#Taylor little hope

[taylorshope]

Merry Christmas, Little Hopers

[blubary]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LITTLE HOPE kinda crazy how it’s four now LOL

[kindheartedgummybears]

girly never gets a break😔

FOUND THIS IN DRAFTS I FORGOT ABOUT IT (spoilers)

[108garys]

The Clarkes haunting the narrative is THE point

The following was a response to the idea that the prologue and end hold little hope back that ended up being way longer than intended, no shade on the person who said that I just realised that I didn't want to drop a whole essay on them, so without any more preamble:

Truthfully I am completely disinterested in making Little Hope more palatable to people who require the story's soul to be torn out to enjoy it because that's what the beginning and ending is. The broken heart of little hope.

That said I very much love the middle too but the Clarke family's story is the heart and soul of little hope and the whole point, otherwise why does anything in the town matter? Vince? Just some dude, the subplot of the town falling apart, being in the literal wreckage of 1970s era Little Hope? Random set dressing because a straight up three century old ruin of a town would just lack the infrastructure required to have the facade of searching for help in town… So many of the secrets are about them, you straight up spend a good chunk of the runtime passively learning about the individual family members both in private and public and even though I think some people choose the shallowest reading out of spite it is very deliberately stated that there is an element of choice in interpretation, the curator says so at the start. The more praised facets would be greatly diminished without the Clarkes, the subtextual nature of overcoming your demons gives meaning to the outright textual fighting of demonic monsters and the parallels would not be as strong between the 2020 and 1692 eras alone.

It is a common mistake that there are better or worse versions of the characters but it's simply not true as they are all different aspects and much like a triangle needs three points the cast of little hope needs all three points of reference to fully appreciate their stories. My earliest read of Little Hope centred on Anthony recontextualising his family in two divergent ways, 1692 where they are presented as victims of circumstance and 2020 where they are more deliberately flawed people who must overcome their demons because the truth is that both things are true of the Clarkes and so they are separated out into their different aspects and analysed accordingly.

Angela's characterisation doesn't work exclusively compared to Amy, her story of fighting for her agency doesn't land the same without Anne, Amy on paper is a woman who did everything right bar being too harsh to a child and was killed for it, Angela is a woman burnt by her past yet soldering on and still retains the same flaw of blaming the child, where as Anne being a snowed under house wife who struggles with keeping her family together and feels like she has zero agency in her situation and all the while fails to understand the perspectives of the very people she feels responsible for is the context between Amy the beloved wife who is wrongfully accused and uses her one bit of agency to place mistaken blame on Mary and Angela who refuses to rely on or believe in anyone or anything, the fact that she's divorced and starting over in her late forties does not work when only compared to the wholesome yet tragic Lamberts who's marriage is never depicted in the negative to justify Angela's divorce. She'd appear as a nearly fully different person for no reason without Anne to bridge the gap and make their depictions consistent, without the 1970s it just looks like she's angry at her husband for failing to save her despite his best efforts and that severely damages her character and arc.

Connected to that, J places his trust in the wrong places, delegates, blame shifts and runs from facing the bigger problem, the alcoholism is emblematic of this but the refusal to see the truth about M's innocence and place responsibility at the feet of the proper authority because he'd have to confront his misplaced faith requires all three, Joseph failing to his dying breath to understand Mary's innocence and James getting blackout drunk over the stress of problems he finds insurmountable are necessary context to John's sobriety and further arc and John being a recovering alcoholic would just be flavour text without the harsh sting of how addiction colours James.

Daylor wouldn't lose its questionable reading if they were only siblings in 50% of other eras instead of two thirds but Dennis expressing his frustration at Tanya pulling away contextualises their codependency and mutual need to be needed in a way that is incomplete, you see a couple in the early stages of dating and siblings who got killed three hundred years prior, the 70s contextualise T's need for stability and dependability and her survival instincts pushing her to flee and D's arrested development in the way he struggles to function when they aren't a unit, beyond that David and Tabitha care for Mary together in Amy's trial scene and after her death he doesn't even fight his own execution, not even to continue the task of raising his only remaining orphand sister alone, this isn't to say David doesn't love Mary as he blatantly shows care for her in not wanting her to be traumatised by his death but he simply falls apart without Tabitha and Dennis being the way he is when Tanya is pulling away from the family shows a lower stakes, longer depiction of that breaking down but she's still physically there so it isn't collapsing in grief, it's the simmering resentment of feeling like a person you care for isn't prioritising you reciprocally, these feelings aren't wrong in of themselves but they aren't pretty and Daniel's outbursts and more negative dialogue choices and David's quiet grief don't capture the way that feeling of being stabbed a million times over everything time you aren't the first choice but the other person didn't wrong you by choosing differently so there is no proper way to get that out feels. D is often mistaken as a shallow generically decent guy with a random angry iteration that doesn't fit into a boring whole but it's simply not the case, him proving he can be reliable in 2020, his fight against his various insecurities is something he needs to do for himself as much as T, the others aren't better adjusted or better people compared to Dennis, their circumstances just present entirely differently.

