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ENA thoughts & theory: on Theodora, the Bathroom, and Unforgiven Frank

[aka: historical events in uncanny streets, aka: I Think I Figured Out What Frank Did.]

edit: you can now also read this on my neocities! it has a cute little page themed after the dbbq menu style :) but anyway on with the post

Throughout most of chapter 1, it feels pretty heavily built up that the bathroom is some sort of force that works in direct opposition to “the genie”. it certainly felt malevolent to me; like it's something that’s replaced “the genie” in the minds and vernacular of the people of uncanny streets; perhaps a kind of corruption or overthrowing of its genie, and usurpation of the people’s efforts to seek it out as a sort of reprieve or authority. once you actually get to the bathroom though, it seems that this… isn’t actually the case?

The simple fact that theodora still exists in there and is perfectly fine and unharmed and surprisingly cordial if you manage to find her is proof enough there's not actually anything sinister about the bathroom, but the "angels" ena corrupts into when trying to mention a "genie" in prior conversations being the same things she transforms into when theodora begins to let her ascend [as well as seen during the icy ascension climb] ties the whole operation directly to theodora.

It seems that the bathroom is in fact actually theodora’s own design, and i posit that it exists as a front to deliberately obscure her name/presence + throw people off her trail. She’s not exactly trying to completely close herself off from everyone, but she does seem to be “in hiding” to some extent. this of course begs the question: why would a character who’s basically a lesser deity be in hiding?

Well, part of it is I think she just kind of got tired of attending to everyone's "aspirations" and whatnot at a whim.

The presentation of the bathroom as a confessional and the surrounding talk of things like “washing clean one's sins” seems in a pretty similar vein to what i’d assume theodora’s more regular duties are, based on her interaction with ena; cleansing, reflection, forgiveness, rebirth, that whole usual god-type jazz. it's all pretty handily represented here, and the whole deal of her ‘throne’ being a wishing well pretty directly parallels how one would typically 'wish' on a genie as well. perhaps she simply wanted people to put in their own work to solve their problems rather than continually come to her for everything. Interestingly though, she IS still quite willing to help directly if you just come straight to her. like, the bathroom serves its own purpose if you assume that’s all there is, but there also seems to be a thing of "if you still remember the genie and/or have done the work to know she still exists and/or are simply diligent enough to search around to find her, you are welcomed to her benefits”.

It’s a bit strange next to the whole ‘burying her name and presence’ thing! If all she wanted to do was make people earn their forgiveness, she could have accomplished that just by making herself really hard to reach¹. But taking those extra levels of censorship...the general populace clearly isn’t the real problem here. she’s obscuring herself because of something else. something specific. something she would not forgive.

...so the frank spec was originally going to be a separate post, but after chasing the ideas in it far enough, i found the two wound up running right back into eachother. I am joining them unceremoniously with this block of text. He has a lot of shit to get through but i promise we will eventually wrap back around to the G͊̉̀Eͦ̿̓N̵̶͠Ỉ͂̏[BATHROOM]

Frank…. Frank is an interesting case to be sure. He’s so calm and cordial, even to ena, yet he speaks of “past mistakes” and having to “remain unforgiven"? He’s the only character theodora is less willing to help out than ena too; she’s fine with letting your excommunicated ne'er-do-well wipe the world bare, yet she draws the line at showing mercy to frank? what did this motherfucker DO? My answer is uhhhhhh colonization, probably!

Right. So assertion #1 i have about frank is that the ship you enter and leave uncanny streets through belonged to him*.

