The following is a list of all known deceased members of the Finch Family. Trivia Besides Edith's son, Christopher, Milton Finch is the only Finch who is likely to still be alive by the end of the game's events, as he was confirmed in a Reddit AMA by Giant Sparrow to grow up to become the King in The Unfinished Swan. May 01, 2017 What Remains of Edith Finch was developed by Giant Sparrow and published by Annapurna Interactive. Our review is based on the PlayStation 4 version.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/WhatRemainsOfEdithFinch
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'A lot of this isn't going to make sense to you and I'm sorry about that.'
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What Remains of Edith Finch is an Environmental Narrative Game developed by Giant Sparrow. It was released on April 25, 2017, and follows Edith Finch; the last living member of her family, returning to her ancestral home in an attempt to learn more about her extended family, whose members were prone to unusual deaths, and whose rooms in the house have been more or less left in the condition they were in at the time they passed away.
The game was critically praised and was subsequently nominated for several awards, winning the BAFTA award for Best Game and the Game Award for Best Narrative
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This game provides examples of:
- Adult Fear: Edie, Sam and Dawn all outlived the majority of their children, and several of the childrens' deaths were due to direct action or neglect by their parents.
- Ambiguous Situation:
- The circumstances of Molly's, Barbara's, and Milton's deaths are left just vague enough for players to draw their own interpretations. Or in the case of Milton, whether or not he's the King from The Unfinished Swan.
- Whether Lewis intended to kill himself is also ambiguous, as his declining awareness of reality and trance-like state in the final part of the flashback imply that he wasn't fully aware of what he was doing.
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: A large part of the game. Each flashback has you play, still from a first-person perspective, a different member of the Finch family.
- Animal Motifs: With a family name like 'Finch', of course, there are knick-knacks and the like with birds on them in and around the house. Edith's journal also has birds sketched around the family tree.
- Art Shift:
- Barbara's story is in the style of a cel-shaded comicbook. Justified, as Edith is reading a comic based on her death.
- Edith's portrait for Milton is based on his self-portrait from his flipbook. As such, it's more cartoony looking compared to the realistic drawings for the rest of the Finches. His self-portrait in particular resembles a younger version of the King from The Unfinished Swan.
- Lewis' fantasy world looks like an old-style fantasy video game. As the story progresses, it gets more and more realistic, switching from top-down view to isometric, then full 3D by the end, but still keeping its simplified look.
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- Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Milton may have done this, or he may have just run away from home.
- Awesome, but Impractical: The house looks like something Willy Wonka would have built for Tom Sawyer; it is loaded with rickety walkways, rope ladders, tree houses and secret passageways. It is also incredibly dangerous, and it is astounding that only one Finch fell to their death from its various unguarded ledges.
- Awesome Moment of Crowning: The culmination of Lewis's fantasy quest sees him become supreme king of his world in an epic celebration, kneeling to be crowned by his love interest. In reality, he's being Driven to Suicide and decapitating himself with the fish chopper.
- Bait-and-Switch: Similar to Gone Home. Edith's foreboding narration upon reaching the house, the topic of a family death curse, the darkened foyer and mysteriously ruined kitchen, and the ominous locked basement can give the impression of a horror game; it's actually an Environmental Narrative Game with a heavy focus on emotional storytelling.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: One interpretation of the curse, assuming it's real, is that it kills members of the Finch family by giving them what they want in one twisted way or another. For some, the connection is less obvious than others, but it still holds through in many cases:
- Odin wanted to bring his family to America in an effort to escape the family curse, so his family did indeed make it to America, but he drowned before setting foot on land again.
- Molly was ravenously hungry, so the curse served her up a savage feast... and then made her the final course.
- Calvin wanted to feel like he was flying, so the curse made the wind pick him up and throw him over a cliff.
- Barbara wanted to recapture her famous scream, so the curse provided her with... inspiration.
- Walter managed to survive for thirty years by making sure to want nothing at all. Then he decided that that was no way to live and that he was willing to die if it meant going outside again... and sure enough, the curse struck him down the moment he set foot outdoors.
- Gus wanted to ruin his father's wedding, so the curse sent a storm that did just that, and which killed Gus in the bargain.
