Rule of Rose Mysteries

In the “Rag Princess” storybook, we are told that the fairy godmother cast a spell on “the girl”:

One day.
a fairy godmother came,
cast a spell on the girl, and said,
“Sew yourself an ash-grey dress.
Then you can go to the ball like your stepsisters!”

What puzzles me about this is the role of the spell. Why doesn’t the above passage just read:

One day.
a fairy godmother came and said,
“Sew yourself an ash-grey dress.
Then you can go to the ball like your stepsisters!”

In the Cinderella story, the fairy godmother casts spells, but are any of these spells actually cast ON Cinderella herself?

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The first section of the following blog-post was based on my mistaken identification of the head of the seamstress as being that of a bear rather than of a pig. See the links to pictures in comment #4. Thank you Pandora for the correct identification (comment #6)! The very last section of this blog-post, however, could still be valid.
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The animation that begins the “Rag Princess Sews” chapter of Rule of Rose is described by TheSinnerChrono’s “Rule of Rose Game Script” as follows:

A girl works at a sewing machine. Her hand gets punctured by the needle; the wheel continues to spin and she’s pulled through the machine, becoming flattened by cloth.

TheSinnerChrono failed to mention a very important feature of this “girl”: she has the head of Joshua-the-bear!

As the only person who we see sewing in Rule of Rose is Amanda, this establishes, it might seem, some sort of co-identity between Amanda and Joshua-the-bear!

What could THAT possibly be about?

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The “Rag Princess” storybook of Rule of Rose tells us:

One day.
a fairy godmother came,
cast a spell on the girl, and said,
“Sew yourself an ash-grey dress.
Then you can go to the ball like your stepsisters!”

The accompanying illustration in the storybook shows Joshua-the-bear as the fairy godmother.

How does this section of the storybook tale relate to the events of Jennifer’s forgotten past?

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I have stated before that I believe that the months ascribed to the chapters of the Rule of Rose game are unreliable.

The airship chapters are ascribed the following months (in 1930):

April_________The Unlucky Clover Field
May__________Sir Peter
July__________Bird of Happiness
August________Mermaid Princess
September____The Goat Sisters
October_______Rag Princess Sews

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If we take note of the progression in the number of Wendy’s drawings posted on the wall of the Sick Room, we find the following pattern:

April_________The Unlucky Clover Field__________2 DRAWINGS
May__________Sir Peter______________________3 DRAWINGS
July__________Bird of Happiness_________________________(no access)
August________Mermaid Princess________________________ (no access)
September____The Goat Sisters__________________________(access; but no drawings at all on the wall)
October_______Rag Princess Sews______________4 DRAWINGS

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Now let’s look at the height progression of Amanda’s covered-up sewing project in the Working Class Luggage area:

April_________The Unlucky Clover Field____________________(no project present)
May__________Sir Peter________________initially SHORTEST-SIZE,
_______________________________________then MID-SIZE later in the May chapter (at which time Amanda says: “It’s almost ready.”)
July__________Bird of Happiness__________________________(no project present)
August________Mermaid Princess__________________________(no project present)
September____The Goat Sisters___________________________(no project present)
October_______Rag Princess Sews______________TALLEST SIZE

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In both of the above progressions, the pattern breaks after the “Sir Peter” chapter and then resumes again in the “Rag Princess Sews” chapter.

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I’m going to start our discussion of Amanda’s sewing project by posting the entire text of the “Rag Princess” storybook here for reference:

Once upon a time,
there was a girl who sewed rags,
day in, day out.
The stench of the rags seeped into her clothes.
Her stepsisters wore beautiful dresses and went to the ball.
The girl stayed at home and her jealousy festered.
One day.
a fairy godmother came,
cast a spell on the girl, and said,
“Sew yourself an ash-grey dress.
Then you can go to the ball like your stepsisters!”
The girl patched together the sooty rags,
and that’s how she became the Rag Princess.
A very stinky princess indeed.
She stunk up the whole town, in fact.
No girl who stunk so would be allowed into the ball.
I’ll make that girl wear this awful dress myself!
And thus, the Rag Princess and the girl in the rag dress became play pals.

