Fruit’s Space

My Background

This might not be something that people care about, but I feel it is important to start with my life situation at the time I discovered the game.

In 2020, I graduated from college with a degree in game design. If you remember 2020, you can probably guess where I'm going with this. Everyone left for spring break, and the day before we were supposed to come back, they extended break by a week. Then, at the end of that additional week, classes had gone fully remote. My three roommates at the time never really came back to campus, and I finished out the lease alone. I never got to do any kind of internship, and I didn't get a graduation ceremony. I really didn't know what I was doing with my life, and finding a job in the games industry seemed impossible. So, I made a decision to move in with my aunt and work at an insurance agency. I was states away from anyone I ever knew, working in an industry wholly unrelated to what I had just dedicated years of my life to studying, but it was a job.

I wonder a lot if this was the right call. At the time, it seemed like an obvious decision, but now, I'm even more unsure of my skills when it comes to breaking into the games industry, and working 40+ hours a week can really sap your motivation when it comes to personal projects.

As the world opened back up, I started hearing from all my friends less and less, and life really started getting monotonous. Living alone is expensive, and I'm not good at opening up to new people.

Last November, by chance, a comic by twitter user Shrimperini appeared on my feed (it's still the pinned tweet on her account if you want to see!). One thing led to another, I saw some more positive reviews of the game, and I ended up picking the game up on Switch when I saw at on sale at a Best Buy.

Now, anyone that knows me could tell you, this isn't the type of game I usually play. I've always gravitated towards things like strategy games or rogue-likes. I only really stray from that in a few cases, whether it's to play a game with my friends, or just a game that I've had a long-standing connection with, like Pokémon. I did play Undertale and Deltarune (and loved them!), but overall, this type of game was not one that I typically went out of my way to play.

Also important: I've never interacted with any fandom in the way that I do with Omori. You can trawl through my Twitter, you won't find much of me talking about ships or obsessing over details until I started talking about Omori. All this is to say: Omori was a bit of a first for me on a few different levels. So, let's get into my actual journey with the game.

The First Playthrough: The Sunny Route

I unfortunately already knew a few details about the game going into things, but nothing that was too big of a spoiler. Something that I think gets overlooked is how great Omori's prologue is. In my opinion, the first night in Headspace is the best night in Headspace, bar none. It perfectly sets you up for what the game's going to be about, and I want to talk more about that later, because I feel that it really shines on later playthroughs.

Based on what I said about my background, you can probably guess what I'm going to say. Sunny's story and personality resonated heavily with me. At school, I was always the quiet one, just kind of following what my friends wanted to do until I started coming out of my shell a bit later on. Faraway is very similar to the town and suburb that I grew up in, and I know that many people feel the same way. Walking around Faraway felt like walking around my own home town today, years after almost everyone I knew back then has moved out and started their own lives. I mean this literally, as well, since I started playing this game right around American Thanksgiving, so I actually was back in my home town. It's nostalgic in a way, and I think that that is a major strength of the game.

I also do want to say, that while a Kel/Sunny comic is what introduced me to the game, I mostly assumed that it wasn't actually a canon ship. What I didn't expect was for the game to actually depict a close male relationship that does border on romantic in its presentation, which made those opening transition scenes of Sunny and Basil so interesting (as well as Basil indirectly calling Omori cute during the flower meaning segment), though I do want to talk a little bit more about that later.

From there, I feel that my experience was a lot like most people's first time with the game. I got to experience Faraway, then tried to rush through Night 2 of Headspace without paying much attention, so that I could get back to the real world plot. I didn't pay much attention during Sweetheart's Castle, and it's already-commented-on gameplay drag issues felt exacerbated by the fact that I just wanted to get on with it.

Real world day 2 happens, I got to meet Hero in the real world, Basil gets pushed into the lake, etc, etc. The shroud has started to lift on what's actually going on here. The North Lake segment got me ready to figure out what was actually going on, but first: Last Resort and Humphrey.

It was around this time that I began wondering if there actually was any kind of gay subtext actually going on. Of course, I had seen the Lost Library entry for the ride home from the beach, but as I descended into Sunny's subconscious, the way that the game started talking about Basil took on a much different tone. I got to the Branch Coral, and listened to it talk about how Sunny and Basil are connected by a "string of fate". This immediately set off some alarm bells in my head. A lot of debate has been had about this line, but for me personally, even if a string of fate isn't always romantic imagery, it certainly is most of the time. Seeing it written in the game (as something that Sunny's subconscious is saying, no less) completely had me reconsidering if there was a connection, which I hadn't really thought about since Basil's disappearance. I thought about the photo album, and how well Basil is treated in Headspace, and it just had me thinking.