- Sam wanted to spend time doing something with his daughter. He got to do just that with Dawn, right up until the deer they were hunting threw him to his death. The curse even immortalized the moment with a photo.
- Gregory, a baby, wanted to play with his bath toys. His dying dream featured the toys coming to life and swimming to the 'other side' with him, so he could play with them forever.
- Lewis wanted something brighter and more interesting than his humdrum life, so the curse provided him with such a rich fantasy life that he eventually died either so he would never have to leave it or because he completely forgot about his real life.
- Milton wanted to get away from the curse and become a famous painter. It's implied that he's the one who successfully broke the curse, but all too late; His mother and siblings still died in painful ways. His art is unseen by almost everyone real and his obsession with perfection angers his fictional subjects to abandon him.
- Edie's wish (as speculated) could be that she wanted to live the rest of her life with her family. The curse provided her with a long life with her family but at the cost of being Forced to Watch (and in some cases, unwittingly contribute to) the deaths of several generations of loved ones. Eventually, Dawn abandoned her with Edith and she crossed the Despair Event Horizon, dying alone in her house.
- Dawn wanted to escape the melodrama of the family she had been born into, so the curse turned her into a rootless wanderer for years before killing her in a painfully mundane and dreary way. note
- In contrast to her mother, Edith wants to reconnect to her family. In the end she dies in childbirth, both continuing the family tradition of dying young and ensuring that the family will go on for at least one more generation.
- Bittersweet Ending: Edith dies giving birth to her son, her last narration stating that if he ever reads her journal, it means she never got to know him. He's returned to the family home, and has a cast on his arm, suggesting that he might perpetuate the family curse. However, the Finches are still standing, still take pride in their family history, and now there are two branches (Christopher and Monroe), implying that the curse is wearing down.
- Bizarrchitecture: The Finch house is certainly unique - a large, stately home riddled with secret passages, which later had carnival-like additions nailed on and joined to the house with precarious staircases and rope pulleys. The additions seem to have been added on with only a passing nod to such things as 'structural integrity' and 'basic safety'; it's a wonder they haven't fallen off and joined the original house in the bay.
- Bloody Handprint: A bloody handprint can be seen on a door in the Creepy Basement in Barbara's story. It was caused by Sven Finch who hurt himself with a table saw right beforehand.
- Book-Ends: Lewis' funeral is one of the first things Edith mentions in her narration, and his death is the last visited in flashback before the ending.
- Both Sides Have a Point: Edith notes that as a child, she was entirely on Edie's side when it came to keeping the stories of the Finch family alive, but as a late-teen she's more understanding of her mother's desire to put all the tragedy and suffering behind her. She still ends up agreeing with Edie, though, as evidenced by the game's narration being her written account of the family history.
- Call-Forward: If you believe that something supernatural is happening, then Milton Finch's short life in the house potentially becomes the backstory of the King in The Unfinished Swan, another game by the same developers.
- Character Death: The whole point of the game. Edith's entire family is dead by the start; the flashbacks piece together how.
- Molly was either eaten by a monster under her bed, or simply died of food poisoning after eating gerbil food, toothpaste, and holly berries, hallucinating becoming a cat, an owl, a shark, and a sea monster.
- Odin uprooted his house and his remaining family to escape the curse. Unfortunately, a wave sank both him and the house.
- Calvin flew over a cliff by swinging too hard.
- Barbara was implicitly murdered by a Serial Killer who left her ear in the music box. They never found the rest of her.
- Walter broke through a wall into a tunnel and was hit by a train.
- Sam was pushed off a mountain by a deer right in front of his daughter.
- Gus was killed by debris during a storm at his father's second wedding.
- Gregory drowned in the bath due to his mother's inattentiveness.
- Milton never dies onscreen, since his disappearance was never solved. The one clue we get tells us that he either ran away from home or Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence. It is implied that he may be the same character as The King from The Unfinished Swan, meaning he possibly outlived Edith herself.
- Lewis decapitatedhimself with the chopper at the cannery after realizing that his real life could never live up to the dream kingdom he created (that, or he immersed himself so deeply into his fantasy that he was simply unaware of the real-life danger.
