Rule of Rose Mysteries

If you go into the Freezing Compartment, in the “Goat Sisters” chapter of Rule of Rose, and then make Jennifer stand near the shelves, and then change the camera angle, you can read the name “Fletcher” as a company logo on boxes on the top shelf. This name isn’t very easy to read, because the name is formed by the spaces between the red and blue colors of each logo. I recommend that you have Jennifer stand in the corner on the left, nearest the door, to get the view that makes “Fletcher” the most readable.

As the game designers have provided us the opportunity to discover this name, we might well wonder if there is a significance to it. Could it be a clue of some sort?
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There is an infamous unused Rule of Rose scene that has long been a topic of argument and speculation among Rule of Rose fans. This scene has no soundtrack.

Some Rule of Rose fans, however, have written dialogue for the scene, and dubbed the scene for sound.

You can watch this dubbed, fan-fiction scene on YouTube at this link: Fan-fiction dub of unused Rule of Rose scene.
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Behind the snowman in the Freezing Compartment, there is a noosed rope hanging. If you go as far as possible into the left corner at the back of the Freezing Compartment, and change the camera angle, you can more clearly see the structure that this noosed rope hangs down from. Two parallel uprights are connected by a horizontal beam that is lashed to them with rope. The noosed rope hangs down from this horizontal beam. Altogether, this structure forms a gallows similar to the type that can be seen in the animation of Sir Peter’s hanging at the beginning of the Sir Peter chapter of Rule of Rose (see it at the beginning of this YouTube video of the hanging… note that the uprights are connected by a horizontal beam that is lashed to them).

I think that the key to understanding the significance of the snowman can be found by relating it to this gallows that the snowman stands in front of.

I propose that the snowman, blindfolded and bound round with rope, represents a condemned prisoner about to be hanged.
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I wrote, in my Twentythird Month-iversary blog-post, that I expected to make a blog-post this month about the snowman that can be found in the Goat Sisters chapter of Rule of Rose.

The snowman can be found in the Freezing Compartment of the airship, and I decided to make a quick revisit to the Freezing Compartment, before writing up my theory, to make sure that I would describe the details of the scene accurately.

Scanning the scene, I noticed something that I had never noticed before. And suddenly everything that I thought I knew about the snowman changed. How did I miss this before? It is right out in the open in plain sight, and yet I had missed it. Surely somebody else must have seen this before now, I thought to myself. But if so, why has nobody ever made a comment about it on my blog, or on any Rule of Rose forum that I have ever frequented?
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As I mentioned in Part 1, I don’t think that the scene in the “Stray Dog and the Lying Princess” chapter of Rule of Rose, in which we see Gregory’s scars, is an accurate representation of of Jennifer’s forgotten past. In fact I think that most of that entire chapter is a falsehood that Jennifer has told herself. See my “Stray Dog Boss-Battle Mystery” blog-posts, linked to at the end of this blog-post, for more on that topic.

So, could it be that the scars that we see on Gregory were also a falsehood that Jennifer told herself about the massacre? And, if so, what sort of inner motivations might have led Jennifer to make up the falsehood that Gregory was scarred like that?

I propose that Jennifer loved Gregory (as a sort of father-substitute).

Jennifer surely must have kept it a secret that she had been kept in Gregory’s cellar all of those months, or he would have gotten in trouble for it. Jennifer wanted to protect Gregory.

Jennifer even declined Wendy’s offer to help her escape from the cellar, at first, because (as Jennifer explained to Wendy, in a letter):

…the man is so lonely, so sad. I can’t just leave him alone.

And in the “Once Upon A Time” chapter, Gregory is one of the only three that Jennifer cares enough about to want to see, in the flesh, before she leaves.

I think Jennifer loved Gregory, and I think that she may have believed that he loved her in return. So, I think, Jennifer was absolutely devastated by the idea (whether it was, in fact true, or not) that Gregory came to the orphanage to kill her. How could he possibly be willing to do that? The idea that two people that she had loved, Wendy and Gregory, had come for her to in order to kill her was an idea that Jennifer feared was true, and yet it was also an idea that Jennifer found to be too awful to bear.

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Those inclined to try to open every door while playing Rule of Rose may have found the number of locked doors to be rather tiresome. During the first airship chapter (“The Unlucky Clover Field”), in particular, one encounters many locked doors. If I remember correctly, behind the One Leaf Clover door, every single one of the many cabin doors is locked (although one can enter the lavatory and find Nicholas, after he has stopped being “a shadow”).

Is this pattern of locked doors in the story another connection to Alice in Wonderland?

Almost immediately as soon as Alice reached the bottom of the well down which she fell, she found herself in the following situation:

There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again.

Remind you at all of your experience with locked doors in the corridors behind the one-leaf clover door, and other corridors, in the “Unlucky Clover Field” chapter?

Coincidence? Or yet another connection between Rule of Rose and Alice in Wonderland?

