fuck nuggets

Before Josh invited them all back to Blackwood Pines: 

- Ashley started to avoid Chris, Sam, and Josh after the “prank” that lead to Hannah and Beth’s disappearance. But since she didn’t feel comfortable with Emily, Jess, or Mike, she ended up isolating herself. Whenever the loneliness became too much, she sheepishly approached Chris at school. She expected his anger, his disappointment, but she got neither of those things. Chris accepted her as he always did and helped her with science as if nothing had happened. So, she just started to act like nothing did. 

Still, Ashley was incredibly nervous around Josh for weeks. He would get this look on his face like he was super pissed whenever he thought no one was paying attention, but the moment one of them spoke to him, all of that rage would flicker out. 

Ashley couldn’t shake the feeling that Josh was a ticking bomb. She waited for months for him to go off on one of them. Any of them. But he never did. If anything, he seemed to just mellow out. Ashley allowed herself to relax.

- Chris hid his anger and grief well. He had been close with Hannah. She was sweet, quiet, and caring. He just didn’t understand how the people Hannah and he had called friends could do such a thing. For a little while, he had resolved to cut all of them out of his life. But then…he saw Ashley at school, isolating herself. 

He knew her fear of isolation. It was one Josh shared; it was something that made the two closer friends. Ashley was punishing herself for what Chris considered to be a more minor part in the prank. The upset look on her face was enough for him to melt his rage. He couldn’t stay mad at Ashley. 

He was preparing to present Josh with the thought of Ashley hanging out with them again. Josh had agreed; Ashley was always welcome, he said, a stupid mistake didn’t make her any less his friend. 

Chris was delighted whenever she approached him in the library and asked if she could sit down.

- Mike joined Sam on at least one of her rock climbing adventures. He had wanted to do it just to show Sam that he wasn’t all talk and to maybe bridge the gap that Sam had erected between them after the Hannah and Beth disappeared. Mike was impressed by how well Sam could climb, though he figured she was taking it easy because he was a beginner and waiting on him. He was proven correct the next time they met up to climb and Sam left him in the dust. 

- Jess originally ignored her crush on Mike, especially after Hannah. She refused to be yet another girl sucked into Mike’s web of charming good looks and “good guy” behavior. She wasn’t willing to do that to Emily; but as their relationship worsened, Jess decided to go for it. 

- Emily and Jess’ friendship started to fall apart long before Mike showed interest in Jess. They blamed themselves so strongly for Hannah and Beth’s disappearance and coped by shoving the blame off on one another. Whenever Mike started to show interest in Jess and dumped Emily to be with her, it was just the final nail in the coffin. 

-  Emily latched onto Sam as her “new” best friend. She frequently called Sam up and asked her to do things with her. At first, things were incredibly awkward because Emily feared Sam blamed her for Hannah and Beth’s disappearance too, but Sam never spoke a word about it so Emily relaxed. 

 - Emily drug Sam out to get a manicure and pedicure just before Josh sent out the invitations. Emily convinced her by saying if she didn’t like it, she didn’t have to get it done again. Sam chose the blue nail polish and the snowflake stencil because why not, its the season. Emily chose black because it was her color. 

- Jess was really jealous and slightly hurt whenever she saw the pictures of Sam and Emily hanging out in all of the places Emily used to take her, but she knew that was Emily’s angle. So, she just retaliated by posting pictures of Mike and her in all of the places Mike used to take Emily. 

- Sam frequently hid out at Josh’s to escape Emily. She didn’t mind hanging out with her, but she was tired of hearing about Mike. Even if it was always incredibly entertaining to hear how creative Emily could get with her put-downs. She had to deal with Josh teasing her about her “new found friendship with the resident viper”, but she could weather that easily. The back-and-forth banter was familiar and comforting. A sign that Josh was getting better. 

- Josh mostly hung out with Chris, Sam, and Ashley. He was still too angry, too raw to deal with Mike, Emily, or Jess. He could probably deal with Matt, but the quarterback was so busy with his own responsibilities that he rarely saw him one-on-one. 

- Josh often ended up at Sam’s house. Most nights, they would sneak out of her bedroom window and sit on the roof. Some nights they would sit in silence, just looking up at the stars and the moon; other nights, he would curse and cry and she would listen. The few nights in between those, they would banter, laugh, and run from their problems. If her mother ever clued in that her daughter had a frequent midnight visitor, she never gave any indication.

- Sam worked hard to forgive the others for the prank they had pulled on Hannah. It was easier not to blame them for Hannah and Beth’s disappearance; she realized that they had not intended for Hannah to get hurt–physically–and that they had no way of knowing Hannah would run out in the middle of a snow storm without a coat. It was harder to forgive them for playing the prank in the first place. If they hadn’t humiliated her so spectacularly, Hannah wouldn’t have had a reason to go outside in the first place. No matter how hard she tried, Sam couldn’t shake that truth, that thought. As much as she blamed them, she blamed herself too. If she had just been a little quicker, if she had just torn up the letters instead of trying to find Hannah, maybe she would have been able to save her from her fate herself. If Sam had just been a little quicker or smarter, Beth wouldn’t have had to chase her sister outside.  