I got through Humphrey, finished up the side quests that I still had, and it was time to start Black Space. Prior to that, however, Stranger lead me through Basil's garden once again, going over the flower meanings. I took note about how the meaning of sunflowers, as it was the first time I made the connection about Sunny's name and Basil's meaning for them (plus him literally always facing Sunny in several scenes lol). And then there was what Basil said about white tulips.

Being honest, it was difficult for me to interpret Basil as not being in love with Sunny after that, and Stranger's dialogue in some of the Black Space rooms really cemented that for me.

Black Space as a whole left me extremely intrigued as to what the plan was. The way it ended really left me in suspense for what was really going on. How did it all relate to what happened to Mari? I had already assumed at this point that she had taken her own life, due to some of the imagery. But what else was going on here? I didn't exactly think the game was going to veer back from being a horror title to turn into some kind of dating sim, but it was clear to me that Basil was involved with some other secret.

In a reversal of what I had expected of the game up until this point, I found it difficult to care about the real world plot of the game during day 3. It didn't help that it felt like a rushed resolution of the Aubrey plot, and I felt like I was simply going through the motions. I still have no idea how I'm supposed to interpret the key in the treehouse and how it got there, and it felt a little aggravating that plans were being made between Aubrey and Hero to include the hooligans next time, while Basil himself was still locked in his room.

So then, the truth sequence. It completely blew away my expectations for what the game was saying, and recontextualized so much of what came before it. Sunny had done something awful by accident, and Basil had done something awful to protect him. That last "Do you want to save Basil?" really hit me hard. I hadn't felt so part of the game until this moment. It was like I was Sunny, and I was mulling over whether or not I forgive Basil for the horrible situation his actions put us both in. The stakes are high, because it's clear that something bad will happen to Basil if I don't. I didn't actually know it at the time, but this is the first time you can actually choose not to save Basil. It's emotional.

And the fight. The way the game creates confusion as to what is actually going on between Sunny and Basil during it by using vague wording and hallucinations. Basil's desperation and the way his desire to protect Sunny as his "perfect" best friend come together, leading to the fight.

Memory Lane happens, and I honestly didn't think much of it at the time. It was cool to see some of the memories in better detail, but it wasn't as emotional to me as what came before or what will come after.

I would be remiss to not include that we learn that it was actually Sunny that had a crush on Aubrey, and not the other way around. I had already suspected this, based on Aubrey not being close to him in the photo album, along with the Lost Library memory, but I remember thinking it was an interesting choice to have Basil be the one to call it out.

I finished up the game, and it impacted me a whole lot. I wasn't planning on playing the other route at first, as I heard that it was just Headspace and mostly unchanged, and I felt satisfied with the story that I got. I walked away with the understanding that pre-canon, Basil had feelings for Sunny that he likely didn't understand, while Sunny had a crush on Aubrey that he was never bold enough to pursue. How they felt at the time the game actually took place is irrelevant to the story being told, outside of us understanding that these are relatable individuals, and I walked away alright with that.

Of course, after that initial wave of emotions from the ending subsided, I did have some criticisms. Sunny's actual friendship with Aubrey felt underdeveloped, as her behavior both in Headspace and the real world differ so heavily from how she behaves in the glimpses we see of the past. Unlike Sunny's relationships with the others, there's no real unique identifiers other than Sunny's crush. While I would not have wanted the only living female character in the main cast to have been treated as a love interest in both the real world and dream world, it would have been nice if the game gave us a little more than just the swing set conversations, like how we get Kel talking about their late night trips to Hobbeez. In addition, while I understood on a base level that whether or not Basil and Sunny are forgiven didn't really matter to the story being told, not seeing it happen left me feeling a tad empty.

Finally, I felt extremely dissatisfied with Headspace. On a superficial level, I could see that many of the things in Headspace were based on things from the real world, it didn't really feel like it had all that much significance, and the knowledge that it would be more of the same in the other route kept me from playing it. I occasionally visited the subreddit, read a few post-canon fics (Bask in the Sun by Lemari and They say Flowers are Meant to be Sunkissed by Witherdahlia being highlights with very similar concepts), and slowly immersed myself in the Twitter community.

Of course, as time went by, I started making my own interpretations about the game. I got very attached to Sunflower, as I felt the fics were the most interesting to read, and I already held the interpretation that Basil had those feelings for Sunny, even if I didn't think it even mattered if Sunny reciprocated (though I did like talking about their dynamic a lot). In February, Sunflower week happened, and I randomly happened across a tweet that pointed out how Sunny knows the recipe for a strawberry cake in Headspace, with that being relevant due to Basil's birthday being one in which a strawberry cake appears. This blew my mind a little bit, and I made the decision to go back and play the Hikikomori route.

