Why Basil isn’t “evil” or knowingly manipulative:
Warning: Major MAJOR Omori Spoilers Ahead
When people aren’t saying Sunny is a psychopath who deserves to be in jail, they’re saying Basil is an evil obsessive mastermind who tricked poor dissociating Sunny into defacing his sister’s corpse.
I’ve already explained before why I disagree with either interpretation but I haven’t gone in depth with Basil’s character. I’ll write about why I don’t think Basil is this dark yandere intentionally manipulating Sunny into dependance on him.
Basil is a tragic character with bad abandonment issues who legitimately wants to help the people he loves most. Unfortunately he also happens to have a broken “normalcy compass” (common in abused and/or neglected children). This means his well intentioned actions are often more harmful than helpful.
Aubrey says during a part of the real world segment that outside our main friend group, she’s always been an outcast. I think it’s no accident that we see in Sunny’s memories that she was the one who introduced Basil to the friend group, implying he’s also always been an outcast like her.
With Aubrey though, we can attribute her outcast status to things like living in the poorest neighborhood in Faraway town while also living in the visibly most worn-down house of said poor neighborhood.
Aubrey has a hoarding alcoholic mother that neglects her and a strict father (Aubrey casually mentions as a kid that her father is weirdly strict about her appearance) who ends up abandoning her anyway. Aubrey’s hot temper doesn’t help either and so even though she manages to be popular and well-loved among her hooligan friends, the rest of the town judges her harshly as if she’s at fault for her horrible life circumstances.
Then we have Basil. Basil’s economic circumstances are visibly better than Aubrey’s and he lives in a nice house surrounded by pretty flowers. Yet even with everything around him (even his appearance) looking so prim and cute, he’s still treated as an outcast.
We know that mentally ill children are way too often shunned by their peers and the adults surrounding them for being “weird” even though it’s not their fault that they have different brain chemistry. Without counting the bullying Aubrey carried out with her friends, Basil was already being ostracized by people outside the main friend group. In one of Sunny’s memories, Basil tells them that he’d always been alone before meeting them.
This lets us know that there’s always been “something” that’s made Basil unpopular with almost everyone. We see hints of why in the contrast between Dreamworld Basil and Real Basil. Whereas Dreamworld Basil is well-spoken, charismatic and cheerful, Real Basil is a nervous wreck that is prone to panic attacks and bouts of screaming. We could say he’s this way cus of what he did to Mari but from knowing Basil’s always been an unliked outcast, I get the feeling he’s not like this only from the Mari situation.
Then we have the probable root of his very obvious abandonment issues: Basil’s parents’ are completely absent save for some pictures in his home. Sunny himself has never seen Basil’s parents in person. Datamining apparently suggests his parents abandoned him when he was a toddler. To top it off, having a constantly ill and mostly unresponsive grandma as his only remaining family doesn’t help with his mental health issues at all, either. No wonder the kid’s clingy.
There’s also the caretaker at his house, who is introduced as Basil’s caretaker, not his sick grandmothers. Basil is at the age where he can legally emancipate himself yet we’re shown he still needs a caretaker to look after him. That Basil needs looking after kinda says to me that he has issues he can’t be left alone with.
So all these paragraphs were to explain the evidence that point to Basil likely being mentally ill since before Mari’s death. Now we get to the parts that make me think he’s been suffering from psychosis even as a kid.
12 year old Basil doesn’t seem capable of understanding the concept of Sunny being angry and accidentally shoving Mari down the stairs. He seems unable to consider the possibility that it was an argument between siblings just at the wrong place at the wrong time, as if that just can’t happen. To Basil, it HAS to be “Something” maliciously causing the incident and/or forcing Sunny to do it.
About the Mari incident and Basil’s fucked up idea: I think a lot of fans forget that first, not only was Basil a 12 year old kid back then (not even a teen yet) but also a lot of the reasoning behind many of Basil’s most important actions seems to be rooted in delusions he genuinely believes.
The same thing happens when the photo album was scribbled over: in his mind, there was no way any of his friends (*cough* Sunny) could have done this. It had to be the same “Something” attached both to him and Sunny that decided to ruin the photos. Basil doesn’t seem to remember doing anything to the album at all.
We could say all of this isn’t psychosis but metaphors for extreme denial instead, like the way Sunny decides things that remind him of The Truth don’t exist (like the closet door).
I don’t think this is all there is to it, tho.
Basil throughout the game tries to guide Sunny to the truth both in Headspace and that the time in his bathroom where he tries to talk to Sunny about the Something following them. Too afraid to hear him out, Sunny runs away instead while Basil screams for Sunny not to leave him again.
This shows imo that Basil’s brand of denial isn’t the same as Sunny’s. Sunny escapes into his own head and pretends everything involving the incident is either perpetually frozen in a time before anything bad happened or that it simply does not exist. He’s all about repression and suppression.
Basil on the other hand, acknowledges that the incident happened but he saw a Something committing the act instead of Sunny himself.
Then, the final battle against Basil confirms to me that Basil’s delusions and hallucinations go beyond denial of Sunny’s guilt.
Even when the truth is finally out in the open for the both of them, Basil still insists it’s “Something” that did everything. He attacks Sunny because he genuinely believes he is attacking Something evil and that this will protect Sunny from it. The most important detail to me: Basil slashes or gouges Sunny’s eye out specifically on the side where Somethings eye peeks out from Mari’s hair.
Saddest of all, we’re never shown if Basil ever managed to realize that there was never a monster doing everything. Although we are shown the burden of the secret is gone in that last scene between Sunny and Basil, we don’t know if Basil ever understood that Sunny wasn’t forced by any monster to kill Mari.
There’s more that can be said but this post already got long af lol. My conclusion is that Basil isn’t some evil yandere mastermind. He’s a sad wreck of a teenager who’s always struggled with mental illness, trying to do the best he can for those he loves while being plagued by nearly constant delusions and hallucinations.
Tricking his best friend/love interest isn’t part of Basil’s modus operandi when a lot of times he can barely tell what’s real and what isn’t.
sunny often gets lost when walking with his friends because they all talk to each other while he stays quiet and just gets distracted by random things, so the gang decides to always hold his hand when they go somewhere and he doesn't mind because it reminds him of when mari used to do it
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