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hasaknightjobBeen over a year since the last one. And hey: they've been around long enough that there's things other than pre-Fandom stuff to know about! Fancy! So yeah, info post on my boys and me.
Since they have been around long enough and there's already a detailed post of their canon here and the last update here I'm going to try to do as much as I can to stick to things revealed and/or established since then. Warning ahead of time for spoilers for Moon Knight as well as content warning for discussion of child abuse as a concept.
Let's get started!
The happiest Marc will ever look. Shame he spent ten years not mentioning that pesky detail about her dad.
Marc Spector is a former US Marine and mercenary who, due to abuse in his childhood, developed Dissociative Identity Disorder. As such, he shares a body with Steven Grant, who we'll get to in a minute.
Also, due to a near death experience, Marc agreed to take on the role of Moon Knight, the avatar of the Egyptian god Khonshu. You know, as one does.
Morally Marc Spector is not a good person. He's not evil but he's not good either. He's not an Avenger, he won't do good things just because good things need doing. The closest he'll ever come to being self-motivated to do a good action is if children are being hurt. He's got a real sore spot about hurting kids and he does count teenagers as children. But other than that he will not be spontaneously bothered to care.
He will, however, protect what he sees as something under his responsibility. Right now in his life in Fandom Marc is still developing this sense of what is "his." He started out with only Steven, more on that in a sec. It then expands to people Steven cares about, people Marc doesn't care about per se but who he at least doesn't actively dislike if something inside him twigs that they might need protection, or things he's declared as his like that boarding house he's now in charge of and those who live inside it.
Marc's morals are such that he does not care if you are a good person. You could be a bad guy, you could have tried hurting kids, you could have betrayed him all of a minute ago. It doesn't matter. What are you doing now? Are you fucking with anything he considers his responsibility now? No? Okay then we're cool.
The inside of Marc's mind - and specifically his thoughts, because that's an important designation with our boys - is agony. Marc is canonically in constant mental pain. But an important thing to know is that his pain is due to trauma. He's not brooding Angel who is riddled with remorse and longing for redemption. Yeah, Marc's got some things he's done he feels a bit guilty about (not doing right by Steven, his complicated relationship with his parents, his meet cute with his canon wife being when he told her that her dad died but leaving off the tiny detail that he was involved with his murder, being a Jewish man voluntarily in service to an Egyptian god, yanno how it is) but in terms of who he is as a person Marc knows himself and his morals and he's fine.
As such, when Marc says things like "I don't want people to like me" he doesn't mean it as in "Woe for I am a wretched creature" he means "No, seriously, don't emulate me, it's a dumb idea."
Related to that, because of his trauma Marc has... unique methods of dealing with things. On a mundane side there's the DID and that he's got the not uncommon comorbidity of being a stone's throw away from alcoholism. But he doesn't care about self-preservation and he's, yanno, not well so he'll cheerfully do whatever it takes to get the job done once he's on the job at all. For example, he'll deliberately take damage in a fight in order to get his enemies where he wants them. And when we say that we don't just mean "Will take a punch" but "No, will take a spear through his chest which he will then use to stab the guy nearest to him while the spear is still in his chest." (There's a reason why comics Taskmaster refuses to emulate Moon Knight's fighting style - and that version of Marc doesn't even have healing armor! He just takes the physical damage! Because he's not well!)
Related to that, Marc has a cynical view of his mental health. He will often refer to himself as crazy. Please note this is very much Marc's view of self and not the mun's view in any way whatsoever. Also though Marc is aware he has DID neither he nor Steven know or use terms like "system" or "fronting" or anything like that. Oscar Isaac and the people who worked on the show knew them and used them, so it is on purpose that Marc and Steven do not use those words. Hence them saying things like "who has the body" instead. Your characters can use them if you want, Marc and Steven just aren't familiar with them.
Marc's role in the system is the protector, but he's the physical protector. More specifically, Marc's job is to protect by taking the pain so Steven doesn't have to. Steven would very much like for this to change but it's a work in progress.
