The Mystery of Joshua’s Clothing Under the Blanket (Part 1)
Posted by PokerNemesis in MysteriesIn “The Gingerbread House” chapter of Rule of Rose, after Jennifer is locked in the cellar room by Gregory, if you move Jennifer next to the bed and press “x” and you will be offered a choice:
“Look under the blanket? Yes No
If you select “yes” you are given the subtitle:
A boy’s shirt, pants and shoes have been neatly laid out on the bed… For some reason, Jennifer felt a sudden pain in her chest.
We see that the shirt has the same sort of tie as we associate with Joshua, and the clothing generally matches what we have seen Joshua wearing earlier in the game. The clothing is positioned as if on a boy, that is, the clothing is not folded, the shirt sleeves extend to the sides as arms would extend, the shirt is situated above the short pants (as a torso would be situated above hips), and the shoes are side-by-side below the pants separated from the pants by a distance comparable to leg-length.
What is the significance of what we are seeing? Why does Jennifer feel a sudden pain in her chest when she views this?
A juicy hypothesis is that the clothing represents a corpse. Later in the game, during the orphanage massacre, Jennifer will see children’s clothing in the yard that apparently represents the corpses of the orphans. Jennifer presumably has censored her memories of that grisly scene, cleaning it up in her mind so that only empty clothing stands in for the dead bodies of her friends lying on the ground. Could it be that she is doing some analogous self-censoring of her memories here? Did Jennifer see a corpse under the blanket during her forgotten past?
One objection to this hypothesis might be that the subtitle tells us that the clothing has “been neatly laid out”. There isn’t a “seems to be” or “appears to be”, or some phrasing of that type, that might suggest that the clothing hasn’t truly been neatly laid out.
Is this, in itself, enough to reject the corpse hypothesis?
I don’t know.
The narrative subtitles sometimes tell us what Jennifer believes to be true, rather than what is actually true. For example, Wendy-as-Joshua is called a “boy” in subtitles, whereas she is actually a girl dressed as a boy.
Also the translation from the Japanese may not be perfect.
People on Rule of Rose forums have, in the past, objected to the corpse hypothesis because they think that there would be the implication that Jennifer spent seven months in the cellar with a corpse in the bed. They find it very hard to believe that Jenifer would have been reluctant to leave that cellar room if it had truly been that she was sharing it with a corpse. Yet Jennifer wrote to Wendy, from that cellar room:
10 December
From J to W
Thank you Wendy.
I want to fly away from this room and run with you in the fields…
But the man is so lonely, so sad. I can’t just leave him alone.
(“Once Upon a Time”, Sickroom, by the lamp)
On Rule of Rose forums, people have sometimes offered the alternative hypothesis that Gregory has just laid out Joshua’s clothing on the bed for Jennifer to wear.
But people don’t generally lay out clothing, for others to wear, under the covers of a bed. And certainly they wouldn’t place shoes under the covers. The explanation that Gregory is crazy is not, in my opinion, by itself, a satisfying explanation for putting the shoes under the covers. I think that it must signify something more than just that.
And the hypothesis that the clothes are just laid out for Jennifer to wear doesn’t really connect well with the earlier scene of Gregory sitting beside the bed, with his revolver to his head, telling a story as if to a Joshua who is lying in the bed. I think that we must regard the clothing as representing Joshua in the bed, at least in Gregory’s mind. Gregory may be hallucinating that the empty clothing is Joshua, or he may be looking at a corpse, but I think we cannot dismiss the clothing as being merely laid out for Jennifer to wear.
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Hmmm…I don’t dig this corpse hypothesis. I got no alternative yet though. I used to follow the assumption that the clothes were laid out for Jennifer, but I haven’t got an explanation for as to why they are under the bed.
But here’s my take on the corpse hypothesis:
If Gregory was looking at Joshua’s corpse, then why would he still need a Jennifer to pose as Joshua?
He believed that Jennifer was Joshua, or at least a suitable replacement for the boy.
