absolutely encouraged this attachment, something we can see even once Kane’s released and in the Federation. How often do we hear him say something like ‘I’m your dad’ or ‘do it for your father, boy’? It’s basically a back-up catchphrase. For Taker, Paul has the urn to control him. For Kane, he has gaslighting and conditioning. Kane has to keep Paul happy if he wants to survive. Bad things happen when Paul is upset. These are rules he followed that were as natural and fundamental to him as the laws of physics. And yes, okay, sometimes Paul isn’t a part of his life. Sometimes he’s managed to get away from his father. In that case, there is a void in his life, and nature abhors a vacuum. Kane will, often, latch on to the first person who’s halfway decent to him. A lot of the time, this is his brother.  That’s a good thing. Taker will always do his best for Kane. (Assuming he has his own free will, but we’ll get to that.) He loves Kane. … But sometimes, it’s not Taker Kane latches onto. Sometimes it’s XPac, or Tori, or Lita, or even Kurt. Someone who cares a lot less about Kane, and more about what Kane can do for them. Because of what Kane grew up with, he has a very hard time differentiating between healthy and unhealthy relationships. He just needs to be needed. He needs to feel useful. So if he finds someone who gives him that dynamic, he latches on hard. If he THINKS he’s found that dynamic, he’ll latch on, even if the other person doesn’t know. There’s a spectrum of how ‘deep’ into this he can get, and obviously, it’s worse with certain people and in certain times. Obviously, it’s worse when he’s recently been released, late 90s era. That’s when the conditioning is the most fresh. It’s also bad during times of turmoil or sudden negative change. Especially early on, Kane doesn’t do well with change, and frankly, the outside world is scary. Yes, he’s a big, scary dude with fire powers. But he doesn’t remember life before the fire (something else we’ll get into). He only remembers isolation. The basement, the hospitals. The world outside is huge and busy and so different. Especially early on, Kane doesn’t know how any of it works. He needed someone to show him the ropes. When the noise in his head is too loud, the world as a whole is too much to navigate. He needs someone to do it for him. Combine these factors and you get a seven-foot-tall fire-demon-warlock who’s beyond willing to throw his own morals and self comfort away if it means you’ll just tell him you love him. If you’ll make him feel like he matters.

He’s a simple man, in that sense. 

Now, that sort of covered his attachment issues, too, so I’ll touch briefly on Kane’s memory. Or lack thereof. 

If you’ve been around here long enough, you’ll know that Paul is a dirty liar. Almost every word out of his mouth is a lie. He said the boys’ parents never loved them. This isn’t true. He would go on and on about how their parents mistreated Kane. This is also untrue. Paul says Adam (the Undertaker) hated Kane from day one. Also false. The list goes on. His parents loved him. His brother loves him still. But Kane? Kane doesn’t remember any of that. Anything before the fire is completely lost to him. Technically, it’s all still in there, but it’s buried too deep for anything but scraps to surface without serious therapy. Part of this is for physical reasons. Paul and the doctors weren’t exactly kind to him. Anything ranging from general abuse to electroshock ‘therapy’ messed with his cognitive abilities. The other reason he’s repressed those memories is just how much worse it makes the entire experience. It’s one thing to be trapped in a basement. It’s one thing to be horribly starved and abused. But to live like that when you’d previously only known love and care? That’s a nightmare. To top it off, Kane didn’t have the best time in the fire (obviously). He watched their mother burn in front of him. It was too much to handle. All of that melted together into a great reason for him to shut the early years of his life out. It was safer that way. He doesn’t remember anything about Iza or JT, and for the longest time, took Paul’s words about them as gospel. The same with his brother, his general past, everything. Over time, some things start slipping through the cracks, but not a lot. He gets flashes, sometimes, maybe weird dreams, but most of what he learns about his past he just hears in stories. He looks at the only photo Taker has saved of their family together and it looks like strangers. He hears stories from Taker, and maybe a few others who knew his mother and father (Paul doesn’t count), and it sounds like fairy tales. Even seeing his and Taker’s school photos on the wall of the elementary school felt like an elaborate prank. He doesn’t always like to think about it, but it’s something he works on processing the older he gets. 

Now we’re on to the obsessive tendencies. These manifest in a few ways. The first is that, obviously, Kane is obsessed with his older brother. This is, like most things, for a few reasons. The first is that the two of them are magically joined at the hip. They have been since Kane was born. Not every Valdis sibling is like this, but the two of them share thoughts sometimes. It helps a lot now that Kane doesn't talk as much, but it's always been that way. This caused a few problems during the fire that I’ll touch in when we go back to discussing Taker. They were also best friends when they were babies. Then the fire happens. And subconsciously, Kane still needs his big brother, just like his big brother still needs him. And then Paul is constantly in Kane’s ear, telling him that it’s his brother’s fault that he’s there. His brother’s fault he’s scarred. His brother’s fault his parents are dead. (This is an interesting one for me, because Paul flip-flops on the images of Iza and JT he paints for Kane. When he wants Kane’s loyalty, they were horrible and abusive, didn’t care about either of the boys, and deserved what they got. When he wants Kane angrier than normal about his brother, it’s that your adoptive father was a fine, upstanding man, your poor, sweet mother, blah blah blah.) And his brother is his only real tie, aside from Paul, to the outside world. So Kane is obsessed with his brother for the vast majority of his life. Whether that means he wants to kill Taker, kill anyone who looks sideways at Taker, or both, depends on the day. 

He can also, as I mentioned before, get obsessed with people he thinks can give him the stability he needs. This one only really happens during bad mental health moments. And I mean really, really bad mental health moments. Like the time he beat Taker into a coma, forgot he did it, held a funeral, went on a warpath trying to find the ‘culprit’ for about a month, then remembered it was him and no longer felt bad about it. The bad moments. This ties into what I mentioned before regarding his need to feel useful. It will never go as far as his obsession with his brother - that overpowers all else - but it can get extreme. It can also be really, really hard for him to snap out of it, depending on how far gone he is. It’s usually best to just call his brother. 

This segues really well into the next point, because his last obsession - with his appearance - leads really well into the BDD point, too. Because here’s the thing: Paul lied. Again. This is an interesting moment where he lied in both directions. When Kane first debuted, he had his mask on, and refused to take it off or let anyone near it. If you ask him why, it’s because he’s disfigured. He’s hideous. He’s deformed. He was scarred so horribly in the fire, any normal person who saw his face would run screaming. And then he’s unmasked, and he looks… Fine. Handsome, even. And Paul says Kane was never scarred at all, it was all in his head. I’ve reconciled it by meeting in the middle. Yes, Kane does have some scars, but they're nowhere near as bad as he's been raised to think. And his BPD preys upon that. Some days, especially once he gets actual therapy and meds, he sees himself as he is. Other times, he sees his reflection as a twisted, mangled monster. It repulses him. It scares him. It isn’t him but it is. It’s a reminder of the worst thing that happened to him and everything that came after, a message to the rest of the world that he’s a freak that will never belong. He’s broken mirrors over it before, put his fist through the glass and it hurt less than looking at himself a moment longer. The mirrors in the funeral home have covers, now, blinds, curtains, that kind of thing, and there isn’t one in Kane’s room. If he uses one at all, he uses one in the bathroom. Some days, it can get so bad that even his reflection in silverware turns his stomach, so there are some special cutlery kept for him at the home. (These have been replaced for various reasons over the years.) It’s one of the reasons he depends on his mask so much. It’s a shield and a security blanket. Especially early on, but even sometimes later in life, he cannot be seen without it. In the canon instances when he’s unmasked early on, he covers his face and runs. Ironically, it’s this behaviour that results in his ultimate unmasking with Rob. They have a really good conversation about it beforehand, too. I’ve talked about it before, but I think it bears reiterating now. The crux of the issue between Kane and Rob was that Steve Austin and Triple H had unmasked Kane during a tag match, and Kane ran out on Rob, costing them the win. Rob is, understandably, upset with Kane. The only thing Kane can tell him is he left because his mask was removed. He had to leave. That makes no sense to Rob. But to Kane, being seen without his mask on is just as lethal as jumping into the freeway or swimming with lead flippers. He can’t figure out how to explain why it’s so bad to Rob because to Kane, it’s obvious. He can’t let anyone see his face. He just can’t. 

