All spoilers for OMORI canon are unmarked. You have been warned.
The Sunburn Trilogy
is an OMORI fanfic series set after the game's good ending. It is written by Chocolian and published on Archive of Our Own.
Snow takes place months after Sunny moved away from Faraway. Invited to visit his friends in Faraway for the coming Christmas season, Sunny jumps at the opportunity to make amends for everything that's happened in the past and see his crush, Aubrey.
But deep within, the guilt and self-hatred for his accidental murder of Mari still lies in his heart, and it threatens to tear at him and others around him. Making matters more complicated is the surprise appearance of Elliot, a bully in Sunny's new high school, that may have more ties to Faraway and Sunny's life than one may think. The return of something far darker makes it even harder for Sunny to let go of his past and fully, completely forgive himself for his transgressions.
Glass, the first sequel to Snow, is currently under development. It follows Elliot after the events of this story and explores his own relationship with his past and present, as well as how this all could relate to Sunny and the gang as a trial approaches.
Ashes, the third and final entry in the Sunburn Trilogy, is still in pre-production.
Beware of unmarked Snow spoilers in the Glass folder!
This series contains examples of:
As a whole
- Anachronism Stew: References or music used in the series is meant to highlight the author's intent of showing how, despite taking place in the mid-2000's, the main story of OMORI and its central themes can be applied to any setting or context.
- Flash Forward Fic: The series is set months after the good ending of OMORI.
- Gothic Horror: This series' dream segments play up nightmarish atmosphere and contain the symbolic thrill of the genre.
- The Namesake:
- Snow is named after a gentle, recurring hallmark of Faraway's winter, not shown until it's revealed when Sunny visits his old friends.
- Glass's namesake is what Elliot's family saw his sister Elsie's corpse lacerated with in the car crash that killed her.
- Series Fic: The fics make up a trilogy of OMORI fanfiction.
Snow
- Adaptational Badass: While Aubrey was already more than capable of fighting in the main game, here, she has much more of an active, physical role in the action scenes in Snow, both in the dream world and the real world. In the former, even Basil and Kel get in on the action.
- Beware the Nice Ones: Contrary to some fanon perceptions, Hero actually does forgive Sunny of what happened to Mari, but with that all being said, talking shit about Mari or hurting Sunny is a definite way to get your shit kicked in by him, something Elliot can attest to in the last few chapters.
- Big Bad Ensemble: Omori returns to haunt Sunny even after the truth is out. Both him and Elliot are recurring menaces of the story.
- The Bully: Elliot decries Sunny as "a stone-cold killer", injures him with an airsoft gun, and threatens his life in way that Sunny sees as akin to "'some kind of redneck'". It's implied there's something else at play with him, though, as Glass sets to elaborate on.
- Dark Fantasy: Mixed with elements of Gothic Horror in the dream sequences, as noted in the above folder.
- Dance of Romance: Sunny and Aubrey get three. One in a dream sequence in chapter ten, one major one in chapter twelve (followed up by a Love Confession no less!), and one while ice skating in chapter seventeen, before an insane, vengeful Elliot shows up.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Elliot's friends are both appalled and mortified as Elliot starts going insane with revenge after Aubrey saved Sunny with the Hooligans' help, as he is not only intending to kill Sunny and Aubrey, but nearly succeeds, even inadvertedly when the ice breaks under Sunny at the lake, as they free Aubrey of her bindings and let her save Sunny from drowning in freezing water.
- Evil Counterpart: Elliot spends this fic's events as one to Sunny. Both lost a respective sister of his, but while Sunny accidentally killed someone he still openly loves and cherishes; Elliot's brutality towards Sunny is completely intentional, and he desperately tries to push away the care he has for Elsie.
- Groin Attack: Kel is the victim of a pretty hard one by Aubrey in chapter nine.
- Moment Killer: Sunny and Aubrey seem cursed with this every time Sunny tries to confess his love. It stops once they finally become official.
- Mythology Gag: The nightmare sequence in chapter five is a spruced-up version of one of the chase encounters with Basil's Something in the Church at Black Space in the Hikikomori Route, only now it's a completely new version of Something and the entire church rotates infinitely to try and stop Sunny this time.
- Shout-Out: And how.
- One to LazyTown's most infamous memes in chapter two: its "you are a pirate" song.
- Another, albeit much creepier, one from chapter two has a moment in the nightmare sequence that takes inspiration from the opening of Sinister.
- "Arr, it's Patchy the Pirate!"
- The video games Aubrey plays in Hero's room on chapter five are nods to Destiny (one of the author's favorite franchises) and a less-glowing variation of Crash Tag Team Racing.
- The nightmare sequence in chapter five is a nod to the rotating corridor fight from Inception, but with a few twists alongside nodding to the aforementioned church chase with Something from the game. Eames' quote, "You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.", is even used here as Sunny's Bond One-Liner near the end of his final fight with Omori in chapter twenty-one.
- Dream!Aubrey, Dream!Kel, and Dream!Basil's pledge to aide each other in the fight against Dragon!Something is a twofer to Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy in chapter eight.
