Hello! Since you're taking research requests, I was wondering what you thought of the images that appear on screen when the Witch attacks you during the party. I don't know how many there are, exactly, but I know there's one that depicts a snake wrapped around a gem and another that looks like a broken baby doll. Do you think there's any deeper meaning to them, or are they there just to look creepy?
hi hi! thank you for the question! there are six images that can flash on the screen when attacked by the witch: a snake wrapped around a gem, a broken baby doll, a cornucopia full of skulls, an open mouth over a fire, two hands touching a fetus, and another strange image of what i assume to be a distorted baby with a symbol on it’s forehead.
the snake wrapped around the gem seems to be alluding to domori trapped in the gem/ice on the second floor. the image itself does not seem to be a symbol for anything specific, so this is where my speculation ends.
the broken baby doll might be referencing rei and her creepy counterpart since in the sintra residence route, she does have a doll that brian must collect for a puzzle. since the two baby dolls look completely different though, i think this is a bit of a stretch, and it might be there just to be creepy.
a cornucopia typically represents harvest and/or an abundance of something, so we can take the image of the cornucopia full of skulls to mean there is an abundance of death at sintracorp- not like we really needed a picture to let us know that...
the open mouth over the fire is directly referencing dormori’s burning at the stake. though the picture is of a campfire, most fire imagery and metaphors within yuppie psycho reference the burning, so i am assuming the same applies here.
in-game, hands with long black nails are typically used to reference the witch (such as in cutscene 09, bewitched) so i am going to assume the hands over the fetus belong to the witch. with this knowledge, i believe the fetus is meant to represent rei’s birth, since we are told that rei was only able to be conceived via domori’s blessing.
as for the last image... i am not entirely sure! i want to say it is also a baby doll and therefore relates to the other image of a baby doll, but it looks much more realistic than the other one. it also has a symbol drawn on it’s head, which i tried to look into to no avail. i am going to assume this is just to add to the creepiness factor of the other drawings and that it has no particular meaning. if anyone wants to try to identify the symbol on the baby, here is the image:
