State of Ivy

[Neyla]

What do you guys think? Is Ivy really that fat thing you see all the time or not?

In the original downfall the police officer said something like "you made her fat and you force fed her"

In the remake Mitzi said "She is only skin and bones"

[Primal Fear]

In the original I found confusing that at end Joe is holding Ivy in his arms althought, if it is true what the the policemen said, that should be totally impossible.

In the remake it rather seemed to me that Joe isn't to be held responsible for the condition of his wife. That he tried to make her eat, but to no avail.

[Udderly Adorable]

A good example of how she looks now would be to look in the game "The Cat Lady" Joe can actually be seen performing a scene from this game in the basement. The camera pans over and you can see her in the chair being shocked. Not only that, but you can assume that she is eating due to the fact that there are chains connected to the chair in his apartment while there as Susan, though what she was being fed...

[Kapuzenwurm]

Originally posted by Udderly Adorable:

A good example of how she looks now would be to look in the game "The Cat Lady" Joe can actually be seen performing a scene from this game in the basement. The camera pans over and you can see her in the chair being shocked. Not only that, but you can assume that she is eating due to the fact that there are chains connected to the chair in his apartment while there as Susan, though what she was being fed...

But at the end she seems very skinny? I mean sure she is dead but i really thought she maybe starved to death?

[Udderly Adorable]

At the end whenever the camera zooms in on her face and her sillhouette while being carried, she doesn't look skinny. Though, Susan does mention that she is skin and bones. I am unsure which iit would officially be. But what I assumed or brought away from it.. is that he had been chaining her up and forcing her to eat because she had been starving herself and making herself sick. Both of them had something horribly wrong with them on a psychological front, though they both differed greatly. When she looked in the mirror, she saw a fat hideous monster. When Joe looks at her, he sees a beautiful woman. The reality isn't easy to "Officially pick out" other than what we have. Susan seeing her and mitzy saying she is skin and bones and in the basement we see her being shocked. Which, that may have just been a nod to the original game.. because originally her last moments were in the chair, one of the endings was if you kept shocking her... she would eventually "Come back to life" and talk to you after you killed the police. Though, it was obviously in his head. But, in that game she looked very large in reality. But in his head, she was very skinny. I am trying to get the "Gold ending" to see what it is, maybe it will shine more light on it.

[Neyla]

I already got that ending and sadly it does not reveal anything more.

[enlyre (Alex M)]

I believe in Cat Lady game the scene was more of a reference than of an actual real facts. In memento in the ends we can see more of a Joe's perfect image of Ivy. So I'd believe Susan's "skinny" comment on this topic

[SharksAreGothMermaids]

My guess is that Joe attempted to force feed her, but the fact that she was bullimic instead of anorexic in this version meant that she could just throw up anything he fed her. (Did you notice the knocked-over chair in the corridor leading up to the blood-door?... I don't think that was blood around it...) So she continued losing weight until it killed her.

As for the fat woman Joe was electrocuting in The Cat Lady... They showed the exact same image of her when Joe looks into the mirror in Downfall, which means it must be Sophie. So Joe must have been killing one of the "Sophies"... i.e. an unfortunate resident of their apartment building. He was projecting a personified image of Ivy's bullimia onto his victims. Either that, or it was meant to be Ivy from the original Downfall and Rem just retconned that scene completely. But I like the first idea better. :P

[Fuzzy.Bunny]

Originally posted by SharksAreGothMermaids:

Either that, or it was meant to be Ivy from the original Downfall and Rem just retconned that scene completely. But I like the first idea better. :P

There were a fair few issues with the narrative in the first game and it seems to me that there isn't really an 'official' version, rather that Rem cleaned up the narrative to make more sense of the whole thing. For example, from the 2009 version:


Issue 1
Following what Mr. Harris said, I find it dififcult to believe that Sophie/Ivy had an eating disorder that made her heavy and then developed an eating disorder that made her very thin. The pills in 'the room where she died' would indicate bullemia nervosa, which doesn't follow if she wants to be larger to catch Mr. Harris' eye. Further, Mr. Harris says that Sophie is his girl and Sophie's diary indicates the opposite. This is the only narrative sticking point and, given the fattening smoothie, we can only presume that this was an idea that wasn't furthered and accidently left in play.

Issue 2
It seems that Agnes is a real person, however this doesn't fit in with Joe's hallucinations and especially if the 'best' ending is achieved by the player. We can presume that she was a sleepwalker and participated in Joe's hallucinations, though it would be fair to say that her dress would be bloody and that didn't happen in the game. If we presume that the dress colour was an oversight (later alluded to in the 2016 version) we can say that Agnes was real, a sleepwalker, and participated in Joe's hallucination by way of his suggestions shaping her dream.

There is a narrative issue with the whole section where the player controls Agnes at that point, as it doesn't seem sensible that Agnes' dream would influence Joe's hallucination. It's important to recall that Agnes finds Joe and saves him, not the other way round. I'm not sure that there is a way to get around this issue given the level and types of interactions had in the Agnes section.

Issue 3
The receptionist doesn't seem to have a place in the narrative if and only if what the detective said was true. Following the detective's call that it was a hallucination, it's not at all clear how Sophie would know that Joe did or didn't cheat on her. We can presume that Joe was hallucinating the whole time and that is how Sophie knew, because all of this was in his head, and this can make sense of the 'best' ending. At this point the receptionist is a narrative loose end, something that may have been explored further but wasn't for some reason.

