#The Coffin of Andy and Leyley

[mercuryswonderland]

Nom nom nom nom

[decayroute]

Do it for your cute little sister~ You know you want to (Commission for WoodylemonIII)

source - ginkkei

[inkycyanide]

"we need more games with complex lore and characters!!!" u could barely handle a non-romanticized game about a toxic and complicated sibling relationship and felt the need to harass the creator for making it sthu...

[coffin-ramblings]

Ashley is "very not good" and "in fact very bad". That is what the promo card tells us.

The flippant attitude to cannibalism and murder, the abuse and manipulation of Andrew, and constant death threats to Julia prove that, so why do they need to say that? Isn't that enough to prove that she's a bad person? On the same promo, we are told Andrew "exists" and is a "doormat extraordinaire", which while true, is a lot more complicated than it looks. He does not just "exists", he was the one who raised Ashley thus one of her "creators", and he is not that much of (if he ever was) a doormat extraordinaire, he lets Ashley make the choices because it's what he wants, and has asserted power several times throughout the game for his and Ashley's benefit. So is what the promo says about Ashley completely true in light of that? Is the truth perhaps a lot more complicated, as it was with Andrew?

Furthermore, it's quite odd how Ashley is quick to accept being called a "tar soul" and how she implies she's a bad person too when she and Andy buried Nina's body.

And in Decay vision, if she kills Andrew, she goes on a rant about how she's glad he's dead, despite it clearly being the worst thing she has ever experienced.

While it's easy to think that she's having a mental breakdown and saying stuff out of madness, I have seen someone (can't find the post though) argue that this is Ashley's attempt to continue her self-narrative that she is a "bad person". She believes no one likes her because she's a bad person. She thinks not even Andrew likes her, and she "has to" drag him the "good person" to be her level of the "bad person" to keep him stuck with her. And when she kills her brother, her parent, her best friend, her soulmate, her everything, she immediately jumps to the justification that she is glad that he died instead of being devastated that he tried to kill her, because bad people can't feel remorse and heartbreak from having to kill someone they love, right?

And I'm inclined to agree with them. Ashley's thought process of pranking Nina is that she'll have her back as a friend after she learns her "lesson", even though she isn't happy being constantly left out or avoided by her.

She didn't hate Nina then, she was afraid of being even more lonely than before if Nina takes Andrew's attention away from her. And her initial reactions to Nina's death was to go "oops", try to justify why she died, cover it up by burying her, and after she's buried, Ashley says that she can just forget about her by not thinking about her for a long time.

That is not the reaction of someone "bad" reveling in their victory of an innocent person's death and trying to get away with it, that is the reaction of a kid who went through something traumatic, not want to get in trouble for it, and trying to rationalize it with something that sounds like an adult in their life (Renee?) would say. Then their brain triggers dissociative amnesia because remembering it would cause great stress and PTSD. Given how stressful Leyley's life was and still is, it makes sense that's her brain's main coping method, and Nina's death was just another instance of it shunting trauma away in an attempt to keep PTSD from happening. It is likely that amnesia made Ashley quite forgetful, as dissociative amnesia does not affect just one singular event, it also affects other memories as an overprotective measure. This also may be why she develops such a flippant attitude to their crimes: joking about them helps her not have to confront the weight of what they just did. Thus, even that attitude being a marker of her being a "bad person" is more questionable. Really, her actions that have the intent to directly harm people are what her make a bad person, but I digress.

The idea that her flippant attitude is perhaps not a good marker of her being a "bad person" is best shown in Episode 1 after they eat the neighbor. Ashley is made aware that her devil-may-care attitude is quite abnormal and worrying for Andrew, which worries her. If she talks before going to bed, she gets visibly confused and worried at Andrew saying she needs to see a professional.

When he later asks how she's so unbothered by the cannibalism, she replies she says she compartmentalizes nervously, which she then follows up afterwards with a joke to not have to dwell on it.

That specific coping method of compartmentalization is the same thing Andrew's brain does in his dream in Episode 2, where it ends with him having a flashback of burying Nina.

In fact, it's interesting how we never get to see adult Ashley's every day psyche. This is not the same as seeing her thoughts and perspectives in the waking world, nor is it the same as the Burial vision where it's Ashley's self-narrative of her life from childhood to adulthood and how she potentially changes it. We never get to see her dream without it being a vision, a glimpse of what her mind looks like in the present processing her experiences in the every day and the past.

