Patrick Andersen - a topic

I feel like Patrick is one of slenderverse's most mischaracterized and misunderstood characters and so I am making it my official duty to talk about him (also because he's like one of my favorite characters ever).

You really often see people just putting him down as another violent, crazy antagonist, and while I'm not gonna sit here and pretend he's a saint and the best person ever, I also feel like putting him in the same category as say HABIT is reductive. This is actually an interesting comparison, HABIT being a full on monster who stands to represent everything horrible and evil you can imagine while Patrick is still at his core very human.

I think that many people don't understand him because of how elusive of a character he is and how little screentime he gets. We also rarely get concrete explanations for the things he does and why he does them so what you're left with is a bunch of pieces you can put together in honestly a variety of ways. Now, I don't want this to sound like one of those "you actually need to have pretty high iq to understand this thing" moments. There are definitely plenty of ways to interpret a piece of art and if you disagree with me on every single point I make - that's totally fine. At the end of the day I'm just some dumbass watching videos on the internet! Here's my take:

Who is Patrick really? Well first of all I can tell you with confidence that he isn't a being possessing Michael's body. When Shaun suggests that he's "hijacking" Michael's body he even goes to say: "I'm not hijacking, I live here too." He also seems far too protective of Michael to be just a thing using him as a vessel. This protectiveness is actually a core trait of his I will get back to later. He seems to really care about Michael's wellbeing, even if he takes drastic measures to ensure it. It's honestly a really endearing part of his character to me. I'm much more partial to the idea that Patrick is the conciousness of a past iteration that now lives on as a split personality of Michael's. If we follow this theory then Patrick was the first to exist in the cycle, died, and was reborn again but for some reason still being able to keep his memories of the past life he lived. After several of these cycles we get to the present day where for one reason or another he lives alongside Michael. I'm not sure if I like the idea that this is the first instance of there being two personalities or that it has always been like that. Either way, I do believe that he lives here too, and even if not fully human anymore there is still a lot of humanity left in him.

The topic of humanity is another interesting one to dissect. Like, Patrick is definitely not normal given that even his presence makes the camera glitch (similarly to the slenderman himself). It might be because he's literally not supposed to be here, because he's a past iteration that should've lost its memories but that didn't. Or maybe because he has spent so much time around the slenderman that it corrupts him in some way. But despite all that there are these moments that really stick out to me - him affectionately calling Michael "Mikey" in one of the documents, hugging Shaun in "so it goes", his phonecall to Vinny in tape 3... like those are all very genuine moments where I feel like he had no motivation to lie or manipulate the situation in any way (especially the last one!)

But he still does a lot of bad things... or does he? Yeah I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that tying up Shaun, nearly setting Eric on fire and threatening Stormy are upstanding citizen behaviors BUT then there's the more speculative stuff. I'm mostly reffering to HABIT's monologue in "GOODBYE" here where he claims that Michael/Patrick is this awful evil manipulator. The biggest reason why I take this whole video with a grain of salt is well.. because it's HABIT. Not to say anything but the guy spends nearly the whole third act of EMH lying to Vinny. So how can we really believe the things he says? Still there is a lot of interesting content in this video so let's dig in a bit:

Brought up in "GOODBYE":

Michael isn't actually Shaun's brother - this one is a bit messy because yes and no. Michael very much is Shaun's brother, I don't think their childhoods were made up or something. But Patrick isn't really his brother, not fully at least so I can understand where this comes from.
HABIT has known him longer than Shaun has - I actually really like this one lol. This supports the idea that Patrick is from a past iteration and so he probably has known him for a long time.
He knows a lot more than he's letting on, knows how the slenderman functions and even knows where the second clock hand is - I feel like it's obvious that at least Patrick does know a lot more than he's letting on. Even saying things like "there is a lot more going on than you could understand". I once saw Dylan even talk about how Patrick is able to see the slenderman's sort of "real", eldritch horror type form. The clock hands... I'm not sure. I feel like if he knew where they were he would have a reason why he's not actively trying to get them. This whole point is real messy as well because HABIT also claims to not know their location at first which he takes back later so - yeah not an idea honestly.
He distracts the slenderman by feeding the people around him to it as a human shield - there might be some truth to this honestly. I'm not sure if Michael would do something like that but I'm sure that if Patrick had to choose between being killed and someone else dying, he'd throw a lot of people under the bus. His protective nature once again might I add-
Michael isn't innocent because if he was he'd try to spare Shaun - to me this isn't a really fair criticism. Michael wanted help and since there aren't many people in his life he could turn to I think that wanting his brother to be there for him is pretty understandable. I mean the poor guy just found out even his doctor wasn't real, cut him some slack.
He doesn't care about Shaun, that he isn't even human and he got rid of Eric for being the rational one - so firstly, I think that both Michael and Patrick care about Shaun in their own way. Patrick more-so tolerates him I'd say. I don't see a reason why he'd want to hurt him (if he doesn't get in the way... like we've seen him demonstrate already). Not being human is debatable in my opinion but I already blabbered about that above ^^. And getting rid of Eric - I think it was partially just because he irritated Patrick, not gonna lie. Then also there's the fact that Eric repeatedly dismissed Michael's mental health issues and I see why Patrick wouldn't like that. Yeah Eric might've been the only rational, I'll give him that lmao.

The thing is that HABIT does just want to break Shaun in that video. So it would make sense to twist the truth a bit if it means it would hurt more.