Another thing to bear in mind about how Marc and Steven work is that while yes, they are individuals and should be treated as such, they are part of a system. Which means they are built in specific ways that impact their interactions and involvement with the world. So if you see things in their pings about how they legitimately do not understand what another character is saying, or the words aren't registering with them, or they honestly do not remotely have an answer to a question, that's an in character thing because that is how they are built. The Dissociative part of their DID is no joke. It is baked into them as characters and as people and it affecting them this way is part of the canon.
Now they can grow beyond that and that's part of their arc here in Fandom, but I'm mentioning it because, well, it's not me it's them. But that also means it is absolutely fair game for your character to notice those weird ass blank spots and metaphorical brick walls and wonder what's up with what. They may need some repetition to even notice what your character did (or potentially they never will in the case of Jake which we talk about in a sec) but it's as much fodder for RP as anything else about them for sure.
Where Marc currently is in Fandom is he's moving in slow steps towards the idea that he might consciously decide what is under his protection and act on it. He's still feeling guilty about how much he screwed up Steven's life before they got to Fandom so he's still of the belief that the way to make this fair is to let Steven have the body if not all the time then most, especially now that Steven is getting things he's wanted for so long, like a loving partner. Steven doesn't agree with the idea that Marc can't have a life of his own but his various attempts to force the issue in the first year they lived in Fandom blew up in both their faces so Steven has now learned he's got to back off a little and try to let things proceed naturally.
Hey, speaking of Steven...
That's Steven. With a V.
Spoiler alert for MCU Moon Knight that Steven is also a protector in their system. It's just that where Marc was the physical protector, Steven is the emotional one.
Steven is fundamentally NotMarc. Not only because he's a separate person, but also because he was specifically created to be nothing like Marc. Marc takes the pain because he's the one who is meant for the pain. He's the killer. He's the one who cannot have any other life.
Steven is the one who, by virtue of not being Marc, should have a happy and healthy life with a mother who loves him. Not being Marc is everything from Marc is physically capable while Steven is clumsy, Marc frequently lies while Steven strives to be honest, and even things like Marc is a killer so Steven is vegan.
Even without being aware of Marc, Steven protected him by being something Marc could look at and be inspired to know that there was a life beyond the abuse he was living in. Steven's unfailing hope, optimism, and love is what makes them keep going right up to this very second. It's notable that Marc didn't take Khonshu's deal to save himself but to save Steven. Steven is the one who keeps them alive and waking up day after day.
Steven also protects Marc by being the one to remind him that, in spite of how they are built as a system, Marc doesn't always have to be the one who takes the pain or who is destined to only do bad things.
Because of his relationship with Marc, Steven's view of morality in general is that hurting people is bad, you do not kill under any circumstances, but there is no such thing as someone so horrible that they are past redemption. You can get Steven furious - like Marc, hurting people he cares about and/or hurting children specifically is a real quick way to do that - and if he has to he'll resort to violence to stop someone if needed. But he'll try the least violent method possible* in order to subdue and then as needed do what it takes to make the person hurting others stop, such as jail for someone truly horrible or not giving that person a chance to hurt him or his loved ones again if it's a much lesser offense. But he cannot be convinced that someone is forever beyond redemption if they want it. He's literally not built that way.
(* I'm going to nerd out here and point out this was so detailed on the show the stunt team even coordinated Steven's fights so that he was specifically holding his truncheons in a way to do the least damage. It's a subtle detail involving like an inch's worth of change in the hold, but it was on purpose and again I am forever convinced the show was only able to do things that layered because they flew under the radar once Kevin signed off on it. Anyway....)
Where Steven is in Fandom now is that he's finally started to realize he can't force Marc to have a life or do things differently, he needs to simply support Marc in whatever gives Marc things to care about and want to be involved in, such as the boarding house. Steven has also recently started to face just some of how much his entire life was a lie. The Dissociation in Steven's side of the DID was so severe that Steven believed he lived an entirely different life from what was reality and he's only just started to realize how far that impact goes. To give an example of the things he now knows, he knows his mother wasn't kind at all but horribly abusive and he knows that he full on hallucinated conversations with her up to and including months after she died. There's still some reveals for him to come but they've been hitting him hard so he's pacing himself.
