Part 3: The Shadow of Andrew Graves
We don’t actually know a lot about Ashley’s backstory outside of her proximity to Andrew. There’s a lot we can infer based on what’s been said, and a good amount of context clues that gesture at severely traumatic events that shaped who she is, but going off of what we know for sure, Ashley was still a victim of extreme parental neglect, bullying from her peers, and ostracization from every social circle she ever tried to be a part of. She was always the weird one, the aggressive one, the one that excuses had to be made for, the one that had to be ignored. She was the embarrassment, and had all responsibility for raising her hoisted upon her brother.
So, naturally, he became her entire world. Her friend, her father, her protector, her _____. You may have noticed that every time someone tried to describe what Andrew was to Ashley, she responded with confusion. No one word was ever enough, aside from Andy. The nature of Ashley’s trauma was, fundamentally, not that different from what Andrew was subjected to, except rather than having expectations forced upon her, she was given none whatsoever. She was given absolutely no standards to live to or abide by, and never developed an independent sense of identity as a result.
With someone as repulsive as Ashley, what could one even expect? She had nothing to build an identity based off of except Andrew, because everyone else pushed her away. And given she kept experiencing social ostracization and loss, it makes a lot of sense that she developed a complex about it. For whatever reason, she began to obsessively value signs of dedication and commitment, and vows and promises that she could hold people to. Or, perhaps, rules, given her general appreciation for games.
She also needed Andy’s love for her to be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, and Andy being Andy, we all know where that led to: the death of Nina. People chronically underestimate how smart Leyley really is, because she knew exactly what to do when she found out Nina died. While this may surprise some of you, Ashley has an intimate understanding of the value of life; we can see this in the scenes where she said to the Entity that she tried to raise and nurture plants (to no avail, which was upsetting to her), and she left a man alive that she would have otherwise sacrificed solely to take care of a guinea pig. So, unless her understanding of the value of life was developed after Nina died, in between Leyley and Ashley, she knew exactly how much leverage and power she had in this one moment. Andy had proved right there that he was just as bad as she was capable of being by virtue of his refusal to set boundaries and hold her accountable (which is flawed logic but the girl was never normal to begin with), and that the two weren’t really that different. And like the demon child she was, she used that to bind him to her. Forever.
But Andy also seemed to understand the power vows held over her, and turned the whole situation on her with a blood oath, making her swear to secrecy while Andy- seemingly- didn’t have to give up much. Maybe their grandfather was right; maybe he should’ve tried to become a lawyer, especially given his performance with the Entity. This blood oath significantly weakened the power Leyley felt she had over Andy, because the closest thing to morality that she adhered to is based on these vows and agreements (and her general care for small and vulnerable creatures, apparently). And then she blabbed to Renee, breaking her vow to Andy. But we see something really interesting in this scene that caught my attention like nothing else: Intense, overwhelming guilt.
Leyley broke the one moral standard she ever held- her word. It crushed her. And soul colors are dependent on one’s own morality, right?
If there was a time for her to become a tar soul, this was it.
Going by the moral rules of the story, this is the worst she ever was. And it was as a child. While before, she could’ve had at least some standard to hold herself to, now she had nothing left. Everything was fair game, as much as she didn’t want to accept it. But now you get the mirror of Andy’s own personality and the traumas that were enforced upon him: Her sense of self was irrevocably fused with Andy’s own. They were the same person, after all. Two halves of a whole. Brother and sister, sharing a heart. And since Ashley could no longer be trusted to keep her word…
Since Leyley’s vows no longer held any value, neither did the vows of Andy.
It’s difficult to say that Ashley wouldn’t still hold deep distrust towards Andrew’s words if she didn’t break that vow, especially since she required Andy mistreating Nina to truly believe that he cared for her, but it’s likely that this incident cemented her tendency to hold such skepticism, as it effectively gave her permission (so to speak) to never grow past this deep insecurity. It’s likely she only broke the vow to begin with because she didn’t truly understand the value and meaning of promises and only ever knew words as something she could use to get an emotional reaction out of people. After all, Leyley tried to confess to Andy that she broke the vow but he slept through it. Either through accident or disregard, she never had anyone hold her accountable for the worst things she ever did.