- Edie died in the night after Dawn dragged Edith away from the house. The circumstances aren't specified, but dialogue at the dinner table implies that she was mixing her pills with alcohol when she realized her last living family was abandoning her.
- Dawn gets incredibly sick and dies holding Edith's hand at the hospital.
- Edith dies in childbirth, accepting that she won't be there to see her son live his life.
- Monroe from The Unfinished Swan is also presumably still alive and implied to be related to the Finch family through Milton, although neither he nor his surviving cousin are aware of each other's existence.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- The music box in the hallway can be turned on early on but becomes a plot point two-third into the game.
- When Edith enters the pink bathroom, there's a toy frog on the sink. This frog was one of Gregory's toys, present when he drowns in the bathtub, later into the game.
- Conveniently Interrupted Document: In the Edie sequence, Dawn takes the book from Edith before she could learn what Edie found in the old house.
- Creative Closing Credits: In the credits, there is a childhood photo of each member of the development team shown among props from the game. In the end, there is a group photo of the whole team.
- Curse: The Finch family believes themselves to have a death curse. It's left ambiguous whether they really are supernaturally cursed, or whether the belief in the curse just leads them to dangerous acts of recklessness and magical thinking.
- Despair Event Horizon: Several characters cross it.
- Walter is so traumatized by his sister Barbara's death that he hides in an underground bunker for 30 years, too scared of the curse to go outside.
- Lewis crosses it when he realizes that his normal life could never measure up to his fantasy world.
- Edie is implied to have crossed it when she realizes that Dawn is taking Edith and abandoning the house and her. It's implied that she then committed suicide by mixing her pills with alcohol.
- Double-Meaning Title: As there are two characters named Edith Finch, the title can refer to both. Edith 'Edie' Finch, Sr. is the matriarch of the Finch family, having been the first to land on America and construct the house with her husband Sven. She spent the remaining seventy years of her life there, watching her family grow and die in equal measure. What remains of her are her house and the stories of her progeny, which are the main focus of the game, as well as Edith Finch, Jr., the last of the Finch line. It isn't clear until the end what remains of her: a son, Christopher, who embodies Edith's hopes that the family can live on without curses and tragedy.
- Driven to Suicide:
- Lewis, although given his mental state at the time, whether he intended to do this or not is questionable.
- Edie may have done this too, though her death is slightly more ambiguous. Late-game dialogue implies that she started mixing her pills with alcohol after learning that Dawn was planning to leave with Edith.
- Egopolis: Every city in Lewis's imaginary world is named after him.
- Family Portrait of Characterization: As the game is about the history of the Finch family, there are naturally several pictures scattered around the house that add to the atmosphere about how they lived their lives. Also, after each family member's death, Edie painted a portrait of them on a piece of wood that shows something of their story. After the sequence of said characters, Edith makes a copy of them into her own notebook.
- Finger in the Mail: Barbara, whose ear was found inside a music box in the hallway.
- Flashback Within a Flashback/Nested Story: The events of the game are Edith's son Christopher reading Edith's account of going back to her old house. While she's there, Edith reads several documents (like Molly's diary, an essay about how Sam wanted to remember Calvin, a comic book about Barbara, Walter's diary, pictures from Dawn and Sam's last trip, a letter to Kay about Gregory, etc.) that bring her into flashbacks showing how each family member died. Finally, the last flashback of the game consists of Edith writing down her recollection of the last time she saw Edie back when she was eleven years old, which in itself goes into a flashback when eleven-year-old Edith starts reading Edie's story of something that happened the night when Edith was born.
- Foil: A three-way example with the brothers Calvin, Sam and Walter. After the death of their sister Barbara, Walter became so traumatised that he lived in fear for the rest of his life to the point of hiding in a bunker beneath the house for thirty years, and then dying when he stepped back into the world unprepared. Calvin, conversely, swore to never be afraid of anything again which led to his death soon after, as he died in a daredevil stunt gone wrong. Sam, finally, joined the army and seems to have spent his life trying to be ready for anything the world could throw at him and raising his children the same way which seems to have served him better than Walter's and Calvin's ways, but which still got him killed in the end in an accident on a hunting trip meant to teach his daughter survival skills. Each of the brothers were defined by the same event, each one responded to it in a different way, and each one came to a bad end because of it.
