#this might be entirely incomprehensible but I spent four hours dealing with air canada’s bureaucratic horseshit this afternoon

[donner-mathis-official]

(HI pretend that I'm sending this from @tldconvictdatingsim) do you have any Donner headcanons or just general thoughts abt him? if so, please share🤲 I'd love to hear them!

@tldconvictdatingsim you have given me such a gift I am going to go insane now I have been thinking about this through an entire day of airline hell.

First of all, I see Donner as being the youngest known Long Dark character. I usually put his age somewhere between 19 and 23 (Jace is a grad student, so she’s probably in her mid to late twenties). He’s got Issues, and doesn’t know how to feel about his dad coming to bust him out. I also think that pre-solitary Donner and any Donner we would see in the game’s time span are almost entirely different people. I won’t get into my views on prison as an institution because I don’t know enough about the Canadian penal system, but I am of the stance that solitary confinement is a form of torture. Donner is almost definitely not a new inmate at Blackrock, and has likely been in solitary for at least a few months. Even for someone who was in a good mental state going in, that would be rough. Donner definitely was not in a good mental state.

To me, Franklin’s comment that Donner is new-school, a different type of crime than Mathis, is very telling. The way I see it, Mathis is a career criminal like you see in movies and video games. I’m not sure if I would go so far as to say charismatic, but that’s certainly what he tries for. While it would be really funny if the fact that Donner is a more modern criminal meant he was a cryptobro or something, that’s definitely not it. When I was playing through it for the first time, my brain went to mass shooter pretty much immediately. Though honestly I think that what exactly he did doesn’t really matter a ton at the end of the day. I will say that I also think his trial was a huge media spectacle. He was a conventionally attractive young man who committed a major crime, and there is no small number of people who get really amped about that kind of stuff.

I think his relationship with his father is an interesting one. We know Mathis has spent a good amount of time in jail. I’d need to rewatch the cutscene where Heller and Vachon talk about Montréal, but I believe Heller refers to that incident as having occurred a few years prior. I think Mathis goes in and out of jail, and that’s sort of a blessing and a curse for Donner. On one hand, Mathis is very mercurial and explosive, meaning that when he’s angry, he’s enraged. That’s not really a good look on a parent, and it makes for a more relaxing time when the parent is not there. But also, we see that Mathis cares very deeply for his boy. He goes to nearly the end of the earth for him. So I’d imagine that, when not mad, he would be a very loving and supportive father. And while I do think that we see Mathis in a very high-strung, tense situation during the game, he strikes me as the type to find excuses to be tense, because if he slows down he might think of all the things he tries not to think about.

I think Donner’s mother is very distant if she’s present in his life at all, just because Mathis is so present, and his absence is felt so clearly that I think it just doesn’t make sense for his mother to also have that larger than life personality. Mathis likes to surround himself with followers (his in game description specifically says he likes to think of himself as a leader of men), and I don’t think he would be any different in searching for a romantic or sexual partner. So Donner’s mom really isn’t helping to blunt the effect of Mathis’s outbursts, or fill in the spaces he leaves when he’s gone. She’s at best just kind of there.

Donner’s upbringing taught him that there were two ways to get attention: either be clever and charming, or cause problems. Being charming is preferable because it doesn’t get you in trouble (and he’s seen the kind of trouble his dad gets into), but it doesn’t always work. Prior to solitary, he’s the kind of guy where most people who know him are like “but he’s so sweet!” and are horrified how he could do what he did, whatever it was. Someone particularly insightful might have seen the way he looked at people, analytical, and maybe understood a hint of what was lying beneath, but it would have been difficult. Unlike his father, I think Donner is very rigid, very put together. He saw the outbursts in his father and said “i won’t do that”, and so he’s this incredibly composed dude right up until he… isn’t.

After solitary, though, I think that changes. He loses some of the charisma, some of the ability to interact with others, but that comes with those walls coming down a bit, the tightly laced image of himself that he portrays loosening up a bit. Keeping up that kind of a front takes constant practice and adaptation and when you haven’t spoken to another person in months, you lose a lot of that. He comes across more like his dad, which I think he has really mixed feelings about. He tries to keep it together, but he can’t, and that upsets him more and makes a real nasty feedback loop.

Also I think he’s gay but super repressed and it freaks people out bc they’re like “a young man with no interest in women? That’s fucked up.”