It’s not like Andy is the only victim of her tendency to disregard the importance of words, mind, just the one who suffers the most from it because he’s the only one who cares. The story says a lot about how people are what they see in others, after all, which was explicitly shown with Renee (f. ex, her not believing that Andrew would ever want to keep Ashley around outside of the sexual value Ashley provided to him, and her correctly identifying that Ashley was playing a game with the massage parlor job yet misidentifying who she was playing the game towards and the intent behind it), as well as Andrew projecting himself on Douglas by thinking he’s a doormat that Renee pushes around, when in reality, Renee and Douglas had an equal partnership with mutual respect.
But either way, this breaking of a vow she signed through blood was what doomed their relationship (at least for now). From here on, no promise would be enough. No words would ever soothe her insecurities, and no action would ever mean as much to her as the death of Nina. Perhaps this is why she’s so stuck in the past, or at least part of it; the death of Nina and the promises made around it were the last time an action mattered to her. There might’ve been (faint) hope before, but that was gone now.
Basically, she learned that ‘Promises don’t mean shit unless they come at the expense of someone else’ and had that reinforced at every possible opportunity. Y’know, just hot girl shit. Also a mindset that leads to deep and horrific abuse! After all, the blood which someone uses to sign an agreement has to come from somewhere. Damn you, Andy, for never holding her accountable!
Wait, you mean that every time you did something other than try to placate her (or as some might say, ‘solve the inherent problem of her existence’), you endured intense abuse from your mom? Wow, it’s almost like there was no solving this problem and it’s unfair to hold either of you responsible.
But without anyone else to guide her, anyone else to make themselves matter to her, and combined with her general approach to promises as ‘that which must come at the expense of someone else’, Ashley ended up manifesting the more toxic half of their codependent traits. You see, Andrew was her world. He was her everything, her _____. And Ashley could see that. She could see that his interactions with everyone else were empty by comparison, that he, on some level, enjoyed his interactions with her. They played games, went on adventures, made each other laugh. They shared something with each other that nobody could ever have.
And maybe she was right, but she never gave him a chance to develop anything else, because she implicitly assumed that this would come at her expense. And with Andrew being her everything, maybe she was right there, too. We see this most clearly in her calls towards Julia (where she asserts her own value and how she’s uniquely special to Andrew), but I believe that bits and pieces of this tendency leaked out elsewhere. Because they were one unit- one person- and not distinct from each other, everything she did was for him. The things that made her happy were supposed to make him happy. Every action of her’s was directed towards him, and every game they played was zero-sum. She had to win, because winning was the status quo. And it was the status quo because he always (as far as we can see) let her win. This is why I said that her tendency towards treating life as a game was not something she had to do. It came from her rejecting a change of the status quo.
But sometimes Andrew acts so outrageously different to her perceived status quo that it forces her to acknowledge it. We see this in Burial when he calmly dismembers the parents, as the lack of Andrew being whiny and annoying over it is nothing like anything she’s seen before. We don’t see the results of this as the episode has yet to be released, mind, but it still shows her having to self-reflect, and in the Sane route vision we see her actually displaying a willingness to let him go (whether it be metaphorical or literal). I believe the moment in Decay where this change in status quo is understood is the murder-suicide vision, but it doesn’t really start to come across until Andrew slaps her; something he had never done before.
For much of the chapter (in the cliffhanger route; I’ve been conspicuously ignoring 3B in this analysis so far for a reason), Ashley uses every tool in her arsenal to try to either enforce the status quo or feel out its differences. All of them either fail to enforce it, or fail to inform her of the differences, which causes her great anxiety! But in this anxiety we see more reflection from her than we’ve ever seen before, ESPECIALLY in this one scene:
"Honest! He's my big brother. He only exists to keep me safe and happy..!"
