Before being imprisoned in the coop, Mina is a habitual people watcher; she sees people as her muses and draws their portraits. However, after being imprisoned and learning about the existence of the watchers, Mina’s people watching takes on a much more serious and survival-tinged tone. Rather than scanning crowds for interesting faces to sketch, she finds herself in a state of hypervigilance, anxiously surveying faces for signs of emotionlessness that might indicate the presence of the sinister watchers. Thus, it is clear that her experience has changed her ability to access her natural artistic creativity, and her personality has been deeply altered as well.

At the beginning of The Watchers, Mina is artistically inspired by the people she sees on the street, and she takes pleasure in sketching strangers with unusual features. As the narrative indicates, “For months Mina had been collecting her strangers, as she called them. She only had to glance at a face to perceive its subtleties, to fasten it to her memory. And her sketchbook was full of them; page after page after rain-speckled, coffee-stained page” (15). Mina likes looking at unfamiliar faces and has an excellent memory of nuances. As an artist who creates excellent likenesses, Mina brings her talent for studying faces with her into the coop, and Madeline picks up on the artist’s instinctive scrutiny. At the end of the novel, Madeline says, “To be honest, Mina, I thought you knew [that I was a watcher]. The way you used to watch me, always studying my face as though I had let it change quite by accident” (286). Madeline—whose sensibilities have been fine-tuned to maintain her concealment—thought that Mina’s attentive gaze was a sign of discovery rather than a natural side effect of her interest in faces.

Through the process of observing both the other captives and herself as they all endure near starvation and psychological torture, Mina finds her outlook on the world drastically changing. The watchers also torture Mina by destroying her sketchbook. After enduring the certain knowledge that she is constantly observed by unseen antagonists every night, Mina becomes deeply uncomfortable with being perceived by anyone at all. These torture methods, combined with Mina’s suspicions about Madeline, cause Mina to look at crowds differently when she returns to Galway, for she now sees potential threats in every crowd. She “instinctively studie[s] their faces from the corner of her eye, but not for those reasons that inspired her sketches once upon a time. She look[s] for any expression, some tangible proof that they [a]re human” (232). Although she has escaped the forest, Mina has never left survival mode, and this hypervigilance now interferes with her ability to reconnect with her artistic talent. Most notably, she is wary of those who used to be her muses, like the android, whom she soon discovers is a watcher like Madeline—one who can walk during the day. Mina’s trauma therefore robs her of many opportunities to fully embrace her creativity.

Mina also looks at the natural world around her differently after returning from the coop. As she walks to the university in Galway, “[h]er eyes pick[] out and count[] [the bushes’] coloured berries in seconds. She imagine[s] Madeline nodding her approval” (251). Mina no longer looks at plants as if they are inspiration for a still-life sketch; instead, she sees them as potential food sources. Madeline is now far more concerned with survival than art, and this makes her less human in some crucial ways. Thus, trauma puts Mina in permanent survival mode and hinders her artistic appreciation of the world’s flora. She can no longer indulge in an innocent and carefree appreciation for the world, and with her newfound hypervigilance, she ironically comes to resemble the watchers in many ways.