WMG / Awful Hospital

Let's start with this guy's smile. A smile can mean so MANY things...

The Green Disease

Fern and her son carry different versions of the same disease.

• Notice how, when answering her friends' questions about her son's symptoms, she could just as easily be describing herself.
  Fern: Green...everything. Green...coming out of him. Patterns on him. Patterns around him. A smell...how is a smell green?
• One possibility is that she's an asymptomatic carrier,

The Birthday Cake was also infected with the exact same disease that Fern and her son have.

• The green-colored pattern it develops is especially familiar-looking on the storybook's seventh page.

The 'Terrible Things' which infested and consumed the Birthday Cake was, in actuality, a strain of Commentators.

• Notice the tone of the questions the 'Terrible Things' ask the Birthday Cake. "How can there be Cake before anyone exists to make it? Whose birthday is it anyhow?" If one were to study the Commentators' commentary throughout all of Awful Hospital, they'd find this closely matches their 'tone' as a group: inquisitively curious, yet smugly wisecracking.
• Perhaps the Cake was simply too hostile and close-minded towards its Commentators to form the sort of relationship which Green shares with her Commentators.

The Green Disease is part of a plan by the Parliament to cause an Assimilation Plot.

• If the disease that Fern and her son contracted is the same or similar. They may have similar properties, the son's version has the ability to pass on to other Zones, and Fern's version seems to be very infectious with corpses that mindlessly hunt down living beings. Also Dr. Phage implies that this disease could be multizonal. Who could benefit from something like this? Maybe a being or a group of beings that remember their backstory of being a singular being that hated divergence and creation of beings different from it, who would seek to return everything back into one like-minded whole. Soon ;) indeed...

The Green Disease is related to or also infected the sarcastic umami long division speaking 3D green entities.

• They're a similar color, featuring a similar mother-child pair, a doctor doesn't recognize anything going wrong but recommends drastically inappropriate treatments despite only perceiving or claiming to perceive health, normality, or only a basic minor condition (what appears to be purging over nothing, but a disease packet was extracted somehow).
  • It's possible the Green Disease is associated with maternity and childbirth, and the Hospital knows enough about this from the previous case to recommend purging or putting the baby back as worked with the previous group.

The Green Disease is a stage in a progression of something worse.

• Fern's son started out green before getting worse. Fern is now green'd. Fern is going to get worse.

The Green Disease conveys a sort of awareness/increased perception range to its host that protects from some but not all zone-related rewriting experiences in exchange for actively sacrificing several other forms of defense against it.

• This explains why Fern can partially resist or remember around some elements of memory experience (or at least leave narrative concern marks for the buzzers in her now-porous concept parameters), but why others still crush this effect entirely. The infection allowed her to perceive the other instance of the infection in her son, but uninfected people experienced nothing. Similarly, Fern's son was able to...SOMETHING involving alternate versions of Fern.

The Green Disease attempts to crush its host into a single concept form by turning all extraneous branches into slobs unless they are extremely purified and prevented from doing so or forcefully combining alternate instances into a single perception.

• This has fairly little effect on Greyzoners because they exist as mostly self-contained concept packets and have their capability to branchinate mutilated off of them, but handily explains whatever Fern's son was doing with the alternate Ferns and how Fern's slobs form.

The Green Disease is purely conceptual in format and is applied as a paint-style overcoat to the infected's existence and its immediate proximity that prevents self from noticing the green.

• This explains why it just forcefully makes them and anything they're happening to be holding so GREEN but doesn't seem to stick with inanimate objects once they're separated from Fern (or her son, in case of blankets): it's a specific concept applied to themselves and immediate possessions, and when they take 'immediate' or 'possessions' off that effect it stops.
  • The exact conceptual effect making up the Green Disease additionally emits 'self can't perceive' and 'others can't perceive' in such a way there are holes for 'similar to self' like Fern being able to see her son's greenness and whatever effect stopped the perceiving it of others only applied to greyzoners from Fern's specific home existence which is why those doctors can't see it but the incompetent and/or alien existences of the Hospital Zone can.