"Though I mean-... he did smack me in the car..."
"But then again, I kinda asked for it..." (which is abuse victim logic, but damn it, she’s trying)
"Oh, and I guess he did kinda choke me, but that was after I assaulted him."
The troubling wording she’s using to describe this aside, I really want to emphasize how big of a deal this is. For the first time, maybe ever, Ashley is actually starting to try to understand the responsibility she has in making situations turn out the way they are. In her own fucked up, codependent, mentally ill way, she’s actually taking some accountability for how their relationship turns out. She’s actually reflecting on what she could be doing better that isn’t just her trying to bulldoze her way through a situation. And, moreover, she’s the first of the two who takes this kind of accountability.
Andrew wouldn’t recognize this for what this is. I mean, how could he? It takes the form of the same shit they’ve done all along. He doesn’t understand the difference. But it is different, going off of what she says when she’s away from him. And without Andrew there- with her only speaking to the Entity- Andrew can’t do what he normally does and take all responsibility away from her. He can’t make excuses for it, can’t make her feel better, and most importantly, can’t put her on the defensive by failing to understand the ways in which she communicates.
Now, the fact that she’s the first doesn’t quite matter as much, because just one scene later, thanks to Lord Unknown, Andrew starts to do the same when he reflects upon the ways in which he could’ve been better for her independently of her input. But as one with a deeply codependent relationship and lack of an independent sense of self does, it still takes the form of something that’s concerning at an outside glance;
"(Did that fuck her up? If it did, I didn't mean to.)"
"(If it did, I'm sorry.....)"
You don’t need to apologize for that, buddy, but you’re still taking important steps in understanding the effect you really have on her. And best of all, Ashley isn’t here to enforce this incorrectly-assigned blame and kneecap your incentive to dig deeper to discover the root of your issues.
I’m proud of you! I’m proud of both of you!
"If everything hadn't been so screwed up from the start, I know I wouldn't have ever come to see her that way."
Uh, well, both of you still have some work to do, but you’re trying.
The last time they were apart, the both of them only got worse, but it’s hard to not reflect upon yourself in a meaningful way in the presence of demons whose abilities force you to confront reality. This is why, in spite of the fact that their arguments are more vicious and genuine physical violence has been brought to the table, my takeaway from 3A was nothing but optimistic. Because, as Andrew said, the two of them are paradoxically closer than ever.
Because, not once, did the two of them ever consider that they should be apart.
But what happens when they make that horrible mistake?
Part 4: Beyond The Beaten Path
When Ashley chooses to shoot Andrew in her dream, their fate is sealed.
One thing I haven’t mentioned much yet is the role of dehumanization in analyzing their relationship. It’s something that’s present in every route, but I believe it’s key to understanding why things go poorly in 3B. The unfortunate consequence of their codependent relationship and their inexorably linked senses of self is that they don’t view the other person as a person. Specifically, both of them view the other as their child selves, someone lacking agency who must be taken responsibility for. This is not a problem one of them has more than the other; it’s something they possess and impose upon the other in equal measure. They both reject parts of the other that are key to their growth, that must be accepted and nurtured in order for them to move forward.
In 3B, Ashley actually meant the words she said to the Entity, that she didn’t know why she kept him around. And as such, she had no trouble shooting Andrew in the dream. She quickly learned it was a horrible mistake, but that doesn’t change what she felt in that moment: That Andrew was still Andy. A waste of ‘all of her’. A child. Someone she must carry around, like a burden. Someone she has to do all the heavy lifting for. Someone she could theoretically function without. And that’s why she roasts the camper to eat him; she has to carry along his dead weight.
If he refuses to assert himself as Andrew, Ashley ends up being correct, and he becomes nothing but a toy to play with.
