Daily Entertainment: Inmates, Asylums, Etc.

[lifethatisscratched]

Today's DE is brought to you by a quick Netflixing of Apocalypse Now, and goes something like this:

Has there been anything, canon or otherwise, that has pushed your character to (or beyond) the limits of their sanity? If so, what was it, and how did they cope?

Comments

[dejah_thoris]

The discovery of the Thern as a real, technologically advanced race bent on destroying her life's work and discrediting her. (Oh also trying to assassinate her, but that was low key compared to everything else they'd done.) She thought she was losing her mind. There was a moment when she contemplated hurling herself off the balcony into the chasm. But it was a brief moment and she decided that going down fighting was more her style.

That was not a fun time.

And then John refused to make use of their healing arts and decided to age and die as a human normally would. She honestly has no idea how she survived and came out the other side of it. She doesn't remember a few years in the interim. She never wants to even think about that again. A part of her honestly thinks she died and was refused entrance to the afterlife, so she was forced to return and continue her work. I don't think that was to the limits of her sanity, I think it camped on the far side of the border for a few months and took some time and love and care from the people in her life to coax her back.

[havetubawilltravel]

For Juliet, getting kidnapped by Yin. I wouldn't call her reaction to Shawn's lies particularly sane either. A little revenge and buttkicking fixed everything, though.

For Eponine, Marius' rejecting her for Cosette. When you're plotting what basically amounts to murder-suicide due to intense desperation and deprivation that's not healthy, and only the emergence of her real nature and self-sacrifice saved the day.

Pinkie in "Too Many Pinkie Pies" and "Party of One". Just convince her that everyone hates her and doesn't want to spend time with her and she gets upset and tilts over the edge of sanity (for good reasons).

[camwyn]

I'm pretty sure it happened at least once or twice during the course of the Black Mesa Incident for Gordon. He was convinced that he was hallucinating the black ops ninja women, for one thing, and for another, when he made it to the cave and had to use an RPG launcher against the helicopter he had a breakdown. The phrase "I was a physicist when I got up yesterday morning, and now I'm the goddamn Taliban" figured into it.

Shephard I'm not entirely sure about; he's always been on the stable side. Scary, but stable. The Combine Overmind did, however, manage to press on his psyche hard enough at one point that he went berserk and tried to kill something four times his size that was both winged and covered in guns with a blunt instrument.

Ellen had to go outside everything. EVERYTHING. EVER. ... let's just say that I don't know how she managed to get through her spacewalk during Mothership Zeta, because I don't think she was entirely at the helm during that time. Possibly she was just hyperventilating too much to muster anything more complicated than 'walk in a straight line'.

Fawkes... I do not believe that Fawkes came out of the FEV vats sane. He put his psyche back together piece by piece after the virus reworked him completely, but like any other Vault 87 supermutant he came out homicidally off his rocker. I even gave him a Conversations With Dead People with the man he'd been before he got turned into a mutant, that's how much it afected him.

Not yet for Edward Kenway, but it's coming in canon.

Santo and Pentecost- no. Varric- I don't think so, no. And Wee Mad Arthur's sanity is sulking in a cave somewhere in the Forest of Skund and refuses to speak to him anyway.

[no_vampires_plz]

See the icon and the episode it came from. Fear of failure + rigidly set deadline (real or implied) = Twilight goes mad-scientist crazy.

[i_am_your_host]

For Emcee, how his canon ends is his breaking point. He doesn't come back from there. His final bow is his shutting down before he dies.

(And yeah, watching the uncut Apocalypse Now felt like watching the entire goddamn Vietnam War and I am never doing that again.)

[athelstanthescribe]

...that sounds horribly like he's heading for retirement...

[i_am_your_host]

Retirement...from LIFE.

Though really, in the show he takes a final bow while wearing a concentration camp uniform against the wall of a gas chamber. It's as final as you can get.

[athelstanthescribe]

Do you have plans for after that? Or will he be too shattered?

[i_am_your_host]

I've tried imagining what it would be like for him to bring him into Milliways after that, but I can't see him ever being the same again. So if I'm going to keep him, I have to either drag the pre-war years on forever, or make him leave the country before things get bad.

[athelstanthescribe]

nods

I'd miss him, but ultimately of course it's your call.

[lifethatisscratched]

I didn't mind it so much, as I've sat through some psychedelic depictions of war and military action before it (namely Michael Herr's Dispatches and Spec Ops: The Line), but I can definitely see how it could turn some people off. The redux version could've used some more editing to keep it from plodding along, but overall I thought highly of it - especially for Robert Duvall.

Um... spoilers.

