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sunshine-jesse · 2 months ago

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The Painful Realities of Andy and Leyley

Decay gave me a lot to chew on. While there was very little that caught me by surprise, per se (insofar as there’s a difference between shock and surprise), I didn't expect Nemlei to Go There with regards to some of the themes she covered in the newest update. I had a hunch, sure, but it was so (seemingly) out of place compared to the tone of the rest of the game that I didn't explore it as well as I could've. Most writers who cover the things Decay did don't play it dreadfully straight or treat it with so much respect. And even when they do, it often comes off as fetishized, which isn't bad per se, but so little of the rest of the game came off as The Author's Poorly Disguised Fetish that it was hard to take the prospect as seriously as I could've.

Effectively, Nemlei outplayed my media analysis skills by being an even better writer than I anticipated.

And so, I will respond in turn.

...or at least, I can try to.

I don't think I can type an analysis that is purely analytical anymore. Episode 3 hit me so much harder than anything that came before it that it's very difficult to write what I do with any sense of detachment. I can't pretend it didn't get personal. I love these characters. I love this story. I love the themes it covers. And I relate to many of them.

That's why seeing TCAL playing everything so dreadfully straight hurt so much.

(This essay is going to be somewhat narrativized to reflect my playing experience of Decay. This is a writing exercise as much as it is character analysis. But I also didn't have the patience to proofread this, so please be gentle.)

Part 1: The Games We Play With Ourselves

My first route was the Cliffhanger route. I want to pretend that I picked it because I knew it’d be the best outcome due to my unparalleled (insert ashley smug face here) understanding of the characters but I actually wasn’t expecting that one moment to be the big decision that caused the paths to diverge. It was just the only save file I had for Decay because it was the most hopeful outcome to me at the time. Because of that, when playing through Decay, everything felt so… business as usual. Things didn’t even feel as tense as they did in episode 2 when the paths diverged. This is, as a matter of fact, how I reacted for most of my first playthrough of the game. I didn’t see it as weird. It made sense. Nobody was really wrong here or making particularly bad decisions.

The only thing that caught me by surprise for the first half of it was when Andrew slapped Ashley, but I didn’t even feel like it was that shocking of a moment. Ashley has a chronic problem with taking things seriously, so I don’t think Andrew showing her what it means to take a threat of violence seriously is a particularly out of pocket response. However, it’s also not the only way to assert his identity as Andrew, because Burial showed us a better way for him to do the same: quiet dismissal with a confident assertion that ‘Andy’ is dead. Slapping her wasn’t the only way to get the point across, but it was -a- way, and I think it was important for Ashley to internalize it even though the slap was a simultaneous sign of strength AND weakness on Andrew’s end.

He didn’t need to play her game, but he did, and he managed to make it mean something.

The episode in general went through great lengths to show how unseriously Ashley takes her own actions. Which is a mood (she’s literally me, chat), for sure, but we’ve already seen that offhanded remarks by Ashley are enough to deeply sting Andrew.

This whole scene was an example of her not taking her own words seriously, by highlighting a dynamic we took for granted in prior episodes. Their endless back and forth is perceived as a harmless game by her. A lot of people perceived this dynamic as toxic back in prior chapters but it’s fairly common in long-term relationships. As someone who has a tendency of doing that myself- at least with friends- it makes social situations easier to navigate when I know that both of us are aware that the other person isn’t actually trying to hurt the other in a way that sticks.

(I’m obviously not saying that their dynamic isn’t toxic, just that this one aspect of it is fairly normal and often taken uncharitably)

There are dozens upon dozens more examples than this but I assume that if I need to list them off to you then you haven’t actually played the game. I’m just listing this one because it’s useful for highlighting the way she views their dynamic.

Either way, Andrew isn’t having it this time, because he’s focusing harder on something he wanted from Ashley all along:

Respect.

Respect is a huge running theme in this episode, and the decision to accept being called Andrew or Andy is the make or break point for the route, and by proxy, their relationship. If Andrew decides to demand self-respect by asserting his identity as Andrew, then Ashley takes his request to not roast the camper seriously. But if he doesn’t demand to be called Andrew, then she does roast the camper. The implications of this decision are huge, but if you choose to be called Andy, he’s too much of a doormat at this point to show why it’s so important.

Accepting being called Andy gives Ashley permission to double down on all the worst aspects of their dynamic. There’s a lot to say about how Andrew reacts to this, but most of it is retreading old ground, because he’s made his issues with this and what it means to him abundantly clear already. What’s more interesting- to me- is how Ashley reacts. When Andrew reacts to “Why do you think it’s okay to hurt me?”, Ashley responds with… confusion.

