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(Spoilers) I don't understand why the Artist is a killer
I love tragic characters, and Carmina's lore is a real hit for me, but I'm not quite making the leap for why she's killing people in the Entity's realm.
I get that grief and guilt are her driving motivators, and the events she suffered towards the end of her lore are heavy contributors towards a total breakdown that might have seen her snap completely. Plus she's got a near-psychic connection with a flock of crows that's only interested in her preservation and will attack anyone else, and that horrified her when it panned out in full - so at first it looks like she's a new kind of killer. A person who doesn't actually want to harm anyone, but has no control over her power and hurts others just by wandering near them. Definitely seems ripe for the Entity's emotional harvesting and checks out with her intrinsic theme of guilt.
Except her actions in game still have her as a willing participant in the sacrifice process; she chases survivors, claws at them, and hooks them. The chasing could be waved away, possibly even the clawing as desperately reaching out for help, but slapping people on meat hooks is pretty deliberate. So there has to be something more to that, but I don't see the motivator to kill within her lore. The most she ever tried was in self-defense.
She's not the first tragic killer where it doesn't immediately intuit why they'd turn homicidal, but I could follow the logic of the others more easily. The Nurse went mad and thought she was putting everyone out of their misery (or in her tome, cleansing the system), Hag is half-starved and both she and Spirit are phantasmic remnants of their living selves, with an insatiable vengeance driving their continued existence, Plague doesn't necessarily like what she's doing but believes it's part of a divine plan, and the Twins are misanthropists who distrust humanity to the point of killing in preemptive self-defense.
The Artist's story reminds me the most of the Wraith's - you can see the snapping point, but the reason why he went on to murder everyone in the Entity's realm was way less clear until his tome lore, and even then, it's still heavily inferred. But that inference is that the Entity locked him in that moment of total rage when he snapped and killed Azarov, and Carmina doesn't really have that equivalent? It felt more like she was looking on in horror but powerless to do anything to stop it. So... is she possessed? An unwilling passenger in her own body? Has she merged consciousness with the crows?
Maybe someone else has a different take that'd make more sense of this.
Comments
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I could be wrong, but didn't the Entity torture Trapper because he didn't want to kill for the Entity?
Maybe the same is happening to her? Who knows.
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I think she is, as you say, someone like Wraith, in that the lore ended before we see her full transformation to a killer, but I think they left enough clues to see how she became a Killer and I don’t think it was willing: the implication that I got from the end of her lore and her animations is that the Artist is less Carmina and more her power itself, the murder of crows that seems to posses their own mind and desires(implied in the map description). You can see it in her animations, she doesn’t act like a person, her posture, sounds...they all are crow-like, so I think with time, she lost more and more control to the crows until she ended as a shadow of the former self, enslaved to the Entity and the dark emotions that she shares with the murder.
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If the killers are unwilling you can tell from the damage to their body. Killers without damage are killing willingly.
The Artist doesn't have any damage on body other than from being tortured when she was kidnapped by the man and was given paint/ink as a weapon.
Her story feel similar to the Spirit story with how both felt rage. They may explain more in her tome but rage and maybe wanting revenge seems to be the main thing for now.
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It's as good a guess as any, but it doesn't feel quite right to me? Trapper was already dispositioned for murder - his dad conditioned him to be a monster and he'd already brutalized plenty of people by the time the Fog took him. He just didn't want to work for the Entity until the Entity laid out that it was the boss and you obey it or suffer. There's similar implications in Leatherface's addons, and I think Billy's, to a lesser degree?
I'm stuck on the last point of her lore - "Death was coming and again, it was her fault." The element of being anguished by everything happening but unable to intervene is a repeated theme; I'm just not connecting where she becomes an active participant in this.
Edit: @Khorzad Oh, I like that, that she's a shell of her former self. She does have a fairly unearthly vibe about her, beyond just the ink arms - I'd thought the eerie sounds she makes were because her tongue had been cut out, but you're right, they're pretty birdlike.
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I know why she is led by her anger that she can't control the power of the crows and got her friends killed
also she is led by guilt for the death of her brother and dissaperence of her mother
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What killers besides trapper have damage tho i can't see any other killers with that kind of thing
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Hag and Nurse? Billy's also scarred and burned, but that could just as easily be from the Thompsons' A+ parenting.
I've also heard it floated around that killers with glowing, pupil-less eyes have had their perceptions in some way altered by the Entity, which would be interesting food for thought; Wraith, Billy, Deathslinger, Spirit, Blight, Oni, and maaaaybe Huntress. Some of these have their own reasons for having glowing eyes, but there's a few where some amount of mindscrew by the Entity helps explain their hostility. Not sure it's consistent enough to actually check out, but I've always been partial to that theory.
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Focusing on the original only.
Damaged: Trapper, Wraith, Blight, Nurse and maybe Hag if the runes she used are not what transformed before she was taken.
Plague was diseased before she was taken and Spirit cuts were received from her father, so these two are not damaged.
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Adding even further proof to this idea is her eyes. They're not the normal glowing eyes we'd expect from a Killer manipulated by rage (like Wraith, Spirit and Deathslinger), but they are not human either.
They're a bit clouded, but look at them. Those are the eyes of a bird, more specifically, a crow.