But if
a) he believed that Jennifer was Joshua AND he knew that the corpse was Joshua, then there would be 2 Joshua characters in Gregory’s mind. Which is unacceptable even to a person who has lost his sanity.
b) he believed that Jennifer was a suitable replacement for Joshua, then why would he still be reading to Joshua, the corpse?
Also, if Jennifer had to watch Joshua’s corpse every day, then why did she not tell Wendy (in whom she often confided) in one of her letters?
Styx wrote:
Yes, the two-Joshuas situation does indeed present some problems that a theorist would need to solve.
Styx wrote:
~
Yes, rather than write:
One might well expect that Jennifer would have written:
…or something like that.
If you would like to split hairs… the “Censored Dream/Memories” would actually account for not mentioning the corpse. Much like no one “mentions” Hoffman’s behavior.
Or… Wendy knows about the corpse…
Consider her first letter, addressed to Joshua. Later she says, “Mr. Bear,” but she also mentions he’s lonely.
I believe I read here somewhere someone was going to come up with a theory that Wendy’s true objective was to retrieve the bear. Perhaps she planned to use the Bear to “keep Joshua’s spirit” with her.
“Why write the bear a letter?” you ask?
What if this letter was to dear dead Joshua? and “Mr. Bear” was a nickname much like “prince?” What if Wendy and Joshua played “Rose Princess and Bear Prince”in one of their games.
…
…
I just had a thought that runs along those lines as well… Rose Princess and Bear Prince… there is actually a story called “Snow White and Rose Red” that has a prince that was turned into a bear in it…
Another reference?
I do think is a corpse, the corpse of joshua. The very first thing that happens when we press X is that a message appears says “Look under the blanket?” instead that makes Jennifer look directly into the blanket. She may be scared of seeing something disagreable, like a corpse. It’s like when you are playing a survival horror. I remember a scene on silent hill where there are too much lockers and one of them is filled with blood that is in the locker and goes to the floor. You know that is SOMETHING there, a scary corpse, and you don’t know if you want or don’t want to see. Something like that happened to Jennifer, maybe.
I don’t know how she came to get along with a corpse, maybe she just saw it once. Maybe, when she escaped from that house, Wendy put the corpse in the bed so Gregory wouldn’t notice Jennifer missing or something, and Jennifer saw it by mistake. That maybe would explain why Jennifer didn’t mention Joshua in the first letters.
I think laying the clothes on the bed symbolizes Jennifer trying to trick Gregory into thinking she (‘Joshua’) is there. I mean, when she looks into the door, she’s obviously fooled him somehow because he’s reading the story to the ‘little boy.’
I think the reason it gives her a pain in the chest is the memory of Wendy and her parading around in the outfit, and the realization at 19 that they had so much fun in a dead boys clothing. However, at the time in the game, you don’t know that much about Wendy and Jennifer, so it just comes out as a pain in her chest.
However, I do kinda like the body comparison. Especially with the clothing out on the lawn during the Stray Dog fight.
Rule Of Rose is a survival horror…Which means that the purpose of asking a question first may be simply for tension building purposes (without any or much significance to the storyline).
The only issue I see with the “corpse” idea/theory was that this spectre only works with the children… Martha, Clara and Hoffman’s battle and death scenes didn’t leave such momentos behind but actual bodies (or rather, in Clara’s case, a doll).
What’s more I still have a little difficulty believing that the much feared Stray Dog would be able to get all (counts in her head “Wendy, Diana, Meg, Eleanor, Amanda, Susan, Olivia, Thomas, Xavior, Nicholas…) 10 children on the lawn at once without any of them running away.
