it’s future rust and it’s future dust

the thing about what remains of edith finch is you spend the entire game hearing the stories of how the finch family died. and you hear these tales about natural disasters and catastrophes and situations that feel so implausible that you just have to believe that a curse is involved. and as the game goes on things get stripped back and you reach a point where you realize the entire game spins around three of the finch family members: edith finch, dawn finch, and edie finch. and edie wants edith to learn about the curse to understand the family she comes from. because this has been all of edie's life, watching her family die, surviving because she opened her arms up and embraced the truths of her world. and dawn wants edith to stay away from the curse because it's what killed her brothers, in a way that dawn could never have prevented. dawn could have saved her father, but she couldn't have saved lewis or milton because it was so beyond her understanding. and here edie is talking about something beyond any of their understandings, and edith is the only person dawn has left. and by the end you realize that edie died of old age. and then dawn died of a terminal illness. and edith dies in childbirth and at the end of this game about train collisions and being slaughtered by monsters and suicide inside a cannery that the three finch members who held their family legacy on their backs all died by natural causes. the three most natural causes in the world really. and what's left of edie, of dawn, of edith isn't the house and it isn't the curse because sometimes your family holds so much weight that you can't understand. what's left of edith finch is her son. the only thing left of edith finch is a legacy of life, but not hers. the lives of her ancestors, true, but the life of her son most of all.

always feel like i've been shot in the chest when i remember that utena. and. anthy. met. as. children. utena witnesses this other girl's suffering and makes it her reason to live to save her, both because she needs something that feels pure and noble to cling to and keep her going in the wake of her parents' death and her passive suicidality, and because she's horrified at what anthy is going through.