Steven is also completely and utterly in love with Llewellyn Watts and is thrilled that together with Marc, their cat, their fish, and even their house they've formed something like a family. Steven still believes the DID means he can't have things like marriage or children, but he's deeply grateful for what he does have all the same. Also thanks to Watts Steven has taken on Mr Knight as his avatar title (because Moon Knight is a Khonshu given title and no. Steven is not a fan of Khonshu, thank you.)
Steven's also learning some important lessons about boundaries with both Marc and with other people - namely you can't force them to change no matter how badly you might want them to - but his development of patience as far as that goes is a work in progress.
Now for the other characters attached to my boys, in one case literally.
The hat is iconic. We are forever grateful they did not include the mustache, however hilarious it is that comics canon is that it's a fake one that Marc keeps in his pocket for when Jake takes over.
Jake is the third personality in the system that, to date, only Khonshu knows about. (Also a faint inkling that lingers in the far back of Watts's mind courtesy of his 20 year in the future AU self coming to Fandom one weekend.)
Jake's role in the system is he is Marc's anger at the world that allowed the abuse to happen. As such he is the most brutally violent of all of them. There is a non zero chance that at least some of the violent things Marc thinks he did were actually done by Jake, but that's a notable at best some not all. However, Jake will take over the body when Marc and/or Steven get so overwhelmed they can't handle things anymore, usually while they are under attack, which is why I suspect Jake's falling under that protector title too (Protector is one of those Avatar of Khonshu things, you see, so there's a bit of a theme here.) But the way Jake handles problems is murder, and callous and violent murder if need be. So... protection isn't inaccurate but, yanno. Woof.
The dissociation is so strong around Jake that not only do Marc and Steven not know he exists, anything that remotely suggests he exists doesn't register to them no matter how obvious the evidence might be. Marc has come to from blackouts to be surrounded by a literal pile of recently murdered bodies and wondered if Steven - yanno, the one of them who is built to be incapable of killing - might have done it. That's how well Jake is hidden.
Because there's very little canon on MCU Jake so far and because he is the most brutal, he's currently being kept way in the background for the purpose of the game. Marc and Steven mistakenly think their continued blackouts are because their brain has suffered damage from their trauma and have no idea it's actually because it's when a third personality has taken over the body. Which is something that Jake does from time to time, but less often now that Marc and Steven are sharing a residence with this pesky detective who keeps observing things.
He isn't yet calling Marc "My son" but he's probably getting there
I'm just running with the theme now but yeah. Protector is a HUGE leitmotif in the Moon Knight mythos so on a nerdy meta level it's actually nice how Marc Spector's story evolved to more responsibly include the concept of DID and how there can often be at least one protector personality in a system if not more. This is something done more strongly in the MCU than the comics and it's part of why I love the show (though there are good runs in the comics that the show drew directly from, to be fair).
Back on Khonshu, he is the Egyptian God of the Moon and Night Sky. He believes in justice, and he will send his avatar, the Fist of Khonshu (yes, Marc knows what that sounds like. He didn't pick the name), to either protect those Khonshu has determined need it or, slightly more often, to enact vengeance on those who have harmed people under Khonshu's protection. Khonshu really likes vengeance. Even the comparatively cleaned up MCU version likes his vengeance bloody and violent. There's a reason why Khonshu seems to get along super well with Jake.
Khonshu is also a manipulative liar, but he is... well not a god of his word per se, but his values are his values. He believes very strongly in taking care of those under his protection, he just has no problem doing it with lies and violence. This would be why Khonshu likes Marc. The MCU version has shown hints of sharing a trait with the comic version who took a particular interest in Marc over the course of Marc's entire life, not just when he happened to be dying in one of Khonshu's temples.
Khonshu's not a huge fan of Steven. He grudgingly respects that Steven is sometimes the only one smart enough to get certain things done, or to (nearly) out manipulate Khonshu in a deal, but he'd cheerfully punt Steven out of the multiverse if he had his way.
