Game Theory - The Curse is a LIE! (Edith Finch)

Episode Date: April 16, 2023

I've been asked to talk about What Remains of Edith Finch for years... and years... and YEARS. Well, the wait is over. I played the game over on GTLive and knew I needed to talk about the so-called "family curse". Is it real? Is it a lie? Today we are breaking down everything we know to figure out if the Finch family really is cursed... or is it maybe MURDER!

If you're reading this, then, unfortunately what I predicted came to pass. I was on to something. I was sure of it. But I also knew that uncovering secrets like this could very well lead to my demise. If I could just peek around the right corner, if I could just open the right box or turn the right knob, the truth would be made clear. Why? Why was this cold open in the style of fnaf when I was doing an episode about Edith Finch? I guess that would remain forever a mystery.

Internet, welcome to Game Theory. The show that exists to document my life instead of journaling like a normal person. Today, we're finally covering a game that the theorist community has been asking me to cover for the past five years. What Remains of Edith Finch? And I gotta be honest, now that I know what this game is truly about, I am shocked that we didn't cover this thing sooner. I mean, it's right on brand for us. Fantasticical stories, a family curse, dead kids? And not just one, but several dead kids.

I mean, that's like the golden buzzer of getting fast track to a theory. Then again, what do you say about a game that people have been combing over for the past half decade, game that's been analyzed up, down, and sideways, and is practically memorized by its hardest core fans. Well, what if I tell you that Great Grandma Eadie is a serial murderer, that this supposed family curse that took the lives of at least 10 people was actually Edy the entire time? A serial killer bumping off members of the family one by one. Seems crazy, right?

Well, sometimes crazy ideas lead to the best theories, and I think today's can answer some weird logical inconsistencies that are found inside of the story. So come with me, friends, as we scale the not. so structurally sound tower of lies that's hidden inside this not so structurally sound house. Seriously, this thing is like a late game jenga tower. And we're about to pull the piece that makes it all come crumbling down. Also, before we start, I'm just gonna say that there are a lot of names and details in the story. Gonna do my best to keep it as streamlined as possible, but, you know, might help to have a set of flashcards ready to remind yourself the difference between a Gregory Finch and a Gus Finch. Anyway, this game is narrated to us by Edith Finch, a young 17-year-old mother-to-be who heads back to her abandoned childhood home before the birth

of her son to try and learn the truth of her family's backstory. The big twist at the end, spoiler alert, is that Edith has already died in childbirth, and that the whole game was her son Christopher reading the journal that she left behind for him. So already off the bat, we're dealing with a story about stories, about legends that are handed down from generation to generation. We also have a story about unreliable narrators, people telling their versions of events. Keep that one in mind, it's going to be super important. So what's the big family secret that got a pregnant woman to scurry across the roof of her old abandoned house. Well, her family is supposedly cursed. People in the family keep dropping dead due to tragic or unusual circumstances. A man is hit by a

train after years of staying in a bunker. A child star is killed off by quote unquote monsters. A young boy launches himself off a cliff while riding a swing and a small girl dies of poisoning from eating toothpaste and berries. The list goes on and on. As we explore the house room by room, we get flashbacks to relive these fantastical tales of death one by one. Someone, One is yeated off a cliff by a deer, while another is crushed by a giant dragon slide. A baby drowns in a bathtub, while another child is killed in a storm. But notice the word that I used here, tales of death. Stories.

These aren't necessarily the real events that resulted in family members' deaths. These all have some mixed element of truth and fiction. It's actually something that Edith herself begins to realize halfway through her journey. I thought it was time I heard the stories for myself and found out what happened to everyone else. But now I'm worried the stories themselves might be the problem. Maybe we believed so much in a family curse. We made it real. And who was controlling those stories?

Great Grandma Edie. Dear Edith, there's so many stories I wish I could tell you, but there's only time for one. Edie, who I suspect was responsible for many, if not all of these deaths, and was then using a fabricated family curse to cover up the murders. Edith has a right to know these stories. My children are dead because of your story. That's a mighty big claim, so let's just take a second to look. look at great grandma, shall we? The thing that first got me suspicious of her was her age.

