Through The Looking Glass, Or Understanding Windows And Their Relation To Colour Theory In OMORI

through the looking glass, or understanding windows and their relation to colour theory in OMORI

WARNING: MAJOR OMORI SPOILERS. PLEASE PLAY THE GAME FOR YOURSELF IT IS BEAUTIFUL

CONTENT WARNING: REFERENCES TO SUICIDE, DEATH, LOSS, AND GRIEF

READING-THIS WARNING: ITS VERY LONG IM SORRY I AM INCAPABLE OF SHUTTING UP AND I ALSO GO IN TANGENTS ALL THE TIME

I feel as though people miss the smaller symbols in this game.

Obviously it's easy to look at, say, flowers throughout the game, or what Something and Stranger demonstrate, or maybe even mirrors and our understanding of reflection, but there's plenty of symbols that people don't look at or write about, because they feel less relevant. Symbols are easy to overlook when you're no longer studying English Lit.

But I am your certified Wet Rat, and I spend hours overthinking this game, so I'm going to talk about what windows represent in Omori, and how this relates to colour theory.

There are several colours that are designed to remind players of the truth, or at least hint toward it, and these are bright red (light), saturated blue, and monochrome. These are all somewhat relevant here, so I'll go through them, and explain their connections with windows.

Windows as a Foreshadower of Truth, but also Repression

Before we discuss the relevance of red light shining through windows in foreshadowing Truth, we have to understand why they stand out among the rest of the house.

To do this, let's discuss saturated blue.

Saturated blue is a very deliberate choice - we know this from Omocat herself - it is the colour of the Phobias, and Sunny's house during Phobia sequences, as well as Basil's boss fight. The use of saturation conveys intensity and fear, and there is a sense of impending failure - we cannot "beat" any of these boss fights by normal means, but instead are doomed to lose or wait until Mari consoles us. This blue is also deliberately not black - this somewhat disconnects these segments from the Truth, because the ultimate purpose of the Phobia bosses is to provide a comparison between Mari saving Sunny's life and Sunny ending hers. Within the Basil boss fight, more features are monochrome, which ties it more closely with the Truth. (Saturated blue is also the colour of Hellmari, but she's more relevant when I talk about Spirit Mari later down the line.) It's prevalent in the Deeper Well, but notably absent from many Black Space rooms, who choose to use solid monochrome or other colours to convey emotion. It still exists within Black Space despite this.

Red (light, specifically in windows) is symbolic of distortion, but it also foreshadows the Truth creeping into Sunny's life. I am talking about red light in particular - while red is carefully used in the final boss fight, Red Space, several areas of further Black Space and in the Red Hands, red has more complex meanings in this game, where it depends entirely on the other colours around it (red and black represents malicious intention, red and white is more closely tied to repression, and red standing out against the Dreamworld is tied to Truth).

It is designed to feel wrong, the same way the encroaching fog across vast forest feels wrong, and the deeper well's atmosphere feels wrong. This discomfort is very well-captured throughout the game, and the careful use of red contributes to this.

In several segments, red light streaming through a window is shown to represent repression of Truth. We know that the sky was not red when Mari was killed - it was late afternoon, with some light streaming through the trees - so, in some ways, the Truth has already been distorted, being shown as worse and more horrific than the actual events. This is likely a result of Sunny's repression.

There is one particular moment where this glowing red light represents repression. This occurs in the Hikikomori Route, if you wake Sunny up during the night. You see several horror sequences relevant to the truth, and the piano room lit with a red glow. Entering it reveals this...

I'll talk more about the symbolism of that particular window later, but we know that the piano is being repressed here. Instead of the pure red light, we see the combination of black and red - which we know represents malicious intent - showing how Sunny's repression of the Truth has become more powerful than Sunny himself, and Omori is now taking over his mind.

Windows as a Door to the Truth

During the Truth sequence, there are red windows in almost every room, aside from backstage-like areas. We know from the previous section that this foreshadows the Truth, and the increasing number of these windows brings it to the player's attention, standing out more than it did previously. The same glow is also found coming from the TV in the first room. Sunny is notably drawn to this glow, as is the player, and you are also required to interact with (which implies potentially entering) the window in the Hospital sequence to proceed.

To understand windows acting as doors, we need to talk about the sliding glass door.

The sliding glass door in Omori is both a window and a door - letting in the eerie red light, but also letting the player (and Sunny) access it and understand it for the first time. This makes it the ultimate foreshadower of Truth, and we must enter it in order to view the entirety of the Truth photo album.

