The Villain of Edith Finch 

Excuse me, that shark falling down the hill is an artistic masterpiece.

And the hero they deserved was child protective services.

Walter's line "Even a monster on the other side of the door starts to feel normal" is revealing because Walter is separated from the train by a wall, but he is separated from Edie by a door.

Edie’s shrines are definitely to the family members’ deaths, not them themselves and their lives. Like, Barbara is immortalized forever with her crutch, inspiring Edith to add it to her own drawing of her in the journal, and it’s what Walter keeps to remember her by in the bunker; through the glorification of her death, it’s turned into this iconic item. But that wasn’t her crutch! It was her boyfriend’s! She only held it once that we know of when she was defending herself from whoever her attacker was in reality. It wasn’t important to her at all in life, but it was part of her death. So it’s one of the key things that represents her.

One more chilling detail: "Last time I was in Edith Sr. Room was when I was 10 and she was painting my portrait." Edith says this when looking through Edie's peephole. This could mean Edie was already trying to memorialize Edith.

Finally someone said it! "You don't leave a baby alone in the bath!" The whole time during this scene I was yelling at the mom.

The worst part to me is that Edith Sr. put the plaque for Gregory on the door of the bathroom, where he would have died, and not his room. It would have been a constant reminder.

i love the way the devs portrayed dawn as kind of a bitch, even someone childish with sealing the rooms while edie was the supportive grandmother as you're first going through the game. Then as you progress you realize that dawn has extremely good reasons for acting that way, and maybe edie is a bit more nefarious than just the kindly grandmother.

The shark is the best thing in all of gaming. You may say it looks crap but I love that shark with every fiber of my being

The line "Every Finch is buried somewhere in the library" is now more creepy

Don’t know if anyone has already said this but something that occurred to me was that it actually makes total sense that Molly would envision death/the family curse coming for her as a sea monster since probably the first story she had heard of the curse was when Odin Finch went down at sea with the old house. To a little girl, it’s probably like a sea monster had swallowed him whole, and I wouldn’t put it past Edith Sr. to make it sound that way when she described it to Molly.

Just a little detail, but Edith mentions how Lewis was quite proud of being Indian, and the architecture of the palace, the sitar, the Eastern styled soldiers and the turban wearing prince are a nod to this :)

Regarding Edie's death and her door, I assumed she intentionally killed herself rather than leave the house, and that she spent that last night drilling the peephole, putting her name on the door, and sealing it up so her room would match all the others. It would make complete sense for someone like Edie to already have her own fancy door decorations ready for her own death.

It's kind of horrifying how the entire Finch family is borderline suicidal. Like a soldier who seeks a glorious death, they take their death as some sort of badge of honor.

I love that Dawn, for all her contentious relationship with her mother, still named her daughter Edith after her. Really adds to the game showing how hard generational trauma is to escape even if you recognize it.

A) Walter was in his 20s when he went to go live in the basement. B) Walter's calendar read 2005 in the end when the original one was in 1975 or so. This means that Edie was repeatedly giving Walter new calendars to make him understand he'd been wasting his life. She offered no support. Or love. He was only a moleman to her C) When you enter Barbara's room, the first thing you see is a replica of Barbara's body with a severed head This story is so haunting

Fun Fact: I have always been afraid of going all the way round on a swing no idea why, so actually having to make a character do it was way to intense.

There’s a huge hint in Edie’s room about her pride in enshrining the dead in the form of binders. Three, thick as hell binders labeled “shrine sketches” “Barbara sketches” “Molly sketches” Even her pet birds have their own tiny shrines, with portraits of them inside their cage next to the window you come in. I remember thinking “how insane do you have to be to literally fill up a binder of sketches for your dead children’s gravestones?”

The mistake about Edie and Lewis' rooms being sealed can be explained as Edie spending her last few moments turning both of their rooms into shrines, just like the other rooms.

I also find the name “dawn” really interesting. Every other character in the story has a common historical name, but dawn, the only one who understood what was going on, has a modern name meaning “new beginning”

you can hear the narrator's voice crack when talking about the baby's death. I feel like it really hit him home with that one

I like to think that Milton figured the truth about the "curse" and ran away, leaving behind that flipbook as an explanation for his disappearance that he thought his family wasn't mentally well enough to see through.

