ALL SPOILERS ARE UNMARKED. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
How OMORI Creates Emotional Torque with Elements of the Hollywood Formula
"I was wondering... if you wanted to hang out one more time before you go... or whatever... for old time's sake, y'know?”
— Faraway Kel
OMORI is known for being one of the most emotionally charged games in its likeness. Its main storyline has many aspects of the hard-developed Hollywood Formula. Though such a rigid structure is far from perfectly followed, the story utilizes it to immense effect.
Sunny is the Main Route’s protagonist. Should he make the fateful decision to respond to Kel’s call, his goal is to regain the memories he repressed and move on from whatever caused him to hole himself up in his Headspace, so that he can find peace and happiness. The Hikikomori Route is the culmination of him never doing any work towards his goal, and it could be said that without Kel knocking on Sunny’s door over and over again, Sunny would be unable to make peace with his troubles, “and there would be no game”.
Sunny and Omori are often accompanied by three “relationship characters”: Aubrey, Kel, and Hero. In Headspace, the three are Omori’s traveling companions in the collective fabrication of Sunny’s lost childhood. In Faraway, Kel is Sunny’s earliest and most frequently present ally. The real Hero saves Basil from being accidentally drowned by Aubrey, and convinces Kel of the possibility of reconciling with Aubrey the next day. Aubrey then shows Sunny that her tender side isn’t all gone, wishes for him to reach what his goal is to attain (peace and happiness), and provides the idea of having a sleepover at Basil’s in hopes of comforting him. All in all, Sunny’s Faraway companions reveal loose ends, prepare for them to be tied up, and express the importance of being there for your loved ones in trying times.
Omori, despite being the game's other Player Character, is the true antagonist; by his very nature of being, he gets in the way of Sunny’s goal by trying to make the latter lose himself. Bear in mind that the main antagonist isn’t always the sole Big Bad. The broadest cause of the story's conflicts is Something, the ghastly trauma that Sunny tried in vain to stow away, so Something is an entity that Omori, White Space, Headspace, and Black Space would not exist without.
The fight against Omori may not be a proper Boss Battle in terms of gameplay, but it is Sunny’s final challenge in the story. In the bad ending of the game, Sunny succumbs to Omori and follows his Headspace pals into oblivion, thus having failed to reach inner peace. In the good ending, Sunny refuses to give up in the face of agonizing guilt for his part in Mari’s demise, yet his reconciliation with his friends is left ambiguous. Nonetheless, he and Basil are heavily implied to succeed in his goal of coming to terms with their grief.
Ambiguous Ending Parting Words
"I do not write tragedies. Real life is a crapshoot and it doesn't need me to write tragedies for it. Other people can fill that. I like writing happy endings, to give the world a more hopeful outlook. That makes this fic
hard to write for me.”
hard to write for me.”— raak1101
Many fans debate how Sunny and Basil's friends would react to the revelation that Mari didn't really take her own life. The lack of canon indication of how the group turns out, as well as the great variation of Real Life psychological reactions to even similar trauma, contributes to much thought on this.
However, precisely because of this ambiguity, the question of whether the five would still be friends is technically meaningless. While the characters are developed enough for different ideas of whether they should stick together to exist, all that the good ending shows is the end of a Dark Secret's terrible burden.
By persisting against Omori, Sunny maintains hope that reconciling with his real friends won't be for naught. The existence of Omori and the dream world are founded on him losing hope that peace, happiness, and love aren't behind him; in truth, the pain depicted in the game isn't somehow "more realistic" than the joy it depicts. Ultimately, any logic behind how the friendships' futures would turn out is not deductive, but inductive.
A Timeline of Aubrey's Feelings
It's certainly difficult to piece together when exactly Aubrey lost her old self. So let's try.
The information we have is:
- Aubrey had her spat with Basil regarding the photo album a few months after Mari's death. Supposedly when Sunny stopped coming to classes.
- A churchgoer mutters that Aubrey's become so wild after her father left.
- Kel mentions she became all weird when Hero left for college last year. Given his age, he left three years after Mari's death.
We can assume that the period when Hero and her father left was around the same time. So three years after Mari's death. This means that she became a delinquent three years after Mari's death.
As for when she started bullying Basil: the most reasonable assumption would be she bullied him when she became a delinquent. But she mentions she started calling him names directly after their photo-album-confrontation. Maybe she just treated him poorly but otherwise left him alone. Until she met the hooligans.
There aren't many clues as to when she met the Hooligans. She has a picture of her and Kim, and based on the transition animation Omocat drew, it was taken somewhere near her full descent into delinquency. So we can assume that she met the Hooligans sometime around when Hero and her father left. So three years after Mari's death.
The basic timeline:
- Mari passes away.
- Sunny stops attending school a few months later.
- Aubrey visits Basil's house after this and runs off with the photo album when she notices they've been blacked out. She begins to treat him poorly.
- Hero leaves for college three years after Mari's death. Her father leaves soon after.
- During this time she meets the Hooligans. Her poor treatment of Basil spreads to them as they all start calling him names.
- A year later during Summer vacation, the game's story begins.