The Second Playthrough: The Hikikomori Route

What I had previously assumed would be a slog through things that I had already done before turned out to be far more interesting. Without the desire to get back to the real world plot hanging over me, I found myself paying a lot more attention to the things that were happening in Headspace. Playing the prologue again was amazing, because I was taken aback by how it practically parallels the entirety of the Sunny route, right down to having to retrieve a stolen item and receiving an eyepatch after the boss fight. Some day, I might break that down further, because it's so interesting. But not today.

Pyrefly Forest and Sweetheart's Castle were much more bearable this time around, because I was paying attention to the little references to Basil and Sunny's friendship in Pyrefly, and the ways Sweetheart's Castle represented a candied-up version of the way that Sunny interprets the concept of "home". This time through Headspace, I saw the very subtle ways that Basil's thoughts "follow Sunny into his dreams". And then, rather than Mari leading you through North Lake, it's Kel. Stranger no longer tells us what Basil thought about white tulips and Sunny, but this time in Black Space, I noticed the implications that Sunny would open up to Basil about his trauma coming from the Lake Incident. It ends with Omori catching Basil in a bridal carry before returning his flower crown.

Whereas the Sunny route was this heart wrenching tale about forgiveness and guilt, and overcoming your fears for others, and how ignorance hurts those you care about the most, the Hikikomori route functioned almost as this deep dive into Sunny's subconscious. The fact that I was playing through pretty much the exact same stuff again but with a completely different perspective kind of blew my mind, and I wonder if this was intentional.

This is all to say that it was around this time that I was once again asking myself the question of if Sunny's feelings for Basil (at least pre-canon) were entirely platonic. Especially as I played the Basil Rush, with its new Tag Photos and Release Energy, I wondered if the game was actually trying to imply a romantic connection. And if it was, why? What purpose would it serve in the narrative for these feelings to exist? How does it relate to Sunny's crush on Aubrey, which surely must've existed in the story for a reason? And how does it all relate to the litany of things Sunny things about in regards to romance?

From a narrative perspective, I could reason that Sunny and Basil having feelings for each other that they could never healthily explore injects further tragedy into the day of the incident and Sunny locking himself away. It provides a context for Sunny's focus on "saving" Basil, both in Headspace and the real world. Basil is undeniably linked to photos and flowers, which are two huge symbols that appear throughout Sunny's mind.

Everything else is stuff I've already spoken about before. The way Sunny treated Aubrey parallels how he treated Basil, and via both things like his fear of spiders, and the way all the foods Sunny appears to know information on how to prepare being associated with Basil, his dynamic with Basil mirrors the way Sunny thinks of Hero and Mari's relationship during Memory Lane.

Playing through the Hikikomori route completely changed the way that I thought about Omori. It was no longer just the story of Sunny accepting his role in his sister's death, I was also now considering the possibility that the game did have a romantic subtext between its two deuteragonists, and thinking about the repercussions of such an idea.

As I completed everything that there was to do in the Hikikomori route, I was immediately taken in with the idea of replaying the Sunny route, with all the knowledge I now had from my previous experiences. First, let me say: Everything that I assumed about playing through Headspace a second time and was luckily wrong about, actually applied on my third run. I did not enjoy playing through Headspace on my third run through, and it will likely be awhile before I do so again.

However, I did start to get an appreciation for details that I missed in my first run in Faraway. Basil's little mannerisms during cutscenes, such as looking to Sunny before responding to Kel's insistence that they were all still friends, as well as the repetition of Sunny backing away from his friends' pain due to his subconscious guilt and fear of facing it, before the final payoff of Sunny choosing to walk back into the center of the room on his own accord during the confrontation with Basil. During Memory Lane, I took note that in the Treehouse Memory, Sunny asked to see one of Basil's pictures that had nothing to do with Aubrey, when previously he only asked to look at pictures of her. There are three different instances in which the player is reminded that Hero and Mari's relationship specifically is one in which they cook for each other specifically, and this information was now recontextualized with the knowledge that Sunny knows the recipe for a strawberry cake, owns a book about tofu (which he hates), and that's not even getting into all the stuff about smoothies in Headspace. Where Aubrey saying that Sunny "would listen to her talk to hours" was once a confirmation that Aubrey and Sunny did have any kind of dynamic at all, I now saw it as a recontextualization of how we were told Sunny interacted with Basil. (also, the "truth" being hidden in the toy chest, which is itself hidden in the closet was certainly a choice /j)

What was the point of all this?

Frankly, it's starting to feel like I'm running out of things to say about Omori. With every post I've made on here and Twitter, there's less things for me to extrapolate from Omori's storytelling, and it's unlikely that we will ever get any more added on to canon. I've grown to love this community, and I think it's so interesting when I look back at how I interpreted the game back in November when I first discovered it, and today. I hope that that will become evident with the mod that I am working on, Senesce.