This is particularly crucial because while Nina appears while Andrew's brain is doing its standard compartmentalizing of Andrew's current stresses, the only times Nina appears in Ashley's head (outside of Burial vision) were flashbacks of when she is doing this as a child. While it's framed as the moment when Andrew "proves" his devotion to her, flashbacks similar to PTSD ones can happen alongside dissociative amnesia, and they do occur in dreams. Even though Ashley has forgotten Nina's name and eyes, she is always there, haunting her dreams.

This all suggests that the plot twist of our perceptions of the characters in episode 3 is that when we finally get to play Ashley in her normal dreams or see her mental breakdown (maybe if she kills Andrew?), we find out that she feels some sort of guilt for Nina's death and perhaps their other crimes. Even though she insists to herself she doesn't feel guilt about that because she is a "bad person", it is all a lie that she manages to convince to herself and the audience. This would be very shocking as we're in her head a lot of the time, so we'd assume she can't lie to us. But she has all along, just like how Andrew has to us.

[coffincestuous]

NOVEMBER DEVLOG!!!

happy november!!! we have a devlog :3 this time from nemlei!!

this is the thumbnail image!! are they KISSING???? YIPPEE!!!!!

second, we have this! i love this little room they’re in, but what is it?? it looks like a carnival was built in a lighthouse. is it real? a dream? who knows!! & they’re so cute sitting together…

ha ha, very funny Mr Hexed. this is another glimpse into the woods / campsite that they find themselves in and i still can’t quite figure out what’s going on!! hey, it you’re going to be on the run from the cops, i guess the middle of nowhere is the safest place… it’s not like they can really be tracked without phones :p

last month’s poll resulted in over four thousand votes for episodes 3A and 4 to be published together when episode 4 is done. there isn’t an estimated timeline for when, exactly, that will happen, but nemlei expects at least a year…

no new news on burial, this devlog!! unfortunate, but i kind of expected it since not a whole lot of work has been done on it. i’ll miss not having a new episode or two or three to play for so long, but i hope that means the remaining episodes will be really enjoyable :3

very very interesting that the decay route is a moral decay & for andrew specifically. ashley, as we know, doesn’t have a strict moral code (or any morals), but andrew “does”. it’s been very important for him to pretend to have morals for a long time, and after that lovely talk with his mom, he doesn’t see the point in pretending anymore. it was clear that there was some kind of decay going on between andrew and ashley, but now we know it’s andrew throwing morality and “goodness” out of the window, and blaming it on ashley. poor ashley. we’ve seen in some devlogs that he’s no longer concerned with being nice to ashley, and i’m personally excited to see him get Much Worse. i love that he’s awful <3

there is still a little hope in my heart that they can have fun together & that somewhere in there will be a chance to switch from decay to burial, but we’ll see!! as they’ve said, decay isn’t the “bad” route necessarily, and i’m excited for it either way :D

[shipper-firemist]

I am surprised they will kiss in the Decay route o.o. I am guessing Ashley is trying her best to not have Andrew kill her[or Ashley trying to kill him or Andrew killing her then Andrew also dies too] yeah there are 3 ways that the Decay route can happen

okay i know nemlei is just being snarky and teasing us by censoring the gravecest kiss but also THE GRAVECEST KISS???? i feel so normal about this

[basilette1]

normal sibling things ye

[incorrect-gravescest]

COOKING WITH GRAVECEST

💚: Please tell me you bought that utensil holder because it looks like pasta sauce!

🩷:

💚: You bought it because it looks like pasta sauce, right?

🩷:

[averagecoffinofandyandleyleyfan]

ashley loves writing on andrews body and he just lets her so by the end when shes satisfied 50% of his skin minimum is covered in writing

[grave0fmyown]

The Ashley Critic made by a friend on discord who will go uncredited by their own choice

[solaceinabandonment]

Ashley: *shouting*

Andrew looks over and jumps

Ashley: the fuck are you so jumpy for, AM I THAT INTIMIDATING YOU LITTLE BITCH!?

Andrew: no I heard the screeching and expected the a bat

I love monster AU’s where the Graves Siblings are vampires- make more of them I demand it

[decayroute]

お姉ちゃん、どうする～？ねえねえ😏

source - 0u0u_DuDu

[chengfagshi]

I saw this and I can't stop laughing.

[kawacy]

Andy and Leyley

based on official devlog art

[aqours]

we've entered a really fucking weird era of shipping discourse ngl