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I've been replaying What Remains of Edith Finch and it makes me think on the lessons the game develops during the exploration of the ruins of Finch Manor. The story is told within different narrators but the main one whose Edith Finch she tells the story from a third-person perspective as she serves as a bridge between her deceased relatives and towards her son who is the character that held her diary with all the family information she gathered before passing away.
I'd like to think on the dynamics of the family, trying to see there is a curse that will kill all the Finches and their descendants into an untimely horrific death, but in reality there is no curse but rather a dysfunctional family whose elders can't see their own faults and can't help the younger generations because they are self-centered into their own delusion's of a death threat that is not real but rather is directed to their own neglect of the younger ones.
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| Finch Manor |
The game is told via a hub which is the manor of great-grandma Edie and the player can navigate towards the different rooms that act as memorials for the Finches who died. There is not direct dialogue but rather Edith goes around the different rooms and get clues how her relatives
lived. We can go through at least three generations of Finches, and we can gather information on how they died and every time there is a death in the family
there are implications of adult neglect towards the kid, this is heavily noted on Gregory's arc where he is left to drown in the bathroom tub.
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| Molly Finch |
Molly is another character as well the first one we get exposed as is the first main room where Edith starts exploring about her family members and is the first room where the player can be exposed to the children trauma coming from the adults. Molly was the first born daughter of Edie who died after a combination of eating some holly berries and a tube of fluorinated toothpaste that probably caused her to hallucinate because she was sent the her room after being punished without having her dinner.
Probably the combination of holly berries and toothpaste caused her to enter in an hallucinogenic state which could explain her visions of being different animals such as a cat, a shark and eventually a monster that devoured humans. The death of Molly foreshadowed what would happen when the other family members died, their rooms became shrines and were left as the last day they where alive.
I can see a lot of Molly's and the different Finches as my own story, I can relate to the intergenerational trauma that followed them and eventually killed them, probably as less as dramatic as my maternal grandfather used to say "We all live long ages, but loneliness is what eventually killed us". The house that always changed was more as a prison to Edith and the vast majority of her family, the same house for me was Cartagena, the city where I was born and that was my prison without any walls but just geographical boundaries.
I always remember looking through my bedroom window, wishing to go away and eventually it became a reality, I essentially had to
die to be able to live, I wanted so badly to be myself without having to be associated with the people I was bounded by blood; in that extent I am probably close to
Milton which ended up leaving his family without a clue of his whereabouts and yet seemed that he lived his life to the fullest.
Sometimes we have to leave and leaving is the hardest part.
References:
- The Making of What Remains of Edith Finch: https://www.pcgamer.com/the-making-of-what-remains-of-edith-finch/
- Myth-making or Neglect? Questions of Nihilism in What Remains of Edith Finch: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5955a0172e69cffa37a39b58/t/645f6bc3cebb40072a8f32a7/1683975108546/nihilism-zawadzki-draft3.pdf
- Molly Finch: https://what-remains-of-edith-finch.fandom.com/wiki/Molly_Finch
- Milton Finch: https://what-remains-of-edith-finch.fandom.com/wiki/Milton_Finch