Not even himself. 

Like a lot of things, this changes with time. He works on it. He goes to therapy. He learns to cope. He handles it. It never goes away, per se - he still has bad days where he wears a mask even at home, and he has good days where he can go without one while he runs errands - but it gets… Better. He still doesn’t like mirrors much, but there are days he can handle it, days he can be alright with himself. Again, the more he’s away from Paul (and his other abusers), the better he gets. He’ll never really see himself as handsome (at least without the mask), but, yeah.

He gets better. 

And the last thing I’ll touch on for Kane is his selective mutism. This is part mental, part physical. Cause like… Kane was set on fire. That’s a thing that happened. He was nine years old when he was burned alive. Yes, he survived, but that messed him up. He sustained some pretty real smoke damage to his throat (and probably tore it screaming, let’s be real). That would’ve been bad enough, but then you add in the psychological aspects. He was told being silent kept him alive. If he did try to speak, he was punished - and besides, it hurt. It wasn’t worth it. And Kane grew to fully believe that he couldn’t speak - maybe he’d never spoken - and would never hear his voice again. Once he gets out, he eventually, gradually, starts talking again. It takes a while, but he gets there. Sometimes. Because other times, the mental blocks come back up. His mouth fills with phantom ash, his throat clogs with long-since–faded smoke. In some cases, he doesn’t know what triggers his nonverbal periods - some days they just happen. He’ll wake up and notice that words just aren’t happening. It doesn’t matter how hard he tries to force them, it’s just a no. Other times, it’s caused by periods of high stress, anxiety, fear, or even anger. In this case, it’s usually only until he’s had a bit to calm down, then he’ll (eventually) be ready to speak again. It works faster if he can have somewhere cool and quiet and dim (not dark) to relax after. He has other coping methods, too. He tries to carry a notepad and pen so he can write things down, for people who care to read. He's started learning sign language. And he has his brother. Taker always knows what Kane wants to say - they’ve been able to share thoughts, to put it simply, as long as they’ve both been alive. There was a brief break while Kane was in the hospitals/basement due to trauma and abuse, but it’s back now. Taker will often act as Kane’s interpreter, or at the very least monitor things around him, when little brother can’t talk. They make it work. 

Now we can move on to Taker, who I would argue is just as messed up as Kane is - just in a different way. Taker’s main mental struggles take the form of self-harm/self-sabotage and suicidal ideation, a saviour complex, lost time, difficulty with interpersonal relationships/trust issues, panic attacks, issues with guilt/blame, and his own flavour of fixation with his brother. Let’s get to it!

First is the self-harm and ideation. This is big, but how obvious it is depends on the day and situation. It’s actually how Taker came to be what he was, and he just never really got better. Well- That’s not entirely true. He does improve over time, in some verses more so than others, it just never entirely goes away. So, let’s talk about it. Adam - Taker before he went by the name - was twelve when the fire happened. Twelve years old when he watched his family die. Twelve years old when everything in his life went to hell. That changes a person. Especially at the time, when PTSD was shell-shock was something only soldiers had, and the treatment was to drink about it. Nobody really knew how to deal with him. Especially since his temporary guardians, Aunt Nel and Liam, didn’t know they had nephews until a month before the fire. They didn’t have time to prepare, even if the resources were out there. What were they supposed to do? Anyways, it got worse. He was a Valdis away from his yard. He was an orphan who watched his family die. He was a small town kid in a big city. So on and so forth, he suffers for about two years before he finally reaches what he thinks is a solution. He offers his soul, an eternity of servitude, in exchange for his family’s return to the world of the living. There was more detail to the potential contract, but we’ll keep it at that for now. He thought it was a great idea. If it works, he gets to have his family back and go home. If it doesn’t, he gets to be dead with his family in the afterlife. There’s no downside, he thinks. And then it goes wrong. He doesn't know it's wrong at first. It feels like it's going well - he does, he wakes up, someone was listening. That's all he needed. And then something goes wrong. I know what it was, but he doesn’t, not until much later. (Kane was alive. That voided the contract. But how was he supposed to know when he watched the house collapse?) That’s not the point here, though - the point is, when he was a teenager, he made the choice to die because it ‘had no bad outcomes’. He genuinely did not want to live anymore if he could not life without his family. He also felt like he wasn’t remembering them as well anymore. It was little details that felt wrong, but he knew more would slip away over time. He couldn’t accept that. 

Just in case you're wondering, dying didn't improve his mental health at all. The only difference is he can't die. He wants to, though. He’s tried. Mostly when he was younger, back when he thought it would still do something (he’s since been disillusioned; he knows he always comes back). While the urge to die stays with him for the vast majority (or perhaps, in some verses, all) of his life, it isn’t until the Big Evil period of his life that he starts acting on it again. That's a really low point for him, and I’ll talk more about it as time goes on (not that he has a lot of high points), but, yeah. The buried alive match against Vince? He didn't care if he won or not. Sure, winning was the ideal situation in the long term, as it would get rid of Vince, and he hates Vince. But he also didn’t expect Vince to play fair. And if he cheats, if Taker dies? Who cares. It's fine. Even if he doesn't come back - which he wasn't sure if he would, at the time - it's no great loss, right? He doesn't think so. And he's tired. He’s so, so tired. It's the worst in the canon timeline, of course. He’s watched his entire life be destroyed for… No real reason at all. His brother is mangled, mutilated, hates him, and is back with Paul. His reputation is destroyed. He’s had his finances stolen. He’s not sleeping. He’s drinking again. He’s been tormented by phone calls, stalkers, having his past trauma dug up, fake cops, real cops, accusations of cheating, murder, abuse… The list goes on. To put it lightly, he’s doing rough. To put it more realistically, he’s completely fucking snapped. He doesn’t want to do this any more. He’s never wanted to do this, but now it’s all become too much, too much, too much again. He just wants to rest, and there’s only one way for that to happen. And besides. If he dies, he might see his parents again. (He might see Liz again.) 