We can take this to be the case, however given the narrative issue with the Agnes section we can't be sure that this is the case.

Solution?
The narrative becomes coherent when we presume that the issues with the narrative were orphaned or otherwise unexplored game ideas that were accidently left in.

Once we change the issue with the 21 year-old Sophie to bulimarexia, Mr. Harris' lines to her being too heavy (which lines up with Harrison in the 2016 version), omit the section where the player plays as Agnes and instead Joe comes across her in some other way (resolving the Agnes issue), and line the receptionist up in a neutral position where she doesn't attempt to seduce Joe, we then have a coherent narrative.

There are a few stumbling blocks in the narrative in the 2009 and how Joe and Ivy's narrative flows into The Cat Lady and now the new Downfall, so I'm of the belief that where we have more major differences in narrative elements (e.g. not the difference in Ivy's hair colour and wearing glasses) it is because Rem intended it to be that way. ^.^

[Fuzzy.Bunny]

Originally posted by h0tsp4ce:

Yeah IMO when Susan said "she's skin and bones" that was put there to show that in this version (thank you Bitterness for your analysis! interesting to see the two stories compared in this way. I haven't had the brainpower to even compare them yet XD) what Ivy really looked like to an outsider.

Don't feel bad. My analysis comes on the heels of just finishing the 2009 version roughly a hour before responding to this thread. I played the 2009 version in early 2015 and, though it stuck with me, it wasn't those details listed above that stuck with me but the central thrust of the game's narrative.

I gave the 2009 version another playthrough because I'm going to be writing a small poetry collection going into Joe's mental state and I wanted to make sure that I had the narratives firmly in mind before I did so. When I played the 2016 version on Valentine's Day I felt like there was some things missing but, reflecting the 2016 narrative off of the 2009 narrative, I see that Rem simply cleaned up the narrative and for the better.

Do I think there will be a The Cat Lady revisioning to bring it in line with Downfall (2016)? No, that game is a masterpiece -and I don't say that lightly. The 'third' game in what I'm, for the moment, calling the 'Queen of Maggot's series isn't likelt to be a revisioning of The Cat Lady but something altogether different. Damned if I know what it will be, but I'm naturally quite eager to hear about and play it!

[SharksAreGothMermaids]

Originally posted by The Bitterness:

Do I think there will be a The Cat Lady revisioning to bring it in line with Downfall (2016)? No, that game is a masterpiece -and I don't say that lightly. The 'third' game in what I'm, for the moment, calling the 'Queen of Maggot's series isn't likelt to be a revisioning of The Cat Lady but something altogether different. Damned if I know what it will be, but I'm naturally quite eager to hear about and play it!

Perhaps there will just be an update that deletes the Ivy/Sophie electrocution scene to make it coherent with Downfall 2016? Or maybe not, I wouldn't blame him for not wanting to revise a masterpiece. Just seems like something that could easily be edited out, since it kinda comes out of nowhere and isn't referenced again.

[Fuzzy.Bunny]

Originally posted by h0tsp4ce:

Originally posted by The Bitterness:

Don't feel bad. My analysis comes on the heels of just finishing the 2009 version roughly a hour before responding to this thread. I played the 2009 version in early 2015 and, though it stuck with me, it wasn't those details listed above that stuck with me but the central thrust of the game's narrative.

I gave the 2009 version another playthrough because I'm going to be writing a small poetry collection going into Joe's mental state and I wanted to make sure that I had the narratives firmly in mind before I did so. When I played the 2016 version on Valentine's Day I felt like there was some things missing but, reflecting the 2016 narrative off of the 2009 narrative, I see that Rem simply cleaned up the narrative and for the better.

Do I think there will be a The Cat Lady revisioning to bring it in line with Downfall (2016)? No, that game is a masterpiece -and I don't say that lightly. The 'third' game in what I'm, for the moment, calling the 'Queen of Maggot's series isn't likelt to be a revisioning of The Cat Lady but something altogether different. Damned if I know what it will be, but I'm naturally quite eager to hear about and play it!

Ahh where can we find the poetry once you write it? Or will it be private? :3

I'll provide a link to its location. Like the rest of my work, it will be available in .pdf format. If you're particularly interested, feel free to send me a friend request and I can send you a link.

[Neyla]

I'm also wondering why these hallucinations are called "Sophie".

I had something in mind but maybe it's total idiocy. Maybe Joe's mothers name was Sophie. Almost at the end (where Joe's father appears) you can see that his mother slit her wrists and she has black hair. Sophie also has black hair but not Ivy (in the 2016 version).

Maybe there is a context between these hallucinations and Joe's mother and he is trying to get over his mothers death in this way.

[Fuzzy.Bunny]

Originally posted by Lisa :3:

I'm also wondering why these hallucinations are called "Sophie".

I had something in mind but maybe it's total idiocy. Maybe Joe's mothers name was Sophie. Almost at the end (where Joe's father appears) you can see that his mother slit her wrists and she has black hair. Sophie also has black hair but not Ivy (in the 2016 version).

Maybe there is a context between these hallucinations and Joe's mother and he is trying to get over his mothers death in this way.

My thoughts were always that Joe bifurcated Ivy into: Ivy, the woman he loved, and Sophie, an evil thing twisted Ivy and trying to kill her. Everything bad is Sophie and Sophie's fault, everything good is Ivy. This seems to play out.

[lastbreath]

That's cool opinion. And it seems correct. But I really don't like changing fat Ivy to anorexic. Joe was real evil in 2009 version with all this wife's transformation.