oh the tl;dr
NEEDY ON STUFF
OK, so I was feeling really shaky on Needy, so I rewatched for the first time in waaaay too long and now I am essaying for the first time when I should have done it five three (IDK) months ago BUT WHATEVS BETTER LATE THAN NEVER. Also, a lot of this is headcanon and extrapolation. We do hear enough from end-of-canon!Needy that I felt comfortable apping her from there, though. You get plenty of voice for her, and I think the movie makes it very clear where her character is going. BUT ANYWAY YES.
As a warning: this one is rambly and disorganized even by my normal standards and also if it's contradictory I blame it on the fact that she's cray-cray.
First off, what I was doing wrong:
Made her too sane. This is pretty much the first time I've ever done this, so it's shocking, I know. I made her angry, sure, but her off-kilter mental state is a lot more pronounced and complicated than just a change of attitude. The movie and Needy's own narration make it pretty clear that while it IS partially "ONLY NEEDY KNOWS WHAT'S GOING ON NO ONE WILL BELIEVE HER :( :( :(" She's also kind of genuinely cracked. She's a kicker! She is continuing to hallucinate even once Jennifer's gone. Yeah, she can be rational, and have normal conversations, make friends and generally act like a person, but she's also going to sometimes be unreasonable, see the walls dripping blood and have uncontrollably violent rage sometimes. Basically, she's rational, but she is not by any means stable. This is what happens when you destroy a girl's life slowly, throw her in a federal nut-bin and then fuse a demon to her soul. OOPS! Anyway I was too worried about pushing too far the other way- making her a tragic Ophelia, which is even more wrong. She might have some amazing shit luck, but she's also a badass motherfucker. These two can be balanced. But anyway more on Needy's crazy later.
Thing two I did wrong was make her too nice. I don't think post-canon Needy is evil. I don't think the movie gives us any reason to think that at all. I mean, yeah, she busts out of jail, but who can blame her? Then she is perfectly civil with that driver dude. And yes, the next thing she does is go butcher Low Shoulder, but they're way eviler than Jennifer could ever be so fuck them. Needy doesn't want to be evil either, but she's not exactly "good" anymore. She's probably not going to be reluctant to feed, or show much remorse over it. She does genuinely want to be friends with some of the people she's encountered in camp, but unlike Jennifer she won't spend too much time pretending to be what she's not. Actually, more than actions, I think this was missing from her voice. She's not an over-sexed creeper like Jennifer, but she does have some amount of that flippant arrogance that Jennifer has. Her response to all the people who write her letters and pray for her salvation is that she's "the shit." So yeah. NEEDED MOAR EGOMANIA.
Oh and third thing is that for some reason I thought she was a really honest person and avoided lying. I'm not sure where I got that because clearly I'm wrong. /o/
From here, I don't really know how to lay out all my Needy thoughts so I'm going to just pick a place to start
First off, what I think the demon is. The movie never says much outright on what exactly happens to Jennifer or Needy. I'm working under the assumption that Needy is now basically the same thing that Jennifer is, both for my own convenience and also because I wanted to play a lesbian cannibal demon. Can you really blame me? So while I think they're the same thing, the way it effected them is different. Jennifer's personality under the demon was a pretty straightforward progression, she went from "high school evil" to "evil evil." But Needy was always the good one, there's no simple and clear path from mousy, nerdy girl to man-eater, the way that there is from uh, man-eater to man-eater. However, it wasn't Needy out in the woods that night, and the Needy that the demon infected wasn't a mousy, cute little nerd. By the time the demon infects Needy she's been through hell and out the other side. She's faced horrible gruesome stuff totally alone, she's held her boyfriend while he died, she stabbed her best friend and then spent a while in a home for the criminally insane.
So the Needy that gets infected is a much stronger Needy than we see early in the story, but she is also by her own description a "very bad, very damaged person." I think it's kind of chicken-or-the-egg when you're talking about Needy going demonic and Needy going badass and Needy going nuts. I don't think Needy is quite "broken" at any part of the framed story, for however much crying and hallucinating she does, she's still basically in control. So crazy, badass, demon they all kind of develop together between the flashbacks and her narration, though they were all catalyzed by the events of the movie. OK, but back to the demon part I swear I'll get back to her crazy.
