As a Headscratchers subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
- The game's overall themes of hunger and gluttony seem to be in a bit of a contrast to the Lady. Having a slender, delicate person as the hostess of such a facility isn't so much the odd part - indeed, it's an appropriate inversion of the rest of the Maw's residents. Rather, it's that you defeat her using a mirror, which seems more in line with a theme of vanity than gluttony. The whole fight doesn't quite feel like it fits in with the rest of the story, such as it is. Am I missing something obvious, or is the Lady just an oddball factor in the plot?
- The game has more than one theme. Another of its themes is light and darkness: Some light, like Six's lighter and the Runaway Kid's flashlight, can be trusted and relied upon in your journey. Some light signifies you coming out of a dangerous area. Other times, light can be dangerous, like with the eyes, or can give away your position. The Lady, in particular, represents shadows, and shadows follow you everywhere in the Maw. Mirrors' whole purposes is to reflect light, which is how you defeat the Lady. Therefore, just because the fight doesn't fulfill the Gluttony theme specifically doesn't mean it doesn't fit into your experience in the Maw. (That's not even considering that you kill the Lady by eating her.)
- The combination of gluttony motif and mirror imagery usually serves to symbolizes eating disorders. For an example of the game that does it very well, look at Downfall (2009) by Harvester Games.
- The DLC clarifies this by showing that the reason the Lady recoils from mirrors is that, for whatever reason, her reflection shows a hideous monster like the Guests even though her real self looks much more human. The eating disorder undertones are unavoidable at that point.
- The Lady keeps mannequins that resemble herself, leaves figurines of herself all over the Maw, and keeps mirrors to gaze into despite only being able to bear doing so if they're cracked. She's a glutton for "feeding" her own ego.
- What is with the bottles in the DLC? They seem to be positive (they glow and release sparkles when opened) and Runaway Kid takes something out of them (looks like a scroll of some kind?), but we never find out what exactly he has collected and the bottles seem to have no influence on the game at all? So are they just a game gimmick or did I miss their plot relevance?
- They give you an achievement if you collect all five. Said achievement is called "I'm losing you" and the description is "I'll be out of reach for a while" so they seem to be standard messages in bottles? They probably don't have significance to the boy himself, though.
- So Roger the Janitor is blind due to the flesh on his head drooping off his skull and obstructing his vision, right? So why doesn't he get it sewn back together or fasten it out of the way or something? Even assuming he's too poor to afford the necessary operation or devices, you'd think he'd at least lift the skin up with his hands when he needed to look at something!
- Maybe his eyes are actually blind under there.
- Another answer; since we don’t even know what species The Janitor is, and physical deformities that inhibit movement are seen in pretty much every resident of The Maw, it’s possible that he can’t lift the skin flap up because it’s melted or fused onto his eyes.
- Or maybe his eyes are part of the flap of skin and flesh that drooped down, so his optic nerves aren't connected to his brain anymore. In which case, he'd be blind whether his face is pulled up or fallen.
- Odd thing I noticed in the game just recently: why is the sausage room (where Six has to make a rope out of sausage) barred off? The only door in and out is barred from the inside, which begs the question of how and why. The only possible explanation I can see is other runaways, but there's not piles of boxes or the like to make it so they could have reached it.
- Maybe some Nomes were using it as a refuge? There could be an opening behind the grinder's table that's too small for Six, but large enough for a Nome to enter and leave through.
- Why does the Lady leave the mirror, the only thing that can defeat her, at her home anyway?
- Since she's been going around smashing every mirror possible, maybe she took it to ensure no one had it so she could smash it in peace. If she couldn't break it, keeping the one thing to defeat her in her own possession doesn't seem like the worst idea; prevents others from getting and using it since she and she alone has it in possession and the staff or children being in her quarters for any reason at all seems highly unlikely (until Six arrives, of course).
- Possibly she'd used it to keep in touch with the tentacle-faced Mirror Monster from the second comic.
- If, as the second game suggests, the Janitor's sagging face is a skin mask covering up whatever the Transmission did to him, wouldn't it be even easier to fix and uncover his eyes than if it was his real skin? Is the Janitor truly blind regardless and the character design is just a freaky visual communication of that, or is he just not fixing an easy problem?
- Depends whether or not he still has eyes under there. Plenty of the Transmission's victims don't. The portrait of the Janitor with his face (mostly) intact may have been created at an early stage of his transformation, to preserve an image of his appearance before his facial skin slid down entirely.
