Fridge / Psychonauts

As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

Fridge Brilliance

General and Plot Related

• Lake Oblongata... Hey, wait a second! The medulla oblongata is a part of the brain.
  • Related: Of course Sasha and Milla are a team! Sasha represents the left side of the brain (mathematical, analytical, logical) and Milla represents the right side (creative, emotional, expressive). -GovernorExplosion
• Crosses over with Fridge Humor: when Raz introduces himself at the start of the game, he claims that "People call [him] (beat) Raz.' But when we meet his family in the second game, the only people he spends a significant amount of time with, none of them call him "Raz". They all have embarrassing nicknames for him, and that's when it hit me: he makes up his nickname on the spot to make himself sound cool.
• At first it might seem strange that's so many mindscapes have trapezes, swing bars, tightropes, and pole equivalents to climb and that it might appear they're only in there to give Rasputin's circus background some purpose; but think about it, Oleander specifically calls them out as challenging and yet they are noted as part of Basic Braining. Part of being a Psychonaut is performing literal mental gymnastics to find the root of someone's problem.
• Oleander's Basic Braining is brilliant in that it highlights how Raz differs from the other candidates; Oleander's mental level is designed in such a way to provide the important basics and traits needed to be a solid Psychonaut in a subtle and challenging way. The other campers struggled and failed to make their way past Basic Braining for a number of factors related to their shortcomings as potential Psychonauts:
  • blindly charging in without a proper plan (Elton)
  • being unable to handle the pressure and giving up too easily (Benny, Clem and Crystal)
  • being too weak to pull off their methods and not considering a better way (Elka and the others who try to use the swings without success)
  • being too busy targeting potential allies for petty reasons rather than focusing on the success of the mission (Bobby).
    Raz by contrast is not only adaptable due to his prior training with acrobatics, but he's also mentally (and literally) the most flexible and determined to succeed at his "mission". Tellingly, the only other people who have the potential to go far is Dogen and Lili. Dogen's only weakness was that he needed guidance, but given how far he had managed to get despite his limitations, makes it clear that he had the determination to make it as far and just needed time to grow. While Lili didn't go very far, it was ultimately because she had focused on something else that proved to be important later on, something that would likely be a scenario in a real Psychonauts mission.
• It's a stretch, but maybe the reason Raz gets so excited at the idea of controlling fire is because fire is essentially the antithesis of water.
• So, I was thinking about Raz's mental shielding and how he is, in Oleander's words "armored like a tank" and I had a bit if fridge brilliance: of course he is, he was an acrobat for his whole life so far, which means his day-to-day life prior to running away involves scaring/thrilling people by flying through the air with only minimal safety. He's so heavily armored because without it he would be constantly absorbing the various thoughts, fears and worries of the crowd during his performances, which could easily throw him off and cause him to fall to potentially serious injuries.
  • It's also likely that he needed to be able to protect his mind from his family, since they'd all be cramped into a tiny caravan for years on end, which means that unless he learned to block their thoughts (or keep his thoughts from being projected out to them), he'd be bombarded daily with the mixture of their prejudices, ignorance and various other things that he might not want to know about. Coincidentally, that's probably why he never picked up on the Double Entendre of his mother and fathers' "tumble in the hay"; he blocked it out without intending to.
• During Basic Braining, Coach Oleander tells you to steer clear of mental cobwebs, while also admitting there are devices that can clean them up (which Raz doesn't have then). But they don't actually hurt you, they just prevent you from getting through. Later, you gain the Cobweb Duster, a machine that lets Raz clear the cobwebs in the Coach's Basic Braining dreamscape and discover a memory safe behind one of them that reveals that he was never actually in the military at all. The untruth suddenly makes a lot more sense...
  • The locations of mental cobwebs aren't necessarily random either, as they're described as manifesting over unused areas of a person's mind. Some cobwebs even obstruct progress to major parts of levels, as in Boyd's mental world where the Cobweb Duster is required to fully clear the world and learn Boyd's secret. Very appropriate for the psychosis that Boyd is experiencing, as parts of his mind have been deliberately locked up and subsumed by the hypnosis he's under; they go unused by Boyd and he's vaguely aware that something in his own mind is missing, but it just becomes another layer to his conspiracies. Gloria's Theater has a cobweb blocking the way into a dressing room where the long forgotten and neglected spirit of her youth is. Edgar's cobwebs block off a room that looks like a normal teenager's bedroom, where two notable figments are (portraits of himself and Dean LaGrante in highschool), and more are in the sewers where he's willingly buried the memories of his high school days. The entrance to the Meat Circus is blocked off by not one, but two Mental Cobwebs, since both Raz and Coach Oleander were trying to suppress traumatic childhood memories, indicating they both really did not want to revisit said memories.
• Meat Circus being far more difficult than everything else in the game makes perfect sense; after all, it's partially Raz's mind, where he's forced to confront his own traumas in person, so naturally he struggles and isn't able to overcome said trauma until he gets outside help. This also explains why the final boss is so anticlimactically easy; Raz has been helping other people with their own traumas throughout the game, so naturally once he gets help from someone else for his own, he's able to easily get past his trauma since he now knows that those memories that have been plaguing him were all based on a misunderstanding and warped perception.

