These things may serve specific purposes. Sometimes, the child may choose to conjure up other.things that are somewhat less friendly. Sometimes, however, there may be circumstances that warrant holding onto such friends. They don’t typically stick around when the child matures. He struggles with anxiety and depression, but he’s not schizophrenic and he does not have a dissociative identity disorder.
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He hasn’t truly learned how to cope with loss, and so he chooses denial rather than acceptance. He’s understandably deeply afraid of losing someone close to him, and so he has chosen a life of loneliness rather than risk more pain. His personal losses shaped him in many ways, some good, some bad. Mystery is important.but so is clarity:Įdward is a lonely man who’s lived an isolated life for over thirty years. There’s one thing we want to address, however, without digging too far into things we’d rather leave unexplained. Personal experience and trauma should be listened to, not dismissed, and we don’t want to lessen or attempt to ‘correct’ anyone’s honest feedback. It’s understandable (and honestly heartening) to see players express their feelings about it in a public forum. We’re happy to see a civil discussion emerging from various interpretations of the story. We don’t want to jump blindly into this discussion, as anything we write can be misconstrued and misinterpreted. That happened (probably) long before.Īs for "It furthers the argument that we should be surprised and incredulous when we learn that a person suffers from a mental illness", not sure how you would want people to react when learning that someone suffers from an illness, mental or physical. Nobody is scared at any point, neither Edward nor the player (at least, I wasn't).įact is Edward seems to have cope with his illness long ago, before the game.Īs such, there just is no struggle in the game. The only disbelief moment for Edward is when he realizes Betty is gone long ago. We, as player, are surely shocked by the revelation, but Edward seems totally fine with it, and there is just no other protagonists in the game that he could not be "open" about it. Really not sure where you saw all that in the game tbh. "It paints mental illness as something that should be shocking or frightening, as something that is so abnormal that a person can't possibly live with it openly"
TL DR: Red Thread could have come out of the gate weaving Edward's struggling to cope with his mental illness into the narrative and used all of the time they spent trying to scare people with his illness to actually resolve the underlying mystery of Graavik. In the end you’re left to speculate about what really happened in Graavik, no clear answers forthcoming that could have been an artful elision, but as it was it felt like yet another glaring lack in the game. It was as if the game was somewhat ashamed of the territory it staked out, going only so far and then no further in the process what was left behind was a story that veered dangerously close to ableist cliches. What lay beneath in Edward, in Graavik, wasn’t truly explored. Its theater of the mind was halfhearted, reduced only to jump scares of faces appearing in lightning-struck windows. I realized then, as the epilogue unfolded, that this was a game that actually shied away from its weirdness. As it is, to service this “surprise! Edward’s craaaaazy!” twist trope, Graavik’s very real tragedies recede into the background, failing even to resolve into coherence by the game’s end. It just further pushes mental illness into a box that nobody likes to talk about.Īnd the article gives one example of how Red Thread could have used Edward's mental illness in a non-reductive manner.īut had the game front loaded with this understanding and let the drama emerge from something in Graavik-rather than using this tragic graveyard of a town as a stage for Edward’s quest for closure-the overall portrayal would have been far stronger.
This is not a healthy way to think about mental illness, neither for people who are suffering from it nor people who aren't. It furthers the argument that we should be surprised and incredulous when we learn that a person suffers from a mental illness. It paints mental illness as something that should be shocking or frightening, as something that is so abnormal that a person can't possibly live with it openly. Using mental illness as a plot twist in this manner only further stigmatizes the people who suffer from them. Simply because reductive plot twists have been used in the past is not sufficient reason to keep using them.
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