Now, these are extreme examples of his self-destructive tendencies, but there are… Less severe cases, as well. Like his tendency to overwork himself. (This is also Paul’s fault.) I mentioned the scars he has on his palms; those are from wearing his hands out until they’re bloody, over and over and over again. He’ll avoid sleep if it means getting work done and meeting deadlines. Sometimes he forgets to eat. There are a few ‘reasons’ for this. The first is that this is, unfortunately, a force of habit. Ever since he first died, he was put to work. I mean, really, does anyone believe Paul did any labour in the yard? And there was always so much to do. Paul took all the money he could after the fire, the insurance, the inheritance, anything he could get his hands on. And then he'd tell Taker about how the home was suffering, how they were in danger of losing the property, how they were racking up debt. How it was his fault he wasn’t working hard enough. And if Taker worked himself until his shoulders dislocated or tore and Paul got a new tailored suit (there’s this little Italian place he just loves, oh, it’s so luxurious there), well, that’s different, and why are you asking anyway, boy, I didn’t tell you to speak. 

Actually, a lot of his self harming habits are things he picked up from the way Paul (And Ted, Love, Fuji, and so many more) treated him. Taker will never use hot water when he showers if he runs it himself, and he’ll never take a bath unless someone else starts it for him. This stems from an incident when he was seventeen years old. There was a bigger, fancier funeral in the books, and he'd been working for days. He’d also been sleeping in a cave near the abandoned residential district for the past few days (something Paul canonically made him do) and it showed. He was tired. He was sore. He was caked in dirt and blood and who knew what else. Paul had been gone for a few days. 

He just wanted to feel like himself again. So he had a shower. And then Paul found out. And just a shower turned into “what in the hell are you wasting water for, that’s expensive”. It turned into “who the hell raised you to be so vain, cause it sure wasn’t me”. It was “why do you care what you look like, when ain’t nobody left who’s gonna want to stomach you”. It was “maybe it’s a good thing your parents are gone, I wouldn’t want their poor hearts breaking when they found out you put your looks over the business they loved so much”. Paul sprayed him with the hose and made him spend the night standing unmoving in the desert. He froze to death, woke up, was made to apologise, and put back to work. So he doesn’t take hot showers, even after he’s away from Paul. 

He also has a hard time stopping a project halfway through. Paul never liked that. (Granted, I think Taker would be this way even if he hadn't been horribly abused, it's just MORE now.) If he was late on work, he'd be punished. Sometimes, if Paul needed a pick-me-up, he’d order Taker to do absurd amounts of work in impossible time limits and go off on him for not meeting the task. An example of this I wrote about was the time he told Taker to hand-craft seven caskets in three days (for the record, a single basic casket takes between six to ten hours on average to make). Technically, without rest or breaks (which he was rarely allowed anyway), this is possible, as there are seventy-two hours in three days. He could’ve technically done it, and he was close. He had half of one casket left. Just half. But Paul came back early and the job still wasn’t done, and he got mad. So he ordered Taker to strangle himself, let him die and come back a few times, and only let him let go of his own throat the next evening. This was also when he was a teenager. It was not the first nor the last time Paul would do something like this. That, plus the gaslighting and financial abuse, were staples of Taker’s existence under Paul. So he doesn’t like leaving work unfinished. 

These tendencies also leak into his fighting habits. Taker notoriously never backs down from a fight (except against Kane, but I’ll talk about that in a bit). He’s also never tapped out. He keeps going until he can’t. This is a pride thing, yes. It’s a reputation thing, sure. And with how his colleagues act like vultures, it’s a safety thing, too. If he shows weakness, they swoop. … But it’s also a punishment. It’s an easy way to get lost in pain. I read once, in an article someone who’d recovered from self-harming tendencies wrote, that to them, the act was a way to make the pain they felt seem more ‘tangible’. It was giving form to the emotional and psychological turmoil they felt. It made it real. It made it easier to accept. It was, in part, that way for the Undertaker, too. He doesn’t think of himself as traumatised. If you ask him, he’s fine. He’s always fine. What are you on about? He’s fine. But he obviously isn’t if you’ve heard him open his mouth for more than ten seconds, and sometimes, he needs to rationalise why he feels like garbage. He’s not tired because he’s been grappling with depression most of his life, he’s tired because he spent an entire day in the yard and then had to beat the pulp outta some dumbass in the ring. It’s not hard to get out of bed because he hates himself, it’s because he’s still sore from going through a table or barricade. He doesn’t have a hard time looking his reflection in the eye some days because of a guilt complex, it’s because the bruise he got annoys him. He’s fine. He's always fine. And sometimes it gets even worse. He decided to fight Brock Lesnar with a broken arm. Sure, he did great, but that is not sane behaviour. 

This was also a habit he developed when he was young, post-fire. Not getting into death matches, but the harm, yes. He’d do that. His method involved a lighter he bartered for from a kid in Houston and sweaters long enough to hide things from his aunt and uncle. It made him feel closer to his family. It made him feel less alone. This is something he kept up until he made his deal. 

I don’t know if it goes here, but he, like Kane, is also food-insecure. After all, what does a corpse need food for? Because he’s hungry? And why should Paul care? That’s not his problem. Might teach the boy some damn self control to go without. And if he did get food, it was rarely anything too substantial. He usually had to go looking for scraps where he could find them - leftovers he was told to clean up after wakes and funerals. Scraps he found in the garbage when Paul had him doing ‘chores’. Of course, Paul’s not completely heartless. He’d give him food sometimes. … And sometimes, he’d put a plate out and order Taker not to touch it. Then he’d come back, see the uneaten food, and talk about how the boy must not be hungry, after all, and make Taker throw it out. Other times, he’d throw the food into a fire (fireplace at his house, fire pit at the home) and suggest he could reach in and grab it if he wanted to. Didn’t you always want to rescue something from the flames? Go on. This is your chance. … But since it wasn’t an order, he couldn't. He could only watch. Watch and wait to be told to clean up the ashes. 

He’s not as bad as Kane is about food, though. He got lucky. He could get food while Paul was gone. And once Paul started selling him off, some people would feed him. Ted did, which surprises everybody - though this was more to show off how he could even afford to feed ‘the help’ than out of any care for Taker. (For the record, Taker didn’t like that food. He’d eat it, of course. He was hungry, and he’d been told to. But it always tasted strange to him. It was fancy food, rich food, nothing like he would’ve gotten at home. Why would he want caprese salad or caviar or tapenade when he missed his mother’s casseroles so dearly?) So Kane is still more foodshy of the two of them, but Taker has his own insecurities, and on bad days, he can forget to eat entirely, or eat the bare minimum because his trauma tells him if he eats ‘too much’ he might get caught. By who doesn’t matter. That it’s his home, his food, that doesn’t matter either. He still gets the sensation that he might get caught. 

Thankfully, he moves past it fairly well. I don’t know if he’ll ever be completely ‘normal’ about food (Kane isn’t), but he can coexist with other people in a dining environment without getting antsy or aggressive. He’ll share his food with the people he cares about (especially his brother and any romantic partners or child-figures). And he’ll usually remember to eat - he has to stay in shape, after all. You just sometimes might have to remind him. 

Now there’s the saviour complex.

