Scarlet-cookie - Scarlet

At this point I’m fully convinced that everyone is just trying to make Grant’s job harder than it already is. First game we got to see music director go insane, I’m convinced sooner or later we’re gonna have to face the wrath of this accounting and finance director.

Pt. 2/3: Expanding (Mostly) On My DCTL & TLO Thoughts

Thanks to reading @inkdemonapologist's thoughts on TLO, I can see where people are coming from saying it's an unnecessary addition to/doesn't fit with the rest of the series, etc. But I think the opposite is the case specifically because of some of the things she hit on. She asks why Joey would actually want his machine to amplify people's hidden emotions and personality traits to a cartoonishly extreme degree (because the inkwell's hive mind said the ink machine was never broken in the first place, so that must mean it was an intended function), and I think it's for one of the same reasons he wrote TIOL:

It's an S.O.S.

I think the ink didn't just make those infected with it into cartoonish personifications of their own emotions and personality traits, I think they became cartoonish personifications of Joey's emotions and personality traits. Look at the actual subjects of some of the amplified emotions/personality traits we see in BATIM, DCTL, and TLO, after everything we noticed in Part One of my analysis/theory.

The BATIM bosses seem more focused on the desire part of Joey's psyche:

Sammy desires someone who will protect and save him, tries his best to please and show love to the one he thinks can do that, but Bendy was a soulless monster that didn't care about anyone or anything (read “Henry didn't know about the full picture, just that he needed to take care of what he did understand before irreversible damage was done” and “Nathan was an abusive, manipulative monster”) and kills him (read “leaves to protect his marriage and his physical and mental health” and “turns him into an abusive, manipulative monster just like himself”), causing him to lash out because he feels betrayed and abandoned. He also goes from desiring to shed the human form he was born in (read “leave behind his poor-person origins and reinvent himself”), thinking that will be part of what sets him free in DCTL, to desiring to shed the ink form (read “escape the persona and terrible legacy”) that he was manipulated into trapping himself in by the ink (read “by Nathan”) when we see him in BATIM (by the way, please forgive all the extra colored text in this part of the list, I need it to illustrate which quotes belong to which character).

“That day the ink found me. It wanted me. He wanted me. At first I was scared. At first I could feel it inside, the drops I'd swallowed by accident. By luck. I could feel them moving around inside me. I shouldn't have been scared. I was foolish. Then the cravings started. I needed more ink. There was no choice. I had to. And the more I consumed the more I understood. The more I felt him. Heard him. I need to please him.” ~ Sammy Lawrence, Dreams Come to Life, pg. 259

“‘Joey now, Nathan,’ I said, taking a swig. Oban on the rocks. Delicious. How they managed to get it into New York City during Prohibition, I still to this day don't know. But I'll tell you one thing, since then my bar has never been without a bottle of the stuff. ‘And you can call me Nate! It's all about reinvention, isn't it?’ He smiled broadly and downed his drink in one gulp. ‘Let's dance! There are some mighty fine dolls on the floor tonight.’ I nodded and indicated I'd be right with him once I finished my drink. I returned the glass to the mirror-backed bar and gave the bartender a nod as he took it from me. I glanced at myself, I looked sharp in my tuxedo. I looked right. Joey and Nate. I shook my head at my reflection. This wasn't a reinvention. This was who I'd always been. Here, in this moment, in this suit, in this tie, in these shoes. These dancing shoes. I was Joey Drew. And Joey Drew was here to stay. I made my way to the mirrored floor, and boy oh boy, did I dance.” ~ Joey Drew, The Illusion of Living, pg. 45-46

“It's been quite a struggle to put this into words, Nathan. After so many years, you know I'd never ask unless it was dire. But when a man's in a spot, he should call upon his friends. Truth is… well, the studio is… *slight tremor in voice* coming up a little short. Hit a few unexpected bumps. If you could… lend us the amount I mentioned in my last letter *inhale* it would be a big help to me… Hope this reaches you in South America. You and Tessa enjoy your vacation.” ~ Joey Drew, Boris and the Dark Survival