Furthermore Taylor feeling like an outsider doesn't work alone with Tabitha being part of a family unit, I've seen it misinterpreted as Taylor being less proactive than her counterparts but the truth is that T's behaviour is characterised by survival instinct and a need for stability, Tabitha realises something is wrong after the first death and attempts to protect Mary but counsels keeping their heads down, Taylor being vocally in favour of staying put and Tanya's quiet desperation to get away from everything are not opposite but different flavors of the same base needs, Tanya legitimately being a practising witch adds a layer between the other two versions, Tanya appears very conventional despite her secret unconventional beliefs and Taylor is the inverse being visually the most nonconforming member of the cast while her desire for a knight in shining armour is very traditional in its own way, pair this with the straight forward trial of Tabitha and you get an exploration of not going with the first assumptions that blankets the rest of the narrative.

Carver is a great antagonist all his own but without 1972 there is no broader context, and even if you still have that era but not the Clarkes it would just be "this guy's bloodline remained assholes for centuries" and not the direct parallel to Carson, there is no canonical 2020 equivalent to his character yet he haunts the narrative beyond himself, judge wyman intentionally mirrors the passing neighbour who immediately demanded to know what Anthony had done when the matchbox is revealed, the accusatory paranoid hysteria of puritan little hope and Anthony's poor treatment after the death of his family are directly connected and that's the point, Melissa is there to bring the conversation about the little girl's guilt or innocence to the forefront in a way that makes it a present plotline that goes beyond Mary and brings in the nature that the past is reflected in other eras and without Megan you lose a lot, Melissa requires her context in a way that Mary alone doesn't achieve and Abraham and Andrew's decision on the matter is in fact a question over Anthony's guilt and his internal struggle between blaming himself and blaming Megan and the further grief around this unresolved guilt to the point where he was psychologically unable to process the death of his family for nearly fifty years is the point, the whole point, of the 1692 reframing.

the Clarke family haunts every aspect of Little Hope and without the ending it would be pointless, the way their deaths hang over everything to the point where the puritan versions are doomed to die in the same way they were already depicted as dying and the way an engaged person would quickly catch on that 1972 death=1692 death and therefore 2020 character faces the same fate, it would be meaningless without the Clarke tragedy, it would simply be shock value that builds towards nothing without the ending and the ending doesn't make the game any less about the other eras because they are one and the same in every way that matters.

[sugarroseparfait]

i am so tired but here you go xx

[gladioluslemon]

got bored so made this:

[delurkr]

do u have any general headcanons for the modern group ?

Hm I'm not sure I quite know what counts as general but I can give one for each of the five

Angela: She is majoring in journalism, with plans to be a newspaper reporter when she graduates. It will be her first actual career, since prior to that her only jobs were various minimum wage ones to keep herself and her husband afloat.

John: He relies on walking and public transport to get around most of the time because an abysmal driving record means his license is suspended more often than not, not that he always follows the law on that. But he does have what was once a decent car except now it looks more like a patchwork quilt than anything else after collecting a replacement bumper and doors and whatever else in various colors to repair a lot of really avoidable damage.

Taylor: She's kept journals since she was probably around 12 or so, but since her family rarely shelled out for the fancy cute ones (and more currently since she's now a broke college student) she's mostly only ever used the cheapest spiral notebooks and decorated the covers herself with colored paper and truckloads of sparkly stickers and such. Her current one is purple.

Daniel: As we already knew, our man be stronk, and as we all would have guessed, he lifts weights. He got into weightlifting as a preteen at the influence of his older sister, and the two of them were weightlifting buddies when they were younger (until college and everything).

Andrew: He eats frozen food that's like, frozen. TV dinners, waffles, or whatever, it all just never matters enough to him to heat it up first. He'll pull it out of the freezer, let it sit out on the counter if necessary long enough to not break a tooth on it, and then he'll eat it as cold as the surface of Neptune with nary a thought that "precooked" doesn't always mean a whole lot and a lot of frozen food needs to be heated for safety. Don't follow his example kids, also older Anthony 100% does it too, and the only reason he didn't when he was younger is because there were 5 other people in the house to keep him from developing the habit earlier.

[unhingedlesbear]

Shoutout to my newly spawned LH stan best friend for this headcanon:

Daniel is a lightweight, in the sense that after like one sip he's gone and can't even remember his own name. Meanwhile Taylor can drink enough to kill a man and still be fully aware.

