#welcome home restoration project

[helvetica-ace]

I love love LOVE all the expressions Eddie has during the Homewarming special!!! He makes such nice faces while experiencing The Horrors I had to redraw some for myself!!- Sweat on fleecy-skin is such an odd thing!

Everything from this update has been wonderful!!! Full Congrats to Clown and the people behind Welcome Home on everything they've made!! It's all wonderful!!!

[madalenadrops]

Both. Both is good.

♥️ 🧡 💛 💙

[ajayjay-licious]

I started studying the Welcome Home style a bit, and experimented by drawing Eddie and his lovely singular pea on a plate!

🫛✨💖

[twilightprince101]

Let's be careful before labeling Wally or Home as "The Villain" of Welcome Home

Or anyone for that matter imo

Listen, I can completely understand why people would go to that conclusion. "So Below" and the eerie vibe that Wally gives off in his obsession don't exactly give either a flattering light (I know there are also the art pieces on Clown's personal blog, but I'm not counting anything that hasn't been officially released yet)

But whenever someone labels a character who is acting weird as "the villain," it puts a bad taste in my mouth. At the end of the day, characters in fiction are real people with motivations, so labeling one as "evil" or "the villain" can sometimes erase that complexity. And after the most recent update, we know that Wally has A Lot of very, very complicated feelings about the situation.

Before I get into that though, I wanna point out something that Clown himself has said describes the brand of horror that "Welcome Home" gives off to themselves personally. Click here for the link to the post.

Before I get into that though, I wanna point out something that Clown himself has said describes the brand of horror that "Welcome Home" gives off to themselves personally. Click here for the link to the post.

"My home doesn't feel like home anymore."

That line sticks to me pretty hard. There's a pervasive feeling of unfamiliarity, unreality, that exists in the core of the story itself.

I think we see, firsthand, Wally experiencing this in the latest updates. In all of the hidden Bug/Answer secret videos, we see a familiar pattern. We get some sort of scene of two other characters talking, a scene in whatever universe they call home, until at the very end one of the characters addresses Wally (who was apparently there the whole time) and the video glitches out.

A key part that not a lot of people seem to realize though is that these videos are from Wally's perspective. See the above picture with Wally's hands. In every scene, Wally is present and was supposedly taking part in an activity (in the above one, helping Poppy with knitting), before the video started playing.

Whenever I saw these videos I had that same feeling that something felt. Different. The interactions felt like scenes you would see in the animated/cartoony aesthetic we'd see from the various art pieces, it doesn't feel like it's "on set/TV" to me. They're moreso just intimate glimpses into their lives. But they're shot in the real world, and that feels. Wrong.

This is very likely the same feeling that Wally's having in that moment. "My home doesn't FEEL like home." It's like he's disassociating, having a brief episode of that unreality feeling. Those bouts of strangeness don't go away until, like clockwork, someone says his name and the video ends, snapping him out of it.

Do other people in the neighborhood also feel the same way? Maybe, but we don't know. What we do know is that Wally, whether or not he tries to explain this to others, feels isolated by this sensation. "My neighbors are only neighborly until they know I'm different in a way they can see."

The only other person he likely shares this feeling with? I'd take a guess that it's Home. Nearly every time Home has been featured, Wally has been there, close. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the only physical puppets/props we’ve seen of the cast are Wally and Home.

According to this post by @eldritchravens, Home is the only other person who talks directly to Us, the viewers. That's probably why they're so close, because they're the only ones who can truly confide in each other about this.

"So does that mean Home is manipulating Wally?"

Again, I really don't think that's the case. I don't wanna call people villains quite yet. Besides, we see (or well, hear) Home and Barnaby have a conversation together, and from how Barnaby reacts it's fairly casual.

This shared feeling is likely why Wally is so obsessed with us, including the Restoration Employee. They seem to be sharing a similar sensation to Wally's bouts of unreality, in the fact that it seems they're the ONLY one who doesn't remember Welcome Home being a thing. They seem to be one of the few things that Wally (and maybe even Home) consider to be "Real." Hence their obsession with "seeing" us.

"Isn't this Wally or Home manipulating the Employee though?"

Maybe, I don't know. We don't really know much of what's going on right now, we're only getting glimpses. For all we know this could be a side-effect of Wally/Home trying to reach out. For the time being though, I want to keep my own expectations in check. I'm choosing not to label Wally, Home, The Restoration Team or anyone as a "villain" until something definitive comes up.

It is very, very likely that Wally is going to be doing something more dangerous later down the line (or maybe even is doing so now). But if he's doing anything, I get the feeling it's more out of desperation. He wants something to quell this feeling inside of him, this pervasive sense of unreality, and to connect with something he feels is "real." And, for better or for worse, that thing is us.

This whole thing isn't to bash on people for speculation or theorycrafting, I personally think speculation is very healthy! But it's still important to remember what the core of this story is going to be. We're only seeing the very start of the story right now, and we don't know what'll happen down the line. It's useful to keep that core idea at the center of our speculation so we can have reasonable expectations going forward.

As for me? This doesn't feel like a story with villains. I don't think he'll pull a Monika from DDLC and start gaining a kill count, but if something does happen to the rest of the cast, my money is that it'll happen completely by accident, and he'll regret it. Hard.

[articunoparticuno]

[hajimedics]

welcome home persona AU, aka mostly an excuse for me to draw my human designs in classy children’s fairytale-inspired outfits

[spookyghostbunny]

I THINK I GOT SOMETHING!

In the secret commercial, they kept switching from animated Eddie to puppet Eddie. What if the puppets see themselves as cartoons? It looks like Eddie has become aware. Does he see himself as the puppet that he is? Is he finally seeing the others as puppets? Let me know what y'all think.

[art-by-missie]

So I know the Halloween update was M O N T H S ago but we still remember the creature that lurks the neighborhood at night and eats whatever it finds, yeah?

[rainbowratsstuff]

I don't think I like that's its just Wally and Home....

[steampunker134]

*hums on a purple kazoo I stole from Barnaby’s collection* Eddie’s Happy Haunting costume was Frakenstein’s monster. What was Frankenstein’s monster in the first place? Simple. A creature hated by its creator for defying expectations.

Sound like a certain mailman we know?

[vannistilldraws]

So about the Welcome Home update

[madalenadrops]

💚💚💚

[welcomehomeincorrectquotes]

Wally: *after the WHRP removes his additions* You're testing my patience here but I still love you.

[theicysneasel]

🎄Icy’s Welcome Home Update Moodboard🎄

[kit-kori]

Welcome Home is extremely interesting to me and I really like it but I'm unfortunately not smart enough to figure out how to access all these secrets on the site hehe... so I'm a happy second-hand spectator reading everyone's theories and letting them tell me all the cool new facts from updates!!