ANYWAY eating people is still sexual to Needy, but not in the same way it is to Jennifer. To Jennifer, the emotional response she needs is desire -> fear. Sex, to Jennifer, has always been about consumption. It's not a big jump to get from using them sexually to actually seeing them as a consumable resource. But what we see from Needy's sexuality, she doesn't really want anything like that at all. She has a pretty healthy sexual relationship with her boyfriend. To her, sex is NOT a form of consumption, and so I don't think she's see consumption as completely interchangeable with sex. (Or at least not how she saw sex as a human.) We don't necessarily see Needy hunt, but we do see her kill. Assuming that there's not a big gap of time between her escape and then ending, basically the first thing on her mind was killing Nikolai. She could have really easily taken out that guy in the car, but she clearly had no intention of doing that. I really don't think Needy will be the same as Jennifer in that she'll go after any guy she can seduce.
Basically, from all of this, I'm working under the assumption that the emotional response Needy needs is disrespect -> fear. She want to find someone who sees women as a consumable commodity and then kill them horribly for fun and profit. When someone has proven themselves a misogynist (or a big enough regular asshole), that is when Needy can see them as food. Now, I don't want this to make it seem like she's a "good" demon. This is not Joss Wheadon and she is not a lesbian Angel. It's just that she has slightly higher moral standards than Jennifer. Girls always go for the ass holes after all. :)
Which brings me I guess to Needy and sanity/morality. So Needy's definitely nuts. It is primarily the fact that her life sucked waaaay too many cocks and too many people she loved died and then she was in prison POOR NEEDY. But she's not an Ophelia-tragic-waify type insane. I mean, she is tragic in that she got shafted even when she was trying her best, but she's far closer to mad dog than she is to Ophelia. Her patient notes at the maximum security federal nut-ward read "KICKER. . . sudden hallucinations . . . paranoia . . . violent fits . . . has left several orderlies in the hospital." In the opening, she attacks a nutritionist with basically no provocation whatsoever and knocks out teeth. She's not off on Jupiter nuts or anything, but she just has a really hard time holding her shit together sometimes. By her own admission she is "cracked" and "lose around the edges." If you want to simplify it way down, she is definitely and solidly a danger to herself and those around her. Oops!
I think now that the demon's taken over, she has a lot more control; she's more stable. But it also means that she's not making any effort whatsoever to be a person anymore. She basically rejects civil society and its rules. The way she talks in her narration, it seems that she has nothing but disdain for her old life and old self. Current Needy seems to be basically honest with herself, she probably is a reliable narrator, so I see no reason to question her rejection of "her miserable life," as some sort of coping mechanism. She just really does legitimately think that old!Needy was kind of a pathetic failure and is much happier with herself as an semi-insane cannibal demon. And she is happy! Uhm, happier. Maybe. This is where some of the egomania comes in, because she knows she's crazy and a monster and possibly evil depending on your definition, and while she doesn't necessarily want to be a crazy evil monster, the idea of being powerful and above all her peers/doctors/creepy religious nuts is kinda cool. I think Needy's really proud that she's not human anymore. She's not a pathetic, stupid, weak girl who sucks at everything. FUCK YEAH NEEDY.
So as for hiding demon stuff, she's actually not doing and AWESOME job of it, and some of that is how bad I am at not infodumping. I'M WORKING ON IT. 8( Anyway, I think she would be doing a much better job of it if they were in the "real world." If someday she and Jennifer moved to New York, had jobs, payed rent, ate a boyband every couple months, I think she'd be able to keep her shit under wraps just fine. But while she's in camp and there are heroes and other demons and angels and cyber shaman and WHAT HAVE YOU, Needy wants to compare junk. A big, big part of Needy's character arc is how horribly alone she was to deal with the Jennifer stuff. And she's OK now with being isolated and alone with her own demon stuff now; she can deal. BUT the idea of not being alone is just . . . fascinating to her. She can't really help herself but poking and prodding at all the interesting things. While she's doing that, she's not going as out of her way as Jenn would to spread miss-information about herself. She's not a super honest person, but I think it's fair to say that Needy by nature is far less manipulative than Jennifer. It's not that she's morally opposed at this point; it's just not her bag, is all. She has been carefully avoiding giving out information about Jennifer, though, because that would be a dick move. :(b
It should be noted, that as much as she enjoys and is fascinated by talking to people with experience with demons, it also makes her a bit less stable. Seeing that there are people out there who are cool and competent and fight monsters makes her think too hard about how much her life sucked. It's not just as simple as a "BAWWW WHERE WERE THEY WHEN I NEEDED THEM 8(" (though there is a little of that) but a combination of that combined with how she DOESN'T NEED ANYONE!!! but if someone had been there Chip would be alive (and hey maybe Jennifer would never have been sacrificed in the first place \o/) and thinking about how now she's the monster to be fought, and that she killed Jennifer who is now once again her BFF, and just. Yeah. So she wants to talk to them, but sometimes they make her have episodes. What I'm saying here is that at some point she's going to be in the middle of a perfectly civil conversation with Sam and punch him in the face. It'll be awesome.