Obviously, everyone has their own ideas when it comes to what Omori is trying to imply with its characters. Accepting Sunflower as "canon" (in the sense that those feelings do exist in some form) has deepened my love of the game and characters, and I love that other people can have entirely different interpretations and still be just as satisfied with the game! Even if it was all unintentional, I cannot deny that it has lit a fire under me when it comes to game writing.

I desperately want to create a game that has someone at home obsessing over the smallest details to extract meaning in the way I have for Omori. Flawed as it may be, it's special to me, and I'm glad I played it. Thanks for listening to me ramble about it!

This is the second summer that Hero has returned from college! He should be 20! Now Hero is a bit of an overachiever, so it is possible that what is actually happening here is that he graduated early, but I doubt that due to what we know about how Hero reacted to Mari's death.

For that first year, even if Hero was technically going to school, he certainly wasn't excelling at it. By the time he gets to the state we see him in-game, he has maybe a year to a year and a half left of schooling. I'm really not sure that I can buy Hero graduating early, regardless of how well he does from that point on.

I also want to acknowledge that the game could simply take place ~4 1/2 years, rather than 3 1/2. There's no reason not to go with this, other than it would mean that the younger four are actually 17 during the game. You are free to believe this instead, but I am going to go into what I actually think is going here next.

We know that the characters got younger during development. We actually have an older version of the photo album, in which instead of saying that Sunny was turning 12, it says 13. Why did this happen?

Let's take a look at Aubrey's recollection of what happened following Mari's death:

For reference, this is part of what she says at the tree stump during One Day Left.

Her words here imply that she wasn't actually aware about how bad it was for Hero, and most of the fandom typically just leaves it at that.

But that's weird, right? Look at what she says. It seems like she did HAVE a reason for why Hero wasn't available, it was just incorrect. And what's more, this is definitely how Hero would've been after his year of very much not studying. There's no reason that Aubrey would believe that Hero reacted to Mari's death in this way unless it was true, especially since it is something that would later be true.

I also want to point out that Kel's talk in the cemetery in which he tells us how Hero reacted to Mari's death is entirely optional and disconnected from the actual main story cutscenes in the real world.

To bring this full circle, I also want to point out a mechanic that was added to the game VERY late in development:

You might see where I'm going with this.

Here's my theory. Originally, Hero would not have reacted to Mari's death with staying in bed for a year in a depressed state. Instead, he would've immediately become lost in his studies as a coping mechanism. However, when the team had the idea for the emotions chart, they likely realized that while happy and angry fit Kel and Aubrey's coping methods respectively quite well, Hero did not seem to fit sadness all that well at all.

In order to make Hero fit sadness, they change his story so that he stayed in a depressed state for a year, but they don't remove his original story of getting lost in his schoolwork. After all, they already had the writing and art assets finished and the game had already been in development for a long time. So instead of doing any major rewrites of the actual script, they simply add a single cutscene in the graveyard that doesn't seem to contradict anything that lets us know that this is how Hero reacted!

Then they had another problem. If Hero spent a year not caring about school, how would he have graduated on time? It would've been difficult even for an overachiever to do two years of schooling in one year. This is an easy fix as well! All you have to do is go through the very few instances of characters' ages being mentioned, and make everyone a year younger! It would've been a lot easier for Hero to catch up and excel if he had an additional year to do so after the incident with Kel! It also gives us another instance of a character getting overwhelmed and angry and pushing someone they care about, which we see multiple times! It works really well, and I like it a lot, but I haven't been able to unsee this change being made ever since the first time I thought of it. The minor line of dialogue about the hero sandwich that reveals Hero has been in college for two years would have been overlooked, since it doesn't mention his age, and likely would've been forgotten due to its unimportance. Aubrey's line, while wrong, can also still be explained away by her simply not being in the know about how Hero really reacted to Mari's death.

I'm not saying this is definitely what happened, but this theory does explain that one tiny little inconsistency that we see in the game. Could also be nothing though idk I'm not perfect

SO

The timeline of the creation of Headspace, White Space, and Black Space! The thing you actually asked about and care about!

It's a little difficult to actually place a lot of things here. Headspace is already so vague. We can use Daddy Longlegs' explanation as a general guide, but it's still difficult to figure out how it lines up with the between night cutscenes, as well as some of the other things.

What I can say is that Omocat has explained Sunny's dream worlds as a very real reaction to trauma that some people have. From this perspective, it would've always existed in some form.

