Tear Jerker / Strong Female Protagonist

• Feral's plan to save the world. She speaks to some doctors about seeing if she can donate her organs multiple times using her Healing Factor. Initial tests prove a complete success, so she decides to spend the rest of her very long life on an operating table, having her organs, blood, and skin constantly removed and regenerated, pausing only briefly when doctors get tired or machines wear out. Oh, and she's immune to anesthetic. It is the most heartwarming, heroic, and horrifying thing anyone has ever seen. Alison breaks down crying when she hears the whole story, because she has no idea what to do.
  Alison: I should...I should stop her, right? But...it's the most heroic thing anyone's ever done, but I can't—
• Pintsize's page-long speech about how he hates the idea of deconstruction in a sense. How he feels it's unfair that people want Superheroes to be sad and complicated all in the name of being smart, when all it makes him feel is like he's being an idiot just for wanting to be a good person and doing the right thing.
• Patrick attempts to dissuade Alison by giving a pages-long Motive Rant about how good and evil don't really exist, and that lives are a commodity. Alison sees through this and calls him out on his BS before stumbling into an unexpected fact - he can't read his own mind. This revelation shakes him so much that he doesn't duck when Alison literally throws his gift to her back in his face.
  • Said gift is a Looney Tunes mug.
• The reveal about Patrick. He really IS evil, after all.. However, this doesn't mean he's not a well-developed, three dimensional character, who's firmly convinced what he is doing is right. And, Alison's pain is REAL.
• Daniel's conversation with Alison about the existence of good people in the world. She's the first good person he's met, and he's convinced himself she's the ONLY good person. When Alison asks why he tells himself that when he knows it's not true, he reveals it's because if other good people exist, that means he's killed a lot of them.
• During the Dynamorphic convention, Alison witnesses a heated exchange involving a dynamorph who is a Sex Shifter, but not consciously - it depends on their emotional state.
  Kiele: When I'm a woman, I'm a woman. When I'm a man, I'm a man. The fact that I can change between the two doesn't make me a fucking monster. It just means I need to figure out twice as much.
• Alison viewing Patrick's childhood while inside his mind. His only friend, the first mind he ever read, was his loyal and unconditionally loving dog. When his parents found out he was psychic he was experimented on by several doctors, at least one of them he reveals is a pedophile who targets third-world children (and is promptly slapped for saying so). His mother, a sociopath, murders his dog one evening right in front of him - because the dog had ripped her stocking. Even worse, his dog only acted because he could tell that Patrick needed his mother's attention. His father is revealed to have been horrified and upset by finding out Patrick can read minds, which Patrick can, obviously, see. It's heavily implied that his mother was going to murder him to make her life easier. His childhood is so horrible that it's a part of himself he locks completely outside of his mental barriers, so he doesn't have to deal with it.

  • After all this, he walled off his need for love and acceptance. And then his fear, and any other emotion that would impede him.
    Young!Patrick: Money, land, investments. Easy. The parts of myself that weren't useful, I plucked out. I made myself into the version of me that could survive.
  • Unfortunately, his friendship with Alison is something part of his mind is a weakness, so she has to be eliminated.
  • Going off of that is the eventual reveal that he mind-controlled his mother in a desperate bid to get her to love him, but the consequences of that was so traumatic for him that he erased his memory of the event and bottled it up because he, as Alison points out, believed it to the be the one thing that would convince those around him that he wasn't human. The statement he makes after explaining how it all worked to her is heartbreaking.
    Patrick: You see, I love people, and I've always sort of wanted to be one.