With the Joshua’s clothes issue, though…
There is one thing I was curious about… They seem to be actually reminisant of a boys school uniform… not necessarily a “poor farmer boy’s” clothes… Which kinda makes me wonder if they were originally Joshua’s clothes… Joshua seems to be the poorest and best dressed little boy in the entire game… If Gregory can’t afford food, how’s he paying for school uniforms? But I digress…
I’ve been trying to come up with reasons it WOULD be the corpse and senarios and sets of mind where that would be applicable. I’ve come up with one or two ideas…
Thinking logically (and slightly insanely) putting Joshua in the cellar actually goes with the Jesus Mythos PN has been seen talking about in previous posts. (This is back in May/April times). As Joshua and Jesus originate from the same Hebrew origin… that may make sense as well. (getting ready to chase another rabbit)
When people were burried in Jesus’ time, they didn’t dig a hole and lay them in it and cover it up with dirt, as we do today. They actually stuck dead bodies in places that were more like caves and sealed the entrance to preserve the body. (Not all dead bodies, mind you, but important ones for sure) I was thinking… Gregory is a farmer who relates children to vegatables. What if his line of thinking is not, “Joshua IS alive” so much as “Joshua will return to life?” Where would he preserve Joshua’s body? Joshua’s name does mean “God will Save”… and Gregory does seem to continue kidnapping children… Maybe he thinks if he made up for whatever “bad” thing he did in Joshua’s room, Joshua will come back? (supposing he did something bad…) Maybe if he keeps sacrificing other children, Joshua will be given back in exchange? Then when Jennifer appears, in fear he’ll loose “Joshua” again, he keeps her in the cellar where he “preserved” Joshua? I was thinking of how the blanket covers up the clothes… maybe like a burial shrowd?
I think too much…
But they why bother putting a “no” in the “look into the blanket”? you have the options to do or not to do because there’s something creepy, or scary, under that blanket. That’s what they do in each survival horror, they put gross things that can race your heart. I don’t really think they would put just boy’s clothes because they wanted to and then Jennifers feels “a sudden pain in her chest.”. For me, it has to be something scary… not just clothes. I explain myself?
I personally don’t think the clothes represent a corpse, I honestly think in this case they are just clothes but I do think that to Gregory, these clothes are Joshua. I recently read a story out of a manga that had to do with a woman getting an abortion. She felt so guilty afterward that she made herself believe that a baby doll was her unborn child and treated in just as a mother would treat a real living child. I think that it is possible that Gregory has done something similar, maybe he felt so guilty about Joshua’s death that he convinced himself that those clothes on the bed are Joshua. I had a similar thought about Wendy being the same way, thinking the teddy bear could be her Joshua but when she found Jennifer as well I think she might have desided to take them both and turn Jennifer into her new prince, she was close enough to Joshua in appearance anyway.
What if the Gregory actually put Joshua’s clothes out on the bed in an effort to be closer to him? I’ve heard of stories where people who lose loved ones will keep the last clothing they were wearing near them.
I really don’t believe it’s a corpse. In order for Wendy to have worn those same clothes she’d have to take them off the body. Unless she’s desperate enough to do it, why would she take clothing off of a rotting corpse?
I always felt like the clothes did signify Joshua’s corpse. Several things, at that period in time it was pretty frequent for even public schools to require uniforms. Sometimes uniforms are provided by the schools if parents cannot afford them. Secondly, in that case, Joshua would probably have at least two or three of said uniform.. at least a spare for Wendy to take. Let’s be reasonable here: are Jennifer’s memories perfect? Do the events line up like they did in “real life?” No. The timing of things is awfully mushed up. Is it possible that Joshua’s body was there at some point and was removed when Jennifer replaced him? I think so.
I think what Rule of Rose throws at us is painful realism. I think it would be a beautiful coincidence for Jennifer to appear near Gregory’s house within a reasonable time of Joshua’s death. It always made more sense to me that Jennifer was a kidnapped child… likely intended for food. However at some point she somehow became Joshua.. that detail of events is never clearly explained. Whether or not the clothes are supposed to signify Joshua’s body or not, I think that the creators knowingly intended us to get that feeling. At the end of the game when you see the clothes of the orphans, and you figure out what that means… suddenly you’re likely to think back to.. weren’t that boy’s clothes on the bed in the same way? And then it clicks. It’s a pretty big coincidence to me.