This seems like too deliberate a line to just mean "i walked through the door on there to get here”. he's got a history with that ship. if it belonged to him, i have to figure he was also the one who originally crashed it into uncanny streets. He does refer to both ena and himself as ‘travelers’, after all; i don’t think it’s just that the ship had always been lodged there and he just lived on it. ramming that giant ass thing in through the sands has already not got him off to a great start, but i mean that could have been an accident. You never know. maybe he’s just a bad pilot. No, the real problem, i think, is that after doing so he proceeded to attempt to harvest uncanny streets and/or remake it according to his vision.

frank has some very very strong and very very baffling associations with the wanderers. i don't quite want to say it's anything so simple/direct as "he created them" or "they work for him", but he has most DEFINITELY had some kind of hand [or robo-foot, as the case may be] in how they currently exist and operate. to be completely real i haven’t been able to makes heads or tails [or snakes and hippos] of all the NUMEROUS scattered clues about them in any sort of sensible or satisfying way, but… the barest overall gist is that the wanderers are something frank either designed himself or sought to harness, but doing so in the form presented here in the tapestries in his room was….not viable. As you can see, it’s a bit… incomplete there, compared to what we see in the game.

This… facility? In the secret area of the gutsy maze is connected directly to frank’s room, as seen with the respective doors + same brick texture between both, and the even same music as in frank’s room will play if you approach this door. obviously this gives him a pretty big tie to the production[???] of these things!

There are a lot of individual elements to the wanderers who are up and out there flying around uncanny streets: hippo, veins, snake, diamond, eye, ribs. The thing that drives me crazy is that despite there being so many places where these elements turn up individually or in groups, none of them are exactly complete sets, or presented in consistent ways, or seem to be from the same origin. this is a bit of a ramble for making only a tangential point but bear with me. The facility hits their 3 biggest features-hippo/snake/diamond, but don’t line up with the elements in frank’s tapestries-hippo/diamond/veins---which weirdly, the veins seem to be their own sort of free beings there???? yet seem to act as a binding agent for the hippo in the functional wanderers? There’s also the eye and the ribcage thing, which i don’t think turn up directly anywhere, but they are… let’s say, more crude and primitive structures/organs, that i might associate with, say, a fetus. those red and blue tendril veins are also notably present in that thing, and act in a similar sort of “binding” manner of ena “becoming one with [the orb]”. it's also those things binding the taxi driver’s heads but i’m gonna get too out in the weeds² if i keep going on about the wanderers' elements.

the point of all this is to say that while frank seemed to have a partial vision/plan for what he wanted the wanderers to be, it seems to me that certain resources/elements/processes vital to them actually functioning were native to/only available in uncanny streets. And so I think he sought to take them for himself by force.

Look, the dude’s a big king head. This alone EASILY carries vibes of conquest, but on top of that apparently his mecha legs are also pretty handily lifted from the ED-209 mech in robocop. granted, i haven't actually seen robocop so i could be way off base here, but i feel like a police gunmech isn't exactly, uh, going to be a force for everyone’s civic benefit yknow. Not to mention the job listings refer to the wanderers as “enforcers”. He is a guy whose associations all reek of hostile takeover.

Thinking more on the wanderer’s purpose though…the npc’s call them wanderers in a general sense, but i wonder if they “wander” because they are searching for something. in their dialogue they report on finding various oddities:

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”A SEVERE BRAIN SIGNAL CAPABLE OF PRODUCING [UNINTELLIGIBLE] WAS LOCATED.” “A NEW PHENOMENON HAS BEEN DISCOVERED /// THE ENORMOUS EGG THAT HOLDS US ALL AS IN THE MOTHER’S WOMB”

a severe brain and an egg/womb, huh.

…I have a hunch they're looking for theodora. The brain thing seems the most indicative because there’s no other imagery or references of a brain in the game, and while the ‘egg’/’fetus’ orb thing is a good bit more nebulous, it IS the most direct connection we have to theodora currently. And boy those fuckers sure do love flocking around this "new phenomenon" leading to her.

It’s no secret that genies have massive power within and/or over the door they rule, so it would make sense for the purposes of colonization³ that he’d seek out something like that to gain access to or control, perhaps to further form the land to his liking.

