Because of the game's layered plot, all spoilers remain unmarked. It would be difficult to discuss it otherwise.
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Fridge Brilliance
In General
- When Jennifer talks to Clara, she says "How Dirty..." and looks away from her. At the time, and certainly to Jennifer, this sounds like just another one of the children being mean to Jennifer. However, she's not an Aristocrat and has no reason to treat Jennifer that way. Once learning about the way Clara has been treated by Hoffman, however, it's almost certain that Clara was talking about herself and looking away out of shame. Crosses over into Fridge Horror when it comes to why Clara acted that way, and also the implication that Jennifer was convinced that she was more alone than she might have been, since Clara may not actually have hated her.
- Why is Jennifer so submissive towards a bunch of prepubescent kids despite being a legal adult? That's because she is reliving events of her childhood the entire time. She's just a kid during those events, so she is acting similarly to how she did back then.
- This can also be used for why the combat is so horribly tricky and sometimes unfair: if a small girl had to defend herself against five older children, she would stumble, be scared, try to just wildly swing and use unlikely weapons of whatever she has available.
- Immediately after getting untied after waking up on the Airship, it's possible to try and pick the scissors out of the automatic contraption that freed you. Despite looking tall enough, Jennifer can't reach them. Which makes a lot more sense come the reveal.
- As noted on the character page, Wendy's Animal Motifs seems to be rabbits and she doesn't act like those with a rabbit motif, subverting it, however, things start to make sense when you realize that her animal motif aren't rabbits, they're hares. In some stories, hares tend to be associated with trickery, selfishness, and being a bad example for people to follow, which is Wendy's true self.
The Funeral
- In the penultimate chapter, everyone who Jennifer interacts with bullies or ignores her- prompting the narration to repeat each time that she is "all alone". Because Brown is still beside Jennifer, the phrase seems like an exaggeration to first-time players, yet another example of the narrator's cynicism. Then it's revealed that Brown has died, and Jennifer imagines otherwise because she can't cope with the truth. She really is all alone.
Once Upon A Time
- In the prologue, Jennifer is sleeping on a sunlit park bench when she- apparently randomly- starts to remember Brown. This chapter shows why that is: in the orphanage, Jennifer had so few sources of comfort (most prominently Brown) that she mentally associated them with each other. One of these sources was the attic window she can observe in Once- specifically, its warm sunlight. The park scene makes a lot more sense now.
- Wendy's Legend of Stray Dog, and subsequent training of Gregory to act like a dog, becomes a lot more meaningful when you consider that she blames Brown for taking Jennifer's love from her. What is Brown? a stray dog. Wendy is jealous that Brown is taking Jennifer's attention away from her, and so comes up with the Legend of Stray Dog to get the other children to think negatively of Brown. When that doesn't work, she then orders Brown killed, in the childish belief that removing him from the picture will make things go back to the way they were. This of course backfires spectacularly and angers Jennifer to the point where she snaps, throws Wendy a beating, and unwittingly dethrones her. So when a hurt and angry Wendy decides that a stray dog took everything from her, she brings a Stray Dog, in the form of an unhinged Gregory, to take everything from Jennifer.
Fridge Horror
- The mermaid symbolism. Diana is equally excited about and afraid of growing up, so her "unmarried mermaid" is her way of balancing the conflict: it's referencing the part of the story before the Little Mermaid falls in love with the prince. She wants all the freedom and fun of being grown-up, but freedom and fun means abandoning safety; she knows this, and that's why she struggles. This is all laid out in the text, that's not the fridge horror. The fridge horror is the fact that the mermaid boss is Clara, who was almost certainly being sexually abused by Hoffman. The mermaid isn't just a reconciliation between idealism and cynicism about becoming an adult, it's the personification of the fear of becoming a woman through sex as a rite of passage. Diana is willful, headstrong, and crafty as hell, she knows damn well what Hoffman wants out of her and knows it's disgusting: watch the scene with the fish tank, where she pretends to cry to get Hoffman to leave her alone. She's not trying to get out of trouble, she's acting babyish to deflect his sexual attraction to her. He's into adolescents, not children, and Diana is right on the edge of his preferred age range. In other words, she can play up being a little girl and hold him off, but it won't work forever. That's why the mermaid boss is a horrifying version of Clara: it's Diana's fear of what her own future will be, nothing more than a broken young woman with no freedom and no agency, nothing more than a fish in Hoffman's tank. This also ties into Clara's unused audio, where she describes not wanting to be trapped someplace by herself, but not wanting to go outside either; a mermaid in a fish tank would love to get out and be free, but if she does, she'll suffocate and die.
- There are two things in the game and the implications of them that makes the above worse. One of them is that Diana has an unexplained bandage (almost like a splint) around one of her thighs and she's also Hoffman's favorite, as he calls her name first when it's time for bed (noticeably, he calls Olivia's, the youngest, last). The second one is that there's scars/stitching on the Mermaid (the latter is particularly on the abdominal region) and, in "The Funeral", we see Clara scrubbing at a spot on one of the beds in the sick bay, with said spot being raised and right where her pelvis would be.
- The scene where Jennifer carries a collapsed Wendy back into her bed looks way, way more creepy once the player learns Wendy's true nature. It s entirely possible that she was just faking illness so Jennifer would touch her.
Fridge Logic
- In the slap scene, adult!Jennifer's dress clearly bears the Aristocrats' crayon marks. But when she transitions back to her child self, the dress is entirely unstained. The crayon scene itself is unlikely to be a case of Unreliable Narrator (because without it, Jennifer's blackout, the preceding Aristocrats' meeting, and everyone's sudden ostracization of Jennifer make little to no sense), so why is that?
- You're missing the point of the game. Adult!Jennifer is the real, grown-up Jennifer, as she imagines herself exploring a mashed-up mess of things and events that she remembers; the crayon marks on her dress were all in her own mind, just like all the children in the orphanage, they aren't real. When she reverts to her child-self in the slap scene, she's accurately recalling the memory of the day she stood up to Wendy and the Aristocrats, so of course her dress is clean.
- How did the Aristocrat Club form without Jennifer realising who Wendy was?