What else what else
OH RIGHT JENNIFER. Hi Jennifer.
Needy would, right now, call Jennifer her best friend if asked. I think this is less an indication of where their relationship currently is and more a . . . I don't know, a thing she would say because what the fuck else would she say about Jennifer. From her new current perspective, Jennifer killing Chip and her killing Jennifer is kind of like a really, really bad fight between two high school friends. They both did and said some terrible stuff, and it was especially terrible because some of it is true, and it hurt but it wasn't quite a breakup? The fight they had in camp was something a little closer to a breakup, but they've still just sort of drifted back together and aren't talking about it. WOW ARE THEY TEENAGE BFFS OR WHAT.
There's another part of her though that really and genuinely hates Jennifer. There is a part of her that knows that Jennifer treated her like shit, that Jennifer is an evil monster and made her an evil monster and it's all because she was dumb enough to get in that fucking van. (It should be noted here that if we're talking about "blame," Needy see Nikolai solidly as the Bad Guy here, so it's not ALL JENNIFER'S FAULT!!!! but that doesn't mean that Jennifer wasn't a solid bitch.) She's strong enough to leave Jennifer. She doesn't need Jennifer. Fuck Jennifer. But then on the third hand, she and Jennifer are the same thing now. Like they did before, they share a bond that they're not going to have with anyone else, and Needy is very, very aware of that. Jennifer is the only path she sees to not continuing to be alone, but she's not sure that she really wants that.
So there's love, there's hate, there's some desperation. Good stuff.
As for the gay thing, Needy spent time in prison. She knows what gay is. She knows that Jennifer is gay for her, and she knows that she is gay for Jennifer. She will act on this if and when ever she God Damn well feels like acting on it.
Basically tl;dr she is bad ass and kind of nuts and has no interest in being anything like human again and she loves Jennifer and she hates Jennifer and she's kind of nuts.
ANYWAY SOMEONE SHOULD APP CHIP because that's basically the only way her life could get more complicated at this point.
I also open the floor to a relationship meme even though she hasn't made it to the traditional 1000 comments yet. Lady and Aeris also applicable.
OK, so I was feeling really shaky on Needy, so I rewatched for the first time in waaaay too long and now I am essaying for the first time when I should have done it five three (IDK) months ago BUT WHATEVS BETTER LATE THAN NEVER. Also, a lot of this is headcanon and extrapolation. We do hear enough from end-of-canon!Needy that I felt comfortable apping her from there, though. You get plenty of voice for her, and I think the movie makes it very clear where her character is going. BUT ANYWAY YES.
As a warning: this one is rambly and disorganized even by my normal standards and also if it's contradictory I blame it on the fact that she's cray-cray.
First off, what I was doing wrong:
Made her too sane. This is pretty much the first time I've ever done this, so it's shocking, I know. I made her angry, sure, but her off-kilter mental state is a lot more pronounced and complicated than just a change of attitude. The movie and Needy's own narration make it pretty clear that while it IS partially "ONLY NEEDY KNOWS WHAT'S GOING ON NO ONE WILL BELIEVE HER :( :( :(" She's also kind of genuinely cracked. She's a kicker! She is continuing to hallucinate even once Jennifer's gone. Yeah, she can be rational, and have normal conversations, make friends and generally act like a person, but she's also going to sometimes be unreasonable, see the walls dripping blood and have uncontrollably violent rage sometimes. Basically, she's rational, but she is not by any means stable. This is what happens when you destroy a girl's life slowly, throw her in a federal nut-bin and then fuse a demon to her soul. OOPS! Anyway I was too worried about pushing too far the other way- making her a tragic Ophelia, which is even more wrong. She might have some amazing shit luck, but she's also a badass motherfucker. These two can be balanced. But anyway more on Needy's crazy later.
Thing two I did wrong was make her too nice. I don't think post-canon Needy is evil. I don't think the movie gives us any reason to think that at all. I mean, yeah, she busts out of jail, but who can blame her? Then she is perfectly civil with that driver dude. And yes, the next thing she does is go butcher Low Shoulder, but they're way eviler than Jennifer could ever be so fuck them. Needy doesn't want to be evil either, but she's not exactly "good" anymore. She's probably not going to be reluctant to feed, or show much remorse over it. She does genuinely want to be friends with some of the people she's encountered in camp, but unlike Jennifer she won't spend too much time pretending to be what she's not. Actually, more than actions, I think this was missing from her voice. She's not an over-sexed creeper like Jennifer, but she does have some amount of that flippant arrogance that Jennifer has. Her response to all the people who write her letters and pray for her salvation is that she's "the shit." So yeah. NEEDED MOAR EGOMANIA.