Sunny never represses the sliding glass door, but will refuse to go outside until forced by his friends in Faraway visiting the Treehouse. In the real world, it is shaded over, making it impossible for the player to see through (save for a short Stranger encounter). This opaque nature is present in the Truth segment as well, except it is glowing red.

You can't see through it, but you can finally enter it.

This door leads us to the peak combination of our colour theory.

To the eyes, this first looks like a fade between red and purple, but the only possible relevance purple would have is its association with Mari.

This colour scheme is actually the result of a fade between red and saturated blue. Combining the colours of the Phobias, fear, as well as Mari's support and safety, and the day of the Phobias' creation; and the Truth, repression, and the fateful day of the recital. Although subtle, this is the game's big comparison, and the main purpose of mentioning the creation of the Phobias at all.

These two days are designed to compare Mari and Sunny, increasing his guilt as he remembers the way his sister generously saved his life, and remembers what he did to kill her.

Windows as a Symbol of Ascension

Monochrome is a key colour associated with Truth in Omori, and it does so in a relatively obviously. It is the colour of White Space, Black Space, Something, Stranger, and, notably, the colours of the photos that show the player the Truth. In this way, monochrome simultaneously represents repression of the Truth and the past; but also the desire to uncover it. Areas and characters that contain more black than they do white tend to represent truth, whereas the opposite tend to represent repression, save for portions of the Final Duet and the Hospital, where white represents acceptance. White also symbolises Sunny, shown in the pinwheels, and it has further meaning in the multiple flowers associated with it.

Spirit Mari is also associated with monochrome, her sprites existing in this colour. We contrast this to Hellmari, who is coloured in the saturated blue beforehand, and we can start to understand the mechanics of Headspace as a whole.

Despite Stranger's quote, Sunny, Basil and Mari are all split in halves, each half with different goals. Sunny, although he doesn't always know it, wants to seek the Truth; but Omori wants to repress it. Stranger wants to free the real world's Basil; but Headspace Basil is a representation of desire, the idea that everything is okay. In a similar way, Spirit Mari wants Sunny to seek forgiveness, and Hellmari is a hallucination of a Mari who would never forgive him.

I personally do not believe that Spirit Mari is Mari's actual spirit trying to communicate with Sunny - as much as that is a nice thought, and even though it is backed up with meaning of the White Egret Orchid, I choose to believe that Spirit Mari is Sunny's own desire for acceptance. As much as Sunny hates himself, the game is about seeking and forgiving yourself for what happened that day, and that requires this hidden desire, which is channeled through Mari.

The window above the piano room is found in several locations in Headspace. It is found in the first Black Space room, just above the first ever key you collect, and Mari is found hallucinated in front of it several times in the Real World. It is an important reminder of the real world, everything Sunny is leaving behind.

Spirit Mari also ascends through the this window during the North Lake sequence, and again during the Final Duet.

The whiteness of the area is highlighted with a light, pastel blue. Unlike the horror of saturation, pastel in-game represents peace and purity, being directly contrasted with each other. Pastel isn't symbolic of repression, although it is the main theme during the happier segments of Headspace. These particular colours - white and pastel blue - are also found in the Hospital, and in the final scene of the good ending. Pastel means acceptance, and it means there is no need to "saturate" the events of the recital day.

Here, the colour gradient, and Mari ascending through the window, are symbols of freedom. Sunny has accepted the Truth, and can now properly grieve his lost sister in peace. Simultaneously, you could argue Mari's spirit is finally free - she isn't tied down by Sunny's repression, and her ascending through the window is symbolic of finally entering the afterlife.

sorry for going so off-topic. as with most of my analyses, the idea came to me at 5am when i was half-asleep and i just had to write it out. lmaooooo.

a place between unreality and lucidity, or understanding the intentions of Chapter 12

CONTENT WARNING: DISCUSSIONS OF DEATH, SUICIDE, AND ABUSE. I ALSO TALK A LOT ABOUT LUCID DREAMING, WHICH CAN BE DISSOCIATIVE FOR READERS, SO PLEASE TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF.

SPOILER WARNING: REFERENCED YUME NIKKI AND OMORI SPOILERS, AND OBVIOUSLY, DREAMSCAPE SPOILERS.

We're back bois, and we're back with my favourite chapter.

I love Chapter 12 so much, the same way I adore the Truth Sequence in Omori. Originally I was going to compare the two, but I realised there's little overlap other than the intentions they're written with.

