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*drinks Happy Sun cola*
firstoff I think the beginning of the game is the moment she commits suicide as seen at the beginning of the ending sequence. the whole game from start to end is how shes struggling with herself about the question of guilt and so on after falling into a coma due to the bloodloss.
Depending on the conclusion of her internal struggle she will wake up or not as shown in the multiple endings.
The bloodthirsty thingies are her inner demons representing the resons for her suicide guilt, the feeling of beeing betrayed and so on.
On the other hand there is her own will to live I think as shes beeing guided by her own voice("Claires Voice"). I noticed that the voice wants her to live, by the way she tells claire what to do when you help that girl who hanged herself.
as for the reasons of her suicide this is what i think happened:
claire and his brother ethan are about the same age maybe twins.
it seems like their mom had allways been bound to the weelchair as shown in the ending sequence with the butterflies.
for some reason their mother changed (shown by how she pinned claires butterflys to the wall("mommy what did you do to my butterflys?!")), I think most likely due to the worsening relation to her husband...
this ultimateley led to the point where she drowned ethan ( i wonder if it was murder or an accident)
Not sure about the part that her father saved her, from the game we only get that he discovered Ethan was missing and how he tells his wife to stay away from claire. (Maybe the two of them went out while ethan and his mother stayed at home)
Afterwards I think he just left and drank till he died or commited suicide. (thats why we always hear about daddy just leaving and claire waiting every year for him to return for the dance)
I suggest the events sourrounding ethans drowning led to the worsend condition of claires mother causing her to need full time care. (Maybe she suffered a trauma from intentionally or unintentionally hurting her son.)
So Claire and her mother moved to Claires aunt who later sent the two away leading to the situation where claire had to handle her mom alone, her Father went off and died at some point, and ethan who got drowned, - heres the twist - actually fell in a coma.
Claire suffered a trauma and forgot all about ethan (whos that boy on the picture mom?) Her mother was unresponsive and her father gone so it was almost as if he had died.
Ethan wandered the same strange world claire does in the game leaving the notes. (I think he matured wandering this place.) He couldnt get out ( guess he kept getting ending D).
Right before the game starts claire gets home and for some reason rembers what her mom did to ethan (it says something like "it all started with remembering the truth" during the ending scene).
She then drowns her mother in the bathtub and commits suicide as implied right before the actual endings start.
Claire blamed herself for the worsening relation between her parents and drowning her mother in the bathtub ( remeber where you find her mom dead in the tub and claire getiing pummeled with accusations of guilt)
As for the butterflies I think they are a symbol of the good ol innocent times when her family was still intakt before her mom started to change and pinned the butterflies
so this is my idea ... i guess...
It's not impossible for him to have matured throughout the nightmare world, it would make sense considering he wouldn't have the means to learn how to communicate properly with others so he wouldn't know how to help them. He would have had to have adapted by himself to be by himself.
I think the story has a lot of room for interpretations and I actually have more questions than ideas. After her suicide attempt (as shown in the final of the game) Claire is forced to wander around in this Inbetween world with every stage representing one of her fears:
The hospital is probably the fear of losing her family which also shows in the two souls you can save with Elle forgetting her children and the small child waiting for her parents.
The school is pretty obvious; the fear of getting left behind as shown in her attempt to find other people she can find nowhere and the one of the two souls (the boy) is left behind as well. The librarian is a bit different since she stays behind voluntarily. The theme is also represented in the scenes with your dad who left Claire behind him (voluntarily by drinking and then dying).
The final part is maybe the fear of losing oneself. Metalhead and The Bro have both lost themself and also Jean and Mr Riddles show such symptoms.
At the end of the game she has to decide if she has now the strength and resolution to live again. If she can overcome her fears (represented in the saved souls).
For the interpretation of the game: I actually like the variant that the into is a hidden memory of her mother drowning Claire and Ethan as childs. It would explain why Claire feels uneasy with water. There are several scenes where she mentions or shows it like the broken pipe dripping or the flooded elevator.
Her mother got injured (braindead, probably the reason she wasn't put in jail) and her father died and she then moved to her aunt which kicked her out after some time. The bathtub scene in the apartment is kind of irritating since it implies that her father and Ethan have still been alive as they moved to the aunt but is probably just a mix of different scenes. At the end I'm not to sure. I don't like the idea she drowned her mother before the suicide but I can't say it isn't possible. I for one will think that her mother (somehow) killed herself in remorse for what she has done.