And no, that's not me being agest, that's me noticing a very clear pattern here. In a family that's supposedly cursed, a family where the average age of death clocks in at 19 years old, where the oldest anyone has gotten is Edie's father Odin at 57, here's great grandma Edie over here, clocking it in at a ripe old 93, 93, nearly double anyone else in the family. The only other person who lives even remotely that long in this family, Walter, who made it to his 50s, literally locked himself in a bunker for decades. Oh, don't worry, we're gonna have a lot to say about Walter here soon. Edie has gotten to live long enough to see her great-grandchildren, but all the others didn't even get to see their own kids grow up. So why? Why did the family curse take so long to take Edie's life compared to everyone else?

It struck me as suspicious. Even more suspicious, though, is that she keeps pictures of loved ones dying next to her best. to her bed. And let me be clear, I'm not saying pictures of dead loved ones, though that is more than true. I mean pictures of them in the process of dying. On a shrine opposite her bed, we see a photo of her husband, Sven, falling off the top of a dragon slide that he was in the process of building. This would be the event that would cause his death. Was the camera on a timer? Who took this thing, Edie? Regardless, if her having that picture next to her while she sleeps is an evidence that Edie is totally disconnected from her emotions, I don't know what is. And mind you, she has plenty of other pictures of him being safe and happy, so it's not like this was the only one that she had to remember him by.

It is weird, it is uncomfortable, and it starts to show that great-grandma Eadie may have herself some very strange views on death. We see early on in the game that Eidie has a shrine dedicated to her dead father, Odin. As part of that shrine, she has on display two of his books, Mysteries of Death and Thereafter and Joining the Great Majority. We never get context as to what either of these two books may be about, but with a title like mysteries of death and thereafter, you can kind of guess. It shows that, to this early generation of Finches, there was something that persisted after death.

Mysteries that continue on. Joining the great majority as a title is even more vague. But the game designers clearly put it here as part of the shrine for a reason, so why? Well, I had a sense that it had to do with death as well, and while it did take some digging, my hunch was right. The expression was first used by Edward Young, an English poet who did a lot of philosophical writings on the nature of death. The full quote goes as follows, life is the desert, life, the solitude. death joins us to the great majority. Here's the spark notes on that one for your next English paper.

Everyone dies, join the club. So Edie's father, Odin, was the guy who literally wrote the book on death. Two books, in fact. And we see this obsession with death continuing to Edie's story. Sven built the house, but it was Edie who designed a cemetery. What kind of family finishes building a cemetery before starting the house?

She even finds death funny, including the tragic, premature death of her own husband. When Edie told people, Sven was killed by a dragon, She could also have said he was building a dragon-shaped slide that collapsed. She could have, but she didn't. I asked Edie once about the dragon in the pond. She said it had killed her husband. I was six.

It seemed like an odd joke to me even then. That right there just gives us more evidence that Edie and the truth don't always go hand in hand. But just because Edie's obsessed with death and happens to be a bit of a storyteller, it doesn't make her a killer, right? Well, no, not on its own. But take all those details and look a bit closer at some of the death stories that were told throughout the game, and suddenly Grand Grand Grands starts to look. a whole lot more sinister. One of the most memorable sequences that we play through in the game

is the death of Barbara. This one is told to us in the form of a pulpy Tales from the Crips style horror comic. Basically, Barbara was a child star whose best years were behind her. One night, while her boyfriend's trying to teach her how to get her iconic scream back, she's attacked by a murderous hookman. We're shown that under the bed, her younger brother Walter is hiding out of fear, but he witnesses the whole thing. She fends off the attacker using a crutch, knocking him over the balcony. When she goes down to check on him, in true horror story fashion, hookman's body has disappeared. Suddenly there's a knock at the door. Barbara opens it, sending in dozens of monsters who've come for a party. They wind up eating Barbara alive and only leaving her ear behind. And that is all we're told about Barbara's death. It's a weird story, right? And obviously it's heavily fictionalized. And yet we know elements of it to be true. We see the balcony of the Edith home still broken where the hookman or whatever he was fell. We also know that her younger brother Walter did in fact see something that sent him running to the basement in fear, living, in a bunker under the house for decades in fear of what lay on the other side.