In the “Rag Princess” storybook, the Amanda’s sewing project begins as a dress for herself:

“Sew yourself an ash-grey dress.
Then you can go to the ball like your stepsisters!”

But it is a project that fails:

No girl who stunk so would be allowed into the ball.

Some entries in Amanda’s diary seem to relate to this sewing project.

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We don’t have any evidence that the grey dress worn by “older” Jennifer throughout the game relates in any way to Jennifer’s “real” life as an adult outside of her dream. In fact, the red broach that Jennifer wears from the dream’s beginning signals us that “older” Jennifer is probably NOT dressed as she dresses outside of her dream: Jennifer threw that red brooch away as a child (”The Funeral” chapter). It doesn’t really make a lot of sense that she would somehow be wearing the red brooch (and not knowing its significance) years later.

“Younger” Jennifer, appears to wear a dress of the same style as worn by “older” Jennifer (grey, long sleeves, and a white collar) under a white apron, in “The Funeral” chapter and in the pre-game (E3) video.

So presumably the dress worn by “older Jennifer” reflects a dress worn by Jennifer during her forgotten past.

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What about the Jennifer dolls?  We see them dressed in raggedy, irregularly sewn grey dresses that resemble Jennifer’s grey dress.

The large body size of the Jennifer-doll that we find tied to a pillar in the Filth Room (”The Little Princess” chapter) seems to mark that doll as being, at least in part, a dream reflection of “older” and “larger” Jennifer.  Older Jennifer will get tied to a post in the Filth Room of the airship (”The Unlucky Clover Field” chapter) and in the Filth Room of the orphanage (”The Funeral” chapter), and the Jennifer-doll tied the pillar foreshadows this.  But Jennifer tells us (the “Once Upon A Time” chapter) that she was tied to the pillar during her—previously—forgotten past, so the doll tied to the pillar can be said to, indirectly, reflect that as well.  But the large body size of that doll tells us that it has dream-spawned characteristics; it is a dream-reflection of “older” Jennifer.  Does this mean that no Jennifer doll actually existed in Jennifer’s forgotten past?

I don’t think so.

I’m going to propose here a hypothesis that there actually was a Jennifer-doll, and that we see that doll being bludgeoned by Amanda with a big stick during “The Rag Princess Sews” chapter.

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In the Rule of Rose game plot, the appearance of the Jennifer doll provides a creepy happening (the game even explicitly tells us that the doll is “creepy”) that foreshadows events that will occur to Jennifer later in the game.  Jennifer will find herself tied to a Filth Room pillar—like the doll is here in “The Little Princess” chapter—twice as the game proceeds:  at the beginning of the “Unlucky Clover Field” chapter and at the beginning of “The Funeral” chapter.

Considering the appearance of this Jennifer doll as a re-emergence of memory from Jennifer’s forgotten past, it could be regarded as a distorted memory of Jennifer having been herself tied to this pillar during her forgotten past. In the “Once Upon A Time” chapter, her memories returning, Jennifer tells us (at the central pillar of the Filth Room):

“Tied to this pillar, unable to move, I was all alone. It took a while, but I finally freed myself. I was always the slow poke… But, that won’t happen again. I’ll never let myself be tied up again.”

The idea that Jennifer might take a memory of something that happened to her, and re-live it as something happening to a doll, seems to me as if it might be comparable with what we will see in “The Funeral” chapter when Jennifer’s memories relating to the death of Brown bring forth visions of broken Brown-dolls.

If so, does this mean that Jennifer’s vision (in the “Rag Princess Sews” chapter) of Amanda beating a Jennifer doll with a big stick is actually a distorted memory of an incident during which Amanda actually beat Jennifer with a stick during Jennifer’s forgotten past?