I know I'm super late to the party but there is one thing I noticed just recently about the house, it's that the garden and the forest have foxglove everywhere Foxglove is a highly poisonous flower, so having them on your property when there are children around is just waiting for an accident to happen I really like this detail, this idea that this family is just poisoning itself out of negligence, and that it is their own inaction and carelessness that kills them. They believe so much in their curse that they make it happen, they tempt fate all the time because they think it's all set in stone anyways. It's subtle and almost meaningless in the grand scheme of the story but it's so telling and I love it

I’m one to agree that the very nature of the Finch household is a hazard in of itself. While you did say that the swing being very close to a poorly built fence and on a cliff, I’d also like to mention that the whole house is built in such a way that it looks like it’s only being held together by magic. I’m really surprised none of the Finches died by misstepping near the edge of the balconies.

The two details that are the most unsettling to me are young Sam's bedroom and Dawn's bedroom. Young Sam shared a room with his dead brother's completely untouched room, and Dawn eventually wound up sleeping in a tiny alcove with a view of the memorials to her two dead brothers. It's just such a grim picture, seeing Dawn's comfy little living space full of books and decorations and turning to the right to see Gregory's cradle.

Nice detail: Lewis dreaming of visiting the distant kingdom isn't a random choice either. In the map he goes to Calcutta, the same place his father, Sanjay was from, obviously because of the Orientalist stories Edie had told him about the place.

When my sister died at the age of seven (she was in a car accident with my paternal grandmother. Both passed). My mom hired a family therapist and my Dad didn’t want us to touch her room. It lay untouched for a year. Her toys were right where she left them, bed undone, and her homework still on the desk. Then the therapist slowly brought up the option of quietly cleaning it and eventually spending time in it. I now know she did this because the concept of keeping things as is can be more harmful then good. That not moving on can cause things like the fall of a family or ideas of “curses”. Which is why this game really got under my skin. I’ve had a “shrine” in my home and luckily my Dad finally let us make little changes. It took him over ten years to finally fully begin to move on. It was easier for me because I was three when she passed and she’s more of an idea. A voice I only hear in home movies. It’s been over twenty years and our family is still going and curse free. We visit her on Christmas and birthdays. My parents didn’t divorce and my remaining siblings do not speak of her like a saint. She stole things from our older sister, and pulled pranks like all kids. She was also a sweet girl and I’m sure she would’ve grown up to be a chef. We live with a strange trauma, but we’re okay. I can’t say the same for Edie Finch.

Walter's death always hits me the hardest. I think it's because he got so close to experiencing freedom and real happiness and it was violently ripped away from him at the last second. The last line of his letter will never fail to make me tear up, it's absolutely heartbreaking.

From my experience, food poisoning often feels like a deep hunger at first, so Molly's dream makes sense to me.

One of the things I have only now pieced together after watching this, was one of the reactions I kept having while I was playing. There are books, EVERYWHERE. As someone who is a self-proclaimed book worm, I kept thinking to myself while playing that there were so many books. Now, looking back, I realized that it might have been a clue from the developers that STORIES are the danger. The house is engulfed in a story of this curse, and so Edie probably surrounded herself with books. Its common for someone suffering form serious paranoia/mental illness, to rely on escapism. This could be that tie.

Its almost as if the circumstances of their deaths outweigh their lives in Edith's point of view. The romanticization of their tragic falls are shown to be so important from a young age that they internalize their own demise before they ever have a chance to find their own identity. Their identity is their death.

It was also mentioned by Edith that she saw Edie bringing food and supplies in Walter's supply part of his bunker where she thought she was "hiding presents". Edie didn't just allow Walter to live under the house like a moleman instead of bringing him to therapy, she also encouraged his behavior by bringing him supplies and restocking his food so that he won't ever need to leave his bunker ever again. That woman is seriously messed up...

the fact that you can hear people crying out in fear and panic as Lewis bows his head down… holy _shit_

"What remains of Edith Finch" doesn't refer to the Edith Finch we control in this game. It refers to "the curse", her morbid mania, passed from Edith Jr. to her son. He goes to a house he didn't grow up in because of the story Edith Jr. wrote because Edith Finch Sr. told her to. Edie Finch remains.

