#queeries :3

look outside is one of my favorite games of all time and its kind of comical how much more i love it than basically anything else. yknow how the utdr fandom gets? acting like those are The rpgs? yeah thats me with look outside.

as a game, look outside is about compassion. the premise, as you might be aware, is that due to something called The Visitor, people who look outside are being transformed into body horror monsters influenced by their thoughts and feelings at the time of transformation. it is also, crucially, always treated as a neutral thing. some curses are extraordinarily painful while others are outright pleasant, and there's no visual shorthand for this. the thing is, though, curses are often distressing, which can lead someone to lose lucidity and lash out! this is why MOST but NOT ALL cursed individuals are hostile: they couldn't cope with the changes to their body and brain.

something very interesting for a horror game [and especially something with such an emphasis on body horror] is the absence of direct metaphor. the curses within Look Outside are NOT a metaphor for puberty or alterhumanity or queerness or physical disability or mental illness or anything of the sort, and so that lack of specificity allows the comparisons to be more freely drawn from character to character and for those topics to exist within the story both overlapping with and separate from curses.

to go over these a bit, i'll start small. there's two rather explicitly neurodivergent characters: Dan, who has autism, and Ernest, who experiences delusions and possibly paranoia [no explicit reason, but canonically predating the plot of Look Outside].

Dan is canonically grating, ignorant of social cues, seemingly unaware of boundaries, and emotionally tone deaf. he is capable of betraying the player's trust by wasting 200 dollars [intended for rent] without any guilt about the matter [which you can kick him out for], basically constantly streaming and sharing private information with the public, and can get all of his viewers cursed simply by not thinking about the consequences of streaming while outside. however, it becomes clear during the unique quest you do with him that he has struggled consistently with being liked, and has resorted to masking with a goofy streamer persona for positive attention. you just see his actual emotional depth only once, because he's always streaming.

Ernest, on the other hand, is best friends with a rat named Colonel Squeakums and often assumes meaning behind Squeakums' squeaks. if you have an item that allows you to understand rats, you can quite firmly determine that Ernest cannot speak to rats and is usually wrong about what Squeakums' is saying, but the rat doesn't resent him for this, and wishes to look out for the old man. Ernest's delusions and paranoia lead him to suspect many characters are hostile without grounds, and he says a lot of odd things such as asserting that before Look Outside there were "little men made-a blue cheese doin' mind experiments on the elderly", but he's overall a very kind old man who appreciates the help you can provide to him.

i started with these two because they're very major characters and neurodivergence is an easy read for the curses! however, i am in no way done. warning for discussion of body horror in the next paragraph.

next up is Joel. he's eight years old, and while he didn't look outside, his baby sister Rosie was napping under a window and got cursed. she was presumably at the age where her teeth were growing in, as the curse led her to keep growing teeth, and those she bit also started growing more teeth. Joel was bitten on the nose, and his face ends up being gradually replaced by a giant mouth full of rows of teeth all the way down to his throat. the player meets him right before he loses his second eye, which causes him to panic. at this point, the only way to calm him down enough to regain lucidity is to find his favorite stuffed bear and give it to him, which allows you to take him into your home! if he is left alive but not helped, the teeth spread across his entire body as they do for his baby sister, little brother, mother, and father.

Joel is, crucially, experiencing drastic and distressing bodily changes at eight. these changes reframe how he interacts with the world, what he can and can't do, and even how he talks [he often has to pause to take a breath mid-sentence]. this is something he had no say in, and it has left him disconnected from his family [who are all either dead or worse]. while puberty isn't the most intense reading of look outside, it is one that is significant for Joel's story. i'm not discussing his post-recruitment story for a few reasons, but he does have trouble grasping the scale of the changes to the world, and at one point worries about homework for school the coming week despite the fact school is absolutely not continuing.

so far these are all firmly major characters. specifically, they're all party members. however, i now want to take a minor character detour to cover some of my favorite, smaller cases.

one character you might meet during the game is David. he is a teacher, and specifically he's special ed. all of his students are disabled, and he asks you to find and help them, since they got scattered around the sewers. and CRUCIALLY, the bus he was in started to crash down into the sewers when he got cursed and his primary thought process was just to try and help his students, so he became a giant spider and made a web that caught the bus before it could go too far down. this is one of my favorite curses in the entire game because it is motivated entirely by one teacher caring about their students and dammit thats a trope that kills me. the students themselves are all really sweet, and David even tells you about each of them so you can identify them easier! one of them is blind and has a guide dog you also have to track down, and one kid was so engrossed in his video game that he managed to remain human. he literally avoided looking outside by just being fixated on his game. iconic.

and now the most minor character im going to bring up here. not even close how minor they are.

joyitcatt is one of Dan's viewers. you remember how Dan is a streamer? his stream chat has some named viewers with unique dialogue they might send. during combat, joyitcatt will sometimes say things such as "gender envy...", "transition goals tbh", or "I wish that was me" about cursed opponents. and during the finale of the game, you and your party go onto the roof of the apartment building, which means everyone watching the stream gets cursed if Dan is in the party! and joyitcatt's roof dialogue is "very happy rn", "sometimes good things happen", and "maybe the visitor is a good thing :)" which are some of my FAVORITE lines about curses and they come from a character that is known only by 10 dialogue lines and a username. joyitcatt is so transgender and alterhuman and i love them so much. if we ever get more information on joyitcatt i will leap for joy they're so cool to me.

ok now for two more characters. these ones read as plural to me!

Leigh is another possible party member, and she is capable of transforming into a giant monster called the Grinning Beast. her quest involves finding her phone [which she discarded just before the events of Look Outside] and seeing the texts she receives over the next few days from each of her parents, one of her siblings, and her boyfriend. all of the contacts have very hostile names [like "LIAR"] and it is clear things ended on a very sour note. she asserts during her quest that she is a just The Grinning Beast now, and no longer Leigh, and you can either choose to let her throw away a ring her boyfriend left for her [symbolically throwing away all of her old life] or tell her that she's allowed to be both of these things. and like. wow. okay. it's kind of hard to analyze this through a plural lens because it's Right There. however i also headcanon her with bpd which led her to split on her family and boyfriend, because i think it'd be cool if she had bpd and was also yucky.

now. clears my throat. Frederic. the Freds are great. basically, Frederic is a painter, and was painting the sky shortly before the plot of Look Outside, unaware of the Visitor's presence. he got cursed that anything he painted would come to life, and unknowingly painted the changes his curse made him experience as well as depicting the emotions he was going through. these self portraits came to life as the other Frederics, and one of them who was originally faceless promptly stole og Fred's face for himself, leading the originally-faced fred to be externally dubbed Faceless Fred and the face thief masquerading as the original fred to be dubbed Face Taker. all of the Freds, however, are vastly different. they hold different beliefs on which of them is the original and whether the others should be killed. some, like Toxic Fred [his painting is labeled Treachery], are aware they're not the original but still want to be the last one standing. on the other hand, Bright Fred [his painting is Blinding Light] is confident he is the original but doesn't even consider killing the others. the one big through line for them is that the Freds all hear the thoughts of each other and it gives them all really bad headaches that make it hard to think or do things. the Freds are so important to me but i had to do sparknotes because theres 10 of them and it'd be a lot to go over. i hope some of the Massively Plural fredness has come across

okay. so. i've gone over several instances of marginalization as it overlaps with Look Outside. but now. here's the kicker: they're all also people of color. and we know this isn't art style or lighting, because there is exactly one white person in the entire game and he is blatantly paler than anyone else. and this game takes place in Montreal, Canada. and it's awesome.