Rule of Rose Mysteries

First of all, if one compares Gregory’s calendar with his diary, one can find that the weather observations match perfectly. You can make this comparison for yourself by looking at my Document-based Time-line: Before Jennifer Arrived at the Orphanage, where you can find all of the entries from each. Every date for which there is a sun drawn on Gregory’s calendar, there is the weather description “clear skies” in his diary; when a cloud is drawn, this matches the observation “cloudy” in his diary; when a cloud with rain falling from it is drawn, this matches the observation “rain in the afternoon” or “rainy”.

I would like to think that the game-authors of Rule of Rose wouldn’t invite us to go through the effort of making this comparison without hiding a clue that we can find by making this comparison. The obvious clue is that the calendar gives us the year of that month of June that the diary is referring to: 1929. Is that all that we can get from the comparison?

I think that there is more.

We are shown Gregory’s diary itself, as well as the text of what is written in it (repeated above the diary so that we can clearly read the text). We can see that Gregory writes on both sides of each page of his diary. And we can see that the first entry that we are shown, June 1, occurs on the left page, in the middle of the diary (by “middle” I mean that there are as many pages which precede this page as there are pages that follow it), strongly suggesting that there are earlier entries that are in the diary that we aren’t being shown (people don’t begin their diaries in the middle, they begin at the beginning: no pages preceding, all of the pages following), so Gregory didn’t just begin writing in his diary on June 1st. We can also see that the last entry, June 27, is on the left page and the right page is blank. This suggests that there are no more entries in the diary.

When we look at the calendar, it doesn’t contradict the idea that Gregory has been drawing weather notes before June 1, matching with diary entries made before June 1, because the calendar only shows one month at a time, and we wouldn’t see any observations drawn in May because the month of May would be on a different calendar page. But we do see a match with the 27th being the last day observations were drawn on the calendar (there are no weather observations drawn for June 28, 29, and 30) and the 27th being the last day that entries were made in his diary.

A comparison between the diary and the calendar therefore strongly suggests that Gregory had been continuously writing in his diary, and continuously drawing weather observations on his calendar, up until 27 June. After that, the pattern is broken.

What might this mean?

Two possibilities come to mind.

1. Jennifer might have arrived at Gregory’s house at this time and we are re-experiencing that day in Gregory’s house. There are no entries in the diary for 28 June, or weather observations drawn on the calendar for 28 June, because Gregory hasn’t made them yet.

2. Something happened on 28 June that resulted in Gregory losing interest in making further entries in his diary or drawing further weather observations on his calendar.

In support of possibility #1, my analysis with respect to when the airship crash occurred (see my post When Did the Airship Crash?), if correct, would suggest that Jennifer must’ve arrived at Gregory’s house right about this time.

In support of possibility #2: In the living room of Gregory’s house, pressing “x” by the clock gives the response “The clock is stopped at 6:45…” One can also see that the wall is busted up quite badly right under the clock (as if the wall received a very forceful blow under the clock). It might be, if something dreadful happened right after Gregory made his June 27 diary entry and June 27 calendar drawing, such as Joshua (Gregory’s son) dying, that Gregory subsequently lost interest in winding his clock, making further diary entries, and marking further weather observations on his calendar after that date. He might have lost interest even in turning the page of his calendar as the months went by (meaning that we are not viewing what Gregory’s house looked like in June 1929, but at a later date.

Perhaps we can decide between these two possibilities, or come up with additional possibilities, by looking for more clues and thinking more about the matter.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 3:23 pm and is filed under Clues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.