#dhmis free lunch machine

[dhmis-tournament]

ROUND ONE

[ultraericthered]

Random DHMIS Thoughts

First some ellaboration on stuff I very recently talked about here.

Much like The Path, Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared is an experience that rides on being both surreal and abstract, where no clear narrative is being told and you have to do a lot of thinking about what you’re being shown rather than just take it all at face value. There are in fact two stories being told simultaneously, an outer plot and an inner plot. Given all the evidence, this is the way in which I interpret them both:

Outer Plot: It’s June 19. Red Guy, Yellow Guy, and Duck Guy are set up to engage with a TV show that’s being made by Yellow Guy’s father, Roy. At early morning, they do their lesson on creativity that goes awry when Roy and his camera crew tamper with it. Closer to 8:30 AM, the three friends go to watch Craig’s Big Day only to be interrupted by a lesson on time, where the clock ages them all to death once they start asking too many questions only for this to be immediately reversed. Wanting to boost the funding and sponsorship of the show, Roy then arranges for the three to be held hostage and the show put on hold until the money is delivered. That afternoon, the three are free to have a lunch picnic when Roy springs the lesson on love onto his son. Much later in the afternoon is the computer’s lesson, which gets Red Guy so dissillusioned with Roy’s show and how fake everything about it is that he walks out on it completely. This leaves Yellow Guy and Duck Guy on their own that evening, when Roy rushes the healthy eating lesson out only for constant phone calls by Red Guy and Duck Guy’s own deepening anxiety to lead to Duck Guy declaring his intent to stop participating in the show as well. So Roy has him “canned”, literally, even having his son eat his cooked remains. All alone now, Yellow Guy goes to bed only to be ambushed by the lesson on having dreams. At this time, Red Guy returns from wherever he’d self exiled to and starts messing with the machine Roy uses to control the show while Roy is out, but all he accomplishes is driving an already traumatized Yellow Guy further into madness. Roy re-enters the room and tries to take back the controls of the machine, but as he reaches out for it, Red Guy literally pulls the plug on the entire show, prompting a reboot where all three friends are together again and are their own favorite colors, it’s finally a new day, and all seems fine... ‘til the creativity lesson starts again.

Inner Plot: As a child, Red Guy was friends with the younger Yellow Guy and the older Duck Guy. Then Red Guy had his final birthday as a kid, on June 19. Between then and him graduating school and getting a job, Duck Guy’s physical and mental health took a downturn until he passed away, and Yellow Guy’s father Roy also passed away, leaving Yellow Guy to inherit the family name and business. Yellow Guy had dealt with his share of trauma growing up too, but accepted that he had to live in reality and be a responsible adult all the same. Red Guy did not. So Red Guy retreated into his own head, regressing his mind to that of a child’s and imagining a fantasy world where time never moves beyond that fateful June 19, he and his two friends are together, and they live in a world that’s like one of the educational childrens’ puppet shows that he used to enjoy so much as a child. The problem? He’s not a child anymore, so his mind is in constant disarray and the reality of adulthood is always disturbibg his daydreams, taking the form of Roy and the twisted show he runs. One day on his way to work, Red Guy makes a call to Yellow Guy and asks him to come visit him at the longue he and his co-workers go to after their work is done. Red Guy later falls asleep and daydreams on the job, making it discomforting when he wakes up to the reality that had kept intruding. He is ridiculed and rejected by his co-workers when he relays his imagination and performs nude with puppets at the longue. Afterwards, he and Yellow Guy have a talk where Yellow Guy tells him straight up that he can’t keep retreating from his adult life like this and no matter how hard he tries he will never be able to exactly recreate his childhood without it feeling wrong and disturbed by the ugly truths of reality, and eventually Red Guy agrees with him and learns to let go and move on with his life in a healthy way, achieving a more balanced state of mind as a result.

Now for what I REALLY wanted to address - the part that leaves the biggest impression on me. The final 2 minutes of the final episode. 

The second Roy’s hand lands on Red Guy’s shoulder, the dramatic musical score kicks in. Red Guy ought to know that this long, outstretched yellow arm and hand belongs to Roy, yet he still jumps back in surprise when he actually sees him emerge from the misty darkness of the room, this room being metaphorical for Red Guy’s mind, somewhere between the outside world when you’re awake and the internal world when you’re asleep and dreaming. Once this is understood about the room, it becomes clear that not only is the Red Guy’s dream world playing out on the screen on the machine, but Roy coming in from behind the Red Guy is like the ultimate metaphor for an ugly adult reality penetrating its way into Red Guy’s childish retreat. This is why the music gets so scary, dramatic, and booming - this is now a Moment Of Truth for the Red Guy. Him messing around on Roy’s machine and only making things worse and more chaotic and traumatic for Yellow Guy, which is now driving him mad to the point where he’ll end up just like his dad, was representative of the futility of trying to solve a mental problem - wanting to relive childhood - by doubling down on more of that problem. No matter what Red Guy does, the nightmare does not become a pleasant dream again, and with Roy in the room, it can only get worse. So it’s come down to two possible resolutions for Red Guy to choose from - either allow the grown-up inside his head to take back control and plague his thoughts and dreams forevemore, or finally BE the grown-up inside his own head and deny Roy that power by pulling the plug on the machine, ending “the show” and then “rebooting it” himself.

Obviously, thanks to whatever talk he and the present day “Roy” in reality just had, Red Guy makes the latter choice. And right before pulling the plug, he says one last child-like thing: “I wonder what will happen?” (callback to what he said in Episode 3 to set up the love lesson). Keeping yourself regressed and stagnant keeps things familiar and predictable, but when you have to really push yourself forward in life and accept the reality of growing up, you’re not sure what’s going to happen and how you’re going to end up, and you might even be scared to try (Don’t Hug Me, I’m Scared, get it?) But eventually you have to do it, and if you go about it right, you could even find it wasn’t all that you’d feared it was going to be.

What’s your favorite idea?