Gaz, Taster of PTSD
is a oneshot Invader Zim fic by SaintHeartwing.
In the episode "Gaz, Taster of Pork", Dib's testing of a spell accidentally cursed Gaz to only be able to taste pork, leading to her being locked up in their father's lab and turned into a media freak while the Professor tried to cure her. Dib eventually managed to undo the curse, but now the anniversary of the incident is coming up, and Gaz is showing signs of PTSD from the whole experience, suffering intense nightmares that are slowly wearing down her sanity.
Will she accept the help she sorely needs, or will things just get worse for her?
Tropes in this story
- Asleep in Class: Happens in Gaz at one point due to Sleep Deprivation from her nightmares. Unfortunately for her, she has another one during this, resulting in her waking up screaming, embarrassing her in front of the class.
- Ass Shove: When Torque decides to mock Gaz's PTSD by presenting her with a pig's head on a tray, she responds by shoving the tray up his ass.
- Bullying a Dragon: Despite knowing what Gaz is capable of, Torque still thinks it's a good idea to mock her trauma. This ends with him having a tray shoved up his ass and an apple so far into his mouth he can't close his jaws.
- Catapult Nightmare: Most of Gaz's nightmares end with her bolting awake screaming.
- Embarrassing Damp Sheets: On a couple of occasions, Gaz's trauma nightmares are bad enough that she ends up wetting the bed, to her humiliation.
- Freak Out: Gaz finally hits the breaking point of her Sanity Slippage during Torque's prank with the pig head, beating the shit out of him and needing to be briefly institutionalized afterwards.
- How We Got Here: The story opens with Gaz locked up in a mental hospital after having had a breakdown, with the rest of the plot then showing how that happened.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Dib notes that Gaz spent years joking about him getting institutionalized, only to end up in that situation herself.
- Nightmare Sequence: Gaz has several, caused by her trauma from the pork-tasting incident, though we only actually see two — one of being experimented on by her father, and another of being tempted with pork products by the Shadowhog and terrified by his Body Horror.
- Plagued by Nightmares: Due to the anniversary of the pork curse incident coming up and it thus being on her mind, Gaz keeps having nightmares relating to it.
- Sanity Slippage: Due to not being able to sleep due to her trauma nightmares, Gaz slowly starts going crazy. The nightmares get worse, she starts psychosomatically tasting pork again despite the curse not being active, and her personality overall starts fraying. This eventually leads to her exploding on Torque when he mocks her with a pig's head, and she spends some time in a mental hospital before she finally starts getting better with Dib's help.
- Shout-Out:
- The narration notes that Professor Membrane couldn’t cure Gaz's curse because "magic must defeat magic".
- Gaz cites Five Nights at Freddy's as the reason that her security dolls turned on her.
- Gaz compares everyone in school laughing at her mental decline to Carrie.
- Sleep Deprivation: The repeated trauma nightmares mean that Gaz can't get any real sleep, which contributes to her Sanity Slippage.
- Therapy Is for the Weak: Part of the reason Gaz's mental situation gets so bad is that she refuses to talk out her issues, due to seeing it as a sign of weakness. Fortunately, by the end of the story, Dib convinces her that this isn't true, and she starts to get better.
- Tongue Trauma: In one of Gaz's nightmares, she finds herself Strapped to an Operating Table by her father, who is going to cut out and replace her tongue to try and cure her inability to taste anything but pork.
- Turned Against Their Masters: Gaz had to throw out her security toys after they were inspired by Five Nights at Freddy's to start threatening to eat her face.