In regards to the truth album line about sinking into the empty room, it's important to keep in mind that nothing there (unless I am super mistaken) implies that this is the first time that Sunny has been there, only that it is happening in that moment. In fact, I find the use of the term "sink" to be very interesting in this context, because very recently prior to the end of the photo album and the incident itself, Sunny had another very traumatic experience when he nearly drowned at the lake. This incident is also very important because many of the traumas that we see from Sunny in game come from this incident. He is still extremely scared of heights, spiders, and drowning by the time the game happens. I don't think it is out of the realm of possibility that White Space was initially created as a response to that, assuming that it didn't already exist for Sunny's entire life.

Next! Headspace, as I understand it, refers specifically to the dream world that Sunny created by merging a bunch of different dream worlds together in order to hide away Black Space, as told by Daddy Longlegs. What we see in the school day memory isn't Sunny exploring Headspace, rather it is just establishing that Sunny has always had a creative and wandering mind, which is why he was able to create Headspace as a coping method in the first place.

The "you've been living here for as long as you can remember" line can also mean many things! It can refer to Omori, as you said, or it could refer to Sunny always having White Space to some extent, OR (and I find this to be the most likely answer) that regardless of how long Sunny has actually had White Space, his repression of ALL his memories both the good and the bad mean that this is literally all he can remember!

All of this is to say: I don't really know. I'm really sorry about that, I've typed this up multiple times trying to come up with a satisfying timeline that I can actually point at evidence for. I believe that Sunny probably had access to White Space before the incident itself, but Headspace probably only became necessary to form out of his different dreamworlds and fantasies after the incident. He was always creative, so he always had creative dreams, but Headspace itself was almost assuredly a post-incident creation.

Now, most analysis of Omori subtext comes from the Headspace sections, and understandably so! Since it takes place in Sunny’s mind, nearly anything can be read into, because everything must serve some function within the world. Within Faraway Town — not so much! Sunny doesn’t seem to have much agency.

Except… That’s not exactly true, is it? There are over twenty sidequests, and therefore at least twenty ways Sunny makes a difference in Faraway Town before moving away, to lesser or greater extents. This can be seen most readily in Universally Loved runs, when he wakes up in his hospital room brimming with flowers from those he’s helped along the way:

Today I want to talk about the Picking Paint and Cooking sidequests. The detail that first brought this to my attention was the wallpaper selection.

It begins on 3 Days Left in Fix-It, where a newly-wed couple is struggling to choose a paint color for their new house, insisting the other one choose. It’s very cutesy and over-the-top, with custom animations showing them blowing kisses to each other.

Eventually, Sean & Karen ask Sunny to choose a paint swatch randomly, and he does so with his eyes closed, but ends up accidentally choosing a floral wallpaper sample instead.

When you visit them later, they actually have the wallpaper up throughout the entirety of the house, which is in the pink swatch, one of two on showcase in Fix-it. The other is… you guessed it! The wallpaper from Basil’s house.

If you go outside into the garden area directly after this, you’ll also be able to see Basil as a memory vision, as well as the flower Sean & Karen gift to Sunny should we finish this sidequest.

(Note: Despite my best efforts, I couldn't determine exactly what kind of flower this was meant to depict, if anything specific).

As you may guess, my proposal here is that even with his eyes closed, Sunny has an instinctual draw to Basil, and things Basil likes. I don’t mean this in a literal psychic sense, but in more of a symbolic way — perhaps even implying that Sunny understands his feelings better on a subconscious level, when he’s not actively looking at them.

Now this is somewhat shoddy evidence on its own, so let’s keep digging.

The reason this stuck out to me is because flowers are usually mentioned in Omori in tandem with Basil. So much so Basil & Flowers might as well be synonymous (and according to the names of the beta characters, once were!)

Obviously, Basil is associated with his flower garden in Headspace, and particularly Stranger's line comparing Sunny to white tulips on the path to Basil's house is often interpreted as having romantic undertones. There's even other official art based off of this line, where if you look very closely at the base of the tulip, it reads: "143. I love you, I love you, I love you".

But even within the main cast's dialogue, flowers are mentioned about 50 times, with 65% of these mentions being spoken by or related to Basil in some way. Many of Mari’s are about the flower puzzle sidequest – which is arguably also related to Basil, as it is initiated by a character named Daisy, and the only Headspace sidequest you can activate while Basil is in your party (not my original observation: read more about that here!)

The majority of Hero’s mentions are about buying flowers for his mother in the main plot. Disregarding these exceptions, it brings the Basil-flower correlation up to 95%!

Sean & Karen then invite us to their housewarming party. They explain they have recently moved in together, but that both of them are from Faraway Town.

We know this to be true, because this pair actually has Headspace counterparts, implying Sunny would have known them from years before.

Enter: Shawn & Ren!

Similar to Daisy, you can find these two at the playground, and they’re some of the only Headspace NPCs you can interact with while Basil is still in your party.

