WMG / Broken Age

Sacrifice Girl and Space Boy are ordinary young people exploring elaborate fantasy worlds that serve as metaphors for real-life problems.

The molly-coddling AI that Space Boy has to deal with is obviously his mother, who still thinks of him as a little boy. Sacrifice Girl is probably a Runaway Bride, or trying to get away from an arranged marriage, or even from a Domestic Abuser.

• Isn't this analysis (at pretty obvious level at that) rather than WMG?
• No, this is speaking literally. None of the events in the story actually happen, except in the minds of the main characters. Strangely, I think this is nigh impossible with the ending of Part 1. Why would Shay and Vella be living in each other's dream worlds? It kinda makes up until that point, though...

"Mom" and "Dad" are literally Shay's parents.

Or at least their personalities, uploaded into A.I.s. They're also the previous "Space Boy" and one of the sacrificial maidens, as implied when Mom starts telling Shay the story of how she was once a girl who was sacrificed and turned into Mom. Levina was, in a way, totally right when she speculated that after each round of Maiden's Feasts the Mog goes off to mate and create the next Grand Mog who'll show up 14 years later.

• Act 2 proves this partially right, in the sense they are the actual parents posing as A.I.s.

Marek is Shay's father.

• Why he's dressed liked a wolf, who can guess?
  • In the game, he says outright that it's to blend in with the other stuffed animals on the ship.
  • There are a few "indicators" that link the father orb to Marek; at least in a way. When Shay returns to his bedroom after the ship has been put on high alert, you can see the father orb briefly peeking up behind the main platform, much like how Marek at one point can be seen from the vent hole. When the ship is attacked and Marek's last mission is cancelled, he tells Shay to forget about the rescued creatures and instead focuses on ensuring the safety of Shay.
  • Jossed.

Alex's ship was a previous Grand Mog, as were the others of Project Dandelion

Alex had the same backstory as Shay and is also a product of Project Dandelion, so his ship was likely to be the same as Shay's. If each ship sent by the dying planet has the same programming, we can extrapolate what happened.Each ship found the planet and deemed it suitable for colonisation, and started kidnapping natives as some sort of preparation (It is certain that this is a standard function of the ship, as it happened even before Shay knew about it). Each passenger of the ship was introduced to the boom controls by their version of Marek, and in turn finds out the truth. Presumably the guilt from this was what cause Alex to try to take over his ship, crashing it. It also explains why Alex was revered as the Dead Eye God who would defeat all Mogs: his Grand Mog came to reap, and he destroyed it.

• Act 2 proves this partially true: the ship is another Mog. However, it's revealed there were no space or other planets, it was all an elaborate simulation.

High-ranking members of the cult of the Dead Eye God are the villains of the story.

After their "god" sealed himself away they studied his ship until they learned how to make a rough copy of it; not nearly good enough to actually travel through space, but workable as a submarine. Then they chose some baby, stuck him inside, and set him off, recreating the Dead Eye God's circumstances as a form of worshiping him. Once the child reaches an age where he'll start acting out against this sheltered lifestyle they sneak one of their members on board to wait until they reach the level of rebellion Alex was at when he hacked the real ship, then to celebrate their living effigy reaching the end of his journey they guide him into unknowingly giving them a sacrifice to the Dead Eye God. (Or, heck, maybe Alex's ship just crashed on top of a girl's school and that's what they're trying to emulate.)

Afterwards, maybe they let the boy out to live a life among them beyond the plague walls, maybe the mating with a surviving maiden thing happens, or maybe the final sacrifice is the boy himself in imitation of the real Dead Eye God leaving the world behind. Whatever the case, they slap a new monster design on the ship, stick a new baby inside, and send it back out into the ocean.

They disguised the ship as a monster and came up with the whole 'Grand Mog' thing just so people would stay the heck away if they saw it and not potentially interfere with their worshipful imitation before the time was right, and to scare them into providing sacrifices. And then they spread around the story that once the Dead Eye God returned he would bring the end to Mogkind because they aren't gonna keep up the rite once their actual God is back.

People getting so into the Grand Mog story that they see the sacrifice as a good thing instead of flocking to worship the Dead Eye God for the promise of eventual salvation from it probably took them by surprise.

• Jossed. Dead Eye worship turns out to be little more than a Cargo Cult.

Marek is the Big Bad

• Act 2 proves it wrong: he operates for someone else. "Marekai" may also be not a name but some title, since Alex too remember a Marek.

