🐝: What if Tomorrow Comes

What if Tomorrow Comes

Reggie knows he's a Sci-Fi Geek, and he's proud of it. Besides his encyclopedic Star Wars knowledge, he was also big into apocalypse movies. And books. And comics. It's why he was assigned his Little Brother, Carlos, through the programme.

So maybe he had a zombie apocalypse plan. And a Triffid apocalypse plan. And an alien invasion one, a nuclear disaster one, a Mutated Mole Rats one, an Asteroid Crashed Into The Moon And Pushed It Closer To Earth one...

He hadn't expected all those things to happen at the same time. But his first order of business: get Carlos safely back to his family.

Fake Fic Ask Game

Eric in the Pod Room - An impassioned defense of a man at his worst

Big tw for discussions of suicide, suicidal ideation, and mental illness, and lots of me projecting my own issues onto a terrible fictional character

I’m in a really bad place mentally right now and I’m immersing myself in a Zero Escape Let’s Play series to distract myself from it. It definitely isn’t the healthiest thing for me to be hyperfixated on right now - the series has a chummy relationship with the concept of suicide, after all, and suicidal thoughts are my worst symptom at the moment. But you know what, it’s twisted, but I’m so dangerously comfortable with my own suicidality at this point that the themes of suicide in Zero Escape almost feel warm and welcoming, to the point where I’d even consider them a factor in why I am so obsessed with the series.

I was working on a larger meta, which most of this post is an excerpt from, about the many suicides from Zero Time Dilemma specifically - none of them influenced by Radical-6, all of them with some interesting psychological analysis to be done concerning them. But the Let’s Players have reached the Pod Room, the puzzle that seems to singlehandedly give players the most reason to hate my favorite character. They turned out to be no exception, and they spent the length of the puzzle going on and on about how they despise Eric. I got really tense and upset and thought, “You know what? Forget about Diana, Carlos, and Delta. I can talk about them later. All I want to do right now is come to Eric’s defense. I want to talk about my boy.”

Like, I get it, you know? The first time I saw the Pod Room, I wasn’t the biggest fan of Eric, either. He bullies Sean, he actively refuses to be of any help in solving the puzzle, he makes lewd comments about Mira (and for the record, the problem I have with this is the fact that he says these things around a child, not the comments themselves; people should be allowed to experience and express sexual attraction and that is a hill I will die on). After the puzzle itself, we learn about Eric’s deepest trauma and after that I see people either feel bad for hating him and begin to sympathize with him fully, or go, “Yeah, that sucks for him, but it still doesn’t forgive a damn thing. He’s the worst and I hate him and I hate this game for making him exist.” I am firmly in the first camp, if you couldn’t tell.

Lest we forget: This is the route at the end of which Eric commits suicide. A murder-suicide, granted, but still. He takes his own life. The Pod Room is the start of Eric’s descent into rock bottom and I just... can’t hate him for that, especially not when I recognize some of myself in him. I have never killed another person (I promise); I don’t have homicidal thoughts. I don’t know personally what would compel someone to commit a murder-suicide and I don’t even want to speculate. But his homicidal tendencies aside, Eric and his suicidality have always spoken to me personally.

I’ve done plenty of analysis of Eric in the past under the lens of personality disorders, and my most general conclusions are that he suffers from PTSD, dependent personality disorder, and possibly borderline personality disorder as well. Suicidality is highly correlated with all three of those disorders, and as such I find it highly unlikely that his decision to kill himself in this route is a spontaneous one. If he is anything like me, when he isn’t actively, imminently suicidal, he probably still spends a lot of time imagining worst-case scenarios in which suicide would be a no-brainer. For me, my worst-case scenarios often involve the loss of my parents; they are my Safe People, people around whom my AvPD symptoms are less extreme and my behavior is less inhibited, and I seriously fear for my ability to function without them in my life. Sufferers of many different personality disorders have “special people” like this in some way or another. DPD and BPD have, respectively, Depended People and Favorite People, the objects of the sufferer’s attachment. Mira clearly fulfills both of these roles in Eric’s life, and lots of his worst-case scenarios must involve the loss of her.

