#gtfothegame

So, I'm new to GTFO in general, I know a lot of the lore but I am currently unable to play the games. So, I feel that I must say that as a warning to take this with a grain of salt. Anyways, I read up on Woods and looked at the audio files and text files surrounding him. I thought it was really interesting that Woods seems to keep falling into the same habits of self-harm from the past no matter how many times they reset him. He's an actual oddity to them. I like to think that this is because, for whatever reason, the mind-wiping only works on Woods for a while before he slowly but surely starts to gain his memories back, and with these old memories comes new distress. So that's why he starts to self-harm so often and his "old habits" come back. Every time Woods is reset, he gets put through the same cycle of having a coat of fog in his mind, getting absolutely horrible nightmares hinting at what he's done and what he's been through in his past, and then eventually taking it out on himself more often than not before he's reset. Eventually, they had to stop this because nothing was coming out of resetting him constantly over and over again. One thing is clear though and will always remain a constant, Woods hates himself and his memories confuse him. He doesn't even know how he could be capable of killing several innocent people in one go while saying he was doing it in God's name. His memories aren't perfect or as clear as they were before the mind wipe but it's enough to know that he did something evil and as he says in his first interview, he thinks he shouldn't be alive and should have died a long time ago. There's always the occasional moment where Woods blanks out or just seems to be... not present. He has this happen with interviewers and he does have this happen with his own teammates. I think the reason why Woods hasn't been marked as faulty and then put into recycling is because he's a fascinating case study and they've never seen anything like this before. So that's why he went from O-2056 to F-2056. He's not faulty yet but he is an oddity that must be marked down. He continues to do work for them and do it well and that seems to be what matters most, but how long is it until he ends up getting to be too much to handle? There is one more character who has this sort of thing going on, and funny enough it's Bishop. Except Bishop hasn't been observed harming himself because he isn't as obvious about it as Woods is for some reason or another, he's able to hide the fact that the resetting and mind wiping works for a while and then starts to lose its effect. There are little tell-tale signs, like Bishop also blanking out and seeming to have horrible nightmares of something horrible happening to him but these could easily be written off as being caused by something else entirely. He also has a very increased aversion to giving his teammates his trust because, god help him, they might stab him in the back like the people in his past did. Just like how it is with Woods, Bishop's memories of his past are not very clear and are very imperfect, that's why he knows he was fucked over but he can't remember how he was fucked over, how he ended up in the Legion Program, or even what he did to warrant the treatment. He knows a name though, Janson Davies and he knows that while he can't understand the specifics, that man is important somehow. Maybe Bishop is so good at hiding his resistance to mind wiping because his old memories are less distressing than Woods' are? Well, maybe maybe not, they are still plenty distressing given that he was kept as a prisoner of war for three years and anything could have happened in that time frame. Maybe he has a different way of handling it all? That is for you to decide dear reader but know it probably isn't much better than how Woods handles it, it's just that his way of handling it is considered "minor" enough that it hadn't warranted several resets.