But if he does, if she’s wrong, then that’s it. That’s the final straw. He’s terrified that their life will end thanks to either the Entity or the police, and even though they end up safe, something snaps within him. Because he doesn’t understand how Ashley communicates, because she dehumanizes him and reduces him to nothing but a small child that can’t take care of himself, they can’t reconcile their differences. Ashley always does the opposite of what he wants, right? She puts them in danger for no reason. There’s no way she’d have a good reason to roast the camper that isn’t just her not taking the situation seriously and playing her silly little games that she gets a kick out of.
And maybe, in any other circumstance, he’d be right.
But he makes the same mistake he accuses her of; he’s unable to take her seriously, unable to see the reason for her actions, and unable to give her the benefit of the doubt. And he refuses to listen to any reasons she might provide, just like he accuses her of never listening. And because she would never do what it takes to keep the two of them safe, because they’re going to die anyway, and because the two of them deserve it anyways because of every awful thing they’ve done, it might as well be him who does it.
She’s always been his responsibility, after all.
In the following scene, nothing Ashley says matters to him, because the point of no return has already been crossed. They’ve refused to make things better every step of the way, and he can’t trust her to ever try to do the same in the ways he’s seen himself as doing for both of them. Because he knows better than her, always. She’s Leyley. She’s a shrieky, whiny bitch that always puts both of them in danger, and could never be anything else.
That’s the true tragedy of this route. Every step of the way, the two of them have refused to see and acknowledge each other. Not once did they make an attempt to understand the other, because they can only ever understand the ways in which they themselves would act.
If he catches and kills her, he tries one final time to assume their old dynamic, and act out the parts of her that he actually enjoyed. But he tells himself that Ashley has always been Leyley, the one he wanted to rid himself of all along. He promptly kills himself because, without her, without the light in his life that gave it meaning, nothing matters anymore.
But if he doesn’t catch her, she pulls her gun on him.
"Fucker, you think I won't shoot my own brother??"
"Go for it. But be sure to shoot yourself right after."
Andrew wants the two of them to die together, and Ashley keeps insisting that she could live without him. That he’s nothing to her. That she can live on her own. But she knows otherwise, and is unable to shoot him no matter what, as she realizes all too late that she is nothing without Andrew. But Andrew knew the truth all along:
He is her everything, and without him, life isn’t worth living.
She is his everything, and with her, life isn’t worth living.
Andrew casting aside the role of protector and trying to kill Ashley is what results in him becoming a tar soul-to-be, because he cast aside the one moral obligation he ever held himself to. But he’s still a spineless idiot that can only solve problems through violence, no matter how dark his soul is.
If Ashley does manage to survive- at the expense of her anything- she realizes too late that Andrew actually did mean something to her, beyond a toy for her to play with. If she has this realization at ANY point before, it manages to avert this outcome. That’s why 3B is so depressing; All it took was one tiny bit of understanding to irrevocably change the future for the better. It takes so little encouragement and acknowledgement of the other person for any kind of healing to begin. But without it, all they can do is hurt each other, because the two of them are too dependent on each other to actually separate. Without the other, they only get worse.
This reflects the painfully real-life nature of many such toxic, codependent relationships. Two people who cannot see eye-to-eye, who cannot ever understand or acknowledge the feelings of the other. They can never feel what the other person feels, only make excuses and tighten their grip while both sink into despair and/or violence. And they can never see themselves escaping, because the world without the other is too painful to handle.
That’s why their playful ribbing of each other outside this route is so important. All else aside, they need to know that the other person isn’t trying to hurt them in a way that matters, that they understand SOME rules of engagement that their relationship operates under. But the moment Andrew tries to kill Ashley, that goes out the window. Without some kind of implicit assumption that Andrew isn’t going to try to hurt her on purpose, she has to control him at all costs. But because she can’t live without him, even when the Entity demands it of her, the only real option she sees is to chain him to a radiator inside of an apartment.
Really, choosing to do anything else would’ve been a better call, because giving Andrew time away from his body cools him down and causes him to lose his desire to kill her. Allowing him freedom, as dumb as it might seem, might’ve actually given him room to breathe and reconsider the best course of action, but Ashley could never understand that Andrew would never actually leave her.