If Jennifer is remembering everything at the order we are playing the game… the clothes are naturally painfull.
She just remembered not the actual Joshua’s corpse, but that the man always called her Joshua (we don’t even know if he made her dress witht hat clothes), and she was not comfortable with that stuation.
We never knew if she ever so the actual Wendy wearing that. But I think the “Jennifer living with Joshua corpse” theory is just not appropiatte (not that the game itself is but it would really derange the already twisted plot).
I’m not “Gregory-insane” but… He rescued Jen. Took Jen home. He just lost his child. I think he was already looney. Then you have a little kid that doesn’t question everything you order to do. I trully believe that, if the man called her Joshua, the man could also made her dress as him. And that type of memories don’t affect you there but, believe me. Time goes by and that’s the type of reasons why people grow up traumatized. I think that’s her pain.
I think Joshua’s clothes in the bed were a connection to Wendy’s death.
That’s memory, you pick up piece by piece a giant puzzle, and then put everything together.
P.D. Although, as crazy as Gregory might’ve, I may also be a connection to an actual encounter Jennifer might’ve had with Joshua’s corpse (not in the bed of course, I don’t think the man wanted to scare the girl). I just think that we would have more evidence for that if tht wa the case.
I go with the corpse theory so heavily because they use the same symbolization with the orphans’ clothing during the Stray Dog battle.
There’s a lot of holes in this suggestion, but maybe Jennifer sees the clothing and feels the pain in her chest because she saw Joshua’s corpse at least once while in the basement. Perhaps the body was there when she was first put down there, and Gregory removed it then and there.
Obviously, the problem with that would be the two-Joshua’s-in-the-same-room thing.
However, if Gregory was crazy enough, could it be possible that he no longer recognized the REAL Joshua as Joshua? Think about it: Jennifer was capable of censoring her memories so she could believe what she wanted to believe. Unless only children are capable of it (And recall, we’re also talking about a man who’s been established as ‘not all there’), could Gregory not have censored his own memories, or maybe gone into such a state of mania or denial that he forced himself not to recognize his own son’s body?
One of the things that really grinds the gears of my sanity is the fact that we can’t re-visit Gregory’s house in ‘Once Upon a Time’.
Welcome INMH!
INMH wrote:
I’d also love to have Jennifer’s comments in the orphanage attic.
That too. I think the creators of the game wanted to leave us banging our heads against the wall.
mabey the fact that joshua is dead in the bed and jennifer is called joshua. because gregory is so messed up in his mind that he has to call whoever he sees joshua. we cant say only boys because he calls jennifer joshua. and he must at some point call wendy. my opinion on wendy was called joshua and she had already killed brown. so she decided to play dress up and be joshua instead of wendy so jennifer wouldnt hate her. and mabey there is something to do with ribbons and joshua. mabey pokernemis should od something on that. cause when you wendy-joshua in the stray last battle he is wearing a ribbon. and throughout the game he is wearing the same ribbons.
Mmh… i know im late, and propably this wont be read, but i always thought that the clothes in the Stray Dog Battle were there to match the Stray Dog Tale in Jeniffer’s mind (Stray Dog eats children, you know) so she only sees clothes cause Stray Dog already ate the kids, that didnt happen in real life, but in her mind, to match the whole Stray Dog thing, she sees it like that… well no to match, but just mixing her confused memories with the storys and the actual event… so if that the case, then that wouldnt be related to Joshua’s clothes, and Gregory maybe just put Joshua’s clothes like that cause he is crazy and wants to remember/simulate Joshua as some people have said… but Joshua’s corpse is also a very interesting theory… in a very disturbing way.
Hey, is there a part two on this matter? i cant seem to find it.
Welcome, Jay!
Jay wrote:
That is an interesting idea.