Before her death is even confirmed, we can see how much he struggles to function without her there in the puzzle room. I read Eric’s behavior in the Pod Room as him flailing in the absence of his special person. The Let’s Players I’m watching have even made derisive comments about how he doesn’t even know how to be a person, and I’m sitting here like, yeah. You’re right. He doesn’t know how to be a person, not right now. His identity and self-worth are tied to a person who has disappeared under mysterious and stressful circumstances; without her, he feels useless and helpless, which is why he’s overwhelmed by something as simple as a sliding block puzzle. Without her, he loses his grip on his self-control, which is why he has no filter to stop him from saying inappropriate things and why can’t stop his worse impulses to mistreat people. I’m not trying to say that anything he does in the Pod Room is right, but there is a reasonable explanation for why he acts the way he does.

And then, they find Mira’s body. One of Eric’s worst-case scenarios has come true, and in the process he has lost not only the person most important to him but the very sense of self that said person helped him feel. It’s just as bad as he always imagined, and even worse, she was killed in exactly the same way his brother was, triggering a PTSD flashback. His trauma is further compounded by being shown graphic video of Junpei and Akane’s deaths (and later just being shown their dismembered bodies in person).The devastation he must be feeling in this moment is beyond what I can even comprehend and I fully understand why he snaps.

Again, I don’t want to speculate as to why his mind goes “revenge first, suicide second” and why he kills people he could be reasonably sure are innocent. All I can say for sure is that, when he does ultimately kill himself, it’s not out of guilt and it’s not out of fear of consequences. His last words are promising Mira that he’ll be with her soon. The suicide is about her. It was always about her. It’s not just that he’ll miss her; he genuinely cannot picture a life for himself where she is not a part of it, at least not a good one.

(Quick sidenote here to talk about one other thing that Eric does in this route: shooting out the X-Pass authenticator. Once Mira’s body is found, six people have died, meaning that Eric, Sean, and Q are free to leave. But Eric shoots out the authentication device before this is possible. When this happened in the Let’s Play, the players called him an idiot for destroying his own means of escape, which really annoyed me. Here’s the thing: Eric is already actively suicidal at this point. He destroys his key to the outside world because he can no longer imagine a life for himself in the outside world. Shooting the authenticator was in itself an act of suicide, even though he wasn’t pulling the trigger on himself.)

All of this is not to say that Eric is okay in the true end and should be left to his own devices. He’s a man in pain, a man in constant crisis, and he’s in desperate need of intervention to prevent him from harming himself or others. I like him and Mira together and she will likely always be a special (Depended, Favorite) person to him, but he can’t and shouldn’t rely on his relationship with her to keep his head above water and keep him from acting the way he did in the Pod Room. Eric needs professional help; but call me optimistic, I think that learning from Sean about how he acted on the other routes, what it looks like when he is truly at rock bottom, might inspire him to seek that help.

Anyway. Sorry for the rant, I hope it was interesting at least. I’m going to go refill my medications and schedule an appointment with my therapist because, as fun and cathartic as this was to write, it’s definitely not healthy to get this riled up over fictional characters; plus, I can’t rightly advocate for a fictional character to get help when I’m not taking care of myself, can I?

Do you have any thoughts on the rules of the Labyrinth in FDTD? I've been thinking a lot about how Richie didn't get a personalized vision while he was doing the trials, the way Seth did with his dad. And outside of the trials we got to see both Kate and Freddie (and later Carlos) get visions design to push or torment them. OR basically any thinking thoughts you have about FDTD, I can never get enough of those lol

Sorry this is late. I started to answer and then decided to wait until after I rewatched the episodes where Richie is actually in the Labyrinth.