"(It's) fine to stomp over every boundary I've ever set, isn't it?"

"I- uh...... wouldn't know."

She doesn’t get it. She genuinely doesn’t get it. She does not understand boundaries, flat-out. She has very few of her own, and therefore doesn’t see them in other people. Even when Andrew expressed boundaries to her in his past- the few times it actually happened- he quickly lowered them, never teaching her what they actually mean. While we don’t know for absolute certain because of how few flashbacks we’ve seen from her perspective, it seems like she’s never been held to account for transgressing a boundary.

Even when she’s slapped in the face, she doesn’t quite understand that it’s Andrew setting a boundary and showing self-respect. We see this later on with the argument she has with Andrew later in the episode:

"...............I stopped calling you Andy."

"Ooooh! Hallelujah! She hasn't called me by the wrong name for a few days! Mercy me, do I stand corrected! This must be love! And not just any love, but true love of the highest caliber!"

She thinks it’s just doing him a favor. She’s not respecting his boundaries at all. It’s something she’s GIVING to him.

With Ashley’s general inability to take things seriously in mind, and her lack of understanding of boundaries, I think there’s one more piece of the puzzle I need to explore before I can explain why I think things I really went to shit:

HOT

SIBLING

BREEDING!!!

Coffin is, still, even with Decay in mind, not making a statement on whether or not incest is good or bad. I can say that with full confidence. It's going further than that: it's using their incestuous relationship to highlight the ways in which the siblings interface with sexuality. Their more romantic, intimate moments are still portrayed as cute, and something that makes both of them happy. Physical affection stabilizes their relationship, and is something the two of them need to feel like things are okay. It doesn't hurt them.

...to a point.

Because she sure as fuck isn’t showing that it’s good, either.

In the Shoot/Dead End route (I'll be referring to this route as 3B from here on, and the cliffhanger route as 3A), their incestuous tendencies are unambiguously portrayed as a negative thing. Everything they do together makes one or both of them uncomfortable, unlike almost every other instance we see in every other route. But why? What's the difference between 3A and 3B?

Let's compare the scenes of intimacy between 3A and 3B:

In 3A, Andrew was slow, patient, and gentle, resulting in something that both Ashley and him enjoyed. They cracked a laugh, hugged each other, very cute, wholesome, and not at all weird if you don't look at the shared genetics behind the curtain.

But in 3B, he was sudden and forceful, resulting in something Ashley didn't enjoy. She tries to reciprocate but he pulls away shortly after, supposedly because she's not good at kissing, and also because he still feels gross about actually enjoying a sexual encounter with his little sister. Her reaction to this was visible confusion.

I want to establish my takes on these scenes now because I’m going to draw attention to them later on.

So, let’s recap:

Ashley doesn’t take things seriously enough. She doesn’t understand personal boundaries. She attempts to reciprocate affections and act with visible confusion when it’s rejected. What does this mean? I want everyone to hear me out on this before they respond with ‘well, no fucking shit Sherlock’, because this little fact about Ashley’s character goes far deeper and is more wide-reaching than many might think, at least given the kinds of analysis I see on this game:

Ashley treats life like a game.

And I don’t mean that as a heavy-handed metaphor for her thinking everyone needs to be played and manipulated and that she has very little personal investment in anything that goes on. I mean she actually, literally, treats life like a game. Let me highlight something from the Q&A so I can explain just how important this really is:

“She doesn’t want to grow up”

“her fantasy of Andy and Leyley.”

When she calls Andrew Andy as a teenager:

"It's supposed to be endearing!! It's our secret game! I thought you liked that kind of thing."

You see where I’m going with this? Her whole dynamic with Andrew is part of that ‘secret game’ to her. It’s something she takes seriously, unlike everything else in life. Every deviation from it is merely doing him a favor. She’s allowing him to break the rules, if only temporarily. She doesn’t take many things seriously because she can’t emotionally grasp the significance of it. In her mind, she’s still a child. And for much of the story, no matter the route, she’s still playing that game with Andrew, no matter what’s at stake.

Ribbing at each other? Part of the game.

Their mutual displays of affection? Part of the game.

But boundaries? Those weren’t part of the rules.

This is why Ashley is so confused and distressed when none of ‘her’ games work on Andrew anymore.

The rules have changed. And she doesn’t understand them anymore.

Here lies the core differences between the routes in Decay. In 3A, Andrew is still willing to play that game with her.

Just like in real life,

Just like with his peers, with his mom, with Julia,

Andrew knows how to pretend to play Ashley’s game.

