The Villain of Edith Finch

And the hero they deserved was child protective services.

you can hear the narrator's voice crack when talking about the baby's death. I feel like it really hit him home with that one

Excuse me, that shark falling down the hill is an artistic masterpiece.

The worst part to me is that Edith Sr. put the plaque for Gregory on the door of the bathroom, where he would have died, and not his room. It would have been a constant reminder.

Finally someone said it! "You don't leave a baby alone in the bath!" The whole time during this scene I was yelling at the mom.

Walter's line "Even a monster on the other side of the door starts to feel normal" is revealing because Walter is separated from the train by a wall, but he is separated from Edie by a door.

A) Walter was in his 20s when he went to go live in the basement. B) Walter's calendar read 2005 in the end when the original one was in 1975 or so. This means that Edie was repeatedly giving Walter new calendars to make him understand he'd been wasting his life. She offered no support. Or love. He was only a moleman to her C) When you enter Barbara's room, the first thing you see is a replica of Barbara's body with a severed head This story is so haunting

Just a little detail, but Edith mentions how Lewis was quite proud of being Indian, and the architecture of the palace, the sitar, the Eastern styled soldiers and the turban wearing prince are a nod to this :)

There’s a huge hint in Edie’s room about her pride in enshrining the dead in the form of binders. Three, thick as hell binders labeled “shrine sketches” “Barbara sketches” “Molly sketches” Even her pet birds have their own tiny shrines, with portraits of them inside their cage next to the window you come in. I remember thinking “how insane do you have to be to literally fill up a binder of sketches for your dead children’s gravestones?”

This was a spooky game

I know I'm super late to the party but there is one thing I noticed just recently about the house, it's that the garden and the forest have foxglove everywhere Foxglove is a highly poisonous flower, so having them on your property when there are children around is just waiting for an accident to happen I really like this detail, this idea that this family is just poisoning itself out of negligence, and that it is their own inaction and carelessness that kills them. They believe so much in their curse that they make it happen, they tempt fate all the time because they think it's all set in stone anyways. It's subtle and almost meaningless in the grand scheme of the story but it's so telling and I love it

i love the way the devs portrayed dawn as kind of a bitch, even someone childish with sealing the rooms while edie was the supportive grandmother as you're first going through the game. Then as you progress you realize that dawn has extremely good reasons for acting that way, and maybe edie is a bit more nefarious than just the kindly grandmother.

One more chilling detail: "Last time I was in Edith Sr. Room was when I was 10 and she was painting my portrait." Edith says this when looking through Edie's peephole. This could mean Edie was already trying to memorialize Edith.

The shark is the best thing in all of gaming. You may say it looks crap but I love that shark with every fiber of my being

For Barbara's story: another clue that the boyfriend killed her is from the narrator. The narrator refers to Barbara's BF as her "biggest fan". He also then refers to the 'monsters' that kill her as "fans" that came to celebrate her. I think it's implying that the BF's sick obsession with Barbara (as a character, not a person) overcame him that night, and he hurt/killed her in anger to hear her scream. Probably after the failed scare, like you mentioned. So the BF was the monster after all.

Don’t know if anyone has already said this but something that occurred to me was that it actually makes total sense that Molly would envision death/the family curse coming for her as a sea monster since probably the first story she had heard of the curse was when Odin Finch went down at sea with the old house. To a little girl, it’s probably like a sea monster had swallowed him whole, and I wouldn’t put it past Edith Sr. to make it sound that way when she described it to Molly.

Regarding Edie's death and her door, I assumed she intentionally killed herself rather than leave the house, and that she spent that last night drilling the peephole, putting her name on the door, and sealing it up so her room would match all the others. It would make complete sense for someone like Edie to already have her own fancy door decorations ready for her own death.

the fact that you can hear people crying out in fear and panic as Lewis bows his head down… holy shit

I love that Dawn, for all her contentious relationship with her mother, still named her daughter Edith after her. Really adds to the game showing how hard generational trauma is to escape even if you recognize it.

I also find the name “dawn” really interesting. Every other character in the story has a common historical name, but dawn, the only one who understood what was going on, has a modern name meaning “new beginning”