Strong Female Protagonist (No Relation to Hark! A Vagrant!)

Im pretty sure he planned this whole thing ahead of time. He had to get rid of them, and this way it looks like a murder-suicide.

Patrick was never a very nice person. He absolutely was a villan. I just wonder how Alison is taking this.

edited 9th May '18 2:28:49 PM by DeMarquis

Than the be a "loving mom" sequence makes zero sense.

Though killing his dad definitely seemed pre-meditated. Even though it arguably makes less sense.

edited 9th May '18 2:58:57 PM by phantom1

Which specific sequence are you referring to?

The weird milk and cookies one.

If he planned to kill them both, he could have filled her mind with suicide rather than love for him at the step one.

It looks pretty clear-cut to me that in this situation he isn't being an all-planned-out mastermind. He is conflicted, is fumbling around and is screwing up.

I think he wanted to try convincing them first, but he obviously didnt expect that to work, or he wouldnt have brought the knife with him. Patrick isnt a fighter, he doesnt need a weapon for personal defense. He has heavily armed goons for that. So he came expecting to have to use them, and his handing it to his mother so quickly and easily, after provoking them into thinking about how they feel about him, seems premeditated to me. It makes sense, he came up with a plan to eliminate both his parents which would lead the police to an entirely wrong conclusion about what happened here.

After his mother did it, he still gave her one last opportunity to change her mind. When that didnt work, he changed it for her. We know he planned it at least as a likely scenario because of the way he says "There is... another way." Another way, in other words, that he previously thought of. The fact that he is horrified by the result, and later concludes that it was a terrible thing, does not imply that it wasn't an action he thought out ahead of time.

The milk and cookies thing is her having been changed. I dont see how it impacts my argument. She isnt her old self at this point. At first, Patrick thinks his action has worked, but he quickly figures out that it didn't, not in a way that he can accept. This part, his emotional reaction to what he has done, is obviously unplanned. So he disposes of her.

You can tell it's him doing it to her by the "lightning" motif that is passing between them at the top of the page 99. He may or may not have known that he was going to take this step when he went in there (I myself pointed out that he could have simply changed his father earlier). The fact that he didn't change his father, and that he changes his mother only reluctantly, implies to me that he was already aware that changing people is something he doesnt like to do, and only does it when he had no other workable option.

Patrick is a person who plans ahead, and makes multiple plans based on different ways a particular scenario plays out. That is, he isnt the kind of villain who has just one master plan and falls apart as soon as circumstances deviate from that plan. He has a contingency to meet any outcome, and I just think we see how he meets some of those contingencies here in this scene. It really reveals a lot about Patrick as a character. This scene is acting as the "big reveal"—it's demonstrating to Allison (and the audience) who Patrick really is, and how he came to be that way. Nothing is happening here at random, either in-universe, or narratively.

Incidently, this shows that Patrick could have been healing sociopaths this whole time, and perhaps other mental illnesses. Too bad he was a villain.

edited 10th May '18 7:19:02 AM by DeMarquis

I think it's simpler than that; sure, he whammied his mother's empathy-sympathy pathway to the "bog standard" setting (particularly as it related to their relationship) — but, he won't have been able to do much about all the secondary or tertiary knock-ons she never learned how to do.

Note how being tuned to "connect with Patrick" didn't effect how she reacted to killing her husband. Maybe, in time, she could have reorganised a bunch of connections around being able to empathise with others. But, I bet she'd never actually manage to entirely. Especially as that is a lot of lack-of-emotional-range memory to reframe. Heck, if anything, suddenly throwing an external, empathy wrench into a fairly stable antisocial brain might just cause a whole cascade of new and interesting pathologies, rather than the mental health you would hope for.

edited 10th May '18 8:24:47 AM by Euodiachloris

Its more evidence that Patrick didn't do this very often, if at all. He isnt very good at it. It's possible he even made himself believe that he didn't have the ability to do it, afterward, as a way of dealing with the trauma. Patrick strikes me as the type of guy who vastly underestimates his own emotional needs and sensitivities. Perhaps he needed to, to survive as a child, but it led him down a very evil path as an adult.

Now, the real question is, what is Allison thinking?

edited 10th May '18 8:20:43 AM by DeMarquis

Seen it.

edited 11th May '18 2:42:31 AM by FuzzyBoots

Well I guess that's her reaction.

Bit of an anticlimax, but ok.

Mind control can't be practiced on humans, so you have to make someone less than human in your head before you can do it.

Patrick's power kind of makes me think it works via some sort of quantum supposition. To read someone's mind requires you mirror some part of them in you, which means it overwrites you (albeit just memory storage). Controlling someone means overwriting them...

You might be reading into it too much. I don't think there's any quantum hullabaloo going on. It's just the way thinking works, taken to its logical extreme. Whenever we talk to people, we build a picture of that person in our mind so that we can model how they will react to things. Telepathy lets Patrick do that much more accurately and without actually talking to people. Continuing the metaphor, controlling people is like refusing to allow people to speak up and imposing your own model of how they should act, like chaining a wild animal.

There's these fascinating forays into cognitive science...

I just thought of something... what if we're about to find out that Allison unintentionally "rewrote" Patrick into being cured by imposing her own will and smashing down his barriers and mental defenses? It's not the exact technique he used on his mother, but there certainly is a parallel, isn't there?

She came in like a wrecking ball. All she wanted was to break his walls.

Many of us were commenting on that very thing a few pages back.

I don't think she fixed or rewrote Patrick by herself. She just broke his current extremely unhealthy status-quo and got lucky that he rebuilt himself into something more functional.

I agree. The "component" (emotions) outside the wall was a genuine part of Patrick that he was suppressing, not something Alison imposed on him.

Be a person.

Rebuild.

Irony points if real-world Patrick wakes up and doesnt remember any of this.

A tumblr I followed made the point that Patrick described mind control as letting someone else into his mind, which is what he's doing to Allison here.

No, he described projecting thoughts as letting someone else into his mind. Mind control is refusing to acknowledge a person as human and just rewriting them like a book. Allison isn't exactly rewriting him, she's helping him rewrite himself.

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