~
Jay wrote:
I haven’t gotten around to writing part two yet.
I also agree that the clothes under the bedsheets could be representative of a corpse. Not only because of the Stray Dog Battle symbolism with the clothes of all the dead children (GREAT use of symbolism in a game, might I add), but because it’s very possible that Gregory did indeed have both the dead Joshua and Jennifer in the same room at once after he found her, giving her an chance to actually see the corpse before Gregory dealt with it (didn’t deal with it?).
The evidence lies in the airship accident. When the airship crashed and either Jennifer a) was found in the rubbish, b) fell attached to a parachute c) fell into trees/bushes and survived, etc, and Gregory found her… it’s quite possible that when he saw her, he may have surmised that Joshua had possibly returned to him from heaven (perhaps this could even take the Joshua/Jesus relation into account). Considering the fact that this child who looked a lot like Joshua just fell out of the sky, and practically dropped right onto his lap, from an airship no less (something that Joshua obviously adored from the items in the boarded up room)… while still being -concious- of the fact that ‘dead Joshua’ was still in his home. I mean, you gotta remember that this Gregory guy is a) nuts, b) desperate to have his son back, c) heavily mentally disturbed, etc. So he brought Jennifer back to his home, and plunked her in the room with the dead Joshua thinking it’s no big deal, cause they’re ‘ultimately the same person’. Or even thought it to be a requirement for him to place the ‘new Joshua’ in with the ‘old Joshua’ for whatever reason. And really the only reason I can think of for Gregory putting the corpse of Joshua down in the cellar is that a cellar is significantly colder, and would keep his corpse fresh (’cause he’d probably start to smell after awhile).
Actually, if you sit and think about it, with Gregory’s mental state, it’s very possible that corpse-Joshua, Jennifer-Joshua and Wendy-Joshua could have all intertwined and interlaced, because Gregory might not have known any better, or was too crazy to tell the difference between at least Jennifer-Joshua and Wendy-Joshua. That it didn’t matter to him that there were Joshua’s all over the place, but that there simply -was- a ‘Joshua’.
Edit: Masq, I think that a lot of your thoughts cross over with my thoughts. I like the idea that the cellar could also represent a tomb, and that the blankets could represent a death shroud. It works.
Khyle wrote:
~
In considering that possibility, there is also this verse from Gregory’s “story” to consider:
Perhaps Jennifer reacted differently than the other “peas”, and this difference saved her?
Kyle wrote:
~
The idea that Gregory had rescued Jennifer from the crash-site, and had regarded Jennifer as Joshua returned from heaven, had been raised on Rule of Rose forums in the past, and I used to favor it myself. The problem with it, for me, came when I wrote my blog-post: “When Did the Airship Crash?”
I find it difficult to mesh the probable date of the airship crash (and the newspaper account of the storm) with the dates and entries in Gregory’s journal, and have them together support the idea that Gregory was at the airship crash-site and rescued Jennifer shortly after the crash.
It seems to me that Jennifer, after the airship crash, must have wandered around in the woods for several days before she came to Gregory’s house—perhaps like Hansel and Gretel wandered lost in the woods before finding the Gingerbread House (I never made that connection before, but I think I really like it).
Of course, this doesn’t rule out the possibility that Jennifer TOLD Gregory that she fell from the sky… in that way giving Gregory the idea she was Joshua returned from heaven.
-
But wait, a letter from Jennifer to Joshua says “This man calls me Joshua, but my true name is Jennifer” or something like that. She doesn’t know who Joshua is, Later, Wendy gets the bear and tells Jennifer “let’s call him Joshua” and Jennifer doesn’t react at all, as if she didn’t know who Joshua was… so I’m pretty much confused right now
Neko Rheeid:
~
It is a letter from Jennifer to Wendy. It can be found in my blog-post “Document-based Time-line: Before Jennifer Arrived at the Orphanage” (see “Important Resources” in my website header):
I don’t know that we can say from this letter, or the others, that Jennifer doesn’t know that the name of Gregory’s son was Joshua. She doesn’t explain it in a letter, true, but she also doesn’t explain that she is not a boy—despite Wendy referring to her first as Joshua and then, in following letters, as Prince—and I doubt that we should take from that the idea that Jennifer doesn’t know that she (Jennifer) is a girl. The letters are all very brief. Perhaps too brief to be realistic, under the circumstances. Perhaps we can reasonably hypothesize that, in her dream, Jennifer remembers only certain parts of letters and other documents.
