Ralph Goat
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Posts: 214
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Post by Ralph Goat on Oct 19, 2006 22:49:21 GMT -5
Since there were no theories posted here yet, and because I LOVE to think about the plot and what it means, I decided to post some of my own theories here (however contradicting and adverse to each other as they may be), and I'd like to see some other people's input, since I still have no idea which one may be right, or if it will ever be decided for a definite meaning at all. @_@ Oh, and I HIGHLY recommend you don't read these unless you are finished with the game.
All of the events were inside Jennifer's mind and memories, one of the main examples being when I examined an item in Once Upon a Time, and Jennifer mentioned that one Halloween the other children dressed up by putting paper bags over their heads, and how that frightened her so. Therefore, the enemies chasing her are her fears, one of them being of children with bags over their heads.
So we don't really know where her real form is. She's just inside memories throughout the game. And I guess there is multiple theories for the ending . . . The theory that she was not 18 at all, and that she dreamed/thought up all of the events could be possible, in my opinion She wants to prevent all of what she thought up from happening as she dreamed/imagined it (it's like a dream/nightmare . . . . with her worst fears and all of that from real life in it), so she prevents Wendy from looking at Brown. That could be why she wakes up as a little girl in the last chapter. It's saying that that was what she really was. That could also be why Diana, Meg, and the other children stayed the same age, but yet she was grown up. Dreams don't often make sense . . . And often people are protrayed in our dreams just as we know them.
HOWEVER . . . I've found that when Jennifer talks about things, she talks as if it's in her past. And there's some points where she kinda explains what happened to make her forget the tragic events of before (I don't know whether those events included Brown dying, her parents dying, or what). She mentioned flying in an airship before, and that an accident happened that made her forget everything. I have no idea what that could be . . . But at least that explains why the airship was a setting included in gameplay.
Also, when she looked into the mirror, she asked herself if she was happy now, and that the answer may be inside of her. *confused* o_O
And I went all the way back to the bus stop (Gregory was sitting on the bench, writing in those little storybooks. o_O) and she considers taking the bus back, but decides not to, because there was something she had to do first (go look at Brown). So therefore, maybe she remembers being older and being on that bus. Maybe after she checked on Brown and such, she went back on that bus and returned to her normal 18 year old life. Maybe all that stuff had actually happened, and she's just revisiting her memories, and leashing Brown up to keep him safe in her memories forever, instead of just forgetting and running away from them like before.
I think that the monsters that Jennifer sees are somewhat what she would see in a nightmare, they are her worst fears, but with a memory hidden behind them. I think the whole environment is composed of her memories. For some reason, I don't believe that the children are ghosts. =/
I also thought about the It-Was-All-Just-A-Dream-On-The-Bus scenario. In fact, I thought that was what the ending was going to be. Maybe she was regaining her memories in her dreams? That could be possible too . . . Because you never know where her real body is.
People can die in their dreams from a heart attack from being scared too much in their sleep. Maybe that's what happens when you get a game over. But a twilight zone is possible too . . . Because I doubt a dream would last THAT long, especially on a bus ride. Maybe Jennifer went into a coma, but they just didn't mention it in-game? There are many possibilities.
So yeah, these are all of the things I thought of when thinking about the plot of ROR, and these quotes are taken almost directly from my posts on Beyond the Camera's Lens (a Fatal Frame forum), but posted them here after I discovered this forum. I'd like to thank Sundae, Kuro-Chou, and Lum for helping me brainstorm on them, though. ;D
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Post by PrinceJoshua on Oct 19, 2006 22:59:29 GMT -5
Rule of Rose is so mind boggling. I like your theories though. ;D
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Post by spookythings on Oct 20, 2006 0:37:31 GMT -5
theres a couple of mentions of the airship in the game, i don't think i've found them all, but jennifer was on an airship with her parents when she was a little girl, and the airship mysteriously went off course, then crashed, killing her parents and landing her in gregory's care (no clue how that happened), where she met wendy. i think that the reason the orphanage becomes the airship in the game is because maybe jennifer told the others about the trip and they decided to pretend it was an airship for a game. either that or as jennifer dreamt and as the memories reemerged, they became entangled.
i don't believe the children are ghosts either. i've never even heard that theory. figments of jennifer's imagination/nightmare, sure, that seems to be the only really plausible solution to their appearance. plus she says she knows what they were and what brought them there.
you have given me a lot more to think about though, i had never considered the coma or that she was seeing future possibilities. i'm definitely going to want to discuss things further when i get to writing the story.
edit: also read somewhere that the game overs may be an indication that jennifer committed suicide, because theres something about her funeral. just off the top of my head, a possible theory for that is that the game over message, along with the storybook for 'the funeral' about how it was either her or her dear friend, suggests that she sacrificed herself in brown's place (hence why, as she lay dead, brown, alive and well, is there licking her face), therefore she never dethroned wendy, and wendy never brought stray dog to kill the others, 'and they all lived happily ever after.'