Another thing pointing to Edie being responsible for Molly's death in particular is that Molly as the cat and bird highlights that she's chasing and eating a "mummy bird" then just a "rabbit" and THEN a "mummy rabbit". I think this demonstrates that Molly had picked up on a lack of care from Edie, and maybe felt like she was being a burden to her family in some way. Her being a "monster" - through behaving badly like young kids do - leads to her upsetting her mother and getting locked in her room, leading to her own death. Molly doesn't blame the curse in her dying writings, she blames herself :( A great game, thanks for the 2nd suggestion to stop and play it, I really loved playing through it 😀

For Barbara's story: another clue that the boyfriend killed her is from the narrator. The narrator refers to Barbara's BF as her "biggest fan". He also then refers to the 'monsters' that kill her as "fans" that came to celebrate her. I think it's implying that the BF's sick obsession with Barbara (as a character, not a person) overcame him that night, and he hurt/killed her in anger to hear her scream. Probably after the failed scare, like you mentioned. So the BF was the monster after all.

I mostly came to the same conclusions. It first hit me when I realized how insane it would be to keep raising a child within the same room he grew up with his twin, not changing a thing, and even keeping the chalk marks while adding on to the surviving child. Imagine being Sam, growing up with a constant reminder of your dead twin, right in front of you, when you go to sleep, when you wake up, when you hang out to do your homework or whatever. Edie is batshit crazy. Also, something that suddenly occurred to me - how did Dawn ever got found and rescued after her dad fell to his death? This is a fantastic game.

The foxglove (a poisonous, sometimes deadly plant) surrounding the house is such a nice touch that I didn't notice till later on

I’m surprised no one talks about the insane amount of wine and liquor bottles in the house. May not be abuse related but certainly neglect at a minimum (of the children). Outside swinging on the swing set , unsupervised while parent(s) are inside plowing through wine.

I think what is especially ironic about Sam's death, is that he is a Vietnam vet. He survived what was some of the most traumatic and deadly events for many people, but what did him in in the end was a peaceful hunting trip.

The Lewis section of the game is actually phenomenal.

I remember seeing a theory about how historically many “family curses” were actually mental illness being passed down, i think thats what this was about, many of them died because delusion or how they see the world

The thing about Edie keeping death reminders of the family and things that were even disrespectful to the dead is one of the most clear signs of her obssession to me. If I keep my dead dog's collar, her toys, pictures of her, it's clearly just a way to keep a part of her with me. To keep her alive in the smallest, ordinary details. But if I mummify my dog's dead body and keep her posed somewhere in my house for me to look at her corpse every day, it's clearly sickening and agonizing. Keeping a reminder of the dead is not keeping a reminder of their death. It is keeping a memory of when they were living.

As the father of a 1-year-old at the time of playing this game and also someone who has struggled with ADHD, Gregory's death was painful to get through as the thought of losing a child through a sudden lapse of attention is without a doubt my single worst fear. It was the first time I wished a game had come with a trigger warning.

I interpreted walter's story as paranoid delusion. His sister's death traumatized him badly, but on top of that his other sister was supposedly killed by a "monster" and his mother was obsessed with a curse that was coming to get them all. In his mind, the rattle of the train passing by was a monster at his door. The shaking WAS the monster. He conflated his fear with the tremors until the two were the same. The monster comes for him at 12 every day. One day, the monster doesn't show up-- the train is running late. He decides to make his escape. But the train makes its late appearance, and Walter is killed by the monster anyway. That's how I interpreted it in my playthrough, at least. It makes sense to me, because I think most/all of the Finches have an underlying predisposition to mental illness. It would make sense that Walter's trauma could intensify delusions and cause them to become paranoid and debilitating.

I think it's also very telling that Edith decided to put a book as the decoration to her tombstone. Every grave has a sculpture of something that characterizes each of the respective Finches buried there, usually their passion: Sven had a saw for woodworking, Calvin a moon and a rocket for his love of space, Molly a cat for her kitty ears and her fantastical transformation, etc... Edith had many talents. She was a painter, she did embroidery, she possibly even picked up sculpting. But on her own grave she chose to put a book with floating words as the thing that represented her the most, showing that first and foremost, she considered herself a storyteller.

16:00 I only realized this now but it makes sense for the boy to be this scared of going out. Because he actually IS hiding from a "monster". He wasn't just traumatized from seeing his sister get killed. He also saw who did it. He probably felt like he might get killed next.