Marek is just another part of the "adventures"

Marek seems to just be another one of the fake adventures Mom (or possibly Dad) created. Considering he played along with the facade of the ship being actually in space. He may just be that part that causes the maidens feast to happen every 14 years on every "Project Dandelion" ship.

• Possibly Jossed. That... "Wolf" seems to have more of an idea as to what's going on than he lets on, and not to mention if you interview Mom while doing Marek's jobs to get to Prima Doom, she says she never made a wolf buddy and is completely unaware of an intruder. She isn't giving obvious hints at it like she or Shay's buddies would during a usual adventure. Another thing to note is how Marek is taller than Shay, a little ragged/haphazardly made, and colored black- contrast all of Shay's other buddies who are below waist height, smooth/well-made, and extremely colorful. Mom and Dad also seem to not really understand Shay's want and need to mature, so it seems odd to make such an adventure for him. Then there's the fact that the Space Weaver doesn't want Shay to go to Marek's destinations, which you think he would, being implied to be subservient to Mom and Dad considering the two run the entire ship. If it is another one of the adventures, the ship finally realized Shay is bored with his life and is trying to make some intrigue, but with how everything has been set up, this seems very unlikely.
  • It seems most likely that Marek is the next step in the ship's programming in raising Shay, which is designed to activate when the passenger grows mature enough to desire to rebel against the first nurturing stage, and intelligent enough to realize how to subvert one of the games. The Marek stage of the program is designed to provide new fake "missions", much like the Mom stage, just designed to appeal to a teenager's mind rather than a young child's. A secondary function of the program is to seek out suitable mates for the passenger, hence specifically hunting down girls of an appropriate age. The reason Mom denies any knowledge of Marek is because it's all part of the program being designed to appeal to a teenager's need to rebel, to the idea of partnering up with a mysterious shady figure unknown to the authorities to accomplish tasks against actual resistance, such as the Space Weaver not agreeing to take Shay to the clandestine destinations.
  • This may be supported by the fact that Marek's "saving" activity is a Mog collecting sacrifices in a Maiden Feast, and Lavina states that Mogs and Maiden Feasts have happened before.

• Weirdly Josses AND confirmed. Marek is all but stated to be part of the cycle of adventures that Shay and his predecessors went through in collecting the maidens on Vella's side of things, but neither of Shay's parents knew about it.

Mom and Dad are separate AI programs and not one computer like Shay suspects.

What Shay knows is that the Mom program watches over him and tries to protect him and engage his developing mind. He seems to only know what Mom tells him about the Dad program. The Dad program works on the "outside" of the ship, supposedly protecting and repairing it, according to Mom. However, "outside" didn't mean literally of the ship but of Mom's perspective of the ship—what Mom cannot see within the ship. This connects with the above WMG "Marek is just another part of the 'adventures'" in that Marek is one of Dad's robot friends for Shay while the fabric friends are Mom's robot friends for Shay. The two programs were designed separately so that the Mom program would not interfere with Dad's functions (and also so that she would continue to try to baby Shay during his rebellion, thus leading him further into trusting Marek—a.k.a. one of Dad's robots).

• Mom was designed to engage Shay during his first development stages (e.g. as a newborn until he was a teenager).
• Dad was designed to engage Shay during his puberty and more advanced development stages. Dad was meant to be the program to go to during or after the rebellion phase.
  • Jossed. Neither of them is an AI but they are the actual parents!

The game takes place After the End.

Vella and her community seem perfectly fine with the concept of giant ship robots and video games, despite coming from a seemingly low technological area. Perhaps they are aware of such things, it's just that with the infrastructure mostly destroyed, the average person in the area can't replicate most of the technology.

• If such a thing is the case, a likely candidate for the cause of destruction would be the conflicts with the mogs, before the Maiden's Feasts got started. It does seem rather unlikely for a tech level as high as that of Loruna to be reached in isolation. Alternatively, technological concepts could have filtered down from the earliest seed families, some of whom are said to have gone native in the badlands.

Vella and Shay communicate with each other in Act 2 by using Marek's earpeice.

At some point while off camera (when the player was controling Shay perhaps?) Vella finds Marek's end of the earpeice setup he used to talk to Shay in Act 1. They figure out who they're talking to, and use this communication line to solve the puzzles that require knowledge of the other's environment. The only question left is why they keep this a secret.