/t/ - Theories

Part three.
Another big foreshadow of the suicide is the flying part of the game, in which the player is able to fly off a rooftop on a broom. Once flying, the player is again trapped until the player chooses to disengage the witch effect and fall from the broom. If this is done, Madotsuki is woken up. Since there are only two places in the entire game where Mado is woken up by something that happens in the dream, I believe that these are extremely significant. Since we know from the end of the game that falling from great heights kills Madotsuki, we can assume that she is symbolically ‘killed’ in the dream and therefore wakes up, relating to the ending. In the witch scene specifically, the event that happens in the dream is totally “self-inflicted”, another indicator of suicide. The creator of Yume Nikki wants the players to know that the flying scene is incredibly significant. To draw a lot of attention to it, there is a broom on Madotsuki’s balcony, one of the last things to see in the game before the suicide. To drive this point even deeper, there are also a pair of slippers on the balcony as well, relating to the tradition in Japan to take off shoes before suicide. The music is quite uplifting in the flying scene. The skies are bright. You don’t randomly encounter really creepy imagery—it’s one of the few genuinely peaceful moment of the game, in which the player is flying farther and farther away from the troubles and horrors of the game. Since it’s obvious from the apartment room that Mado jumps off in the dream and the broom on her balcony that this scene is closely tied to her waking world, the suicide can be read as a sad sort of hopeful. Madotsuki didn’t care where her suicide took her as long as it was away from everything she knew previously. It was the only way out after exploring her dreams in search of something more and coming up empty.

Obviously even this lengthy piece of writing doesn’t answer everything about Yume Nikki. The most obvious unanswered question is, why was Madotsuki unable to leave her room in the first place? Is this her own choice or is she actually trapped in her bedroom physically? How much of the game’s imagery and scenery was meant to be ambiguous and open-ended and how much of it was carefully thought-out? I’d be happy to talk more about this to anyone interested. I can be slow to respond, though.

ctbotham@gmail.com

Okay, I guess I’m done.
Thoughts?