The Camp Counselors

• Sasha is a scientist whose last name is "Nein". So... he's Dr. No?
• In the intro, when Raz quotes the front of Oleander's pamphlet at him ("To soar across the astral plane? To wage psychic warfare against the enemies of free thought?"), Oleander's reaction is subdued, to put it mildly ("That is what I wrote on the front of the pamphlet.") This makes more sense when you realize that Oleander was in the process of betraying those ideals, and probably felt guilty at being reminded about it. Furthermore, he becomes enthusiastic when Raz quotes the inside of the pamphlet — which emphasizes his grudge against the normal world.
  • Another way to look at it is that Oleander is legitimately surprised that someone truly read and believed in what the pamphlet said. Just from the way the other campers act, it's pretty clear that they for the most part see it as a summer camp that just happens to involve psychic training here and there, and for the most part goof off. Oleander, even in his mentally warped state as the Big Bad is probably joyful that someone actually takes the whole thing as seriously as he does, hence why even though the counselors technically claim that Raz isn't allowed to take part, Oleander has no problem letting Raz into Basic Braining. He was probably gleeful at finally being able to teach someone who gives a damn and probably had plans on making Raz his most powerful psychic death tank soldier for his Evil Plan, especially after learning first-hand how resilient Raz's mind was.
  • There's a third layer to this. The pamphlet describes Whispering Rock Camp as a place where psychics aren't discriminated, but instead trained to be heroes. One of Oleander's motivations was that he wanted to become a military hero, but was denied the chance due to his short stature. Raz came to the camp precisely because that pamphlet gave him the hope to escape his father's (perceived) prejudices and become a hero. Oleander empathized with Raz.
• Considering Oleander's proficiency in shielding, why didn't he provide Raz with the Shield ability like Sasha and Milla did with Marksmanship and Levitation? Well, Oleander obviously wasn't going to provide a mental defensive ability when he was trying to steal the campers' brains for his own goals. Why make it harder for himself when he could just choose not to teach it at all?
  • On that note, it's fitting that Raz learns the Shield ability in Lungfishopolis: It's in the mind of someone who's been put under the complete control and regime of Oleander, and it's this ability that allows Raz to defeat him. As for why he learns it from the lungfish rebels? It was Linda subconsciously giving the ability to Raz once she realized he was trying to help free her. Linda must have learned how to use it from the coach and recognized that it was the only way to drive him out of her mind for good.
• Why did Coach Oleander go nuts, when he was one of the most trusted Psychonauts in the U.S.? They put him in charge of children, for crying out loud, and the government usually doesn't put children in the charge of someone they suspect might go crazy around all that Psytanium. One argument is that it was prolonged exposure, the camp is obviously frequented by other Psychonauts. Sasha and Milla are probably there on a fairly regular basis as well. Then you realise Sasha and Milla both learned to keep their minds under strict and careful control. Milla because of her nightmares brought on by her orphanage burning down and all of the kids dying, and Sasha because of the incident with reading his father's mind when he was young. Oleander, on the other hand, apparently never gained that sort of control, and in fact obviously had a chip on his shoulder for being rejected from every branch of the military for being too short. He may have repressed that chip fairly well, being both locked up and buried under cobwebs, but it was still there. So the Psytanium never affected Sasha or Milla because their mental defenses were too strong, but Coach had cracks that the Psytanium would eventually work around to drive him mad. Tim Schafer, you... are... a genius!
  • There's actually another layer to it given what was noted in the character section, at least in terms of Oleander's likely specialization. Sasha specialized in Psi-blasts, Milla was the Levitation expert. So what was Oleander's specialty? Psychic SHIELDING. He was the Stone Wall of the team, the person who was supposed to teach Psychic resilience. It's telling to note that in the Lungfish mental world of Lungfishopolis, the primary power there was the Shield, which Linda the Lungfish only got indirectly from Oleander. With this in mind, it actually makes a lot of sense as to why no one would have picked up on Oleander's instabilities until it was too late; because to everyone else, he would have seemed to be the last person who would have fallen to madness due to his specialization, and nobody else would have considered that his psyche's seemingly powerful defenses had such severe cracks in its armor. It's telling to note that the only person who did seem to have an inkling as to just how bad Oleander's mental state really was happened to be the one Psychonaut who has it worse than him; Agent Ford Cruller, a man who literally had his own sanity shattered. And because of his own shattered sanity, he likely would not have been able to tell anyone until it was too late due to his personalities taking over at inopportune times.
• The music in Ford's Sanctuary is solemn, yet surprisingly somber. This is Foreshadowing for Ford Cruller's own backstory. He's basically confined in it, both because of his literally-fractured mind; and because he has been removed on active duty, forcing him to investigate potential missions from the Sanctuary and send the coaches in his stead, who claim all the merit.

