#Maybe I'll just start posting things and give a TLDR context of what they're talking about but not a transcript

[royalarchivist]

[A sad violin song plays over an image of a sad hamster]

Pac: This doesn't have anything to do with me – I wear a blue sweatshirt, you're crazy, this mouse doesn't even have a sweatshirt, this hamster! [Reading chat] Am I a depressed hamster?

[ Transcript continued ↓ ]*

–

Pac: Actually– that's fine! I embrace that idea – of course I'm going to be depressed, are you crazy? [He hits his desk, then starts counting off people on his fingers] Fit is gone, Richarlyson is gone, Ramon is gone, Bagi and Empanada who were always there when we were there are also gone, I haven't seen them! It's just me and Tubbo, and sometimes Philza shows up.

Pac: I lost Chume Labs, I lost the Favela, I lost Murder Mystery, I lost Ilha Chume Labs, it's crazy! Look at how much I've lost, and I've gained nothing! Of course I'm going to be depressed, are you crazy?! How am I supposed to be happy?!

Pac: [Reading chat] "You have us Pac," that's true, thank you. No, that's true, sorry.

* NOTE: Please note that this is an incomplete transcript, as I was primarily relying on Aypierre's translation mod at the time and if I am not confident of the translation, I do not include it. As always, please feel free to add on translations or message me corrections.

[nitw]

would you like an excuse to nitw post i for the life of me canNOT understand the PLOT OF THIS GAME

that's fair! nitw's core story is intentionally vague and non-direct so i don't blame people for not immediately getting it. i'll talk abt it as quickly as possible bc i just woke up lol

the 3 major themes of nitw i feel are dealing with mental illness as a young adult, existentialism, and how capitalism takes lives in different ways.

while mae's official diagnosis is never revealed, the way she describes her experience at college is easily identifiable if you've ever been through a long-term depressive episode in your adult years. the thing about depressive episodes and other forms of mental breakdowns is that they aren't always rational. in mae's case, while a lot of it seems to stem from peer pressure and rushing into something she wasn't prepared for, she's not really able to grasp what's wrong with her or why everything is going wrong until it's already too late. i always really liked the whole "shapes" allegory when she talks about dissociation; how the world just started blending together one day, from things that used to make sense and have a meaning and an identity attached to them, into random shapes and colors that didn't mean anything.

now, the existentialist and anti-capitalist elements in this game might be harder to see if you don't know youre looking for them, because this is where the whole supernatural/demonic cult thing comes in. it also doesn't help that nitw's full story can't be experienced in just 1 playthrough, since some of the context is locked behind events, hidden locations and specific dialogue choices. i'll try to summarize lt:

BASICALLY: in the game's lore, there's an all-powerful demonic being called "the black goat". it lives down at the far bottom of a hole in the ground, discovered by local miners many years before the game takes place. it's supposedly the cause of sinkholes, floods and other natural disasters around town, as well as the shitty state of the job market and people being forced to leave their homes. certain people (including mae) have "heard it singing" and have been inevitably gravitating towards it.

during an especially tough period for possum springs' working class, the town's old mining community formed a sort of cult around the black goat, after discovering that it LITERALLY feeds on human sacrifices. though the cult made it a rule to only sacrifice people who "wouldn't be missed" or "wouldn't contribute anything important to the town".

this is all a huge metaphor for late stage capitalism, as an endless cycling of people suffering and dying for the sake of maintaining "order" in society, and how you can't improve on these conditions without getting to and destroying the (literal, in the game's case) core of the problem. and that might be a task too big for any person.

near the end of the game, mae has this big monologue moment where she directly confronts the black goat, and in turn, confronts herself and her own issues. she basically goes "yeah, this whole situation sucks and maybe nothing we do will ever contribute to anything on the grand scheme. but that's why i need to hold onto even the smallest things that give my life meaning, even if they're sad, even if they hurt." it's one of my favorite scenes in the whole game, and really ties everything together in a neat little bow.

TLDR; at the end of everything, hold onto anything

[petrichorpetals]

So from the evidence I've collected, I'm very sure my Yeosang came here from another timeline/world theory is correct.

