Theory about the Hanging man/Bellman, our secret ally.

[Tinkorn]

After I finished both the Little Nightmares main game and DLC I started thinking about some things that felt strange and I came up with this theory.

What if the man who hanged himself, who we assume to be the Bellman, rebelled against the Lady? First I wanna talk about the mirror Six uses to defeat the Lady. Why is it even there? It doesn't make sense that the Lady would break all mirrors except for one. Let's go back to the Bellman. I think that the Bellman is related to the Janitor. They could be related, like how the chefs are like twins, the big differences between the Janitor and the hanging man (the Bellman) connect them, the Janitor has long arms, the Bellman has long legs. And if they aren't blood related then I think that the Bellman, like the Janitor was a caretaker for the Maw. As we see in one of the concept art pictures the Maw is HUGE and as handy as the Janitor is (pun intended) he can't be everywhere at once. My theory is that the Bellman took care of some parts of the Maw. It always bugged me why does the Hiddeaway look abandoned? The Janitor is seen there but he isn't doing a very good job at taking care of the place. The only explanation I can think of is that someone else ran that place, someone who is now gone, to me that is the Bellman. So what else did the Bellman do? Well I think he was like a warden to the Prison, which is why he was hanging there and he was also the one watching from the surveillance rooms. A lot of people seem to forget about them. The first one you see is before you enter the Lair. The Janitor couldn't possibly be the one using it. The other one is in the Hideaway, which reinforces my theory about the one using those rooms to also run the Hideaway and being the hanging man (the Bellman). One more reason why I think there is someone other than the Lady who is watching is the post-credit scene in the DLC. In it we see that the credits where played on a TV. Furthermore to me it seemed that someone was watching the whole DLC on that TV, the chair, the cigarettes etc. And finally the figure that appears in the TV, it has long legs and a hat that kind of resembles that of the Janitor. I think that person is also the hanging man. This brings us to the conclusion that the hanging man, who we assume to be the Bellman, stood against the Lady, that's why he was killed and it was made to look like suicide (another theory which says that the chair is too small and should've been kicked to the ground if it really was suicide). But before he died he left a mirror in the Lady's quarters and left a clue (the hidden last image in the surveillance room before the Lair where the mirror Six uses to kill the Lady is shown) in hope that one day a kid will escape and defeat the Lady, doing what the poor Bellman could not.

EXTRA:
Here I want to give some explanation why I think the Hanging man is the Bellman. First, there is a painting in the Lady's quarters of the Bellman who, thanks to data mining, we see hanging. Also in a video on YouTube by Itsjustjord where he slows down the song on the TV you use to distract the Janitor with, one of the lines says: "He hung, he hung, he hung, don't leave me. No more Bellman among the sea." Finally about why I think the Hanging man/Bellman was using the surveillance rooms and watching when he was alive is because at Gamescom 2016 a person was seen dressed as the Bellman who was watching people from behind a mirror. In the Guest area when Six goes to a bathroom you need to break a mirror to escape and when you do you see a chair behind it, as if someone used to sit there and watch, just like the Bellman at Gamescom. So it would make sense that the Bellman was also using the cameras to look around the Maw. And because one of the cameras points at the mirror we use to kill the Lady I assumed that whoever was using that room must have left that as a clue on how to defeat the Lady.

[Stefneh]

I've been looking through the discussions for theories to read and this is a good one! Thanks for sharing!

[Tinkorn]

Thanks for reading! Glad finally someone saw it.