#wally said no! the whrp asked and He Said No!

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

Not sure if this is where you want your asks to be sent or not, I'm new to your blog so sorry if this is the wrong place

There is another instruction for Wally that I haven't seen you talk about and I want to know your thoughts! Back in november, before the responses, the secret URLs (such as woxyve) had the word "delete" added to the end (ex: woxyvedelete) implying that they wanted Wally to delete the page. After this most recent update it changed again and now says nodelete meaning that Wally refused to do that task. Thoughts?

where else would asks be sent if not the Askbox! inbox! both!

i actually wasn't aware of this until a few days ago, when i saw a post pointing it out - i had never gone directly back to those pages. which serves me right! i'm gonna be double checking Everything from now on lmao

but my fucking GOD is it interesting. thus far Wally has been... fairly cooperative. he's had a moment here and there, such as closing the guest book and losing his patience a lil, but he does his best with the rest! especially with requests! so for him to straight up go "lmao nah" when asked to delete something...

characterization-wise, i think it's very telling. as of now, Wally has been commonly portrayed as a bit of a doormat - getting talked over, sitting off to the side, being a bit of a background character - in in-Home media. less so in his whrp/qa/You interactions, but he's still widely agreeable & willing. but him refusing to delete the urls gives major points to him Having A Spine. he's holding his ground. he knows what he's doing. he's not going to let the whrp shut him up. there's a Thought Process / Plan / Purpose being shown here, or at least hinted at. there's a sense of.... Control. of "this is the way we're doing things, this is what i'm saying and you're going to sit down and listen" it's just... such a shift from the Wally we see in his interactions with the neighbors. which again, lends credence to there being a time discrepancy, with whrp Wally being older and more "experienced" while past Wally is still figuring his shit [being alive] out <3

story-wise it adds some Delightful friction. like obviously there's already tension, what with the staff only page, "Let Me In", the mysterious black stuff, the guest book closing, and the whrp/qa being disturbed by it all. but Wally outright refusing to delete things is a Different sort of conflict. it's more... direct. which makes sense! his interactions with the whrp/qa are becoming more personal, too. but it lends to the feeling of a push-pull. as the whrp/qa investigates Wally and starts treating him like the person he is instead of a long-lost character, they're probably gonna clash (a lot) despite the apparent impulse to pursue Welcome Home. currently, Wally doesn't seem big on compromising. if he doesn't know what to do, it looks like he simply Won't or he'll do his own thing and be like "shrug". if he doesn't want to do something, it also looks like he simply Will Not.

of course, there's the strong possibility that the whrp Were Not Serious about it. the 'delete' command might have them testing the waters, poking the bear, etc. but then were they testing to see if Wally is there, or were they testing his level of compliance? both? a secret third option?

and if they Were serious about it... why? what is it about the marked urls that made the whrp go "get that outta here"? and why couldn't they delete it themselves? i mean, obviously they can't delete anything Wally adds, otherwise the extra stuff he's added probably wouldn't be there (unless the impulse / curiosity driving them is too strong to delete anything added). but there's still a why about it. what changed so fundamentally in the site's code - or laws of physics/reality - that made it impossible to alter Wally's additions?

it's just. i feel that there are a lot of implications in such a small interaction. it shows more than one would expect.

[fangirltothefullest]

Thoughts on the welcome home update because YES. Spoilers below the cut.

That sleep aid pill is called remderem which is almost "remember" but the d would be backwards, and its also almost "murder me" while missing the u. Is this anything? I don't know. Im always looking for names of things in args.

We have seen through two puppets eyes. First it was Wally and his discomfort and/or dissociation, and now it's Eddie's discomfort and/or dissociation. Which is fun because we've heard that Eddie would do crafts for the show and you'd just see his hands so that was a fun touch.

First iteration of the website we had mail letters (Eddie) giving us clues. Second iteration had bugs (Frank?) and active drawings (Wally?) giving us clues. Now we have symbols giving us clues and they remind me of stickers a little bit so possibly a connection to Sally? Who else would give the tiny pictures? Questions questions.

