this is an exercise ( mostly in constraint for me, a challenge if you will, to shut the fuck up ) in short, concise headcanons based on a meme i found. rather than reblogging it & getting maybe a dozen sent in from the list, i plan to write 1 headcanon, every day, for a 100 days ( mostly consecutively ) to give some quick flash bangs of information on my portrayal then get the fuck out.
030. Do they believe in the afterlife?
oh... right off the bat i'm gonna lie. i'm a liar. I'm not keeping this short, so sorry.
to answer this question, there has to be a positively MASSIVE separation between ethan as a child / young adult, ethan as an adult & ethan after realizing he is infected.
as a child, he was very religious. his father was catholic ( his mother was previously muslim but converted after she moved to the states & began dating his father ) & it was a huge part of their household. ethan grew up having a lot of his identity formed around the values of his father's faith. he knew god was real, god loved him & wanted him to be the best person he could be & would forgive him for anything he did as long as he earnestly asked for forgiveness. his father volunteered a lot of time to missionary work & as i've noted before, ethan's summers were spent between mexico ( doing missionary work w/ his father ) & tunisia ( visiting his mother's family w/ her ). while w/ his mother's family, he melded to their beliefs system as well, he got up w/ his cousins to do morning prayers, his diet was adjusted to be halal-- but for him, it was more about the culture than the faith.
he did not give up his father's catholic faith, tradition or values, but he added his mother's family's customs to it. as a kid, he used a lot of phrases common for his cousins to use w/o really understanding or respecting the meaning behind it. it was more to assimilate to his mother's side of the family rather than claim his heritage, which is fairly common in mixed households & children of immigrant parents.
he was a good kid who went to church every week ( & special holiday sessions ), went to a catholic private school & also went to special weekend camps. not that he was down on his knees doing his nightly prayers, but he did tend to do them as he fell asleep for fear of disappointing his heavenly father.
as w/ all kids, his vision of heaven was shaky but simple: a place where he'd live w/ his parents forever, candy & cake & ice cream for every meal, every comic book he could ever want to read, etc.
once he hit his teen years, his faith became a little more fluid. it wasn't gone but it had changed. it wasn't the brightly colored laminated happy idea he was sold as a child. he became enmeshed w/ schooling, academics intertwined w/ religious values. the pressure to perform, to move toward a career became a moral failing. it pushed him to pick a career, not just a job. he knew the more prestigious & financially stable a career he picked, the more it reflected well upon him not just socially / financially but morally. his faith was tied to his successes & failures.
as he moved into young adulthood, he began to, as most people do, decide who he is. once in college he found a lot of people who were shedding their faith & up to that point, ethan hadn't really worried too much about his sexuality & how it is looked down on by most catholicism. he understood that much of orthodoxy was against it, but his parents attended a more modern, accepting church. he never felt as much push back at church as he did at school. there was far more bullying at school by teachers & more often, students.
he believed, as an adult, the classic definition of heaven was silly. he moved to a more generic idea: there is an afterlife in which good people who do good things get to go & live forever in peace & serenity, while bad people are punished ( he was more torn up about how selfish he is than he is by being bisexual, so he donated often to charity for 1. as a boost to his own ego & 2. as a way to pay for pittance. ), but outside that, there isn't much.
after the event of the baker house, he no longer believed the afterlife was what he thought it was. he had going through a near- ( lol buddy, nothing near about it, dumbass ) death experience & he saw nothing. there was blackness. he has an atheist turn for the first time in his life.
suddenly he believed there was an eternity of blackness forever. it was terrifying. while his idea of an afterlife had lost a lot of that shimmer of his childhood, he still had a hope that it was something beautiful but upon almost dying, he had it revealed as just a hollow promise, ( he thinks what he saw of zoe & jack was just a hallucination. his own mind making something up ) & he had to grieve that loss.
upon dying & walking around the realm of unconsciousness, he realizes that there is, objectively, an afterlife. it is NOT what anyone expected but it is undeniable. it is a life after death, but one that is limited, crafted of the horrors done and molded ( heh, pun intended ) by the head of the realm. it is eveline's twisted playground, it is miranda's insane repetition of cruel experiments. this triggers something of a split in his psyche. there is the former values he held & the post-infection reality he lives in.
ethan thinks that his soul was accepted into the real heaven & the body he is now, as a thing of mold, a reproduction, is a soulless thing that lives only to know self-soothing for all eternity. it is a hell of his own making, again, a hollow promise of his own. he chases down joy & bliss in his own way to avoid the damnation he thinks he deserves.
after decades, ethan's will can manipulate the realm & begin to craft it more towards his adult definition of an afterlife, where people can exist in peace & serenity. i wouldn't say he is a benevolent god, but more a disinterested one. he doesn't care to impress his will & desires on the others, rather he just allows them to do whatever they want w/n the shared jail cell all the infected must share.