This is one of the biggest factors of his trauma. Taker watched his family die when he was 12. Both his story and the most recent comic adaptation of the fire have him trying to run in the building, to the point he had to be restrained by firefighters, plural. He wanted to run in there and try to save them. And then when he talks about it, he blames himself for the fire even before he thinks he set it. Part of this is just his personality. Even without the fire and related trauma, he wants to look out for people and take responsibility. It’s older brother/next in line syndrome, you know how it is. But the trauma made it worse. Something to know is that we don’t hear a lot about the boys’ parents in canon. That means I get to make them into my own personal playground. But one thing we do know in canon is the last conversation Taker ever had with his father. We don’t know it word for word; we know the gist. Since they’d been fooling around with chemicals, their father explained that it was dangerous, that they shouldn’t do it again, and what our boy took away from it: You’re the oldest. You should know better. You have to take care of your brother. Now this is something I’ll talk more about when I touch on Taker’s Kane Complex, but it informed a lot of how he processed his grief. Obviously, JT did not mean ‘everything is your fault all the time’. That would be insane. What he meant was ‘please, PLEASE don’t use your magic powers on the highly flammable chemicals and PLEASE let me know if your brother tries to do it too’. But Taker, after the fire, filed it away under the first interpretation. He should have stopped Kane. If he had, the fire wouldn’t have happened. He should have stayed in the home.If he had, the fire wouldn’t have happened.  Or if it had, he could have gotten his family out, and they would be okay. And then after the fire, if he made the deal properly, they’d be back, and they’d be okay. And that’s how he saw the rest of his life.

He had to take care of the home, even at detriment to himself, because he was the only one left. And then he has to take care of Kane, because nobody else will. He has to stand up to Hunter and Vince because no one else will - not in a way that matters. He has to keep his coworkers in line because nobody else will. He has to save those that have no one because no one ever saved him. If you combine this with his low-to-no self preservation, and his extreme sense of justice, and you can see how this spirals quickly. It also has different levels. Sometimes, ‘saving’ someone means giving them food. They’re hungry? Here, have a snack. (Usually means he’ll just buy you something extra from the vending machine. He rarely gives away the food he’s eating, unless you’re Kane or similar in importance. Kane can have his food if he’s hungry.) Sometimes it means giving them advice. Everyone knows to come to him if someone gets out of line. He’s the conscience of the WWE. He’s their judge. If you have a dispute, you can talk to him and he’ll solve it. And, as we know, sometimes ‘saving’ people means stepping in when they get in over their heads. When AJ and the Good Brothers jumped Rey Mysterio, Taker came in and took away a stolen victory. (And the trophy - he uses it as a hat rack.) When Shane and Drew were mauling Roman as a joke (with Elias helping), he slides in and helps Roman put them both out (and curses their souls). When Hunter was abusing Shawn, Taker challenged him to one of the most brutal cage matches I’ve ever seen and won. (The way he won it matters, too, but this is already way too long. I’ll talk about that later if people want me to!) When Stephanie was being abused by her father and his goons, and later Brock Lesnar, Taker was the one to get between them and make her feel safe by any means necessary. When Diamond Dallas Page kidnapped Deborah, Taker was the one who came to save her even if it meant a five on one brawl. And of course, Kane - but he’ll always take care of Kane. These are just the examples that come to mind off the top of my head, too - there are more. He just can’t stand aside and let people get hurt, even if he doesn’t personally like or even know them well. He can’t just ignore it. He can’t. Part of it is, again, his sense of justice. He’s always had that, even since he was little, but it got stronger as he got older. But the biggest factor of this is, he knows what it feels like to be on the other end of that. If we go by strictly canon, it’s very, very rare that anyone tries to help either brother, but Taker especially. He doesn’t have friends. He was openly sold as a slave for most of his adult life on television and it was generally treated as a mark of honour and status to have control over him. People bragged about it. People joked about it. His colleagues would try to steal the urn every so often just to see if they could, and what they could do once they got their hands on it. Some of them didn’t even acknowledge him as a person. I think there were only three, maybe four, people outside of Kane who actually tried to help him out of bad situations.

Dok Hendrix once told Taker people would love him even if they heard Paul’s blackmail (Paul shot this down and screamed at Taker for listening to something like that). Shawn and Kevin welcomed him for a little bit (and we all know how that turned out). Steph helped him a bit in the Big Evil era. Maybe you could count Chris Jericho for a bit? And Steve at least treated him with respect and looked after Kane during the Ministry era, as well as a few other moments. But that’s it over thirty years of his time in the federation. It’s small bits, it’s scattered, and if it isn’t directly shot down it turns into betrayal later on. It never lasts. It never works. Most of the time, it only winds up making things worse, because they don’t or can’t follow through. None of them care enough to commit - or they just don’t have the ability. Whatever the reason, it doesn’t matter. Nobody saves him. When it was at its worst, he was ignored. He suffered. He saved himself. And because he knows how that feels, he can’t sit back and let anyone else suffer like that. He stands up because he knows nobody else will; Because nobody else will, he feels he has to. To a lesser extent, he plays a similar role in the Valley itself. He takes care of things. Usually strange things that the cops don’t want to handle, and disputes of that nature, but still. He takes care of things. He’s willing to put his life and well-being on the line if he thinks it’s a worthy cause - he really doesn’t care about himself, as long as the would-be victim is alright. He’s fine. 

Lost time is next on the list. He doesn’t always know how much time has passed if he’s doing something mindless or repetitive. He forgets to check on things. Gravedigging, sanding caskets, even exercising, sometimes he just gets lost in it. This is yet another holdover from his slave days. A lot of the time, he’d be left at the same task for days, or however long it took for it to be finished. He just works. He didn’t have any need to check time or think about lunch breaks. He didn’t get time off. He didn’t get rest. He just kept going until he was done. Sometimes he’d keep working after that. It depended on what Paul told him to do. And, unfortunately, this is how he lived through the majority of his formative years. It’s how he was ‘raised’, if you can call it that. He won’t realise how long it’s been. He can be out there for hours and hours on end before he even notices it went dark. 

Since we’re on the topic of yard work, there’s another point I want to make. Work becomes a coping method for Taker. It’s not good, it’s not really healthy, considering he does it when he’s hurt, but it’s what works. He doesn’t do well idle. When he was young, Paul would get mad at him for taking a rest. It doesn’t matter if he’s sick or exhausted or hurt, there’s always more work to be done. And if he doesn't do that, the consequences of sitting down were worse than the scars he got from working. … But also, when he was working, he'd usually be left alone. He wasn't getting screamed at if he was alone in the yard or the shop. It was quiet. A lot of the tasks he had to do also involved repetitive motions that he could get lost in, or enough thought that it would take his mind off things. It’s self-soothing. It’s relaxing. It also just helps him burn off the anxious energy. He gets really antsy if he feels nervous or unsafe. You can see it a lot in promos - he paces, he does repetitive movements, his actions become bigger and faster. A caged lion. Sometimes he gets this out of his system by fighting, but he can’t always do that if he’s at home. So he works. Sometimes on his bikes, sometimes on general house tasks and maintenance, sometimes on orders, sometimes on the yard. Just anything that can get him moving and focusing on something else. He doesn’t do well sitting still when he’s anxious (unless he’s full on catatonic, but that’s not an improvement). 

