Michelle Won

Michelle Won is one of the main characters in the Elsaverse second story arc, featured in several titles. Despite her young age, Won has an extensive background that is still partially undisclosed; she is currently working as a detective for the Sangrive Police Department, being tasked with the investigations about people with powers together with her partner Nathaniel Blake. Despite being the main female character in the game Darkness Falls (2018-2019), Won is a special case within the Elsaverse as she has never been a love interest that players could pursue romantically. She has no gender preferences when it comes to sexual attraction; her most recent relationship was with a stripper named Candace, but they broke up just before the start of Elsaverse: Transitions (2020-2021).

Character Overview
Michelle Won was born in an unnamed small country on the southern border of China that is ruled by an authoritarian government; when she was only a child, a military squad trashed her house and killed several people, including Won's mother. That day, her father decided to fight against this tyrannic government, founding and leading a resistance group that resorted to questionable methods to fund and carry out this fight, and that was quickly labeled as a terrorist group. Won was taught to fear and fight the established authorities, learned to shoot heavy guns, and was almost killed a couple of times before she was 14; she also found a brotherly figure in Chein-ming, a boy slightly older than her whose parents were killed along with Won's mother. One day, Won's dad was also killed in his fight; before dying, he apologized to her daughter for having dragged her into his war and asked her to flee and have a happy life somewhere else.

With just her father's leather jacket and some papers he gave her, Won arrived in the unnamed country in which Elsaverse's stories take place and started a new life all alone. She reflected a lot on her dad's fight, reaching the painful conclusion that he was indeed hurting their people while supposedly trying to free them; at the same time, she couldn't just forget all of what he did for her and the rightfulness of that fight against a brutal government. Somehow, she ended up joining the army of her new, democratic country, becoming kind of what she had always been fighting against. Michelle latched to her strong sense of justice to conduct herself, but still suffered from an internal dissonance she was barely able to manage, as she never fully overcame her issues with political authorities. Sometime later, she left the army to join the police force as a detective in a city named Downriver, looking for the relative safety of the job compared to her older one. However, her partner died in an ambush during a drug bust; Won's intuition told him not to go and wait for backup, but he didn't listen and was shot dead. Even though Internal Affairs cleared her of any wrongdoing, Michelle was accused by her colleagues of having abandoned her partner to die, and she ended up requesting a transfer to another city.

That's how she arrived in Sangrive. Won was immediately assigned as Nathaniel Blake's new partner and they started working together. Despite being a newcomer in the city, Michelle had already some contacts there, like Gary, the prosecutor, or Joan, a young hacker girl Won met online. This relationship with Joan is quite representative of Michelle Won's character, as she has been acting as a motherly figure for Joan, whose actual mother is an addict. Won is smart, intuitive, and energetic; she seems a bit hot-tempered and prone to jump to conclusions, which explains the nickname "Fire Lady" that the assistant pathologist, Jannike, chooses for her, but she is also reflexive and resourceful, as well as a hard worker. But, above all, Won cares for the people and wants to bring down the bad guys, which is why she idolizes the most decorated detective in the country, Karen Thorntree. With all those traits, plus her positive and friendly attitude, Won manages to impress her new partner both professionally and personally, to the point that Blake eventually decides to share his trauma with her. Later on, when Won's childhood friend, Chein-ming, shows up unexpectedly in Sangrive looking for some dirty money to fund the resistance he's now leading, Michelle finds in Blake the support she needs to face her past and do the right thing: arresting Chein-ming for trafficking with their people, a red line that Won's father explicitly asked him not to cross.

Another one of Michelle Won's defining traits is that she likes to keep close to interesting people, who she easily identifies thanks to her intuition. In that regard, Won quickly catches there's something special in Xara, the blind woman who defused a gunman situation, and signs up for her martial arts lessons at a local gym; Michelle also manages to befriend Jannike despite their tense first meeting and Jannike's weirdness in social, non-sexual interactions. And, when the existence of people with unnatural abilities becomes the only logical explanation for some strange cases they are trying to solve, Won quickly understands that is better to let Alexis, Amanda, and Anastasia go and have an unofficial meeting with them later, than to bring them in for interrogation. From that moment on, Won and Blake are tasked with investigating any case that could potentially involve powers so that these powers don't become public knowledge, although the detectives don't quite trust their liaison with top authorities, Lara. Won even suggests bypassing Lara and hiding info from her, and Blake agrees: in their reports they don't mention the "Triple A", nor Candace, nor Joel Dresden. And is yet to be seen how these mysterious authorities take the news of Beth Lagrange's fake death: there's no corpse to be found, and it seems that Won and Blake agreed once again to not mention Beth's powers in their official reports, as all of their efforts in Chasing Beth (2021) seem to be aimed to not expose her.

In her private life, Michelle Won seems to have had a relationship in the past with Michael Blackhawk, whom she meets again in the post-credits scene of Chasing Beth. Gender not being important for her feeling attracted to a person, in Darkness Falls Won starts a relationship with Candace, a stripper with the power of knowing people's actual feelings by reading their body language, but they break up some months later as Candace started to worry too much about Won's safety at her job.

Miscellaneous

 * In Darkness Falls Episode 2, Won reflects on how the internet is an unfriendly place, especially for women, which is why both Joan and herself use male names for their online profiles. This is inspired by Tlaero's own online experience, as she hid her gender for years under a neutral nickname to avoid harassment.


 * Tlaero's sudden retirement in April 2019 left Darkness Falls second season unfinished. One of the main storylines planned for that season was Won's secret and traumatic past; in order to leave this character in a good place, Tlaero wrote the short story Won: Darkness Within while officially retired to give the saga a proper and happier ending. Some months later, though, she came back to writing and expanding the Elsaverse, which translated into making Won a single woman again.