u/Drewsko199

https://preview.redd.it/6uhklc42l3hh1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=99b4ddbad67d89ddf42d7272dc1c11860f416983

So if I understand everything correctly, the "rules" of the Blight's effects on a session of TF2 are as follows:
* Once the Blight connects and loads in, all players in the server somehow have their minds/souls linked to their playermodels in ways that gradually get more vivid and drains them of IRL mobility, all while screwing up their controls so disconnects, killbinds and such are disabled so they're effectively trapped as the mercs.
* The Blight assimilates the players by touch, but it doesn't need them to be "alive" to do so as it can still assimilate their ragdoll if they remain within reach.
* The primarily-showcased way to escape is to "kys" via the map itself, but in a way that keeps your ragdoll out of reach of the Blight. This generally entails relying on a map with a killzone like fall-to-your-death edges, but killing yourself with weapons in a way that launches your ragdoll out of bound is permissible as well. Once done, game controls start working again and you can disconnect normally. Alternatively, completing the match objective also works in freeing your controls.

So the thing I've been trying to wrap my mind around with all that is this: what exactly is this fine line that loosens the Blight's metaphysical grip on the players?

Some of these bits makes sense with the Blight still being constrained as an ingame entity: it can be shot to death and succumb to fall damage, so having the same limits as a player's "life" as far map boundaries neatly explains that escape method. But map objective is more confusing: as far as ingame triggers it does "negate" the fight by putting the losing team in Humiliation mode for less than a minute while preparing to reset/switch maps, but with the winning team remaining active as normal and the Blight easily crossing teams, that doesn't seem like it would logically negate its window to assimilate. Is it something about the Victory/Defeat state that restores the game functionality enough to shake the player out of the Blight's power and disconnect? The Blight can already affect the game rules by negating the timer, so I'm not sure what the win/lose conditions do differently in successfully cutting its power off players.

That all said, I'm more hung up about the ragdoll situation: What makes the map boundaries so essential to disconnecting? With the Blight needing the physicality of grabbing a player/ragdoll, requiring the body get out of reach being straightforward on paper but metaphysically more complex is weird. Even if they're not in the vicinity of you, getting yourself dead not being enough and ensuring your ragdoll's out of reach seems a bit arbitrary. It suggests that the Blight's metaphysical influence expands all across the "box" of player boundaries; that as long as the player is in there, they're indirectly linked and trapped, vulnerable to a full assimilation, and it's a matter of getting their metaphysically-linked ingame body out of the "box" to free themselves to experience TF2 as a normal game again that you can disconnect from.

That all makes general sense, but that still throws me off about the specifics of killzones. Because the Blight would die trying to follow you in there, it can't get you and you're free of its reach, that's fair. But killzone areas are In-bounds areas, if you use budda/godmode cheats you can rocket jump in and out of them easily enough. They hypothetically would be the same as dying anywhere else that leaves the ragdoll behind, still leaving your mind linked to the body as per the Blight's powers, but something about the killzone dimensions somehow acts as its own negating influence the same way the dimensions of the map boundaries do, just because it "could" kill the Blight's proxies? What is it about the code of these boundaries and the mechanics of winning that actually severs the Blight's indirect links to you? How exactly is a player really "freed" from their link to their ragdoll? Is spectator mode ever factored in? Does being reduced to gibs/vaporized change anything?

I dunno, it's a funky enigma this series does with the technical side of TF2. The gist of the Blight's horror is pulling the player ingame and making it "real", the map their new physicality, but the ways it can be fended off with the game's own mechanics seems somewhat inconsistent and hard to add up. Maybe it's stuff that can still come up later as the characters in-series find options to fight back against the Blight, but for now it just boggles the mind, which I guess its a horror all its own so it's all still working there.