“how did I become this me?”
I’d like to talk about Melinda May.
I’d like to talk about Melinda May in seasons 6 and 7 where a lot of stuff is going on, but only some of it is dealt with explicitly. The gaps are fillable though. It’s one of my favourite parts: filling in gaps in the text, not exactly headcanonning, but extrapolating the bits that can be extrapolated if you put your mind to it. Mixing logic and poetry and finding the truth somewhere in between.
May we meet in season 6 spent Coulson’s last days in Tahiti with him, she buried him and she came back. And she is probably the most open we’ve ever seen her. She is dealing with her loss, and she is able to talk about it. She supports Mack. She seems to have found some kind of closure after all.
And then Sarge turns up, and whatever peace she’s found is gone.
She still doesn’t close herself off.
She starts believing that Coulson is in there somewhere.
It’s a mistake that gets her killed.
A monster wearing the face of the man she loved drives a sword through her chest.
It’s a lot even before she falls through a portal to a world of death to fight some nazguls.
But before all that she speaks in an attempt to draw Coulson out of the monster.
Melinda May makes a speech about love.
When a sword goes through her chest, she is raw, and open, and vulnerable, and filled with faith and love, and all her defences are down, like we’ve never seen her before.
And then she comes back from the dead with no feelings of her own, but mirroring feelings of those around her. First it’s those who touch her, then it’s people around her, but it’s less precise and less intense and more like reading people, and in the end she is overwhelmed by deaths happening far away. She reads Kora, but is it superempathy or is it paying attention and tons of experience? She is upset by thousands of deaths. Which is quite normal for people outside of military organisations.
At the same time, more and more of her shows, but everyone, including herself, is too busy saving the world to notice.
She does have a superpower. But this superpower is also her emotions finding their way back to her after years of suppression and slow healing and a traumatic overdrive in the temple.
When she goes to hug Daisy, at least two things are happening at once.
Daisy wants to hug her, but keeps some distance out of respect for May’s boundaries, and May picks up on that want.
May at this point is ready for this hug, and she actively wants it, but she also knows that Daisy wants it, because she knows Daisy, and she would do it for Daisy and for herself.
It’s also human to mirror emotions, one way or another.
Contrary to popular belief, Melinda May has always been an empathetic person. We’ve seen her respond in her own way to emotional needs of others, and not just Coulson and Daisy. We’ve seen it with Elena in season 7, but also in season 5, we’ve seen it with Bobbi back in season 3, hell, even with Ward.
It’s what she does with her emotions and the emotions of others that has been changing. Her ways are not always healthy, and sometimes they’re both efficient and unhealthy.
She’s been lowering her defences for some time and ended up short circuited in the temple, but then she recovered, and the point came when she didn’t need to shield herself from others anymore. She uses her superpower to defeat the enemy, but she also calls herself the Cavalry, because it’s all her now, and there are no walls within her.
We see her one year later being a mentor, working with people, making jokes, smiling, content.
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