The Campers of Whispering Rock

• On Elton's Campster, it says that after his father died, he lived with his mother in a "special hotel for ladies only" and that "lots of sailors came to visit her". Remind you of anything?
• In the early stages of the game, after Maloof recruits Mikhail as his bodyguard, you can see them hang around. If Raz asks Maloof if he can join in, Maloof replies "Sorry, Raz, but this is our thing". The fridge brilliance comes in when you realize that "Our Thing" ("Cosa Nostra") is a Sicilian term for The Mafia, and that Maloof's attempt to wire Coach's jeep to explode near the end of the game, and the line "This is how we do things in my family", hint at his Mafia connections.

Lake Oblongata and the Thorney Towers Residents

• Linda being female is actually hinted at in her design: Her mutations make her resemble a Deep-Sea Angler Fish much more than a Lungfish - and what most people think of when they visualize an Angler Fish is their Female form ^note Male Anglerfish are little more than swimming gonads, while the fangs and lure associated with Angler Fish are females that they assimilate into..
• If you watch the memory reels in Lungfishopolis, you'll see how Linda originally looked. That means that in her mind, you haven't actually increased in size at all, the citizens are just normal-sized, unmutated lungfish. Veers right back into fridge logic when you start wondering why, if this is the case, his personal gravity is still wonky.
  • The mental world is constructed with each little lungfish as the "normal" size. SO even though you're the same size, you're still too big for their world.
• Raz is unable to use Levitation in Lungfishopolis (due to his increased size), and the coach (disguised as Kochamara) steals all of his Psi Blast ammo once he realizes the boy had received advanced combat training from Sasha. This is actually a perfect example of Gameplay and Story Integration; Oleander had set up defenses specifically against Sasha and Milla's signature abilities so on the off-chance that they caught on to what he was planning and attempted to breach the lungfish's mind, they would be completely helpless against him. The only reason Raz managed to defeat the coach was by using his own shield ability against him, since everything else he would have learned from camp would be ineffective.
• A minor one, but there's a Running Gag in Lungfishopolis involving the Navy bringing out military hardware that is increasingly not-boatlike, eventually leading to deploying airplanes. Seems like another throwaway gag until one realizes how much naval power is provided by aircraft carriers.
  • That increasing military firepower is can be seen as subtle foreshadowing for who the Big Bad is. Why would a Lungfish even know what a Navy or airplanes even are? Coach Oleander wanted to be in the military, and was roundly rejected by all of them. He acts like a sergeant, and makes his mindscape into a raging battlefield, even when training new psychics. He also severely messed with the Lungfish's mind and body, so Oleander would do what he thought would make the Lungfish more likely to fight off a Psychonaut.
  • It could also be considered another bit of foreshadowing in regards to Coach Oleander's nature as a phony war veteran. After all, while it is true that the Navy does use airplanes via aircraft carriers, the fact that he claims airplanes are what the Navy is known for, despite that mostly being the focus of the AIR FORCE, hints that he was never part of the armed forces at all. And that's not even getting into the Navy having a TANK division... Granted, it could be argued he just conflated all the branches of the armed forces together just for the sake of simplifying things, but still.
  • One very simple reason is that this is the mind of a fish. Naturally, an aquatic creature would place greater emphasis on naval forces, regardless of where it actually turns out to be.
• When playing the Milkman level, I was always annoyed by the strange, forced perspective that happens whenever you enter a house. It doesn't do this at any other point in the game, making it even weirder and more out of place. Until today, when I realized — you're looking down at Raz from ceiling height in a corner, exactly where you would place a security camera.
• Something that struck me when playing Psychonauts was the lack of Censors in the minds of the Lungfish and Boyd, something that we were told existed in every mind (the Censors, not the others). It took me a little while to realize that this was not only intentional, but a very clever decision as the Lungfish had their mind crushed under the dominion of Oleander and thus would have had all their censors repressed and/or destroyed. As for the second, thanks to his overly suspicious mind, Boyd always incorporated different aspects of the world into his conspiracy. In effect, there is no difference between "good" and "bad", so there are no censors, presumably destroyed when he finally cracked.
  • It's also noteworthy that many psychologists believe people with schizophrenia lack the ability to 'censor' their own mind and have trouble controlling their thoughts. Boyd's lack of censors is this idea made literal. Though Boyd does have censors.
    • Although, it would go with that theory. They only show up after the Rainbow Squirts are found. Then they only try to attack the Squirts. Remember that Boyd was hypnotized (from the looks of it, it may have been actual hypnosis as Boyd isn't right in the head), and it appears the milkman personality was Boyd's inner arsonist suppressed. It's likely that Boyd's lack of Censors were either because they were suppressed or just cooped up in the first place. After all, would somebody who has normal censors be able to pull up the kinds of ideas Boyd does?
    • I think Boyd's Censors being focused on the Milkman and not on Raz makes perfect sense. The Milkman is a separate personality, a thing that normal Censors would take high priority in destroying. Combining this with Boyd's obsessive personality and conspiracy theories means that his Censors, as Censors are filtered by whatever mind they are encountered in, are gong to focus on that rather than anything else. The Censors appear en masse when Raz finds the Rainbow Squirt house and thus the hiding place of the Milkman.
  • And so does Fred! Of course, he seems to realize that he's not quite sane, so that could explain why he has them, despite being a patient.
  • Sasha's Exact Words were "any sane person's mind." The lack of Censors in the minds of the asylum residents foreshadowed a bit here.
  • Also, Coach Oleander's Basic Braining Course didn't have any censors, though whether this was foreshadowing his insanity or a conscious act to keep the Psycadets in relative safety is unclear.
    • Though with being highly trained teachers, chances are Oleander, Nein and Milla have their censors under relative control. Sasha Nein's only come out when provoked and he says that he had kept them under strict control along with everything else in his brain.
  • Oddly, Milla's mind has censors that attack Raz despite her overprotectiveness towards the children in camp and concern for his safety. However, since Milla is aware of the combat training Raz received from Sasha, it's possible she allowed her censors in as a test of Sasha's teachings, and to see how capable Raz is against a threat.
• The nature of Boyd's mind: Boyd's mental world is a 50's suburbia filled to the brim with conspiracy, the goal of the level is to find and wake up the milkman so he'll unlock the gates in the real world:
  • The important part is the question being asked. "Who is the Milkman?" You would think an arsonist would remember any persona they took, even if they have gone mad, yet Boyd seems just as confused about the Milkman as the players are, he just sees it as another conspiracy. Then, you open the vault showing Oleander hypnotizing Boyd. Boyd has no idea who the Milkman is because he's a constructed part of Boyd's personality. Boyd would honestly have no idea who the Milkman was because he wasn't a natural part of him and he wasn't aware of ever getting it. Instead, when said hypnotist worked on Boyd, he could most likely go inside his mind, see what the mindscape was like, and construct a way to hide that part of him until it was needed. Boyd accidentally hid it by coming on with paranoia; anyone asking about the Milkman would get an answer that sounded like just another babbling theory from him, hiding it from anybody who would question him. Why were there no Censors until the final battle of the mind? They were suppressed. Boyd's mind would still have defenses against outside influences, in the form of G-Men, but the most omnipresent part of any mind would have been suppressed so they don't just teleport right into the Milkman's chamber. Instead, the G-Men were a kind of backup defense system that was made unique to Boyd's mind, but the Rainbow Squirts were also a more natural part of the mind, fitting in with the 50's suburbia concept, so the G-men, while they questioned them, they didn't see them as an outright alien entity.
    • Which brings us to the final part. What the hell was the Milkman's mission? Well, pay attention. His mission is to remove all traces of the Asylum after Oleander was done with it. His mission, which was hypnotized into him, was to clean up the asylum, which was holding the plans and evidence of Oleander's involvement with the brain snatching. Boyd was to stand ready to "clean up" the asylum after it was cleared of inmates. It would explain why the Den Mother, another part of the construction and why she was so hostile the second the guise was broken, was to wake up the Milkman when everybody had left the grounds, allowing him to burn up the place without causing any deaths.
  • A book depository in Milkman Conspiracy with a sniper sitting in it? That will sound familiar to all Conspiracy Theorists.
    • Except the sniper in the book depository is the official explanation.
    • The sniper is a girl scout. And if you've played the level, you know that the girl scouts are the only ones that are really dangerous. So EVEN MORE fridge brilliance.
• When you're in Boyd's house (in his mind) you can see ashtrays and cigarettes scattered about. A common trait among people with schizophrenia is nicotine addiction.
• The appearance of the Nightmares in Boyd's inner world seems to come out of nowhere. After all, they were manifestations of Milla's survivor's guilt after the orphanage she worked at burned down. What does Boyd have to do with guilt and... fire... oh, right, that whole "Milkman" thing!
  • For additional Fridge Horror, we never see HOW Milla's children burned. Wanna bet Boyd did it?
• The fact that Boyd's censors come looking for the Milkman once his location is discovered and that attacks the censors makes sense if you consider the Milkman to be an artificially-induced personality that Oleander brainwashed Boyd into possessing. The Milkman is attacked because he's a foreign object, but unlike the others he's powerful enough to overcome the censors and pull a Split-Personality Takeover, essentially subsuming the original Boyd until his purpose is complete.
• This has been discussed elsewhere, but Raz is the flippant, somewhat snarky go-getter he usually is throughout most of the Milkman Conspiracy, often getting impatient with or cracking jokes at the expense of Boyd or the figures in the guy's mind. After getting inside the asylum and meeting them, by contrast, he's inviting, patient, and almost tender when talking to Gloria, Fred, and Edgar as well as most of the occupants of their respective minds (which results in him developing a pretty pleasing-to-watch dynamic with all of them) - as if unlocking Boyd's Milkman persona was a lesson in exercising maturity and care when you've got the ability to both figuratively and literally get directly inside people's heads.
