askookykid - Tumblr blog

askookykid · 1 year

Text

My thoughts and theories on the LN Podcast: Episodes 1 and 2:

Putting all this under a readmore because spoilers for Episode 1 and 2 of The Sounds Of Nightmares:

General Stuff.

The way people talk and the way things sound make me think that the story is talking place in the past, I’d date it to somewhere around the Late 40s or Early 50s, so that’s another point to Little Nightmares taking place in 1948 specifically.

This whole thing is very interesting. The world isn’t corrupted. Children and Adults don’t hate each other. Otto acts like a human being. The corrupted stuff is in Noone’s head, but I don’t think it’s all a dream.

I think the dreams Noone is having, showing the actual world of Little Nightmares, are either visions of another world, or are visions of something that’s going to happen. Either this non-corrupted world is a separate one from Little Nightmares’ world (which I will call Nowhere for now thanks to the Little Nightmares 3 Description) or my personal theory that I will be going with until it’s disproved: The Non-Corrupted world IS Nowhere, but before everything goes to hell. Noone’s dreams are prophetic.

My reasoning for the Prophecy Theory was started because of 3 things, and there’s more evidence to come in specific episodes.

Names for people and places follow a very similar pattern to in The Nowhere. The Place the story takes place in is simply called: The Counties, similar to places like The Nest, The Maw, or the Pale City. Otto (an Adult) is supposed to be referred to as “The Counsellor”, but doesn’t mind being called by his real name, and Noone (pronounced Noon) is mentioned to have chosen her own name, which is implied to be the origin of most child names.

In Little Nightmares, many of the dreams that children have are prophetic, showing events that will eventually happen or vaguely warning of future events. Six has a dream of the Lady the same day she encounters her, Mono dreams of the door before he ever starts seeing it and begins heading towards it, RK has a nightmare related to The Granny and RCG has a nightmare about barricading a shed door with something banging on the other side, which happens later exactly as she dreamt it.

The dreams Noone has are rather symbolic. The first episode is the better example of the two, but both aren’t really real locations in Nowhere. They’re symbolic representations of The Maw and Guests specifically.

Ep 1:

In this, Noone ends up inside a massive stone giant, and encounters the Ferryman for a brief moment. Like literally just the Ferryman. Fully described in the coat, hat and melted face and later referred to as the Ferryman (and the Candleman, a reference to the cut Wax Bellman from LN 1, who was initially cut from the game and then was remade Into The Ferryman and got put back in).

After that she goes deeper inside the giant to find a giant clockwork structure that keeps the giant alive and maskless shadow children working on it, keeping all the gears moving. After that she finds a starved, rotting man chained inside a bedroom and then she encounters A Tall Lady wearing chains with a face that’s been purposefully stretched out to remove any wrinkles or signs of age.

After that is more travelling before Noone and a Child she encounters in her dream find a courtyard where thousands of screams can be heard from other people, chained up and starved in their own rooms like the one Noone saw before. Then the Lady in Chains shows up again, kills the other kid and Noone wakes up.

Like I said before, this dream is heavily symbolic, but it’s obviously about the Maw and The Lady.

First off, the Ferryman is here. No symbolism, no speculation, he’s here and that immediately draws connections to the Lady.

Then there’s the Shadow Children, or the Workers, who I don’t actually think represent Shadow Kids found in the Maw. The workers represent Nomes, who keep the Maw (or in this case the Stone Giant) running. Despite being seen as antagonists, the Workers don’t actually do anything to Noone in the dream. They head towards her when she draws attention to herself, which scares her, but they never actually attempt to harm her. They just want a closer look at Noone in all of their appearances and they immediately back off once Noone’s dress tears and a piece gets stuck in the gears.

The Lady in Chains is very, very, VERY obviously the Lady. They’re a tall woman who is desperately trying to appear younger, stretching their skin to remove wrinkles. The chains that the Lady can seemingly manipulate may also represent her powers, and I’ll get into that in a moment.

Then there’s the chained man and the thousands of others just like them. They may represent Guests or something like that, but I think they represent something else: The souls of both Guests and Children alike that the lady has consumed after countless Maw Feasts.

My logic for this is that both the chained people and the Lady’s representation in the dream specifically involve chains. The Chained People are chained to walls in specific rooms, rotting and starving, and the Lady In Chains is constantly surrounded by chains, with chains literally coming off of her clothing and flowing underneath her dress. The Lady In Chains can also control those chains, manipulating them however she wants to and using them to ensnare a child, pulling them away to kill them. Now if the Lady In Chains is The Lady, then the Lady In Chains’ ability to control chains probably represent the Lady’s own ability to control her unique soul stealing shadow magic. And if chains in this dream represent the Lady’s Soul Stealing Magic, then it makes sense that the rotting, starving, tortured souls all chained up throughout the Giant in the dream are people that the Lady consumed. That’s what the Lady stealing your soul feels like. You are chained up by magic, starved and tortured by the Lady slowly breaking down your consumed soul until you no longer exist.

And the Lady In Chains has THOUSANDS of people chained up. Think about that in relation to the REAL Lady. Horrifying.

Also with the revelation that the Chained up people are souls that the Lady consumed and is slowly digesting/using up, you can make the claim that the Giant in the dream may ALSO be a representation of the Lady. After all, those people are chained up and imprisoned INSIDE the Giant, and Nomes may keep the Maw running, but by doing so they also keep the Lady running just as much.