This is so mind-blowing to me because I have never thought that Edie could be the problem and I actually felt bad when Dawn took Edith and just left her like that. And it further makes me realize how easily I got carried away by the storytelling and felt obsessed about the family curse and death, maybe just like many of the family members.

I just thought of something, Sam is the only character who writes twice about other members of the family, Calvin and Gregory, the way he talks about both of their death tells you a lot about how this romantisation of the curse affected him mentally. He tells us in his letter for Calvin that he finally managed to fly, in the way a child would to comprehend death but the way Edie justificies it all in the curse, and not on the fact that her own son plunged to his death because of neglect, prevents Sam from comprehending death as anything but glorious and mystical. So when he son dies he doesn't tells it for what it is, the horrific death of drowning baby, but as something beautiful to some degree, he tells his wife that Gregory was happy after all. I feel like it's a given but I don't think anyone would rationalize it that way, anyone but someone that has always understood death as being the accomplishment of their family legacy essentially.

I saw a 52 minute video, and thought to myself: “I’m not gonna watch this whole thing.” I watched the whole thing. Take my sub, you hypnotizing bastard.

I really really appreciate that the story doesn't pin down the "curse" to any one thing- many family members have significant signs of mental illnesses (mostly Bipolar and Scizophrenia) but not all, many family members die from outright neglect but some from fully natural causes, and Edith's son is shown to have a bit of the Finch carelessness despite knowing nothing of his family prior to this. It's somehow realistic and supernatural that way.

It's truly sick that they named the bathroom that Greg died in "Greg's room". It's like they think he's haunting it or something, imagine the pain his mother must have felt from witnessing or hearing about the "shrine" Edie made to "honor" the death of an one year old by his mom. Fucking disgusting.

I know this video’s 3 years old already but since it wasn’t very obvious, and no one has seemed to figure it out yet, the true cause of death of Gus was that the giant totem pole crushed him. You see in the flashback that when the wind and his kite picks up the tent, it hits the totem pole causing it to rock, and then the camera goes out of frame as Gus stumbles to the ground. When as Edith on the beach we see the totem pole knocked over on the beach right where Gus was standing in the flashback.

I like to think that Edie's door is sealed shut because we're seeing Edith's son's interpretation of the story he's reading. He may have read that the doors were sealed with peepholes early on and imagined that all of them were sealed in that way, even when it wouldn't make sense for them to be. I see it as another reminder of the unreliable narrator.

It's kinda chilling and tragic that despite Dawn having realized what was actually going on, she still failed to protect her children from the family curse. She tried too hard to protect Lewis, trapping him in a normal job and a mundane life, which only made him long for the kind of fantastical lives the rest of his family lived, leading him to commit suicide. Milton straight up ran away. And by the time she tried to get her remaining family away from the house (something which she should've done a long time ago) it was too late. The curse had already taken hold of her daughter. Edith Sr's stories had already planted a seed in Edith Jr's mind, which is why she comes back to the house despite being 22 -months- weeks pregnant. And because of the book/journal Edith Jr wrote, the curse has probably taken a hold of her son too. That's why he also comes to explore the house.

Honestly as depressing Gregory's and Lewis' deaths were, I can't help but think that Walter's death might've been the most cruel one He lived for 3 whole decades in a basement because the death of his older sister traumatized him so much. Three decades. Having every day be a carbon copy of the last. And the moment he ventured out, the moment he found a chance to live again, he dies When I was first playing the game and at his part, I first tried out to go back up the basement, but a small object on the ground didn't allow me to do so. I thought at first that it was just a gameplay thing, and I might've been, but I think it also tells that he had no other way. That his mind was so damaged that he couldn't have taken the normal way, back to the floor where his sister was killed

In Gus's memory you're stood next to a totem poll. When you're walking from the beach to the cemetary that same totem poll has fallen, I'm pretty sure that's what killed Gus during the storm.

I think that Edith's son’s bandage at the beginning might represent the inevitability of the ‘curse’, as he was already growing into the reckless nature that the Finches were famed for, and died from.