Throughout the game, they are always found next to each other, and they are even some of the only characters in the game to have a shared dialogue box. It’s not just Shawn and Ren, it’s Shawn and Ren.

Clearly, these two have always been close enough in real life for Sunny to make this observation and consider them a matching pair, even though they’re only now moving in together nearly four years later. In my interpretation, I consider them childhood sweethearts.

Coincidentally, they also give Omori the Observe skill. This skill is granted after laying down to stargaze with them. Recently, an acquaintance of mine mentioned they thought these two had similarities to the legend of Tanabata, or Star Festival. The story of Tanabata is about a pair of star-crossed lovers — a Weaver Princess and a Cow Herder.

Ren doesn’t seem to have much in common physically with the Weaver Princess, other than wearing a Japanese-inspired outfit similar to Mari’s, but Shawn distinctly has horns and ears attached to the sides of his head. While the wiki lists these as goat features, I think they’re much more reminiscent of a cow, with horns that grow out in a crescent shape rather than curving straight up and back.

There’s not much else to go off of, but considering Omori notably uses other Japanese folklore as inspiration for Headspace characters, it’s also not an impossible stretch. We don’t know why Shawn and Ren might have been considered star-crossed (or perhaps that’s a romantic daydream Sunny came up with himself!), but there are very notable reasons Sunny & Basil might be, including being the same sex in a small town in the 1990’s, and the complexities of their history together.

Shawn & Ren can also be found in the lobby area of the Last Resort. They’re noticeably on screen during the sequence in which Aubrey and Kel create the Bad Drawing of Basil in an attempt to continue the search for him.

That’s the last of Shawn & Ren’s appearances in the final release of Omori, but it’s also worth noting that these characters existed even in the early concept art of Headspace:

This shows to me that they have significance beyond the "random NPC made to fill out Headspace". In the 2018 Demo, there also existed sprites of Shawn & Ren that didn’t make it into the final game:

Notably, they’re depicted holding a jump rope between them. Presumably, this was removed to censor certain allusions to The Truth too early, similar to the Noose Room being removed, or the first half of Basil’s VHS tape, etc. The jump rope here is purple, like all of the jump ropes in the final game, probably to not stick out against the Headspace landscape. However, the jump rope in early Omori art was bright red:

We know that Sunny & Basil are described as being “tied together by a string of fate”. Of course, the true “string”, or I should say “rope”, that ties them together is The Truth, as they are the only two who know, and are irreparably changed because of it.

The “red string of fate” comes from Chinese mythology and typically describes soulmates. I’m certainly not the first to make the connection between the jump rope and the red string of fate, as lots of popular fanart can attest to.

But wait — are they star-crossed lovers then, or are they soulmates? Aren’t these two concepts opposites? One describes a couple who is destined to be true to each other for eternity, and one describes a couple whose future together has been impeded by the stars themselves.

Well, I submit my theory: Sunny & Basil are star-crossed soulmates. They can’t exist without each other, because they’re the only two in the world who truly understand each other, but they can’t exist together, because of the traumatic and delicate nature of their history.

Finally, we come back to Faraway Town and the second sidequest involving Sean & Karen. We show up to their homecoming party a little earlier than invited on One Day Left, and now we have Hero and Aubrey tagging along. (I definitely recommend this sidequest if you haven’t done it yourself already, as it is very heartfelt!)

In the cooking portion, the four of them all divvy up tasks like they presumably used to when they were friends — except one of the group is missing. Well… two actually. And seeing them all back together like this, Basil’s absence is even more apparent:

Later in the evening, we return for the party, and Karen welcomes us in:

It’s a housewarming party, so her dialogue requesting we “make ourselves at home” only makes sense here… but there’s someone else who has said this to us before...

In fact, there's someone else who is repeatedly associated with the word “home” in Omori...

The last one even explicitly refers to Basil’s “flowers back at home”, bringing us full circle.

Sean & Karen bought a house together, but until they added the final, floral touch (with Sunny’s help!), it wasn’t a home.

Sunny’s home is wherever Basil is.

In conclusion: Sunny choosing floral wallpaper is an intentional thematic choice, and Sean & Karen’s relationship not only embodies the typical childhood sweethearts love story to contrast Sunny & Basil’s more complex relationship, but also represents the overwhelming affection for Basil that Sunny doesn’t know how to express or even acknowledge.

And also they definitely move in together post-canon.

So! Obviously, based on the title, you know that the thing I want to talk about here is the use of the daisy in-game. We see it a couple of times in Sunny's dreams, and it's clear that they are associated with Basil. One appears in the Rain Area of Black Space, next to Stranger, where he talks about how Sunny was always someone that he could depend on.