Ep 2:

Here we hear a tiny bit about Otto’s beloved Cici (Sici? Sissi? It’s pronounced See-See), who could honestly be a lot of things right now. A lost lover, a lost child, a lost friend, a lost family member, but the important part right now is that Cici had similar dreams, or at least encountered the Ferryman in some them. Definitely going to be important later.

This dream is a lot more straightforward. Noone finds themselves in a town with another Child she’s never seen before named Jester. They wander for a short while before Noone sees the Ferryman again, exactly as he was before, and runs, separating from Jester in the process.

Also while in this town, Noone sees “Contraptions that resemble fish carrying large, extremely fat people wearing wooden masks and brown robes towards a Market and Bathhouse” (Seems familiar, right?)

When Noone enters the Bathhouse, she finds dozens of monstrous people washing themselves, and finds one of them using Jester to scrub themselves. When that monster sees her, it immediately forgoes cleaning and goes straight for her, chasing Noone until she accidentally brings a bottle of cleaning chemicals down onto both of them, killing them both and waking Noone up.

If it wasn’t immediately obvious, those are Guests. Extremely fat, Masked people wearing brown robes. The masks are wooden instead of whatever the hell actual Guest masks are made of, but everything else matches. Even the fish shaped contraptions moving the Guests towards the Market and Bathhouse make sense once you realize that the Bathhouse represents the Maw.

In this dream, Guests are brought to the Maw to feast, but some things are slightly off. Instead of food and gluttony, the Guests we see are obsessed with cleaning and cleanliness, but they’re still very clearly guests, endlessly heading towards a place that claims to be able to fulfill their endless needs.

Even their behaviour when seeing Noone matches with real Guests. When a Guest sees Noone it immediately forgets about cleaning itself or the child it’s carrying and goes straight for Noone, just like how real Guests always go for the freshest meat they can see, forgetting about the 5 star meal right in front of them when they can see meat that’s even fresher and harder to come by (a live child).

Prophecy Theory:

But then, why is everything slightly different and more symbolic than any other child dreams we see. Most of them are pretty straightforward? And what’s with the Ferryman? If these are all prophetic dreams, why does the Ferryman seem to be aware of it all?

Well, first I want to point something out.

In all Child Dreams in the games, the most powerful entities seem to have have some sort of awareness or control of some sort over the dream. In Six’s dream, the Lady turns towards her before she wakes up, seemingly aware that Six is looking in her direction, and when Mono dreams of the Door in LN2, the TV next to him turns on, possibly because either the Thin Man or Broadcaster (two separate, yet similar entities) was aware of what Mono was dreaming about.

Now with that in mind, The Ferryman IS as powerful as the North Wind, another extremely powerful entity, so it makes sense that in a prophetic dream, the Ferryman could be still aware of things.

As for why these dreams are so symbolic and hard to understand when most prophetic dreams are pictures and images of what’s to come, it’s because these events are VERY far away from happening. The Lady doesn’t appear as THE LADY despite possibly having awareness because The Lady doesn’t exist yet. The world hasn’t fallen under the influence of the Eye, and we KNOW that the Lady and the Maw only start everything they do AFTER things like the Signal Tower are built, which happens presumably AFTER or RIGHT AS the world goes to shit.

Noone’s dreams are all symbolic because her dreams don’t even know how to process or comprehend what’s coming. It can’t show the Lady or the Maw because Noone’s dreams can’t look that far and that accurately into the future, so they create the Lady In Chains, The Stone Giant, The Workers, and a dozen other representations of what’s coming because it can’t say for certain what things are going to look like. Only a rough guess at the eldritch horror that’s coming. Vague representations of The Lady and The Maw and the Nomes that keep it running. Somewhat accurate but still slightly off depictions of Guests heading towards the Maw in droves, etc.

But the thing is, the Ferryman is there. And the Ferryman is unchanged. And the Ferryman is aware that Noone is dreaming. That means that Noone’s prophetic child dreams are depicting the actual Ferryman.

And that means that the Ferryman actually exists somewhere out there in either Noone’s world or whatever dark corner of the universe that the Eye resides in.

We know next to nothing about the Ferryman besides the fact that he’s as powerful as the North Wind and chooses to work for the Lady (mean that the Lady is probably just as powerful). And now we know one more thing about him: He’s existed longer than any of the other monsters besides maybe the North Wind. Probably created by the Eye itself.

And keep in mind, in the actual games, There’s evidence that a world was here before us. Viewers couldn’t exactly have built the Pale City after all. And in those buildings, all over the place, you can find evidence that the Eye has been here for a VERY long time, it’s symbol found on many things from before the world presumably went to shit. The Eye has always been here, it’s just that relatively recently it went from “passive influence of various types” to “Plunge the world in chaos and darkness”. So the Eye definitely exists at the time that the podcast takes place, and so does the Ferryman and presumably the North Wind.

Also: The Ferryman has apparently been in ALL of Noone’s recent nightmares, and he wants her to “give in to this world”. Does he want Noone to give in so he can drag her further into it and probably claim her soul for the Eye, or does he want her to give in so he can escape THROUGH her, possibly bringing the Eye out along with him?

Anyways that’s my somewhat coherent rambling. Enjoy.

47 notes · View notes