I'm sorry, as someone with Maladaptive Daydream Disorder, Lewis's bit with the daydream was waaaaay too realistic. It stuck a bit too close to home and when I played it, I cried a little bit, not gonna lie. Yes, it does take over your life. Yes, I'm only really able to pay attention to about a quarter of my life. Yes, I do feel like I'm missing out on all the good stuff in life due to my brain trying to block out the bad stuff. Yes, it's fun. Yes, I blame my dad for not letting me take medication for my ADHD, Depression, or Anxiety, all of which can cause MaDD. Yes, I too was suicidal in the past. All I can say to other people who feel like this and are underaged like me is it does get better. It might not seem like it, but it will, I promise. Go talk to someone you trust, go get ice cream, go sit in the park for a few minutes. Do what you can to help yourself.

I've been reading this book ("I dont want to talk about it" by Terrence Real) for one of my classes and it talks a lot about how it takes three generations for the effects of family traumas to really start to fade and I was thinking about that a lot watching the second half of this video essay... we discussed in class how maybe part of this could be because generally only three generations of a family will be alive at the same time, and the eldest generation's influence is only direct so long as they are present... It prompts the idea for me that maybe, now that Edie has died, Edith's son might be able to heal and the curse could start to dissipate now that the only direct connection he has to the Finch family (outside of blood ties) is the book Edith left him. This essay was wonderful and very thought provoking!!! I definitely agree with the observations of negligence, and I hadn't really considered the game in the light of Edie's enjoyment of the attention the curse garnered, but now that I can see it, I don't think I can view the game through any other lens.

Gregory always gets me. He was the only Finch who was completely and utterly helpless to his fate.

I’m incredibly late to the party here, but another interesting thing to note would be the extensive pet cemetery. I feel like pet deaths are often notoriously attributed to neglect or mistreatment, which would go along quite nicely with the theory that the Finches are just careless by nature. Absolute quality video, btw!

I'm prone to magical thinking. I think magical thinking is interconnected with inherited family trauma. It took me playing this game twice to realise that the fantastical elements of these stories were due to unreliable narrators, and not that supernatural things had actually happened. I'm surprised about how easily I bought into the story I was served, and that kind of low-key scares me.

It’s been a few years but I i’d like to point out that molly actually ate holly berries, not mistletoe. Correct me if i’m wrong. I might be mistaken on this. The common christmas holly can be easily mistaken for mistletoe and holly can have some not so nice effects on children when compared to mistletoe. Vomiting and diarrhea are much more severe when it’s happening to a child who’s stomach is empty. I might just be overthinking it but the moment after she ate the holly is the moment that the story and perspective broke away from reality. She also talks a lot about how hungry she is, that’s basically what the whole story is about, it comes to the end with her hunger consuming her and she dies of starvation or dehydration. That’s what I concluded.

At the end of the story, Edith says that she never saw Edie again, when the nursing home van came the next day, Edie was "already gone". I took this to mean that they didn't find her body dead from mixing alcohol and medication, but that she was actually gone from the house. It seemed to me that Edie walked out to her childhood home in the ocean, and died reaching it.

I think we forget how Dawn’s method was just as harmful as Edie’s. She kept her kids in the dark, did the exact opposite of Edie, and her kids still suffered. Like the video said, they’re brilliant people, they NEED a creative outlet, and Dawn took that away. That’s why Lewis died, that’s why Edith came back (and possibly caused her premature death), and that’s why Milton ran away. Edie let the illness fester, and Dawn tried to push it away entirely. Both women were wrong.

Something I always found interesting about how this story is told is just how vague the story become after dawn’s death, and how Edith jr. has almost nothing revealed about herself. It’s strange to be thinking about this, but the recklessness of the family goes a layer deeply when you think about how Edith is 17 years old and is pregnant, and how that, despite being addressed, is never explained or developed. the question of who the father of the child may be is never even do considered, being a teenage parent it’s possible Edith wouldn’t know who the father is, or didn’t care, or maybe we’re shown the boys perspective during the whole game with his father just cleverly hidden out of frame. But I feel that now I’m the one digging too deep into answers that don’t need questions

One of my favorite not-so-subtle details about this game is that the title could refer to either the character you play as or the great-grandmother. That is, it could be about what remains of Edith Finch as a young girl passing on the stories and her interpretations to her unborn son, or it could be about what remains of an old woman whose neglect and inability to process tragedy led to harmful aggrandizement of the death that surrounded her and inevitably led to more trajedy. It's also worth noting that Dawn and young Edith were the only ones in the family to die of irrefutable natural causes.