The Green Disease is a conceptual mimic, and is not actually related to whatever the Parliament are trying to do.

• Instead, it is effectively the equivalent of a conceptual cuckoo bird, in that is altered everyone's perception into thinking that it is the disease they have been working on, or at least part of it, meanwhile being something entirely separate and, on the part of the carrier, is partially asymptomatic. The true parliamentary disease being the Blue Disease.

The Blue Disease

Jay's disease is a similiar-yet-different strain of illness than Fern's.

• Kind of like the difference between Hepatitis A and Hepatitis B.

Jay cannot actually see his blueness.

• Any more than Fern can see her greenness.

The Blue Disease is a stage in the Green Disease caused by something with the Green Disease getting severely damaged.

• Jay is noted to have patient data and possibly conceptual damage; it's possible he was originally brought in for the greenness but whatever damaged him made the green blue.

Fern was originally going to have the Blue Disease before the Green Disease kicked in, or the former is a stage of the latter.

• Fern was portrayed as blue (not blue-disease blue, but definitely blue all over) in the introduction, but turned green disase by the time she was in the Hospital. It's possible that Jay just got stuck in the stage where blue turned to green, while Fern was able to proceed to greening in full. We just don't see this with Fern's son because the bluishness actually happens relatively quickly and might be unnoticeable until it's turning green.

The Blue Disease is what happens when the Green Disease is being manipulated by external highly emotive forces.

• This is why Fern's hair turned blue during the dating simulator shenanigan: her headspace was getting contaminated, the same way Jay was extremely violent and wanted to kill everyone. Jay was under the thumb of Crash, the Parliament, and who knows what else the entire time, and they were all rather dedicated about what they were doing.

The Parliament

Dr. Phage's behavior and intelligence has been affected by The Parliament since the beginning.

• Time and again, people like Maggie and Magatha have been insisting that The Hospital shouldn't rightfully be as incompetent as it is. The Parliament's been causing Phage to make bad judgment calls.

That moment where Phage told The Commentators 'You're only poisoning her,' that was actually The Parliament speaking through Phage.

• While they affect their judgment and influence him to perform certain actions, The Parliament lets Phage live out his life with most of his autonomy still intact. But at that precise moment in time, the Parliament assumed full-on Demonic Possession mode. At that moment, he was effectively their living sock puppet.

The Parliament holds a very personal vendetta against The Commentators in particular.

• Because a strain of Commentators were what ruined the Cake so long ago, they've got a vicious grudge against the Commentators who are helping Green. They're are all too glad to undermine their efforts to help the woman for the sake of that grudge.

The Parliament created the disease as a stupidity plague to unmake reality.

• Reality in the Noisy Tenants universe seems to be based on mutual-perception and self-perception. What better way to undo reality than to turn everyone into oblivious idiots?

!! The Magboils are in conflict with the Parliament

• Magboils are known to show up where zones start to bleed into each other, and they were ALL OVER the bone dungeon where Fern and Friends encountered the Red Blight, and the Exvironator. If the Parliament is trying to join all the zones, then that would explain why they show up where the zones bleed into each other.

The Parliament/crumbs of the cake are becoming almost as divergent from the original cake as most other existence.

• They just have a better sense of what they originally were or retained/split up the consciousness of the original cake, but their further divergence is similarly increasing, just in a different more xenophobic direction. One of the members of Parliament absent even claims it's because they're attending a recital for their progeny: they're having children with differing goals and interests and are thus decaying further and further from original as well. Also, the storybook specifically displays the original crumbs changing over time/layers/whatever just like everything else.

The Parliament is the result of partially corrupting some form of government zone from its equivalent of Dr. Phage by the cake, but they haven't caught everyone there yet.

• This is why the Parliament has members too lazy to show up: they took over the 'essence' of the concept of good government but a lot of the more slacking or distant concept cores they either didn't assimilate completely or when they did enough residual effect occurred to mess them up anyways.

The Cake is a lie.

