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Misty Fucking Quigley ([personal profile] citizendetective) wrote2022-02-11 01:23 pm

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Age: 31
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→ CHARACTER INFO

Character Name: Misty Quigley
Age: Early forties
Canon: Yellowjackets
Canon point: post-1x10, "Sic Transit Gloria Mundi" (2021 timeline)
History:
Link to one I wrote myself because I like doing my own, though there is also a wiki. Pick your poison; this show is absolutely nuts either way.

Personality:
Misty has poor social skills that go far deeper than simple awkwardness. She is awkward, but that's really the least of her problems: she also repeatedly violates people's privacy, boundaries, and personal agency, even (or especially) those of people that she cares about. She has a normal emotional range, but seems to have a low capacity for empathy, which enables her to do a lot of truly alarming things either without fully realizing how alarming they are, or by taking a "the end justifies the means" approach ("the end" in this case being "I have friends and I love them and they appreciate me and I take care of them and they're thankful to me and everything is JUST GREAT"). On some level, she does know that her actions are inappropriate, but doesn't quite seem to get how or why or to what extent. Multiple times when she's called out on her behavior, she reacts with genuine surprise or confusion over the level of anger directed at her; generally she'll get that what she did wasn't optimal and she'll anticipate some level of annoyance, but she'll be blindsided by anything more severe than that. She also admits to some of her misdeeds far more easily than one would expect from someone who fully understood how warped they are: she cheerfully tells Natalie that she's been texting Kevyn while pretending to be her, for example, and casually tells Jessica about how she's been spying on Natalie. As a kid, she desperately wished to be "normal", and as an adult there's a part of her that still wishes for that - but by now, she's also accepted that she isn't. This acceptance has given her a level of self-possession that she didn't have in her flashback scenes, but it also means that rather than trying to gain the connection she craves by working to make herself into the sort of person that people want to be around, she instead leans hard into the things that she feels worked for her while stranded in the woods: namely, fostering useful skills that other people will need to rely on, zeroing in on (and in some cases, even exacerbating) people's weaknesses so that she can make herself feel wanted by soothing and comforting and caring for them, and engineering scenarios that will force people to spend time with her. The end result is that she's become a highly manipulative person, even though she doesn't necessarily see herself that way.

She's nurturing... to a fault. And I mean to a fault. Misty has an overwhelming desire to care for people, and thereby make herself feel wanted, needed, and vital; in pursuit of this goal, she's shown doing anything from damaging the car of someone she wants to spend time with so that they have to depend on her for a ride, to lightly poisoning someone she has a crush on so that they stay weak and dependent on her (though she's admittedly only seen doing the latter in her teenage flashback scenes). She does seem to have limits (ex. she'll inconvenience or lightly harm someone so that she can swoop in to help, but won't purposefully provoke serious pain or anguish in someone she truly cares about, even in situations where she easily could), and sometimes healthy concern wins out over toxicity (ex. she actively tries to prevent Natalie from relapsing into her drug habit, even though a strung-out Natalie would presumably provide her with a wealth of potential caretaking opportunities), but it's still a selfish, maladaptive trait overall. Ultimately, it probably started out as an innocently enough: in her very early flashback scenes, we see her doing what she can to help scared and injured people with no apparent motive beyond a simple desire to make sure that they're okay. But once she realized that she had something no one else had (i.e. first aid skills) that made her a hot commodity among her fellow plane crash survivors, and that taking advantage of this was a great way to make people want to keep her close to them, she wildly spun out from there, twisting that formerly innocent instinct into something much more complicated and dark. In a sense, she's spent the last twenty-five years desperately chasing the high she got from being the team's go-to medical girl after the crash.

She's tribal, and unendingly loyal to her people, both of which she expresses maladaptively. As stated above, Misty is perfectly capable of deep emotion and caring; she uses manipulation not to fake feelings that don't exist, but to work in service of genuinely-felt feelings in incredibly inappropriate ways. She imprinted on a whole-ass high school soccer team when she was a teenager, and she loved those girls. Natalie is the primary direct recipient of this in the present day, but those warm feelings clearly still extend to the others as well, at least to some extent: she calls them all her friends, she has a framed photograph of the entire team in the entryway of her house, and she has a blast every time she gets to spend time with any of them, regardless of the situation. Unfortunately, Misty's devotion is not at all contingent on the people she fixates on reciprocating it, or even wanting it, which means that she pretty much always comes on way too strong. She'll also go to extreme, dangerous lengths to please or protect them, both when it's asked for (see: her going along with every single one of Natalie's terrible ideas) and when it isn't (see: when she becomes convinced that a pushy journalist is a danger to them, and she responds by kidnapping the woman, holding her hostage for several days, and then murdering her). And while she couldn't ever be called a selfless person - her motives are too complicated for that - she's even willing to risk harm to herself or derail her own schemes in pursuit of this. A quintessential example of both (cw: drug abuse/addiction) is when, via her spycam, she spots on-again off-again drug addict Natalie risking relapse by buying cocaine. Misty immediately flies over in a panic, barges in (without taking the time to knock, call, or come up with a plausible cover story for why she's there, which she surely would have done if she prioritized maintaining the secrecy of her spycam over keeping Natalie from taking the drugs), and, in an impulsive effort to get the cocaine out of Natalie's hands as quickly as possible, shoves her out of the way and snorts the entire line herself so that Natalie can't (as opposed to taking a few extra seconds to, you know, run it into the bathroom and flush it). It's an absolutely ridiculous scene, but also a very telling one.