Currently in Fandom Khonshu has come off of about a year of sneakily using Jake to honor his agreement with Marc and Steven not to ask them to kill (since, yanno, the deal was he wouldn't ask them to kill. Which he didn't! See? God of his word.) But since they moved in with Watts Jake can't take over the body for days at a time without it being noticed, so that hasn't happened since. Luckily there's all sorts of weirdness looming with gods and multiverses in Marc and Steven's home universe so Khonshu's currently content with having his favorite avatar (Marc, for the record, very specifically Marc) hanging out in effectively safe storage on a multiversal nexus until such time as Khonshu needs him.
(Or yanno, that's the story I'm sticking with until canon gives me something to go on.)
I made the graphic, I'm using it, dang it!
The Midnight Manor is a House of Shadows, which in and of itself is an eldritch-like being that is its own pocket universe. As a House of Shadows it has the ability to turn itself into any building-like structure and to do things like create elaborate illusions.
Houses of Shadows live off of human emotions the same way plants live off of sunlight - which is to say in the way that they take in energy that's floating out there anyway with no harm to the thing the energy came from. Because this House of Shadows originally hailed from near Limbo, which is a horrible place (Just ask Illyana, who grew up there), the only way it knew how to elicit emotions was through horror. What it really wanted, though, was to live a life with purpose. Hence now that it has a chance to be a home it no longer tries to scare people and instead tries to be a nice place for them to live.
To help it be a home (and also because the game needed more housing options and the mods said this was the one they wanted, I can claim no credit for this idea) it's now both a private residence and a boarding house. The private residence is for Marc, Steven, Watts, and their pets. They're the ones whose energy is being fed off of to keep the place alive. The residents are just residents. However, with both character and player consent, there can be fun things like changes to their rooms or small illusions to keep things fun and interesting. There's also an All Purpose Room which functions effectively like the holosuites in the apartment buildings, just using illusions instead of holograms.
(More on the layout and features of the place can be found here.)
The place has renamed itself to Midnight Manor (cough because the canon name was Midnight Mission and Marc both doesn't have a mission yet and also Midnight Mission Boarding House sounds like the home of a cult, let's be real cough). "Midnight" is fine for short.
A thing to remember is it's not a building. It looks like a building but it's a being. Which is why it will act/appear differently from buildings in town when certain events happen.
Also its canon pronouns are it/its because yes, I do care about not misgendering a fictional being. I worry when the fictional cat gets fed too, okay? I'm invested.
Me in my natural habitat
Hello! Still The Brat Queen or TBQ for short. She/Her. Still on East Coast US time. Also still disabled which apparently the last time I wrote this I had vague optimism might be a thing that would go away so, uh, ouch. For sure.
Anyhoo, because of being disabled I don't work, but I am also at the mercy of my medication. I need to take things about every six hours which also means every six hours my brain and body go into shutdown mode and there's nothing I can do about it. I have to pass out for about two hours at a time, usually in the neighborhood of sometime around noon and sometime around 5 or 6pm Eastern. (Also early morning and late night but those aren't as obvious unless you're some weirdo on a schedule that's based in the Netherlands or something, pffft).
I also get migraines that can knock me out in pain for days at a time. I also have weekly doctor appointments that knock me out for the rest of the day. I also have a website where I do media analysis, which means that when there's a show on that I'm regularly doing writeups for I'm busy the day it comes out and can't ping at all.
All of which is to say if you don't see my characters out and about it's not because I/they don't care, it's because I'm doing my best with what real life throws at me. Patience and understanding is appreciated and slow play is love.
OOC communication is also love so feel free to hit me up in email at thebratq at gmail dot com or thebratqueen in discord whenever you need. And you can find me in social media and other such places via all the links here.
Aaaaaaaaaand that's it. Questions? Comments? Gremlins?
Since they have been around long enough and there's already a detailed post of their canon here and the last update here I'm going to try to do as much as I can to stick to things revealed and/or established since then. Warning ahead of time for spoilers for Moon Knight as well as content warning for discussion of child abuse as a concept.