Another weird detail about Edie: she had the pictures of Sam's death PRINTED. I went through the game and after the photo death scene you can see that there's an order form right above the pictures, meaning that someone had to go to a place to get them printed out. And by then the only adult left was Edie, so it had to be her. Really creepy..

Here's a pretty spooky detail with Lewis's story. At the end when he's "bowing his head to take his crown", when he actually bows his head, you can see the yellow and black caution line from the blade machine on the other side before it happens. Just a little something that I thought was a bit noteworthy.

One thing that I dont see anybody pointing out is that Lewis is recovering for marihuanna adicction, at the same time he's working a mundane job and visiting a psychiatrist. Not only he was affected by Eddie stories, but also the withdrawal effects and the fact he was now living a boring life which probably lead to his suicidal thoughts. I would say that its also Dawns fault too, because it was her idea to make him work in a conveyor belt as a solution to forget the stories and fit as a normal citizen. Lewis should have been in house with the support of his family, or in an hospital until he feels recovered. But giving the family negligence towards others safety and health its no surprise.

This makes a lot of sense with the details that really disturbed me while playing this game. Barbara's death was actually the one that disturbed me the most. I thought "what a terrible thing for the artist of this comic book to do after the death of this poor girl" and "how does the artist know so many details regarding Barbara's death." Edith always speaks in so much reverence when speaking about Edie I didn't even stop to think about Edie must have been involved in the tacky memorialization of Barbara's death.

I think the most distressing thing about Edie's son isn't his broken arm, but the fact that he's alone. He's a young boy who is reckless enough to pursue this on his own or neglected enough to be allowed to.

The shrine that stood out most to me while watching a playthrough of the game was Gregory's. A baby drowns and Edie decides to put rubber ducks and a bottle of bath bubbles in a cradle? Sounds pretty disrespectful to me.

Having just replayed through this game recently, paying very close attention to every detail I knew to expect and in particular looking for answers to any holes and found at least one answer to an issue you pointed out towards the end. Regarding Lewis and Edie's rooms being sealed/drilled - Edith explains that Dawn didn't take her out of the house until one week after Lewis' funeral; Dawn only told her to begin packing the night of, and they moved a week later. This leaves a full week for Dawn to seal the two rooms and for Edie to drill the peep holes (Lewis' in particular, as Dawn would obviously be traumatized by her son's death and want to add his room to those she sealed). How this relates to Edie's own room, given that Edie is still using it during that week, is also answered in a very sly, blink-and-you'll-miss-it way. At the very end, when you access the library, most will head straight for the book and end the gameplay segments of the game. However, if you explore the library a bit more thoroughly, going past even the book and into the shadows between bookshelves, you'll find a cot set up at a height perfectly easy for a lady in a wheelchair to access. And who was it who left a key for young Edith to access that library in the exact same sequence? Edie.

Reeeeally late to the party but I think Milton ran away after realizing the situation at the house. As soon as he moved in and got the castle, he recognized how "the curse" made grandma obsessed. Remember the missing poster, right next to the broken fence? Right at the beginning of the game? I think that broken fence was how he ran away. And I mean- the flipbook he makes implies that he is leaving voluntarily. The house "swallowed" him- it was swallowing him up emotionally, and staying there felt like he was being consumed by a past his grandma didn't want to let go of.

It was suggested on another vid that Milton died within the walls of the house, either being trapped when things were sealed up (not sure how the timeline works with that one) or just getting into an accident in one of it's many secret, sometimes unfinished passageways. His drawings are all over the secret passages, so he used them frequently. In his flipbook, he is shown creating his own passage and disapearing into it forever. There's the line "Whatever Milton found in the house, mom didn't want it to get out", so it's not like he disappeared into the wilderness. In Wilson's room, Edith says "none of us make it very far" and earlier she says that she felt like the house had 'swallowed' him whole.

