What kind of things would trigger Simon's PTSD, aside from the obvious things like blood/water/swimming/being alone etc. Things from before the Lung, and things from prison, etc...
(For fanfic purposes :))
Oh, man, I've been waiting for someone to ask this!
Not only do I know all about PTSD for personal reasons, but I'm also an abnormal psychology graduate (I doubled up with my writing degree for this exact purpose!)
Get ready, it's a bible. It's also meant to explore niche things that might not fit in Iron Lung directly, but could be grounds for further analysis/inspiration for other ideas. This is all just fuckoff notepad writing, so don't take these ideas as law, rather as whumpy, gritty, evil inspo! *evil laugh*
Note: These are movie-extrapolated headcanons and opinionated psychological horror writings. I also attach links to posts with further contextual explanation to things that might not make sense. Enjoy your hurt/comfort and hurt/no comfort resource!
If you are sensitive to common PTSD triggers, don't read this. There's so much. So much.
Simon's Anxiety/Fear/PTSD Triggers: The Masterlist of Bad Memories
From Parental Death:
For individuals experiencing traumatic bereavement, even happy memories can be triggers. Sounds crazy, but true.
Traumatized brains like to immediately counter a pleasant memory of the trauma source (that being a dead parent) with the intrusive, horrifying, or painful images. We see this happen repeatedly in the movie when Simon thinks of his mother, and is immediately ripped into thinking about atrocities. His mother's soothing voice is thrown straight in with The Horrors because they are connected. I have a post talking about this exact memory sequence. His mother, the knife, the blood, the holster, his guilt... it's all the same thing in his subconscious.
It's something Simon doesn't even know about. This whole post is going to be full of things Simon wouldn't know about.
That being said, Simon's vice is nostalgia. He's always thinking of better times, chasing the calm he once knew. Simon was hurting himself and mentally "pressing his thumb into the bruise" for some kind of relief, because he was never taught fuck-all about mental health. He doesn't know his lamenting is causing flashbacks.
This often borders on maladaptive daydreaming or an attempt at affect regulation that backfires. Because his only source of comfort (the past) is contaminated by trauma, Simon likely suffers from anhedonia (the inability to feel pleasure from things he used to love).
Direct emotional triggers that might make Simon feel uneasy:
Humming or wordless singing, especially in a low/soft female voice
Specific perfumes, soaps, or laundry-detergent smells that might match a memory (from Mars, when things were plentiful)
Being handed something precious to "hold onto" (unfortunately, if gifts in the Iron Lung universe are so rare that this knife meant everything to him, he'd be scared of accepting them.)
Kitchen knives specifically (as opposed to combat knives, which might feel more neutral/functional to him. His mom used to cook for him and this sort of gets connected to the holster-knife memory.)
Holsters, sheaths (He'd be reminiscing on his own similar item after having a look at another).
Being thanked or praised, survivor's guilt (He would be feeling like "No, please don't thank me. I don't deserve that.", then respond with a very, very hesitant and shocked "yeah of course".)
Someone calling him a pet name or term of endearment she had for him unexpectedly
Being comforted physically (worse if it's a woman), push/pull between craving and fearing it (fundamental fear of abandonment)
From Eden Station:
The smell of dirt/compost, the feeling of it under his fingernails
The smell of rot/meat (you never forget the smell of a dead body.)
Crowded spaces/too many people piled on top of each other in a room (he has some apocalypse-based social anxiety in my head. He has to actively notice people's behaviors at all times, for safety purposes, and when there's too many people to keep track of, he starts feeling unsafe).
Hymns/choirs (Dude would immediately think god is coming to smite his ass, or would get thrown back into a flashback where he watched these/participated in them. Maybe not panic but would have a physiological response like getting the sweats.)
The concept of performing autopsies / of skinning/flaying / of field-dressing animals (He'd be deeply uncomfortable after The Incident. Just a personal headcanon of mine!)
The act of digging holes in the soil <- this is a funerary ritual. He doesn't want to be a gardener. He'd be thinking about all the corpses he's seen under the dirt the whole time he's trying to plant things. It's not a good time.
The sight of raw meat in general puts him off. We have no idea what else Eden was using those bodies for...