Obviously, theodora isn’t going to be wild about all this. She intervened and ultimately stopped him, but not before his assault did some damage.

this “broken palace” where the shattered theodora lies… i’d like to assert it was in fact formerly HER palace. I always did find that area weirdly serene and beautiful, in an out-of-place sort of way; it’s certainly a more natural kind of aesthetic i could associate with her were the bathroom not in play. Seems a shame to abandon it rather than rebuild, but…i believe that when frank launched his attack, she feigned her own death in the process of fending him off. The wanderers, too, seem to corroborate this:

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“WE HAVE ISSUED THE TIME OF DEATH AT 2:04 P.M.”

She let him believe that this attack did in fact destroy her, to set up an eternal stalemate--that, by a cruel trick of fate, in his effort to take over by force, he’d also destroyed the way to accomplish his goals. That’s why he’s trapped there in the lost village now. Trapped with the ruins of his ambition, trapped with a dead god that provides no way to change the land he sought to conquer.

It is certainly interesting, when ena talks to the shattered theodora, that she very deliberately highlights she “can only keep you from returning” despite that having no real relevance to the conversation they were having. That’s all that remnant of her exists to do, and it’s keen on letting you know it.

Meanwhile, the real and very much not actually dead theodora is far more into subterfuge and also still needs a place to live. So she simply made a new makeshift palace/hideout/base of operations, and… you guessed it. That's the bathroom babeyyyyy. That’s why you can’t speak of a “genie” in uncanny streets, and why no one there these days even knows what the genie is. she wanted something completely disconnected, unassuming, and censored so that she may evade the remaining wanderers, and so that word she’s still alive and in power and serving her people [even if more passively now] never reaches frank; forcing him to live with his guilt + the consequences of his actions, and/or just to set an example so he doesn’t try any shit again.

And that’s how we find things in chapter 1.

Going forwards, though… i do find this line interesting:

There are… certainly a number of ways to interpret this one⁴, but for the sake of this post, i think there’s a fair call that this line can mean “the pretense of theodora’s being dead” has been stripped away. It has got to be crazy to learn that you’ve been living a lie for the past however long, but at least he doesn’t seem too pissed that she’s been deceiving him all this time. Whatever happens, it’s nice that he’s not interested in going back to his old ways now that he’s free.

I accused frank of a lot of shit in this post, but i do really love the guy. it’s hard not to be endeared to a guy who’s accepted his punishment, but still commits to being better even though he knows it won’t absolve him. It’s hard not to be endeared to one of the only people who’s actually fucking nice to you. And of course, ena might also have her own history with him, given he’s a thing she thought of for her aspiration to theodora + how frank bafflingly uses the correct ‘ƎNA’ spelling of her name. There’s a lot about his past that i’ve tried to piece together here, but still quite a bit more beyond reach-at least at this this point in the game. I certainly hope we get to see more of him, and i get the suspicion there’s a good chance we will.⁵

…

Alright yes i’ll address the superscript numbers now. Because this was clipped together out of two separate posts that were Specifically About Frank and Specifically About Theodora initially, there are a few tangential points & observations that i removed from both broader topics to make it flow better as one throughline about uncanny’s history. They’re not substantial enough to merit their own posts so i’m just tacking them on down here as footnotes.

¹. i’ve seen a bit of questioning of why theodora allows the purge events to happen, and im gonna be honest chief i dont think she cares. If people are creating their own path to her that's not her problem, and by whatever metric the purge events are “illegal”, i don’t think she was the one to declare them as such. Now, the wanderers on the other hand….. VERY distinctly seem to dislike the purges. They were the ones to take the taxi driver’s head, and also seemingly what hurled that chunk of building into uncanny dark to try and prevent you from getting in [an echo of their murmurings can be heard before seeing it crash up from the below] Which i find so so baffling with everything else i’ve posited about the wanderers in this post! I don’t get why they would care at all, let alone try to stop it.