“He appears from the shadows to rain his sweet blessings upon me. I see you, my savior. I pray you hear me. Those old songs, yes, I still sing them. I know you are coming to save me. And I will be swept into your final loving embrace. But, love requires sacrifice. Can I get an amen?” ~ Sammy Lawrence, Bendy and the Ink Machine, ch. 2

“She bent down. ‘It's just me, Arthur, it's just Isabel.’ She reached out her hand. ‘I'm going to touch your shoulder now. It's just me.’ She did so, very gently. She looked like an angel then, a reference I have obviously taken away and used later in my career, as you know. She was delicate, with a high sweet voice, and her touch seemed to cure him. The man slowly sat up, and she held him close now. I watched this bit of theater and was moved.” ~ Joey Drew, The Illusion of Living, pg. 125

“…But here, at home, the things I keep and display, those are deeply personal things. Not trophies, but artifacts… …A letter from Henry. You might not think I'd keep such a thing, but I do. I have no ill will toward the man as you know. Him leaving, as I said, was the best thing that could have happened to the studio. His letter reminds me of that…” ~ Joey Drew, The Illusion of Living, pg. 218

“…The time of sacrifice is at hand! And then, I will finally be freed from this… prison. This inky… dark… abyss I call a body…” ~ Sammy Lawrence, Bendy and the Ink Machine, ch. 2

“Henry! Come visit the old workshop… There's something I need to show you.” ~ Joey Drew, Bendy and the Ink Machine, ch. 5

Sounds to me like there might be some hidden context behind some of these remarks… Could he have (at least eventually) meant Henry leaving was a good thing a little more genuinely, some part of him (way) deep down understanding that his friend couldn't stay? That it was an act of self-sacrificial love to let him go? And could this mean he was going to sacrifice what was left his image in confessing everything to Henry, reinforcing that the worrying newspaper in his storage room was Nathan's doing, not his? 🤔

Back to things I'm more certain about, I think the split here – the fact Joey thought both of them would protect and save him in different ways – explains why Sammy seems to be talking to/about multiple different people when we meet him again in BATIM Chapter 5. He... he literally is. He's not (entirely) screaming about Bendy and Joey, he's screaming exaggerated versions of what Joey wished he could say to/about Henry and Nathan.

“BETRAYED!!! ABANDONED!!! I trusted you! I gave you everything… and you left me to rot! …Why? WHY?! He said he'd save me! He said he'd set me free! Now, I have nothing. NOTHING!!! He lies! HE ALWAYS LIES!!! My lord! Why have you forsaken me?! No. Don't look at me. Stay away. HA! You lied to me. You said I'd be free. Well, I'm going to free you now. Free your head right off your shoulders! Sheep, sheep, sheep… it's time for… sleep.” ~ Sammy Lawrence, Bendy and the Ink Machine, ch. 5

Susie desires to be perfect and loved and is devastated when someone she admired and who gave her opportunities to make her dreams come true (read “Nathan, Detective Sinclair, etc.”) takes away what she cherishes (read “Henry plus who knows who and what else,” “opportunities to tag along on his investigations,” etc.) and tells her that she's unlovable trash, which drives her to try harder and harder to make herself perfect, destroying herself and agreeing to horrible things that she never should've. She also desires to be safe, secure, stable, and be able to trust those around her, which when violated, causes her to lose trust in everyone, suspect everyone of lying, conspiring, wanting to betray and take advantage of her, leading her to harming innocents in her quests for self-preservation and vengeance, while also creating a split between two very conflicting sides of herself: the “Alice Angel side” that wants to do all the horrible things, and the “Susie Campbell side” that's heartbroken over the fact that she's doing it (let's call Joey's versions of this his “Joey Drew side” and his “Joseph Dempsey side,” based on the fact he tells us all about how he started going by “Joey” when he started the Studio Chapter of his life and the theory that “Drew” is actually a sort of stage name, not his legal one).