She doesn’t even understand why he tried to kill her, after all! Once more, the diametrically opposed ways in which the two understand communication, as well as their refusal (or inability to, at this point) to understand the other stop them from actually being able to improve things. But they already passed the point of making good decisions with relation to each other, because both of them are too obsessed and afraid to ever leave or risk letting the other go.
In this route, their dynamic takes an interesting turn. Throughout the whole situation, Ashley is the one that holds the most material power in between the two. Between the chain (at first), and the trinket, she doesn’t have any reason to be afraid of him. Indeed, the visions of the trinket cause her to throw away the frying pan that would’ve been used to kill her, showing the trinket allows her to deprive Andrew of a lot of power he could hold over the situation. There’s also the implicit power that comes with the fact that Andrew would never, ever leave her, but her being unable to accept this is half the problem.
But despite her holding most of the power, she also puts forth more effort into trying to understand what’s going on and what’s changed between them, whereas Andrew insists on trying to express himself and make his opinion known. The kiss scene above is a great example of this; he kisses her by surprise, so she knows what smoking is like. He’s trying to forcibly impart his perspective and understanding of who he is on to her, and she doesn’t enjoy it very much.
The kiss she gives him in response, however, is likely her weird way of trying to make him happy. Given her reaction of confusion to him pulling away, I believe it’s her making an attempt at understanding the effective language he’s speaking. ‘If he kissed me, is that something he likes? Would it make him happy?’
But Andrew, still, doesn’t allow himself to enjoy it, because he’s still holding on to what little moral center he has left. It’s to the point where being reminded that Ashley is his little sister immediately causes him to go soft. He could never allow himself to take advantage of his sister, because he raised her (poorly), provided for her, took care of her, and obviously has a lot of power over her. As someone who has always thought of his own sexual desires as inherently harmful, fully giving in to them for someone’s sake other than her own would be crossing a point he had always promised himself he never would.
After all, he could never acknowledge her as an adult, with her own agency, and her own desires.
Not to say having sex with her is a morally correct decision (if you actually read anything I’ve said in this essay as me making a moral claim one way or the other, then I don’t know what to say), obviously, but his reasons for not doing so entirely come down to him refusing to accept her as her own person. Whether or not you or I think he’s morally right, he’s right for reasons that exacerbate the problems that already existed between them. Because Ashley is an adult. She can make her own decisions. She does have her own desires (as repressed and ill-defined as they are), and she IS Ashley. She’s not Leyley, and hasn’t been for a long time.
Ashley is fully aware of what sex is, what it does to people, and what it means. Andrew’s accusation of her not appreciating symbolic gestures was wrong.
Leyley is a person who doesn’t exist anymore. She DOES know better, and she COULD do better, if she was given the space and patience to learn. But in this route, neither of them give each other any space, and the point of no return has been crossed. Ashley sees Andrew as a violent, abusive monster who could kill her at any time, informs him of this fact many times throughout this route (whether she’s actually afraid of him or not or just using the accusation as leverage), and takes even the smallest indication that she’s right.
And whether he’s Andrew or Andy, he’s resolved to be whatever Ashley wants him to be.
Cue the most painful 20-30 minutes of a game I’ve ever experienced.
Andrew beating Ashley and the subsequent scenes represent the absolute lowest point of their relationship. Violence is something he’s already thought of exerting against the Leyley that existed in his mind. He wants that side of her dead. And he doesn’t enjoy it at all, so it doesn’t tick the same boxes that having sex with her would. He can no longer force himself to disengage to avoid conflict, because he passed that point the moment he tried to kill her. That was it, something needed to be done. He needed to finish it this time, so he could have a normal life-
And yet, he doesn’t. He can’t. He shouldn’t.
He can’t live without her, no matter how much he hurts her. But this isn’t him growing a spine, this is a short term solution to a problem that he’s never been willing to tackle. Andrew wants to keep Ashley in line, like he did as a child, but he’s an adult now, and so his methods must change. Violence works, it causes her aggression to calm down, but it causes no long term change, because it brings her back to the same sobbing wreck she always was. Her response to violence or the threat of such has always been to desperately try to placate him, after all.