Let's get started!
Marc Spector (the Protector)
The happiest Marc will ever look. Shame he spent ten years not mentioning that pesky detail about her dad.
Marc Spector is a former US Marine and mercenary who, due to abuse in his childhood, developed Dissociative Identity Disorder. As such, he shares a body with Steven Grant, who we'll get to in a minute.
Also, due to a near death experience, Marc agreed to take on the role of Moon Knight, the avatar of the Egyptian god Khonshu. You know, as one does.
Morally Marc Spector is not a good person. He's not evil but he's not good either. He's not an Avenger, he won't do good things just because good things need doing. The closest he'll ever come to being self-motivated to do a good action is if children are being hurt. He's got a real sore spot about hurting kids and he does count teenagers as children. But other than that he will not be spontaneously bothered to care.
He will, however, protect what he sees as something under his responsibility. Right now in his life in Fandom Marc is still developing this sense of what is "his." He started out with only Steven, more on that in a sec. It then expands to people Steven cares about, people Marc doesn't care about per se but who he at least doesn't actively dislike if something inside him twigs that they might need protection, or things he's declared as his like that boarding house he's now in charge of and those who live inside it.
Marc's morals are such that he does not care if you are a good person. You could be a bad guy, you could have tried hurting kids, you could have betrayed him all of a minute ago. It doesn't matter. What are you doing now? Are you fucking with anything he considers his responsibility now? No? Okay then we're cool.
The inside of Marc's mind - and specifically his thoughts, because that's an important designation with our boys - is agony. Marc is canonically in constant mental pain. But an important thing to know is that his pain is due to trauma. He's not brooding Angel who is riddled with remorse and longing for redemption. Yeah, Marc's got some things he's done he feels a bit guilty about (not doing right by Steven, his complicated relationship with his parents, his meet cute with his canon wife being when he told her that her dad died but leaving off the tiny detail that he was involved with his murder, being a Jewish man voluntarily in service to an Egyptian god, yanno how it is) but in terms of who he is as a person Marc knows himself and his morals and he's fine.
As such, when Marc says things like "I don't want people to like me" he doesn't mean it as in "Woe for I am a wretched creature" he means "No, seriously, don't emulate me, it's a dumb idea."
Related to that, because of his trauma Marc has... unique methods of dealing with things. On a mundane side there's the DID and that he's got the not uncommon comorbidity of being a stone's throw away from alcoholism. But he doesn't care about self-preservation and he's, yanno, not well so he'll cheerfully do whatever it takes to get the job done once he's on the job at all. For example, he'll deliberately take damage in a fight in order to get his enemies where he wants them. And when we say that we don't just mean "Will take a punch" but "No, will take a spear through his chest which he will then use to stab the guy nearest to him while the spear is still in his chest." (There's a reason why comics Taskmaster refuses to emulate Moon Knight's fighting style - and that version of Marc doesn't even have healing armor! He just takes the physical damage! Because he's not well!)
Related to that, Marc has a cynical view of his mental health. He will often refer to himself as crazy. Please note this is very much Marc's view of self and not the mun's view in any way whatsoever. Also though Marc is aware he has DID neither he nor Steven know or use terms like "system" or "fronting" or anything like that. Oscar Isaac and the people who worked on the show knew them and used them, so it is on purpose that Marc and Steven do not use those words. Hence them saying things like "who has the body" instead. Your characters can use them if you want, Marc and Steven just aren't familiar with them.
Marc's role in the system is the protector, but he's the physical protector. More specifically, Marc's job is to protect by taking the pain so Steven doesn't have to. Steven would very much like for this to change but it's a work in progress.
Another thing to bear in mind about how Marc and Steven work is that while yes, they are individuals and should be treated as such, they are part of a system. Which means they are built in specific ways that impact their interactions and involvement with the world. So if you see things in their pings about how they legitimately do not understand what another character is saying, or the words aren't registering with them, or they honestly do not remotely have an answer to a question, that's an in character thing because that is how they are built. The Dissociative part of their DID is no joke. It is baked into them as characters and as people and it affecting them this way is part of the canon.
