Asylum of Doom is a one-shot Invader Zim fanfic by Zim'sMostLoyalServant.
Dib drags Gaz along with him on another one of his explorations to paranormal sites—this time to the reportedly haunted ruins of the Burke Lunatic Asylum, a Bedlam House where patients were subjected to cruel treatment in the name of making them mentally normal until they rioted and burned the place down. After a few hours of not seeing any ghosts, Gaz is having trouble believing the place is actually haunted...until she trips on something, hits her head, and wakes up as a patient of the Asylum in 1945, told she's been institutionalized for having "delusions" of being from the future. With everyone believing she's just another raving lunatic, and security so tight even a mouse couldn't escape, can Gaz make it back to her own time?
This fanfic contains examples of:
- Abandoned Hospital: In the present day, Burke Lunatic Asylum is an abandoned, partially burned down ruin.
- Albinos Are Freaks: Discussed and defied in regards to Maddie. As she lives in the 1940s, she's treated as a freak for being albino, but is ultimately the nicest and most normal person that Gaz meets in the asylum, which she's only locked up in because she believes that she should be treated like a normal person despite her appearance.
- All of the Other Reindeer: The other teenage inmates make fun of Gaz for apparently having claimed to be from the future.
- Alpha Bitch: Patricia, one of the other patients at the asylum, has an attitude that Gaz equates with being more appropriate for high school popular girls than the current situation, as she's the snooty leader of a clique that bullies Gaz and Maddie for being viewed as "freaks" even by the situation's standards.
- Animorphism: At the end, it is implied that the albino bat that startled Gaz into falling and hitting her head, and sent her back in time to the asylum, was actually Maddie's spirit in another form.
- Bedlam House: Dib and Gaz explore the ruins of the Burke Lunatic Asylum, a brutal place where inmates were electroshocked, hosed down with freezing cold water and even lobotomized. Gaz experiences firsthand how brutal it really was when she falls, hits her head and is mentally transported back in time to become an inmate.
- Blackmail: Maddie gets Patricia to stop attacking Gaz by threatening to report to the orderlies that she has a hidden shiv, which will no doubt get her brutally punished by Dr. Burke.Maddie: Let's see how the staff react to that little toy of yours. You've managed to hide it from them so far, you really want to risk them finding it? I'd hate to think what the doctor would do to you.
- Brutal Honesty: As Dib is filming their exploration of the asylum, Gaz dryly comments that he usually gets more dislikes on his videos than actual views. Later, she also points out that no matter how hard he tries, no one ever believes him, and his efforts to expose the paranormal just make him look crazy.
- Cassandra Truth: When Gaz is trapped in the Lunatic Asylum, nobody believes her claims that she's from the future and doesn't belong there. They just think she's crazy like everyone else is.
- Chekhov's Gun: Patricia, one of the girls in the asylum, attempts to maim Gaz with a shiv she made out of a sharpened plastic utensil. Gaz later steals this shiv and tries to use it on Dr. Burke, which makes him resort to lobotomizing her — and this apparently "kills" her and returns her to her own time.
- Cuckoo Nest: After falling down some stairs and hitting her head, Gaz wakes up in the past when the Asylum was operational, and is told that the entire life she knows is just a delusion.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Maddie is an albino girl who was institutionalized at the Asylum just for vocally protesting that she shouldn't be treated as abnormal just for being albino. Due to the time period she lives in, such a belief was viewed as delusional.
- Doomy Dooms of Doom: Really, it wouldn't be an Invader Zim fanfic if the word "doom" didn't appear somewhere. The title, in this case.
- Dr. Jerk: Doctor Burke is a smug bastard who seems to take great joy out of Gaslighting Gaz, and electroshocking her when she refuses to accept what he tells her. And when he ultimately decides to lobotomize her, it's clearly payback for her attacking him, not a desire to help her.
- Electroconvulsive Therapy Is Torture: Electroshock is used as regular treatment on uncooperative patients at the Burke Lunatic Asylum, which Gaz gets to experience when she's sent back in time and becomes an inmate. She tends to black out the experience and is thus spared the pain of it, but it leaves her physically and mentally drained, and contributes to the slow erosion of her willpower.
- Everyone Has Standards: Gaz may not be a very nice girl, but when she and Dib are exploring the Burke Lunatic Asylum, she shudders at the thought of patients being chained to the wall and hosed down with cold water.
- Eye Scream: As punishment for Gaz trying to attack him with a shiv, Dr. Burke decides to lobotomize her with an icepick through the eyeball, which will destroy her brain. This actually turns out to be the key to getting her back to her own time. Just before the icepick hits, she wakes up in the ruins of the Asylum in the present day, perfectly fine.
- Fate Worse than Death: Dr. Burke pretty much sums up having a lobotomy as one as he's about to perform one on Gaz, though he justifies it as a necessary sacrifice to "cure" people of their "abnormalities."Dr. Burke: Years ago, lobotomies worked by drilling holes into the skull and cutting out chunks of the brain. Now all I have to do is drive this pick through the space between your eyeball and its socket, and I'll destroy the part of your brain causing all these delusions and violent tendencies… admittedly, you'll probably also lose your ability to speak, most conscious thought, and bowel control, but some sacrifices have to be made, I suppose.
- Food as Bribe: Dib gets Gaz to accompany him on a trip to the ruins of the Burke Lunatic Asylum by promising to buy her Bloaty's Pizza Hog for a whole month.
