Lily was Stella and now she isn't and I'm upset
I'm not crazy, I know for a FACT that Lily Lovebraids IS Stella Greyber and that Mob only created Ms. Gracie at the last minute. Let's go through the evidence.
Chapter 5 is where we'll start. Stella is nowhere in chapter 5. She doesn't get a tape despite being one of the few characters who has gotten one since chapter 1, she has no notes, she doesn't even get a mention of any kind. There's one document written by PW talking about all the people who have committed crimes at Playtime, she isn't on it. That could be down to the ARG which I'm getting to, but the fact is that Stella isn't just a background character this time around, it's like she never even existed.
But who does get a lot of screentime? Ms. Gracie. Gracie got so much time in this chapter, multiple tapes, multiple videos of her, multiple notes, we were swimming in Gracie lore. However, this is just uncharacteristic of Mob, to introduce a brand new human character and then bombard us with lore for that character. Sawyer was built up slowly over years in ARGs, PjPt tapes, and a chapter 3 tape before he appeared in chapter 4. PW made his debut in the Orientation Notebook long before he returned for chapter 5's ARG. Eddie, who is also a very old character, debuting in chapter 2's ARG, had almost no content on him until chapter 4. Every human character in this series is only given a limited amount of time to shine, the content for them is very spread out, so for the writers to bring in a totally new human character, and just dump info on us like this, it doesn't feel very much like Mob.
Now, the ARG. There are two key takeaways from the chapter 5 ARG. The first is that Stella was involved, and likely the main actor in freeing the toys and allowing The Hour of Joy to take place. The second is that PW, also involved with this plot, was spared by The Prototype because of his helping the escape. For this help, The Prototype turned Preston into a toy and said, "I'm so glad you were there when I needed you, Preston. Now, I can be there for you, always."
Couple these points together, and the logical conclusion is that Stella, who helped The Prototype escape, was then rewarded by being turned into a toy. He then, likely, vowed to take care of her needs.
Now let's reference a note that The Prototype wrote about Lily. In Observation: Lily, The Prototype says that, "She has been provided only the bare minimum of food, water, etc. [...] I have moved her."
Here he is being far, far harsher towards Lily than he was Preston, but I think the treatment is understandable considering that Preston was just another scientist, while Lily directly conducted conditioning of the experiments and, as I theorize, was one of the Heads of the company. The fact he is keeping her alive despite holding her in contempt speaks that, at least originally, there was a bargain between The Prototype and Lily that he isn't breaking, despite Lily having suffered ego death. He still continues to take care of her, provide her sustenance, allow her to exist in his prescience which, if she weren't important and was always antagonistic towards him as a human, I just don't believe him doing. The Prototype has killed people for far less than just opposing him.
Let me now give a brief rundown of Stella and why Ms. Gracie is basically just an aspect of her that was spun-off. In her very first tape, Stella talks about wanting to be young and energetic forever. She says childhood is magical and that she wishes she were still a child and couldn't get older. Now look at Lily, she's fun, energetic, but developmentally stunted on purpose. She can't really age or change, and she's stuck in this fake world of childish playthings. I can't think of a more perfect ending to Stella's story, she got what she wanted, what she sacrificed so many other lives for, and she barely gets to enjoy it because Stella died years ago under the same conditioning she subjected the children to.
Speaking of, Stella's Gamestation appearance has the exact same infantilizing tone and energy as Gracie's tapes. Overly friendly and treating the oddities around them as totally normal. The way the characters introduce themselves and talk to the kids is the exact same. It really feels like they had Stella fill the role of conditioning the experiments, but for some reason during 5's development, swapped her out for an identical copy.
Even more strange parallels:
-Lily is much older than the other chapter 5 characters, being created at least before Isacx's and the rest of the original team left the studio, while everyone else was invented afterwards
-Stella's name is Latin for star, which Lily and her dollhouse are covered with, and the writers have proven with the cases of Marie, Theo and Ollie that they love nominative determinism
Further, there are actually fragments of an older version of Lily's story still in the game, one even older than the story I'm attempted to reconstruct. Lily is first mentioned in the Orientation Notebook as Experiment 1467. We only know about her from the calendar. To quote, "March 06 | Scheduled Labs for Experiment #1467 Can never remember these darn numbers."
Then, in chapter 5 itself we get a document that says Lily is Experiment 1468, and that she was created by the company. She's already acting crazy, despite everything else in that chapter stating plainly that Lily was created by The Prototype as a means of punishing her. I believe this note was left in by complete accident then.
That means we have 2 scrapped story-lines where Lily was, very likely, Stella Greyber.
This first one is more fanfiction but, presumably, Stella would've become a problem after the Hartmann Incident where she started to really consider her actions and how terrible they were. She would attempt to step out of line, only for Leith to make an example out of her as he did with Sawyer. I always found it weird her, in chapter 3 Stella is freaking out and trying to hide what's going on from the Hartmanns, because that would be the only reason she isn't giving a straight answer or calling the management for one. But then in 4 we learn that she only found out about the BBI after this event? That doesn't sit right personally. So I think what was meant to happen instead is that Leith experiments on her and deliberately destroys Stella's mind so she can't rat him out. In this version Stella is just one of the toys since she was in the same boat.
The second one is far closer to what we got, it's basically the Mob canon. Stella becomes distressed with what she was doing, notably also including creating conditioning tapes. She then helps The Prototype escape, and while he is grateful for this help, he can't let her go unpunished. So, after The Hour, the toys kidnap Stella, The Prototype turns her into Lily, destroys her mind, and continues to take care of her but keeping her isolated. Literally just what we see in-game, but replace every mention of Gracie with Stella.
Now, why did Mob even make this change? Well I think it's because fans were already predicting this would happen for a long time. Stella being turned into a toy is a very old theory. Game Theory's first video on this game makes the assertion that Stella became Poppy, and I'd wager a guess that this is where the idea for Lily even came from, since Poppy and Lily have a lot of deliberate parallels and a rivalry in-game, but that's a different discussion.
So, Mob probably did for a long while want to take Stella in this direction. They created a toy for her back when the original writers were still on and included her in the Orientation Notebook. They were probably going to keep it this way, but after Lily was officially revealed through Trademarkia, people started to guess again and this time they were correct. So, I guess in an attempt to get on over on people, they just spun the character off, and did it sloppily. They just replaced one characters name with another, and then called it a day, and that just upsets me a lot.