². For reasons i could not even BEGIN to guess, that whole underground gutsy maze area has EXTREMELY direct parallels to EVERYTHING frank has going on. The music and doors and brick texture as mentioned above, but it’s also got the same sort of water as in the broken palace, and wouldn’t you god damn know it, those are also both the locations where the pointing spirit guys appear.

Not to mention this is also where the wanderers decided to take the taxi driver’s head, and there’s also that strange priest in the underground vignette of ena with the lantern featuring a wanderer that leads with the snake’s head rather than the hippo’s…. Sincerely. What did they mean by all this.

³. this isn’t even the first or only theme of colonization i’ve picked up in dream bbq. This is probably going to be its own post later but... Man… i dont know… i think it could mean something that she and frank both are similarly “unforgiven”, almost as if they may have similar crimes. I don’t think ena is actively malevolent per se, but she does seem…uncaring, and i could definitely call her complicit. paving the world over in homogenous grey, paving the way for “investors in real estate” and auctioneers to immediately move in once it smells “much more valuable” and to liquidate the remaining assets… her own being wrapped up in being a “salesperson”, the big fuckoff gun..... i dont know man....

⁴. the gut vibe check i had for this line is that it has something to do with that bit theodora says about "fears and hesitation will only betray [ena’s] true ambition” in claiming her aspiration. But like the “truth” of ena’s aspiration that frank sees is uncanny streets getting outworlded, and that seems…a bit needlessly sinister, that he’d call that “noble”. There is also an admittedly much simpler read in the lies and truth just refer to the directions from the green and orange pointing spirits. But like thats boring. that is simply too mundane to feel appropriate for this series.

⁵. chapter 3!!!!!

Frank ABSOLUTELY has history with piero and is apparently on pretty good terms with him, which ena very much distinctly is NOT. but ena also seems to be on good terms– dare i say even friends with frank– so i think he’s gonna come in clutch for us trying to get us in the crowd door. Also apparently if you look at that painting in isolation it does have eyes. this isn't relevant to anything, i just wanted to share it 'cause it's neat.

This…does present an interesting case in that frank is not a guaranteed encounter in chapter 1. If you don’t meet him there, would he still be there for us later? And if not, what is there for the crowd door? Disguise? Breaking in with force??? Continuity going forward is something i think about a lot for dbbq; how each route leaves you with and without certain tools to use later. If you have the humanboard, you probably won’t see frank. If you see frank, you probably won’t have had the humanboard. Is the best option doing the quests for humanboard and then hopping in the river to meet frank? hell, you can even get out of chapter 1 with 'useless' extra inventory like the chocolates. will any of that shit be relevant later? Boggles the mind.

*For getting all the way down here i present you, finally, with an alternate offshoot version of this theory that leaves more questions than answers: The ship may have been frank’s… and theodora’s. It’s for sure interesting the ship is where the door is, and that frank likewise may have owned a door. it really could go either way whether the door was already on there or if it was added as a way for other people to come and go more easily once the ship became a, uh, permanent fixture of uncanny, but IF that door had always been on the ship…. It could have interesting implications for theodora, depending on how long she’s been the genie of it. Particularly since there is a very fair read that the missing statue of her on the ship may be the same one that’s seen in the broken palace---they do have the same pink eyes, after all.

The only conclusion i’m willing to draw about this for now is that theodora may have also come in on the ship along with frank. Perhaps they could have been working together, at one point. This doesn’t change all that much about the rest of the theory though; frank could’ve still gotten power-hungry, and theodora could’ve clashed & broken ties with him all the same.

It could also have some interesting implications about where a door actually leads, and a genie’s powers in relation to that door and the area it’s located in, but, well, that’s more off the wall stuff that’s not really productive to think about right now. Perhaps in chapter 2 with the whole ‘inauguration of the new genie’ business…..

There also may be something to said about the ship having the same kind of stained glass as the orb; again with how the orb is a pretty direct association with theodora and how the wanderers seem to be drawn to it.

I wasn’t able to draw anything constructive out of it, but it’s… it’s there.

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