“Once upon a time, there was an angel. And she was beautiful. And loved by all. *Voice breaks with tears* She was perfect. No matter what Joey says.” ~ Susie Campbell/Twisted Alice, Bendy and the Ink Machine, ch. 3

“…I appreciated the advance notice of what event I was attending, but to be honest wondered if he felt I hadn't dressed properly for the occasion at the art gallery. It stung a bit, and while my ego wasn't hurt (I never took that sort of thing personally) it did tell me that the detective was not someone I had any interest in becoming friends with in the future… …The fact was, of course, I didn't have many options in my closet, but I did my best to look put together and accomplished the task fairly easily. The good thing with my appearance is that it is very suited to a suit, so even the most basic one looks like it was tailored to fit me…” ~ Joey Drew, The Illusion of Living, pg. 129 (emphasis added)

“They told me I was perfect for the role. Absolutely perfect. Now Joey's going around saying things behind closed doors. I can always tell. Now he wants to meet again tomorrow. Says he has an ‘opportunity’ for me. I'll hear him out. But if that smooth talker thinks he can double-cross an angel and get away with it, well. Oh he's got another thing coming. Alice doesn't like liars.” ~ Susie Campbell/Twisted Alice, Bendy and the Ink Machine, ch. 3 (emphasis added)

“I didn't love this probing. I didn't trust it. They say it's women who love to gossip, but in my experience men love it just as much; they just do it differently. They hide it behind short sentences and indirect questions. What did Kyle care about my experience with shoes? I wondered. Probably trying to figure out my past, and that was none of his business. Then I told myself it didn't matter because I didn't care what he thought. He might have been richer than me at the time, but that's where his superiority ended. He was simple; he was downright silly. And his attempt to get more from me, to push me to admit something that wasn't true, was lazy and obvious. Never approved of a lazy man.” ~ Joey Drew, The Illusion of Living, pg. 24 (emphasis added)

Bertrum desires the respect of others and praise for his work, and is so infuriated when he's belittled by and receives nothing but constant criticism and demands for change from someone who claims to respect, understand, and admire him but clearly doesn't (read “Nathan—” seriously, especially after my experience with my ex and his family, my gosh does his remark about the rewriting of history being a blemish make me wanna sock him! Talk to me when you can stop rewriting everything Joey says), that he is literally consumed by and made one with his doomed creation in his attempts to outshine and get back at him, nothing but an extremely miserable piece of his former self remaining.

“A grand idea is one that requires care and attention. A well calculated understanding between creation… and creator. I was told that Mr. Drew hired me to build his park for this very reason. He trusted my eye to craft and design something wondrous and exciting. So why do my notes keep coming back dripping with his critical red pen?! Changes! Corrections! Questions that a child wouldn't ask! Mr. Drew may consider himself a dreamer… but in the end, he's the man who can see the island but could never build the boat himself.” ~ Bertrum Piedmont, BATDR teaser audio log dated May 19th, 1940 (emphasis added)

“Joey definitely told me this [murder mystery] story early on in our friendship and I had the pleasure of watching him share it several other times, seeing how he perfected the telling of it. I'd say that this version is near perfect, and it's a good thing he wrote it down when he did because in later years it became more rambling, and characters would get mixed up. I even found myself correcting him once or twice, which you can imagine he did not appreciate…” ~ Nathan Arch, The Illusion of Living, pg. 98 (emphasis added)

“…The only important question is this: Who are we, Henry? I thought I knew who I was… but… the success starved me. Nothing left but lines on a page. In the end, we followed two different roads of our own making. You, a lovely family… Me… a crooked empire. And my road burned. I let our creations become my life…” ~ Joey Drew, Bendy and the Ink Machine, ch. 5

Meanwhile, the infected in TLO are more focused on the emotional reaction part of Joey's psyche:

This one's just gonna hafta be a bullet point list; there's just way too much material.