Gardening tools, shovels, trowels, anything that "digs" (uneasy graveyard type vibes)
Greenhouses or any warm, humid, enclosed plant-smelling space (See this post talking about Simon's unease around plants.)
Religious phrases, chants, call-and-response speech patterns (We see Simon in a PTSD reciting prayers to himself in the movie.)
Candle smoke / incense <- I'd assume they were making this out of tree bark / "human fat candles" maybe? Maple incense is a known thing.
Kneeling postures/being forced to kneel <- HE WOULD HATE THIS. HAAATE IT.
Ceremonial-looking items ("I got a bad feeling about this" type shit. Unless it's his brother's Eden Pendant or other sentimental item).
Worms, insects, or anything moving in soil (I doubt they had anything alive like this on Eden but I think the sight of watching something move under the dirt would be STARTLING and scary for him, because the only thing he can picture under the dirt are dead bodies. "OHHHFUCKFUCKFUCK THEY'RE COMING ALIVE". Simon's a superstitious guy at his core, even if he convinces himself he's not, especially after the Lung...)
From Living in Space:
Absolute silence (this means that the life support systems have stopped working! Those machines always make noise or a hum. Simon would FLY into a panic if things got too quiet for too long.)
Vents and air ducts, comforting when humming, terrifying when they stop
The smell of hot metal (astronauts often report that space "smells" like burnt steak. I imagine Simon spent too long wondering what suffocating in space would be like. A la Confined Space Hazards, where he is repeatedly threatened with getting jettisoned out into space)
The sound of an airlock/pressurized door, for the reason above (imagine you're on a plane with a bunch of suicidal nutjobs. Wouldn't you be waiting for one of them to pop the emergency door open mid-flight? It would be so easy to get rid of the Butcher that way.)
Ear popping / pressure changes (the early warning signs of a hull breach or a failing pressurization seal.)
Thin/stale air might make him start reliving memories of space station life. There's a unique tinge to it.
Strobe lights / flashing lights (a common "HEY SOMETHING IS WRONG" warning signal from space stations)
Simon would be VIGILANT about equipment failures. He'd be on-alert for threats such as explosive decompression, flash fires, toxic leaks
He'd have a hard time with sensory deprivation. Living indefinitely in a "tin can" with constant, loud life-support noise, extreme lack of privacy, and an inability to see the sky most of his life would cause some issues there.
Cooking meat (this guy might honestly go vegan after the shit he's seen, but I think passing up protein would be too detrimental to his health, so he'd eat it anyway)
The sight of ash/soot
The smell of an overheating appliance
The smell of spent fuel / starship fuel
The sight of yellow fat / cooking/rendering fat
An inability to map out an exit to a room would have him stressing (this ties into the obvious claustrophobia, but Filament would have fucked with his head more than that).
Violent movies, or graphic imagery depicting combat or disaster.
Unexpected physical contact
Specific dates tied to the incident, such as the anniversary of Filament Station's destruction (especially if this was something he knew about previously, like a planned deployment he had to sit and be anxious about for a long time, again he wouldn't panic but it would be a bout of depression he'd be confused about the origin of at first).
The sound of stomping boots on metal
Simon's own freeze response ("Don't just stand there, do something!" <- This is what causes Simon to have "lash-outs", because "fight" is the easiest way to break out of that, and people died when he froze in the past.)
From Prison/COI:
Very obviously here: screaming/yelling
Slamming/rattling/metal doors
Lack of personal space/invading personal space/his living area
Taking his belongings without asking / theft, even if it's small, like swiping/borrowing a hair tie.
Loss of autonomy, not being able to choose when to sleep, what to wear, when to eat, etc.
Witnessing/hearing violence (this overlaps heavily with everything else...)
Aggressive/negative interactions with authority figures
Soldering irons / hot tools / power tools (both from what they did to him and seeing sparks fly from Jack's welding. Ties into the explosion/fire thing too)
Deadbolts, heavy locks, anything that would tell his brain "YOU ARE TRAPPED"
Empty beds (he witnessed his captured compatriots get dragged out into the Iron Lung never to return. He'd be immediately checking to find this person to make sure they are still there if this is unusual behavior.)