She's bubbly, outgoing, enthusiastic, and unapologetically nerdy. For all her neediness and desperation, Misty isn't indiscriminate: she gloms onto and craves approval from a specific, curated list of people, not from absolutely anyone who will give her the time of day. That said, when we see her interacting with people outside the core Yellowjackets team, her baseline is still a cheerful (over-)friendliness, she frequently attempts chatty smalltalk with her coworkers and patients, and she's strongly hinted to have an active (if probably shallow) social life online. She also just plain loves to have a good time, and she doesn't let little things like completely inappropriate circumstances keep her from doing so. She takes the time to pick out the perfect mood music before heading out to kidnap someone. She enjoys getting arrested because it means she gets to see what the inside of a jail looks like. She's positively gleeful when walking the other women through how to dispose of a dead body. And she has her fair share of more innocuous interests, too: she loves musical theater, she's really into true crime shows and podcasts, and she's a good pet parent to her bird (an African Grey parrot, which is a notoriously difficult species to properly care for), all of which she'll happily expound upon at length and/or attempt to engage others in.

She has a serious ruthless side. Casual acquaintances are probably where most people should want to be with Misty, because while earning her love means dealing with her obsessive, clingy smothering, earning her ire has its own dangers. She won't jump straight to murder or serious harm (though she is capable of both, given the right circumstances), but she can be petty and spiteful as fuck, and we see her doing things like withholding pain medication from a patient that she finds unpleasant and briefly switching off another patient's life support in order to scare a couple of rude kids. She's not exactly sadistic, because it's not other people's pain that she enjoys - it's the opportunity to deliver payback and retribution for wrongs both real and perceived, as well as a way to make herself feel powerful and cool. In early conversations with a kidnapped Jessica, she comes off like a cross between a tough-as-nails, doesn't-play-by-the-rules cop from a TV drama and a wannabe supervillain, both of which she was probably purposefully emulating. She loves to indulge in opportunities to feel badass, in large part because there's not much else about her besides her ruthlessness that lets her come off that way. Notably, those she views as close to her seem largely exempt from this behavior: when Natalie, Shauna, and Taissa react to her with anger, distaste, or rejection, she "forgives" them, because they're her "friends". The most angry she gets at any of them is when she destroys Natalie's cocaine stash in effort to keep her from relapsing, and Natalie is angry rather than grateful; Misty yells at her, but instead of lashing out further she goes home and cries about it. She'll do shitty, manipulative, boundary-crossing things to her in-group in service of trying to help them, protect them, or keep them close to her, but they're safe from purposeful cruelty.

Suitability:
Misty is a very tribal person: she places high value on being a member of a social circle, and once she's committed, she cares deeply about her cohorts (though as evidenced by everything above, this caring often manifests in unhealthy ways). She'd like the sense of belonging that ADI would give her, and she'd love having the opportunity to take part in investigations. The possibility of running off into the wide, open world would not even cross her mind.

Granted, all this is somewhat complicated by the fact that, as far as she's concerned, she's already found her One True Tribe, and ADI ain't it. Therefore, while she'd happily help avert the apocalypse as long as no conflict of interest existed, and while she might develop a sense of loyalty towards the organization/her fellow employees, it would be extremely unlikely that she'd prioritize them over the team she already has, and she could potentially switch sides if an Entity managed to convince her that stopping the apocalypse on this world would somehow harm the Yellowjackets ladies back on her own world. Basically, it'd be easy for ADI to have her nominal loyalty from the go, but if she ended up in a situation where she was told "save the billions of people here, or save Natalie", then uh, sorry for your lots, innocent billions.

Powers/Abilities:
First aid & medical training. She doesn't appear to be on the level of a doctor or a registered nurse, but her teenage self is shown to have a good deal of first aid knowledge thanks to having taken a couple of Red Cross training courses, and given the line of work she goes into, she presumably furthers that knowledge as an adult. She's very familiar with and comfortable in hospital-like environments, and she has a decent working knowledge things like medications and standard medical procedure.

Crime scene investigation. She's no professional, and she's shown making at least one big mistake with this sort of thing in canon ("You can't identify a body just by its torso" you certainly can if that torso has a very distinctive tattoo that you didn't think to check for, Misty!), but she's a huuuuuuge true crime enthusiast, and she's amassed a lot of casual knowledge about crime scene clean-up and police procedure due to this fixation.

Misty is a standard modern Earth human, with no supernatural abilities.

Entity Affinity:
Misty won't enter the game with a patron, but there are a couple that might be drawn to her!

The Corruption. Specifically, the aspect related to obsessive and unhealthy love/relationships. Misty is perfectly capable of caring about people, but she doesn't know how to do healthy relationships of any sort, and she's an obsessive person to begin with; combine all these things, and it generally spells bad news for anyone who she wants to be a part of her life.

The Lonely. Misty is lonely to the core. By middle age, she's largely accepted that no amount of enthusiasm will make up for the fact that people find her off-putting, and she's more inclined to resort to manipulation or force if she really wants someone's time or attention - but she's well aware that this isn't as good as someone genuinely wanting her around. Usually she's determined not to let this get her down, but we do occasionally see her reacting to rejection with disappointment, wistfulness, or even tears.

Inventory:
Just the clothes on her back, plus her purse and everything inside (just standard stuff: a small amount of cash, credit cards/ID/etc. that will be useless here, her cell phone).

Samples:
log threads
network/log thread
log thread
log thread
log thread
network threads

Most of these are dialogue-heavy despite being log threads, and the second thread in the last link (here) probably has the most clear focus on internal thought processes!