Carmina is no longer herself, but, as Khorzad explains better than I can, a shell of that person overtaken by the murder of crows that kept watch over her.
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Remember the entity did heal her wounds as well such as replacing her hand and saving her from dying in the desert
the entity kind of did the same with spirit in a way by preventing her from dying by turning her into a spirit or with the twins he saved charlotte from dying of hypothermia and brought back her brother
maybe she kills because she feels she owes the entity a big favor
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She laughs when she hit the survivors, so she could be enjoying it and view it as art. Like how she saw the death of the man as a piece of art.
Someone pointed out there are no crows in South America. After reading her story I believe the crows were sent by the Entity and was keeping an eye on her cause it sensed the potential in her and was preparing her cause the Artist saw herself as the reason death come to the people she is close to and the Entity wanted to take advantage of that, like how it took advantage of the Spirit rage.
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Don’t forget chars Charachters such as bubba, and pig
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Yes that's exactly what I was thinking all the time while reading her lore. The crows are obviously connected to the Entity, either controlled by it or just straight up coming from its Realm altogether. The Entity was slowly preparing her to become a killer down the line through the intervention of those crows.
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I think she's another example of the entity corrupting someone over time.
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The only killer with damage not related to their pre-entity life is Trapper, so this arguement kinda falls apart there
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Killers being willing and unwilling from the damage on their bodies is canonical.
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I'm pretty sure it's the crows* possessing her body, and not her. that was my interpretation, at least.
*since there aren't crows in Chile, these are either entity crows, the Chile equivalent of crows, or it's an alternate Chile.
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Same deal as plague. She is most likely just grateful to the entity/crows due to them being such an important thing for her life. Also maybe she got mad at the person who cut off her arms and tongue, kinda like spirit.
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Prettt sure the doctor got tortured too.
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Mah, Nurse is definitely willing to kill, but delusional
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This is exactly it. The entity forces its killers to do their bidding, and regardless of whether or not it makes sense for lore we can always assume that the entity has provided some motivation or incentive to participate in the trials as the dealers of death and pain.
That motivation doesn't have to be violent either, and we're aware of many killers who carry out their tasks willingly for one reason or another. Characters like Ghostface or Trickster do it because they genuinely enjoy it, Doctor and Blight are obsessed with the pursuit of dark knowledge and inhumane science with little to no regard for the consequences, The Clown feeds into perverse indulgences, and so on and so forth.
I think Carmina might be new, in that she was given something (I mean all the killers were given at least superhuman strength / speed alongside other powers but let me get to my point here):
When her hands were cut off she lost everything, painting was not only her whole purpose and identity it was her escape- a way to cope with her grief and intense feelings of guilt and regret. When she was pulled to the realm of the entity, she was offered them back: substitutes made from the very ink she used that were even better than her original hands. They could morph, shift, change in size and shape, instead of holding a brush her hands could be the very tool of her inspired expression, and nobody would ever be able to cut them from her. They were hers to keep- so long as the entity received something in return: in exchange for her new hands she had to use them as a tool not only for art, but for violence, to inflict the pain and violence that she too had once been subject to.
This alone was an offer that she couldn't refuse (not to mention it was also an offer she actual can't refuse, consider the consequences other killers like trapper have suffered). Her hands were her everything after the loss of her family, dealing out "impermanent" death- may be a small price to pay for being made whole again.
So here we could be seeing the entity bargaining. Not just with the promise to be able to inflict pain endlessly that insane individuals or otherworldly beings like Ghostface, Freddy, or Pinhead might desire- but with something that a person like Carmina genuinely and desperately yearns for, in her case, her hands.
And this may even be slightly supported through the map as well- we see actual paintings in the Eyrie of Crows. Suppose for a moment that these weren't paintings from her former life, or even paintings recreated by the Entity itself in the process of reconstructing the realm. Suppose that Carmina herself painted them- in the realm of the entity, shaping her inky hands into brushes of different sizes and forms, configuring them to her whims, and pouring out her emotions of anguish, rage, all into the imagery of the crows who were both her blessing, and her uncontrollable curse.
I mean people were always wondering what killers did between trials anyway. Maybe with Carmina, that question is a little easier to answer?
Post edited by Seiko300 on4 -
Idk … but I like birdies
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Nope, ol Doc actually did all of that to himself. Just couldn't stop bringing his work home with him
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I always thought that the Artist's torture was more mental than phsyical. You can't see scars or hooks on her body, but ink drips from her mouth and eyes. If you wanted to make it sound really brutal, you could claim the Entity rotted her body from inside until she was nothing but a shell of ink.
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First, I would like to state that I really dislike Artist's and I do think it has really bad writing in a way that makes it seem like a bad creepypasta.
Putting that aside, for the reason she kills I just assume she is possessed by the crows. She makes crow-like noises, on her mori she attempts to fly like a bird to attack the survivors and she kicks pallets with two legs. With that being said, it's pretty safe to assume that she isn't on her full consciousness on the trials, which may explain her actions.
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Regardless of the theories and subtle implications that some people are picking up on - it's still horribly written.
The story boasts of horrendous staging - it is completely unclear of who, what, why things are as they are... which is the entire point of lore in the first place.
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