Time to Disinfect
is an OMORI fanfiction written by The Other Red.
In this Alternate Universe Fic, almost everything is the same as canon, except for one little detail: Mari is autistic. This alters her perspective just enough that, by sheer coincidence, she happens to pay attention to something that her canon self never did: the fact that Sunny had injured his hand during music practice. She immediately stops the rehearsal to take care of him, and that act inadvertently prevents a certain tragedy from ever happening and sets her and Sunny's futures onto an entirely different course.
The story follows Mari's perspective as she tries to juggle being a good big sister to Sunny along with all of her other responsibilities, the pressures surrounding the music recital chief among them. But that's a task that may be easier said than done, especially as it becomes apparent that being autistic has affected her life in more ways than just giving her a slightly different point of view.
Time to Disinfect contains examples of the following tropes:
- Abusive Parents: Though she hides it behind a guise of parental concern, Mari's mother is portrayed as emotionally abusive, belittling Mari and dismissing her mental health while pushing her to do things that make her uncomfortable, such as maintaining constant eye contact during conversations. She gets much worse in chapter 9, revealing that she sees Mari as nothing but an embarrassment and hitting her in a fit of anger.
- Adaptation Expansion: Faraway Town itself is elaborated on a bit more here, with additional buildings never seen in the game, explained as having been built outside the official city limits. The music hall for the recital is one of these.
- Adaptational Angst Downgrade: All of the friend group, except for Mari herself, are mentally better off in this fic due to Mari's death never happening.
- While Sunny is angry over the recital, he's merely a frustrated young boy rather than becoming a suicidally depressed shut-in.
- Basil isn't saddled with the trauma of witnessing and covering up the accident, and is still on good terms with Aubrey rather than becoming the target of her lashing out.
- Hero doesn't shut down from grief, and Kel doesn't descend into toxic positivity, which also means their huge blow-up has no reason to happen.
- Without the tragedy driving her friends apart, Aubrey isn't left to feel abandoned and develop anger issues because of it.
- Adaptational Angst Upgrade: While the game implies that canon Mari wasn't quite as well-adjusted as she appearednote , she was generally remembered as a cheerful and easygoing person. This fic meanwhile not only brings her issues to the forefront, but compounds them with an emotionally abusive upbringing that leaves her with repressed neurotic tendencies and self-loathing. She eventually has a full-blown mental breakdown that drives her to Self-Harm.
- Adaptational Jerkass: Mari and Sunny's mother, in canon, was a background character with only a few lines, but she appeared to be well-meaning. When she appears here she reveals herself to be a very passive-aggressive and callous parent.
- Adaptational Nice Guy: Downplayed, since Mari in canon was generally considered a Nice Girl anyway but with a nasty perfectionist streak. In this story, she's shown making a deliberate effort to keep her expressions of frustration contained and trying to be encouraging to Sunny instead, even when he makes mistakes.
- Adaptational Protagonist: While Mari in canon is extremely important to the game's background and closely related to the protagonist, she's ultimately a secondary character, not even part of the main playable party. Here she's the central protagonist, with the narrative exclusively following her viewpoint (no matter how unreliable).
- Adaptational Romance Downgrade: While Hero and Mari's exact relationship status in canon was slightly ambiguous, they at the very least had strong feelings for each other and Basil considered them "a match made in heaven". In this story, Mari's narration explains that Hero doesn't like her that way and her "flirting" is merely a running joke between them. However, it's Played With since Mari is an Unreliable Narrator and Hero glances away with a frown when she brushes off the subject, hinting that he does reciprocate her feelings and she's simply unaware of it.
- Anger Born of Worry: Sunny spends most of chapters 10 & 11 acting short-tempered and quick to snap at Mari. It takes her awhile to realize that he's actually terrified for her wellbeing, because he walked in on her Self Harming.
- Anguished Outburst: When Sunny presses Mari for the reason why she's acting like a perfectionist about piano practice, the conversation grows increasingly heated until Mari snaps and screams at him in desperation, revealing her fear of being abandoned if she can't "do things right".
- Apathetic Teacher: Though not actually seen, Mari expresses disdain for Sunny's former violin tutors for not actually teaching him anything. Sunny learned violin better from Mari herself - who has never played it - than he did from them.
- Arc Words: The phrases "It was too much." and "It was all wrong." crop up repeatedly throughout the story, seeming to represent when Mari's anxieties are at their worst.
- Beige Prose: When Mari goes into a panic attack, the normally-wordy prose becomes increasingly clipped, with paragraphs gradually replaced by short, blunt sentences as she spirals further.
- Breather Episode: Chapter 13, fittingly titled "A Moment of Peace", comes after a series of tense and emotionally-fraught chapters. It offers a break from the constant stress with some lighter scenes where, for once, everything mostly goes well, making plans with Hero and baking cookies with Sunny. Even when it touches on heavier subject matter with Sunny getting upset over making mistakes, Mari is able to reassure him quickly and resolve to tone down her perfectionist tendencies with relatively little pain.