Now they can grow beyond that and that's part of their arc here in Fandom, but I'm mentioning it because, well, it's not me it's them. But that also means it is absolutely fair game for your character to notice those weird ass blank spots and metaphorical brick walls and wonder what's up with what. They may need some repetition to even notice what your character did (or potentially they never will in the case of Jake which we talk about in a sec) but it's as much fodder for RP as anything else about them for sure.
Where Marc currently is in Fandom is he's moving in slow steps towards the idea that he might consciously decide what is under his protection and act on it. He's still feeling guilty about how much he screwed up Steven's life before they got to Fandom so he's still of the belief that the way to make this fair is to let Steven have the body if not all the time then most, especially now that Steven is getting things he's wanted for so long, like a loving partner. Steven doesn't agree with the idea that Marc can't have a life of his own but his various attempts to force the issue in the first year they lived in Fandom blew up in both their faces so Steven has now learned he's got to back off a little and try to let things proceed naturally.
Hey, speaking of Steven...
Steven Grant (the Protector - oh wait, there's two of those?)
That's Steven. With a V.
Spoiler alert for MCU Moon Knight that Steven is also a protector in their system. It's just that where Marc was the physical protector, Steven is the emotional one.
Steven is fundamentally NotMarc. Not only because he's a separate person, but also because he was specifically created to be nothing like Marc. Marc takes the pain because he's the one who is meant for the pain. He's the killer. He's the one who cannot have any other life.
Steven is the one who, by virtue of not being Marc, should have a happy and healthy life with a mother who loves him. Not being Marc is everything from Marc is physically capable while Steven is clumsy, Marc frequently lies while Steven strives to be honest, and even things like Marc is a killer so Steven is vegan.
Even without being aware of Marc, Steven protected him by being something Marc could look at and be inspired to know that there was a life beyond the abuse he was living in. Steven's unfailing hope, optimism, and love is what makes them keep going right up to this very second. It's notable that Marc didn't take Khonshu's deal to save himself but to save Steven. Steven is the one who keeps them alive and waking up day after day.
Steven also protects Marc by being the one to remind him that, in spite of how they are built as a system, Marc doesn't always have to be the one who takes the pain or who is destined to only do bad things.
Because of his relationship with Marc, Steven's view of morality in general is that hurting people is bad, you do not kill under any circumstances, but there is no such thing as someone so horrible that they are past redemption. You can get Steven furious - like Marc, hurting people he cares about and/or hurting children specifically is a real quick way to do that - and if he has to he'll resort to violence to stop someone if needed. But he'll try the least violent method possible* in order to subdue and then as needed do what it takes to make the person hurting others stop, such as jail for someone truly horrible or not giving that person a chance to hurt him or his loved ones again if it's a much lesser offense. But he cannot be convinced that someone is forever beyond redemption if they want it. He's literally not built that way.
(* I'm going to nerd out here and point out this was so detailed on the show the stunt team even coordinated Steven's fights so that he was specifically holding his truncheons in a way to do the least damage. It's a subtle detail involving like an inch's worth of change in the hold, but it was on purpose and again I am forever convinced the show was only able to do things that layered because they flew under the radar once Kevin signed off on it. Anyway....)
Where Steven is in Fandom now is that he's finally started to realize he can't force Marc to have a life or do things differently, he needs to simply support Marc in whatever gives Marc things to care about and want to be involved in, such as the boarding house. Steven has also recently started to face just some of how much his entire life was a lie. The Dissociation in Steven's side of the DID was so severe that Steven believed he lived an entirely different life from what was reality and he's only just started to realize how far that impact goes. To give an example of the things he now knows, he knows his mother wasn't kind at all but horribly abusive and he knows that he full on hallucinated conversations with her up to and including months after she died. There's still some reveals for him to come but they've been hitting him hard so he's pacing himself.