• Either the Parliament is misleading everyone or they are misled themselves. The books detailing this being powerful and/or for children may just be an attempt to make the propaganda more effective by mind-controlling and indoctrinating very early.
• The Parliament are a bunch of reactionaries pining for a Good Old Days where everything was Proper. Their cake was half-baked from the go.

The Parliament aren't the true remains of the cake.

• Jerry is. Jerry is the true remnant of the Old Flesh, the true continuation of consciousness or whatever works for consciousness for the Old Flesh. And he really does not care about those upstart non-cake whippersnappers that think they know better than him. Among other things he does not care about.

The Parliament and it's followers will be defeated by uploading information on what the Old Flesh really was.

• As long as the Parliament will try to reach it's goals, there won't be a cure-they're incompetent, but they won't let anyone get in their way. But if they knew that everything would be all for nothing-that the Old Flesh was the Concept of Death and that bringing it back will result in it splitting again-then they'd probably break, allowing Fern to work towards her son with one less threat.

Fern's Son

Fern's Son is gifted with superpowers galore.

• Just check out everything behind the spoiler tags on his Character Page entry!

Fern's Son was the one who butchered Lexis and Ora to save Fern from being digested by them.

• The hint comes in the form of the babyish title for page #193. The kid reached out with his psychic powers, and, well... took a page out of Alma Wade's playbook.

There's a fair chance that Fern will have to fight her son.

• Between his disease, the influence of the Parliament, and all the psychic phenomena he's capable of… the son's turning into a force to be reckoned with. It's possible the Parliament aims to turn the boy against his mother, thus forcing her into the cruelest situation possible for her: a battle for her life against the very son she's struggled so hard to reunite with.
  • She will be fine with being killed by her son.

Fern's son is The Very Hungry Gray Worm.

• In the storybook, the worm hatches from an egg that's colored in Fern's green shade! And it's only fitting that a GRAY worm, would represent a GRAY zoner!

The Parliament intends to groom Fern's son into becoming a living weapon of mass destruction to destroy everything.

• Just read through The Very Hungry Gray Worm, and see everything it destroys! Fern, (the egg,) Dr. Phage, (the "imbecile doctor,") Celia's hat and Staph's mask are on page 7 of the story, and finally the Commentators, themselves, are ripped through.
  Bogleech: Your connection to Fern and everything you've accomplished as commentaries could be "eaten."

Maya Celia

Celia's disabled the decapitoids

• She deliberately trashed Balmer's anti-dolphin robots in order to create a chance to free Fern.

The slob which Celia's kingdom is based on is being cooked by Burgrr.

• Why else, in her letter, would Maggie claim that it's getting smaller instead of bigger and that it's tasting "spicylike?"

Jay

Jay actually had his own set of Commentators in his head from the very beginning.

• And the reason why he's so bad is because they were all a bunch of violence-loving Trolls who led him to hurt people, time and again.

A 'Commentator Swap' somehow occurred when Fern beat The Jayslob.

• Fern now has all of Jay's commentators in her mind while Jay has all Fern's!

Jay's not actually his own human being, but more like the conceptual embodiment of a troublesome patient.

• Obviously he needs to be causing trouble to be called troublesome, so he kills staff. But to kill them, he needs a weapon-so he is outfitted with the concept of a weapon, (it changes every time.) And if he is going to be a "patient", then he requires a problem that could put him in a hospital. So he has the concept of an injury, (this also changes every time.)

Jay's disease was created specifically to make him as disruptive as possible.

• I'd say it's pretty safe to assume that whatever disease is turning Fern green and Jay blue is the Parliament's doing, as it seems to relate to the slobs and their... err... redness. Jay's version, though, seems to be of a more aggressive and actively destructive nature, compared to Fern's, which only activated post-mortem. Combine that with the weapon that seems to appear on Jay's person each time he respawns, and I'd say it's pretty much a safe bet that Jay was a living weapon created by the Parliament to weaken the Hospital and unexistentialize key figures who could prevent their plan.

Dr. Man is Jay's "Anonymous Benefactor."

• Man's the one with "surgical clearance" who arranged to bring Jay from Planet Earth to The Hospital. It's also possible he's the one who's been resurrecting Jay, every time he died.