• The bull that pushes you back and forces you to redo parts of the level reflects the obsessive-compulsive nature of Edgar's mind. It's running the same circuit constantly, a lot of powerful anger going in circles without deviation. The bull could be doing something else, but it is compelled to charge along the same rut. The bull also prevents Edgar from reaching Pasionado by blowing down his card staircase with its passing, whereupon Edgar just sighs and tries to build it again in the exact same way each time. Even the other inhabitants are caught up in an endless loop of trying to do something, getting interrupted by the bull, and they go right back to what they're doing. This is foreshadowing Edgar's hangup at being dumped by his high-school crush for the cheerleading captain, and how Edgar is unable to let it go without outside help. The repressed anger is preventing him from doing anything but stewing on a specific sequence of events that he can no longer change.
• One thing that pleased me about the "Black Velvetopia" section of Psychonauts was how all the different elements, each one bizarre on its own, added together — the paint, the cards, the luchadors, the toreador, the high school paraphernalia — to tell Edgar's story, piece by cryptic piece. Except there was one thing bugging me, even after completing the chapter: what's with the talking dogs? They didn't seem to have anything to do with anything. Then days later, once I'd finished dealing with Loboto, Pokeylope et al at the top of the tower, I was treated to a cutscene that showed Edgar finishing his masterpiece... Dogs Playing Poker. Of course.
  • As an FYI, there was a bit of Foreshadowing with that bit - in one of his dialogue responses, the St. Bernard offhandedly mentions the poker nights he had with the other dogs.
  • In a way, the dogs longing to play poker with each other could represent how Edgar once knew happier days before Lana broke up with him, but is being held back by his grudge. Once the metaphorical dogs are allowed to meet up, it shows Edgar is ready to move on and enjoy his creativity instead of stewing in the past.
• Fred's having velociraptor arms conveniently lends to his and Raz's torsos being about the same size - and therefore to Raz being able to fit nicely into his straitjacket.
• "Fred"'s an unassuming, affable-enough-sounding name that was probably picked to give the Nice Guy with a Famous Ancestor an inverted Sesquipedalian Smith kind of name. Turns a little ironic when you consider that Napoleon was actually a pretty big fan of a guy named Fred.
• So, Sheegor goes and gets the brains that you didn't and puts them in the appropriate children. Boy, it's a good thing there's a photograph with each brain's jar! Imagine if you just broke the jars and took the brains with you with no indication of which one goes where! That'd just be... eheh... silly... but really, if you did do something so foolish as that, making Sheegor run around to their various hiding places for nothing, you've got Sasha, Milla, and Cruller around. They'd be able to figure out whose brain is whose, presumably. Which is why this is in Brilliance and not Horror.
• Gloria's diagnosis is all but explicitly stated to be bipolar disorder. As this Youtube reviewer notes, Gloria's on-a-dime mood swings aren't characteristic of the condition (manic or depressive episodes can last for months each before switching) - but seeing as irrational aggression and paranoia can be features of manic episodes just as abnormal happiness and grandiosity can, they do fit with interpreting her as in a manic phase when Raz meets her.
• In Gloria's mind, you begin the process of going after the Phantom via one seemingly innocuous bit of generosity — Jasper offering you a script to perform on the stage. If he hadn't done this, Raz could have never ultimately defeated the Phantom, who is revealed to be Jasper himself. Why the self-sabotage? Well, Jasper is a manifestation of Gloria's crippling self-doubt and working to undermine all her past and present success, but underneath it all, it shows that she still wants to win, to heal herself. So Jasper ends up sabotaging her own self-sabotage.

