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His dad Dale was fairly weak but still cared the most for Ethan, Ethan showed that through having Dale suicide instead of succumbing to the Sleepers will,
And the grandfather saving Ethan at the last minute from the train etc, abusive uncle and rude brother that slanders Ethan's books and mocks him relentlessly.
But what really tugged at my heart strings was when you finish with the
Trapped forest (I searched that one last but stuck in my mind the most), you see a LOT of bottles scattered around.
So my take on that is that after the unfortunate passing of Ethan, the grandfather Ed feels so guilty that he didn't take time to read Ethan's far fetched stories when he was alive, so goes back and reads it, while drinking and crying Ethan's final story to him.
At first it made sense that the entire thing is a story in his imagination, the detective is just another of his stories (his final story) and his death is just a tragic accident.
However, this implies that the only scene in "reality" that we as an audience actually ever see, is the final scene where Ethan has missed dinner and his family come to find him and the fire accidentally starts and he gets trapped inside. In this scene he talks about the new story he is writing, and he has been down there writing so long that he's lost track of time. We also see the scribbled pictures of the corpses on the walls. We also see the map on the wall that had a picture of Paul Prospero pointing to the Vandergriff House. This implies he's been working on the story a long time, but hasn't finished the ending. It seems to me that he has already written most of the story that we are living as the detective. If this is the case, he has ALREADY written about The Sleeper, or is the process of doing so. And he has already written/decided that the detective will arrive at this location (to save him?)
How has this happened before the fire even starts? Before he knows he's going to die? Most theories I have read imply that The Sleeper is something he thinks up in the last 4 minutes of his life... but..
Please correct me if I've gone totally off track here with a misunderstanding, but I think this seems to point to the fact that Ethan knew he was going to die. All throughout the detective's story his family are talking about The Sleeper, (evidently a metaphor for Ethan passing out / dying) Was he planning to kill himself in that room? Planning to burn himself alive? Had he already given his final story a title: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter?
All the other stories, relating to each of his family members, and all of the audio we hear of him speaking with them, gives us plenty of evidence to suspect that Ethan feels unwanted, unloved. He gives the stories to each family member and they say they'll read it another time. It's like he's invisible. Like he's already vanished. Maybe he reasons that his family will be better off without him. So he writes a story where they all die in ways that reflect the ways in which they have wronged him, and then kills himself as the final piece in the puzzle.
(Random side thought - does this also explain why Ethan is surprised to see the detective in the end - this is the end of the story, that he didn't get to finish writing? Ethan has already finished writing most of the story, and our experience as Paul is him reflecting on the story he's just written and creating the ending in his last moments?)
Wow, that's even darker than I was expecting now I've written it all out. Hoping for someone to waltz in and dismantle this please! I suppose an alternative explanation is that Ethan might have been working on a detective story beforehand, but it was totally different than the Sleeper tale we end up witnessing.
No place is truly quiet, no place is truly ordinary. Ethan warned me about this. Warned me not to be fooled by what I saw here.
Aaaaaand what did I do? Fooled, totally pwned by that bird-brained villain that we're up against. So off to the interwebz at the witching hour and what do we find? That the developers agree, and say the story kinda has two, possibly more interpretations... And they're secrets.
I LOVE SECRETS! Don't you? Well, of course, if you r reading this, u might run into a couple of secrets, or maybe me just being a n3wb :P. But even now, I feel things don't "add up" but I can't fit the puzzle pieces together, but I thought I'd list away a few thoughts for others to conjure from or maybe add to. Ok, from here on out, there be spoilers (and not the kind you find at NASCAR).
In the game, there several running threads that tangle together, messy and sticky like the web of a redback spider. Alchohol, fire, water, magic, crows and the numbers 5 and 6. Furthermore, something is just off in that final murder mystery where we 'meet' that entity that looks like Ethan Carter... But is that really you, Ethan?
If you'll notice, when we do meet Ethan, we are in ghost/blue-room mode, but Ethan is not a ghost. Naturally we all just wanted to run over and tell him how bad we felt for him, but in our rush and joy (Ethan is unharmed! Yay!), we might not have noticed something - the text for meeting Ethan is "Awaken". Moreover, this is the room that just caught on fire and given that the door was closed, we really don't have any proof that Ethan ignited it (couldn't he have tried to give himself an escape path - even though all the letters are completely flipped by the time we get there and escape door is closed). And did you look at the room? Why would Ethan even want to get in there? There's nothing worth burning, and no signs of fire damage at all -- and most damning of all, when this mode ends... There is no burnt corpse, no Ethan, living or dead. He is still fully 'vanished'...