...so I wrote about the intentions instead. The little bitch boy intentions. You'll see what I mean.

Buckle up, this one takes some insane turns. I had wild epiphanies while churning all this out in a couple hours. I think I may be losing my mind.

understanding what I mean by "lucidity", and discussing dreams as plot devices

Lucidity is a very particular type of plot device that I find difficult to describe - it is a specific type of fragmented narrative that fragments location, exploring an impossibility that often has links to deeper meaning. Typically it is an abstract way of foreshadowing or revealing something to the reader, and it mirrors the concept of a "liminal space".

Dreams in texts have been used as a method of foreshadowing for hundreds of years. While the human brain has no ability to predict the future, but only reframe the past, the uncontrollable fragments of memory that are spat back out at you during unconsciousness have captured human fascination since we first started sleeping.

Dreamscape itself isn't a dream, but it is a different form of consciousness, and the creator has stated that Chapter 12 draws a lot from lucid dreaming, which suggests this counts as part of the 'Lucidity' narrative trope. As someone who does not dream much, I find this shit fascinating. Like I'm sure it's horrific as hell but. It seems so fucking cool.

Perhaps some of the best examples of the use of lucid dreaming to form narrative are Yume Nikki and its fangames, as well as Omori. Yume Nikki was a catalyst for the creation of many RPG maker horror games, and it's an excellent piece of work. No concrete story, just wandering an endless abyss of Madotsuki's mind, observing the horrors within it. The fangames branched off this concept (I personally recommend .flow ) and added more aspects, but never being concrete about the trauma.

Things are illogical in the Yume Nikki dreamverse, but they don't have to be logical, and things don't have to make sense to the player - it is purely up for speculation. At the same time, we know it has to mean something. There's an innate sense of exploration and meaning in dreams, despite the real life version often being meaningless bullshit.

This is where Omori explicitly diverts - it outright states what happened on the Recital day, in a short, distorted sequence known ominously as "The Truth". While the entire game is about lucid dreaming, this section captures the horror due to the illogical nature of it, where Sunny travels from his living room, to a hospital, to stairs, his bedroom, backstage... things are wrong. At the same time, the player is focused on completing the album and collecting the polaroids, with the confusing nature of the locations building to the horror of the final moment.

Despite all this, none of these sequences are the big moment, or even nearing the climax.

Yume Nikki doesn't have a big moment, unless you see the ending as significant enough for that title. It is a game about wandering unreality, and without a plot, it can't have a climax. It uses lucidity to provide a sense of narrative, even when there isn't one, tricking the player into trying to comprehend an impossible universe.

Omori is not building up to that that one sequence, but rather, it is a stepping stone leading to the Final Duet, which is the true climax of the game. It's an emotional release for Sunny and the player, a sense of finality in a game without a proper "ending". The Truth sequence is merely a way for the player to understand plot and build horror, and without the Truth's photo album... we would understand nothing at all. An impossible universe.

This leads to my big theory...

the purpose of chapter 12 - you can't understand it

Chapter 12 is a lying piece of shit and won't admit to us more than cookie crumbs about the future of the Dreamscape universe. And I still love it. And here's why.

Due to the abstract nature of it, we can't understand it. Perhaps Sunny can, to some extent, but since we're not sure the cause nor purpose for it, we can't understand it. We can speculate, but we can't understand. Just like Yume Nikki, we might never properly understand what each segment means.

Here's some little nuggets I've been scrambling through for information.

The beginning talks about time and distortion of it, which mimics some of the issues with time Sunny has in real life. This may be foreshadowing his eviction or declining physical state.

Body horror is incredibly prevalent, particularly self-mutilation. This has several implications, but it likely hints to Sunny's feelings for himself. It may also foreshadow what Mari looked like during the Recital day scene, which I'm starting to realise hasn't actually been shown yet. Interesting.

While this is one of the first times we see Mari as more than a virus or a corpse in the text, it's also completely distorted by Sunny's unreliable narration. Despite the slightly manipulative conversation held between them, Sunny is completely frozen in grief, desperate to beg for her forgiveness.

Sunny sits there with her pain in that hospital, insisting he deserves it. It hints further to Sunny's declining mental state, but that doesn't tell us anything more than his own self-loathing. Both this and the above point foreshadow Mari's potentially abusive nature.

Sunny is completely determined to stay within the lucid dream, and is also very insistent that Mari is somewhere at the end, which turns out to be right. How he knows this is not shown to the reader.