There are questions remaining like: Who found Claire after her suicide attempt as she even seems to have locked herself in her room? Are the souls she saved just representing parts of herself of is the Inbetween connected somehow? Who sent the flowers at the end of the game?
The theory seems to suggest Ethan which may be the most logical choice but there are some issues with this. The first one is the question how nobody did not he has been in coma and second how he would recognize his now much older sister after all this time and how did order the flowers. It may simple but as he has seen the world last time as he was a child he should miss this simple knowledge. The only thing we know for sure is that the patient is around the age of Claire:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=347650663
Why would they let a long-term patient go and not check him up and down? If we assume the notes are from Ethan there is another problem. The bathtub accident happened as Claire was a child otherwise she would have better memories of it. So if she was seven and the patient is around her age he is at most two years older. So he was nine years old. Yet in one note the person mentions that he played seven years on the baseball field. So he would have started as he was two years old. Also he mentions his grandfathers farm. Why would Claire and mother not move there after the accident which is a better environment for both? Still I have no better idea than Ethan.
And lastly some small things I am "mad" about. There are no additional informations for collecting all butterflies or for completing the game in nightmare mode! Also in the first transition element from hospital to the school there is chase sequence with the biggest of the ennemis. And there is a locked door. I opened it and inside was NOTHING. No notes, no achievement, no ITEM. Man what a let down.
So I am done for now. Yay, wall of text.
Basically it's your father leaving you all these notes since the beginning. (Besides the first one, obviously). On the perfect ending, he woke up from his coma before you and left you flowers.
I got all the notes and read them but like I wrote before and shown in the image: The doctor is telling you that the long-term coma patient who sent the flowers is about Claire's age. So it is definitely NOT her father. Also the developers implied all the notes are from the same person. Maybe the first one is different because it is more of a memory than the stranger other world.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=350694964
i recognized the meaning of this scene and also the obvious solution to the puzzle. Dumb me never looked close enough at the person hanging at the wall (you encounter the person two times; here and after the hospital section) but as I did I saw that the person at the wall is Claire hersefl (the hairclip is a pretty obvious sign). So you are (for those who completed the game) ripping out your own heart and as such literally killing yourself. And for this reason the solution to the puzzle is the time at which Claire attempeted her suicide, 3:33. So the right valve is giving you the hour marker, 3 o'clock and the left valve is giving you the minute marker with 35 (or 33) minutes. That the valves are used as a clock makes also sense since there are exactly 12 different positions you can turn them to.
Claire didn't drown her mother.
At one point you hear from Claire's Auntie talking about how they took Claire and her mother in and how Claire needs to do more to look after her mother etc etc.
The implication is Claire came home to find her mother drowning in the bath and blames herself for it. For not being there enough. From that point Claire doesn't join the band, something happens with her and the chess club.
Claire moves out from her Auntie's / possibly her Auntie is taken to (and ends up being the Woman in the cafe in the notes).
Claire moves into the almost slum housing because she refuses to be separated from Annubis (So she's living in a run down place). She's spending most of her time either at the hospital or at school. Something happens (possibly a problem with the building) and Annubis gets scared and runs (Hence no Annubis for the last level). Claire's mother dies in hospital and leaving the hospital Claire's repressed memories about Ethan etc surface and feeling like she has no-one left in the world and blaming herself for everything she goes home and tries to kill herself.
Here's how I understood the game, Claire attempts suicide after learning after all these years that her mother killed Ethan.
I think she was convinced that it was she who was responsible for his death, because at the end, she berates her mother about it, "you let me believe all this time that it was my fault "(at least that's how I read it).
Claire did not know that his father had died before ending up in the maze of his life, her mother never told her, she grew up being convinced that it was gone because of her or her mother ( her accident), hoping he comes back every time. Too many lies and guilt, when her mother told her to Ethan it was too much and she could not continue.
Maybe her mother attempted a murder-suicide with her son, because she was jealous of her daughter, her husband being either drunk or with Claire, she also blames him for doing that stuff both.
His father was possibly killed in a car accident, because if you go to the garage early in the game Claire reported that the car of his father is absent.
Or maybe he came home one night and he surprised his wife trying to kill his son and perhaps herself, and on the way to the hospital they had this accident, and Claire home alone who wakes up after these events after a nightmare, her family is nowhere, the car is not present, these are the first images of the game.
Who let the notes? I do not know, at first I thought that each note was a state of mind of one of the trapped souls. But apparently not. For flower bouquet I immediately thought of the boy who is brought ate in the apartment, since he has about our age, the nurse speaks of a coma, and as he drank a lot I assumed we were facing an alcoholic coma.