...Oh and the freaky mural on right hand wall that grandpa was calling Gayle? You remember, she died in this very house in September of 1970 something...
...It's now on the opposite wall. It moved, and the last remaining wall piece is now facing grandpa, like a wide open maw, ready to accept it's final victim. There are six of these things by the way, exactly the number of dead except Ethan. Something moved it - and given the looks and how they survived the fire, I'd say they're made out of solid stone...
Furthermore, the claims of grandpa and Ethan just don't add up here. Grandpa claims they must die because the Sleeper is already inside of them - a kind of fatalist acceptance. But he's little better than Dad, who went down the same road with a scissor not long before only end up aiding the Sleeper's plan just the same. Meanwhile, Ethan wants to destroy the Sleeper by setting the room on fire. Maybe it's because everyone else keeps trying to kill him with fire. But this room has seen fire before without any impact. Remember grandma is now on the wall - and she died in a fire in this very house as noted from the traps newspaper article (and oh how the Vandergriffs did NOT want to be around for "personal reasons" thereafter). Meanwhile, from Ethan's story in the labyrinth house, we find out the "secret room" held by the alchemist is protected by magic from fire. It doesn't burn -- and the alchemist never comes out -- with the back of the paper basically showing the secret hallway in the Vandergriff House.
Something... is off. But where is Ethan? I have no idea, he's like that vanishing magician, or maybe he covers himself in tree sap, but as I've dug deeper I have hit some oddities.
First off, even though we've never seen it, the ominous villain of this story has a strong affinity for crows and water. We learn about the character through the stories. In the Fake Interiors house, the evil pact is addressed to a character named Focalor. Looking this name up brings up the exact symbol at the top of the paper and the character is said to destroy ships, controls waves and winds and has the wings of a griffin. The last name of the Vande"griffs" comes to mind and certainly on the monument next to the dam, you can see a griffon. In the graveyard scene, we see the crow symbol with large numbers of sacrificed crows. There is a crow sacrificial knife, and a crow lever for turning fire on and at the end, it's a group of crows flying into the air that alerts Ethan's mother to his position. The word used for triggering the story in the underground caves is Gnaiih, which is roughly related to Gienah, the brightest start in the Corvus cluster and CORVUS is of course the password to the underground crypt. Oh! And did you notice that you heard a lot of crows in this game, but outside of the one scene and the large numbers of dead ones, you don't see a single crow in flying through the game itself. Actually, you don't see ANY wildlife for an area that should be a lush riperian zone, not even a mouse. The most you see, are insects... that's it. That's not normal. In fact, I sometimes wonder if cawing crows were a guide as to which areas were important to the story.
Also, this villain is also interested in water and that's seems to be overlooked. Both the Cthuhulu story and the house of fake interiors gives some hints to this, with the Cthuhulu version having water directly flood the world, while the house of fake exteriors only gives a name and picture of a boat directly next to the door. This latter image seems out of place up high in the mountains, but this location isn't as solid as it seems. We have two lakes, one of which is practically crimson toned from iron deposits, but deep beneath the ground, the mines have apparently flooded with some kind of underground river... enough so that it ends up being used to drown the mother. Water is also bubbling up with various gasses later in the mines. So where-ever this is, there are more than just pools of water on the surface, entire rivers flow beneath this place with all kinds of water, clear, blue and hellish looking. It's also not that far from a major body of water as one might imagine.
We can find the location of the game from the return address on the patent rejection letter after the mine portal story. 46 Ogden Road, WI 54856 -- which matches up with the county specified elsewhere. Needless to say, if you look this place up, the county is directly next to Lake Superior. There is a LOT of water associated with this place even if we can't see it.
One possible thing that might add to this story involves that one spaceship story, where we read "Fangs". In the comic Abstruse Stories, nearby, if you search the main story author, you come up with a famous set of short stories called Dandelion Wine (who's publication date of 1946 is an annagram of the publication date of abtruse stories, whcih is 1964). The story has an interesting parallel to Ethan Carter as it's protagonist is a boy about Ethan's age, who lives in small town America and learns about making alchohol using dandelions and citrus, both yellow, which match those Martian hills, while combining in elements of magic. Sound familiar? Perhaps most interesting is a story about a Serial Killer, called The Lonely One in a story named The Whole Town's Sleeping. In the end of this story, The Lonely One ends up being killed by a sewing scissor... which is exactly the weapon used by the father, coincidentally. The story also takes place in a ravine with the constant whine of a dynamo (which is exactly like the area where the father died)... That... That sounds oddly familiar. In the chapter that follows, Doug also goes through his own kind of revelation.