It seems to fit the pattern, but I am reluctant to believe that it could be so, unless we force in the idea that Jennifer’s dreaming mind has greatly exaggerated the size of the stick and the magnitude of the force of Amanda’s blows.  “Younger” Jennifer would be killed, or at the very least gravely injured, otherwise.  And we have no evidence to support the idea that Jennifer was ever physically damaged during her time living at the orphanage.

Here is a YouTube video of the scene where Amanda beats the Jennifer doll: Amanda beating a Jennifer doll. Watch the scene from 8:45 to the end of the video.

Is there possibly another, totally different explanation for the existence of the scene in which we see Amanda beating a Jennifer doll?

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If you stand Jennifer in front of the doll that is tied to the central pillar, and press “x” only once, you get a subtitle that reads:

…There’s a creepy doll tied to the pillar.

There are features of this doll that lead the player to connect the doll with Jennifer: both wear grey with a white collar, both have a red object at the base of the throat, and the knee-sock and shoe on one leg of the doll resembles the knee-socks and shoes that Jennifer can be seen to be wearing.

Press “x” a second time and the head of the doll droops forward, the controller vibrates, and we hear Wendy-as-Joshua give a sinister sounding laugh.

You can see a You Tube video of this scene here (at the very beginning of the video):  Jennifer doll tied to pillar.

It has been proposed that the face of this doll is the face of an animal, perhaps even Joshua-the-bear’s face (considering that Jennifer has some symbolic associations with Joshua-the-bear). I can certainly see how that impression can arise. But I think that this is either just a quirk of the camera angle, or else we must argue that the face of this doll is different from that of the other Jennifer doll faces that we can view.

What are the other times we can view the face of a Jennifer doll?

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The subtitled text of the “Rag Princess” storybook concludes:

One day.
a fairy godmother came,
cast a spell on the girl. and said,
“Sew yourself an ash-grey dress.
Then you can go to the ball like your stepsisters!”

The girl patched together the sooty rags,
and that’s how she became the Rag Princess.
A very stinky princess indeed.
She stunk up the whole town, in fact.

No girl who stunk so would be allowed into the ball.
I’ll make that girl wear this awful dress myself!

And thus, the Rag Princess and the girl in the rag dress became play pals.

When Amanda uses the phrase “that girl”, I think that we can safely assume that Amanda means Jennifer. In her diary, Amanda wrote (April 4), in an obvious reference to Jennifer: “I’m still lower class, even after that girl came.”

What interests me the most in the storybook text above is the mention of the ash-grey dress.

Think about it.

Who wears an ash-grey dress in the Rule of Rose game?

Jennifer, no?

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In the Perrault version of Cinderella, in the Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella, and in the Disney animated movie version of Cinderella, there are only two step-sisters for Cinderella.

In the “Rag Princess” storybook, however, the illustrations show that the rag princess has three step-sisters. Why this change in the number of step-sisters? I propose that there are three step-sisters because the story here is depicting the relationship between Amanda and three orphans: Diana, Meg, and Eleanor.

In the airship, during the “Unlucky Cloverfield” chapter of Rule of Rose, after coming up the stairs and entering through the door into the First Class Guest Sector, one can find a sign hanging on the wall to the left which describes “Social Rank”:

Social Rank
Refined Class
Duchess…..Diana
Countess….Eleanor
Baroness….Meg
—Lower Class—
Poor………..Amanda
Beggar…….Jennifer

The text of the Rag Princess storybook tells us:

Her stepsisters wore beautiful dresses and went to the ball.

The girl stayed at home and her jealousy festered

I propose that the “real life” situation being described is this: in the Aristocrat Club, the girls Diana, Meg, and Eleanor are ranked socially as “Refined Class (”wore beautiful dresses and went to the ball”), but Amanda is ranked “Lower Class” and desperately wants to move up to “Refined Class” rank (”stayed at home and her jealousy festered”).

We see, in the storybook illustration, a castle off in the distance. This is the site of the ball and indicates that the ball relates to aristocracy.

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