Steven is also completely and utterly in love with Llewellyn Watts and is thrilled that together with Marc, their cat, their fish, and even their house they've formed something like a family. Steven still believes the DID means he can't have things like marriage or children, but he's deeply grateful for what he does have all the same. Also thanks to Watts Steven has taken on Mr Knight as his avatar title (because Moon Knight is a Khonshu given title and no. Steven is not a fan of Khonshu, thank you.)
Steven's also learning some important lessons about boundaries with both Marc and with other people - namely you can't force them to change no matter how badly you might want them to - but his development of patience as far as that goes is a work in progress.
Now for the other characters attached to my boys, in one case literally.
Jake Lockley (the Anger... but let's face it probably a Protector too)
The hat is iconic. We are forever grateful they did not include the mustache, however hilarious it is that comics canon is that it's a fake one that Marc keeps in his pocket for when Jake takes over.
Jake is the third personality in the system that, to date, only Khonshu knows about. (Also a faint inkling that lingers in the far back of Watts's mind courtesy of his 20 year in the future AU self coming to Fandom one weekend.)
Jake's role in the system is he is Marc's anger at the world that allowed the abuse to happen. As such he is the most brutally violent of all of them. There is a non zero chance that at least some of the violent things Marc thinks he did were actually done by Jake, but that's a notable at best some not all. However, Jake will take over the body when Marc and/or Steven get so overwhelmed they can't handle things anymore, usually while they are under attack, which is why I suspect Jake's falling under that protector title too (Protector is one of those Avatar of Khonshu things, you see, so there's a bit of a theme here.) But the way Jake handles problems is murder, and callous and violent murder if need be. So... protection isn't inaccurate but, yanno. Woof.
The dissociation is so strong around Jake that not only do Marc and Steven not know he exists, anything that remotely suggests he exists doesn't register to them no matter how obvious the evidence might be. Marc has come to from blackouts to be surrounded by a literal pile of recently murdered bodies and wondered if Steven - yanno, the one of them who is built to be incapable of killing - might have done it. That's how well Jake is hidden.
Because there's very little canon on MCU Jake so far and because he is the most brutal, he's currently being kept way in the background for the purpose of the game. Marc and Steven mistakenly think their continued blackouts are because their brain has suffered damage from their trauma and have no idea it's actually because it's when a third personality has taken over the body. Which is something that Jake does from time to time, but less often now that Marc and Steven are sharing a residence with this pesky detective who keeps observing things.
Khonshu (the Protector of those who travel at night, among other stuff)
He isn't yet calling Marc "My son" but he's probably getting there
I'm just running with the theme now but yeah. Protector is a HUGE leitmotif in the Moon Knight mythos so on a nerdy meta level it's actually nice how Marc Spector's story evolved to more responsibly include the concept of DID and how there can often be at least one protector personality in a system if not more. This is something done more strongly in the MCU than the comics and it's part of why I love the show (though there are good runs in the comics that the show drew directly from, to be fair).
Back on Khonshu, he is the Egyptian God of the Moon and Night Sky. He believes in justice, and he will send his avatar, the Fist of Khonshu (yes, Marc knows what that sounds like. He didn't pick the name), to either protect those Khonshu has determined need it or, slightly more often, to enact vengeance on those who have harmed people under Khonshu's protection. Khonshu really likes vengeance. Even the comparatively cleaned up MCU version likes his vengeance bloody and violent. There's a reason why Khonshu seems to get along super well with Jake.
Khonshu is also a manipulative liar, but he is... well not a god of his word per se, but his values are his values. He believes very strongly in taking care of those under his protection, he just has no problem doing it with lies and violence. This would be why Khonshu likes Marc. The MCU version has shown hints of sharing a trait with the comic version who took a particular interest in Marc over the course of Marc's entire life, not just when he happened to be dying in one of Khonshu's temples.
Khonshu's not a huge fan of Steven. He grudgingly respects that Steven is sometimes the only one smart enough to get certain things done, or to (nearly) out manipulate Khonshu in a deal, but he'd cheerfully punt Steven out of the multiverse if he had his way.