He even keeps Barbara's crutch down there with him, above the fake window that he created for himself, either as a memory of his deceased sister or as a means of protection, more likely a combination of both. The truth about Barbara's death is, to this day, one of the most persistent mysteries of the game, one that people have theorized about for years, guessing everything from her boyfriend being the killer

to the house literally consuming her alive. One theory I haven't really seen, though, is that it was Edie. Great Grandma Edie did it. Intentionally or not, she caused Barbara's death. Let's look at the fact, shall we? As I mentioned before, Walter sees something the night of Barbara's death, something that causes him to lock himself in an underground bunker for decades out of fear. When he's down in the bunker, he gives us this line.

If you wait on that, you can use to do anything. Even a monster on the other side of the door starts to feel more than. He wasn't hiding from death or a curse, he was afraid of a monster, a monster on the other side of the door. He's so scared of this monster on the other side of the door, that when he does eventually decide to leave his bunker, he digs a hole out the other side rather than going through the door and back into the house.

And think back, who killed Barbara in her story? Monsters. We see that word being repeated, connecting these two stories, these two deaths together. So what sort of monster could be on the other side of Walter's door? Edie. I saw Edie sneak down to the basement once, carrying packages. I thought maybe she was hiding presents. It turned out she was hiding a lot more than that.

Edie is the monster. Whatever she's doing as a mother, her kids are scared of her. Whatever she did to Barbara, it scared Walter so much that he'd rather live in a basement and choose to knock a hole through solid rock using a sledgehammer than face her again. My guess is that Edie and Barbara got into a fight about her boyfriend being in the house. During the confrontation, Edie gets violent and angry. She shoves Barbara, who's then knocked over the balcony railing, falling to her death. In fact, one small detail that's easy to overlook, but the game tries to make sure that we notice, is the roller skates on the balcony.

As we climb the stairs in Barbara's story, a skate rolls down randomly. Later, the other skate is the thing that ultimately sends the hook man plunging over the balcony. That detail feels important. It feels real. That is the instrument of murder here. And if there was any doubt that the monster on the other side of the door is eating,

Walter also tells us this. I can't believe I've been down here for 30 years. On that first day, after the shaking started, I didn't think I'd survive a week. This isn't fear of a curse. That's imminent fear. That is fear of a real, palpable current threat. Someone determined to silence a person who's seen too much.

And we know for a fact that there is indeed some dark secret to find inside the Finch household. Very early on in the game, we get this line. I was for when Milton disappeared. Mom spent months searching for my brother. Then she sealed the doors. Whatever Milton had found in the house, mom didn't want it getting out. Milton is the only finch to go missing, to not have himself a confirmed death. He found something and then he disappeared.

It would seem like his fate is that of Walters. You learn the truth, you go poof. Speaking of Walter, you know what else is suspicious? His death. Walter waits years to leave his bunker only for him to immediately get hit by a train. The thing is, there's no train. The game takes place on a very real island. Orca's Island is an actual place in Washington State.

And there is a train on that island. Kinda. It's a privately owned train by whoever owns the property that it resides on. From what I can tell, it's not so much of a railroad as it is a ride. It is hardly the massive steam locomotive that's implied in Walter's story. And that still doesn't explain why it was going underneath the private residence of the Finch household. Just doesn't add up. Walter never specifically mentions the train either. However, if you look on the other side of the bunker, there is a model train set that Walter was

clearly building. Maybe that happened to be the source of inspiration for the story that would ultimately cover up the truth about his death. Because, you see, there's one other thing that you have to know about Great Grandma Edie. Not only does she love making up stories, she loves the fame that comes from her stories. In her room, we see this newspaper hanging up on the wall. I'm pretty hype about winning a family day out at Druid World! If you can manage to get over your excitement for Druid World, you can see the article about the moleman.

We're told by Edith that... Edie gave a big interview about a moleman living under the Finch house. My mom was furious. A mole man living under the Finch House. That, my friends, is Walter. That is her traumatized son. Eidie literally called her son a moleman and sold the story to a cd newspaper. That is the sort of person that we're dealing with here.