But this is no solution, this is sweeping the problem under the rug.
And with a refusal to change comes Ashley’s response, and Andrew’s refusal to accept her agency as an adult comes back to bite him. With intimacy and sex seen as something that Andrew doesn’t enjoy, she can only fall back on it as a means of control. To ruin him for other people. This is her projecting her attitudes towards sex on Andrew, because there’s no reason to believe he’d even care about this, and yet he does.She tries to ruin him, to bind him to her, and takes advantage of him while he’s drunk.
Andrew now belongs to Ashley, once and for all, and Andrew can’t even attempt to help her unpack it because he’s unable to
He nominally tries to pin the blame on Ashley, but he still takes full responsibility for it in his own mind, as his soul burns to charcoal. They acted in the worst possible ways to each other, all because they were unwilling to accept and understand the other.
Andrew couldn’t accept the unpleasant parts of Ashley as anything other than a burden. Ashley couldn’t accept that Andrew had grown up, and responded in turn. And through refusing to understand the other, they had no chance of understanding themselves.
There is so much more about Decay I could outline. The dream symbolism, the ways in which other relationships compare to Andrew and Ashley, and how parallels are drawn. I could point out how Andrew’s dream sequence involves him playing with a Julia plushie in the same way Ashley conceptualizes Andrew as a toy, and how the maze sequence symbolizes artfully dodging Ashley knowing that that’s what he’s doing. And I will at some point in the future, maybe, especially if this essay inspires enough discourse to change my views on some matters! But I have to end this essay somewhere, so instead I’ll end with my take on the two endings of 3B.
Both endings are the result of one of the two siblings ceding to the desires and perspective of the other. They’re one last show of care to the other, to either guarantee a future, or an end. But neither of them have any chance of happiness anymore; they’re simply too far gone for that.
In Shots and Such, the ‘ending’ of the route, the wedding ring they found serves as something that can bind them together. Back when they were teenagers, Ashley showed an interest in marriage. The idea of it was important to her, and he remembers. And so, Andrew extends this one final symbolic gesture towards her, showing one final time that he could’ve extended that understanding to her all along. He could’ve accepted that symbolic gestures were important to her, even though they were communicated differently than he was willing to try to understand.
And so they live a miserable, awful life together, inflicting violent abuse and not resolving a single one of their issues. But they’re together and alive, right back where they started.
They could’ve been different, but at least they’re alive.
The second one, Splat, is caused by Andrew reaching the end of his rope, without anything he can use as leverage for a vow. He draws a gun on Ashley and tries to get her to leave him alone, but she’s unable to do that. They’re simply too intertwined, and she cannot imagine a future without him. So she remembers the one thing she knows he spoke of that made him happy, that’d show him she cared:
Jumping off the balcony together. And with that, their dynamic flips.
Ashley has become Andy- apprehensive and afraid, but Andrew has become Leyley- driven and enthusiastic. Andrew offers to traumatize some school children, but it’s notable that Ashley is the one that resists the idea, further emphasizing how they’ve flipped. Now she’s the moral conscience, as weak and flimsy as it is.
And so they jump, with Andrew laughing on the way down, and Ashley burying her face into Andrew’s chest, looking afraid.
They hit the ground, together forever, serving as the perfect punchline to their lives. Just like their lives, their deaths were both hilarious and crushingly depressing.
And here we are, at the crux of why I found Decay- 3B specifically- so crushing.
The two of them are the same. They’re mirrors of each other, reflecting each other’s tendencies in a different light. But because they are each other’s shadows, they see in each other that which they cannot forgive in themselves. But even with that in mind, even with all the hate they had towards themselves and each other, even when both of them were too far gone to change, they could still bring themselves to put forth one final display of understanding towards their other.
If they can do that at their worst, when they’ve inflicted unforgivable crimes to the other…
They never had an excuse not to try.