Currently in Fandom Khonshu has come off of about a year of sneakily using Jake to honor his agreement with Marc and Steven not to ask them to kill (since, yanno, the deal was he wouldn't ask them to kill. Which he didn't! See? God of his word.) But since they moved in with Watts Jake can't take over the body for days at a time without it being noticed, so that hasn't happened since. Luckily there's all sorts of weirdness looming with gods and multiverses in Marc and Steven's home universe so Khonshu's currently content with having his favorite avatar (Marc, for the record, very specifically Marc) hanging out in effectively safe storage on a multiversal nexus until such time as Khonshu needs him.
(Or yanno, that's the story I'm sticking with until canon gives me something to go on.)
The Midnight Manor (the protector of those who live in it, really)
I made the graphic, I'm using it, dang it!
The Midnight Manor is a House of Shadows, which in and of itself is an eldritch-like being that is its own pocket universe. As a House of Shadows it has the ability to turn itself into any building-like structure and to do things like create elaborate illusions.
Houses of Shadows live off of human emotions the same way plants live off of sunlight - which is to say in the way that they take in energy that's floating out there anyway with no harm to the thing the energy came from. Because this House of Shadows originally hailed from near Limbo, which is a horrible place (Just ask Illyana, who grew up there), the only way it knew how to elicit emotions was through horror. What it really wanted, though, was to live a life with purpose. Hence now that it has a chance to be a home it no longer tries to scare people and instead tries to be a nice place for them to live.
To help it be a home (and also because the game needed more housing options and the mods said this was the one they wanted, I can claim no credit for this idea) it's now both a private residence and a boarding house. The private residence is for Marc, Steven, Watts, and their pets. They're the ones whose energy is being fed off of to keep the place alive. The residents are just residents. However, with both character and player consent, there can be fun things like changes to their rooms or small illusions to keep things fun and interesting. There's also an All Purpose Room which functions effectively like the holosuites in the apartment buildings, just using illusions instead of holograms.
(More on the layout and features of the place can be found here.)
The place has renamed itself to Midnight Manor (cough because the canon name was Midnight Mission and Marc both doesn't have a mission yet and also Midnight Mission Boarding House sounds like the home of a cult, let's be real cough). "Midnight" is fine for short.
A thing to remember is it's not a building. It looks like a building but it's a being. Which is why it will act/appear differently from buildings in town when certain events happen.
Also its canon pronouns are it/its because yes, I do care about not misgendering a fictional being. I worry when the fictional cat gets fed too, okay? I'm invested.
The Mun (protector of kitties and good doggos)
Me in my natural habitat
Hello! Still The Brat Queen or TBQ for short. She/Her. Still on East Coast US time. Also still disabled which apparently the last time I wrote this I had vague optimism might be a thing that would go away so, uh, ouch. For sure.
Anyhoo, because of being disabled I don't work, but I am also at the mercy of my medication. I need to take things about every six hours which also means every six hours my brain and body go into shutdown mode and there's nothing I can do about it. I have to pass out for about two hours at a time, usually in the neighborhood of sometime around noon and sometime around 5 or 6pm Eastern. (Also early morning and late night but those aren't as obvious unless you're some weirdo on a schedule that's based in the Netherlands or something, pffft).
I also get migraines that can knock me out in pain for days at a time. I also have weekly doctor appointments that knock me out for the rest of the day. I also have a website where I do media analysis, which means that when there's a show on that I'm regularly doing writeups for I'm busy the day it comes out and can't ping at all.
All of which is to say if you don't see my characters out and about it's not because I/they don't care, it's because I'm doing my best with what real life throws at me. Patience and understanding is appreciated and slow play is love.
OOC communication is also love so feel free to hit me up in email at thebratq at gmail dot com or thebratqueen in discord whenever you need. And you can find me in social media and other such places via all the links here.
Aaaaaaaaaand that's it. Questions? Comments? Gremlins?
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Date: 2024-01-06 08:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-06 08:08 am (UTC)(I mean that in the best possible way)