Have I talked about his catatonia yet? It’s not on the list, but it’s worth mentioning. Taker has gone through some shit. Most of it is objectively some of the most awful shit someone could go through. Torture, abuse, poisoning, enslavement, kidnapping, dying, grief, so on and so forth. You name it, it happened. And he doesn’t have the mercy of death to escape it. He just has to endure, and endure, and endure, and endure. And that’s too much for one person, even if that person accidentally metamorphosed into a god. So sometimes, the only thing he can do is shut down and remove himself, mentally, from the situation. He isn't there. It isn’t happening to him. It’s like a TV show he’s watching, but even then, he’s not paying attention to it. Since when the urn is used, he doesn’t have to be mentally present, he forces himself to dissociate back into memories. Before he finds Kane again, he usually uses memories of his childhood. Of being back home with his brother and parents, thinking back to those good times while his body carries out its job without him. After he finds Kane, those memories hurt. After the ministry, those memories are warped. He might still try to use them, but he’s more likely to use memories of other loved ones (if he has them), good times with Kane, things like that. Anything to avoid thinking about how miserable his situation is. He’s not responsive outwardly when he’s doing this. He probably won’t hear you when you talk to him. The lights are on and nobody’s home, if you get me.  It’s like a robot. Watch the old, early 90s clips of him and you’ll see what I mean. It’s rough. 

But it’s the only thing he can do to comfort himself. 

Now we get to the dramatic part. His difficulty with trust and interpersonal relationships. I’ve said before - maybe even in this report, I forget - that Kane and Taker were traumatised in opposite directions. A lot of the time, Kane needs to be around people. He needs their approval. Alone for him meant starvation. Too much alone meant death. Taker is the opposite - for starters, he’s already dead. But it also ties back to how they were raised. Kane got fed a lot of fake love - I love you, son, you need me, son, that kind of thing. Paul needed Kane to be loyal. Taker, though, well, Taker came with the urn. He didn’t need all the lies and pretty talk. He just needed to listen. Paul could be open with the abuse, and he was. Oh, he was. So was everyone else. This isn’t to say that Kane wasn’t abused - he obviously was. It just had different undertones. I’m doing this for your own good, because I love you, versus I’m doing this because it’s funny, because I can. That changes things. Taker has seen the worst of humanity being open about being the worst. People who should have looked out for him didn’t. People who could have stopped it just watched and talked about it. Some of them even cheered it on. Nobody ever came for him. Nobody ever cared. 

He refused to be like that, but he also refused to let anyone get him dragged down like that again. He’ll help people, sure, but he won’t trust them. People respect Taker, people listen to him, people will go to him for help, but he doesn’t have friends. Aside from Kane, there’s nobody he really hangs out with in the locker room. There are some people I can definitely see him getting along with, sure, but in strictly canon, he has no friends. He doesn’t try to make friends. He doesn’t want friends. But people go to him when they need help or advice. That’s what’s so interesting about Taker - he’s good with people, he just doesn’t like being WITH PEOPLE. You can imagine how this makes it for people trying to get close to him. If he doesn’t want you around, you are not allowed near him. You have to prove you’re- Not even safe, worthwhile. Because nobody is safe. Everyone shows their ‘true colours’ eventually. That doesn’t mean they deserve to be hurt (... Most of them), it doesn’t mean they’re beyond redemption (again, most of them), but they’re not his friends. He doesn’t want them to be his friends. If someone is getting closer than he wants them to be, he’s not above chasing them off or shouting them down. He doesn’t need people close to him. That’s just asking to get hurt. He’s had enough of that shit. And even if you do get close, there are still some things that set him on edge and shoot the trust metre back down to zero. For example, don’t tell him what to do. Very few, if any, people have the Give Undertaker Orders privilege (even if they don’t mean it as orders). Like in the ABA era, Chris Jericho comes into the brothers’ dressing room (also a bad mood, Taker is territorial) and asks why Taker wasn’t at the meeting, because most people don’t listen to meetings without him there. They need him. So Taker responds completely rationally by demanding to know who Chris thinks he is, why he thinks he’s allowed in their dressing room, who gave him the right to tell Taker what to do, and by the way, Taker’s been here longer than you’ve been walking, boy, and if you wanna KEEP walking– To the point Kane has to try to reel him back in and it almost doesn’t work. (He actually gets mad at KANE for trying to tell him what to do, though to a much lesser extent than he was at Chris, because Kane is still his precious baby brother.) And the time Kurt Angle tried to plan for the alliance, and both Kane and Taker intimidated him out of the room and as soon as he was gone, Taker took over. (And people actually listened, but that’s beyond the point.) Or Vince when WCW was invading. Vince goes hey, I’m putting together a team to stop an invading force, here’s my passionate speech about teamwork, and Taker replies no, you’re useless, your entire team is useless, Kane and I are going to do it by ourselves. Taker does not respond well to being told what to do. Now, there are some exceptions. If he genuinely respects and trusts you - which is a number so small you can usually count it on one hand - he’s a bit more agreeable. If you’re someone he wants to protect, he’s more gentle. For example, when Stephanie is getting away from Hunter, Taker very deliberately puts her in the position of power. He holds ropes for her, gets her microphone, doesn’t talk during her promos (just stands guard), and, on Valentines’ Day, he says to her to tell her which of Hunter’s body parts she wants him to bring, and nods and agrees when she asks for his heart. If you can get him to come to the conclusion on his own, he might be more amicable. If he thinks there’s no other choice, and he’s resigned to deal with whatever it is, he’ll listen, he’ll just be mad about it. But by and large he hates being told what to do. His freedom was something he fought long and hard for, and that he knows can be taken away whenever his luck goes sour. It’s safer to just let him do his own thing. 

Then there are the panic attacks. Taker, canonically, has a panic disorder. He talks about it during his first recount of what happened the night of the fire - how his chest ached, he couldn’t breathe, the room felt like it was spinning, he felt nauseous, his heart was racing, so on and so forth. Given that he was being forced to look at the corpse of his mother, I think it’s a reasonable response. And, given that things only got worse from there, I think he still has it. It actually takes him a lot to get up to a full-blown panic attack. The only time we’ve really seen it happen 100% in the ring is when Kane came back for the first time. I’ll never get over his face in that segment. He was ruined. But again, a reasonable response - he thought Kane was dead for 20 years. He mourned, he grieved, and there’s his beloved baby brother, impossibly tall and ruthlessly strong and oh, yeah, Kane hates him. I’d have a breakdown too. He gets close sometimes, though. You can usually tell when he’s in a ‘panic spiral’ - not a full-blown attack, but boy howdy are his nerves being TRIED. The first sign is that he gets very… Antsy. Very jittery. He paces, he fidgets, he moves around, his gestures get bigger. He gets louder. He’ll try to get in the space of whatever’s freaking him out if it’s a person, trying to intimidate them (or eventually beat them) into submission. He gets kind of erratic in his thoughts and all around is just nervous energy made manifest… In a 6’10 pro fighter who also happens to be a warlock and the incarnation of Death. The worse it gets, the closer he gets to catatonia. It’s almost funny to watch. You can see him spike all the way into a savage, ruthless, sadistic warpath where nobody is saved, and then if it gets worse, he crashes down to shrinking in on himself, isolating himself, and shutting down. Which side of the coin he leans towards depends on which era he’s in. Early Taker will go right past the anger and into the quiet shut-down stage. This is what was safe. He wasn’t allowed to show emotions when he was ‘owned’ by Paul, or Ted, or Love, or anyone else. If he wasn’t ordered to sit still and shut up, he would’ve been punished for any ‘unsightly’ behaviour. They paid good money for him, you know. (Paul didn’t. But that’s not the point, the point is he ought to behave himself.) Biker Taker is more likely to use his temper as a shield, and only fall back into the silent, shut-down panic when it’s very severe. Late stage Deadman can go either way. Underneath that, the chest constriction and breathing difficulties are what he feels first. Then he gets dizzy and nauseous. Sometimes he can also get headaches and feel unsteady. A great way to tell if he’s mad/just quiet or panicking is to watch his hands. If he’s just mad, his hands are steady. If he’s just minding his own, his hands are steady. If he’s panicking, his hands shake. Again, for him the signs are subtle, because they had to be. Now, what do you do if you notice Taker panicking? Easy - leave. Chances are, you’re not someone he considers safe enough to rely on. There are very few of those. In some cases, even the people he thinks of as ‘safe’ aren’t people he wants to have see him like that. Kane, for example, when they’re getting along, is someone Taker trusts implicitly. But Kane is his little brother. Kane needs him to be strong. He can’t break down, Kane needs him. He can’t be traumatised, Kane needs him. 

