i don’t really go much to outlast trials i’ve just been steadily learning things about it so my opinion does not hold the same weight as people who actually like, played the game and all, but it saddens me to see the kress twins not really receive the same hype as the other prime assets, reduced to either “ew, incest!” “yay, incest!” “ew, mean old bigots!” etcetc when they and especially arora are like HEARTBREAKINGLY interesting to me.
the gendered element between them, pushing up glasses about the biological impossibility of opposite sex conjoined twins aside, is so deeply telling. i see people say it’s just shock value/not that deep/whatever but i think it’s very pointedly important the fact that otto is the one who is mostly “whole”, he has two legs to walk on and the normal amount of limbs and he can still eat and run and perform normal bodily functions - while his sister grows out of his back like a tumor, starving herself to not inconvenience him, he has the luxury of getting to be a scary hefty brute and weaponize his “ugliness”, arora has two left hands and can only really be jostled along, never facing forward. he gets relatively normal clothes, while arora’s body doesn’t even grant her privacy, she’s too misshapen and thin for her dress to do more than hang off of her, her most private body parts are practically always on display, her life is one of such extreme humiliation that she can only twist into a superiority complex to stave off the suicidal thoughts, (poorly so, if how often she brings them up is any indicator)
and with the amount of social commentary in trials i do believe this is 1000x intentional. this isn’t to say otto doesn’t suffer the ableism and mistreatment too, of course he does, but he is if nothing else granted the fact that if you put a curtain over arora he would look mostly “normal”, something they both desperately try not to think about judging by their insistent use of “we”, their belief that they are whole and it’s the rest of the world that’s in halves, and their disgust with franco’s act of incest as if their shared body is some justification for it on their part.
arora wants to die and otto flatters her otherwise, tries to cheer her up because she’s all he has, their life has been one of being told they’re mistakes, miscarriages, attempts to “fix” them by their father who likely never would have loved them regardless - their incest is much more imo than just symbolism for their rich-family-superiority-complexes but that superiority complex is still very much there: they delude themselves with grandeur to give their mistreatment by the rest of the world meaning, they both have been forced to stay in the shadows even in their successful political work, but arora cannot delude herself as much as otto can. because otto is the luckier one - he’s the husband and she’s the wife. he’s the man and she’s the appendage. he wears a full suit while her dress dangles off of her and doesn’t even cover her sex organs that otto could hypothetically access whenever he wanted.
and like, i don’t think otto is necessarily the Evil Aggressor To Blame For Everything Ever of their dynamic, ultimately their suffering is shared and that’s kind of the point of their character, but i think the gap between them (gender, body types, etc) despite their… closeness is still really interesting. it’s the kind of unspoken privilege and injustice that the outlast games are about, which, as an aside, for the series that extremely pointedly had zero women in it for o1 and had them mostly as manpain for o2 (much as i like o2), is a pleasant surprise lol!
i do get the feeling red barrels kinda got the wrong idea of what led to the breakout popularity of characters like eddie gluskin, that being gratuitousness and pushing the envelope, but if nothing else trials seems to know what it’s trying to say with and about the gratuitousness, whereas there are… many arguments on the internet about whether or not outlast 2 accomplished that (again: i like that game but hoo boy). accepting the inherent absurdity of things like a dead baby pit by going more into black comedy/desensitization while still treating the overt sexual horror they’ve leaned more into over the games with thought and intention plus a heaping spoonful of social commentary feels like a nice middle ground. but again take that with a grain of salt as i don’t go here much.
…all of this to say: the kress twins still make me sad. Never think about old people worst mistake of my life