#exorjosh

I always got the idea that the spirit can't leave the mountain, so when the rescue team took him down from the mountain, the spirit wouldn't be in control of him anymore

The first person who comes to see him in the hospital is the real Dr. Hill. I've always thought that real Dr. Hill was actually a really nice guy. The others are still mad at him at this point, and Dr. Hill was concerned about his prank to begin with

They finally get him on the right meds to calm down a bit and stop the hallucinations

Chris and Sam are the first of the group to warm back up to him, convinced by Dr. Hill

He has partial wendigo vision loss and now wears glasses, which he hates and wants contacts instead, but with how the shape of his eyes has kind of changed, he can't get contacts to fit or stay in(I've never worn contacts so if this ain't how it works I'm sorry 😭)

When he's finally released from the hospital, he mostly just hides in one of his parents' houses, trying to keep his distance from them because he thinks they blame him for what happened to Hannah and Beth, and that they'd hate him for looking different

On the rare occasions he goes outside during those first few months, he wears a face mask to hide his teeth

He likes to sleep under things, in dark, warm, cozy spots, so sometimes he'll wake up under the bed and not remember going down there in the night

He will sometimes still make wendigo screeching noises when startled

He likes his meat a little more rare now, and thinks its gross, repeatedly apologizing if he eats in front of other people, even though it's not that bad

Winter reminds him of everything that's happened and he prefers to spend winter either indoors or someplace warm

It takes his parents a while to get through to him that it's not his fault and they're just glad that he's still alive

He has trouble gaining weight now and is usually a little skinny

Eventually, the rest of the group slowly comes around once he's been on the proper meds for a while

Once he's more comfortable with himself again, he starts taking advantage of and having fun with his wendigo powers

He can climb up on the ceiling to easily kill bugs, or just for fun to get around the house

When the group comes over he'll take off his glasses and they can play Marco Polo

When he's genuinely happy or sleeping, he purrs. Not exactly like a cat, but like a rumbling noise in his chest and throat that happens whether he likes it or not

He walks really quietly now and can sneak up on people easily

Chris encourages him to be more comfortable with wearing glasses

I want to believe that the rescue team found other wendigos and knows what happened, so he never gets in trouble or anything

They do keep and use the flamethrower guy's notebooks as a kind of handbook for understanding the changes in behavior or preferences

He's even more protective of everyone in the group now

I don't think he'd ever stop wearing the face mask in public just to avoid attention from strangers or scaring people, especially kids

I think he'd eventually(like maybe after 2 or 3 years) he'd go back to college again

Eventually, he doesn't have to see Dr. Hill anymore as a therapist and just needs to keep taking his meds, but Dr. Hill still checks in on him and makes sure he's ok

(I am using the word eventually too fucking much)

He never goes back up on the mountain again for any reason, because there's no way of knowing if the spirit would just come right back and possess him again

I think the family just fences off the whole mountain as is and leaves it alone so no one else gets hurt

He still has urges, but he can hold them back better. Chris provides him with raw stakes and other things from the local butchers. (In my local butcher, you can buy lamb innards for whatever. Scottish dishes, dog food, flavour additives etc etc)

His mental clarity varies from day to day, so Chris came up with a system. Josh will text him a number from 1 to 10 every morning. 1 being "I want to rip someone's throat out" and 10 being "I feel like normal Josh." Chris knows to be worried if the number goes below 5. If Josh hits a 1, Chris needs to lock him in his room for both their safety until he's calmed down.

Thanks to the curse, Josh's eyesight is blurred, but he's not completely blind. He can sense moment better and has inpecible reflexes. He's super fast and agile, hanging from anything and everything to jumpscare Chris, much to his dismay. His teeth are jagged and deformed, severely affecting his speech and ability to show his expressions. He's not nonverbal. It just takes a while to get it out. He can't go outside much due to his condition, and with how popular his court case became, but when he does, he goes with someone and wears a face mask. The soles of his feet have become softer to absorb his weight when he jumps from place to place, causing him to move more silently (aka, Josh has something like toe beans)

Josh is on a LOT of meds, but he's just thankful he finally got the right medication for his conditions. He still has hallucinations, but Chris figured out that they don't show up on cameras or screens, so when Josh calls for help, he runs in like paparazzi and snaps photos everywhere with much hilarity for Josh to laugh at, then he shows Josh the photos to show that nothing was there.

Overall? I just want Josh to get the help he deserves and, quite frankly, needs.

At first I think Chris would be, rightfully, pissed at Josh, but once he hears of his mental illnesses and at how shitty his past therapist was (because let's be honest, that guy in the game didn't sit right with me) he learns to see his perspective.

Still deciding if the others should be alive or not. Emily wouldn't forgive Josh. Just no. Michael, maybe? I don't know. Jess didn't really know what he did fully, so she might be more inclined to forgive. Sam would forgive. She's kind of like that. Ashley would tolerate Josh but not fully forgive. She might be guilty if she stabbed him, but in her defence, she had no idea. Matt might want to forgive, but seeing Em's distrust in him would make his hesitant

(ref under cut)

I dug this out of the depths yesterday because I’m suddenly charmed by Until Dawn again. The fandom is kind of dead everywhere but Reddit and Twitch, but I figured some might like to look.

Fic notes:

☑️ Post game

☑️ Wendigo!Josh

☑️ mental health

☑️ Survivors: Sam, Chris, Mike, Jess, Josh

☑️ Chris-centric, Josh-centric

ooouughh the GRIP this man has on me with my art rn

Okay, so. Spoilers for Until Dawn necessary to answer this so don’t read if you want to avoid that.

So. The 2016 playstation game Until Dawn is a decision-based story driven survival horror game with eight playable protagonists. All eight are determinate and can live or die depending on player choices. However, one of the eight, Josh Washington, the character the tragedy of the game centers around, even if he survives is never given a happy ending.