Bill is afraid of the future; of being out of control; of his dad's businesses, which will eventually be his own (read “the studio”); that he's a monster just like his dad (read “Nathan”) and cannot fix anything only destroy; of the people that his dad does business with (read “that he has to do business with, e.g., Nathan, the investors, etc.”); of indulging his desire to run away and start a new life and what that would entail, e.g., losing the safety his dad's (read “Nathan's”) money and connections do provide him. It's from this place of fear that we see Bill try to escape reality and forget the truth, but also what finally drives him to try and fight the monster when he realizes the full magnitude of the situation.

Constance is angry that she has no freedom; that she can't say what she wants and get it; at the inequality/power imbalances/etc. she suffers under (e.g., the fact that if she makes one wrong move her life could be ruined meanwhile so many others are just untouchable); at the fact she's not like the people she admires; at how everyone gossips about her and her sisters' love lives (read “his and probably also Henry and Nathan's love lives” *stares at every time Buddy got upset that people kept assuming he and Dot were dating and when Norman expressed surprise he hadn't once caught them -ahem- “fooling around,” and then at when Joey used his Angel & Devil play as a way to say “people will assume you're sleeping with someone if you're too affectionate but as long as the two of you know that ain't how it is then that's all that matters,” and then at when Constance almost got in big trouble with Bill's dad because he assumed she was trying to lure his son into marriage for his money and she flew into a rage*); at the lies and social games going on around her; at how Andrew (read “Nathan, Sammy, Jack, Norman, etc.”), someone who claims to love her, doesn't actually care and manipulatively tries to change the narrative around their breakup (read “Henry leaving”) taking her power away and making her the villain; that the people around her won't/can't help her; that she can't be her true self and has been forced to be what others want for so long that she doesn't even know what her own desires are— which she starts figuring out and trying to assert herself through discovering she might want nothing to do with romance ever and just want to focus on her career (“Nothing romantic, my darling, you don't need to run through the wall leaving a Joey-shaped hole in its place.” ~ Abby Lambert, The Illusion of Living, pg. 75 “…I knew I was a catch. But I was meant to swim the seas alone.” ~ Joey Drew, The Illusion of Living, pg. 166). It's from this place of anger that we see Constance engage in cruel, unreasonable, and even violent outbursts as well as experience massive power trips, but it's also what keeps her on the path of trying to sabotage the machine and cure ink infection. She's also the character most vocal about what's wrong in her life (as you can probably tell from the sheer length of this list entry), just like how anger is the emotion seen most often in Joey (“That's the Joey I knew.” ~ Henry Stein in one of his BATIM Chapter 4 invisible ink messages, in reference to the first audio log where we hear Joey's charmer facade drop when he flies into a shouting rage because he didn't realize he was still being recorded, previously only having heard about these common occurrences secondhand… Y'know, now I think about it, that tape itself actually addresses Joey disliking who he was being forced to be pretty directly. “…Okay, let's stop it right there. I can only do so many takes of this trash in a day…” ~ Joey Drew, Bendy and the Ink Machine, ch. 4).

Brant is ashamed of his poor-person origins and invisibility/mediocrity; of the fact his pride is bruised so easily and it makes him do stupid things; of the underhanded crap he's having to do in order to get the attention, respect, and praise he craves; of the fact he betrayed the trust of a nice person he'd started to get attached to (read “all his employees and friends”); of the fact that he's not satisfied with the idea of getting married, having kids and dying like everyone else (read “Henry”) seems to be, as seen in how he wonders if there's something wrong with him as he contemplates the obituaries and their repetition of statements like “loving husband and father.” It's from this place of shame that we see Brant engage in downright manipulative behavior, but he's also the main character that we see the least of (read “emotion we have the hardest time seeing for the longest”), being “killed” by the Ink Demon (read “the Studio Chapter of his life”) shortly after he meets (read “starts”) it; but then he comes back near the end of the book (read “end of Joey's life”), his shame so strong and actually focused on the correct things that it drives him to try and make things right with those he wronged and join the fight against JDS (related: I don't think we should be dismissing the “Phil 2:03” note on Joey's cork board as not actually referring to such a freakishly relevant Bible verse because his appointments with Dr. Hackenbush are at weird times. “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves” does not feel like a coincidence, and as I said it seems like Nathan was not happy that Joey's conscience grew so loud and he reached out to Henry for help in the end; who knows how much of that very surreal memory was altered by outside forces for the sake of keeping Henry and Joey at odds beyond the grave? 👀).