Assuming the basement became a “Sick Room” for Joshua, and not just a room Gregory used to keep kidnapped children in:
Perhaps Gregory laid the clothing out on the bed after his son died as a sort of memorial. As he started to lose his sanity, he started seeing the memorial as Joshua himself.
The bed in the basement is the only bed in the house, and the only bed he could rest in. It was probably the room he spent the last weeks of life in, and the room he died in. Many people keep memorials of their family members’ rooms.
But I can’t think of a reason why it would be in the basement. Perhaps Joshua became sensitive to light.
The clothing is nice dress clothing, not something a sick boy would wear to lay in bed all day, so it is probably not the clothing he died in.
Also, I find it telling that Jennifer’s greatest complaint is “He won’t let me leave.” If I were trapped for months with a corpse, the corpse would be my first complaint. It’s been said before, but I think it’s important to remember.
*Slight aside* Does anyone know how these letters were even passed? There are a million between Jennifer and Wendy and I highly doubt a mailman was about, or that Gregory went between his home and the Orphanage. It just seems curious to me that there was an open line of communication.
It’s possible that Gregory let Jennifer come out and play when he was home to look after her but to keep her from running away (or when she tried to run away) he would put her back in the basement.
If this is true, there are a million places Jen could hide letters to Wendy. Joshua’s Room, The mailbox outside, the window ledge to the basement. The places Wendy could have been in in the house are numerous.
When we see Wendy in The Gingerbread House, she appears at the basement window (Jen also refers to her in a letter as ‘my rescuer at the window’). It could be that Jennifer and Wendy wrote eachother lengthy letters (running under the assumption that Jennifer only remembers parts of the documents) and then passed them to eachother through the window. It would make sense that Wendy wouldn’t stay long for fear of getting caught, so they devised communicating with letters instead.
Oh, here’s a thought: what if the letters never actually existed? If they were just transposed into Jennifer’s memories as a way of processing their conversations? There are letters exchanged between the two when Jen is at the orphan, regarding Brown, that can be found in the OUAT chapter. If they were there together, would it make sense for the two of them to take the time to write out letters when they could just pull the other off to the side to chat?
Then again, it may be that they still did this for nostalgic purposes, regarding it as a sort of playful remembrance of when they first got to know eachother. Dunno, just throwing it out there.
I always believed that the clothing represented the dead body, myself. But I wonder, though… what if the clothing does represent a corpse, but it wasn’t there in the “real” world of the past?
I’m not good at explaining things like this, but… perhaps the clothes are there because Jennifer knows that something bad happened to Joshua. Jennifer knew he was dead in her time there, but probably didn’t know the details. So when she’s trying to remember her past, perhaps in her “dream” world she simply places his body – or rather, the clothing that represents his body – in the bed which belonged to him. Even if he died there a long time before, Jennifer is in a confused state and not quite remembering things correctly. With her memories twisted, the thought “Joshua is dead” or “Joshua died here” could quite easily be represented by that. It wouldn’t be the first time a straightforward memory would be represented by a seemingly abstract occurence.
The bit that tips me towards that theory the most is the part about her feeling pain in her chest, which – assuming she doesn’t have a heart condition – could mean that she knows deep down that this is a sad thing but doesn’t quite remember why.
The clothes would have to be a body. I thought maybe Gregory put them in bed in a sort of tucking in ritual but after the stray dog attack the yard is full of clothes. It may be symbolic of there being lifelessness.