Enemies and Bosses

• A small one, but notable nonetheless. The Censors' rather appropriate catch phrase is spouting the word "no" over and over. Where do you first face off against them? Sasha Nein's brain, of course.
• Why is it that the only battle you get help in is the last one? Simple; no one else could overcome their personal demons and neuroses on their own... why should you be any better? They needed help... so do you.
  • Speaking of, given that it includes Raz's own demons, it's surprising that (even with the help of a much more powerful and experienced psychic) the Meat Circus ends with such an Anti-Climax Boss. Except the main help isn't the psychic assistance, but what it represents: love, respect, and admiration from Raz's real father, a display of raw caring and emotion that easily disproves (and thus vanquishes) the false image that had nearly killed Raz.
  • On that note, that also explains why Meat Circus is so much more difficult than every other level in the game. Last level aside, since Raz is in his own mind, he's taking on his own personal problems by himself and struggles to deal with them. In fact, the final boss is nigh invulnerable until Raz gets help from someone else to defeat it. Raz has been helping people with their mental problems throughout the whole game, so what better than to have the last level be Raz himself getting help to deal with his own mental traumas?
• In a way, not only does Razputin get to confront the corrupted vision of his father in the Meat Circus, but Oleander does indirectly help to defeat his own, too. It always felt odd how the Big Top just has a large meat grinder in the middle of the arena for no reason other than the Butcher analogy, until one remembers the early game. That grinder did appear before, as the final obstacle course in Basic Braining. Oleander even mentions in that level that the logs and the blades surrounding it is an "old" obstacle, so it's been in his mind for a while. The spinning blades in that area are the blades making up the meat grinder in the final boss arena.
• When you enter Oleander's mind, it's an obstacle course. However, it's empty beyond figments and set-pieces. Sure we see kids blasted to smithereens, but Oleander was clearly doing that on purpose For the Lulz (or For the Evulz depending on how you look at it). We later learn about censors from Sasha, censors acting as anti-bodies from foreign invasion in the mind who act independent of the conscious mind, and that they are present in any sane person's mind. Sasha's mind has censors, even Milla's mind — Milla being particularly protective of the children — has the occasional censor out to get you, and they actually care about you. Even when you return to Oleander's mind and he is too preoccupied to notice your return, there are no censors. This can be seen as Foreshadowing that there is something seriously wrong with Oleander, or that there is something in a different part of his mind (like the Butcher) that the censors are investing all of their time and effort into combating.
• The Meat Circus makes a whole lot more sense when you realize that another word for circus is carnival.^note The word "carnival" is derived from the Latin word "carn", which mean "meat or flesh", and it originally referred to the festivals before Lent being the last time people could eat meat before fasting.