He’s not quite aware it’s a game in the same ways as her, but he does know the sets of behaviors he can use to calm Ashley down. And as shown with the Entity, he’s extremely good at negotiating rules even when he’s not aware there’s a game at play. But he still doesn’t understand it as a game, and that’s where many of his frustrations come from (not to say Ashley is fully aware it’s a game either, but he’s even less aware than she is). Ashley doesn’t listen to him as often as he’d like because he’s not fully aware of the rules she expects them to operate under. Or perhaps, more accurately, not aware of what he has to do to change the rules rather than just create exceptions.

I don’t exactly know either, but I think it has something to do with how much gifts mean to Ashley. Keep in mind that all it takes is a wedding ring to avert the double suicide ending.

I think this proclivity for engaging with life as if it was a game might be why Ashley is said to be in-tune with the Demon Realm and enjoy their puzzles so much: everything has clear rules and conditions for winning or losing. Agreements are ironclad, and a deal is a deal. It’s a series of easy and somewhat predictable input->output mechanisms, as long as she’s precise with her desires. While the Entity is clearly manipulating her in some way, it’s yet to do so through lies, and she has been shown no reason to believe that it ever lies, outside of when it tells her highly emotionally inconvenient information.

(If your eyebrow rose when reading that, mine rose while typing it too, but I’m not here to diagnose anyone because that makes analysis less interesting and I literally wrote the essay on why people shouldn’t do that)

One detail I want to point out before tying this all back together is that games are something Ashley has appreciated from the absolute youngest we’ve ever seen her, before either of them did anything wrong: The flashback where they visited the grandparents. Andrew turning his pursuit of Ashley into a game was shown to instantly get her to behave better, as it’s given her clear and obvious rules to adhere to, and conditions to get something she wants, no strings attached. I wanted to point this out so I could establish that this is how she’s always been and not a pattern she fell into, because I need to emphasize just how pervasive games are to how Ashley interfaces with the world.

With Andrew, her ‘secret game’ becomes something different.

Tying back into my first essay, the ‘games’ she plays are the framework with which she uses to feel in control of Andrew. They’re what her entire sense of safety is predicated on, and without the rules and reciprocal ‘play’ that comes with games, she loses any sense of emotional stability and becomes extremely volatile, confrontational, and sometimes violent. She’s not one who can function without an understanding of what’s going on, which is precisely why she lacks foresight and operates on intuition.

It’s not like she’s not trying, right? I’d like to present the scene where Andrew calls Julia with Ashley on the line.

At first, Ashley loses her shit and just barely manages to keep herself together. It really seems like an act of wanton cruelty on Andrew’s part, but it’s important to note that you get a star for this scene. You don’t get stars for scenes where their relationship deteriorates. So why do you get a star? She initially appeared upset, but the moment Andrew reframed it, her expression flipped, and she immediately became happy.

"So she can behave. Somewhat."

"Hmph! You dared to doubt me? Shame on you! Despite your underhanded bullshit, I emerge victorious!"

Andrew had to stop Ashley from yelling, and from hanging up, but Ashley managed to quiet down and stabilize herself enough to not loudly explode and get violent and uncontrollable.

And outside of where they were forced to be separated either to solve a puzzle or at the whims of the Entity, Andrew led her through every challenge they faced and she didn’t spend the whole time questioning his ability.

Why do you think we play as Andrew for the vast majority of the episode, even when they’re together?

She trusts his judgement more, even if she can’t quite understand (or at least vocalize) why. There’s a reason she roasts the camper in every route where this one interaction isn’t possible: Her desire to gain strength from eating people supersedes her trust in Andrew’s ability to handle difficult situations. She has to gain enough power for the both of them, or they’re fucked. But if Andrew has the strength to assert his identity as Andrew, maybe she doesn’t need to do all the heavy lifting.

(This is why I believe the star scenes are what they are. They’re not required to improve their relationship, but they ARE required for the necessary context to show why “the future” (as stated by the Entity in the Vision Room when he mentions them) is what it is.)

For a large part of the rest of the episode, we see a lot of smaller moments like this, where Ashley is at least trying to reach some kind of mutual understanding with Andrew and Andrew is trying to convey his actual feelings to Ashley, but the two of them keep speaking past each other because they simply do not understand the language that the other speaks. But what’s important is that their relationship manages to not deteriorate, and despite the vicious fighting, they still express a desire to understand the other when left to their own devices. By this point, I was feeling vindicated, as a lot of my initial analyses that were incredibly charitable to both siblings seemed to be at least somewhat correct and that I was right to give them the benefit of the d-....

Part 2: The Lies We Tell Ourselves

...-id Andrew just kill a fucking child in cold blood?!

