tw: internal homophobia, death
a few tumblr accounts ago we actually made this a whole post, but.
Earthbound Halloween Hack Dr. Andonuts is canonically plural. we'd even say traumagenic DID.
in the game, you meet entities in his magicant who seem tasked to do things for him (what comes to mind is yogurt guy, the one who exists because opening yogurt lids is difficult/perhaps painful for him. he's really bored & feels like he's meeting the definition of insanity. been there done that). some entities seem to be fragments. frozen in a moment or a feeling. having no coping mechanisms. some stuck laughing at themselves to cope with the pain their existence puts them in. the ness-entity comes to mind and so do the flowers. regarding the flowers this guy seems so empathic it hurts him physically (which is a formative issue for us btw).
you also see firsthand how trauma and irrational guilt has fractured his psychie. you travel through layers of a generally-headspace-coded Magicant (we'd argue moreso than most magicants) where Doc's memories are slowly coming back together, like an entity meant to be oblivious starting to pull at the thread.
- in the first, he's struggling with memory issues (remember me? enemy) but tries to be sociable and responsible, although he also (as far as he remembers) lies through his teeth so things can keep going smoothly in spite of missing information, before swearing off lying forever. he's also hounded for being absentminded and disinterested. the experience is obviously confusing and overwhelming, and the pain of it is rooted in repressed sexuality that led to things going VERY wrong between him and his ex (i.e. he seems to connect it to her untimely death). he seems like he's supposed to not remember any of the gritty details, but in corrupted Onett, he starts to pull at the string. there's also a conversation going on in the street signs with details ranging from silly to disturbingly obsessive. and you can find the background music guy, too.
- in the second area, "the gray house" we'll call it, he's definitely dissociating through conversation. a lot more than in the first area. and his responses seem to hold a lot more fear. feels like a trauma holder was in front for these memories. and we see a lot of the forementioned unstable fragments here. one guy who can't comprehend his teeth. one guy whom we can hope is just dealing with reversed gravity (the horror of this game sometimes uses that thing where your imagination is worse than whatever visual could be made). this area of confusion and fear culminates into the convo had between him & Jeff in canon, except from Doc's perspective. and it shows one of his major pains is thinking himself coldhearted and ruthless for doing what he thought was best for his son. at the time he was mentally unstable, freshly single, generally not in a good place. and circumstances held that his life was about to get a lot more tumulous. he left his son at the boarding school so that Jeff would grow up healthier than him.
- in the third area, let's call it 'the assembly', we'd actually argue we're looking at a different being for most of this. he's apathetic to his 'actions' (see: involuntary, if at all his fault), presenting them as an achievement (coping). while also berating himself(?) kinda harshly for them through the signs and the dialogues near the end. we see a few. interesting beings. here as well. its been ten years and we still havent quite formulated what we want to say about the army fella bragging about his muscles, but there's something there. whoever's got the reins here seems to be a persecutor who's only making Doc's hyperempathy pains & OCD worse, working off of some mentality that it'll somehow prevent more of these things that nobody could have predicted.
- after all that, we can skip ahead to the final area, where with all of the worst memories broken forcefully out of their shells, we have our final battle: one phase where we see all of doc's desires and ideas so horribly beaten down that he literally cant move (the ID), and another where at the edge of oblivion, a fierce protector steps in (Dr. Andonuts's Rage)
thank you for coming to our tedtalk.
- @endlesspyreplural
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