Fridge Horror

• Touched upon in Psychonauts' own Nightmare Fuel page, but once you get past the "OMG this is hilarious" part of The Milkman Conspiracy, and start thinking about it, things get pretty creepy pretty fast. Particularly if you listen to Boyd's monologue. Some of the lines that make you pause and go "What." include:
  • “Hi Mom! Look at me, I’m tangled in a web of deception! How’s Uncle G?”
  • “I scream, you scream, we all scream, we all scream…”
  • And (bearing in mind that the arson is Boyd's thing) “The fire will start in menswear”.
  • Also, there's "These are not my dot-to-dots. These are not my babies!", which can be concerning if you know what the Capgras Delusion is.^note If you don't, it's the delusional belief that someone you know, like a friend or family member, has been replaced by a look-alike.
• Given that the "milkman" appears to be a past version of Boyd, it can reasonably inferred that the Rainbow Squirt leader protecting him is or was his wife. Considering that those in charge of scouting activities tend to be parents of participants, this suggests that all of the Rainbow Squirts are modeled after his daughter. Despite the fact that they are swarming the place, the current Boyd does not understand their connection, meaning that this man cannot even remember his own wife and daughter.
  • It also suggests his wife was Cheating with the Milkman.
  • Another possibility is even more disturbing. The Milkman is instead an alternate personality that Oleander programmed into Boyd, a foreign object in his psyche, hence why the censors come after him and why Boyd is tormented by paranoia. On this reading Oleander basically shattered a man's psyche to clean up after himself, and arranges for a man to be essentially subsumed by an alternate personality (though thankfully this proves temporary).
  • This analysis proposes that the Milkman and Den Mother are actually based on Boyd's parents, reaching an equally disturbing conclusion.
• The Nightmares in Boyd's mind come out of nowhere and seem to have no reason to be there. The only other place you see them is in Milla's nightmare room. Now, what do Milla and Boyd have in common? Places burning down. How many arsons did Boyd commit before he was himself committed?
  • Speaking of which, the memory vault in Milla's nightmare room shows the children she was caring for in the orphanage all perished in the fire. Wanna bet Boyd was responsible?
    • Even worse, if Boyd WAS responsible for the orphanage fire, that means the man is responsible for the deaths of dozens of children, as well as mentally traumatizing Milla. The guy should be counting himself lucky he never comes face-to-face with Milla.
• While much of it goes glossed over, the fact that the asylum patients are still roaming the grounds takes on a whole new level of disturbing when the deeper details are considered, particularly with the implication that after the place closed decades ago, everyone in there has been abandoned and forgotten about ever since. Even if they were simply moved there for some reason far sooner, they have still been left alone without any care for their clearly-life-interrupting psychological conditions, in a very unsafe place where someone with reduced awareness like Gloria or Crispin could easily injure themselves on accident, let alone any signs that they have access to food or a shower.
  • Though it is implied Dr. Loboto is in charge of their 'care,' it is not especially comforting to consider a person like him being in charge of the mentally ill, even moreso when you consider that his idea of 'therapy' for Edgar was chaining him to the floor and forcing him to paint.
  • Going even further, Coach Oleander is seemingly the only other person who knows about the asylum. While he's at least slightly more stable than Loboto, it's also heavily indicated he lacks any sort of concern for the abandoned inmates, himself. Not only was he not shown to do anything to help them, he went out of his way to take a man with debilitating paranoid tendencies and actively worsen his condition for his own uses.
• Sasha's aversion to Tiffany lamps becomes a lot less funny when you realize there was one near his mother's deathbed.
• The Meat Circus is already terrifying enough, but you have to wonder what it must have been like from Raz's point of view. We already know that he's hydrophobic, but considering the fact that a watery grave was sealed as his fate long before he was born, it's probably not just your average everyday fear. To him, doing anything remotely near water is a gamble with death, so just try magnifying that to the degree it was presented in the Meat Circus. I'd be surprised if the poor kid wasn't emotionally traumatized by that experience.
• "Sasha's First Loss." So... does that mean there were more...?
  • He’s a middle aged man and a secret agent besides. With that line of work and how life is as you get older, there is always loss.

Fridge Logic

• So, since the Aquatos felt, for a long time, that they're cursed to die in water, how do they clean themselves? It's not like everywhere's going to have a showerhead, so do they just wipe themselves with wet, soapy towels, or something?
  • While mental worlds are another story, in the real world the Hand of Galochio only manifests when Raz is above or already in a deep enough body of water that he can potentially drown in it. In the camp, Raz can walk through the shallow stream just fine. Thus, we can infer that the family is perfectly capable of taking baths. Psychonauts 2 establishes that the curse doesn't exist in the first place and the Hand of Golochio, if it even physically exists and isn't just a hallucination (as implied in Rhombus of Ruin) is Raz subconsciously using his own psychic abilities against himself due to deeply internalized fear. Hell, the Aquatos believing that it's safe to take baths might even be why Raz can walk in the stream without issues.