I want to draw attention to the wording I used to describe how Ashley treats life as a game. I said she treats it as a game, not necessarily inexorably understands it as such. This is not a tendency she had no choice but to manifest; outside of being part of the way she manifests the Andy and Leyley fantasy, it’s also an emotional regulation tool that simplifies her interactions with the world. I want to specify this because I feel like, if I don’t, it might paint a picture of her being a helpless victim in a world that treats her poorly. Nor that growing up would solve her problems, and that she has no agency because she had no choice but to be this way. While I would never deny her nor Andrew victimhood of each other and the world around them, I also don’t want to confuse people into thinking that I don’t think they could’ve done better, and that I shouldn’t expect them to. Because the more I played through the game- and after finishing it, the more I thought about it- it became clearer and clearer that they could, because Andrew…

Holy shit, Andrew. Talk about dropping the pretense.

When the parents were sacrificed, Andrew- and his life- could never be normal again. The man realized that too, because nothing Ashley suggested registered as objectionable anymore. He offered so little resistance to killing the campers that it didn’t even sink in what kind of action that was. He was never much of a moral conscience to begin with, but from that point on, he stopped trying.

"Aaah, you know I can't say no to a family value pack."

Oh, Andrew, you wretched little shit. I get it now.

The thing about Andrew that I didn’t quite get last time is just how loose his grasp on the idea of normalcy actually was. It seemed like a central facet of his character and something he desperately wanted to hold on to at all costs, but now it looks much, much different. It wasn’t something he wanted to convince himself was true much past his teenage years, but the moment hormones started setting in, he made almost no effort to come to terms with his sexual desires. He made no attempt to distance himself from Ashley, to not project his fantasy on to Julia, or even to not peep at his sister in the shower.

‘Normal’ wasn’t something he wanted to be. It was a role he wanted to play.

At every chance he got, he fed into his darkest desires like an addict, and projected those fantasies on to Julia. He didn’t even bother trying to make space between him and Ashley; no, she had to do it for him, because she was mad at him. And the best part is, it wasn’t even good for him.

As much as he tried to lie to himself, what he really wanted is to lie to others. Not once did he try to change himself in accordance with the person he wanted to be, and especially what others wanted him to be. Not once did he self-reflect about what he really wanted, or what would be best for him, or even Ashley, for that matter. He just wanted other people to shut up. Andrew was not a victim of his own impulses and desires. I really feel the need to emphasize just how messed up this man is; Without Ashley taking an active role in his life, he didn’t get better. He filled in the gaps in his heart by choosing to be worse.

Nemlei took subtext, turned it into text, and then turned that text into a baseball bat that she used to crack our skulls over and over again. He was never the ‘good person’ in their relationship, and never once tried to be.

And the worst part is that I fully understand and empathize with why.

There’s a funny thing that sometimes happens when you have impossible standards piled on to you and enforced through abuse and you’re denied a chance to ever be your own person: You fail to develop a coherent sense of identity. You latch on to anything that ‘seems’ right and predicate your whole sense of self on it. You need this sense of identity to navigate the world, so anything that threatens it is a threat to everything you know, and you respond to it in turn. Everything you do outside of that one core idea (or several ideas) becomes an act, a puppet show you play to placate others and serve your own ends. You can’t afford empathy or understanding to ‘threats’, because you’re too busy trying to protect what you ‘know’ you are. A threat to your world is a threat to your life, and so you respond by desperately doing whatever it takes to remove that threat. Sometimes lies, sometimes violence, of varying degrees of intensity depending on the threat.

Sometimes you learn to shut your feelings off.

Sometimes you learn to react too strongly.

Sometimes you learn that nobody else matters, because everyone else will just hurt you anyway.

You devalue people. You overvalue people.

Anything to feel safe, anything to feel like the outside world is less of a threat. Anything to remove that threat, manage that threat, or protect the only thing in the world that matters to you, whether that thing is yourself, or someone else.

And for Andrew? It’s said to us in the beginning of episode 3:

Andy’s Leyley

Leyley’s Andy

Yeah, Nemlei. I get it. You understand.

There’s another side to this coin, but I’ll get to that.

Not that this happens to everyone, but it absolutely happened to Andrew. The ‘role’ he was had forced upon him was that of Leyley’s _____. Her protector, teacher, parent, general caretaker. Her emotional regulator. Her brother.

Her everything.

It was all he could be. All he was allowed to be. Because the moment he diverged, he was punished greatly by Renee, and at some point, Ashley herself. He predicated his entire value system on being her ‘Andy’, to the point where every action he took that wasn’t part of the act he put on to attempt to interface with the world normally became for her.