He’s.

Fine. 

Now, if you are someone he trusts to see him vulnerable, the best thing you can do is give him space. He will come to you if he needs you. Like I said, he feels safest when he’s alone. He needs to decompress, he gets very touch-averse, everything gets Too Much, he will go off on his own. It’s best to respect this. If he does come to you, he’ll at the very least give some kind of signal as to what he wants. If he wants physical touch, he’ll lean on you or pull you in. If he wants to talk about something (generally not what’s bothering him, but who knows), he’ll start the conversation. If he wants food, he’ll probably get it himself, but if he wants you to eat with him, he’ll offer you some. As long as he’s not completely shut down, he’s decent enough at communicating. Just don’t do anything he doesn’t initiate. That’s a surefire way to have him not trust you again. 

Okay, onto his guilt complex, for lack of a better word. Ever since the fire, Taker was told that everything was essentially his fault. If the home was suffering financially, it was because he wasn’t working hard enough. If he couldn’t complete often-impossible volumes of work orders, it was because he didn’t know what he was doing. If Paul yelled at him, it was because he was stupid. He was a disgrace. His parents would be so ashamed of him. Maybe it’s a good thing they died– And so on and so forth. A lot of these ‘scoldings’, or instances of verbal/psychological/emotional abuse, came with physical punishments as well. Enough treatment like that takes its toll; eventually, you start to believe it. You hear it enough and it becomes true. It’s his fault. Everything is always his fault. There are other factors that add to this, too. Firstly, even before he gets his thoughts scrambled, Taker was involved in the incident he believed was responsible for the fire. He didn’t SET the fire (and unbeknownst to him, the entire thing was just a coincidence, not the cause), but he was involved, and after losing his family, he needed someone to blame. It had to be someone’s fault. He was twelve, he was scared, he was grieving, he couldn't handle the idea that he lost his home and family through some freak accident. That it just happened. He had to blame someone and he chose himself. And then there's the conversation he had with his dad right before the fire. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, JT and Adam/Taker had very different interpretations of what that talk meant. For JT, the talk was ‘please think before you use your innate magic powers on the dangerous chemicals. And please think even more than that before you get your brother in on it’. It's pretty reasonable. Adam/Taker, given that was the last conversation he had with his father, internalised it as ‘you have to protect your little brother you have to look out for your little brother if anything happens to Kane it’s on you’. A VERY EXTREME response. And, as we know, things did very much happen to Kane. A lot of things. So it’s his fault. All of it is his fault. 

And this is a great segue into his next and most prominent problem: His own version of an obsession with Kane. It’s not that he thinks Kane can do no wrong; he’s called little brother out before, to some extent. It’s that he can’t stay mad at Kane. He also has a very high threshold - especially compared to how he is with other people - for how far Kane has to push him before he gets mad. He will always be looking out for Kane, no matter the situation. Even if it means putting himself at risk. Even if it means getting hurt or killed or losing something or someone else important to him. Kane always comes first, before anything else. Anything. Kane always comes first. In a timeline where they were plunged into medical debt, Taker sold his bikes for Kane. In canon - something confirmed by Mark and Glenn in the Last Ride docuseries - Taker, for a while, named himself after his brother (who he thought was dead) so nobody would forget him - hence why he debuted as ‘Kane the Undertaker’. He’s given Kane his food (or tried; Kane brushes him off sometimes, which shows that, most times, the affection goes both ways). It took months of abuse and the defilement of two (technically three) corpses before he agreed to fight Kane, even though Kane was demanding it. He didn’t want to hurt his baby brother until he had no other option, and until he learned that was the only way to get through to Kane sometimes. When Kane is hurt, Taker hovers around him and tries his best to comfort him. When he’s nonverbal, Taker translates for him. When Kane is stuck in an abusive relationship, Taker tries to talk him out of it and leaves the door open for him to come back home when he’s ready. Kane’s the only person whose jokes Taker laughs at, even if he rolls his eyes the entire time. He said in the middle of a promo, standing dead centre of the ring lips to the mic, that Kane was the only thing in his life that made him truly happy (and likewise, Kane has said before that Taker is his favourite person). Kane is his only surviving immediate family member, his tag partner, his baby brother, his best friend, the other half of his soul. Also in the Last Ride (since it's really the first time they talked out of character), Glenn and Mark described the brothers as intertwined, part of each other, and not doing well when separated. They need each other. And that means for Taker, nobody else is as important as Kane. Not him, not anybody. If he has to die for Kane, he will; if he has to live for Kane, he will. He can forgive anything Kane does to him and he can’t forgive anything done to Kane. I would argue that Kane is more of his greatest weakness than the urn is. If you have the urn, yes, he has to obey  you, but only physically. He’ll only do exactly what you tell him to while you have the urn. He’s not putting in any extra effort. The older he gets, the more likely he is to lash out as soon as there’s a window. Once he has a chance, you put that urn down, he’s acting for himself again. He’s learned. But if you have Kane, well, that’s different. He’d hesitate. He hates even the thought of doing something to endanger Kane, so if it means Kane is safe, he’d rather endure the suffering. He’ll still try to find a way out, sure, but it’s more important to him that Kane is safe. 

Okay, this is the one last thing I’m going to touch on, but it kind of relates to Taker’s fixation on looking after his brother and Kane’s just all-around fixation on his brother, so I’m mentioning it now that they’re both done. 

