YMMV / Hands (OMORI)

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is Mari's pleasantness to her friends completely superficial? Or is she an otherwise normal girl who secretly thinks her abuse of her brother is okay?
• Broken Base: The comment section for "Recovery" has arguments over incest with regards to another big OMORI fanfic, Is It So Wrong?, which scitydreamer called out for appropriating passages from Hands to justify the story's relationship between Sunny and Mari.
• Complete Monster: Mari is a far cry from her good-hearted canon incarnation. When Mari was old enough, she began to repeatedly molest her own brother Sunny to "relieve" stress, horribly traumatizing him. When Sunny got his own violin, Mari decided to make her own recital in a duet with Sunny just so she could sexually abuse him further. When Sunny smashed his violin due to not taking Mari's criticisms and sexual abuse anymore, she attempted to rape him, even slapping the boy when he tried to resist, all while planning to make the rape as painful as possible. Further flashbacks show that Mari also planned to prey on Basil and possibly Aubrey too; the former by taking him to "take pictures with her".
• Fridge Horror: Most fictional incest is thought to be implausible in a real-life context due to the hypothetical Westermarck effect; people are virtually never sexually or romantically attracted to those they lived very close to in early childhood. Considering the fact that many real-life rapes are done for cruel domination instead of sexual gratification, two things are likely is such is considered true:
  • Mari's idea of stress relief was to mentally scar her brother for life — with her deliberating how to do it.
  • With all her saccharine speech to Sunny, she was completely okay with ruining the intimacy of sex for him.
• Funny Moments:
  • Upon hearing the truth about Mari, Aubrey mentions that part of her wishes Mari wasn't pushed down the stairs... so that she'd be able to kill her herself.
  • Aubrey one mentioned to Mari that her parents wouldn't let her be alone with any one of her friends. While she's thankful that she was resultingly safe from Mari, the parents also applied this to someone whom Aubrey thinks could never hurt a fly: Basil.
  • As much as picnics feeling ruined for Aubrey because of the truth about Mari is played seriously, the last of her statement on the matter?
    “...I just can’t deal with this picnic shit anymore.”
• Heartwarming Moments: Following his moment of denial about what Mari did, Hero works to support Sunny with his trauma, and is even described of the no-strings-attached older sibling Sunny always deserved.
• Misaimed Fandom: At least one other fic writer has quoted this fic for Sunny/Mari purposes, which scitydreamer was absolutely not pleased about since this fic is meant to show the relationship as predatory. The tags attempt to shut this down by warning Sunny/Mari shippers to not interact with the author.
• Narm: One of Sunny's bad memories with Mari recalled when he almost kills himself involves her saying "Please do not resist" — wording that sounds unusually clinical compared to one's close loved one raping him.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • It's about a boy being raped by his older sister that he thought he could love and trust, and this fic does not try to play it for fetish points or otherwise invoke Double Standard Rape: Female on Male; it's depicted as horrifying as it realistically would be. It also puts those already-creepy red hands seen throughout OMORI in a new light, instead representing Mari's molestation tendencies. Thankfully, depictions of Mari raping Sunny are either cut before they get too explicit or described in the abstract; the details of the psychological damage done to Sunny are horrific enough.
  • The possibility that Mari may have molested others is brought up. One of Basil's flashbacks involves Mari seeming like she's about to put the moves on him, and she's only stopped by Sunny, who steps in so that Basil is spared from her sexual assault. Aubrey too has a flashback that implies that Mari, in what seemed like an innocent embrace at first, was trying to grope her. Note that even though Aubrey and Basil aren't related to Mari unlike Sunny, they're still several years younger than Mari (there's a flashback in the source game where she and Hero mention being the only adults in the group).
• Realism-Induced Horror: Much like with the source material, the nightmare imagery is merely a representation of a very realistic concept- this time, it is the idea that someone you love and whom is beloved by the community could secretly be an abuser who mistreats you behind closed doors, with you too scared to say anything about it, as happened with Sunny and his sexual abuse by Mari.
• Squick: The descriptions of Sunny's memories of Mari sexually assaulting him, which permeate through parts of his imagination and are sometimes displayed as strikethrough text, as if a vain attempt to repress them occurs. Thankfully they are not too explicit, but the allusions are still unsettling enough.

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