Jay is doing an incredible amount of damage in Chip's position just because of what he's made of.

Seriously, sludge so deadly it can massively affect the success of Dr. Man's minion? That can't be healthy.

Hospital Staff

Dr. Phage is a concept-core manifestation of the Hospital.

• Just like Harmburger may be to Fleshcorp Tissue Recombinators Unlimited. This would explain why he seems to have a reputation as a capable and competent doctor when so many events in Awful Hospital have shown that that is often NOT the case, as his competence degrades along with the corruption of the Hospital (see Plank Mazes). Circula Tori actually mentions something of the sort in her file on Dr. Phage, if I recall correctly.

Dr. Phage is a concept-core manifestation of Awful Hospital itself.

• Building off the above theory, it may be possible that Dr. Phage is really a manifestation of the concept-core of Awful Hospital, the webcomic. Then his "reputation" could be whatever "canon" dictates, regardless of his actual actions in-story. Also, it would explain his awareness of the fourth wall, beyond "he's a being well-versed in multizonal operations, and is therefore aware of the commentators".

Dr. Phage, or the Hospital in general, emerged from 40K.

• Specifically, some time after the Warp calms down, Isha and Nurgle decide to create an interdimensional ideal of sickness and health. Because why not.
  • Dr. Phage says "Nurgle forbid" at one point during his conversation with Tori. There may be something more to this.

Dr. Man really is just a regular human man.

• Biologically, at least.

Fern will encounter Dr. Man in the Maternity Ward.

• He showed an interest in Fern's son, saying that "If you can bring him here, I can give him an examination of my own. We can proceed from there." Perhaps Dr. Man left his room because he's secretly following Fern; letting her "clear a path" to her son.

Circula Tori's resistance and 23% success rate is partly because she just has relatively functional personal safety, observation, repair, and even backup capability compared to the rest of the facility.

• She's known to stop manifestations that aren't working efficiently such as stopping the Snippers with an unprofessional relationship from causing more damage by operating outside her permission after realizing it was causing damage. Even Dr. Man is a bit slower on this, not dismissing his Bandages from the battlefield or rectifying their condition until it was over (though that could be a limit of space to escape or medical equipment to transfer vessel).
• Tori operates with many parts using a proxy body composed of parts separate from her core artificial-heart-y self for operating purposes (in full medical scrubs, no less) and may be using yet another proxy of the patient to voodoo doll around direct interaction as alluded to by the scissors. Most other entities appear to operate from a limited primary body and directly to boot, exposing them more directly to various infections.
  • Because her identification materials display her proxy, it's possible identity assimilation into her endosphere was considerably less started so Fern remained Fern and didn't pollute Tori.
• Tori's extended body with separate perception due to her many eyes gives her more ability to perceive herself and others and thus certain types of anti-awareness effect with insufficient breadth/not covering her zone-stuff/not affecting the Hospital might not affect her entirely due to stronger dispersed perception, allowing the rest of her to work around it and gain awareness of some awareness-suppressing effects, though this doesn't seem to work on current concept blocks like people being buried or locked away because of affecting the Hospital as a whole.
  • Her success rate might be because she's not at all effective on patients who are conscious and thus squirmy and complainy (possibly because as a surgeon specialist almost all of her training consisted of work on anesthetized or otherwise not complaining people and isn't nearly as equipped otherwise), but they keep getting given to her anyway without anesthetics by someone's incompetence; she can bring even greyzoners who we know she's questionable with back from the brink while they're not objecting, but she somehow can't bring herself to pay attention to patients claiming they're conscious even to summon an anesthetist.
• As far as everyone else, Crash is missing a technician and the doctors are incapable with a concept-level stock phrase block of helping at all with him or recovering forgotten, nobody but possibly an 'interzonal high council' referenced in the notes has the sheer authority to act as a sanity buffer for Phage's increasing moments of incompetence, and whatever staff dedicated to cleanup and control have likely been incapacitated or rendered unrecoverable by Jay and other problems locking them up and otherwise 'if they get screwed up there's not enough around to fix it'.
  • The Snippers in the surgical ward are capable of performing the same kinds of procedures Tori does which means even without her being able to assist due to preoccupation some minimal backup functionality is retained (even if as the patient queue shows, this is not exactly very good, capable of keeping pace, or often even authorized), and the Snippers are even capable of fixing up Cathy when Fern brings them a piece. Presumably if Tori was injured in the line of work and needed the same kinds of surgery she would normally provide, the actual surgery could be outsourced to some of the more competent Snippers if the surgical ward was operational in general.