In another part of the room, we get this short story. One summer, they evacuated the island, but Eidie refused to go. For a few weeks, she was a celebrity. She loves the fame, and she is shameless in pursuing it, and nothing shows that more clearly than Barbara. It struck me as odd the first time I played the game that a comic book would publish the story, real or fictionalized about the tragic death of a very real young woman. And I wasn't the only one.

Edith calls this out as she wanders through the house. Of all the stories people wrote about Barbara's death, I'm surprised Edie saved this one. Right? Your daughter dies, but you keep the comic book that retells her getting eaten to death? I mean, that's pretty sinister, even for someone who jokes about death. And sure, we later get this line. Edy told me all Barbara wanted was to be remembered.

But again, Eidie lies. Eidie lies a lot. For the real reason that comic book is there, look no further than Great Grandma's Bedroom. Right next to that moleman story in Edie's room and right under the article where she's made famous for not leaving the house, we see a binder labeled Barbara Concepts. Concepts. Concepts for what? Well, I think it's concepts for stories. She's sold Barbara's story. Just like she sold Walter's story as the moleman. This whole wall is kind of like her wall of fame.

Little bits of time that she got to be passively famous. She's either directly or indirectly related to the deaths of those around her, at which point she twists them into something fantastical. If I were to guess, it's her creating fictions that make her less responsible for the deaths. It's also probably part coping mechanism. And lastly, is to make those deaths beautiful, poetic. Blame it all on this legendary family curse that allows her stories to live on. All Barbara wanted to be was remembered, Edie?

Yeah, I think you might be just talking about yourself. So far, I've mainly focused on Walter and Barbara. But Eadie being a monster is shown less explicitly in other stories, too. When leaving his bunker, Walter says this. I know it's out there somewhere. Whatever killed Barbara and Molly and Calvin? Well, let's look at both Molly and Kelvin then, shall we? Molly is the first Finch child that we meet and the first death that we play through.

The story goes that she's sent to bed without dinner, and because she's hungry, she decides to eat things like a tube of toothpaste, some Christmas berries, likely holly berries based on the color, and an old carrot. It's speculated that this combination somehow poisons her, but I looked into the food that she ate and I just don't realistically think that it could have actually killed her. The carrot was in the same bowl as what appears to be gerbil droppings, so she could have gotten salmonella, something that's known to be transferred in rodent droppings, but that wouldn't have killed her.

She would have been sick with symptoms like stomach cramps, vomiting, and a fever, but all of that would have passed within a week or so. Hollyberries are a similar story. She only eats about three, and while they certainly can be poisonous, she'd have to have eaten 20 or so to have actually ingested a deadly amount The toothpaste, same pattern. While toothpaste in 1947 had thankfully stopped using soap as an ingredient, they were just starting to use fluoride, which again can be poisonous in large amounts. But one tube of toothpaste is highly unlikely to be fatal. But still, all of this is missing the major point here. Why was Molly hungry in the first place? I'll be gone soon, but I wanted to tell somebody about what's going to happen. It started when mom sent me to bed without dinner. Edie, her mom sent her to bed without dinner. We can see that her Halloween can't.

My guess is that this detail is showing us why she's being punished. She ate her candy when she wasn't supposed to. And when you try to go out the door, you get this. Mom, can I come out now? Late, go to sleep! She's a 10-year-old girl who is literally locked in her room and starving to death. That is not okay. Intentionally or no, Edy's actions of locking her kid in her room and not feeding her

resulted in the child's death in some way. That's not all. Right next to the Mole Man and Barbara stuff, we have yet another binder of Concepts, Molly concepts. Perhaps the story of a girl who goes hungry, but instead of violently starving to death while locked in her room, the whole thing is made magical when her hunger transforms her into a cat, just like we play through in the game. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if Edie fabricated Molly's journal in the first place. As for Calvin, well, he launches himself off a cliff while playing on a swing.