And then, when you get to Neighbor's Bedroom in the Omori route, you will have a daisy, rather than a sunflower, in the lineup of all the friend's flowers.

Finally, Home for Flowers (Daisy) is the version of Basil's theme that plays just prior to the truth segment.

So, where does this association come from?

The first thing to note is that when Basil talks about sunflowers, he never says that he is a sunflower, only that he wants to be like a sunflower. The second thing to note is that in the game itself, there is no indication in the real world at any point that Basil ever assigned the daisy to himself. Some people say that the flower he wears in his hair is a pink daisy, but Basil's flower clip does not match up with how daisies are depicted in-game or in art, mostly due to the number of petals.

There isn't really any evidence for this one way or the other, but I personally believe that this is an association that Sunny himself made at some point, and that Basil doesn't even know about it. Like sunflowers, daisies can represent loyalty, and they have other meanings as well, such as innocence or purity.

However, the most relevant meaning, in my opinion, is its Victorian meaning representing the "ability to keep a secret".

Now, there is one big reason that Sunny would associate Basil with keeping a secret in the modern day, and I assume that that isn't something that I have to mention here. However, Sunny already notes Basil as someone that enjoys keeping secrets. Take a look at Memory Lane:

In the Treehouse Memory, Basil revels in his winning hand, and teases the others with his secret.

In the Beach Memory, we are given an example of Basil taking a picture of Aubrey without her knowledge, which is something that he prefers overall, as mentioned a couple times in the game.

In the Picnic Memory, we see Basil planning to hide a flaw with one of his photos (Hector's poop in the background) so that he can still include it in the photo album.

In the Rainy Day Memory, he of course promises to keep Sunny's crush on Aubrey a secret.

In the Birthday Memory, he teases the others by refusing to tell them what his wish is for.

And finally, in the Christmas Memory, we find out that Sunny's violin was actually Basil's idea in the first place, and that he successfully kept this a secret from Sunny even as the entire group was working the entire Summer to save up for it.

I'm not sure that Basil would ever assign a flower to himself based on his love of secrets, but Sunny's repeated memories of it make it likely that he would assign it to him, especially since Basil seemingly refused to assign a flower to himself.

This has all been pretty straightforward, but I want to hop into some possible connections that I've never seen discussed. Bear with me, because this link is going to sound tenuous at first.

First, take a look at the way the daisy in the Rain Area is referred to:

If we hop into the sorting minigame in the Omori route, one of the things we find this:

I promise this isn't as insane as it sounds I hope

So, most of the things that we go through in the sorting minigame have a direct link in Headspace. The similar wording is interesting, but my attention would not have been drawn to it if there weren't something more.

Let's rewind way back to the beginning of the game, during the prologue.

One of the first quests that the player is able to access (and I believe the only quest that the player can start while Basil is still in the party during the prologue) is entitled "Daisy's Dilemma". It can be and usually is completed during the prologue. Daisy is looking for some help in finding a gift that she can gift to her crush. When you get to Otherworld, you will find the "Flower Puzzle", which you can then give to her to pass on to Neb, her crush.

Ignoring the obvious implications of having such a quest so early on in the game with what we will later learn about daisies, I want to take a look at the puzzle itself.

The description of the puzzle in your inventory calls it "A perfect combination of flower and puzzle". The word "perfect" is of note here, with the very specific use of it throughout the game, especially as it pertains to Basil. But more than that: take a look at the icon for it:

The puzzle piece on the right, to me, pretty clearly shows a daisy, which leaves us with little triangle of evidence including a flower puzzle depicting a daisy given to a crush in Headspace by someone that loves flowers named Daisy, a single daisy depicted next to Stranger in Black Space (along with other evidence in the game linking Basil to Daisies), and a single puzzle piece that can be found among Sunny's belongings during the Omori route.

I realize that this may be a stretch to some, but I absolutely see this triangle of daisies and puzzles to be intentional.

So, is there anything else going on here that we should take note of?

Well, Daisy doesn't appear to have a direct analogue in the real world. You might be able to say she represents Bebe, who is said to have bad taste in men, and we see develop a crush on the Maverick throughout the real world sections of the game. I do find this a little unlikely, as Bebe seems unaware who the Maverick is at all, and doesn't seem to have any connection to Angel, who is represented by Neb.

Now Neb is very interesting. He clearly is representative of Angel, but it's kind of hard to tell due to their differences in personalities. To my knowledge, Angel is never really associated with puzzles in the real world, though he is pretty immature overall, and spends time at Hobbeez and enjoys games. The fact that his name is "Neb" is something that I find interesting, though, as this makes him the only one on the playground, based on a real person from Sunny's life, who's name seems irrelevant to his namesake.