[sunbaked_baker]

The end of Rae's canon has Sunshine's mind and sense of self shattered, the fragments barely holding together long enough to keep her and Con from getting found out by the Goddess of Pain. She believes she has been poisoned, infected - already dead but her body just hasn't stopped moving yet. She went through the final battle fully expecting to die a horrible death, and her mind is so blown to pieces by the experience of it that she is left in the aftermath numbly wondering when the long process of her death that started at the beginning of canon will finally be complete.

She gets through it with the help of a healing benediction bestowed upon her by a vampire, and an intense dream sequence where the fragmentary particles of herself just begin to coalesce again - although she fights this, because it hurts not to let herself be nothing and no one - and a dream/vision of her grandmother impressing upon her that no, it wouldn't have been better if she had just died like she intended to, because the world needs her to do the difficult things that need to be done.

She is only just beginning to heal from what canon required her to do, by the time canon ends. What she did in canon and what she continues to do still hurts her - physically, mentally, and emotionally - but the first time was the worst.

[athelstanthescribe]

Canon never makes it quite clear whether he's breaking down or having genuine mystical visions, but Athelstan starts seeing things in season 2.

It begins when he's sitting alone in his tent listening to the other Viking men doing horrible things to the women of Winchester, shortly after he's just done things himself that have him racked with guilt, and he sees a picture of Jesus in a book start to bleed.

After this, and after he's been through the worst experience of his life (and that includes the sack of Lindisfarne), it progresses to seeing himself bleeding multiple times, momentarily believing a woman he's already met is the Virgin Mary, and seeing Jesus walking through a Viking drinking party.

Yeah.

(There's also the incident with something that may or may not be a demon and whatever it is, is real enough to cut his face, stalking him around his bedroom.)

[yakalskovich]

Insane enough to crawl under his bed with a burning candle with a large, flickering flame...

The Nazgul and I were making fun of that last night as we were watching that episode.

[onceaviking]

Godric.

His death and the subsequent visitations/visions/what have you, really seem to shake Eric.
Then there's all of Season Six and the beginning of Season Seven where he looses all initiative.

As for the cure?
Revenge. Eric's prime motivator. Or one of them, anyway.

[ceitfianna]

Will has some tough moments when he's being tortured but what really breaks him happened in Milliways when two of his friends were possessed and attacked him. That left him wanting to curl up and die and not to be in the world.

It hasn't happened to Charles yet but the end of XMFC combined with history leaves him wanting to hide from the world. When he first came into his powers, he was on the edge of madness until he learned to navigate them and build shields. In Milliways, everything with Slenderman left him as broken as he's ever been.

For most of mine they've been broken in other ways but not mentally.

Sameth was on the edge of it after the attack on the cricket field, but he kept hold of himself.

Ivan when he was kept a prisoner in a storm drain, that was awful for him.

[death_gone_mad]

I feel like I keep on answering the same question over and over since canon decided to reveal the answer.

Amascut was abandoned by her brother on the far side of the universe to deal with an enraged and lonely and crazed Elder God on her own. She... hasn't been coping. She's functional enough to wear several masks convincingly, but there is a whole lot of red hot not right at all boiling below the surface.

[genarti]

The limits of their sanity? Hmm.

Enjolras: No. Months of post-death desperate loneliness at Milliways weren't great for him, and he's still got some quiet issues from that, but that's nowhere near what you're talking about.

Cosette: ...Um. She had a hell of an early childhood. She was abused and emotionally neglected, to the extent that she's blocked most of those memories now, but I guess this depends on your definition. I'm not sure what mine is in this case.

Kazul: Nope. Past what humans would call sane behavior, probably -- AND THEN I WAS SO ANNOYED THAT I ATE THAT SENTIENT BEING WHO WAS TALKING TO ME AND I REGRET NOTHING -- but that's just temper for a dragon.

Thor: Nnnno. Again we get into cultural definitions, a bit: Thor has lost his temper in ways that our current society would consider A MAJOR PROBLEM in terms of violently externalized emotions, and I haven't decided if he's ever actually gone on a berserk but it's certainly something he's capable of and not shocked to see in other people. But he's never been pushed to a point that he or his society would consider 'past sanity.'

River: See, uh. Canon.

Trowa: He got total amnesia for a while after drifting away into outer space for an unclear but long amount of time. But -- yeah, that time. It worked out okay in the end, because he got picked up by someone who knew him a little and is a genuinely kind and very nurturing person, and she went "you're... uh, you're my little brother!" and that is the story of how Trowa acquired a sister. And then he eventually went back to war, and did get his memory back in a complicated situation a while later, and then helped end the war and went home to live at the circus with his new sister. But it wasn't really fun for anybody involved at the time.