There is a missing anesthesia specialist who the absence of is severely hurting Tori's effectiveness rate.

• Tori is not meant to work with non-anesthetized bioforms and both refuses to be corrected by the patients on their conscious status and does not function well with squirmy people. Fern might be able to find them and bring them in for reconstitution out of concern her son might be making his own condition worse by not knowing what's going on and reacting messily.
  • The resurrection of Anna Sthesia, who is focused on the Dental Ward but provides her gases to the entire Hospital, appears to prove this correct.

Dr. Phage will have to answer to the interzonal high council or extrazonal board of operations.

• The Interzonal High Council is mentioned as having more authority than him and the Extrazonal Board of Operations presumably has been getting extremely biased review ranges from him. Eventually, someone is going to have to set him straight for incompetence over damage control, and nobody in the Hospital proper has the authority to do so.

Somehow, Fern will end up in medical school rather than getting out of this.

• In a silly, exaggerated sequence, she will somehow become a medical professional and join the Hospital. Hey, it's WMG.
  • Alternatively, she could end up a non-medical member of Hospital staff, since her greyzoner affinity for independent existence, running convenient errands, and personal observation capability might save the Hospital again through addition of an extra perceptual range.
    • As of 723, she's lied her way into getting a Temp Staff card...

The Hospital was never effective and probably never will be.

• Tori's 23% success rate, under what presumably means averaged among whatever ranges and layers pass for 'previous', is considered among *the best* after the increasingly disastrously incompetent Phage, implying everyone else is somehow far, far worse, and the Hospital is the stuff of creepypasta even before it went awful, and has historically been damaged repeatedly (though normally not to the extent of Awful Hospital).

The Hospital's low success rates being tolerated and in fact considered good actually have something to do with branchination.

• Presumably through use of purges, rollbacks, untranslatable concepts, and other such questionably-considered-damaging resuscitation methods we can't make sense of from our perception layers they're actually much better, but can't save certain 'branches' or components and consider that a failure. 23% success is saving about 23% of all versions of all cases, where it would actually be something more like 97% except for those people who lose over 80% of a truly ridiculous amount of branches and ranges and concept links who are squirming about because the anesthesia wasn't meant for their layer.

The Hospital is only this bad because external forces are actively murdering and burying anyone competent first to further the plans of others.

• This leaves only the most ineffectual and more importantly most dangerously unkillable around, as all the 'very effective doctor but not good at not dying themselves' personnel are out of the picture. Jay alone has probably taken out an appreciable chunk of staff over the course of all his lives.
• Chip has detected at least two other beings killing and burying Hospital staff. Whether this is caused by a grey-zoner panicking and trying to defend themselves or a deliberate act of sabotage has yet to be discerned.

The Hospital's low success rates are simply due to being a place of last resort and given awful, awful irrecoverably apocalyptic cases the overwhelming majority of the layers.

• It's possible that there are Clinic zones or other medical facilities (Dr. Balmer vaguely implies there might be another medical zone with the hospital being nonfunctional: traditional or alternative medicine? Some form of cyborging zone?) capable of handling many zones and ranges in the vast span of everything by themselves for the most part (and without massively risking the concept of 'health' as a whole in the process), but the Hospital is usually considered 'last line nothing else worked' so while they're practically miracle workers some of the people they're trying to save need more than a miracle and most easily fixable things were supposed to be handled elsewhere. Except when people who are actually much more fixable skip straight to the Hospital, which explains how they have some successes at all.

There has historically been an invasive concept related to 'DOG' which Dr. Fleagood has spent an excessive amount of time suppressing even in the greyzone.