I agree with her

[psyhicn]

together no matter what …

[tatjana-fantasy]

I was looking through my Little Hope sceenshot collection and for the life of me, I can't remember when this happened? They look so silly! XD

[thingsasbarcodes]

The Dark Pictures: Little Hope - Everybody Lives Ending

[taylorshope]

Random Supermassive memes

[blubary]

Daniel and Taylor for the first time in a while (oops)

[kindheartedgummybears]

guys shut up they're literally the Power Rangers

[108garys]

A letter of significance

Recent fog has gotten my mind going as it so inevitably does on the subject of little hope. A new thought that came to me out of that fog is the hidden symbolic depth of Vince's cap

Yes a hat. I had been musing on his scenes and some of the broader details surrounding him and the T/D bond in the broader cycles and how platonic/familial/romantic, the connection between the Ts and Ds is strong regardless of how they are defined(all have differently important but equal bonds in LH but that's neither here nor there), but in 1972, Tanya loved Vince and he was cursed with becoming important to her and the cycle despite remaining outside of it. I thought first of his cap having a D on it, how you have Daylor right there and Ts previous lover is there with the first initial of the person they stood in for emblazoned on his forehead, that this is a sign of him being bound to Tanya. After more thought I came to the love spell specifically referenced in Tanya's spell book, how he is marked by a literal scarlet letter which can be seen as indicative of Tanya's attention wandering outside the core group and the taboo element of their shared new aged belief. Beyond that it's a thing puritans actually used to do and while the adulterous A is the most famous example, one could also be made to wear the drunkards D

So in conclusion Vince's cap symbolically represents his tether to Tanya, the cursed nature of this binding after her death, his "life goes on, but we don't all go with it", the way he is physically stuck in his grief(although it is my preference is the spell was mutual it also works as something she did to get his undying love even 50yrs after death), the way Vinya and Daylor compare and contrast narratively and a niche yet appropriate jab at his vice and unhealthy coping mechanism through alcoholism.

Given the game says by name out loud that a #1 dad key chain is significant, I think I am engaging with little hope as intended in my random deep Vince cap thoughts lol

[sugarroseparfait]

okay so i finished little hope a few days ago and i have several thoughts on why anthonys subconscious makes the characters behave in certain ways (i have the most to say about john and angela because i ship them like crazy, i have a fanfic on ao3 for them btw xx)

andrew spends most of the game trying to become more heroic and save his friends, and the metaphor here is pretty obvious. it’s because he wants to prove to himself that he could have done more, but also he doesn’t want to believe it was all his fault. he sees hallucinations of mary/megan because he knows she’s the real perpetrator, but still can’t bring himself to blame her, if the true ending is anything to go off of.

john and angela don’t exactly have the most friendly relationship, but they’re there for each other when they need to be, especially when it’s important. i think andrew imagines them this way because of how poor james and anne’s relationship is, bordering on abusive from what we can see, and angela mentions at some point that she had a difficult divorce, which could have potentially been abusive. as well as this, john mentions how he’s been sober for nearly 3 months at the start of the game, which is the opposite of james, who is clearly struggling with alcoholism. and i think john is a good foil to both james and angela’s ex husband, because of how (sorry john i love you) pathetic he is. the same goes for joseph and amy, who clearly have the best relationship of the 3 pairs. in both imagined scenarios, anthony’s parents have a strong relationship where they work together, and are generally kind to each other, even if the former do bicker from time to time. this counteracts how james and anne don’t try to work through their problems as a team, especially james.

even though angela isn’t very warm to people, she does have moments where she can behave kind of like a mother figure, particularly to andrew and daniel. there’s a dialogue between the former and angela at some point where andrew says he doesn’t think taylor or any kind of girl would be interested in him, and angela says “im sure that’s not true”, which is definitely something a mother would say lol.

john in general is a better father figure to anthony/andrew than what we see from james (when he tells anne that things would be better if they’d had kids of their own instead of adopting, it’s kind of implied james doesn’t try hard for any of his kids). he’s always encouraging him, and even though they do have friendly disagreements (the jabbering/yabbering conversation will always be funny to me), overall john cares deeply for andrew, and even though it takes him a while to step up and be the leader, he tries his hardest to do what’s best for the group (unlike james for his family).

taylor/tanya is a strange case, because i can’t see that many discernible changes between the two— however, taylor is probably more level-headed than tanya, and when she has the dialogue choice to tell daniel to leave her behind, i think it’s anthony trying to subconsciously reassure himself that there was nothing that could be done (the same can be said for the other characters when they have their ‘leave me behind and save yourself’ moment). and i know everyone was shocked by the reveal because of the fact that daniel and taylor are dating (which i was too at first lmaooo) but i think it’s because there was a lack of closeness between tanya and dennis that anthony wanted to fix in his subconscious.

daniel is different to dennis in the way that daniel is more selfless, and he’s not so aggressive to the people around him. he’s understanding of angela and her cold demeanour instead of just chalking it up to her being rude for no reason, and he’s playful as opposed to dismissive and unkind. he tries to save everyone around him too, especially taylor, even if he isn’t technically the smartest guy. even if he does have moments of arrogance, it’s never meant to be horrible.

also, a neat little detail that i only picked up on my second play through— the judge in the trials is the same guy at the start who finds the house on fire and asks anthony what happened. it’s cool to me because he was literally ‘judging him’ lol