It was all for her, because he was her _____. Anything to keep her under control, anything to keep her safe.

One of the most notable examples of this is shown when Lord Unknown was attempting to give him therapy. When he started hearing how people spread rumors about how he slept with Ashley, and Douchebag told him that the people in Ashley’s class said that she spread them, he just glossed over this fact. So little attention is drawn to it that I actually missed it on my first playthrough. Instead, the first thing Andrew expressed internally was concern over whether or not she was being bullied; it didn’t even register in his mind that she was responsible for smearing his reputation.

To him, she was never responsible for anything. She was his responsibility above all else. The incestuous rumors hardly mattered to him, and he kept finding holes in the story and pointing them out, such as how she didn’t have time to spread them early (since we saw them enter school together) in the day because she stood Douchebag up on a Friday, and how there was no way to catch them behind the auditorium ‘yesterday’ given it was a Monday. The presence of those holes is why I’m skeptical of whether or not she actually spread them, but it’s not like it’s something she wouldn’t do. More on that later.

Above all else, Andrew wasn’t concerned about how people saw him; he hardly even cared. He was upset mostly about people thinking that he’d take advantage of Ashley in that way. There was nothing weird to him about how clingy they were to each other, how affectionate they were, how protective he was.

Of course he was all that. Andrew was her brother. It was his job to be all that. It was his job to be her _____.

I’d like to present an alternate theory to the idea that Andrew dated Julia to appear normal. The theory isn’t mutually compatible with that, but it feels woefully incomplete. Given the focus on bullying, the anger had over the idea that he’d ever hurt her, and the fact that sexual feelings started creeping in his mind thanks to the magical curse of teenage hormones, I believe the primary reason he dated Julia was so that he could prove to others- and himself- that he would never hurt his precious Ashley. Not in that way, not at all. It was everything he predicated his sense of identity on. It was what he had to be, above all else.

So in order to protect his ‘role’, his identity, he chose something he, deep down, knew would hurt her, because nobody could ever be led to believe that he’d take advantage of her like that.

Especially himself.

Appearing normal to others was a pleasant side-effect of this, and if he could convince himself he loved Julia, he’d never have to add ‘boyfriend’ to the list of things he had to be for Ashley.

Hahahaha, whoops.

Surprise! It was the thing he actually wanted to be for her the most!

Teenage hormones are an awful thing, aren’t they? In realizing that he had sexual feelings for Ashley, he finally found something he’d actually enjoy being for her!

And it was something he could never be, lest it risk everything else he thought of himself as being for her!

Oh, the wretched irony of sexual desire. I could never.

Which way, western man? Everything you think you should be, or the one thing you actually want to be?

Andrew tries to have it both ways, but, y’know how that went. No attempt to rein in these desires, projecting his sister on his girlfriend, etc etc. Already been over that. But now I can highlight why I believe he got worse and kept feeding into his desires; the closest thing to a moral conscience he had- his identity as Leyley’s _____- takes a step out of his life for reasons I’ll cover when I cover how much of a fuck up she actually is.

What, you thought I’d skip over her just because I was- and still am- her number one defender? Oh no no. Now that I know better than to give these losers (that I love very dearly and desire nothing but happiness for) so much charitability, I have a lot to say about her too. But back to Andrew.

Without that sense of personal identity- without his proximity to Ashley- he sees no reason not to give into his desires, watch her while she dresses, and project all of his most sexual fantasies on to Julia. His interactions with Ashley were, as fucked up as it is, grounding to him. They stabilize him, give him a reason to act right that isn’t just a facade. With that, he has nothing. Nothing except his facade of normalcy.

I think the year-long gap between his interactions with Ashley are precisely the reason why ‘normalcy’ became so important to him. It became a second sense of identity that conflicted with what he predicated his identity on before. He could finally emulate being a somewhat normal person, with a somewhat normal attachment to a somewhat normal person. Horray! But the prior identity still existed. It never went away. Ashley was where his heart was, and trying to give it to someone else only hollowed out what was there before.

This one CG speaks louder than any words the man has ever spoken, up to this point.

These are not the eyes of someone who is merely depressed. These are the eyes of someone who is confronting the idea of living a life without the only thing that ever gave him meaning.

He can’t even make eye contact with himself, because there’s nothing there.

Andrew, without Ashley, is a hollow husk of a man who starts to crumble the more he tries to convince himself he could be anything other than her everything.

She is the light of his life. The nightmarish, toxic, corrosive light of his life.

(cont. in next post)

#the coffin of andy and leyley #andrew graves #ashley graves #tcoaal #gaming #gravecest #tcoaal essay

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