Headcounts, anxiety spikes if a number doesn't match what he expects (someone went missing/didn't come back from the Convict Realization Program/died. This overlaps with Eden's supposed death rate)
Handcuffs, zip ties, rope, any binding material
Being patted down or searched
Small windowless rooms (Obligatory)
Orders given without explanation ("sit," "don't move," "wait here" would PISS HIM OFF)
Surveillance cameras or the feeling of being watched on a monitor. Simon wouldn't like cameras in general.
Specific phrases used by his captors that resurface in unrelated contexts
The sound of keys jingling (physiological response, again with the locks thing)
Antiseptic or industrial cleaner smell (from coronary clean-up, from getting blasted with it)
Someone standing over him while he's seated or lying down (that's grounds for Simon swinging at the guy)
From the Lung:
Emergency alarms ("HULL BREACH" // "FIRE")
Smell/sight of blood/meat
The texture/sight of orange/brown rust
Radio comms, especially bad when orders are being barked
Scabby textures/stringy red items (things as insignificant or niche as shredded beetroot might make him queasy)
Round porthole windows (he would see monsters in it. He'd see Ava's blind eye in it.)
Floor grates/drains
Tunnels (he'd bitch about this and need a minute, but he'd be able to power through if necessary)
Live wires / sparking (again with the big Venn diagram of explosion/hot imagery)
The Oxygen Meter Sound. The Blipping Noise. That one. Any kind of "click!" or computer blip would have him immediately holding his breath for a second
The amplified sound of his own breathing (e.g., wearing a mask, helmet, visor)
MRI machines, CT scanners, or other tube-like medical equipment (claustrophobia generalization)
The color red in large or unexpected amounts
Reflective or distorted surfaces, "funhouse mirror" visuals, warped metal, even a screen catching light oddly
Being looked at by someone with a cloudy or blind eye (Ava's face HAUNTS him.)
Dripping water sounds
Old plumbing groans
The sensation of something brushing past him in low light
Glass breaking or cracking sounds (from the porthole shattering and threatening to just end his life immediately with the SM-13 flooding, also the immediately guilt-punch of accidentally breaking his brother's pendant would come to mind)
Talk of zombies, ghosts, or coming back from the dead (after having a full conversation with the dead SM-8 crew... yikes. He'd be terrified then, of his victims coming back to "get him")
Connected Triggers
The "Meat, Blood, and Rot" Problem
Connected Sources: Eden Station → Filament Station → Prison -> The Iron Lung
This is Simon's heaviest overlap. The smell of rot/corpses from Eden Station, the rendering fat/cooking meat from the fires of Filament, the literal blood ocean of the Lung, and the death in the COI prisons all feed into one massive aversion to raw meat and blood.
Structural Integrity
Connected Sources: Living in Space → Filament Station → The Iron Lung
Any sound signaling a breach = instant panic. The hyper-vigilance of listening for failing life support in deep space overlaps with Filament's destruction, which then connects directly to the hull breach warnings inside the Lung.
Confined Spaces
Connected Sources: Living in Space → Prison/COI → The Iron Lung
Simon's claustrophobia is a stack of different terrors. The deprivation of living in space connects directly to being locked in windowless COI prison cells, which routes right into the ultimate claustrophobic trap of the hemorover itself.
Hot Metal, Sparks, Live Wires
Connected Sources: Living in Space → Prison/COI → The Iron Lung
The smell of hot metal from space station hazards (the fear of getting jettisoned or suffocating) connects directly to the physical trauma of COI soldering irons/power tools/welding imagery, which then links to the sparking, uninsulated live wires starting fires inside the hemorover... which loops straight back around to suffocating as the fire eats oxygen.
Simon's very anti-fire. Funny, considering Markiplier is a water sign. /j
Abandonment / Missing People
Connected Sources: Parental Death -> Eden Station → Prison/COI
The high death rate on Eden Station links directly to his time in prison, where a mismatched headcount or an empty bed meant someone was most certainly dead. They were in a(n implied) war.
He also has a generalized fear of abandonment from his mother's death. This ties into Simon not being able to shut up when he's stressed, because he needs somebody, anybody.
