Rachel: Saved by a lame website.

I was originally going to get online and do some precalculus junk, but the website where I am conducting my independent study nonsense refused to load again today, so I have some free time to blog while I wait. Before this I was sitting on my butt and doing nothing but planning out Freedom's plot while watching 30 Rock, so I am still inspired and have decided to torture you all by talking about Freedom. Again.

Okay, Cori, so you asked me exactly what type of insane Freedom becomes. I thought about it a little bit and here is what I know as of right now. Basically he becomes totally obsessed with surviving, and everything spirals downwards for him from there until he eventually snaps out of it towards the end of his journey. The way he kidnaps Vine in the name of his own well-being is kind of a prelude of what is to come. After he kidnaps Vine and all of the adrenaline wears off he ends up feeling horrible and starts having doubts about himself as a person. He wonders if he even deserves to live any longer because he has obviously become some sort of monster. But these feelings don't stick around. The police find him rather quickly and he is thrown in prison where he is left to stew for a bit while the city decides what they want to do with him now. This gives him some time to think, and, to cut a long story short, he no longer feels guilty about what he did because he becomes so frantic to find some way out of the mess he has gotten himself into. Again, long story short, he doesn't find a way for the time being. He ends up being taken to a hospital where he will have all of his beloved "implants" taken out and where he will ultimately die. Usually patients of this hospital have their unnatural body parts removed and are sent off to Almost Heaven, but Freedom has fused himself so thoroughly with wires that there is no way that he will be able to survive all of the surgeries. This adds to his distress, understandably, and it is at this hospital where he really starts to become a different person. His need to escape the place alive overpowers any clear-cut sense of right and wrong that he has left, and he rapidly becomes willing to use anyone and anything to his advantage. He acts normally on the outside to earn the doctors' trusts so that he is able to gain more privileges and thus stray nearer and nearer to the free world, but on the inside he is forever plotting and calculating his escape. What's more, he even begins planning what he will do after he is free, which is where his twisted view of the world really starts to develop. He has always wanted to take down the government of Paradise City, but now he feels that he will actually be able to do it, and rather easily; all it will take (in his mind) is the assassination of the top government official in the city, Cadmus Buck-Edwards. Once Cadmus is dead, he figures that everything will go back to the way that it is "supposed to be", which really makes no sense. He unconsciously convinces himself  that his life will go back to the way that it was before everything went so wrong for him if only he can murder the man in charge of the city, which obviously isn't true. Murdering someone of such power would obviously get him into nothing but more trouble, but he doesn't see it that way at all. Ultimately, once he escapes from the hospital (he actually succeeds in doing that, which doesn't sound like that big of a deal, but it is) he ends up intentionally endangering his own life by trying to end someone else's, which is totally the opposite of what he would have done at an earlier time. Freedom starts out as a generally level-headed guy who would never do anything to hurt anyone, but in the blink of an eye he turns into someone who is more than willing to kill someone and die trying, which is key: to avoid death was the whole reason he started freaking out in the first place, and now he doesn't care. His character kind of turns inside out...so I guess that is what kind of insane he is.

I kind of important thing, however, is that he doesn't stay "inside out." He ends up coming to his senses and using his "powers for good," for lack of a better way to put it. He still strives to take down Paradise City, but  desires to liberate Paradise City's citizens and to overthrown the evil and corruption of the Death List. So it's different. But this doesn't happen until the end of his tale, so he spends a great deal of time lost within his own head.

Any, advice, Cori? I just realized that this whole post is for you, haha. You're special. I'd better go and check that dumb website again, but now you have this little chunk of information if you've got any ideas.

-Iridian