- Aubrey mentions having taken Kim to see The Holiday in chapter nine.
- Chapter sixteen features a Castlevania reference dubbed by Captain Spaceboy comics that Kel and Hero play out.
- What is essentially the most prominent song from A Charlie Brown Christmas is used in chapter seventeen before Elliot enters the scene.
- Finally, in the final chapter, a Halo 3 reference is made as Sunny promises that he'll be back soon for Aubrey.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Omori only cares more for Sunny's wellbeing in his own twisted way, being Sunny's manifestation of his self-hatred and guilt for having accidentally killed Mari. That all being said, the execution of his intentions involves taking Sunny over completely from the inside and doing what he would've done with him in the first place during the final boss fight in the canon route of OMORI. So obviously, that's no good.
Glass
- Abusive Parents: Marc's call to Elliot in chapter twelve of Snow initially implies that Marc isn't all that nice to his son. Marc eventually berates and brutally beats Elliot just for passing out over his PTSD flashbacks, and then tries to punish him by depriving him of his food.
- Ambiguously Bi: It's implied in chapter fifteen that Elliot had crushes on both guys and girls back when he and Elsie were in school together.
- Arc Words: "His blood is on your hands."
- Cosmic Horror: Compared to the Dark Fantasy in Snow, Glass prioritizes a fusion of Gothic Horror (with elements like lycanthropy, Victorian-styled architecture, and even plague doctors) and this trope, with the main threat in the dream world this time being composed of many an Eldritch Abomination after another, all within a Lovecraftian style, as like its source inspiration, Bloodborne.
- Darker and Edgier: Yes, somehow even MORE than Snow was at times.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Elliot is not only revealed to have had a dead sister, similarly to Sunny, but he loved her very much and is tormented by her death, so much so that it's done quite a number on his mental health. He tries to deny it to fit his tough-guy exterior, but deep down, he immensely misses her and the childhood they shared.
- Jerkass at Your Discretion: Marc hugs Elliot in front of a nurse once Elliot recovered from his injuries in chapter four, but while they're driving through a freeway, Marc threatens to throw Elliot in jail if he doesn't help cover up his father's crimes in court.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Elliot's entire demeanor throughout the fic is seeping with this. It's very apparent that in between Snow and this fic, he had some time to come to his senses and realize the extent of his behavior, and he's desperately trying to make up for it.
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The Hemlock family shares its name with a highly poisonous species of flowering plant. The family name is rooted at Marc Adolph Hemlock (Elliot's abusive father who's also a racist, corrupt right-wing politician), whose middle name and last initial combined ring a bell to genocidal dictator Adolf Hitler.
- Parents as People: In addition to the emotional stress Sunny's mother, Valerie, goes through trying to support their child while managing a court case and looking for work, Marc and Christine are revealed to have had to work through the stress of raising an adopted Elliot without revealing that he was not only adopted, but that his biological parents are dead. It's also shown that Marc actually wasn't that bad of a father starting out, even being much more pleasant and compassionate. At first.
- The Reveal: Chapter nineteen, "Athazagoraphobia", comes loaded with revelation after revelation that not only showcases Elliot's backstory in full, but also gives context to what Elsie was like and what happened to her.
- Elliot is not Marc's biological son, but rather an adoption originally named Geoffrey from an Egyptian-American man named Mahmoud Nazir-Khaldun, who left him at an orphanage due to the mother dying in childbirth and the father being unable to provide the necessary needs for him. The note left in the baby's carriage is also the biological father's suicide note.
- Marc and Christine both knew about the biological father's suicide note and kept it a secret from the now-renamed Elliot, with Marc mentioning that no kid should have to know that not only were both of their parents dead, but also that one of them killed themselves as a result of their wife dying in childbirth. It's later shown that they never revealed this information to him at all.
- Christine is implied to be emotionally manipulative towards Marc at times.
- Elsie met a girl named Chelsea at church, and it's implied Chelsea formed a crush on her over time but was hiding it due to both their parents' conservative Christian upbringings, on top of the time period still being heavily prejudiced against LGBTQ+ people. It was her parents' car that Elsie was in when the crash happened.
- Hero and Mari were present during Elsie's class performance of Beauty and the Beast, therefore giving credit to Hero's threat to Elliot and his dad in chapter twenty-two of Snow, where he said he knew what really happened to Elsie and would let the public know.
- And finally, the person who crashed into the car Elsie was in, and therefore the identity of her murderer, is her own father. On accident. While comforting Elliot for suffering a humiliating defeat at the final match of the spring semester and getting beaten up for it, he failed to pay attention to the speed at which he was driving, and crashed into Chelsea's parents' car that Elsie was in. While the parents and Chelsea survived (though badly wounded), Elsie died from the collision at such tremendous force, her corpse set aflame from the gas leak and explosion.
- "Well Done, Son" Guy: Part of Elliot's motivation to bully Sunny in Snow is to regain his father's love by following his beliefs. Shortly after his therapist inquires that the caring father Marc once was (or acted like) is long gone, Elliot starts to turn away from both his own misdeeds and his father's ideology.