At the end of that commercial before his existential crisis, they say Eddie has been invited and they did his job for him so he could rest. Eddie does not seem happy about them doing his job for him instead of letting him do it himself. I am reminded of how clumsy with the mail he seems to be sometimes and how much work they make him do in the other audio clips. I wonder if he is feeling extremely overwhelmed but also unappreciated and that they can do all this work to help and choose not to most days? Sally insists it was easy to do and Eddie does not sound pleased.

One thing i can't stop thinking about and i have to go back and really re-watch the commercials closely, is Poppy. When they invite Eddie to the party they say everyone is there but there's no Poppy in the picture? And earlier they poured gravy on an ornament that, to me, looked very oddly shaped and almost like meat, and we hear Poppy, but we don't see her. So... a pea on a plate..... "P" on a plate? My brain could be misconstruing but did they eat Poppy and is that what he's actually seeing and is that why it's all red? I'd he seeing the reality beyond the mask? Is it more than a pea?

Eddie says "where?" In his crisis as a response to Frank calling his name. People are talking about this as if he doesn't know where he is. I agree this is a likely idea but what if he's asking where Poppy is? Do we ever actually see her in any of the videos or do we just hear her?

Wally has feelings a lot which is good to confirm he has feelings! Eddie also said he would be happy with an apple every single day and my he is an innocentbautism creature wally agenda is flourishing.

The amount if commercials has me fascinated because people used to do that for TV shows (still do but those earlier type ones welcome home is referencing is spot on) commercials for basically everything is accurate and what is funny is the accuracy of what each person is selling. Howdy with the cigarette commercial- he takes every opportunity to sell you something no matter what even if it's not good for you. Sleepy looking Wally selling you sleeping pills happy with the thought of the dream.

Wally being nervous about getting the holiday correct. Is it because he's never done it or ia Home going to hurt him?

Did home hurt Eddie because he was upset during the party? It sure fucking looks like it with home watching him so intensely. Does the chair have something to do with it?

Eddie's scribbled writing reminds me of the people trying to decipher the code on the safe.

On the secret pages it's signed "-W." But it talks as if it's a human person who watched the show and is working either the WHRP team. It also talks too grown up to be wally. Who is this?? Is it the same person from the terrified scribbles of the hidden page previously? It seems maybe so because of referencing needing the cleanup.

[theneighborhoodwatch]

going through all your ask gets me excited for the new updates but also scared??? i’m so sad bc right now we see all the neighbors being happy and just hanging out (minus wally)

it’s such a weird feeling being excited and sad for them at the same time

oh hard agree, that's like 75% of the reason i'm here. i said to someone once that i Say i'm into horror, but i usually find myself more drawn to the tragedy in horror than the horror itself? which begs the question of why i don't just read more tragedies, but i dunno - something about the way it unfolds in horror hits different. maybe it's because it feels like it's allowed to get a lot more surreal or ambiguous or just plain Ugly.

i will point out though re: wally being highlighted as an exception to the general rule of "everyone gets to hang out and be oblivious to the horror plot unfolding beyond the fabric of their reality for a bit before shit hits the fan" - while wally Is at least partially responsible for setting that horror plot into motion, if we subscribe to the belief that the audio tracks that the WHRP keeps digging up aren't actually from the past but links to the parallel reality in which the town resides, or at least that the bug videos take place in the present day, then like. you could absolutely make the argument that wally is trying to enjoy what he's got while he still has it, he is just sometimes - understandably - Literally Too Stressed To Function, even if he may or may not have the ability to articulate that. there's potential there i think. to have a character experience something similar to the fear and anticipation mixed with genuine fondness that we do. such an endearing bundle of moral conundrums, that wally is.

it's all in service of making the horrors hit harder when they finally come in full force, y'know. something something darkness cannot exist without light or whateva.

[theneighborhoodwatch]

Could it be possible Eddie is the one sending things to WHRP?

i think it's possible - i've said as much in a previous ask. although it could also be that wally is just using eddie's supplies without his knowledge since it's the nearest available tool for communication. it is curious that while wally mentions talking to the other neighbors pretty regularly in the guestbook doodles, they never seem to ask why he needs to know something or who he's talking to. although it's also possible that wally just Conveniently left it out of his notes if they did; he doesn't seem to be particularly Verbose in his writing.