Segments of this are related to Mari's own memory, which provides us with a better understand of the VHS system, and of the accident that lead to her suicide.

The lucid dream is a representation of Sunny's unending trauma through what he perceives to be Mari's eyes, perhaps even a representation of what he feels he needs to do for her forgiveness.

We also learn a bit more about Pianoboy, who we know is a clone of Sunny, and he specifically highlights a connected feeling of isolation. At the same time, it has to go further than that, but we're again limited by understanding. There's more, but not enough to guess what 'more' means.

But those tidbits mean nothing. And I can't do much more than spew nonsense about segments, with no ultimate conclusion.

Because Chapter 12 is not designed to be understood, but rather, it's something to look back on when you finally do understand. It's foreshadowing in its most complex form, hinting ominously to what you don't understand. It is also similar to Black Space in this way - no-one can figure out the truth of the Recital Day from Black Space alone.

I could spend hours trying to understand every symbol, every room, the essence of Chapter 12 itself, and fuck me because i totally would but ultimately, it's all fragments of a deeper narrative, more complex than our limited understanding.

And it's a horrible, horrible thing to do to a reader. An unanswerable segment, dangling understanding right in front of their nose, but making it unreachable. Haunting them with the human desire to see patterns in chaos. What utter cruelty. How could you do this to me, @omoriboii. Why would you do this to me, the analysis God, with the most overthink-y brain in existence, and yet give me, ultimately, nothing to lead to. Why leave me a crumb to look back on, something I can never understand with the information I hold. I may be stupid, but I can understand when I am beat.

It's perfection.

why even torture someone with the inability to understand?

Building horror is incredibly difficult, because it's so easy to do foreshadowing incredibly wrong. We've all seen horror movies that are so bad they're funny, relying entirely on petty jumpscares, terrible props and showing off the killer way too fast-

Wait a minute. Showing off the killer too fast ruins everything? Dammit, I wanted to flex my big sharp knife. That's right guys. I'm the serial killer of this blog. ?????

Anyway, demonstrating the inability to understand something to the reader is a common feeling that gets the emotional brain hooked and the cogs whirring in the logical segments. You need to understand. You develop theories, you discuss them with others, seeking evidence, only to find something that changes your view, ruining everything, forcing you to start again. Being teased is fun. I am kinky

That's my favourite feeling of all time. It's why I spent hours searching for that again after I played Omori. I still remember my first theories of the truth of the game, right up until the one I had just before I discovered the real Truth. Even after that, there was more for me to analyse. Analysis. I love analysis. Yk?

I love a good challenge, and analysing these segments are so much of a challenge that I actually can't do it, which is why I get so hyped over it. Why do I do this to myself?

I actually don't really know how to end this, but I think you get my point. It's fun. I like it. I love suffering. uhh. dreams cool.

new bit: song i wrote this listening to.

today's song, the main title theme from Tomorrow Won't Come for those without.

i needed a reminder of what horrible liminality feels like, and that goddamn game does it better than anyone. i love it so much. thanks, etherane, your games cursed me with a sick desire for unreality.

special thanks to all the games who ever bullied me for having boring ass dreams.

ooooh yesss more VHS lore. The devices themselves quite literally need their own computers just to run, as they're constantly tasked to read sensors covering parts of the player's body _and_ run a game at the same time. The consoles went through multiple iterations before eventually being discontinued. However, just about everyone who owns one has cracked it in order to keep using it. As mentioned in a few chapters though, this hasn't been an entirely 'ethical' or 'safe'. Thing. Reports of injuries have been cropping up left and right, with Chapter 6 showing Basil to be one of them. It only gets worse from here.

posting tiny snippets of fanfic until someone finds it interesting and i am motivated to finish it, part 2

warning: major omori spoilers, mentions of death.

[KEL MULTIVERSE 1 - 332]

Kel pulled out a small glowing tulip bud from his backpack, white, clear and crystalline, made of glass. It reflected the glow of the blue fire, but it also flickered with its own blue colour. Kel could almost see the universe held inside it, a calm sunset, four friends; then a cold graveyard, a delusional child. 

That one was a fucking disaster. Again.

At least he now knew ‘The Truth’ for that Kel. Although, really, the killing of someone else always seemed to set off the chain of death. 

Murderers, that’s what we all are, Kel thought to himself, rotating the glass.

