Arslanian blindfolded; Doucette's breakdown (pp. 567–568)

The theme's moral counterweight, stated flatly by Schacht. A depressed kid is breaking down in the weight room, and "the crueler guys are in there watching like it's entertainment" — the schadenfreude-spectation of the Eschaton gallery (073) and the coliseum bleachers (065) in its purest form, real suffering consumed as a show. Schacht names the line the whole culture keeps crossing: "Somebody in pain isn't entertainment." It's the single clearest statement in the theme of the boundary the Entertainment (and the era around it) erases — the distinction between watching and preying, between an audience and a scavenger. That it takes a burned-out ex-contender who no longer cares about winning to say it plainly, and to walk away disgusted, marks how rare the refusal is: nearly everyone else stays to watch.