Syd

This is a little old, but I never posted it here so let's pretend it's new eheheh.

"Die in there cowering like a dog, or come out and face it like a man." – Micah Bell

Sometimes I feel so bad that I can't really draw lol (only horses maybe) so yeah, I would be incredibly grateful if someone draw this for me.

Wet dog hair.

Grown out chops and mo that you know just killed him to be so unkempt.

Sun burnt cheeks.

In other cases, he’d be an asshole to deal with inconveniences and frustrations. End of chapter 4, into chapter 5 is a bigger deal: the bank robbery, waiting around in that room, scurrying to boarding a ship, the ship sinks and they’re stuck on a raft, they all are stranded on a hot island with (assumed) one of their men dead. I too would be pretty tired! Too tired to pick fights or be a hardass.

Micah is no idiot, he can hold his sour mouth and conserve his energy. I quickly rewatched the Guarma cutscene clips and yeah, he seems to be doing his best impression of a background character through most of it. He still had some snarky things to say but overall he seems pretty pliant and going with the flow of the events. It’s not a whole lot he could be doing when backtalk could result in unfavorable outcomes for all of them.

(Drawing from personal experience here but) It seems Micah lurks. He’s always done that when he isn’t pivotal to a cutscene, but I think it’s fine to look into it beyond “he doesn’t have a speaking role in this scene.” He watches, listens, and doesn’t talk or interact. He does this too in camp, he has bouts of seeming apathetic and dismissive to even talking to Arthur, and not in an antagonistic way, he genuinely just wants be alone. On the first ship, on Guarma, and on their escape ship, Micah does the same; lingering and existing in his own little bubble, observing the surroundings and noticing the bad weather. There is a scene where Micah points out dangerous storm clouds aboard the ship and the way he mumbles is similar to how I sound when not 100% there. I’m corn plating fr…

Micah isn’t all low energy in chapter 5. Trust bloodshed and adrenaline to pump him up and get him back to his well-known self. He also still squabbled with Arthur but they seem more agreeable overall on Guarma, chalk it up to mutual desire to survive.

I also can’t overlook that Dutchie is almost always present. Dutch can turn a blind eye to Micah’s bitchiness, but when it is survival or death and you have less than 5 people to insult, it would immediately be on Dutch’s radar if Micah was rocking the boat.

My final point is: he sleepy. He is tired enough to sleep on screen in a hammock and I think that is pretty damn telling. (I’m exaggerating the importance, but it was significant to me).

I don’t think that he believes his own words because evidently he IS tired and sleeping isn’t a waste of time when it’s necessary.

But I have insomnia, and if someone asks me why I sleep so little I tell them that there’s more important things to do.

He definitely suffers from insomnia, and there’s a lot of things out there that can CAUSE insomnia. He has a distrustful nature as it is but I think his past as his father’s partner in crime plays a lot into that.

I think it’s interesting, because I know I personally could never sleep near other people, so it surprises me that Micah is even capable of being exhausted enough to just do it.

Him going to sleep goes against everything he preached to be in the first 4 chapters. I do think that failed bank robbery and the boat sinking did a number on him.

The sleeping has always intrigued me too. Particularly with the timing of it all, yes, he’d be physically and psychologically exhausted from Guarma. But (as we were lead to be believe) {there was no rat, Dutch was the downfall} did he not just go through with the final act of ratting out the gang? For a raging insomniac to sleep among them with the looming uncertainty of a potential visit from the Pinkertons?

In this case, (leaning toward canon that Micah was the rat) perhaps he wasn’t even asleep, and it’s his attempt to cement an idea of innocence to Dutch and the boys, an elaborate act of “letting his guard down.” Maybe it’s a true depiction of his growing weakness and desperation as the chapter progresses. As mentioned, he faltered - ratting out the crumbling gang as the outlook became bleak and uncertain. He was weak, and he knew that. Drained and frustrated from consistent failure, beginning with Blackwater, and boiling over with his stint in the Caribbean. I believe part of him wanted to see out the Van Der Linde gang as planned, but his genuine fear of losing control got the better of him, and his self-preservation will always come before a group he’d only ran with for 12 months. For that he felt remorse. His escape, if not at the bottom of a bottle, was sleep.