This mostly stems from what we learned from fever part 3 and the deja vu mv but honestly the Yeosang being sus about this had already been foreshadowed in his diary entry of fever part 2. (You'll have to forgive my terrible pictures I have fever part 3 in front of me and I'm too lazy to grab fever part 2 to take better pics)

Basically our setup to this was how at the end of the diary film we switched dimensions into the world of fireworks which I'm fairly sure is called Strictland. Everyone basically says how much the new world feels like their old one but different. The first time I read this I wasn't sure what he meant by "Everyone says this is a new world but somehow, I'm familiar with the scenery here. " line and just took it at face value to be metaphor. But given his repetition of staring down the camera to say "I remember" in Deja Vu, it would make a lot more sense if we take it quite literally too mean I remember this place because I'm from here. There's also a lot of talk about the word world in "wanting to escape the world I've lived in, the world I've been trapped in" as well as "the friends who have willingly invited me to their world". Basically the tldr of the matter is that yeosang escaped from the world of Fireworks into the world of school!Ateez using a chromer that breaks. (IMO we see this exact moment where it breaks at the end of Deja Vu) I say it's likely a chromer since Yeosang shows an at least approximate knowledge of what would happen if he breaks one when he breaks the one the black pirates/halateez gave to hongjoong while the android guardian/white mask holds him hostage.

Yeosang seems to have an approximate knowledge here of what would happen if the Chromer broke, to the point where he doesn't even call it the Chromer when he's thinking about what they know about the object, he specifically calls it a sandglass when any other mention of it has been the Chromer.

There's also the matter of him going out of the way of saying "My friends would not have been all scattered if I had not met them at first". This could very well be talking about where they lost Yeosang and scattered in the hallway but given his wording of at first, I'm putting this as evidence that Yeosang was a newcomer to their world when he got here with the chromer and wasn't a part of their friend group originally.

This theory gets backed up by the ending bit of Not Too Late playing at the end of Deja Vu and if you do a quick look into the lyrics, Not Too Late comes across very much as the beginning of school Ateez where they're all lamenting about being lonely before they all get together to make friends.

Except for two things.

One of which is Wooyoung and Yeosang talking about not being able to get out or escape (Which lines up for Yeosang if he's trapped in this new timeline and adds some interesting implications for Wooyoung I'll get into on a post about him later).

The second of which is Mingi's part. Mingi brings up killing and saving, both things that happen and we see happening during Inception and Thanxx in Fever Part 1 when Hongjoong keeps resetting the timeline using the chromer. There's two implications here: one, Mingi is aware of the timeline resetting (something that I already suspected but is now confirmed) and two, while this might seem like a song from the very beginning of school Ateez, Mingi gives us the added context that it is very much not. (It's also interesting that Yeosang's the one that pulled out Mingi's headphones to make him past attention to the world around him in diary film but like Wooyoung, I'll get into Mingi later in another post)

Since we're assumedly several timeline cycles in, why is this song playing over Yeosang breaking the Chromer? I posit that instead of this being the moment where Yeosang breaks the Chromer while escaping the white Android, this is instead either the moment Yeosang crash lands into school Ateez's world via his own "sandglass" for the first time or this still is that moment, but due to time shenanigans, the Yeosang that escaped just so happens to have escaped back to when he first got to their world making him trapped not only in school Ateez's world, but in an endless cycle of breaking the Chromer to get there in the first place.

We see that Yeosang doesn't go back to their original world and warehouse with them afterwards. Likely because he wasn't a part of their world to begin with to return back with them.

There's other bits of evidence that say that Yeosang with the broken Chromer at the end of Deja Vu is going to school Ateez like the hand that reached for Yeosang had a sleeve similar to their school uniform in Inception.

(Interestingly enough, Yeosang has an emblem that isn't like anyone else's on his uniform and Wooyoung has several emblems. Not necessarily relevant to my current point but food for thought.)

I'm not one of those people that obsess over hands, so idk whose hand that is exactly, but I do have suspicions.

If we're looking at the rings and at how one hand kind of mirrors the other, we can come to the conclusion that it might be the same person. We can go so far as to think that maybe, that hand might even belong to another version of Yeosang. Potentially even the hala!Yeosang that we catch a glimpse of in the diary film giving Hongjoong the chromer. (Side note: I only just realized that it was actually hala!yeosang that gave hongjoong the chromer and not hala!hongjoong like I thought going in. Yeosang really does just have a longstanding history with the Chromer huh.)

Edit: it's now basically been confirmed by the making of deja vu mv that the hand is Hongjoong's so basically depicting the moment Hongjoong reached out for yeosang when the timelines reset. I still standby the rest of my theory. Here's the screenshot I grabbed off the alternate hand angle in the mv making video:

For me personally, a lot of things start to click into place when we consider the possibility that Yeosang is actually from another world. Even his like a bird in a cage stuff makes sense when viewed in this light. He has the freedom of song and dance that he didn't have in Strictland, which banned any form of music or dance thinking it would lead to human emotion, but is stuck in this new world with no other option but to potentially repeat the cycle of when he got here.