I've wondered for awhile what the reason for this was. Recently, I discovered that one of the definitions for neb refers to a snout or nose. As luck would have it, there is another playground kid that is named Nose!

So Nose is one of only three of the playground kids that do not appear to be based off of a real person, including her best friend Bun, and the aforementioned Daisy. Like some of the others, she is based off of one of Sunny's plushies, though her and Bun do not appear to also be influenced by the younger tutoring kids in the same way Brows, Bangs, and Happy are. If you take a look at the photo album, you will find Nose in one of the pictures, being cuddled by both Aubrey and Basil.

And let's also take a look at some of the few lines of dialogue for Nose and Bun:

The term "best friend" has some pretty specific usage throughout the game. While Sunny himself appears to apply the term generally to his friend group, the real Basil is only ever shown to use it when referring to Sunny. Not to mention, the way that Bun is talking here is very reminiscent of the first few pictures of the photo album, in which Basil refers to Sunny as his best friend, as well as shy.

After playing hide and seek, Bun and Nose will play patty cake together.

The reason this is so interesting is due to the implications later on that Sunny himself was involved in the making of Basil's birthday cake, or at least learned the recipe for it at some point.

And there are some surface level similarities between Sunny and Angel that could've resulted in Angel being the one to play this role in Headspace. Both are the youngest in their respective friend groups, and Angel is seemingly raised by an overbearing older sister, with his parents nowhere in sight. He even has a "Foe Factx!" journal in his room that you can find, similar to the one that Sunny has in his dreams.

None of these characters really have a whole lot to say other than what we've gone over, but I also want to bring up the item that you get for completing this quest.

She gives you a Daisy charm, which allows the wearer to start the battle happy. I'm not sure it means much, but the two other charms that make the wearer happy are the Heart String and the Wedding Ring, which both use some fairly romantic imagery, and are easily missed by most players. The Heart String is available in the room in Humphrey in which you are chased by the cat monster thing. This is also the same room where you can get the blender item for Hero (relevant due to the smoothies being organized by Basil's tastes). This probably isn't an intentional connection, but it is also soon after the Branch Coral, which includes the line about Basil and Sunny being "tied by a string of fate". The Wedding Ring is of course given to the player by Spaceboy at the end of the Omori route.

Now, you might find a lot of this to be a little bit out there, especially with the connection to the puzzle piece that Sunny has in his belongings. However, I hope that this has at least shown that there is likely a connection between this first side quest that you can take and Basil.

Finally, while real world Basil is never depicted with daisies in-game, he is shown with one in some post-release official art.

I briefly mentioned it in that post, but there is something interesting going on with the smoothies that you can find within Headspace.

(We're going to not include the Dino Smoothie, as the Dino snacks are kind of in a class of their own and "Dino" isn't a flavor.

So based on the descriptions, something that is immediately obvious is that these are not organized by how much Sunny likes each individual flavor, as if it was, it'd probably have Berry at the bottom, then Banana, followed by Strawberry, then Mango, and finally Melon.

In addition, they aren't organized by healthiness, either, as the Berry Smoothie would be at the top if that were the case.

So how are they organized? Well, they appear to be organized by Basil's preferences.

Basil says in the Birthday Memory:

and then, regarding Bananas:

Obviously, we don't have a full rundown of Basil's fruit preferences, but I think these being the two that are put at the top and bottom is enough to assume that that is the order that Sunny's mind went with here.

However, the fun smoothie facts don't end there. Meet Budgirl:

There are nine of these little fellas all in one area. Off the rip, they take the form of a tulip with it's color changed to match Basil's flower charm. It has a face that resembles a face that Sunny makes several times in the photo album, and it makes a "meowing" sound sometimes when you interact with it. It's the same audio as when Claus or Mewo meow.

More importantly, whenever you interact with the central one, there is a 20% chance that you will receive a Mango, Berry, Melon, or Strawberry Smoothie. This is also the only repeatable and reliable way to get Strawberry Smoothies, as they are the only smoothie that cannot be purchased anywhere, so it's either this or going with the 2% chance you get from fighting Strawberry Short Snakes.

I just think it's a little adorable that this even exists, a pink version of the flower Basil associated with Sunny, which dispenses smoothies excluding Basil's least favorite flavor, and which is the only way to reliably get the smoothie that his most favorite flavor!

As one last aside, Sunny does appear to know that that tofu can be used in the making of smoothies, according to the chef mole...

And what really ties all this together in a real way is that despite never really appearing in the real world, blenders appear often in key areas of Headspace (and even in a version of Sunny's kitchen in Black Space!) The Blender weapon for Hero is one that's easily missed while getting chased by Experiment 667 in Humphrey, and is in the same area as the "Heart String" charm, which makes the wearer happy (like the Daisy and Wedding Ring, no less).