#big evil

OMG I'VE BEEN WANTING SOMEONE TO ASK ME THIS FOR SO LONG! I'LL TRY MY BEST TO EXPLAIN IT IN A WAY THAT MAKES SENSE [for a bit of context all the clips I'm going to be talking about are from 1996 + I have them saved if anyone wants to see a certain one!] So when mankind's debut was being teased he would always be alone in dark places talking about how he's a 'freak' both physically and emotionally [my favourite quote from these teasers is 'on the eight day God created mankind, why was he having such a bad day?'] and he later goes onto talk about how both of his parents grew to resent him due to either his anger [he says something about how his father thought he was too out of control and needed to be 'numbed'] or his deformity [he says his mum used to always wake him up so her friends could hear his music but once it stopped she started to resent him or something like that] and I believe that because of that not only does he have parental issues [like hell he frequently calls Goldust 'mommy' and says he's her little boy who needs to protect her] but further more I hc that he has a twisted kind of religious guilt which is why he's so 'crazy' [trying to destroy himself and possibly end up dead because God clearly made a mistake with him which you can either read as him trying to deform himself sm he's unrecognisable and therefore nothing like what God created him to be or you can read it as he feels if God couldn't love him then there's no point in living because he was created as pure evil and pure evil must be punished/cleansed from the world.

Now as I've stated before mankind sees Goldust as a mother figure and I think it's for two reasons; one, his own mother rejected him for being a 'freak' so he believes no 'normal' person could love him so he finds comfort in someone else who is, as Vince McMahon always puts it on commentary, 'a bizarre one' but also because Mankind's mum 'always woke him up for the music' which made him feel wanted, he clings to Goldust's theatrical nature as it reminds him of his mum [and side note, Goldust clearly takes on the role really well, there's footage of him literally in Mankind's boiler room, a place he feels safe and grounded, a place he calls his home being so tender with him, comforting him like every child wants their mother to do.]

Before I go onto The Undertaker, for context, in '96 the three men had a feud; from his debut Mankind always attacked The Undertaker and then when Goldust and The Undertaker began feuding Mankind would frequently come to his rescue [clearly closer with Goldust, playing into the stereotype of a 'mamas boy.']

I feel like there's two ways to view The Undertaker in this dynamic; one being as Goldust is a mother figure to Mankind he could view The Undertaker as a father figure [in his debut teasers there's light implications that Mankind's mother and father weren't on agreeable terms, especially when it came to how to raise Mankind so the conflict could remind him of that and as his mother was implied to be more tender, even if she was still rejecting him, he would be more inclined to 'protect' her and in turn protect Goldust from The Undertaker] but also you could argue his religious guilt could absolutely manifest in a hatred for The Undertaker because, as previously mentioned, I think that Mankind would be drawn to death and self-destruction as an attempt to either defy God or cleanse himself from the world and as The Undertaker is very much symbolic of death [he's literally 'the dead man'] he could be angry at death for refusing to take him and the closet he can get to attacking death realistically is via The Undertaker.