Fridge / Okage: Shadow King

• Fridge Brilliance:
  • The Turtle and the Pebble joke the townsfolk start talking about towards the end of the game. Sure, at first it just seems like something fun the developers added to make you talk to the townies, in hopes of figuring out what the punchline is. Then once you make the Sword of Gear the Gearman reveals that the punchline was 'removed' from the world because the person it was supposedly about wasn't happy about being made fun of. You laugh, feeling a little disappointed, but then you realize just who would have that ability, and this comes the Fridge Brilliance: Beiloune is the Turtle, Princess Marlene is the pebble, and the true Marlene is the baby turtle.
    • To build on that, when you hear the rest of the story,or at least what didn't get erased, from the the villagers you'll hear that a red turtle enters the story and directly challenged the mother turtle about the pebble she's claiming to be her child. Note that the red turtle is the only animal with the guts to actually do this in the story and compare him with who in the game was most resistant of the classification system and the red turtle is Ari.
  • The entire idea of Classification and characters playing their roles is an extremely meta way of both making fun of and skewering the idea of role-playing games in general. Characters act in certain ways simply because they're playing the assigned roles Beiloune gave them to make an adventure for Marlene. But that's dangerous for the world if it results in entire towns being destroyed and two of the major characters killing each other for no reason other than Beiloune's classifications tell them to.
  • When the world runs on Classification and those who aren't classified are essentially forgotten, how does Marlene still vaguely remember Ari when he's wiped from existence even if she can't bring up his name? For two reasons: 1) while the one the adventure was created for, she does not have a specific Classification, only those around her, so she can't remember details due to his lack of Classification but does remember his existence from being a major figure; 2) the real Marlene is forgotten herself, and there's implications in one conversation that she can see outside the music box through the Marlene doll when it was active, thus a remnant of the original Marlene still existed who herself is trapped through being lost in the Classification system.
• Fridge Horror:
  • The "god" of this world created categories (read "castes") for people to live in for their entire lives. Beiloune's motivations read eerily similar to the type of "logic" the [whatever]-ist type of people tend to make: "Everything in the world would work just fine if everyone stayed in their place!"
  • While none of the towns you can visit show any damage, it's implied from some conversations in Tenel that two whole towns were destroyed in the very short time you were separated from Rosalyn and Stan in chapter 5. As in completely wiped off the map because of their fighting each other. This emphasizes how screwy the Classification system really is: Ari's generally mild interference in the whole affair is preventing entire towns from being demolished and people from dying because he won't follow the rules.