- Foreshadowing:
- The organ music in the beginning could possibly be music at Edith's own funeral. It's also surprisingly cheery, hinting at the bittersweet nature of the ending, along with Edith facing her future Death by Childbirth with grace.
- If you look at the pond before entering the house for the first time, Edith mentions about the story that a dragon living in the pond killed Sven. If you look closely, you can see that the thing in the pond is actually a dragon-shaped slide. Later it is revealed that indeed Sven died in an accident while building said slide.
- In Molly's diary, before you start reading it, there's a barn owl feather in it. Bet you can guess which animal she changes into.
- In Edith Sr's room, next to the door leading to the pink bathroom, there's a picture of a baby being bathed. It's likely that this is a picture of Gregory, who drowned in that bathroom.
- When leaving Calvin's room, Edith mentions that the secret passages were built 'for smaller hands and bellies'. It's a subtle hint towards Edith being pregnant at the time of the narration.
- If you look down at any time, you can notice that Edith's stomach is visibly swollen.
- There is also a line of narration after Walter's death scene where Edith says that there is only one 'or maybe two' members of the Finch family left. While it would be reasonable for the player to assume she is referring to her brother, Milton, whose body was never found and therefore could still be alive, later events imply she is actually referring to her unborn child.
- When Lewis is entering the Throne room to be crowned King in his fantasy, it's not hard to notice before he even gets to the podium that his 'throne' is a Guillotine.
- Gay Option: A minor one. In Lewis' segment, the player gets to decide whether his imaginary quest was for a 'beautiful prince' or a 'handsome queen.'
- Generational Saga: The game tells the story of 4 generations (from Edie to Edith Jr.), or 6 if you include Odin and Edith's son, Christopher.
- Justified Tutorial: Lewis's 'level' contains one of the few moments of conventional gameplay, and the story starts out simple to help you get the hang of it.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Several of the Finch family stories can be interpreted this way.
- Molly's Story. Did she really turn into a cat, an owl, a shark, and a sea monster before returning to herself (and being eaten by the sea monster she had just been), or was she hallucinating while dying of food poisoning due to eating things like toothpaste and holly berries?
- Milton's disappearance. Did he run away from home, or did he disappear into a world he painted into reality, as his story implies?
- The story in Edie's journal. Did she actually find something at the old house, and did the light in the window really come on, or is it just the ramblings of an imaginative old woman meant to symbolize the great unknowns of life? The journal gets torn by Dawn, and the house abandoned before we can get an answer.
- The family curse as a whole. Does it exist, or has the Finch family just been supremely unlucky for generations (perhaps aided by a heritable tendency to being subtle Death Seekers)? As the above examples show, we never do get a definite answer.
- Mixed Ancestry: Edith, Milton, and Lewis are half-Indian from their father's side. Lewis in particular takes the most from his father though Edith also has a rather dark complexion.
- Nested Story Reveal: The outer frame of a character returning to the Finch house is set up to look like Edith's story but is revealed to be another layer of her son returning to the grave of his mother.
- Never Found the Body: Barbara and Milton. Barbara is at least presumed to be murdered by a Serial Killer, given that her ear was left behind; what happened to Milton is a complete mystery.
- No OSHA Compliance:
- The house has a lot of upper levels attached to it that look like it might collapse at any time, with the later children's rooms there. Some of the staircases leading up to these rooms are already rotting apart.
- The cannery chopper in Lewis' story noticeably doesn't have a guard or any real protection - one would think it would be simple to implement a guard with a hole at the bottom to allow workers to efficiently slice salmon without exposing themselves to the risk of injury. One could be mistaken for thinking that Lewis' fate involves accidentally chopping his hand off or at least one of his fingers when his imagination becomes too much for him to still be aware of the position of the chopper. Granted, the fact that he successfully decapitated himself with said chopper is probably even more damning of his employer's negligence.
- Off with His Head!: How Lewis dies, by sticking his head under the blade of the cannery chopper.
- Ominous Music Box Tune: The music box plays a rather melancholic tune.
