Question about Door 3

[Battler Ushiromiya]

Why does Junpei's ploy force Santa or Lotus and Clover to authenticate at the RED? They could just refuse to authenticate, and Junpei wouldn't be able to carry out his plan. It's not like he's threatening anyone. If they refuse, he can do literally nothing about it.

[shadg]

They're desperate and on edge at that point. Santa makes sure to be as flippant and annoying as possible, Lotus is a selfish ♥♥♥♥ (well, yknow, to an extent), Clover NEEDS to make progress to find Snake, and they just wasted a bunch of time wandering around. So none of them trust the others to not go through the door and leave the others behind.

If they refused to authenticate… How does the RED handle that? I'm pretty sure a wrong combination would just reset the RED but I wonder what happens if you leave the authentication process hanging. Can you use your bracelet to authenticate on two doors at once? I doubt Zero would let that happen. So, since Junpei, June and Seven have all authenticated on door 3, I would bet their bracelets couldn't authenticate on the other two doors as long as the door 3 RED is active. And Santa, Clover and Lotus have a digital root of… 6. They can't open either of these doors on their own.

For Lotus, she's scared that they don't have much time left. For Clover, she wants to find Snake. For Santa… He's angry at Junpei because he knows that he messed up. He knows they're fated to ♥♥♥♥ up and die now, because Akane knew that through the morphogenetic fields, and it's a safe bet that anything Akane knows, Santa also knows.

Sure, they could just engage the RED without authenticating and it'd beep "wrong digital root" or something like that, but… How can they be sure that this won't result in something horrific happening? The sight of the Ninth Man's disgusting body is fresh in everyone's mind. Do they really wanna bet that Zero won't punish them for messing up the Digital Root? Besides, they're angry and confused, tired and scared. It's possible that none of them (except Santa) even consider the possibility that they can ♥♥♥♥ Junpei's plan by not authenticating/ engaging the RED without authenticating.

So a combination of not knowing wtf they're doing and being afraid to die, basically.