#this is also kind of a precursor to me talking about marie's irrigo fate. and the point about resistance is important to that

[torturingpeople]

i've been thinking about how irrigo and violant work recently. so of course i had to make diagrams about it

i don't think the plaque is like a literal tangible thing like it is on your tooth or in your blood vessels, but it's more of a residue that either snaps the synapses immediately and makes it impossible to reconnect the memory or builds up over time on the synapse and makes it harder to access a memory

"with resistance" in this case refers to someone who uses or has been exposed to irrigo frequently over an extended period of time. it works in the same way as drug/antibiotic resistance does in the sense that your synapses grow more resilient to the effects of the plaque and don't just immediately break. think of it like going from dental floss to rope

i also think violant can provide resistance too - in this way it would more likely cancel out the effects of the plaque and it's like placing a casing over your synapse, but at the same time now you have both a violant casing (with violant being impossible to erase so the casing is there basically forever whether it's effective or not) and irrigo plaque on your synapses so it's not something you can do repeatedly without eventually damaging the synapse and doing something fucked up to your memory

there's also potential for the buildup of irrigo and violant causing toxic shock in the brain in the same way foreign objects do - it's only in a long-term sense and if left unchecked the body will start attacking itself and engaging an immune response to remove the buildup, which will in turn inevitably damage, weaken or break the synapse entirely

the way to treat violant+irrigo buildup is with exposure to apocyan. in essence this has the ability to remove the plaque buildup and the casing, essentially breaking it off your synapses, and can help to heal any damage caused by an immune response or the synapse being freed from the casing and plaque. in this it would return the neuron to its natural, unaffected state, and the pathway would neither have the benefits or drawbacks of using violant or irrigo