Headscratchers / OMORI

NOTE: Unmarked spoilers ahead.

Sunny's Education

• If Sunny has been living as a shut-in for four years, then how has been getting any kind of education? If he's being homeschooled, then how has his obviously very busy mother been teaching him? Did his mother pay for someone to homeschool him?
  • It’s possible that Sunny has been getting his education online; he does have a computer after all.
  • More likely, the answer is that he hasn't — real-world Aubrey mentions in a late-game scene that she tried to approach Basil 'after Sunny stopped going to school.' He probably just stopped attending at some point and nobody had the heart to make him go.
    • Speaking from personal experience as someone whose neglectful parent just dropped them into homeschooling, it's very likely his neglectful mother did that when he stopped going but didn't bother much with trying to teach him anything. It's pretty easy to do that if the homeschooling program is just an application on the computer.

Sunny's Headspace Friends

• So, given that the dialogue seems to suggest that Sunny has never met any of Aubrey's new friends before he shut himself away for four years (such as Angel referring to Sunny as "that weird knife guy"), why is it that some of the people in Sunny's dream are based off of them (Berly is based off of Kim, Van is based off of Vance, etc.)? Applies to other people he's likely never met, such as the Unbread Twins being based off of Mikhael's siblings.
  • It's entirely possible that Sunny may have met them in the past, but both parties only remember each other vaguely. That, or Sunny may have only caught glimpses of them — be it in passing before he became a shut-in, or maybe even seeing them from outside his window while he was a shut-in.

Lack of an autopsy

• How come there was no real investigation of Mari's death? You would think they'd find blunt force trauma in an autopsy. Moreover, if Sunny admitted to killing Mari and staging it as a suicide, wouldn't he and Basil be sent to juvy?
  • There might have been an investigation, but the details were only given to Sunny’s parents. They obviously decided not to tell Sunny’s friends, either because they were devastated enough already, or because the results were only meant to be shared with Mari’s family.
  • As an person who was raised in an environment like Faraway Town, sometimes in small towns, people don't do autopsies.
  • As for "wouldn't Sunny and Basil go to juvie?", they already have the benefit of the doubt (so to speak) because it's known they were very close with Mari. Assuming an autopsy happened and the results were shared with the family, Sunny's "admission" of supposedly killing Mari and staging her suicide would probably be dismissed as "this kid is very young and obviously loved Mari very much, and Basil liked her a lot too. Maybe tell them that moving her body was wrong, but they're out of their minds with grief and it wouldn't be good to pressure them about it more".
  • It’s also possible that, since Sunny’s father is heavily implied to know the truth, Sunny’s family, or at least his father, decide to take her death at face value and cover it up to avoid the massive fallout that would result from the truth getting out.
  • Unused text from the Black Space Photo Album suggests that Mari didn't have any visible injuries that would cause an investigation to happen: "You sweep the bits of wood from her body. Nothing but scratches."
  • autopsies aren't always done.most of the time it's only if a cause of death is unknown/unexplainable.

Is the Toybox Key real?

• I am confused by the toybox key. When you revisit the treehouse in the real world, Sunny finds the key taped to the backside of the photo left there. You never actually get to use this physical key, because when you actually go to open the toybox and retrieve the violin it is after Sunny gets knocked out in his fight with Basil and this is actually part of headspace/his imagination. So the question is: how much of this is real? Is there a real toybox that Sunny and Basil hid the violin in (this is sort of connected to the above question: how did nobody raise questions about Sunny's violin disappearing at the same time). If yes, is the toybox key real? Or is the moment where you "retrieve" it just another manifestation of his subconscious? If it is real, who put it there and why? I don't see any reason for Basil to do this, and wouldn't it be way too risky leaving it there for someone else to find?
  • Quite likely, Basil did actually put the broken violin in the toy box, because it (along with the Sheet Music) is evidence of what really happened to Mari. Basil locks the toy box, drags/carries it back to the house, puts it in the closet, and closes the box with the key and puts the key in the treehouse taped to the photo along with the reminder on the back of the photo, knowing the parents aren't likely to check there. Perhaps Basil was thinking that they'd just assume that Sunny has the key somewhere and just never bothered with the box and never thought to check it as it was stashed in the closet? Sunny's dad leaves, Sunny becomes a shut-in, and his mother is likely distracted with just trying to take care of a child that has obvious signs of severe depression (not to mention the mother probably has issues herself, she just lost her daughter and her husband). One thing remains, though — Sunny knew of the photo with the reminder on the back of it, because it is in Headspace. This means Sunny had to have seen it, but probably chose to forget about it. It's also possible that Sunny himself locked the violin in the box and then put the key on the photo and wrote himself a reminder to not forget in case he ever wanted to remember.

Something's face

• Something's main appearance is based on the image of Mari's lifeless eye staring at Sunny through her hair while hanging. Something in the Water could be tentacles, kelp... or hair, and it also contains several hanging figures. Basil's Something isn't a repressed memory, but foreshadowing of the blood splatter left if he commits suicide. Something in the Dark's body is the staircase Mari fell down, and its many hands are symbolic of the hands that took her life... but what is its face? It's this strange, distinctive grin that also shows up on Something in the Walls' back.
  • If you ask me, I don't think there's any real in-story significance to the creepy grin other than Sunny imagining it. It's probably there just to make the two Somethings scarier.
  • Alternatively, it could have been rigor mortis starting to set in.
  • It's implied Basil's Something is actually Mari's hair spread out across the floor as her body lay dead at the bottom of the staircase.
  • In a game steeped with so much symbolism, even in the smallest detail, it seems odd that this face should be so prominent without really being explained or with an obvious real world connection to Sunny's life - it feels very out of place, which makes me think it was an early design from before Something's true purpose was fleshed out, but the devs kept it because it looked creepy.

Smoothies

• Of all things they could have been, why are the items that restore Juice to everyone all fruit smoothies? Couldn't they have been sets of drinks, instead of something one normally consumes personally.
  • Since Headspace is loosely based on Sunny's favorite experiences in his waking childhood, he probably just really likes being hydrated and reinvigorated by fruit smoothies.

Basil's knowledge of nooses

• Is there any normal, sane reason of why a twelve year old knows how to make a noose?
  • No, there isn't. But this just lends weight to the theory that Basil had already had suicidal feelings prior to witnessing Mari's death. Basil is implied to have a difficult relationship with his parents and his effeminate nature may have led to intense bullying (he is bullied by Aubrey later, but for a different reason.) The fact that he is able to fashion a noose so quickly out of a jump rope means he's obviously practiced making one before, but he never went through with it (it's implied that his Grandmother is the only one keeping him grounded, when she is hospitalized in the late game, with the implication that she died, Basil goes off the deep end and will kill himself if Sunny doesn't intervene.)

Mari's stockings

• Much is made of Mari's pristine stockings being a giveaway that she didn't kill herself, as it shows that she couldn't have walked across the muddy ground to the tree where she hanged from. But what is stranger is that there wasn't any mud on her. Did two 12 year old boys really manage to lift the dead weight of an older girl's body all the way to the tree without dropping her or slipping once? Did they not have to put her down on the ground while one of them tied the noose?