The overlap here between Parental Death and the Prison/COI headcounting thing is huge. In a prison full of Edenite cultists who are trained to kamikaze, silence means someone vanished or died. In space, absolute silence means something is very wrong. Simon talks because noise equals life, in his head.
If he is talking, he is alive; if someone responds, they are alive. If there's noise, there's people, and things are OK.
Unexpected Physical Contact vs. The Need For It
Connected Sources: Parental Death → Filament Station -> Prison/COI
This creates a really really nasty push-pull scenario. His craving/fear of being physically comforted (stemming from his mother's touch being tangled up with the trauma of her death) intersects with prison, but not only that, his freeze/fight response from the Filament Station disaster.
It's a whole complex "need-hate-need-want-hate-get-away-from-me-please-need" shit-show here. I'm not shocked he developed violent tendencies. This is why earlier, I said that Simon would have an issue about wanting to be near people, but not too close.
The framing choice to obscure her right eye, in favor of her left blinded eye is amazing. She's turning a blind eye to Simon's situation, she's blind to him as a person and to his concerns about his safety. When her right eye visible, it gets hidden by shadows, or her focus is somewhere else. By hiding her uninjured side, she also protects herself from showing her vulnerabilities and doubts, her own humanity. Eyes are the window to the soul, so her remaining one is guarded. We only see her as someone touched by strife and hardship, marked by it and made worse for it.
Oh fuck, oh god. I'm scraping Iron Lung again looking for details. I haven't even named or added these files to the master reference yet, I just had to throw this down immediately.
The millisecond Simon believes for sure that he's going to die, his eyes go straight down to his Eden pendant. Not to the side; not to the monster; not to the burning hull.
The pendant.
Simon's last thought, what Simon believed would be his last thought, was
of home.
Fuck you, Markiplier. I'm sending an invoice for emotional damages to your manager. /j
rewatched iron lung today.. thinking about how simon is so determined to survive bc he truly does believe that there are more people out there... even though his whole life he's been dragged into mess after mess by people and their beliefs, he loves so so much and persists in trying to be a good person despite how people paint him or have used him or anything like that... just simon wanting to a good human, holding onto hope with a white knuckle grip, palms burned and bleeding with the strain of it, but the pain and suffering only makes him hang on tighter.... he just wants to do and try and be.. simon iron lung you want so much and receive so little despite all the effort you put into everything you do...
Guess who locked innnn. Sorry it’s been like. 3 months. I hope I made up for it in slightly improved art? Hoping I can make a new update soon. With the movie out on YouTube my well of references is now infinite. Bonus stuff below the cut <3
He just looked so KIBTTY in that panel I couldn’t help myself lol
And no text versions!! VERY happy with the lineart in this one.
obligatory pedantic questions: What counts as a star? What counts as a planet? What makes a planet habitable? What happened to things that are neither - black holes, nebulae? What natural resources remain on these?
If you want to listen to someone go into the semantics of this, watch the first half of this video.
Looking at what explicitly happened in the Quiet Rapture, we know that the Sun, the stars, the Earth, and Mars have vanished. We know that space stations, starships, and 'barren moons' remain. From this pattern I propose that mass is the criteria for being Raptured: anything above a certain mass and density disappeared, ranging from medium sized planets to supergiant stars.
What is left are the 'moons' and a few other miscellaneous objects. Possibly the term 'moons' refers to any spherical body small enough to remain, as 'moon' is a very vague category and could have been repurposed with a new definition in the wake of the Quiet Rapture. Moon doesn't really mean anything if there are no planets or sun to orbit; a moon is a satellite, but what happens if that moon has nothing to be a satellite of?
So, this is a rough list of celestial bodies in the Solar System remaining after the Quiet Rapture, possibly redefined as moons:
dwarf planets
large spherical asteroids
actual planetary moons
moonlets
temporary satellites
Other remaining objects:
comets
planetary rings (which are quite sparse and light)
the asteroid belt, Kuiper belt, and Oort cloud
space junk
All of which provide a lot of potential for worldbuilding and headcanonising.
