Who he was before and the one he couldn't forget.
Marion, as Myra puts it, was not like the other people in the Counties, he was a man who kept his promises and was willing to do what she gave up believing people would ever do, try. But as the Descent to Nowhere comic progressed, something about Marion felt...familiar.
To remind everyone, years ago, back when Little Nightmares 2 released, a certain piece of concept art of the Thin Man caught our attention. Back then, there were many things to take note of in the concept arts, but among them was the picture of the Thin man standing behind a table, smoking heavily as he questioned a child sitting in front of him, which made I and many other theorists question for years over the possibility of this unique picture possibly giving us insight to the kind of person the Thin Man was.
But in addition to this picture, other things began to stand out, other concept arts additionally depicting what we could only conclude to have been a detectives office, and with the Pale City having within it a child's missing poster, a toy store, a children's play room in the hospital, a children's school and an apartment with a room fitted for a child, but no actual children still roaming in the city designed to house a large number of them, all of these things made I and many other theorists theorize years ago the man in the picture was once a normal man, a heavy smoking detective in charge of finding the children who vanished from the Pale City, back when it was still just a normal human city, a city we now believe to have once been known by a different name, the Counties.
But such a task to find so many vanished children led us to believe such a detective was at his wits end in his struggle to find them, as a result we believed he would retreat to the only thing able to give him some comfort, a television where he could watch programs where problems could be resolved in under 30 minutes, it was his escape from reality.
However, with still so little information to go off back then, we struggled going back and forth between deciding if we should include the possibility of such a detective existing in the story or not...until the Descent to Nowhere comics showed us who this detective may have always been meant to be... Marion Guy, who one fateful morning met Myra Wan on the bridge after failing to sooth himself in front of the television. Who had attempted to give up his heavy smoking with lollipops and had a strong determination to solve the cold cases of the children who kept mysteriously vanishing in the city. But if what we theorized is true...then does this mean Marion Guy is Mono? Is he the Thin Man we saw in Little Nightmares 2?....maybe...but if he was, how would we know?....then again, maybe we always knew.
Marion was someone we were told had a blind resolve, in other words, he was an uncommonly single minded man. In fact Marion was as determined to work with Myra as he was to find those vanished children, refusing to work with anyone else but her because he truly believed only they shared what no one else in the Counties had left, a light on, and sure enough, even after Myra tried to push him away at the start of their first meeting, Myra began to understand Marion was someone worth trusting, sound familiar? It should, because despite not knowing Marion for very long, many theorists and I realized Marion and his relationship to Myra reminded us of Mono and Six.
And I know what you are thinking, "How can Marion be a child like Mono in the Nowhere, if he's an adult in the Counties?" The thing is, Mono and Marion's story in Descent to Nowhere are not happening at the same time. Time in the Nowhere is warped, a human could encounter others in the Nowhere from decades, even centuries apart from their own time, we can't trust time in the Nowhere to run at the same pace as the human world and we don't know what's truly become of the human world now during the events of the game. Of course there is a far more concerning matter to consider than just the obscure laws of time and space of the Nowhere...it's how an adult like Marion could somehow end up in the Nowhere as a child. We have always known there to be more than one way to enter Nowhere, the Nowhere itself prefers children but as we learned from the Ferryman in the Sounds of Nightmares, traveling to Nowhere is not limited to just kids, even adults can be granted permission to travel there, all it takes if for a toll in torments to be paid.
However, no matter the way, fear is essential to open the door into Nowhere. Because of this, we theorized an adult can enter Nowhere as a monstrous Resident, but only if they are willing to give into their desires, warped by their fears and do something irredeemable, before taking a sleep they can never awaken from, but more on this later. This however, is just with Residents who were once human themselves, but what if maybe...just maybe... there was always a way for adults to travel to Nowhere as the children they once were. From what we understand, only a special kind of tormented child can travel to Nowhere, not only must a child be consumed by their childhood fears, but they must also desire an escape from their own world before dreaming their way into the Threshold, guided by the Ferryman through the dark mist and through the door to Nowhere. There are many things a child can be afraid of, but from what we have learned from Noone and Ruse, all children in the Nowhere appear to have one fear in common, the fear of being truly and utterly alone. And if what Otto's professor theorized is true, fear really is the key to opening the door into Nowhere, but it may also be the key to how one will appear after entering it.
