citizendetective | Mar. 7th, 2022

User Name/Nick: Iddy
User DW:

corknut
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact:

Ihdreniel
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Tiffany Doggett |

tucky

Character Name: Misty Quigley
Series: Yellowjackets
Age: Early forties
From When?: post-1x10, "Sic Transit Gloria Mundi" (2021 timeline). She has no canon death, nor anything close to it, so I'm just going to go the "generic car accident" route!

Inmate Justification: Misty is a bubbly self-styled #TeamMom whose desire for friendship and connection far outpaces both her social acuity and her moral compass. She's not malicious as a baseline (though she is very much capable of maliciousness, even seriously harmful maliciousness, depending on the circumstance), but her actions are so inappropriate that this barely even matters; she pulls a lot of creepy, overstepping, harmful bullshit out of a genuine belief that she's looking out for the people in her life and being a good friend.

Arrival: Brought in against her will.

Abilities/Powers: n/a; she's a baseline human.

Inmate Information:
Misty started out life as a lonely, socially awkward, bullied kid who wanted desperately to be liked and have friends, but had absolutely no idea how to go about making that happen. In some ways, things probably would have been easier for her if she'd been shy or introverted, but she wasn't: she was outgoing as fuck, and pushy, and needy, and overbearing. And if she'd gotten some intervention on that when she was still young, she might have turned out kind of okay. Alas, what happened instead was that she survived a plane crash and was stranded in the wilderness for 19 months with a group of other teenagers, during which time she honed some old bad habits, picked up some exciting new ones, and eventually went back to society having learned that, hey, if people find you off-putting and don't want to spend time with you because of it, then manipulating or outright forcing them into doing so anyway is a totally valid life choice that will absolutely get you what you want!

Misty genuinely enjoyed her Wilderness Survival Adventure, and looks back on it as the highlight of her life - even after the [mumble mumble still indeterminate] horrors that they all went through, and even twenty-five years after the event took place. In the woods, her first aid training earned her the role of de facto doctor, something that she'd reveled in and that ultimately kick-started a lifelong obsession with trying to care for and nurture others (as an adult, she feeds this need by working as a care assistant at a nursing home, where she gets into shitty, possibly one-sided one-upmanship battles with patients she views as uncooperative or insufficiently grateful for her care). She sees herself as closely bonded with the other survivors (a high school soccer team that she, a fellow student, was essentially the water girl for), despite the fact that none of them have shown much interest in reconnecting with her (or, for the most part, with each other) or in reminiscing about their ordeal. When some of the survivors start receive ominous, anonymous postcards alluding to what happened, fellow survivor Natalie Scatorccio immediately suspects Misty of having sent them, and responds by breaking into her house and confronting her with a gun. Misty, completely unbothered by this and genuinely delighted to see her ✨✨✨good friend Natalie✨✨✨ again, immediately uses it as an in to start to try to worm her way into her life. Natalie (who is prime inmate material in her own right, honestly) is annoyed by this, and sometimes tries to thwart it; other times, she finds Misty's dedication useful and harnesses it. The two end up spending much of the season together, attempting to mystery-solve the death of another survivor: the official conclusion is that it was a suicide, Natalie is convinced that it was a murder, and Misty is the only one who believes her and is willing to help her try to find the killer. Misty's relationship with Natalie is really where we get the best view of how maladaptive she is socially, because holy god. Over the course of approximately two weeks, she:

Spends time texting at least one person while pretending to be Natalie, in an effort to score Natalie a date;

Does damage to Natalie's car so that Natalie will be forced to rely on her for rides;

Follows Natalie around town after being told to fuck off;

Gives Natalie a knick-knack outfitted with a secret recording device, so that she can keep tabs on her activities during the aforementioned "Misty, fuck off" periods;

Kidnaps and later murders a journalist who she believes poses a threat to the other survivors.

And this only covers the actions she spearheaded herself; it does not take into account the various other crimes and poor choices she took part in at Natalie's behest (which included more stalking, breaking and entering, theft of police property, and threats towards others of grievous bodily injury).