- Outliving One's Offspring: Several of the Finches see their children die before them. Odin outlives his infant son Johann. Edie outlives all five of her children, and Sven manages to outlive three of them (Sam and Walter are still alive by the time he dies). Sam and Kay outlive both of their sons, leaving only Dawn, who outlives her elder son and is alive when her younger son runs away, but dies before her daughter. The only two people in the family with children to not outlive any of them are Edith (who dies while giving birth to her son), and potentially Milton on the assumption he's the King and the events of The Unfinished Swan are canon. Taken Up to Eleven with Edie, as not only does she outlive her children, but most of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren too.
- Public DomainSoundtrack Dissonance: Edmund Sears' 'It Came Upon the Midnight Clear' (1849) plays in the background while the sea monster you control eats up a ship's captain and crew members in Molly's scenario, while 'Waltz of the Flowers' from The Nutcracker (1892) by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky plays in the background while Gregory plays with the bath toys and accidentally drowns himself in his scenario. Not surprising, since both are Christmas songs that play at the time of the children's deaths due to the curse.
- Reality Ensues: A constant theme of the game is that members of the Finch family are prone to making grand gestures and acting on story-logic rather than common sense, and that this frequently ends badly for them.
- Sarcastic Confession: Edith notes early on that Edie liked to tell people that there was a mole man living beneath her land, something Edith considers an example of Edie's overall eccentricity. She later finds out that Edie's son Walter was in fact living in a bunker under the house the whole time.
- Secret Passage: Sven Finch built several of these into the Finch house.
- Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Walter was so terrified of the curse getting him that he hid in an underground bunker for decades. Eventually this made him desperate enough to see the sun that he recklessly breaks out of his bunker- and onto some train tracks just as a train was coming.
- Sequence Breaking: It's possible to reach the end of the game without experiencing the stories of Odin, Calvin, Sam, Gus, Gregory, Milton, and Lewis.
- Serial Killer: One is mentioned in Barbara's story, and is presumably responsible for the death of Barbara and her boyfriend.
- Shout-Out:
- When Molly turns into a shark, the music goes dum-dum-dum-dum.
- Barbara's story is presented via a comic reminiscent of Tales from the Crypt, and even includes the theme from Halloween.
- Milton's room, its contents and even the background music inside are all a reference to The Unfinished Swan. There's enough implication it's not a coincidence.
- Shrine to the Fallen: Most of the rooms are kept by the Edie the way they were when the inhabitants died. Notably done for Calvin's part of the room which was roped off to prevent his sibling Sam from making a mess of it.
- Single Line of Descent: The Finch family. It's justified by the curse (if indeed there is one), since only one kid from each generation would survive to have children of their own. If Milton is The King from The Unfinished Swan, then this is averted (and possibly a sign of the curse wearing down), as Monroe and Christopher would be cousins.
- Stealth Prequel: Possibly one to The Unfinished Swan, if Milton and The King from that game are the same person (something the game gives enough evidence to support the possibility).
- Surprise Party: A dark version occurs in Barbara's story when the surprise party guests turn out to be monsters waiting to feast on her.
- Swallowed Whole: Molly, maybe.
- Things That Go 'Bump' in the Night: Molly herself becomes one of these and crawls under her own bed to eat her. Or she just imagined it in her hallucinations.
- Tickertape Parade: Lewis imagines such a parade for the way to his Awesome Moment of Crowning.
- Under the Sea: When Molly turns into a shark and chases down the seal. Also, to a lesser degree, the scene when Gregory is drowning in the bathtub, he imagines himself swimming in the sea.
- The Un-Reveal: Edie's segment has the young Edith start reading her account of something that happened the night she (Edith) was born, which seems to be supernatural in nature. The player may well hope that this is the part where we finally find out what's up with the family curse, the disappeared Finches and the entire Big, Screwed-Up Family. No such luck, though - Dawn turns up and tears the book apart before Edith can finish it, and those questions remain unanswered.
- Wham Line: Edith: 'If she'd told me there was going to be so much climbing, I never would've come when I was 22 weeks pregnant.'
