#it's true that dimentio's the only one to be said to be described in the book

[spacedimentio]

To this day I don’t understand why people are convinced that Dimentio wrote the Dark Prognosticus. I’ve been a fan for over 10 years now and not one thing in the game’s text has given me cause to think that he might be the author. If he’s the magician’s son, it still most likely predates him as the knowledge of how to create Pixls in the first place came from it. It’s just a very long standing fan theory that’s been around since the game came out.

[artgletic]

Mimi hot takes

So Mimi is most certainly an enigmatic character in SPM, but is unfortunately overshadowed by the more mysterious Dimentio when it comes to lore discussion. I think there’s plenty to look into when it comes to her however, and I intend to do so here! Discussion under the cut

So really all we have to go off of for Mimi lore is what Carson proposes, which is that she’s either a failed pixl experiment, or the unintended creation of a witch researching shapeshifting potions. I will be real with you, when I first read this I immediately discredited the witch theory due to how out-of-left-field it is. However, I do have a couple things to say on it, but we will have to talk about it later. Let’s investigate the failed-pixl theory. So what do we know about pixls?

Other than the 12 pixls we see ingame, the only bout of pixl lore we get is again from Carson. Here he talks about the pixl war, led by the pixl queen who mind controlled the many pixls to do her bidding and aid in her revolution against the ancients, their creators. During the uprising, the pixl queen successfully overthrew and enslaved the ancients. It’s revealed later on in Carson’s story that the pixl queen was likely the product of the master magician, creator of the 12 original pixls. He created her in an attempt to bring his daughter back to life by placing her soul in the body of a pixl. The pixl queen was so appalled by her fathers actions (that is, robbing pixls of their deaths just to be put into tools to be used), that she wanted to stop it from ever happening again.

The pixl queen was later “vanquished” by one of the master magician’s apprentices, and is heavily implied to be Shadoo, the boss of the flopside pit of 100 trials (see my Dimentio lore post for more on that; I discuss Shadoo in detail there). I suppose the best question to ask would be: what does “vanquish” even mean?

Well, we know that Shadoo is nothing but a cloud of shadow, somewhat reminiscent of a shayde in the Underwhere. If Shadoo is the soul of the pixl queen, what happened to the pixl vessel?

Well, we know that the pixl queen was to be created as a vessel for an ancient’s child. We see many depictions of ancients and ancients’ descendents in-game, one of which is Nastasia. In ‘Of bats and men’, Carson describes the story of a man looking for his lost love saving a bat and the bat transforming into ‘one of his people’ to be with him. This story is all-but-said to be about Nastasia and Count Bleck, a member of the tribe of darkness, which itself is an offshoot of the tribe of ancients. Nastasia has a notably blocky head, thin limbs and beady black eyes (see XXX for Nastasia’s eyes). This is reminiscent of Flipside’s citizens, most notably the children/teenagers,

All of which rather look like Mimi (aside from the noses, but we see Nastasia, a member of the tribe of darkness and as such a more ‘pure-blooded’ ancient, has no nose. None of the sage murals of direct descendants of the ancients have visible noses either. Same argument can be made for these children having no arms and Nastasia having them). It would make sense, considering the pixl vessel was made to house the spirit of the master magician’s daughter who died young. Mimi is clearly an automaton at the very least, as evidenced by the otherwise random gears churning in her head in her spider form. Perhaps her ‘true form’ is what the pixl queen looked like.

Approaching from another angle, the Pixl queen was said to have ‘illusionary powers’ that she used to hide. In my Dimentio post I compared this to Dimentio’s invisibility which he uses to eavesdrop on people, but upon second glance I think this illusionary power would be more akin to turning into something else to hide. Shadoo has no physical form, and their entire boss fight is spent taking on the shape of our four main heroes, Mimi’s most notable power.

I think Mimi doesn’t know this about herself. I think she was probably a vessel that wasn’t supposed to ever wake up, thrown in the garbage along with the other pixls after the events of the pixl uprising, but did. Now she fumbles around in the world trying to find meaning and personhood despite being a vessel for a person who isn’t there. Carson’s information on her states that “Mimi has the ability to mimic any person she wants to... She's so good at it I hear she even sometimes forgets who she is…”. I think it goes deeper than this. I don’t think she has a ‘who’ whatsoever. She just copies what people would expect from her, a teenage girl, hence her almost comical obsession with boys and gems, and forced crush on the count (at least it feels forced to me).

With this in mind, I quite like that Mimi’s first appearance is her imprisoning and usurping the domain of an ancient (or an ancient’s descendant rather), as well as enslaving a population into doing her bidding (the prisoners of Merlee’s mansion), just as the pixl queen did. She’s obviously not aware of this, but from a meta perspective I find it very interesting.

OTHER CONNECTIONS AND IDEAS:

Perhaps Mimi WAS the witch experimenting with shapeshifting? Carson’s theory certainly never said that the witch and her creation were separate entities. Maybe this is what caused the thousand-year delay between the master magician putting his daughter’s soul into a pixl, and the pixl queen’s uprising (stated to be 3,000 and 2,000 years ago respectively). The daughter attempted to be able to unlock shapeshifting, and the product of that skill was the pixl uprising, which led to Mimi. There’s also the fact that Mimi inflicts a curse on Merlee’s mansion, which to me has always felt a little strange given Mimi’s powers and overall vibes. But in this light, ‘cursing’ is definitely a witchy thing to do! Maybe this word choice was meant to evoke the witch idea.

This is more of a linguistic choice and I’m only familiar with the english translation so take it with a grain of salt, but I found it quite odd that the pixl queen was first described as having the “demonic” spirit placed in the pixl vessel. “Demon” just felt like an odd choice of words, especially when there are actual demon characters in the game (D-men in the Underwhere). This connection may be a bit of a stretch, however in the Merlee trivia game at the end of chapter 2, Mimi can be asked a myriad of questions that are likely her honest answers (aside from a couple, like her saying mario is “her type of guy”. This is clearly buttering up the crowd). The answer I’m talking about specifically is one in which she says her favourite animal is a demon. I don’t see how this would convince Mario that she’s the real Merlee, and is likely her just being honest. This is the only other time “demon” is mentioned in the game outside of chapter 7. On a thematic level, it’s interesting to think of what her referring to a demon as a pet could mean. When she was a ‘demon’, she was a pixl. Did ancients treat the pixls like pets? Maybe similar to how we treat roombas (a tool-pet combo)? Mimi likely isn’t aware of this connection and just said the first thing that came to her mind, unaware of its grim origins.