Natalie, in point of fact, is annoyed by Misty's Mistyness but not frightened or terrorized by it - but the sad truth is that, even if she had been frightened or terrorized, Misty probably wouldn't have done that much differently, and that's because she lives in a fantasy world where all her actions are (at worst) kind of crappy but ultimately still justified, and (at best) hallmarks of true friendship. 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 people while pretending to be her, for example, and casually tells another person 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 when she was young, 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.

By this point in her life, Misty's overwhelming desire to care for people stems from a deep-rooted, unfulfilled desire to feel wanted, appreciated, and vital. 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 back into drug addiction, even though a strung-out Natalie would presumably provide her with a wealth of potential caretaking opportunities), but it's still a selfish and maladaptive trait. 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.

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 - and one of those feelings is an intense loyalty towards those she feels bonded to. 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: killing pushy journalists). 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 the name of this dark loyalty. 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.

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 monitor 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 the reporter she kidnaps, 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 any of her fellow crash survivors 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 and reveals the hidden camera she'd planted, 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 at least safe from purposeful cruelty.

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. This "coworker" category is probably where most Bargizens would fit by default, at least at first - and, unless they enjoy frequent headaches, that's probably where they'll want to stay.

Path to Redemption:
Bottom line: one of the worst things her warden could do would be to feel too sorry for her. It’s okay for them to feel sorry for her a little bit! She is, in many ways, a pitiable person. But she's also going to need a lot more intervention than a pat on the head and assurances that, yes, she is deserving of the love and friendship and connection that she craves. It would probably be good for her warden to be able to genuinely like her as a person, but they absolutely should not be someone who would find her obsessive behavior even a little bit cute or endearing. Standard strictness probably wouldn't be the best approach for her, but being monitored closely and kept on a short leash would be; additionally, a warden who could model healthy attachment styles would be excellent. A good match for her will acknowledge the sincerity and validity of her feelings ("I love my friends and want them to be safe"), while never letting that overshadow the multitude of terrible ways in which she expresses those feelings (i.e. never letting "I see you want to be a good friend" morph into "You are a good friend", because she 10000% isn't and she needs to realize that). They'd also do well to keep an eye on the relationships she forms onboard the Barge to make sure she's not repeating patterns from home: this means paying attention to how she talks about people and looking for signs that she's starting to unhealthily obsess over anybody, as well as making sure that nobody too terrible is earning her loyalty (and thereby earning the right to use her as a lackey for whatever misdeeds they might get up to).

Misty is generally very good at keeping a cool head in tough situations, but even so, the Barge will be a bit much for her. She'll be unlikely to panic, but she might very well get overwhelmed sometimes; chatting with other non-superpowered earthlings about how they've adjusted would be good for her. She will very much enjoy the concept of pairings, both temporary and permanent; regrettably, she'll enjoy them because she'll see a warden as a built-in friend who is being forced by the Admiral to hang out with her. Enforcing boundaries will be a must.

And, lastly, an important but probably not completely comprehensive list of things she needs to learn in order to graduate:

It's tough being awkward and bad at reading social situations! But if someone looks you in the eye and says "I do not want you to do the thing", there is no excuse for doing the thing anyway, even if it's "for their own good". Also, if an idea sounds wacky or unorthodox or extreme, ask before going ahead with it. Say "I care about you and I don't like that you shut me out sometimes, so can I put a spycam in your house?", and then listen to them when they inevitably say no.

Wanting to help and take care of people is admirable. Being fixated on the idea of helping and caring for people, hinging your entire sense of self worth on your (real or perceived) role as Caretaker, and using other people as pawns to fill a bottomless well of needing to be needed is fucked up.

It's much harder to love someone who's creepy than it is to love someone who's awkward. Luckily, creepiness can be unlearned with effort, and the first step is paying attention when people tell you you're being creepy and remembering that for later!

Growing a moral compass from scratch is very, very hard, and possibly even impossible; luckily, following the law will usually help guide you in this. No more kidnapping. No more murdering journalists. No more stealing meds and supplies from work.

Girl, none of this even worked well for you in the woods, even though you think it did. It definitely isn't working well for you in suburban New Jersey.