So, first part of RESOURCES: ENERGY
(I think I'll make another post going into food and link it at the end)
Energy is matter, and if the Quiet Rapture blinked most of the universe's matter out of existence (most matter is in stars) then the total amount of energy in the universe is now a fraction of what it was, speeding up the heat death of the universe significantly.
For humans, this is bad! Almost all of our energy comes from the Sun. (sidenote: the other stars disappearing is not actually that much of a problem. We can't harness such distant starlight for energy, and most stars would not disappear within a lifetime following the Quiet Rapture. Emotionally, though....)
So that means solar energy and fossil fuels/biofuels are no longer available. This is immediately catastrophic, since a space-colonising civilisation would depend heavily on solar energy. And even if fossil fuels/biofuels work as a back up energy source, they require organisms, and in a food-scarce world nobody would be producing biomass/hydrocarbons just for fuel.
Geothermal energy would be promising if it was only the Sun disappearing, but Earth is gone too, though there are some geologically active moons in our solar system.
Any process involving gravitational energy is also probably unviable, especially as hydropower requires water and a lot of infrastructure, not to mention anything with a usably significant gravitational pull would have been Raptured.
Given that humanity survived the period directly following the Quiet Rapture, they must have had significant amounts of power stored in long-life batteries, giving them some time to get organised concerning energy sources. They must have figured out something at some point, because though the Father states that 'supplies dwindle', presumably shortly after the Quiet Rapture, any stored fuel would run out long before the events of Iron Lung. The only exception is if fuel was being mass-manufactured somewhere in space for entire planets-worth of people, and enough remained in storage to support a small population for a couple of decades.
If the survivors managed to produce their own fuel, there are a few potential energy sources:
Nuclear - requires uranium or plutonium as well as infrastructure and safety procedures, but there is precedent on a small scale.
Magnetism - I’m shit at physics but: electric generators produce electricity by having a conductive coil rotate through a permanent magnetic field. When this happens, the amount of magnetic flux passing through the coil changes as area increases, then decreases. Through electromagnetic induction, an electric current is induced in the coil, ie, electricity. However, there needs to be a kinetic energy input to rotate the coil in the first place. These generators would probably be used to recycle kinetic energy as they aren’t primary resources, they just convert motion into electricity.
Elementary particles - this one is weird but hear me out, it involves particle physics and the mass-energy equivalence, and requires a particle accelerator. Essentially, colliding matter and antimatter (usually in the form of electron and positron pairs) causes them to annihilate one another and produce high-energy photons. Thus, the matter has been converted into energy (light). Currently, this is completely unfeasable as an energy source (see CERN, 4th FAQ) but considering Iron Lung takes place 300 years in the future on an accelerated technology timeline, who knows what could have been cooked up!
Okay. Now, the blood.
The oceans on the anomalous moons are... almost... human blood. We can assume they contain plasma and red blood cells. In terms of resources:
Plasma contains 90% water, with the rest consisting of proteins, amino acids, gases, glucose, and ions/electrolytes.
Red blood cells contain mostly hemoglobin, which in turn contains iron. Also present are proteins and lipids from the cell membrane.
All of these substances are useful resources.
Tangent. Platelets are possibly not present in the moon blood, as their purpose is to cause clotting, and the ocean is mysteriously liquid. But then, maybe they are present, just not at the surface. Ava says the bottom of the ocean is just congealed blood, so maybe the platelets are present in the ocean at depth. No idea. End tangent.
So, the blood: useful, but for what? Food seems to be what the characters of Iron Lung are thinking, but I propose what they're actually looking for is fuel.
The SM-8 data, via dessathealien:
Organic chemistry is not my strength but blood, as an organic substance, surely contains organic compounds. From the molecular structure above I can see hydrocarbons and alcohols, which can be converted into glucose, then ethanol, as fuel.
So the blood oceans are in fact a massive resource for fuel (and water). I still wouldn’t make it into food, considering all that stuff about "unknown nucleobase that promotes rapid lysing followed by uncontrollable stem cell growth." And I definitely wouldn’t drink it directly, from what we hear in the SM-8.
But it would be very 'indomitable human spirit' to find a creepy unnatural ocean of blood possibly containing the eye of God, poke around it a bit, and start harvesting it for fuel. Picture John COI working on a treatment/processing plant shunting the blood through various reactors, hearing it whisper “join us… jump in the blood…” and going “get fermented, molecule.”