It wasn’t until she broke down in front of Josh on one of their nightly stargazes that she felt the burden of her rage and a little of her self-hatred lighten. He had held her as she cried and cursed just as she had for him so many times before; he had listened and stroked her hair. When she was finished talking, but still crying on his chest–ruining his hoodie, he had started talking. His voice was raw with his own pain as he soothed her guilt. And even though Sam knew she should move away from him and let him go, she stayed in the shelter of his arms…and he let her. They held onto one another the entire night, almost falling asleep on top of the roof, before being startled by the alarm echoing from her mother’s bedroom.

-Matt lied and told the others he was busy when he wasn’t because he couldn’t bring himself to face Josh or any of the others. He should have known he couldn’t outrun them forever. Emily cornered him at one of his teammates’ parties and gave him the most scathing put-down he had ever earned. She called him a coward. She cut him to the quick and demanded that he stop rolling in his own self-pity and stop making this tragedy about him. 

That was the first night Matt saw something in Emily that no one else did. He got to see the vulnerability and her guilt. He got to see the caring side of her as she screamed at him about cutting all of them out of his life because he couldn’t deal. 

Later, he maintained it was the alcohol’s fault when he kissed her mid-scream. She had slapped him in retaliation because, really, who kisses someone whenever they are berating you? She had more to say, damn it. Once she was finished, she looked at his sheepish expression and his reddening cheek and told him, “you can kiss me now, if you still want too.” 

“And risk getting slapped again? No way. I’ll wait for you to kiss me.” 

“Well, I guess you’ll just be waiting for a while then.” 

A while turned out to be midnight, whenever Emily spotted Jess and Mike locked in a vicious tongue war. She hunted Matt down, grabbed his shoulder, and pulled him down into a kiss in front of half of the football team.

After reading this post, I thought it made a lot of sense with regards to what we learn about how people turn into wendigos in The Inpatient, I just didn’t want to post a big huge spoiler on this person’s post.

(The original post talks about this person’s theory that, when Josh is down in the mines, the person Josh is talking to when he says, “I trust you,” is the wendigo spirit, and that he’s being possessed then.)

While i love the theory that the person josh is talking to is the player, since this is the first and only time you control Josh in the whole game (minus the Dr. Hill interludes), it really makes sense with what’s revealed in The Inpatient about the process of becoming a wendigo.

When you’re being possessed by the wendigo spirit, it can talk to you in the voices of people you know, and it can make you experience strange dreams, which could easily translate to hallucinations in someone already prone to them, I would think. While I’ve always figured that the wendigo spirit disorients whoever it possesses–as that’s the only explanation i can see for why hannah and josh could never just find their way out of the caves like the other characters can in just the span of a few hours–The Inpatient shows us exactly how it happens.

So it’s completely plausible that this whole sequence is his possession and beth and hannah are just projections of the wendigo spirit, and not simply the crumbling of his already questionable sanity. The dark voice we hear laughing, which I supposed to be the voice of Josh’s own mind, could easily be the wendigo spirit. There are many moments in The Inpatient where we hear a dark voice, that doesn’t quite sound like any of the characters it can mimic, and that’s exactly what I think Josh hears.

It doesn’t fit as nicely as i might like that that spirit was the Makkapitew, though. It would be a very satisfying through line if that was the case, since it’s revealed at the end of The Inpatient that you were the Makkapitew, the wendigo that killed hannah and beth. The makkapitew was killed by jack, the flamethrower guy, and it then entered hannah. It would have been narratively satisfying if the makkapitew had then entered josh, but Hanndigo doesn’t die until after this scene, so it kind of feels less meaningful if it’s just some random wendigo spirit.

And actually, I think you could marry the two ideas (that Josh was talking to a wendigo spirit in that scene, but the one that eventually possessed him was still the Makkapitew). Because in The Inpatient, as the two major outcomes are whether you become the wendigo or your roommate does, I think that shows that the Makkapitew was influencing both the player character and Dr. Bennet through the green dreams and such. They’re both being influenced, for sure, but neither quite possessed.

I don’t think the wendigo spirit could actually take ahold of someone or possess them until they have actually eaten human flesh. And at that point, Josh hadn’t.

But he could certainly be being influenced - and it makes a lot of sense if he was since he was clearly in an already weakened mental state and had been left isolated in a wendigo den. Seeing as there’s no human flesh to eat, and he’s hardly coherent enough to take his ‘hallucinations’ of this thing past face value, when Mike and Sam find him, he just appears to be having a breakdown. And, you know, doesn’t look like a man being persuaded by a cannibal spirit because “Wait- but why would I eat people; I’m not even hungry??”

Hannah:

Beth:

Sam:

Josh:

Ashley:

Chris:

Mike:

Jess:

Emily:

Matt:

until dawn characters: Hannah Washington