Eric's nose bleed[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]I get lambasted on the reddit for thinking Eric's nose bleed was on purpose. It's rather bizarre. I can say all the weapons came from DOOM and it's no problem, but once I say his face was out of DOOM, now it's too much.
Now it's a DOOM LARP rather than "doom influenced" I guess, and that paints their hero in too bad a light. We are allowed to say he blew his head off intentionally with the shotgun, but to say he also gave himself a nose bleed intentionally with the shotgun is not allowed. It seems to me that kind of ostracism for completely reasonable theorizing is why all the mainstream theories suck and are fanfiction.
I was told the same thing everybody else was. I thought he did it on accident too, simply because of wielding a sawed off shotgun one handed. But think about it:
Eric loved DOOM (so much so that tl;dr to explain)
The whole massacre was influenced by DOOM (so much so that tl;dr to explain)
DOOMguy is nameless, because he's supposed to be you the player; it's supposed to be Eric.
DOOMguy's face is of course one of the game's most iconic images.
When DOOMguy's face takes damage - you're a one man army against Hell, you usually take some damage - he gets a nose bleed.
Now consider it along with these facts:
For some reason, they didn't injure their faces during Rampart Range, when the guns were newest to them. They didn't even injure their hands during the massacre like they did at Rampart Range, i . e. they practiced more than once. Eric even shoots from the hip during some of Rampart Range, suggesting he knew not to put the gun right up to the his face. "Because he had one hand on the gun and put up to his face" can still be accepted by somebody saying "and he did that on purpose". If he did it on purpose, that explains why they didn't make the same mistake earlier.
Eric injured his nose, not Dylan. Dylan even said "Why did you do that" on one account and one can imagine it as sarcastic, telling us from the grave it was "CUZ DOOM". If it was "just because of sawed offs", nothing to explain why Eric and not Dylan. If it was Doomguy, that explains it.
Eric was down low with the shotgun to shoot Steven, Kacey, Cassie, and Bree. He was not before or after for any series like this at all. Before might be explained by people getting under tables, but not after. Why other than this point of the massacre is he mostly standing up or bent at the waist with the carbine? Why a certain time during the massacre where he's low with the shotgun? To try and hit himself in the face, I submit.
Eric said "peekaboo" as he shot Cassie. He was not playing peekaboo. He was "peekaboo shooting", a term from FPS video games, i. e. DOOM and games like it.
Eric did not shoot Bree. He tells us because a bomb was still set to go off and kill them all, and I believe him. In fact, I think the library massacre kicks off after the first car bomb fails to kill cops, to get cops inside and have the perps, students, and cops die from the final bomb in the cafeteria...only 5 minutes to live seems to make hitting himself on purpose more plausible....But he still shot Steven, Kacey, Cassie, so why now is he saving ammo and letting the bomb do it? Why didn't he shoot Bree? Because he got his nose bleeding, as intended. He could take a break.
Eric blew his brains out, vertically, with the shotgun. Curiously, people find Dylan's suicide method needing explaining. But Dylan's method is the usual method. Shot to the temple. Why did Eric blow his head off? Well, when DOOMguy dies, he bleeds out his eyes and scalp too, as well as his nose.
DOOM manual, see p. 15
The White VanWonder if there's any connection to the OJ case and why they "hate white vans". Several people see "the jocks always get away with stuff" or something similar as the subtext of the van breakin. The connection to OJ makes a bit more sense to me than the stories of jocks at the school. Of course not as personal for them, and while this is speculation, it seems to me the type of people to have a murder fantasy more likely to be talking about tv with their grievances.
Like the guns were out of DOOM, the bombs were out of Duke Nukem 3D. Tl;dr for all the references from that game too. But, sufficed to say, Dylan shoots a tv screen and smashes a chair before leaving the library, saying it was one last thing he wanted to do. Both of those are things you can do in Duke but not DOOM. One of the first tvs you can shoot in the game is playing the OJ chase.
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