Christmas headcanons? Christmas headcanons! Specifically on whether or not they celebrate Christmas or not, how they do, etc etc. I’m gonna make a post for each fandom, so stay tuned for the rest of them.
Starting off with Ib. Under the cut ‘cause it’s long.
IB: Her family is in the upper-class, and every Christmas Eve they host one of those snooty sort of parties that aren’t really meant for kids. There’s a lot of people from around town at them. Ib isn’t too thrilled about it, especially considering she’s really quiet and shy when she’s young.
That being said, Christmas Day is always a lot better.
They’ve always done the Santa Claus thing, and they have a smaller gathering on Christmas Day with just immediate family members. (Of which there aren’t all that many.) Generally Christmas Day is a lot more laid back.
GARRY: His Christmases have always been of the more traditional sort, at least when it comes to what they do. The only relatives he knows are the ones on his mother’s side, and he always goes back to her house for their gathering.
He has some interesting relatives on that side of the family that he isn’t entirely sure what to think about, but y’know. That isn’t all that uncommon.
[ just wait until he meets the other side of the family. ]
MARY: She only had a vague idea of what Christmas was while in the gallery. She heard about it from books, and always thought it sounded like a lot of fun, but it wasn’t something they ever knew how to celebrate in the Fabricated World.
In any verses where she gets out though, her Christmases become much like Ib’s. She’s not as annoyed about the snooty Christmas Eve party as Ib is, ‘cause she hasn’t had any experiences like that at all. All of it is super fascinating to her at first.
Only when she gets a little older and settled in to the human life does she start to get bored of them.
ALONG WITH THAT, take a headcanon dump about the dynamics between the three mains from Ib in my connected verse during and after Ib and Mary return to the art gallery. ‘Cause oh boy for a year or two it’s a whole mess.
Revolves mainly around Mary, ‘cause she’s kind of the center of the conflict.
Warning for spoilers for the Together Forever ending specifically. Also, decently long, hence why this one’s under a read more.
I’m gonna try and actually write this coherently and in chronological order this time (unlike the outline I wrote in a google doc). So I guess we’re starting with what Ib and Mary’s dynamic is like immediately after the original game.
When Mary escapes the Fabricated World, the real world is altered in such a way to account for her presence. What this does is make Ib and her parents believe that Mary was adopted into the family as a toddler.
Ib was still a baby at the time, so Ib remembers growing up with Mary (even though this didn’t actually happen.) So they’re initially pretty close.
They’re kind of polar opposites in a way- Mary is outgoing and lively, while Ib is shy and lowkey an introvert. I’d imagine Mary drags Ib a lot of places (read: parties and stuff like that) and kind of helps her out of her shell.
But as Mary gets older and more used to the real world and how things work, she definitely starts to feel guilty about what she did to Garry. When she was in the Fabricated World, she really didn’t realize the seriousness of it.
Not that she was completely innocent and naive. She 100% knew, at the very least, that she was forcing him to stay there against his will. But at the time she, for one thing, didn’t really register the murder aspect of it. And she also kind of viewed it as a fair trade off, because she already believed that Garry was supposed to replace her as Guertena’s ‘favorite child’ so to speak.
So why shouldn’t he take her role in the Fabricated World as well?
As time goes on it does start to bother her, but she never does anything with it. She’s so scared of losing the relationship she’s developed with Ib that she keeps quiet about it, even once Ib starts having nightmares about her experiences in the Fabricated World.
As it turns out though, keeping the secret for so long ends up backfiring on Mary. Because when Ib finally does find out, she’s absolutely livid at Mary for lying to her for so long. If you recall the opening to this headcanon dump, she fully believed and remembered that she had grown up with Mary.
So, obviously, realizing it was all a lie (on TOP of all the traumatic memories she regained from the Fabricated World itself) was a huge blow to her.
And then we have Garry. At this point he’s figured out a lot more about Mary’s side of the story via journals of hers she left behind. He’s also had a lot of time to think about the situation, and he’s honestly not as mad at Mary as he might have been at first. Nor is he as mad at her as Ib is.
I don’t think he’s fully forgiven her, but he’s more or less in a gray area where he’s not sure how he feels about her. They’d probably be able to sort things out fully at some point, but it doesn’t necessarily happen in the Fabricated World. They do talk about the situation with Guertena, but don’t really address remaining mixed feelings they both have towards eachother.
Mary actively avoids him for awhile after they all escape. She doesn’t hate him, but she also still doesn’t really like him either for reasons she’s not sure about. Probably just leftovers from being so bitter towards him for so long.
The other reason she avoids him though is Guilt ‘cause that doesn’t immediately go away either. Like I said, I think they’d sort this out at some point. Probably relatively soon after they all escape (like, within the year.)
But then there’s the situation with Ib. That’s where the really messy part is, because Ib doesn’t even come CLOSE to forgiving Mary for a long time. The fact that a good portion of her childhood was a lie is really traumatic to her, and she’s just not able to move past that quickly.
There’s a LOT of tension between them. Mary wants to mend their relationship, but Ib doesn’t budge. The only time she really interacts with Mary is when their parents are around, because neither of them want to explain to them why there’s such a rift between them all of a sudden.
I don’t know exactly how long it would take for them to sort things out. Definitely not in the span of a year. Maybe in 2-3 years. They would, eventually, get back on better terms. But it’d take a long time.
Also, I know this focused heavily on Ib and Garry’s dynamics with Mary, and that’s because that changes more than the dynamic between Garry and Ib does. They 100% remain friends. I imagine Ib hangs out with him pretty often, and that may be what leads to Mary giving up on avoiding him.
I would think after a few years, the three of them are all on decent terms. But because of all the trauma involved in it, it just doesn’t happen instantly (especially when it comes to Ib and Mary).
Take some Ib (muse) headcanons based on my default / connected verse for the Ib crew, just because.
Prior to finding out the truth about the art gallery, Ib did have some vague memories and associations that came from her experience there, aside from the nightmares that ultimately led to her going back.
She specifically had an attachment to roses, and it was (and still is) a heavy part of her aesthetic post-gallery. She could never bring herself to harm a flower, both before and after finding out the significance of it.
She also had some weird fears crop up over time. She’d often be nervous around things like portraits that resembled the Lady in Red, store mannequins, and even dolls to some extent.
(Although Garry got the worst of the trauma when it came to the dolls.)