Oh and third thing is that for some reason I thought she was a really honest person and avoided lying. I'm not sure where I got that because clearly I'm wrong. /o/
From here, I don't really know how to lay out all my Needy thoughts so I'm going to just pick a place to start
First off, what I think the demon is. The movie never says much outright on what exactly happens to Jennifer or Needy. I'm working under the assumption that Needy is now basically the same thing that Jennifer is, both for my own convenience and also because I wanted to play a lesbian cannibal demon. Can you really blame me? So while I think they're the same thing, the way it effected them is different. Jennifer's personality under the demon was a pretty straightforward progression, she went from "high school evil" to "evil evil." But Needy was always the good one, there's no simple and clear path from mousy, nerdy girl to man-eater, the way that there is from uh, man-eater to man-eater. However, it wasn't Needy out in the woods that night, and the Needy that the demon infected wasn't a mousy, cute little nerd. By the time the demon infects Needy she's been through hell and out the other side. She's faced horrible gruesome stuff totally alone, she's held her boyfriend while he died, she stabbed her best friend and then spent a while in a home for the criminally insane.
So the Needy that gets infected is a much stronger Needy than we see early in the story, but she is also by her own description a "very bad, very damaged person." I think it's kind of chicken-or-the-egg when you're talking about Needy going demonic and Needy going badass and Needy going nuts. I don't think Needy is quite "broken" at any part of the framed story, for however much crying and hallucinating she does, she's still basically in control. So crazy, badass, demon they all kind of develop together between the flashbacks and her narration, though they were all catalyzed by the events of the movie. OK, but back to the demon part I swear I'll get back to her crazy.
ANYWAY eating people is still sexual to Needy, but not in the same way it is to Jennifer. To Jennifer, the emotional response she needs is desire -> fear. Sex, to Jennifer, has always been about consumption. It's not a big jump to get from using them sexually to actually seeing them as a consumable resource. But what we see from Needy's sexuality, she doesn't really want anything like that at all. She has a pretty healthy sexual relationship with her boyfriend. To her, sex is NOT a form of consumption, and so I don't think she's see consumption as completely interchangeable with sex. (Or at least not how she saw sex as a human.) We don't necessarily see Needy hunt, but we do see her kill. Assuming that there's not a big gap of time between her escape and then ending, basically the first thing on her mind was killing Nikolai. She could have really easily taken out that guy in the car, but she clearly had no intention of doing that. I really don't think Needy will be the same as Jennifer in that she'll go after any guy she can seduce.
Basically, from all of this, I'm working under the assumption that the emotional response Needy needs is disrespect -> fear. She want to find someone who sees women as a consumable commodity and then kill them horribly for fun and profit. When someone has proven themselves a misogynist (or a big enough regular asshole), that is when Needy can see them as food. Now, I don't want this to make it seem like she's a "good" demon. This is not Joss Wheadon and she is not a lesbian Angel. It's just that she has slightly higher moral standards than Jennifer. Girls always go for the ass holes after all. :)
Which brings me I guess to Needy and sanity/morality. So Needy's definitely nuts. It is primarily the fact that her life sucked waaaay too many cocks and too many people she loved died and then she was in prison POOR NEEDY. But she's not an Ophelia-tragic-waify type insane. I mean, she is tragic in that she got shafted even when she was trying her best, but she's far closer to mad dog than she is to Ophelia. Her patient notes at the maximum security federal nut-ward read "KICKER. . . sudden hallucinations . . . paranoia . . . violent fits . . . has left several orderlies in the hospital." In the opening, she attacks a nutritionist with basically no provocation whatsoever and knocks out teeth. She's not off on Jupiter nuts or anything, but she just has a really hard time holding her shit together sometimes. By her own admission she is "cracked" and "lose around the edges." If you want to simplify it way down, she is definitely and solidly a danger to herself and those around her. Oops!