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Ralph Goat
Beggar
Ze veel nevah zee eet cahming!
Posts: 214
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Post by Ralph Goat on Oct 20, 2006 9:48:03 GMT -5
Hey, that's a good theory! I never thought about that, I always wondered if Jennifer considered trying to save Brown by that. But the Game Overs representing it is entirely possible! ^_^
And I heard Gregory rescued her from the airship somehow, and took care of her, because he recently lost his boy named Joshua by death. I think maybe he wanted a replacement, 'cuz sometimes he even called Jennifer "Joshua". XD
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Post by spookythings on Oct 20, 2006 18:51:19 GMT -5
speaking of joshua, that scene where you look under the covers in his room just made me think of something strange/creepy. at the end, after gregory kills everyone, thanks to jennifer's memories being 'sanitized,' all we see of the children is their clothes lying on the ground, devoid of their bodies even though we know that they're all lying there, dead. does that maybe mean that gregory was keeping joshua's corpse in that bed? i know that the game says something about 'clothes and shoes being laid out,' but i don't think they would have exactly said 'theres a little boy's dead body lying here. wtf!' besides, i can see lying the shirt and shorts out, by why exactly would you put shoes in the bed? thats weird even for the mentally unstable.
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Ralph Goat
Beggar
Ze veel nevah zee eet cahming!
Posts: 214
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Post by Ralph Goat on Oct 20, 2006 21:10:05 GMT -5
Omigosh, could be! Maybe he wants to pretend that Joshua is alive so much, that he put his corpse in the bed and pretended that he was still alive, but sleeping. And it did seem like he was sitting near that bed, and talking to someone. That is one serious case of denial! I heard that there was a document in Gregory's house somewhere that informed us of Joshua's death and how Gregory took it, but I was so scared the first time I played the game, that I never saw it. I'm hoping I catch it this time around. *_* Edit: Speaking of inanimate objects meaning more than they seem, there's also the common theory that all the animals in the game are dolls. Like Brown was a doll (like the one you saw towards the end of the game, where you thought you saw Brown laying on the ground, and it was a stuffed toy) and Meg's goats were dolls, when at one time they seemed real. That would explain why Brown could endure so much pain throughout the game. XD But it's only a theory.
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Post by Gregory Wilson on Oct 20, 2006 21:55:16 GMT -5
well i also noticed that gregory is calling Jennifer Joshua because young Jennifer has a slight resemblance to his dead son. The brownish, short hair........
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Post by spookythings on Oct 20, 2006 22:00:39 GMT -5
the brown as a doll thing would kind of invalidate the entire game, though, i think, because the whole point was that jennifer found something other than wendy and wendy couldn't take it. it wouldn't really be as compelling a story if wendy simply took away her toy, nor do i think wendy would have been particularly angry over it seeing as how she had joshua the bear. plus the once upon a time chapter shows brown as a puppy. its an interesting theory, but it would heavily impact the emotional appeal of jennifer's story if everyone got killed over a doll. i kind of think that the dog dolls she kept seeing were just red herrings for the sake of intensifying the search for brown. theres brown over there in the hallway! no, just a doll. theres brown over there! nope, just another doll. theres brown being dragged away by the im--nevermind.
another thing about the joshua's corpse being stashed away in the basement theory is that as jennifer stood there looking down at 'the clothes' she felt a terrible pain in her chest. perhaps that signifies that she knew deep down inside that it wasn't just a boy's clothes lying under the sheets. not to mention the ominous 'pull back the covers?' option.
gregorywilson - i think its also entirely possible that gregory dressed jennifer as joshua because if he was unwilling to accept that she was a girl, he probably wasn't going to go out and buy his son a bunch of dresses. unless there was a whole different side to joshua the game isn't telling us about...
i think its a little weird that even after escaping gregory, jennifer and wendy kept up the charade, making jennifer 'prince joshua' to wendy's 'princess.' i think she probably got that dress we see her wearing in the trailer and the flashbacks from the orphanage, because gregory was probably absolutely convinced that jennifer was his joshua, as jennifer mentioned in some of her letters to wendy.
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Post by Gregory Wilson on Oct 20, 2006 22:18:09 GMT -5
well about that brown doll. there's also a possibility that the brown jennifer had from the beginning is a doll. if we'll remember the chapter "Rag princess sews", we saw Amanda pummeling a rag doll with a resemblance to jennifer. maybe wendy also made a brown doll to put her angers to it just like what amanda did on that chapter.