The first time Kane killed Taker, he didn’t really know his brother was immortal. He thought his brother was gone forever. He thought that’s what he wanted. … And then Taker came back. And since then, Kane has killed Taker multiple times. He’s broken Taker’s bones and left him limping, bloody, and essentially homeless. Kane beat him into a coma and left him in a parking lot, either to bleed out or for someone to find him. Now, granted, this was all happening during the many time periods that Kane was being manipulated and groomed by the man who abused him so bad he was mute for twenty years, but it still happened. And Taker forgave him, partly because he recognizes it as Paul’s doing, and partly because it’s Kane, and as I mentioned, he cannot stay mad at Kane. As you can imagine, this had a major impact on their dynamic. We know that, at his core, Kane does not actually want his brother gone. We know this based on the actions and words we get from him when he’s not being manipulated. I think there was a time when he did want to kill Taker, when the only information he got about his brother was through Paul, but not anymore. We can get further evidence of this based on the way Kane reacts when he puts Taker into a coma. This is a very smart thing for Kane to do. He’s won. Taker isn’t dead, so he can’t come back. As long as they keep him on life support, and as long as he stays unconscious, he’s out of the game. Kane has won. And he responds to this victory by having a complete mental collapse. He holds a funeral, ends up literally collapsing, screaming, sobbing in the ring, forgets that he did it, decides he’s going to find out who’s responsible and murder them, and starts yelling that he should have been there to protect Taker “like you’ve always been there for me”. He lost his brother and it shattered him. So he doesn’t want Taker gone… But he keeps trying to kill him. Again, it’s when he’s unstable and manipulated, but it also carries the undertone of the most fucked up part of their relationship. Kane doesn’t see killing Taker as being as serious as it is (unless someone else does it, then it’s the worst crime you can commit). Again, when he’s lucid, he doesn’t like Taker being hurt, but it’d be wrong to say that when he’s gone bad, he doesn’t use his brother as a punching bag. He can vent that way. He’s not always proud of it, but on the other hand, twenty-plus years of obsessive hatred isn’t something you let go of easily. It’s also the one edge Kane really has over Taker in a fight. Statistically, if the brothers fight, Taker has a 60% chance of winning (roughly), Kane has a 20% chance of winning, and there’s a 20% chance of it being a tie. Taker is far and away the better fighter. … But he will never go as far as Kane will. Taker will never kill Kane because Kane is his little brother, and he loves him, and Taker can never follow the people who die. Kane will kill Taker because, as far as he knows, Taker is responsible for the fire, and besides, Taker will come back. If he doesn’t, Kane gets the revenge he thinks he wanted. If he does, no harm done. It’s fine.

This also brought me into something I almost forgot - Taker’s hang-ups with saying goodbye to people. More specifically, with people dying (or otherwise exiting his life) without saying goodbye. By the time he’s reached the Federation, he’s in his early-mid twenties. His father, mother, and younger brother all died suddenly. He was permanently separated from his first love through a tragic accident. He lost all of them without warning and without any goodbye. A lot of things were left unresolved. Additionally, who his family is combined with the nature of his curse means that he knows, for a tangible, provable fact, that afterlives exist. He knows that there’s a heaven, a hell, a purgatory, and countless others. And he knows he can never be a part of them. He can traverse hell, but he can’t stay there. He can never cross the gates of Heaven, full stop. He knows the people he loves most are, or will be, on the other side of eternity, and he will never get to see them again. So, yes, you’ll have to forgive him if he gets a bit protective, and a bit upset at the idea of the people he loves dying unexpectedly or before their time.

As for how he deals with it, the name of the game is deny, deny, deny. Like I said before, he’s fine. He refuses to admit he’s got anything bad going on with his mental health, he’ll just rub some metaphorical dirt in it. He throws himself into his work, be that the yard, the workshop, or the ring, to an unhealthy degree. He bottles things up until his inevitable catastrophic breakdowns - see Big Evil for one - and when it culminates in his self-destructive death, he just comes back and pretends it never happened. He engages in self-harm tendencies when it gets bad, as I mentioned. If it gets really bad, he drinks, though it’s something he works to get better from in any timeline where he falls into that particular hole. He uses the ring as a way to feel more in control of his life, combating the feeling of powerlessness that a life of abuse and slavery left him with using the fact that he’s one of the biggest, strongest, baddest, scariest motherfuckers in the squared circle, and everyone else there knows it. Sometimes, he uses his partners to feel better - in the sense that he doesn’t always feel like HE has the right to need rest or a break, but if they look tired, he might sit or lie down with them for a bit, and the idea of someone in his house who he WANTS to have around can help him feel safer (and let’s not forget him counting Steve’s heartbeats at night to ground himself when his thoughts get too loud). He manages until he doesn’t. 

(Also I’m fairly sure he’s undiagnosed ADHD and self-medicates with repetitive physical labour and high-intensity activities, oops.) 

Anyway, I’m pretty sure I missed a lot, but you asked me this months ago and it’s thirty pages long. 

Whoops.

[solitarelee]

East Asian fanartists are starting to migrate back to Tumblr because Twitter is insane, toxic, and dying, and what we're NOT going to do is let the fucking exclusionists get them, do you hear me? We are not going to let a bunch of feral idiots try to apply the most myopic version of puritanism to foreign artists we're not we're not we're not. Form an armed brigade if you have to, do you hear me. We're not going to bully the artists who may or may not even speak English because we have our precious standards of moral purity. If we see art that makes us uncomfy we're going to block the artist and tumblr savior their name so we don't have to see them again AND WE'RE GONNA MOVE THE FUCK ON.

[frownyalfred]

thinking about how the Batkids must be SO tired of the Batman hero worship from the other Titans, JL members, sidekicks, etc. there's people literally falling over themselves to meet Batman in a Watchtower hallway, meanwhile they actually know Bruce, and Bruce just made them memorize backup codes to all of their major security systems in the Cave for three hours because Hal Jordan made an offhanded hacking joke at their League meeting earlier that day.

[louisbxne]

TLC

FANMAIL (1999)

[versusvirtuous]

My outsides are cool My insides are blue

[lurkinglurkerwholurks]

I'm rereading @unpretty's Sorrowful and Immaculate Hearts series for the first time since early 2018 and I got to the part in Wayne Manor that reads:

As they left the store, Thomas hoisted his son into the air, placing him on his shoulders. "Mom says you shouldn't do that," Bruce scolded, holding on despite that. "She says you're going to hurt yourself." "Pshaw," Thomas said. Bruce was small for his age, even if all signs pointed toward that changing. "I'm going to be big when I grow up," Bruce reminded him. "Then you won't be able to pick me up." "The hell I won't," Thomas said, holding on to his son's legs to keep him steady. "Even when I'm ten?" "Even then." "When I'm twelve?" "I'll throw you in the air if I want to." "What about when I'm thirty?" Bruce pressed, which must have seemed impossibly old to an eight year-old. He probably imagined thirty as looking white-haired and feeble. "I'll pick you up at your own wedding and make you do the whole ceremony from my shoulders," Thomas declared, making Bruce laugh.

And I had two thoughts nearly simultaneously.

They didn't even make it to ten.

No wonder Bruce stays strong enough to carry even Red Hood when needed.

[transboypatrickmurray]

the pretty/unpretty faberry duet was one of the queerest things that happened on the show and there have been queer sex scenes

[quotablefanfiction]

“No jumping on the giant toxic fungus,” Batman called from outside. “We’re totally going to jump on the giant toxic fungus,” Nightwing assured Robin under his breath. “You’ll die,” Batman added. “We’ll be fine,” Nightwing assured Robin.

Poison Ivy’s plants are a tempting playground (chp. 1)

No Whammies by Unpretty (AO3) Batman – Teen – Poison Ivy/Harley Quinn #Humor #Fluff #Case-fic

Poison Ivy has captured Nightwing, which means a very serious rescue mission is necessary.