I think now that the demon's taken over, she has a lot more control; she's more stable. But it also means that she's not making any effort whatsoever to be a person anymore. She basically rejects civil society and its rules. The way she talks in her narration, it seems that she has nothing but disdain for her old life and old self. Current Needy seems to be basically honest with herself, she probably is a reliable narrator, so I see no reason to question her rejection of "her miserable life," as some sort of coping mechanism. She just really does legitimately think that old!Needy was kind of a pathetic failure and is much happier with herself as an semi-insane cannibal demon. And she is happy! Uhm, happier. Maybe. This is where some of the egomania comes in, because she knows she's crazy and a monster and possibly evil depending on your definition, and while she doesn't necessarily want to be a crazy evil monster, the idea of being powerful and above all her peers/doctors/creepy religious nuts is kinda cool. I think Needy's really proud that she's not human anymore. She's not a pathetic, stupid, weak girl who sucks at everything. FUCK YEAH NEEDY.
So as for hiding demon stuff, she's actually not doing and AWESOME job of it, and some of that is how bad I am at not infodumping. I'M WORKING ON IT. 8( Anyway, I think she would be doing a much better job of it if they were in the "real world." If someday she and Jennifer moved to New York, had jobs, payed rent, ate a boyband every couple months, I think she'd be able to keep her shit under wraps just fine. But while she's in camp and there are heroes and other demons and angels and cyber shaman and WHAT HAVE YOU, Needy wants to compare junk. A big, big part of Needy's character arc is how horribly alone she was to deal with the Jennifer stuff. And she's OK now with being isolated and alone with her own demon stuff now; she can deal. BUT the idea of not being alone is just . . . fascinating to her. She can't really help herself but poking and prodding at all the interesting things. While she's doing that, she's not going as out of her way as Jenn would to spread miss-information about herself. She's not a super honest person, but I think it's fair to say that Needy by nature is far less manipulative than Jennifer. It's not that she's morally opposed at this point; it's just not her bag, is all. She has been carefully avoiding giving out information about Jennifer, though, because that would be a dick move. :(b
It should be noted, that as much as she enjoys and is fascinated by talking to people with experience with demons, it also makes her a bit less stable. Seeing that there are people out there who are cool and competent and fight monsters makes her think too hard about how much her life sucked. It's not just as simple as a "BAWWW WHERE WERE THEY WHEN I NEEDED THEM 8(" (though there is a little of that) but a combination of that combined with how she DOESN'T NEED ANYONE!!! but if someone had been there Chip would be alive (and hey maybe Jennifer would never have been sacrificed in the first place \o/) and thinking about how now she's the monster to be fought, and that she killed Jennifer who is now once again her BFF, and just. Yeah. So she wants to talk to them, but sometimes they make her have episodes. What I'm saying here is that at some point she's going to be in the middle of a perfectly civil conversation with Sam and punch him in the face. It'll be awesome.
What else what else
OH RIGHT JENNIFER. Hi Jennifer.
Needy would, right now, call Jennifer her best friend if asked. I think this is less an indication of where their relationship currently is and more a . . . I don't know, a thing she would say because what the fuck else would she say about Jennifer. From her new current perspective, Jennifer killing Chip and her killing Jennifer is kind of like a really, really bad fight between two high school friends. They both did and said some terrible stuff, and it was especially terrible because some of it is true, and it hurt but it wasn't quite a breakup? The fight they had in camp was something a little closer to a breakup, but they've still just sort of drifted back together and aren't talking about it. WOW ARE THEY TEENAGE BFFS OR WHAT.
There's another part of her though that really and genuinely hates Jennifer. There is a part of her that knows that Jennifer treated her like shit, that Jennifer is an evil monster and made her an evil monster and it's all because she was dumb enough to get in that fucking van. (It should be noted here that if we're talking about "blame," Needy see Nikolai solidly as the Bad Guy here, so it's not ALL JENNIFER'S FAULT!!!! but that doesn't mean that Jennifer wasn't a solid bitch.) She's strong enough to leave Jennifer. She doesn't need Jennifer. Fuck Jennifer. But then on the third hand, she and Jennifer are the same thing now. Like they did before, they share a bond that they're not going to have with anyone else, and Needy is very, very aware of that. Jennifer is the only path she sees to not continuing to be alone, but she's not sure that she really wants that.
So there's love, there's hate, there's some desperation. Good stuff.
As for the gay thing, Needy spent time in prison. She knows what gay is. She knows that Jennifer is gay for her, and she knows that she is gay for Jennifer. She will act on this if and when ever she God Damn well feels like acting on it.
Basically tl;dr she is bad ass and kind of nuts and has no interest in being anything like human again and she loves Jennifer and she hates Jennifer and she's kind of nuts.
ANYWAY SOMEONE SHOULD APP CHIP because that's basically the only way her life could get more complicated at this point.
I also open the floor to a relationship meme even though she hasn't made it to the traditional 1000 comments yet. Lady and Aeris also applicable.