I have a whole other thing on food sources in Iron Lung, but this is long enough.
i love ava's acting in this movie so much i love you "cold" characters who are harsh and make the calls no one else will but who still wear their emotions so openly for those who look. naturally we hear it when she professes her regret to simon and humanizes the both of them but we also see/hear it in her brief moments of Joy.
"there's something else down there." "there just might be." the satisfaction she gets out of having something to actually work towards. how despite the cruelty of simon's situation she is caught up in the mission and speaks to him like one of her own crew. like they're both in this together. here's what you're gonna do. and you're gonna do it well.
and they Are in it together in the end. the disbelieving Hope in her voice when she is told the SM-8's logs may be recoverable. this could actually save us. nothing else matters but this. she can't keep the smile out of her voice at the thought of it. "i'll get you myself." "let's get this done, simon." god.
In Molly's website, there's a picture of what is supposedly the chemical composition of the blood that fills the AT-5 moon's ocean.
The screen quality is, as always, pretty bad, but you can actually see the structure of the molecule rather well. Or, well enough to identify some of what's going on.
So, firstly - the text says it "mimics molecular structure of human blood hemoglobin". This is visible on this molecule - the heme molecule is right there in the middle. Here's my (yes, handwritten) copy of the molecule (I tried my best to copy it as faithfully as I could)
In this diagram, you can see the heme molecule smack dab in the middle of the AT-5 hemoglobin molecule. The interesting part is the two other molecules that are bonded to the heme molecule (with impossible bonds, mind you) - the C17H19N7O2 molecule on the left, which isn't similar to any sort of known molecule as far as I can tell; and the C11H22N2O6 molecule on the right, which, while not an exact match... is very, very close to a disaccharide.
Just for posteriority (and if anyone else that's better at orgchem than I am wants to try to figure it out): the SMILES codes for both molecules are:
So. I can't really say anything about what the left molecule is doing here, since... there's nothing else like it. But I can talk about the right molecule.
Like I said, it's not an exact match - but this molecule is very close to nitrogen-containing D-saccharides, 'aka' amino sugars. I compared this mystery molecule to the RCSB database and got a few options - all of them similarly close to our mystery molecule, with the only differences being certain parts being depicted specifically in a 3d space, which our diagram does not do. I selected a few that seemed to make some sort of sense.
One option is N-Acetyltalosaminuronic acid, which is an amino sugar present in the cell walls of certain Archaebacteria. I find this one a bit unlikely, but it could be something to do with the alien nature of it all - the Archaea domain is the farthest from humans, after all.
Another option is N-Acetylglucosamine, which is a very widespread amino sugar, that composes certain bacterial cell walls, is one of the molecules that composes chitin (which is interesting), can form hyaluronic acid (which is also interesting), and (even more interesting) has been proposed as a treatment for autoimmune diseases.
The other option I found was N-Acetylgalactosamine, which is funnily enough very on theme - it is the terminal carbohydrate forming the antigen of the human blood group A. Which means that if we go by this option, the blood ocean is composed of exclusively type B or O blood, for some reason?? It is also a big part of intercellular communication, and it's concentrated on the sensory structures of animals. There's also been a few studies trying to explore the correlation between this molecule and the immune system in general.
Two of the options can be about the immune system. The description of the effects of this alien hemoglobin talks about "promoting rapid lysing followed by uncontrollable stem cell growth". I wonder if it also has an immunosuppressant effect as well, to kickstart the mutation process - the immune system is the one that culls cancerous cells, after all... which brings us to the next image in Molly's website.
This is pure speculation at this point, but... I think the blood cells of the AT-5 ocean act as like... a reverse virus. Not "injecting" their DNA into other cells, but instead, like... "sucking" it out? The cells it comes into contact with mutate back into stem cells, which are biology's "clean slate". I can't help but think it's some sort of "removal of individuality" of your biology to create something new - a collective of sorts. An eel made of human body parts, an oceans-worth of human blood.
The real question is. After all of that. After you've been striped clean of your genetics and fully assimilated into the blood. Do you die? Or are you still there, conscious?
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