- Wish Fulfillment: In-Universe. Tired of his dead-end job at the fish cannery, Lewis dreams up an ideal world where he is the supreme king and all of his subjects adore him. Eventually, he gets so immersed in this fantasy that he stops wanting to leave.
- Womb Level: The final level of the game, where Christopher is born and Edith herself dies.
- Yank the Dog's Chain: Walter, who believes deeply in the curse and tries to survive it. He does this by staying stationary in the same place, eating the same can of peaches for 30 years, while digging through the wall underneath the house to escape it. He succeeds, only to enter a tunnel with train tracks, while a train is coming.
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http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fridge/WhatRemainsOfEdithFinch
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- 'Crawling through the doggy door used to be a lot easier when I was eleven.' Or maybe, it used to be a lot easier when Edith wasn't pregnant with her unborn son.
- Giant Sparrow's previous game The Unfinished Swan also started with the untimely death of the protagonist's mother. Given how 'The King' from that game who created her might actually be Milton Finch, she may have also inherited the Finch family's bad luck.
- Here's something interesting regarding the curse: in the main trope page, Edie, Sam, and Dawn all outlived all but one of their children. But what of Edith's generation? True, she only gives birth to one boy before she dies from childbirth. But she is considerably the only generation who does not outlive at least one of her offspring. Perhaps a sign that the curse is waning a bit?
- Another way in which her death is different: the obligatory text that explains her death - the journal she writes throughout the game - is the only one to take a proper look back at the Finch family legacy.
- Edie seemed obsessed with memorializing her lost loved ones, almost to the point of denial of their deaths; Dawn simply sealed away all traces of her lost family members' existence. Perhaps it was Edith's frank, graceful acceptance of death- even her own - that broke the curse.
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- Edith adds a sketch of each family member to her family tree diagram as she learns the story of his or her death. So it makes sense that a sketch of herself is present from the beginning - as she writes her memoir, she suspects, and rightly so, how she'll die.
- Edith learns about each Finch's death from a piece of text. The entire game consists of her writing her own.
- Apart from Odin, who never got to live in the new Finch house, every Finch's death-story is learned in their old bedroom... except Edie's, which we learn in Edith's room. This may symbolize a part of Edith dying the day she was torn away from Edie, although given Edie embraced the family death curse possibly to the point of enabling or even perpetuating it, it may have been for the best, allowing Edith to find a middle road between Dawn and Edie's attitudes.
- 'To our final night together, and all our final nights apart.' The second part is Edie making reference to everyone's inevitable Finchian deaths.
- Edie's gravestone features a sculpture of a book surrounded by a cloud of letters. Given that one of her final acts was writing a book, and given one of the game's visual conceits, it's even more fitting for the younger of the Ediths.
- Each of Edie's sons' lifespans and enjoyment of life and deaths correspond to how they approached life.
- Walter becomes so scared, he becomes a lonely recluse in his own family household. He lives a long time but comes to realize his safe life in the bunker is too confined. He dies trying to enjoy what little time he has before a train hits him.
- Calvin promises to never be scared and faces life with a bolder attitude. He lives out his dream to fly, but unfortunately, it becomes his undoing and ends his life prematurely.
- Sam takes a moderation of both approaches and becomes both cautious but unafraid to live. Thus, his lifespan and enjoyment of life are moderate too. He lives a pretty full life where he's been to war, got married (and divorced) and had a family. By the time he dies during his hunting trip, he dies neither prematurely nor at a ripe old age.
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- Considering that Dawn sealed all of the rooms after Milton's disappearance, it seems slightly strange that the window into Milton's tower was already opened from the inside when Edith came back - until you remember that Milton is the King from The Unfinished Swan, so it's possible that Monroe's mother came through the same door into the real world that Milton used to enter the world of paintings, and therefore may have opened the window to get out of the tower!
- Based on the King's age at-glance when his wife fell pregnant with Monroe, this may have even been recent, which means that Edith may have been the final death of the curse, considering her and Milton's sons would have been born around the same time as one another (Christopher before Monroe, obviously).
- Odin was obsessed with death and the curse himself. His shrine contains several books he wrote, all about death, and he was so desperate to escape the curse that he turned his entire house into a boat. He's where Edie got her obsession from.
