So apparently heaving use of marijuana can trigger schizophrenia in people who have a family history of it. Guess which homestuck character has been heavily linked to the number 420, aka marijuana? In other words, eating sopor did not keep Gamzee from acting on his insanity, but over years of use made it more likely that his inborn insanity could be triggered. If he was ever mad in the first place.
It had been suggested in this theory and in canon that Lil Cal’s power is turning people into puppets. So there are two options here:
1. Lil Cal is the one who hypnotized Gamzee into a state that mimicked schizophrenia, which Karkat’s shooshpap then broke the spell, or
2. Lil Cal is the one who’s been keeping Gamzee’s schizophrenia pacified as he takes care of Caliborn.
Because remember, Doc Scratch has been playing all of the trolls this whole time, and he wouldn’t have left Gamzee to raise the infant cherubs if there was any chance of him hurting them. And since people with schizophrenia cannot control their actions, that would be highly dangerous.
Whether it’s 1 or 2 is hard to determine. Gamzee is, after all, meant to be a capricious character (hard to determine if he’s good or evil). Either way, it’s very likely that he would have grown up completely sane if not for his habit of eating sopor.
I’m curious to hear what other people have to say?
Gamzee is inherently unstable. Remember that sopor vs. sober doesn’t mean peaceful vs. murderous, it’s roughly more akin to stable vs. unstable. The troll society grew up without any sort of mental health care whatsoever, so any latent mental problems would have been largely ignored as he grew up, or considered normal for a young troll.
He was off his sopor slime for a while before he went crazy (it’s implied that he ran out at some point during the session), and as a result was very unstable. However, Gamzee is inherently a pretty docile motherfucker (as befitting a Bard of Rage, destroying his own negative emotions and basically just being chill as fuck) and so he had no reason to hurt anyone.
Enter Dave, who upon revealing his religion was a lie, did all of the shit we’ve been talking about triggering the rampage to begin with: revealed his friends were toast, gave him no reason to believe anything at all, etc. The thing about destroying Rage is that when you do so you need some sort of positive emotion in order to maintain it’s destruction. Without this being the case, he couldn’t deal with the negative emotion that was an inherent part of his nature.
MASSIVE amount of negative emotion, no outlet for it, a culture built around violence having raised him, an ancestor who was famous for basically killing any motherfucker he wanted, Gamzee essentially flipped his shit six ways to hell.