Resisting the urge to smash it into pieces, he sighed, tossing it into the river. After all, he might have to fish all these out again sometime, so it would be worth trying to keep the functional ones around, but out of sight. He watched the glow dim as the flower sank into the acidic waves, like a lost ship taking its final breaths.

As he drifted off to sleep, Kel wondered how many crystalline flowers he had left. How much time he had left. The world closed in around his fear, where he would sleep through nightmares in numbed horror.

In these nightmares, he watched everyone die over and over, dead bodies being dragged to hiding places and graves being dug, weeping parents. He saw an echo of his past self relive the worlds again and again, a naive child who thought positivity would solve everything, banging at closed doors and crying quietly in a bathroom, breakdowns in front of five corpses. He saw only failure and husks, shells of humanity. 

Happiness doesn’t work. Happiness stopped working.

Tonight, yet again, there was a girl with dark brown hair, clutching a stuffed toy, happy and innocent… a girl with faded pink dye in her hair, clutching her hands, empty inside… a girl with bright pink hair and green coloured contacts, gripping a bat, furious… a boy with blue hair and a beanie,... many more, standing around him, enclosing him… but they all had the same golden eyes, the ones that bore into him.

My name’s Aubrey. Who are you? 

Hey. Who are you?

New kid, huh? Who are you, then?

I’m Rei. Who are you?

They repeated the questions, but he had no answer. He couldn’t speak, words failed him, so they encircled him like sharks, bats looming over his head, sky darkening, vision darkening…

Who have you become?

Kel turned in his sleep, covering his head as if to block something out.

Outside his mind, feeble glows pulsed synchronically at the bottom of the river, distress calls for dead universes.

I think an Omori 2 staring Basil would fall into the same trap as Subnautica (2) below zero.

Subnautica Below Zero is an awesome game! IF it would have been the first. It is literally smaller in map size and less scarier in nearly every way.

An Omori 2 might find itself in the shadow of the Original, in many aspects.

Omori 2, if it even comes to exist (hope not), might honestly ruin the franchise as a whole. Although the team seems to be milking what they can, with merch and the manga, so it's still relatively popular.

I can see, what, a few functional (?) possibilies:

Your Basil idea could work. I wouldn't trust it unless all assets were completely rewritten, and everything was entirely changed, because if not, it demonstrates a very poor understanding of trauma. I can't really stand people who try to give Basil or anyone else a White Space, it just misses the point of representing dissociation and repression. Different characters value different things, and their trauma manifests differently. Even as minor things as people assuming Basil can actually see Sunny's Something and isn't viewing a different hallucination are incredibly and dangerously damaging.

A potential Mari AU might work, but it would have the same problem. It would also need to have better twists or other convoluted, since the original game's twist was so central to its current fandom.

I really hope that Omori 2 never exists, genuinely. As much as I love the original game, its irreplaceability is key to its charm.

posting tiny snippets of fanfic until someone finds it interesting and i am motivated to finish it, part 4

content warning: gore, drowning.

[MARI - 25]

Mari plummeted through the grass, soil swallowing her up, suffocating her with darkness, she was drowning just like he did. Her hands disappeared and the Puppeteer’s gnarled fingers wrapped around her throat, yet you still did it you still did it you still did it you still did it

Mari gasped for air, choking in an inky black ocean, and the Puppeteer tightened its grip. She tried to scream out, but no words could be heard, her ears filled up with swollen water, leaking into her mind, fading out, the Puppeteer’s limbs tangled with her, pulling her down, lower and lower and lower and lower…

Mari crashed onto solid ground. The Puppeteer was gone.

She looked around, picking up her shovel. A small note was written on the handle.

A shovel for burying your sins.

A movie theatre. Everything was dark like the ocean. Rows of seats stretched on forever, down to a brightly lit stage. The stage had nothing on it.

Shh! The movie is about to start!, said No-One. The theatre was empty. 

Mari moved down the stairs, shielding her eyes from the light. Something drew her to it. Her fingers were missing. 

Shh! The movie is about to start!, repeated No-One. Shh! The movie is about to start!

Her hands were missing. She dropped the shovel, but she kept walking.

Shh! The movie is about to start! A chorus sang those words piercingly, like a choir at a church. Shh! The movie is about to start!

Her arms were missing. She reached the stage.

Shh! The movie is about to start!

Mari looked down. Her body was missing. She was missing. 

You are meant to be here.

A man with a crooked neck stared at her with harshly dyed black hair. His eyes were white scribbles. He was the movie.

You were born to be here.

The man reached into her neck and pulled out her throat.