Yes I have a question thats been on my mind since last night. I binge watched 2h32's entire channel and idk if you know this or not, but who exactly is the main character? I know it's P but the "victim" in all this- "I know the pieces fit, Cause I watched them fall away" but I cant exactly find the core of it. From what I gathered the "victim" was
Captured, tortured, killed, shoved into the burlap sack, dropped into the well, and then reborn/made into a demon/monster
But who is it? I thought it was P but during 'Opera' you can see his glowing eye. So maybe it's Doppelganger? Or the headless guy with the mannequin feet? Because maybe his feet were chopped off when he was captured?
So do you have any Theories or know who they are?
Hey there! This is probably gonna be a really long answer; it’s been a hot minute since I’ve been given an excuse to talk/theorize about 2h32 so please bear with me!
This same question really stumped me when I first got into the series because it seemed like the answer was constantly changing. There are plenty of monsters that we see in addition to P, but how many are different characters/entities, and how many are just P in different forms or costumes (he does call himself the Conductor, and he does love his theatrics)? P’s look has been pretty consistent in the more recent videos where he appears, but what about the older ones? What about the humans we see getting captured and killed?
It also doesn’t help that while there is a story to 2h32, the videos are uploaded out of order so the story beats are all scrambled, at least at the beginning. In more recent videos like “Doppelgänger”, we see the monsters–including P–prowling around a house instead of the woods, attacking humans. But P, at least as we know him now, was never directly seen in the earlier videos. So where exactly did he come from?
At one point on the channel, there was a video called “The Fallen Conductor”. It was five minutes long and actually gave an explanation/told the story of the events that had happened up until “Exeunt”. That video has since gone missing, either deleted or hidden very, very well somewhere else, but I had copied and saved the transcript of the video long before it was removed so I could go back and reference the story without having to rewatch the video each time.
Here’s what “The Fallen Conductor” told us:
Several monsters already existed prior to the start of 2h32. And it seems like P and the monsters struck up a sort of mutual agreement at the start of the series.
“It’s the story of a broken man to whom we offered our help. We invited him over on our side with promises of a new life.”
This then results in P going into the woods, being found by one of the monsters, and essentially being killed and reborn via the whole process of the burlap sack and the well. P becomes one of the monsters, and the narrator in “Fallen Conductor” explains that “With his new nature, came new cravings. His new body was in a constant state of change; He always needed more and more corpses to mend his rotting flesh”
So P starts hunting humans, as we see in videos like “Opera”, “Ode”, and “Ensemble” . It also explains why we see so many different monsters hunting humans, or so many different forms of P conducting his hunts (at least in my opinion; I think some of the monsters in the earlier videos are just different forms of P as he adjusted to his new body and was constantly “mending it” with parts from corpses. And again, he loves his theatrics). Maybe part of the reason we see the recurring images of chains and bodies in burlap sacks is because that’s one of the methods P uses to hunt and capture victims, mirroring his own death in a way (but that could also be me overthinking things).
I’m pretty positive that the Doppelgänger and the Maestro (headless guy with mannequin feet) are two different characters that are separate from P. It is possible that, much like P, they were previous victims of the monsters at one point as well, before becoming monsters themselves. Thus bringing in a whole cycle of victim-to-monster where some humans are killed and reborn, while others are killed outright in order to feed the monsters and mend their bodies.
So yes, as we know by now, P, or the Conductor, is the main character here. He was also a victim of the monsters at one point, albeit a willing one, where they agreed to turn him into one of them as a “promise of a new life”. And through P’s quest for an audience, we get to see both his transformation as well as his hunts for other humans, and eventually we see him and the other monsters cross over onto our side, lurking in houses and killing unsuspecting humans for sustenance, amusement, or perhaps both.
I hope that made sense! Tbh some bits of the series are still fuzzy to me and I can't quite puzzle out how exactly they go together, but that's my best assessment based on what I've seen from the series and what the lost "Fallen Conductor" video explained. If you want I can repost the full transcript for “Fallen Conductor” so you can read the whole thing for yourself. And if you have any more questions or theories I'd love to hear them!