Part 31 of the Sorrowful and Immaculate Hearts series (AO3)

[getawaylicense]

ryan murphy is going to hell for a lot of things, but mashing up unpretty by tlc and i feel pretty from west side story and turning it into a sapphic duet that sounds like a fleetwood mac song is absolutely not one of them

[jzixuans]

ppl who want sizhui to get aggressively defensive over people scorning wei wuxian this and ppl who want sizhui to snap and start yelling at the lans that okay sure but WHERE is sizhui experiencing anger and coping with it by punching trees in half with his bare fists because he was raised by the one and only tree-hater hanguang-jun.

[brothersgrim]

@unprettiers asked: “I’m not what you planned, but I’m a safe place to land.” // taker (steph :3)

A safe place. It’s so funny, he almost laughs. But he is tired, and he is warm for the first time in– He’s not sure how long, so he doesn’t. Just lets out a quiet huff. He doesn’t open his eyes, but he does tighten the arm he’s thrown over her. There’s light trickling in through the hotel window, spilling silver-blue over the room and tracing over outlines of furniture, luggage, and hastily-discarded clothing just enough to afford the slightest visibility. He can see, when he finally peeks one eye open, the way her hair spills over her back, silky-soft and meticulously cared for even in its rumpled state, the way the covers have been pulled up just enough to ward off any lingering chill in the evening (neither of them,  he guessed, felt like getting up to mess with the room’s thermostat). He can’t see her face, but that’s because it’s nestled against his chest. He's not gonna bother her to move.

“‘S one way to put it.” He rumbles, shifting until he’s comfortable. (It was difficult, with how scratched up his back was.) Neither of them had really planned this. If things had gone according to plan, he and Steve would’ve tied the knot by now. … Actually, if things had gone according to plan, he’d be back at the home in Texas, with Kane, and Mother, and Father, and he never would have set foot in the Federation to begin with. But things never went to plan. His parents were dead, he’d become so intertwined with the Federation he didn’t see a way out, and Steve… Steve was with Hunter. 

Steve had been with Hunter for a long damn time. 

And so, the Undertaker and Stephanie were with each other. He settled his free arm behind his head, acting as an extra cushion alongside the hotel pillow. It was thin, but he didn’t mind. Liked it better that way, even. Was more used to it. His other hand moved from her back to her scalp, lightly scratching his fingers through the strands of her hair. The scent of her shampoo wafts up, expensive flowers that he couldn’t name. He probably smelled that way, too, since she’d insisted he borrow her shower. Ah well. Probably better than what he smelled like beforehand. 

“You’re not gonna hear any complaining from me.”

[gleetournaments]

The Ultimate Duets Tournament Round 2 Match 57

//

[weaponizedducks]

yet again thinking about the faberry pretty/unpretty duet....

[daystarvoyage]

Hi! I read somewhere about someone not liking Luz's ending since she "didn't grow as a person" at the end of the owl house. They said that she only became more depressed or traumatized but she's still the same cheerful and helpful girl like in the first episode of season 1. Do you agree?

Hello Hope you have a great day from the brown sugar queen, I know it’s late by the time you get this so ima clear a lot,

time for the tea.

Now i have all the love and heart for my girl Luz Noceda but lemme me tell you her personality made me look at how she was handled gave me a SIDE-EYE besides that,

Yes, i agree on this, definitely,

I felt That the crew wanted to do so much with the show but felt they had no idea writing Luz, however they too had there drawbacks, Yes I LOVE LUZS CHARACTER AND SHE IS SELFLESS A GOOD FRIEND (even if it’s the wrong person) Loyal, and cheerful. How we get moments that

Luz's character can be bastardized!

i feel fans try to view her as this bubbly girl boss, we know and love, however we overlook her flaws cause of discourse. she’s this impressionable, unruly, explosive girl with self imaging issues & unresolved grief, that effected her lifestyle.

I truly do depict her as a girl failure which ill get to a list of reasons, I’ll be getting into

EDITED its Masculization

heres a term masculinization comes to her character writing, style-wise, cause this word has been used throughout the animation to the point it’s a trope.

Now let’s get down to reasons why, she gets to the way she is.

Luz wants to do so much for others, that she hasn't practiced learning about self-love and acceptance, it all backtracks in her past of her deceased father & trying to relate to earth kids with opposite interests that can be harmful.

I felt they truly had fun time to an extent how they can push her in a negative direction, (this goes for hunter which I’ll do a post/video soon.)

how they wanted her to be more of an edge lord along the series run, (and the proper writing of the show didn’t help.)

Heck to the point in season 3, she never interacted with anyone on earth in her school, which is concerning, cause that can lead to self-harm or failed relationships, also known people as kikimora or talking to her other friends in season 3 coulda gave her a wake up call.

ALSO CAN WE BRING UP LYING TO HER LOVE ONES OUT OF NO WHERE! Season 1

DRAGGING THEM THROUGH MORTAL PERIL IN SEASON 2!

AND NO NEURODIVERAGENCE DOESNT EXCUSE BAD BEHAVIOR OR BLACK FEATURES BEING MINIMIZED.

2.They should've let a POC (person of color) write Luz cause of how she turned out Personality-wise throughout the series, which I rewatched, along critic videos and yes even in season 3 they decided to make her some shonen wannabe edge lord,(A wannabe Pokemon Goh But more emo.)

Luz's is flawed, as a character & written wise, felt the show didn’t know how to write for POC, cause fans who are another ethnicity might view this, and say oh, where portrayed as this etc, but without our black features or even how where portrayed in society in social norms.

Yes I did a post on her fashion & wardrobe and how it affects a character, boy they got my girl looking a hobo at times. ( and the good so called hair symbolism could’ve made Luz even better.)

ALSO (I may be ranting but hope ya listen)

Hated how they tried to Mary Sue her at certain episodes when she's faced with problems or issues that can affect everyone in dire times, for example,

her willingness to learn magic, which she can be impressionable and wanting Praise for the wrong reasons, but To be loved I Understand.

She is a person wanting acceptance and tolerance ( which that whole wanting to be understood season 3 dialogue could've been for season 1), just to be liked by a new world, would have fleshed out her character more, and given the viewers and her friends reasoning why she does staggering things.

also when she wanted to get to learn magic from her sensei, Knowing Eda knew how unpredictable & reckless at times luz can be, but Eda has her issues. throughout 4 episodes I think its been dragged out she has done stupid things to put others in harm's way even OWLBERT.

3.she can act nonchalant & ambivalent in dire situations, (to the point her friends should've Gotten angry with her actions, GUS AND WILLOW PERIOD) But don't worry all that's being glazed with the Mary Sue trope, discourse, & her being submissive to amity,

which she can take many stabbings and hits for a cause you know all is well with a Good ship. INSERT SARCASM

tragically i do feel she ended up a girl failure, But they Try hard at girl bossing her up, cause she was put in situations where she didn't have dire punishments and consequences. plus excepting a power she had no choice accepting at the season finale,

Comment below for more, about how Luz should be improved or the fact the series could've written her better.

Hopes this answers all your questions, have a great starlight day. glad we can unlock the topic with a key, & sip some tea.

A VIDEO I DID DOWN BELOW FOR MORE ON LUZ.

[jauntilyplacedcaps]

[tha-wrecka-stow]