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I have proposed that ropes, in Rule of Rose, may symbolize many different things, for example bonds of love (the restrictions of which may be sometimes resented), and bonds of fate (tying the orphans to their doom).

Now I want to propose an additional symbolic meaning: ropes as the psychological forces within Jennifer’s mind that suppress her memories.

The evidence for this comes from something told to Jennifer by a pair of scissors, the scissors that cut her bonds at the beginning of the “Unlucky Clover Field” chapter:

“No thanks necessary. No thanks necessary. You might have been better off being bound than free to feel pain. So scary!”

According to the scissors, cutting Jennifer’s bonds made her “free to feel pain.” What does this mean?

The cutting of Jennifer’s bonds allows her to start her task, assigned to her by Wendy-as-Prince-Joshua, of obtaining a gift-of-the-month. The the gift-of-the-month task, I propose, is actually only a pretense (in the dream-plot at least, if not in Jennifer’s forgotten past) that disguises Jennifer’s true task: the recovery of her memories. Wendy-as-Joshua makes this clear in between the “Unlucky Clover Field” chapter and the “Sir Peter” chapter when she says:

Well? Do you remember now what a bad girl you were? You haven’t gotten your memory back yet, have you? Well, you’ve really done many, many bad things. You’ll just have to remember them little by little! And when you fully remember what a bad girl you were, this game will end. Now, take your stupid dog and continue with our game, dear Jennifer.

See also my blog-post Bad Ending vs. Good Ending for more on the central importance of the recovery and acceptance of Jennifer’s memories.

So when the scissors tell Jennifer, “You might have been better off being bound than free to feel pain,” I think that the scissors are sending a message that pain will come with the recovery of Jennifer’s missing memories. And if so, the ropes that were cut seem to represent part of the psychological forces that have kept Jennifer’s painful memories bound up in her unconscious mind.
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Stray Dog can be seen in the drawing of the “Mermaid Princess” storybook associated with the text:

Before long, she was old and decrepit.

See the time 9:28 in the YouTube video linked to here, Mermaid Princess video, to view that page of the storybook.

In terms of the surface level story of the storybook, the story of a mermaid princess, Stray Dog seems very out of place among the mermaids at the bottom of the sea. Why is he there?

The reasons that have been coming to my mind as possible answers relate more to the pattern of the inclusion of Stray Dog in the Rule of Rose storybooks in general—he can be found in most of them—than to any specific involvement in the story of Clara. So I think I’ll write up most of those ideas in a separate blog-post focusing on that pattern, as those ideas will relate to more than just this particular storybook.

On this specific page of the “Mermaid Princess” storybook, Stray Dog’s presence might serve to help us associate the underwater scene with the orphanage world, thereby encouraging us to identify the mermaids swimming in the background as the girls of the Rose Garden Orphanage.

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The “Mermaid Princess” storybook continues:

Before long, she was old and decrepit.

Why should the mermaid that symbolizes Clara be spoken of as ever getting old and decrepit? Clara was only 16 years of age during the time that Jennifer is remembering in the Rule of Rose game.

Jennifer says, during the “Once Upon A Time” chapter:

I wonder if I’ll be like Clara when I’m older… Will I enjoy those days?”

Does the above question from Jennifer imply that Clara did not enjoy those days? Clara does not ever seem to me to be happy or playful in any scene of the game that we see her in. Does “old and decrepit” perhaps refer to Clara having lost her youthful outlook on life?

Why would it have been the case for Clara, that she would have lost her youthful outlook on life? I think that this is likely to relate Clara’s description in the Rule of Rose game as “the frightened princess”. I have written of some of the reasons that I think she was described that way in my blog-post: The Frightened Princess Mystery.

If Mr. Hoffman had sexual relations with Clara, this in itself might affect Clara’s mentality in an extreme way. Even more so, if the hypothesis is true that Clara had become pregnant and then had an abortion.
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There is no witch in the “Mermaid Princess” storybook. But there is a witch playing an important role in “The Little Mermaid” fairy tale, which the “Mermaid Princess” storybook seems to echo. And there are also some puzzling references, in the “Unlucky Clover Field” chapter of Rule of Rose, to the idea that Martha is a witch.

When Jennifer finds Martha’s hat in that chapter, we see the text:

The hat worn by Martha, who was accused of being a witch.

And later in the “Unlucky Clover Field” chapter of Rule of Rose, when Jennifer finds a dirty rag, the voice of Martha (her invisible ghost?) says:

I was a mighty witch. Yet now, I am but a powerless wretch. Rubbish and dust.

It isn’t at all clear why Martha should be depicted as a witch in the Rule of Rose game. Could it be that we are meant to associate Martha, in some manner, with the witch of “The Little Mermaid” fairytale? And if so, what might that association be meant to tell us about what happened in the orphanage during Jennifer’s forgotten past?
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