[theneighborhoodwatch]

i have been trying to make this into a coherent post for days and have gotten Nowhere so you will have to put up with this borderline incoherent trail of thoughts instead. okay here we go:

dorelaine sounds like it was meant to be a mondegreen of darling (or vice-versa depending on what perspective you're seeing it from) which lends some credence to the WHRP's insistence that ronald dorelaine Must be the creator of welcome home (again - "must be," not "is," which is odd.)

wally as a self-insert for dorelaine? this information sponge who kind of exists to learn from his friends/loved ones on our behalf, the audience surrogate, a slate so blank he didn't know what a clown was until someone asked him to draw one. what about a character like that would cause someone to draw on their own traits to write him?

in that same vein, wally being not only a self-insert but an Ideal Self? if so, what about the above traits would have been Desirable to dorelaine? wally being representative of a desire for some kind of "fresh start"? or perhaps of flawlessness by way of (initially) not knowing there are flaws to be had? ignorance is bliss and all.

y'know. i was talking about this in a metaphorical sense and was gonna go on about how like i wonder what it will look like the further things progress and wally deviates more from this aspect of himself (assuming he hasn't already. dorelaine probably was not quite so attached to his house, for one thing) but i think this might be one of the only contexts in which a literal(ish) possession story could work - i.e. how far do you think someone would go to discard their original identity and become their ideal self?

i was gonna elaborate on that but then i realized i was just describing the season one plot twist from surviving romance.

[spoilers for surviving romance, obviously] by which i mean: yknow how it turns out that the protagonist, who is now the MC of the novel the entire story takes place in, actually used to be the author of the novel? and the whole thing was written in an attempt to justify her own suffering (without actually unpacking any of her trauma or the defeatism that was beaten into her by her circumstances) by giving her idealized self-insert (the original MC) a happy ending after a series of borderline comedic acts of cruelty - something she felt she would never be able to achieve herself? and how she only remembers this after repressing it long enough to form relationships with the other characters in the novel after being thrown into a life or death situation and realizing that they all have a lot more depth and interiority than the original novel's narration afforded them? yeah? Yeah.

that's not the Whole plot twist but it is the part of it that's the most relevant to this post.

but hey, maybe there's no literal possession/reincarnation/transmutation/Whatever stuff going on. in fact, for now i'm confident in that not being the case, at least not literally. but i still think if wally being some kind of self-insert or at least being based on ronald dorelaine in some capacity is canon, then it is worth noting bc like. wally As We Understand Him so far exists to absorb and reflect the world around him and the people in it in order to guide us, the audience. if he turns out to be a self-insert on top of that, then he also exists to reflect his creator in some form. for as much as everything seems to revolve around him (even when we Know for a fact that whatever happened had an effect on the other neighbors as well) it's kind of hard to imagine wally existing as his own guy; he always exists in relation to something or someone else.

one has to wonder how he feels about that. he seems confident that it will all work out in the end (whatever "it" is) but, well. this Is a horror story.

something about what i said a while ago, about the puppets being more affected by unconscious decisions - "things left unsaid," in particular.

still think about Metaphorical hauntings in welcome home though. that one guillermo del toro quote - "What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? A moment of pain, perhaps. [...] An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber."

"ah but doesn't home also lend themself to a good possession story?" so close! i think whatever's going on with home is closer to necromancy/a state of Undeath than anything else. i will not be elaborating at this point in time <3

..... possible future holy trinity imagery with dorelaine, wally, and home? father/son/holy spirit? unlikely but Could you imagine.

ah. i think here is when the thoughts run out. thanks 4 reading.

[theneighborhoodwatch]

So, there’s a theory that the WHRP left all those commands to test Wally Darling. So far, it’s giving the same vibe as paranormal investigators when they ask a sprit to do something, but the spirit is less threatening?

Some examples:

“ok [Spirit’s name] if your in here, can you move the plushie please?”

“If you want to [insert verb here] us, [ Spirit’s name] can you dim the lights on those flashlights please?”

i mean - i don't think it's a theory so much as it is just the case? they're clearly trying to see what he's capable of, they just aren't saying what for. maybe they're trying to warm him up for a more specific task (the delete/nodelete thing supports this interpretation) or maybe they're just trying to see if he actually poses any threat since they clearly can't get rid of him... we will see!

this does remind me of an ask i got back in march though - not much more to say that i haven't already said there!