Now, that’s actually part of whay makes Until Dawn a phenomenal game imo, because it’s a deeply genre reflective piece, especially about the treatment of mental illness and demonization of it in and by horror, secondarily about the discarding and appropriation of indigenous tradition. The game leads you to believe, as all the characters do, that Josh, who is psychotic, depressed, having a breakdown, and terrorizing his friends elaborately because they are responsible for his sisters’ deaths one year ago, is also responsible for the incredibly dangerous things going on and death of one of the friends (determinate/assumed). It plays very in line with classic horror mentally ill = evil, and the characters and player tie Josh up in a shed once he’s finally stopped from what he was doing, and refuse to believe him he hasn’t hurt anyone and insist he has to the point that he, mid horrific breakdown, becomes unsure himself and has like a complete collapse and monumental hallucinations.

Right after it’s gone that far, there’s the midpoint reveal Josh was not lying, and the things up here killing people are Wendigo. (There’s fascinating history here—the Russians who first colonized the area refused to believe native tradition and beliefs and camed up with what they called ‘Wendigo psychosis’—a mental illness that made you go crazy and eat people—to try to explain stories away. So there’s like four layers of respect indigenous tradition and quit fucking doing this to mentally ill people in horror going on in just the game thesis alone. The team worked really closely with tribe members from the areas involded and there’s some really cool interveiw stuff—also, fun fact, Until Dawn is the single most accurate/respectful presentation of Wendigo in any piece of western media I am aware of. They’re often portrayed with horns and like deer people, a style I believe invented by Steven King? But that’s wildly off and just made up, and in traditional lore they look like starving elongated pale humans with no hair.)

Anyway! Sorry. I have so much love and so many thoughts on UD I get carried away. So, the midway twist suddenly puts you in the position of “Oh fuck, Josh didn’t hurt anyone, and we didn’t believe him so we hurt him and then tied him up and left him like a gift for the monsters.” and you spend a good portion of the remaining game trying to get him back before it’s too late. No matter what you try though, you cannot truly save Josh. He is either killed by a Wendigo extremely graphically, or he is left alone in the mines and possed/taken over by one of the Wendigo spirits and beginning to turn himself by the time he’s found. I like this choice as much as it hurts, because it forces the player to think. If you could save Josh, it’d be “Well it was messed up what happened to him, but it turned out okay!” And you’d get to move on. But no matter what, it is never all turning out okay for Josh, so you do not get that option. Almost the entire fandom back when the game dropped was distraught over this and Josh’s treatment, and there was a reason. It was exactly the intended one. The unsatisfying way his story ends regardless makes it so you end up unable to brush off the rest of it as okay, and it ruminates instead, and is a really, really good genre reflective on how mental illness is treated in horror specifically. I am sure some people exist who reacted different bc there’s so many period, but I have played UD /many/ times and with a bunch of people, including my baby brother at 12 and a 24 yo dude who hated Josh on sight because he’s got a really manipulative family member who uses his disorder as an excuse to ve shitty, and I have never once played UD with someone who did not after the halfway plot twist, no matter how annoyed or mad at him for his shit they were before, did not both care about and feel extremely bad for Josh and try hard to save him. The choice worked. Really fucking well.

That said, it uhhhh, fuckin sucks for Josh! And while I think the game benefited from ending how it did, I think a super hard to find secret ending where things are less awful (like of the kind maybe nobody found for a whole year even) could have done a good job of both making the thesis really sink in like a knife, and letting the poor traumatized guy get a happy ending. Because both would be ideal, you know? I know you can’t always do both, but I wish. That said, they probably made the rightest call how they left it, esp with RoB releasing so soon after. Anyway! Most of the fandom also was in mourning for Josh, and I believe it was @danji-doodle who originally popularized exorjosh and coined the term? Basically, it was a kind of fixer but fixer in line with canon AU, where in the “Josh is possesed by a Wendigo spirit” ending, be was sucessfuly exorcised/saved, and rehabilited. It was very cute and sweet. Because it centered around him being sucessfully exorcised and rehabilitated, and was specifically a Josh-fixer AU, it was called ExorJosh.

Anyway, fun fact! While in production for Until Dawn, Supermassive also made Rush of Blood, a firstperson VR shooter. The shooter is basically an incredibly fucked up first person experience of Josh having a breakdown and getting possesed, inside his head how that looks to him. The last thing you fight is the specific Wendigo that possesed and is trying to take him over (truly horrifying), but while an arcade shooter and very surreal, it does actually make ExorJosh canon. Which I was thrilled about, bc I was very sad after UD. Somehow most of the UD fandom doesn’t seem to be aware of the existence of the game, or well, don’t know what happens in it anyway. So I am very sad for them. The game’s been out since 2016/17 I can’t remember for Rush of Blood off the top of my head. :’-] But anyway, it’s a little open to interpretation because of the hallucinative nature of the experience, but considering if you kill the Wendigo (I should note, in line, albeit really extra-ly, with Algonquin legend. It is possible, though unusual, to exorcise someone possessed by a Wendigo by destroying its heart of ice, either physically with boiling medicine made for that, or spiritually in an internal battle, which is how the last boss fight goes.) —There’s also a secret ending where you wake up at the end of UD/the matching Josh scene from it, and the most hard to get trophy, where you can see the doctor for moments (though to you he looks like a corpse you see in the first game) before returning to the nightmare, is called Moment of Sanity. —If you win/kill it, you wake up with the doctor you see off and on in it and are told you’re not cured yet, but that this looks really good for you and you’re probably gonna make it now (I’m paraphrasing but that’s the gist). So it’s basiclaly confirmed and I am very happy for him bc Josh deserved to fight free and live happily again. :’-]