Warning: As this is a Moments page, no spoilers are marked as per Administrivia.Spoilers Off. We have grouped examples into folders by game for the benefit of players who haven't played all of these games.
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Eternal
Fridge Brilliance
Fridge Horror
- Eternal has been through several different revisions, but although its plot's events are somewhat different between them, they can all still be part of its canon (at least loosely) because it features a "metastable time loop", wherein one timeline's events cause very similar events to happen in the next timeline. At the same time, this means it's not necessary to have played an older version to comprehend a newer version's plot.
- In 1.3, in "S'pht Happens", a difficult-to-find secret terminal (terminal #5 here, which normally requires grenade jumping out of the tower after closing the citadel doors
), S'bhuth uses the Latin phrase "fissúra cívitátis clausa" (which translates loosely as "breach of citadel closed"). Why is a S'pht AI using Latin? Because the S'pht are creations of the Jjaro, who (in Eternal's setting) spoke Latin. - In the fifth chapter, why is Hathor completely blind to the major flaw in her plan? Because the computer banks we shut off in "Deep into the Grotto" housed most of her memories - including those of our solar system. This was subtext in all versions of the game, but 1.3 adds further supporting evidence for it in her new terminal from "We Met Once in the Garden", wherein she writes, "i've lost most of my memories, but i didn't lose any memories of you." She doesn't say which other memories she retains, but a plausible interpretation is that she held onto the memories that held the strongest emotional resonance for her. Since she had no emotional attachment to our solar system's appearance, she doesn't remember it. Moreover, there's a strong chance that Earth was so long in the Jjaro's subjective past that it had passed into myth. Thus, it's entirely possible that they really didn't know our solar system as anything other than "the place where the first W'rkncacnter crashed" - and since this all occurred 65 million years in our objective past, they didn't know it was the place of their own origin.
Fridge Horror
- Leela's characterisation has some of this as well, especially in 1.3. In chapter three, S'bhuth all but kidnaps Marcus from her while she's busy scouring Lh'owon's network for signs of Hathor, and ultimately sticks him in stasis for a thousand years. When he wakes up, she's merged with him, and the two are barely coherent, but in terminal #5 of "S'pht Happens" (see the Fridge Brilliance example above), both of them mention "Outside", partly in the context of telling the player to go outside to find the terminal, but also in a more jarring context that suggests... something else. Their final terminal in the level (terminal #2) isn't any more coherent.
In later levels, they apologise for their earlier incoherence, and while they put on a brave face, it's clear they've seen something that unsettled and has permanently changed them - Leela becomes increasingly insistent on keeping the history she knows intact. What happened to Leela in the intervening millennium? We learn that she reached what's called "the Outside", from which one can view all possible timelines. Most likely, she saw chapter three's "failure timeline", in which Marcus aided the S'pht and the Pfhor unleashed what they called the trih xeem on Lh'owon's sun, freeing the W'rkncacnter and unleashing chaos on the galaxy.
If seeing the Outside inflicted such massive trauma on a mind as powerful and stable as Leela's, what scars will Marcus bear after being sent there in "Where Giants Have Fallen"? And note how casually Leela sends him Outside, despite knowing the effects it had on her, purely because, even with the galaxy being destroyed, she still can't bring herself to change history. What changed her so much? Even though she tells us at length over "Third Rock from Lh'owon" and "Flight of Icarus" about the intervening millennium when we were separated, she never tells us what traumatised her. Nothing Is Scarier indeed. - The sheer desperation that led the Jjaro to build the Arcem, a structure so powerful that its destruction could ultimately destroy the galaxy. What kind of foe could lead them to build such a structure? We get some hints: we see a message directly from the W'rkncacnter in which it claims to have manipulated key actors over the millennia, and on higher difficulties, we see the Jjaro - who are substantially stronger than ordinary Bobs and are no slouches in combat themselves - falling en masse to the somnia, who might not be too much individually, but they keep coming back.
- Speaking of which, the casual arrogance with which the W'rkncacnter discusses the genocide it plans against multiple species. It regards their lives as meaningless purely because it existed before they did (or so it claims), and its justification for wiping them out is the Insane Troll Logic of restoring its own timeline - never mind that doing this won't actually restore its timeline, and that a being with its powers is entirely capable of travelling to a different timeline without casually attempting a genocide of every other species in the galaxy. The worst part? It gets what it wants in the "Where Giants Have Fallen" timeline, and we haven't dealt with it in the others. Meaning it's still out there. And it's the W'rkncacnter from Pathways into Darkness - it crashed into the Yucatan peninsula in 65 million BCE, and as of 1996 CE, it's in our sun. So, in Eternal's setting, a genocidal monster is lurking within the source of light that sustains all life on our planet. Sweet dreams!
Rubicon
Fridge Horror
- Lysander from Rubicon is a major source of this in general, but particular note goes to Durandal's shift in attitude towards him near the end of the Salinger Plank; prior to the last chapter, Durandal seemed to regard Lysander as just another enemy, albeit more irritating than usual (casually referring to him as "blitheringly sociopathic" during the SO's escape from the Pfhor ship, for example). Then he informs the SO that Lysander is another Traxus Derivative Model like the Marathon A.I.s, and orders them to put him down. No sarcastic remarks or even anger over how much trouble Lysander's been giving the duo—Durandal sounds downright somber, and not just because he didn't get to question Lysander, either. Well, to know that Lysander was a TDM, Durandal would have had to do some deep digging—say, during the chapter "Distant Orbit", when Lysander's focus isn't entirely on the Salinger—and it's highly unlikely that he could find this information without also discovering the horrific abuse Lysander was subjected to...
- Given that Durandal himself is implied to have been subjected to horrific abuses by Strauss, it's quite likely possible he's started to regard Lysander with some degree of pity as well, which arguably turns the whole thing into a bit of a Fridge Tear Jerker, too.
- You'd think Dangi would keep a close eye on the primary developer of the Achilles virus and make sure that he didn't, oh, say, snap and escalate its lethality to apocalyptic levels...but they didn't, suggesting that Dangi thought he was too broken down to even conceive of such a thing. Another way in which they treated this sentient being like a tool.
- Per Word of God, Lysander was slated for execution once Achilles was released. He says that he "gave you" those core dump override chips (themselves presumably advanced programs that couldn't be hastily written minutes after the attack on the station), not that he made them...