"My children are dead because of your stories!" Damn, that shit hit me hard, I got an entire flashback sequence of each family members death, tuggin on the heart strings.

this might be a niche take, but Encanto feels like a more wholesome or uplifting take on What Remains of Edith Finch, right down to the grandmother’s abusive behavior being a trauma response (similar to Edie) but instead of becoming reckless and hurting her children, she tried too hard to protect them

I now think Edith senior killed herself on the night they left. She was most likely was sleeping in the library since there was a bed in it and Dawn was not aware of the hidden path until that night, so she could have already sealed up her door, It is possible that the night they left she finished the peepholes and then her pills. She didn't leave for a forest fire or when she was the only one (besides Walter) to be living in the home, so she could have killed herself instead of being taken to a retirement home.

Walter didn't just go underground because of witnessing Barbara's murder. That dragon slide Sven died making was supposed to be Walter's 13th birthday gift, several years after Barbara's death. After that was when he went underground. Think about that photo of Sven in the moment the slide broke; that picture was probably taken by Sam. Both Sam and his dad Sven were photographed (by Sam) in the exact moments they fell to their deaths. The totem pole that Edie and Sven made to commemorate Molly, Calvin, Barbara, and Odin was what got knocked over by the tent in the storm and killed Gus, adding another layer of tragic irony to the story.

I kind of felt when Edie drank the wine and made the toast that she chose her death. It felt like maybe she sealed her own room up as one last shrine. She said herself she would never leave.

Exploring this house really hit close to home….1) my older, 17 yr old cousin died in 1990. I would go through all his Boy Scout books, drawings, rare coins and treasures in the evening while I slept in his room during several summers working on my aunt and uncles farm. My aunt left his room exactly as it had been and I looked up to him as something legendary during my entire childhood. I became a boy scout myself, worked the land and hunted and fished as he had loved to do and eventually joined the army just as he had planned to do… 2) When I finally got out of the Army I moved into my grandparents vacant house that had been sealed, locked, and left exactly as it had been for nearly 20 years…I spent almost a week just going through journals, photo albums, book and magazine collections and loads of family treasures and family lore.

Those shrines make me feel like Edie valued her loved ones more when they were dead. If she had shown the same amount of devotion and care to their well-being when they were alive, would they still have died?

My thought was always that the shaking in Walter's story is meant to represent the trains. The trains never *actually* stopped coming, rather it's part of a larger metaphor with Walter's line "if you wait long enough, you get used to anything". Eventually, after 30 years of hearing the trains come & go at the same time every day, it subconsciously became routine for Walter. The trains were still coming, but by then he was so used to hearing them that he stopped noticing the effects altogether - so he thought perhaps it was safe to go out into the real world.

This was a spooky game

I think Gregory’s death works amazingly at building a foreboding atmosphere as you know he’s going to die and the juxtaposition is really unsettling

50:57 Since the peep hole was done I think it implies that Edie must have been the one to seal the room. Maybe she wanted to finish the story of a house full of sealed rooms so everything matched. Her death, while never given a cause, suggests she died with intention so she wouldn’t go to the nursing home. Therefore she wouldn’t need her bedroom anymore

I know other deaths are more ambiguous, but the one that's really bothering me for some reason is Walter's. I don't think he was hit by a train. I'm not convinced there really were trains running out there. I think the train motif came from them having built the house over some old train tracks, and him having taken up an interest in trains when he was young. After watching Barbara die, in a way to cope, he fixated on something familiar -- trains. They were harmless, they were *normal*. They have nothing to do with his sister, or some fantastical curses. You see the train toy models in the bunker. He could lock himself away with them and they weren't gonna hurt him. But he was traumatized, and it preyed on a thing that he loved. I believe the shaking of the bunker by "trains" was a manifestation of anxiety or panic attacks. He worked through them with repetition and focus, opening those peaches over and over. They weren't scary anymore, they were routine. S/o to the line about the monster becoming a friend. Friends are just people you get comfy having around -- that's what his mental illnesses became. Think about what living 30 years underground eating only peaches would do to your body. I know the pantry had other food, but look how full it was -- he probably was really only eating peaches, because they were the focal point of coping with aggressive anxiety. I'm sure the "house shook" several times a day. He was severely malnourished, probably approaching death as it was. But routine was holding him together.... until it wasn't. One day, he didn't have a panic attack. It was jarring. The one thing he knew was gone. It spurred him to do something different. He got up, knocked a hole into the wall, and completely exhausted himself doing it. He likely hadn't had any form of real exercise in 30 years, on top of being malnourished. It was a moment of adrenaline and of uncertainty. He burst through the wall, saw the light and the fresh air, and then... his heart gave out. It's sad but it fits. He was living in a state of mental turmoil for decades but, for him, that was holding it together. Then, experiencing the very first sign of improvement to his mental health was when, for him, it all fell apart.