Many adults tend to grow out of their childlike hearts, and many more forget their childhood fears.... but not everyone. When Myra and Marion were first introduced, the two of them shared something not many people still had, they were children at heart. Marion for one, we learned is a bit naรฏve, likes cracking jokes, is constantly filled with questions to ask, and still wielded the innocent determination to uphold the duty he hoped to fulfill as a detective, he wanted to help bring some much needed change to the city. However, throughout the comic, we see Marion express a side of himself showing us even he was reaching his limits in dealing with a city plagued by corruption and strangeness, agreeing to commit to a double suicide with Myra if his final attempt at making a difference in the city failed. Marion had hoped he and Myra's combined efforts could do what no one else could, find a vanished child and solve the mystery of "The Milk Carton Cases" to finally wake the counties up like a blow to the head. Hush was the most recent child to vanish from the city, the one Marion had hoped to find, but in the final issues of the comic, when Marion learns their chief of police had killed Isaac, one of the children imprisoned in the secret underground floor of the Counties psychiatric institute, we see Marion lose hope of everything he wished he could bring back to the city, believing other children like Hush were as dead as Isaac, along with any change.
As Marion stood at the edge of the bridge, we can see just how broken he had now become, having finally reached his limit from facing the cruelty and corruption of the city, its the same face Myra had when she first stood at the edge of the bridge in Issue #1. With nothing more to give him just one little glimmer of hope to reignite his will to keep fighting, keep pushing the boulder up the hill, there was now only one thing Marion wanted more than anything....to leave such a cruel world all together. The only thing he had left to give him solace in his final moment, was knowing he would not leave the world alone, he had Myra with him ready to take the plunge alongside him...or at least he thought.
Marion was not aware Myra had been in the process of uncovering just where the vanished children were as she stood on the edge of the bridge with him. After taking her drugs, her mind threw her back to the day she first faced the Ferryman and it proved successful in finding the answers she needed, problem was the effects of the drugs she took to do it kept her mind and her body from reacting to stop Marion from jumping, and by the time Myra finally did resurface from the hole her mind had plunged into, it was already too late, Marion jumped off the bridge, and in his final moments, Marion faced a devastating realization... he was falling alone.
As Marion looks up at Myra still standing on the bridge, overwhelmed with the cruel reality of his situation as he continues to fall, something strange happens...Marion's body vanishes midfall. Even after Myra regained control of her body and desperately rushed to the bottom of the bridge, walking along the now frozen waters to search for Marion...there was no trace of him anywhere. As for where Marion vanished to, well, if what we theorized is true, then answer is obvious....he's in Nowhere. Marion may have been a grown man, but in those final moments of his fall....he must have felt as scared as a child.
If Marion truly wanted to escape the Counties as much as we believe, if he felt truly alone in his final moments and if he truly felt such a fear as any child would have felt, then Marion's deathly fall allowed him to do what Otto failed in doing, he dreamed the way the children did, reaching Hypnagogia, being asleep and awake, both at once, entering the Threshold and finding the door to Nowhere...and then maybe...just maybe...the Ferryman let Marion pass through the door.
While Myra learned just where the children were being taken to at the end of the comic, the Nowhere, Marion may have been just as successful in their mission. Marion, the detective who aimed to solve the mystery of the vanishing children, would eventually find out where those children were, but he himself would no longer remember anything of who he once was and what he aimed to accomplish the moment he awoke in the Nowhere, not as a man or a Resident... but as a child... a child we may now know as Mono, who would eventually meet the very same little girl whose vanishing started his partnership with Myra, but would just as easily be gone from his sight due to circumstances beyond their control, Hush.
If what we theorized is true, then could this be the reason why Mono was so willing to stand by Six's side and no one elses?
For years many of us wondered why Mono was so willing to find and stand alongside Six the moment they met, willing to risk it all to help her at every turn when he was not willing to do the same for the other kids like Hush and the kids in ep. 6 of the Little Nightmares 2 digital comic.
But if what we theorized is true, then Mono's determination to find and stand alongside Six was always because of one very simple reason...she was familiar to him...he knew her, but couldn't remember why...but now, maybe we do. Mono and Six, two children may have never been children at all, but rather adults who were still children at heart, who one fateful day crossed path on the bridge in the Counties, and then again in the Wilderness after their world was claimed by the Nowhere. But hey, it's just a theory.
