HI I NEED TO TALK ABOUT N’S ROOM
Okay, first of all this thing is nuts. When I entered it for the first time, I was shocked because I felt like I was in a different game and there was this creepy music and this feeling of wrongness and all that got even worse in the sequel with the music being all distorted and the lights being off and everything in a broken mess. It’s so unsettling. And it should be with all the implications this room has.
It’s a children’s room. A little kid might look at this room and think it’s great with all the bright colors and toys, but he was stuck in there until he was twenty. The lines from interacting with various items in there imply that he was living there recently. This wasn’t his childhood room, it’s his current one and it didn’t grow up with him. Plenty of adults including me have rooms full of stuff that might be considered childish like plushies for example, But that is very different because of agency in it. Most people get to choose the things in their room. They are interested in those things and it brings them joy. If someone outgrows an interest, they can just remove it from their room. N’s room was never updated. He was never allowed to explore and gain new interests as he grew. Ghetsis prepared a playroom that a little kid would love but never anything past that because it’s just a box to keep him in full of entertaining things to shut him up. There is no love in these gifts.
There are also goals with the infantilization N faces. Ghetsis isolates N, keeps him sheltered, and aims to preserve the childlike purity and innocence in him. a childlike innocence that makes him kind, makes him a hero, and makes him easy to control. He can’t grow up.
Once N fails him, Ghetsis calls him “nothing more than a warped defective boy”. He specifically calls him a boy. Ghetsis is the kind of person who would think of children as inferior and stupid so specifically using the word boy was definitely him comparing him to a child in a degrading and belittling way because of his view of children.
N’s room is referred to as his “world”, both in one of the shadow triad calling it the world that Ghetsis gave to him, and N saying that room was his whole world growing up. He wasn’t allowed to leave the castle until he was an adult and was crowned as king and then left to go explore the world and proselytize, and with the way things are worded it seems that he was barely allowed to leave that room either. He was stuck in this room almost his entire life. That is… not healthy. There were plenty of things to do and he had his sisters and pokemon in there all the time along with Ghetsis and the sages going in there a lot, but there’s no windows, there’s no bed, THERE’S NO BED. It’s not even a bedroom, it’s just a brightly colored prison.
I wonder if he ever had a bed. Maybe he had one at first but it was removed. Did he just not like using it and preferred sleeping on the floor because of his time living in a forest? Did Ghetsis take it away as punishment? He doesn’t even have blankets or pillows in there.
And there’s also the pokemon. He was surrounded by pokemon, but they were all pokemon that were previously abused that Ghetsis purposefully put him with to help drill the world view that humans only hurt pokemon and they need to be liberated. N described them as “Pokemon with their hearts shut so very tightly I couldn't even talk to them”.
He probably loved that room. He was abandoned as a child and lived in a forest before this. He was a kid trying to survive in the wild until a man showed up and took him in. He gave him a family, home, last name, and a purpose. He loved getting a last name so much he scribbled it into his basketball. As a kid, that was his home. It was familiar and comforting, but also the site of a lot of abuse. He can’t even bring himself to go in there anymore. What had before seemed like a fun and happy place to him is now small, stifling, and scary after seeing the world. He can’t bring himself to be in there anymore. He leaves immediately and waits for you outside. If you try to enter it again after leaving he says “There is nothing more of interest there. Let's keep moving”. You can’t go back in.