Scott is paranoid that he's in constant danger and there's no escape for any of them, and is proven right (speaking of which, doesn't Joey being the one wrangling all the stray Lost Ones who almost escape make much more sense if 1: he's the literal center of the hive mind, so he can see exactly where those infected thoroughly enough with the right kind of ink are and what they're doing – as @inkdemonapologist pointed out, Buddy was clearly not exposed to the same kind of ink as Sammy+, explaining why Joey could never find him but he apparently eventually knew all about Sammy's Bendy worship and everything – and 2: he's not the real boss, he's just another puppet trapped in Nathan's twisted games).

Altogether, you get quite the full picture, indeed, if you ask me.

Maybe they didn't have everything planned this way from the very beginning, maybe they worked it all in when they realized how well it works (Lord knows I've done that, myself, as a writer. Especially in my and my bestie's BATIM fanfic, funnily enough), but the patterns match way too perfectly, at this point.

I think it's fascinating how this shows off how all of Joey's behavior that we perceive as being “because he's just an egotistical jerkwad like that” – asserting dominance and superiority at every opportunity, complimenting himself and putting others down constantly, being a control freak, lashing out for no good reason, etc. – is also completely normal behavior for people who have no freedom, hate themselves, have been wronged by others, etc…

“That big question. Why? The biggest of all the ‘W’ questions, I have found over my years, and often the hardest to answer. Especially when the why disguises itself as something else.” ~ Joey Drew, The Illusion of Living, pg. 21 (emphasis added)

“‘What?’ The most used of the ‘W’ questions, and I think the most useless…” ~ Joey Drew, The Illusion of Living, pg. 33

…It's also a fascinating way to illustrate how trauma often causes someone to cause the same trauma in others (whether intentionally or unintentionally), who cause the same trauma in others as well (thinking of how Alice stole Boris from Henry and then kept dangling the hope of achieving the dream of saving Boris in front of him until finally his cherished one and his dream were destroyed in the most devastating way possible), spiraling on and on into countless vicious cycles… until somebody decides to be the one to break that cycle. 👀

I think Joey, himself, has attempted this at points besides when he contacted Henry, though the attempts were unsuccessful for many reasons. From the more-obvious “his brain was still in Nathan's blender” to… well, my next point:

Anyone notice that both Joey and Bill clearly dissociate? I've personally experienced events both like Joey's window story where a switch flipped in my brain and suddenly nothing felt real (I usually tell people it feels like I'm dreaming, but “watching a play” is also an accurate description. Also, holy heck, this poor guy has literally been surrounded by death since he was 10, no wonder he's such a mess) and like Bill's experiences of memory blackouts whilst his body runs on autopilot. Notice how similar Brant's reaction to dissociated Bill (“He seemed strangely out of sorts; maybe he was just drunk. But it was different. It spooked me a little.”) is to Sammy's reaction to Bendy's (Joey's) smile (“That smile… Something's just wrong with that smile.” By the way, why don't I remember anyone talking about how it's clearly implied that Mr. Unger could tell Joey's hand perfectly matches Bendy's hand print in DCTL? I was not expecting the connection between the two to just be… spelled out like that). This suggests to me (as someone who's heard similar descriptions of her dissociated self) that Joey's smiles are not always malicious in nature as people tend to assume, but a sign that he's in terrible shape and trying to cope. *Stares at Nathan's Elves and the Shoemaker note* It also seems that we get further confirmation that his coping smiles are frequently caused by Nathan (and that Nathan enjoys not only watching Joey suffer, but making his reaction to suffering that people find the most unsettling happen in front of large groups of people, as abusers do because it adds to the illusion that the victim is actually the villain) in his Angel & Devil play.