- Broken Ace: From the outside, Mari has everything going for her: she's a charming Cool Big Sis, a budding musical prodigy, a straight-A student, and so on. Below the surface however is a troubled and neurotic autistic girl gradually cracking under an immense amount of pressure — both self-inflicted and heaped on her by her parents.
- Career-Ending Injury: While Mari's knee injury from a softball accident was present in the original game, it's given much more emphasis here. Although she can still walk, the injury has severely weakened her leg to the point where it causes frequent bouts of chronic pain just from everyday tasks. Naturally, this completely ended any hope of her having a career in sports, when she had previously been seen as her school's rising star athlete, and it's later mentioned that her parents were hoping to line her up for a lucrative sports scholarship.
- Character Tics: Mari has physical tics that seem to be based on her mood, clapping her hands or bouncing her shoulders when she's happy, and pulling at her collar when she's nervous.
- Chronic Self-Deprecation: Between her mother's emotional abuse and her own internalized ableism, Mari's self-esteem is horribly low by the time the story starts, and only gets worse over the following days. She's quick to judge herself for even the tiniest perceived flaws, routinely blames herself when things go wrong, and neglects her own needs because she considers them "fake problems" that don't deserve attention. She's also fully convinced that she's a burden to her friends due to her neurotic behavior, with her narration openly stating several times that she doesn't deserve them.
- Cut Himself Shaving: Mari's mother excuses a nasty bruise on Mari's face caused by her hitting Mari for talking back to her by claiming that Mari just tripped and banged her face on the banister of the stairs. Mari's narration notes that this story isn't as flimsy as it sounds because she actually had done something like that in the past.
- Disabled in the Adaptation: Nothing in canon ever suggested that Mari was neurodivergent. Here she's explicitly on the autism spectrum.
- Disappointed in You: When scolding Mari in private, her mother caps it off by proclaiming how disappointed she is. This is the line that hits Mari the hardest, with her mentally comparing it to being stabbed in the stomach with an icicle, and she spends the rest of the night obsessing over the word.
- Dramatic Irony: Mari believes that Sunny is highly dedicated to practicing with his violin and compliments him for his diligence several times. Readers familiar with the game's backstory will know that Sunny hates practice and only does it for Mari's sake.
- Everybody Knew Already: Played for Drama. All of Mari's friends are revealed to have known about Mari's autism, to the point they didn't realize she was trying to keep it hidden. Except Mari was genuinely terrified of them knowing, and the secret comes out at a moment when she's already stressed, pushing her close to a mental breakdown.
- Fictional Colour: Played for Laughs. Mari finds a box of Sweetheart-brand band-aids that turn out to be so vibrantly pink that she's convinced the color can't naturally exist on earth, much to her and Sunny's bemusement.
- Foreshadowing: When thinking about her bad leg, Mari notes that it could sometimes buckle completely from the pain. A few chapters later that's exactly what happens at the end of her argument with Sunny.
- The Friends Who Never Hang: Discussed. While having lunch together, Kel brings up that, out of all their friends, he and Mari almost never hang out without the others around. He's quick to note that he does think she's cool, though, and he'd like to spend more time with her.
- Gray Rain of Depression: After a nasty argument with Sunny, Mari wakes up to find that gray clouds and rain have blown in overnight, reflecting her own anxious mood.
- Hates Being Alone: Mari's perfectionist tendencies ultimately stem from abandonment issues, with her having convinced herself that nobody will want to be around her if she can't "do things right". Her tearfully admitting just how afraid she is of being alone ends up being key to helping Sunny understand her after their argument.
- Hate Sink: There's no real "bad guy" in the conflict between Mari and Sunny, with both of them having sympathetic reasons for their behavior. The same can't be said for their mother, Rin, who's depicted as an emotional abuser. Her every major scene shows her as a petty, self-centered ableist responsible for destroying Mari's self-esteem, making her an easy target for the audience's ire.
- Heartfelt Apology: After Sunny finally explains why he hates violin practice, Mari emphatically apologizes, admitting that she messed everything up because she was caught up in her fear of being alone, letting all her priorities get twisted in her head. Sunny quickly accepts, assuring her that he doesn't want to be mad anymore.
- Hollywood Autism: Averted. Mari is autistic, but the author's notes make it a point that her behavior is based on their own real-life experience rather than stereotypes. Although she occasionally has difficulty interpreting peoples' feelings, she's still fully capable of both feeling emotions and caring about others, with the story starting due to her concern for Sunny. Her train of thought is shown in detail in the narration, and while it's sporadic, it's never just random nonsense. She's shown being overwhelmed and having a meltdown, but this is presented as a legitimate panic attack rather than simply her acting out.