In his original story, Dr. Fleagood has been confirmed as either setting a trap or trying to remove a parasite (and it could possibly be both even so). His reactions to the dog owner lean against it being a trap, so it's entirely possible he hasn't been corrupted or anything.Given the current state of the Hospital, he's been unable to contain or consume the DOG parasite as he attempted in Dr. Fleagood Does It Again. It's not looking good, but it does explain handily why DOG would leak all over BABY. The fact that a giant dog head has invaded the Maternity Ward is only meaning the poor guy's barely able to eat it all.

• He has said 'it's all dog' with regard to the grey zone: maybe he's considering being drawn away from his vital task of dogscape suppression to help deal with Fern's son in the Maternity Ward a bad sign for it not taking down the greyzone, but seeing it as an acceptable loss or fixable later?

Tori is the Heart of the Old Flesh

• ...and knows it. What could be more exciting than Tori — the rock of stability the hospital rallies around, the doctor other doctors sing the praises of pretty much unprompted — what could possibly be more exciting than Tori being the mole, secretly nurturing the Universe Cancer rather than fighting it?
  Think how excited Willis will be. Think how excited Magdolene will be. Think... oh, but it would be amazing.

There is a Mole in the Surgical Ward

• Someone was acting as Jay's Anonymous Benefactor, bringing him Back from the Dead and not filling out the proper paperwork for it. Someone was also making their own edits to his journal. There is also the fact that Chip was originally a member of the Hospital in the first place before somehow getting relocated to the Cafe by the Parliament, and the only method we know of that could have moved him would be the Surgical Ward's Q-36 procedure.

Spleonard will be the key to getting rid of the Parliament's Perception Filter

• Jerry says that the Parliament probably made the Hospital unable to perceive them by messing with their ability to prioritize important information. Magdolene says that the Hospital has a priority algorithm to ensure they don't waste perception on someone who doesn't need it, like someone who just wants attention from a cute nurse. Spleonard fits that description perfectly. He isn't a zero priority, but before he got drained, he was only the next step up, and Phage was intentionally filtering him out, which might make him the key to recalibrating and rebooting the Hospital.
  • Jerry also really didn't wanna be turned into a spleen.

Windifred is practicing Selective Obliviousness regarding "Fran's" identity.

• Windifred is Hospital Staff, but not medical staff, which likely means that she is less susceptible to the Parliament's Perception Filter. She can see that Dr. Gynnie needs all the help she can get, and she can sense that Fern is genuinely trying to help. But since most of the staff isn't clearheaded enough to tolerate the rules getting bent, she cannot accept Fern's help openly and is therefore playing dumb and leaving hints.

Other Theories

Grey-zoners are not necessarily limited beings. Instead, they wield the potential to be incredibly powerful.

• The perception range runs off of what concepts are perceived, correct? Grey-zoners are incredibly resistant to any sort of Perception Filter, which would suggest a great deal of control over their own perceptions, conscious or otherwise. If a grey zoner pretends something exists, say, a weapon, or a mighty beast companion, or a powerful artifact, and they put on an act that convinces the other nearby perceptoids that the pretend thing is real, then it would become real, under this theory. Repeating a lie so much it becomes the truth is a thing that can happen much more literally in the range. Fleagood's certainly trying to do so.

Time exists, but is perceived proportionately, meaning that when you enter a zone, time is stretched so that it lives as long as you do. Layers are an attempt by the perceptoids to keep things from getting confusing.

• This is why Jay's journal has pages from dates 12 years after Fern arrived, and why so much time has passed from Maya and others perspectives only a few layers after Fern leaves. This troper doesn't have any specific numbers, but the idea is that if you're in a zone that represents something that would live on after you die of old age, time outside of it speeds up so that you will die of old age when it dies. If a human entered a zone of a concept that will last 10,000 more years with 43 years of their life left, one second there would cause a little under four minutes to pass in the grey zone, from their perspective.

If a Layer is a page, then...

• A cubeoid is a chapter (cuboids are roughly equivalent of a "year," and a chapter takes months to do), and a spiralling is a panel.