“Devil: You will allow it because it is an important detail and the devil is in the details. I leaned over at this moment and placed each of my index fingers at the edge of her lips and pushed slightly to make them turn up. A forced smile. Abby's eyes grew wide but she followed along. We hadn't practiced this but it felt right for the devil to do. Smile! The devil is in the details! The audience laughed again, this time with a bit of discomfort; the forced smile had something extra to it. Something unsettling. I loved that. I dropped my fingers and Abby shook her head at me.” ~ Joey Drew, The Illusion of Living, pg. 86

I now want to point out how it's when Bill is the most visibly frightened that Joey tries to share his “philosophy” with him— Joey literally tries and fails to share one of his biggest coping mechanisms with Bill just like how Bill tried and failed to share his own “time skipping” coping mechanism with his dad.

“I hadn't been paying any attention. Now I regretted it. I remember trying to explain to Father as a child this feeling of losing moments. He couldn't grasp the concept and had no desire to try harder. Mother had just died and he hardly had room for his own thoughts. I don't blame him. But if he'd understood, I'd felt back then, then maybe this could help him too. Help him skip past the scary things, the frustrating things, and just focus on what needed to be done.” ~ Bill Chambers, Bendy: The Lost Ones, pg. 56

“Joey leaned in, and with a slight smile he said, ‘Have you ever considered, my boy, that your reality is no more real than a dream I had last night?’ ‘I… had not considered that, no,’ I replied. ‘Well, consider it now.’ ‘I… will.’ …I had no idea what he meant, and I had no desire to consider my own existence in that way…” ~ Bill Chambers, Bendy: The Lost Ones, pg. 207-208

Both of these scenes have very interesting parallels to the first paragraph of Nathan's foreword…

“The Illusion of Living first made its way onto our shelves in 1942. This was a moment in our country's history full of angst and turmoil, and Joey Drew, who I had known since we were teenagers, thought that this book might be of help to a nation in crisis. Indeed, it is my firm belief that, had readers not been so deeply invested in stories about the horrors of the world and savage satire, or the complete opposite, desiring to close their minds with silly pointless diversion, they might have found a true vision his memoir/treatise. A true hope for the future and a model for how to live a life full of positivity. As it was, the sales upon the original release of the book were not what anyone hoped for, but Joey Drew, ever the optimist, didn't get upset. He knew the world would be ready for his words when the world was ready.” ~ Nathan Arch, The Illusion of Living, pg. 1

Ignoring how much more passive-aggressively Nathan says that people weren't in a headspace to listen, and the clear implication that he would absolutely adore if more people would adopt his favorite puppet's maladaptive coping mechanism (*stares at his note where he states that part of him hopes Joey actually knew that the studio was already struggling financially in 1942 because he prided himself on knowing his studio so well and another part hopes that he didn't know because others were lying to him rather than he was lying to himself* this note doesn't reek of sinister motives at all, Nathan /s), I think this is actually a moment of truth. I think Joey genuinely believed that his so-called “philosophy” could help people because it was basically the only thing that was keeping him in any semblance of one piece, maybe even the only thing keeping him alive… and, at some point, he came to understand that people tend not to hear someone who's trying to help when they're in the wrong mindset. Feels like that might give new context to Joey's “you should've pushed a little harder” comment to Henry… Could he have really meant, “I wish you'd tried again when I could hear you?”