"So, if trolleys and runabouts and friends and near friends can go away for a while or go away forever, or rust or fall apart or die and if people can be murdered and if someone like great-grandma, who was going to live forever, can die.... If all of this is true... Then... I, Douglas Spaulding, some day, must..."[also?]
This, of course, adds to the idea that Ethan is accepting his fate, but the Ethan in the story end isn't like the Ethan in the final mystery. Thing is, I'm not sure that final scene is even real, or just something the Sleeper wants us to see. As the witch notes, we do not know if death brings happiness or suffering. For all we know, Ethan survives and this is the death of his childhood and the beginning of misery -- finally putting away the stories he loves for the mantle of adulthood that is being forced upon him by his family. But as I said -- I feel like this is a different Ethan. Maybe we're even being used as unwitting helpers of the Sleeper, guiding Ethan on to the will that the Sleeper wants. After all, with no place left to go, we eventually do click "Awaken".
EDIT: And MORE stuff!
We now have three stories, Sap, Looking Backward, and the story about the alchemist, that suggest that the room cannot be burned and neither can the protagonist be destroyed by fire. At the very least, Ethan is strongly predicting his future encounter with this fire, which isn't entirely out of the question as both the witches story and the story and the story about the magician in the house suggest a character that can "see the future". So then - it leaves me wondering. Who do these other authors belong to? There certainly seem to be a ton of them, but, I can't find them. Mr. Carlisle, who's name sounds like an alliteration, almost begs to be a fictional character. But from what story? And how do these stories come together to describe the pieces of this world?
One thing that's unrelated: You don't need to use spoiler hiders since this entire discussion is a spoiler.
Really? Ok! Much easier for others to read then. Thank you! ^_^
From what i have gathered, all of the events that you get to endure are all happening in Ethans mind, and he is making them up in his last moments alive. and you can see this when he lays down on the mattress; the clock next to him reads 7:00. once the camera zooms out, before moving throught the house, we see the clock now reads a little after 7 o'clock.
This would also explain why you, the player, exist. He created Paul in an effort to either comfort himself, fore he knew his fate, or he had a hope of being rescued. This can be interpreted differently from person to person, but I believe the first option.
The whole sleeper thing and the murders that you investigate were obviously not real, but I feel it was a way for Ethan to justify why his family was always so cruel to him. His Grandfather was the only nice one to him, and his death was very tragic.
After watching the end, (I know its cliche, but) I couldnt have asked for a bigger plot twist.The fact that you've been playing in this alternate universe (in Ethans mind) is totally crazy after playing for hours. Not only that, but after thinking about why and how everything played out throughout the game, its actually really sad.
Also, this whole thread is tagged spoiler, so tags not needed in the post.
As I see it, most of the discussion points that all users have made, such as Ethan being a sleeper and Paul not being real are all valid, but there is one thing, as I see it, that just doesn't make sense, and that is the fire.
- Why is it so that in both of those world the Vandergriff house burns down?
If Ethan dies (becomes a sleeper) when the "real" fire happens, how does the Prospero-"tale" then include the fire? Remember that when the player first encounter the house, the house is already burnt down. There is no way that he could predict his own death like that without it being supernatural. If Prospero is not a physical man, then the house he encounters should be complete and not burnt down.
My idea is that Paul Prospero does exist someone that simply Ethan knew about and maybe even admired enough to write a story about.
_______Think about it:______________________________________________________
In the first world, in which Paul Prospero simply is a real man, the house has burnt down when the accident in the basement occurred. When he visited the house, he simply "Touch"-ed Ethan, who has died like the rest, to see what happened. My idea is that the story of the house burning down and the other murders is real. To them, the sleeper is Ethan that died in the house and their anxiety and depression of them are, with Ethan's voice in their heads, their mental illness that cause them to kill each other. "The sleeper must be awoken" is their denial for it.
An evidence for this is that the achievements for the murders are "Denial, Anger, Depression, Bargaining and Acceptance" which are the emotions they are going through after Ethan's death. Paul simply weaves the story together. And the dead bodies are real.
No, that can't be it simply because Travis mentions the story of "Paul Prospero, Supernatural Detective" before the fire starts. If it only occurs in Ethan's head during the four minutes, then Paul can't be known to Travis.