- Food Slap: On her first day at the Asylum, Gaz gets a spoonful of oatmeal thrown at her by some teenage patients who make fun of her for claiming to be from the future. She gives them a taste of their own medicine by hurling an entire bowl of oatmeal at them.
- Forced Bath: A darker example — when Gaz is mentally transported back in time and becomes a patient of the asylum, she finds out that part of their "treatment" involves being drenched in ice-cold water and roughly scrubbed down by the nurses, with uncooperative patients chained to the wall and sprayed down with hoses like animals.Gaz: (teeth chattering) C-couldn't you have u-used s-some warm w-water?Asylum Nurse: Hot water's a privilege for sane people. Besides, the cold helps the brain heal from whatever's wrong with it.
- Force Feeding: Patients at the Asylum who refuse to take their pills are force-fed them by the orderlies instead, as Gaz finds out the hard way.Orderly: Prescriptions are mandatory. You will take yours.
- Foreshadowing: All Gaz sees of the thing that startles her and makes her fall down the stairs are a pair of red eyes in a white face. Upon meeting the albino Maddie in the past, she gets a feeling of familiarity, and at the end of the story, it's shown that what startled her was an albino bat that is then implied to be Maddie's ghost in another form.
- Friendly Ghost: Maddie is the only inmate who tries to be friendly to Gaz and tries to help her escape her situation. She turns out to have been one of the ghosts haunting the asylum's ruins all along.
- Gaslighting: After falling and hitting her head on the floor, Gaz wakes up in 1945 as a patient of the asylum, with the orderlies, nurses, Doctor Burke and even the other patients telling her that she grew up an orphan and was institutionalized for repeatedly insisting that she was from the future. Burke in particular reinforces this by showing her a picture of her in the orphanage and playing recordings of previous conversations between the two of them that she has no recollection of, with him saying that her contradictory memories are delusions. After many days of all this, Gaz actually starts to question whether they're all right but ultimately wakes back up in her own time.
- Jerkass Realization: Her experiences in the asylum make Gaz reevaluate her treatment of Dib, causing her to apologize to him when they're reunited.
- Laser-Guided Karma: While exploring the ruined asylum, Gaz is utterly apathetic to how the patients were treated, and ultimately calls Dib a crazy freak for his insistence on telling everyone about his paranormal beliefs. Then she hits her head and wakes up back in time as a patient in the asylum, being subjected to those same treatments and with everyone telling her that she's the crazy one for insisting she's from the future.
- Lighter and Softer: While it's still a rather dark story involving Electric Torture, Gaslighting and attempted lobotomy, the ending is notably gentler than other Gaz-focused stories written by the same author. While some of Zim'sMostLoyalServant's previous anti-Gaz stories have ended with her getting tortured, executed, irreversibly transformed, mind-wiped, Driven to Madness, or humiliated in front of a large crowd of people, in Asylum of Doom she escapes alive and with both her body and mind intact, and even a bit apologetic for how she treated Dib. This is stated in the author's notes to be a result of the story being written after Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus, in which Gaz's canon counterpart was given a dose of Adaptational Heroism that made the author reconsider his opinion of her.
- Mythology Gag: Dr. Burke tells Gaz that the orphanage she grew up in was called "St. Jhonen's Home For Orphans," a reference to Invader Zim series creator Jhonen Vasquez.
- Neglected Garden: The long-abandoned ruins of the Burke Lunatic Asylum are overgrown with wild weeds.
- Orderlies are Creeps: The orderlies and nurses at Burke Lunatic Asylum clearly don't give a damn about the actual wellbeing of their patients, subjecting them to dehumanizing forms of medical treatment and manhandling them when they try to resist in even the slightest way.
- Or Was It a Dream?: After waking up back in the ruins of the Asylum in the present day, Gaz wonders if her entire experience as a patient in the Asylum was a crazy nightmare brought on by hitting her head. But as she turns to leave, she sees the ghost of Maddie giving her a wave goodbye.
- Pet the Dog: After she is sent back to her own time, Gaz remembers what Maddie said about not caring about what others think of you because it doesn't matter, and apologizes to Dib for calling him a crazy freak for being obsessed with paranormal stuff.
- A Rare Sentence: When Gaz apologizes to Dib, he's so stunned by it that he assumes she has a concussion.
- Rousing Speech: Maddie gives a small one to Gaz just as the latter is prepared to give up and accept that the life she knew is a delusion in order to make her torturous treatment stop, telling her that even if it is a delusion, as long as it's not harmful then no one has the right to try and force her to change. This gives Gaz the emotional boost she needs to decide to go down fighting, attacking Burke and remaining defiant even as he tries to lobotomize her, which leads to her waking up back in the present.
- Soup of Poverty: Oatmeal is seemingly the only thing the inmates at the Lunatic Asylum get served for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
- Strapped to an Operating Table: When Gaz finds herself waking up in 1945 as a patient of the Lunatic Asylum, she's strapped to a bed in a patient room, something that's done to her every night for her whole experience there. She's also strapped to an actual operating table for her repeated bouts of electroshock and eventually for a lobotomy.
- Survival Mantra: At the end of her first day in the Asylum, as she's strapped into a patient bed for the night, Gaz keeps telling herself that it's All Just a Dream and to "wake up, wake up, wake up" over and over until she eventually falls asleep.
- Year Inside, Hour Outside: From Gaz's perspective, she spends at the very least several days somehow having traveled back in time and become a patient of the Burke Lunatic Asylum. When she manages to get out and return to her own time, little or no time in the real world seems to have passed at all.
