Until Blog - Dearest Joshua Washington

[distantattraction]

[Sam, Chris, and Ashley voice] I want to get off Mr. Josh’s wild ride, please!

There’s a lot to Josh that’s explicitly covered by the story of Until Dawn, but there’s so much about the year between lodge incidents that’s implied, and I want to start there because it’s just as insane as the shit he actually does.

Josh believed his friend group to be responsible for the disappearance of his sisters, and he kept hanging out with them for a full year after it happened. Hating them the whole time, planning a truly unhinged revenge scheme that must have taken a huge amount of time, money, and commitment. There’s technically no evidence that the friend group stayed tight after the disappearance of the twins, but no one really talks about how long it’s been since they last saw each other, just that it’s weird to come back to the mountain after a year and/or without the twins.

To me, the weirdest thing about Josh’s big Saw games plan has always been how little of it focused around the people who were most directly responsible for Hannah and Beth’s disappearance. Ashley is the only victim of Josh’s “game” that actually had anything to do with the prank; Sam and Chris weren’t involved and were unduly punished, whereas Mike, Emily, and Jess all got off scot free somehow. I wonder if maybe it was only ever about Sam and about pushing Chris and Ashley towards each other, and if revenge was just Josh’s excuse for how out of control the plan was. It’s really scary and sad how unhinged he is about his friends (or “friends,” depending on how you feel).

There’s a page in Hannah’s diary that’s very, very sad where she says that she didn’t realize how sick Josh was until he had to be hospitalized. It’s so crazy to read knowing everything Josh did and how hard of a time he’s had with treatments. The fact that he could be completely falling apart and one of his sisters, who he lived with, didn’t even know? That says a lot about his behavior and his ability to act like nothing is wrong. It explains why everyone came back to the lodge for the anniversary of Hannah and Beth’s disappearances. It can’t have just been guilt because of how few of them seemed to feel guilty. But if they stayed friends with Josh after his sisters disappeared, if they kept hanging out with him and going through their regular high school and college lives like Josh’s entire world wasn’t destroyed because of a mean prank his friends pulled, well. Then there’s more than just the guilt to bring them to the lodge again, there’s also the obligation of not letting a friend down (again).

I’ve always found it really upsetting that Until Dawn is pitched as a story in which you can save all of the characters even though you really cannot save Josh. There’s no cure for becoming a Wendigo in canon, so that’s a permanent transformation that does not count as “being alive” as far as I’m concerned. It feels quite a lot like he gets punished for being the most mentally ill character, and that feels terrible. That boy has enough problems without also being doomed to die.

I didn’t know very much about antidepressants when I first watched a playthrough of Until Dawn, but I have a non-zero amount of knowledge now. It sucks big time that Josh is apparently chemically resistant to SSRIs and SNRIs because those are the more modern antidepressants. Between the older technology of MAOIs and the higher dose they had to put Josh on, I’m not surprised that his health didn’t actually improve. It’s not that I think his doctors did him dirty or that I think Josh didn’t go off his meds (he may have, I don’t know), but I do think Josh’s problems are just bigger than his doctors are prepared to handle.

The other thing that’s wild about Josh is how little we see of his friendship with Chris. It’s basically only present at the very beginning of the game, before they get into the lodge. After that, it’s all Saw games and being angry for perfectly legitimate reasons, and then they never share a scene again. The one thing Chris and Josh’s friendship really has going for it is the fact that Chris seems to be one of the few people who knew already that Josh had a mental health issue. I’m assuming it was a secret, though I wouldn’t put it past this group to be told that one of their friends has a serious health condition and for everyone but Sam to just brush it off.

In conclusion: Someone please get Josh a new storyline branch, some proper medical help, and new friends who don’t like pranks. I like him, and I want better for him than this.