I think the death of Molly was key here. An important detail you missed, Molly states in her diary she would not be around much longer - she was already sick with something serious (at the time in children) probably Scarlet Fever that can cause the rash you visibly see on her arms & hands. She then ate the toothpaste/holly berries which exacerbated her weak condition. She died in her sleep after writing in the journal, her imagination fuelled by the toys & pictures in her room. The references to choking & hunger sadly reflecting what she was feeling as she wrote. I don’t think Edie had anything sinister or particularly morbid in mind at this point. Holly is a natural decoration for Christmas when the event takes place. The danger of eating the berries was probably just overlooked or unknown to Edie. Molly had been naughty and locking children in isn’t that unusual if they won’t go to bed and just keep coming out (especially at the time -1940’s). Here’s where you made a very important point. Edie was probably overcome with guilt here and the old family curse story became the perfect outlet for her to cope. She became absolutely obsessed to the level of psychosis (Lewis later reflects the same mental illness, it seems to be a trait in the family, taken to varying levels from their various obsessions). Anyway, Molly’s story and this game as a whole is simply a masterpiece of storytelling. Amazing amounts of small, scattered details that link & relate beautifully to one another. So much that is very easy to miss but make you gasp when you eventually see them. This is an extremely talented studio.

I know this video has been around awhile but i think this needs to be said. The stories killed Edith as well. She went back to her family house, jumped and crawled through the house to read all these stories, putting extraneous activity on her body… while she was pregnant. That had to have had extremely negative effects, possibly leading to her death in childbirth. She died to “the curse”

I think it’s worth noting how Kay acts in Gregory’s death, she clearly already doesn’t have a nice relationship with her husband. In Gus’s poem, Dawn says the line “Our father didn’t hit us as kids, at least not very hard” (something along those lines) which insinuates that Sam was, at best, spanking the children (which imo is still not great to do to children) or at worst, abusing them, Dawn saying “At least not very hard” as a sort of way to justify it to herself. I think that Kay was very upset with this from Sam, hence the strained relationship and hence why she took so much priority in his calls that she neglected the baby in the tub. I guess it could also be assumed that then Kay could had also been a victim to abuse, but there’s not much evidence on that one besides a possible connection. Either way I find that detail very interesting

29:09 When Lewis bends down to face the ground, you can hear panicked voices around him. It’s better if you have headphones. The only one I can make out is: “Oy!” “Stop him!” It’s very very faint.

Lewis's death scares me the most is the fact that the blade was meant to cut *fish*, I doubt that blade was made to be sharp or strong enough to cut through all the bones and flesh of a human neck. I could be wrong about all of this but the thought that the blade was not enough to kill him and that he bled out slowly rather than died instantly is _horrifying_

A good mother wouldn’t let her son be immobilized by fear to the point of hiding away in a bunker, they would have the bunker only be used for true emergencies.

It seems like the recklessness has continued though. The fact that Edith was at this dangerous house in the middle of nowhere, alone, while 22 weeks pregnant, probably means that either the father of her child is not in the picture, or she didn’t tell him where she was going, so when she presumably dies in childbirth, that leaves her son either without family, or with an overly trusting/neglectful father. That’s why he goes to the house on a boat alone with a broken arm. He’s reckless like the other Finches, not because of Edie specifically, but because of neglect, which she was definitely also guilty of.

about Calvin's death: on most swings, especially ones for children, you can't swing all the way around like that. there's a point where the swing stops you from doing that. so that means that whoever made the swing did a horrible job and it was dangerous for a child to be on it in the first place

The real villain is almost every parent in the game.

The bit where Edie was already doing Lewis’ portrait near the end got to me. I bet she started the day she heard he died. What’s creepy about it, besides the whole portrait of course, is that you can only make out his eyes. Staring at you.

In my opinion Edie used the curse as a scapegoat to any trauma she experienced. She started actually believing the curse and loosing all the emotional damage caused by death. She didn’t sulk over death she just thought that she would have to accept it.