I mean, he didn't build that swing set at the top of a large cliff. That blame absolutely falls on his parents. That's not all. Notice his leg. It's in a cast. It's broken. Now, is that necessarily Edie's fault? I don't know. I can't find any proof one way or the other. But it's made abundantly clear that her kids are afraid of her. And this house is hiding some dark secret that makes people run for their lives,

so wouldn't be surprised. At best, Edy is an aggressively neglectful parent. Worse, she's actively attacking her kids. And worst-worst-worst-case scenario, she's killing them off when they step out of line, and then covering up the truth with fantastical stories. It's interesting to note that every death in the Finch family has been connected back to Eadie in some way.

family member who lived with her or was close to her has perished. Edy is always there. Edie is there calling to Malia as she starves. She's there calling to Kelvin to come in before he launches himself off a cliff. She's the monster on the other side of Walter's bunker door. Barbara dies in her house and then Eadie goes on to sell the story. There is no curse here. There is only Eidie. She is the curse and I think she knows it. For all the commentary that's been going on about this game, I've never really seen anyone talk about Eadie's final story, you would think would be the most important one of the batch. It's the story that she tells to Edith the night before Edith and her mom run away.

It's actually a story that Edie writes in the form of a book, hidden in the now sealed off library. Dear Edith, there's so many stories I wish I could tell you, but there's only time for one. This is about what happened on the night you were born. It's also the only story in the game that goes unfinished. Basically, the story is about one night when there's a particularly low time. Edie is able to revisit the ruins of her olden.

house, one that had sunken under the waves decades ago. On the way there, she gets lost. When the fog rolled in, I lost my way. I got turned around. I started seeing things. Eventually, she makes it to the house, as she says in her own words, That night, a lot of things came back to me, or maybe I came back to them. Things I can't explain, but that I need you to try and... Edith, what are you doing in here? She opens the gate, A light turns on in one of the windows, and then the book is ripped away from Edith before she can finish. What is this story all about? What is Edie asking Edith to do?

Things I can't explain, but that I need you to try and, try and what? Figure out? Explain? Pass on? What? I think this is meant to be Edie's confession. Her telling the story of her past abuses and past misdeeds in the way that only she can, in the form of a highly symbolic, overly fantastical story full of symbolism.

The line that sticks out to me here is when the fog rolled in, I lost my way, got turned around. But what was all of this? What way did she lose and what does her coming back to the old house mean? Well, Edie says that this is the story of what happened the night that Edith was born. We know that Edith was born in 1999. At that point, there hadn't been a quote-unquote death in the family since 1983. The next death would be in 2003 when Milton finds whatever secret is inside the Finch household and suddenly disappears.

Walter leaves his bunker and immediately dies by quote-unquote train in 2005, and then there's Edith's brother Lewis in 2010. Could this whole story be symbolic of Edie's journey with her father's ideals? She's heading back to the old house. She's heading back to her origins. Back to the teachings of her father. She says that when she gets back to the house, she remembers things. Like she'd come back to old friends.

The light turning on at the end would be the representation of that enlightenment. But what is she being enlightened to? Is it a return to the importance of family? Is it a return to being a monster? Does she realize that by killing people off, she's once again helping them join the great majority? A lot of this sounds like the actions of an addict. They may know what they're doing is wrong,

but their old habits can be like a crutch, the friends that they feel safe around, despite knowing it's bad for them. Maybe that's why Dawn rips the book out of Edith's hands, because she's figured it out and doesn't want Edith reading it to get similar ideas. Eadie wrote it to Edith to explain her actions, so Edith might take the lessons and apply them for the future generations of the family. Edie knew she was getting old and couldn't keep going forever.

Maybe this was meant to be a path. of the torch. However you slice it, Edy is a monster. I don't think there's any way to deny it. Whether or not she actively killed off members of her family intentionally can't truly be proven, at least not yet. But it seems likely that she's been directly involved with many of the tragedies that befell the family. And then she went on to brand the family and its curse and the local pop culture so that she could be immortal. She was selfish, she was cruel, and she was seemingly violent. And when people learned the truth of the Finch matriarch, they had a habit of disappearing. Walter, Milton. What remains of Edith Finch is a mystery of trauma all pointing back to the actions of one woman. Remember, this final story is told to you in the library, a place where... Edie told me once that every Finch who ever lived is buried somewhere in the library. It's a story of all their deaths and why all their deaths relate back to her. Either that or, you know, Edie loved taxidermy. Maybe that last line is a bit more literal than you might think.

But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.