- There seems to be cycle of three different methods of dealing with the curse within the heads of each branch of the family. Odin tries to escape the curse by moving his family all the way to the United States from Europe after the death of his wife and son, only to die before they can reach their destination. His daughter Edie relishes in telling the tales of the deaths of each member of the family, and is ultimately comfortable with death. Her son Sam tries to prepare his children for everything that comes in life, and to try and follow in his footsteps by doing the same for their children. The cycle then starts over with Dawn, who attempts to run away from the curse after the death and disappearance of her two sons, only to die before they can truly find somewhere safe. Her daughter Edith, like her name sake, then goes on to recount the deaths of her family members (as well as herself) in a journal for her unborn son, being resigned to death. While it's uncertain whether or not her son Christopher will continue on with his great-grandfather's method, Milton shows a bit of a mixture between the three, escaping (like his mother and great-great-grandfather) into his own world, giving his son his paint brush in order for him to be prepared (like his grandfather), and passing his legacy onto his son (like his great-grandmother and sister). This may be due to his status as an outlier on the family tree, possibly having broken the curse.
- During Walter's story, he mentions the deaths of Molly, Barbara, and Calvin, leaving out the only sibling of his who was still alive before he went down in the bunker, Sam. This implies that Edie never told her son about his last brother's death, either due to lack of proper communication between the two, or a mother sparing her son the heartache of losing another sibling. For all Walter knew, Sam was still alive by the time he died.
- Molly's room features a mural depicting a brick wall that has been broken open, revealing a magical castle. Edith notes that Milton has found the secret passage to the room before her. These two facts together answer an age-old question: where do artists get their ideas?
- The first part of the shark sequence in Molly story is played for laughs - a shark rolling down a hill, flopping about to get around trees and nearly getting hit by a car. But only that first part is mentioned in Molly's diary. Why did Edith imagine the rest in that way? She didn't - as evidenced by the floating texts from Edith's journal throughout the game, the entire game takes place in the imagination of the journal's reader, Christopher. A boy his age is far more likely to imaging such gags.
- No reason is given for Sam and Kay's divorce, but based on the tone of the divorce papers and the fact that Sam's calling Kay is what potentially distracted her and led to Gregory's death, it can be reasonably assumed that Gregory's death was not in fact the cause. The marriage was in trouble before that. So if Kay and Sam didn't divorce due to Kay not wanting to put up with the Finch family curse (which would have been a fair reason in its own right), why did they? The numbers show that Dawn was born when Sam was only 18, and Gus was born a year after. Then there was a gap of seven years before Gregory was born, but if we assume as implied that Kay and Sam were already fighting at the time of Gregory's death, these numbers have a lot more significance. One could reasonably assume that Sam and Kay got married way too young, had two children, started to have issues, had Gregory in an attempt to save their marriage, which obviously failed, and then divorced, sending Kay out of the Finch family tree to inexplicably never be heard from again.
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- There's a strange math to the deaths of the Finch family, by generation. Edie by far lived the longest at 93, though she had a baby sibling who died. Edie's chldren were a mixed bag, two dying before their twelfth birthday, and only one seeing 50. Then Sam's children include another infant death, a teenager who just qualifies and Dawn who lives to be 48. Dawn's children die at 22, 17, and potentially 11 (though Milton does skew the numbers a bit). This means the average lifespan by generation goes 47, 24~25, and 20~21. The lifespan of the Finch's is getting shorter (Odin might skew with the numbers too but nothing is known about any siblings he may have had) which is terrifying enough. But moreover, while it isn't fixed, it seems the longer one child lives, the more likely their siblings will die younger.
- Molly's story came first, and unlike the rest there's nothing so blatant as the rest to indicate what would have caused her death save her explanation of the monster under her bed. Then you look at the things she ate because she was so hungry before her death. Most of them seem fairly innocuous and unlikely to kill a child. An old carrot from her hamster. A tube of toothpaste. And then the berries. Holly berries, though not especially well known, are poisonous. Molly probably died of eating the poison berries. And being so young, ended up dying in her sleep.
- The way she described how she kept getting 'hungrier' may have in fact been stomach pains. As holly berries can cause stomachache and diarrhea.