- Hope Spot: Sunny hits a wrong note during the recital, upsetting Mari, but they're both able to keep playing and the next notes come out smoothly. She just starts to think that maybe it was a minor enough mistake that they could still recover... and then Sunny makes a second mistake, and this time it surprises Mari into a disastrous series of errors of her own, sending her into a panic attack and ruining the recital for good.
- Innocently Insensitive: As Sunny himself acknowledges, this fic's version of Mari always tried to be kind and patient with him about music practice, but he still ended up hating it because she didn't realize how badly he was struggling, making her encouragement come across as insensitive, while also making him feel guilty for being mad about it.
- In Spite of a Nail: Mari and Sunny still get into an argument that ends with Sunny shoving Mari off her feet, though luckily for them, the different context means it's much less dangerous than it was in canon.
- Internalized Categorism: One of the fic's tags on AO3 is Internalized Ableism. Mari seems to harshly judge herself for being autistic, with a voice in the back of her head criticizing her whenever she fails to act "normal". This caused her to develop perfectionist tendencies, because she's convinced her disability makes her difficult to be around and she's terrified of being abandoned if she can't "do things right". It's strongly implied that she picked up these beliefs from her mother.
- It's All About Me: During her rant in chapter 9, Mari's mother frames everything Mari does in terms of how it affects her, with no concern for Mari's feelings whatsoever.
- Named by the Adaptation:
- None of the friend group in canon are given last names. This fic names Mari and Sunny's family as Takahashi, Hero and Kel's as Rodriguez, and Basil (or at least his grandmother) as Abner.
- Hero and Kel's unnamed parents are called Elena and Aarón, and Mari and Sunny's mother is referred to as Rin.
- No Sympathy: After the recital, Mari and Sunny's mother shows no care or concern for Mari's mental state despite witnessing her having a severe panic attack, callously comparing it to a five year old throwing a tantrum.
- Once Done, Never Forgotten: Mari reveals in chapter 15 that when she was eight, she and her family attended church on Easter Sunday, as they used to go to church every week, but that day it was extremely crowded, and Mari was so overwhelmed by the noise that she started crying in the middle of the service, with her mother and several attendees being absolutely furious at her over it. Basil mentions that people in town still talk about that incident seven years after the fact, and Mari suspects that incident, combined with other people learning through it that she's autistic, likely colored their views of Mari and proceeded to spread rumors about it. Everyone is understandably angry on Mari's behalf.
- Point of Divergence: Mari stares at Sunny and catches a glimpse of the cuts on his hand, which she impulsively insists on treating. Distracted by her fussing over him, Sunny's frustration never boils over to the point of breaking his violin, and thus the inciting incident for the events of the game never happens.
- Psychological Projection: Mari's mother accuses her of being completely self-absorbed and refusing to consider how her behavior impacts others. This is blatantly untrue about Mari, who cares deeply for her brother and her friends, but describes her mother quite well.
- Rage Against the Reflection: A mental breakdown caused by her mother's abuse drives Mari to lash out at her "blank-eyed" reflection and punch her bathroom mirror hard enough to crack it.
- "The Reason I Suck" Speech: When Mari's self-loathing gets particularly bad courtesy of escalating abuse from her mother, her internal monologue delivers a bitter rant listing reasons for her to hate herself (framed as talking about her reflection in the mirror).
- Reconstruction: The original OMORI deconstructed Cool Big Sis, since Sunny's image of Mari was heavily idealized, with her drive to be the perfect big sister damaging their relationship with tragic consequences. This fic meanwhile reconstructs it, as Mari being Spared by the Adaptation allows her to show that, despite her flaws, she genuinely loves Sunny and earnestly wants to be a good role model for him. Once she realizes why he was upset with her, she immediately apologizes and begins making efforts to correct her behavior afterwards.
- Self-Harm: In the middle of a severe breakdown, Mari convinces herself that pain will help clear her delirious mind and slices open her hand with a shaving razor, only to be caught in the act by Sunny.
- Spared by the Adaptation: Mari herself. The series of events that led to her death in canon are unintentionally avoided here, so she lives to see the recital.
- Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: Discussed. While Mari is still very much alive, her narration comments that her reflection in the mirror looks almost exactly like a ghost girl from a Japanese horror movie due to her long, unkempt black hair, damp clothing, and pale skin.
- Tempting Fate: Mari reassures Sunny that playing on stage won't really be any different than practicing - it's just the same song, after all. Naturally, once the recital starts, she finds that playing with the pressure of the audience watching her is actually much more difficult.
- Unreliable Narrator: The story exclusively follows Mari's perspective, explaining her interpretation of everything that happens around her. Unfortunately, due to her autism, she frequently overlooks or misinterprets things, and thus the narration does as well.
- Workaholic: Mari and Sunny's parents apparently spend large amounts of time away at work, with the narration noting how rare it is for them both to be home. Their father, in particular, even goes in to his job on his scheduled days off.
- You Are Grounded!: Mari and Sunny are grounded for a week following the failed recital, though Mrs. Rodriguez convinces their mother to at least let them have lunch with Kel.