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Ralph Goat
Beggar
Ze veel nevah zee eet cahming!
Posts: 214
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Post by Ralph Goat on Oct 20, 2006 22:51:55 GMT -5
Yeah, but I guess it would take a major impact away from the story, like Spooky said, if Brown was a doll. And I wouldn't WANT Brown to be a doll. XD Brown is cool. XD As for the Jennifer doll, does anyone have any idea why Jennifer fainted when she saw Amanda beating up that doll? That was very very strange. Not even Fiona from HG faints that easily. I don't really see a reason to be scared by that . . . as long as Amanda is taking out her anger on the doll, and not Jennifer herself. XD Me and my friend were talking about it, and thought that maybe Amanda had two sides to her: The good side that wanted to be friends with Jennifer (the one that told Jennifer to punish her and that she was sorry for shoving a rat in her face) and the bad, jealous Amanda that wants to upgrade higher than Jennifer in the Aristrocrats society. I guess the bad Amanda won out over the good in the end. @_@ Killing her dog . . .
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Post by Gregory Wilson on Oct 20, 2006 22:56:39 GMT -5
yeah i also wondered about that too. maybe because Jennifer might have seen herself there being pummeled by amanda as a hallucination like what jennifer experienced in the funeral chapter where she mistook the doll as brown.
just maybe
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Post by spookythings on Oct 20, 2006 23:18:52 GMT -5
i'm not sure i understand... are you suggesting the dream brown was a doll? that could be. and i understand that the orphanage was a little unlikely to be raising goats and pigs so the goat dolls made sense, the half-fish, half-doll mermaid doll made sense (although why hoffman would have that kind of fish around is a little beyond me. i'm no expert on the different types of fish, but that looked like a salmon? to me), but the brown doll just seems far reaching to me. why would jennifer dream about a doll? aside from my earlier theory, the dog dolls may have been some final grabs on the part of jennifer's subconscious to either protect her from or prepare her for what she was about to discover (brown dead and stuffed in a sack).
re: jennifer fainting
i think that possibly it was the shock of discovering that amanda hated her with such intensity that hit jennifer the hardest and caused her to faint. she was already terrified of her surroundings and here was some girl she had (as far as we know) never wronged, pummeling what is essentially a voodoo doll. it would have creeped me out too.
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Ralph Goat
Beggar
Ze veel nevah zee eet cahming!
Posts: 214
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Post by Ralph Goat on Oct 20, 2006 23:35:54 GMT -5
Well, I guess that's more understandable, looking at it that way. So far in the story, besides Wendy (who we don't even see in the airship) and Brown (who isn't on the enemy's side anyway), Amanda was the only person that showed some sort of friendship to Jennifer. When she realizes that Amanda actually wants to kill her, all of her hope of anyone else on her side breaks, I guess. Another thing I wondered in the game that just now occured to me, why were there "cells" in the orphanage? Were they punishment rooms? Or is the word "cell" usen carelessly here, and they actually mean "basement rooms"? It was mentioned once that Diana did a lot of thinking in the Cell of Solitude, so either she was in trouble all the time, or they really were just rooms in the basement that were accessible by children. (I sure hope not . . . One of the cells had weapons in them. ) And Jennifer's fear of the imps can originate from the imp dolls in that one cell, the one that was illustrated from the tale the other children told about the "Sweepers". Or from the story itself, most likely. ^_^
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Post by spookythings on Oct 21, 2006 0:15:21 GMT -5
haha i was thinking that same thing when i went into the cell of remorse for the axe. 'cell of remorse, huh? are they sorry they're about to get chopped up?' but according to dictionary.com, a cell is just a small room, like in a convent or a prison. i don't get the cells either. locking children up in rooms in the basement seems just plain nasty. the only ones that made sense were the cell of bliss and cell of solitude. it seems as if though the cells were added just to give the player some place to listen to records or watch movies.
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Ralph Goat
Beggar
Ze veel nevah zee eet cahming!
Posts: 214
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Post by Ralph Goat on Oct 21, 2006 14:35:16 GMT -5
Well, at one point, I thought the cell where you find the Aristrocrats Pledge (I don't remember the name of the cell at the moment. @_@) was some sort of other meeting room because:
a. There's a rose on the door. The Aristrocrat's symobl. b. There's chairs, tables, and such in there. c. The pledge is found in there.
So I was thinking, "They need ANOTHER hidden meeting room? The one in the Attic isn't enough?" but I guess it could be possible. Maybe a back-up, less-used meeting room just in case of an emergency or such. Or maybe one used to form gossip plans against the other children, because it seems like they do that often. XD;
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