I always kind of assumed that it was Santanico’s prepping of Richie mixed with his being in the mental-messing-with-people part less than the others that kept him from having too many personal aspects in the Labyrinth.

He was shot before the others found the secret tunnels/maze, and was dragged into Santanico’s personal chambers before being turned. And we know she prepared him for at least parts of the Labyrinth, so I think it’s possible she taught him how to focus his thoughts in such a way so it didn’t dig up anything too painful for him and thus risk him not completing the task she gave him. It still got some things, the big safe/vault he saw as a personal challenge, Pritchard who Richie has a hatred of, the insults to his family name etc, and the job itself is a sore spot for both brothers. These are little things, but Seth wasn’t even there for the conversation with Big Jim where he insulted Ray Gecko so that was just for Richie (who may have hated his dad, but he still became a boxman just like Ray. There's definitely some complicated feeling for both brothers about their dad, even if Seth's are more obvious), and then there was Richie’s failure with tricking Big Jim. This was the part of the plan that Richie was in charge of, the piece of it that he not only created but convinced Seth to let him lead/execute, and he failed at it, which digs into Richie's issues with wanting to be the boss/make decisions in the plans. And we know from Scott, who talks about his vision when he finds Jacob and Kate again, that they didn’t show us all of the tests/visions. Storywise, the writers/editors may have decided that Richie’s personal test/puzzle didn’t need showing and/or Seth’s was more interesting/important.

There might also be something to Richie’s pure intentions/mind that kept the challenges part of the Labyrinth from messing with him quite so badly. The Labyrinth, where Seth, Richie, and Carlos where sent into was comprised of what it could take from a person’s mind, while the temple/maze portion that the others, Kate, Scott, Freddie, etc, fought their way through had visions of hidden worries/fears/truths. It’s the Labyrinth that reads the intentions of people and that the culebras apparently send people into as punishment. There, Carlos and Seth both have alternative motivations for wanting to get in and get out, while Richie’s is more “pure.” I could see how him wanting to find the Special Snake for non-selfish reasons might be construed as pure compared to Seth’s “want to find it to free my brother from this woman’s clutches” and Carlos’s “wants to take over the empire” motivations. Seth’s motivation might also have played a role in why he got the personal puzzle he did, designed to drive doubt further into his head about Richie, destroying his reasoning for even going in and thus increasing his chasing of failure.

While the Labyrinth builds its challenges from the things in people’s heads, personal things designed to test them, I think the rest of the maze just takes what’s prominent on the person’s mind, as well as snagging things from one person’s mind to show someone else. Freddie’s worried about his daughter’s baptism, that’s what’s freshest to him after watching Kate and Jacob and thinking about what Carlos said about him losing his family, while Sergeant Frost had his most horrifying PTSD moment replayed for him over and over. But Kate got to see the truth of what her mom did, and while it was painful, it also opened up for her see the truth of what her dad’s been doing and forgive him. Her visions ultimately helped her and helped to repair the relationship she had with her dad. And now that I think about it, so did Freddie’s. It helped show him what was really most important to him which helped him let go of his obsession for revenge. The outside maze area was less pointed in its visions, not designed to test, and what it took and reflected back at them was less obstacles and more designed to show someone truths… or at least versions of the truth. (I don’t personally buy that it can show you the future or anything, so I don’t think what Freddie saw was set in stone to happen if he didn’t let go of his revenge, but more his fear manifested into a worst case scenario designed to force him to face the fact that he’s chosen revenge over his family.)

There might also be something to Richie and Kisa’s mental connection playing a role. She messed with his head for possibly months (hell, it could’ve been years, although I highly doubt it) prior to them even entering the Twister, and it wouldn’t surprise me if over time he developed a certain level of defense against too much digging. Santanico was reduced to only showing up in reflections (after revealing herself in full glory in the woods) until Richie got close enough for her to start showing up as full formed visions again. He’s had practice in blocking his thoughts, while Seth had next to zero prep of any kind before going in.