I'd like to point out that there's actually even more weirdly specific repeated themes/imagery across DCTL, TIOL, and TLO…

…and I think it might be direct evidence that Joey's thoughts are leaking into the minds of the infected through the ink's hive mind (much like how Bill's thoughts about Alice in Wonderland and Joey's “philosophy” leaked into Constance and Brant's minds). I'm not just talking about how Buddy, Bill, and Constance are all almost pressured into drinking like Joey successfully was at ages fricking 15-17ish (perhaps their avoiding it is wish fulfillment for Joey?), or how everyone keeps on hearing that it's dangerous to ask questions…

In DCTL, Buddy talks about how the noises in his family's apartment made him think the building was alive and then later mentions that his eyes adjust to darkness much more quickly now that he's ink than they did when he was human; in TIOL, Joey uses the very same “living thing” descriptions for his childhood home and in the very same story talks about being very good at forcing his eyes to adjust to darkness quickly. “You just need to focus hard enough,” he says. This insistence that he can control involuntary bodily functions through sheer willpower continues throughout TIOL, including an insistence towards the end of the book that he's not affected by things like cold and hunger due to having such a strong mind; then, TLO begins with Bill and Brant expressing how impressed they were that Constance didn't seem cold in her swimsuit and wondering how that was before Constance explains that she was actually freezing, but she had to pretend for the camera, so she forced her body to behave as if it were comfortable (considering Bill's dad was in charge of the advertisement she was filling in for her sister in, that doesn't seem to bode well for Joey's reasons to pretend he's impervious to every completely normal limitation of the human body and mind under the sun)…

I dunno about you, but at this point I think it's confirmed that Buddy's comment at the beginning of DCTL, heavily implied to be especially important…

“This has always stayed with me: Of all the memories that are getting mixed up a bit in here, in this brain, in this head, this… this for some reason just sticks out. Right then when he clapped, the lights came back on. It was like they were waiting for him, it was like he was in control of them. He wasn't. But I made that connection back then. Somehow it made sense that maybe, just maybe, he had the power to do that. He didn't. And he doesn't. Don't let anyone make you think he does.” ~ Buddy Lewek, Dreams Come to Life, pg. 20 (emphasis added)

…(you mean there's someone besides Joey, with his weird hierarchy charts in the Employee Handbook, etc., who wants us to think that Joey has power??) 1: was insider information gained from the ink's hive mind, and 2: was a little more… metaphorical than we thought; not referring to magical powers, but instead just… power in general…

Continued in Part Three: My BATDR Timeline & Plot Twist Theories

Me and my friend Gacha Maria UwU had an impromptu theorizing session last night with the topic being

“What are Wilson’s motives?”

We cooked up a hypothesis that I figured made the most sense. 

“Wilson’s trying to obtain Audrey’s powers.”

He seems to be acting sort of like a higher-up but doesn’t look like he has any powers of his own. He wanted the lost ones to bring Audrey to him (“bring her to me”, he didn’t say he wanted her gone or d3@d, he just wanted her as a whole), perhaps for the reason of harvesting her powers for his own gain? By putting her through the studio it could potentially enhance and test Audrey’s powers, and at the end Wilson could just extract it without doing the dirty work himself. He wants a dark revival, well Audrey’s glowy power could definitely bring a revival alright.

Maria pointed out that Audrey must’ve accidentally stumbled into Wilson doing his evil schemes, and that might unfortunately be how she does end up inside the machine in the first place (“A pretty girl like you shouldn’t be wandering around all by yourself”). By that we could possibly tie Porter in too, he might’ve been what Wilson intended to be Audrey in the first place, but failed. He’s implied to have powers of his own by his bio, perhaps he was one of the failed conduits for the “revival”, having powers too weak to be used. Maybe that’s why he still retains some of his humanity because of that. 

The dark revival’s meaning is still somewhat vague honestly, but whatever it is, seems like Audrey would be crucial to it.

Ah yes, antagonist putting protagonist through a series of events to at last earn what the protag has gained. I am eyeing you aggressively, TMA and Kagepro.

Heidi and Big Steve

They’re wholesome as heck.

When Audrey said “Joey’s world is leaking into ours” has anyone ever wondered if that’s alluding to an ARG

Fun and totally not suspicious quiz