What Happened To Milton?!?!? What Remains of Edith Finch - Game Theory

hello guys knuckles up or Michael here and boy do I have a video for you as you probably guessed from the title today we will be talking about what remains of Edith Finch for the few of you that didn't catch the video game awards this year they took home the prize of Best narrative alright and the award goes to what remains of Edith Fitch prior to that award and before playing the game with my literature / media class I had never heard of it but I'm glad I got the chance to play it I enjoyed it very much the art narrative sound and everything in between was great now before I go any further today I must warn everyone here that I will be digging into this game quite heavily which means lots and lots of spoilers so I highly recommend you go play the game before watching this video it'll help you understand what's going on you have been warned just to recap for those of you that have forgot or those of you that are here for a spoiler what remains of Edith Finch is told from the perspective of Edith Finch she returns to the house she grew up in after many years of staying away from it why well there was clearly something suspicious going on regarding the family as all of the members had been dying mostly young and in unexpected ways the curse as they called it took the lives of many among those in a family your job as Edith is to navigate the old house to discover what happened to the rest of your family after playing from the perspective of Molly Calvin Barbara Walter Sam Gus Gregory Lewis and Edie the deaths become crystal clear you find that all remains of the finches is a newborn baby courtesy of Mother Earth while playing the game there was always something that never sat right with me I breezed past it initially but I couldn't help but feel that there was something more to it in the game you play from many different angles but not all of them Sven K Sanjay Don and Milton are characters that you never get to experience from a first-person perspective let's look at that last one Milton Milton was introduced right at the start of the game in fact the opening few lines deal directly with his mysterious disappearance later you climbed towards the top of the large house and enter into his room which doubles as an art studio you take a look at a flipbook left on the table sketches name onto the family tree but a bing bada boom missile worldwide as a step in the room and they never talk about him again that's it kid went missing he likes to paint what next well sadly nothing as I said you don't actually get to find out what happens to him and he's not really brought up for the remainder of the story well ladies and gentlemen you are in luck as I have put in the hours to figuring out what the hell happened now what can we draw from what remains of Edith Finch about Milton he's the son of Don and Sanjay brother of Lois and Edith Milton is 11 years old at the time of his disappearance he is a black-haired kid who simply loves to paint that's not very much to work off of if I'm being honest especially when trying to figure out what happened to him let's pause for a moment while making this video I kept trying to figure out what happened to Milton but the most important question we need to know is who is Milton we already covered his story in what remains of Edith Finch but there's another game believe it or not that we need to take a look at in order to figure it out and this game is the unfinished Swan again big spoiler alert and full effect for this game the unfinished Swan you have been warned the unfinished Swan was created by giant Sparrow the same company that made what remains of Edith Finch the game came out in 2012 and received some well-deserved praise in the unfinished Swan you play as Monroe a boy who recently lost his mother I'm noticing a pretty dark trend on these games some sad stuff anyway Monroe's mom was known for painting vigorously she loved it that said she was awful at finishing any painting that she started Potter death Monroe was told by the orphanage taking him in that he could only take one painting he chose his mom's favorite which was a swan that she had not finished hence the title the unfinished Swan amid a dream Monroe flies into the painting to chase after the Swan after the Swan tries to escape it's a pretty cool story why is it important though well look no further than the king the king is the main focus of the narrative and the story yes I'm recording for my media studies ie it's okay [Music] well look no further than the king the king is the main focus of the narrative and story specifically on his love of painting he uses his magic paintbrush to paint structures using black white and gold colors that you see in Monroe's dream he is fascinated by art and architecture so what's the comparison well there is no doubt in my mind 0% zip soldiers out of East Oba Dumba whatever board you use for zero it is very very clear that Milton is the King right off the bat Milton and the King are both creative painters who make some very impressive work the magic paintbrush is used by the King to create the walls of his kingdom while for Milton the magic paintbrush is used across worlds from one game to another the King's new subjects were tired of white they were tired of tripping of banging their shins of miss placing their homes so they started painting everything ruining the Kings spotless design in response the King outlawed all non magical brushes and pledged to spend the next month painting shadows for his kingdom their looks are essentially the same the King is an older looking version of Milton the only few differences are that the King is much taller much larger and he has a beard a 3d diagram exists in Milton's room that exists within the real space of the kingdom the only colors that the two used to paint are white black and gold coincidence I think not anyway you still don't believe me let's look at more well riddle throughout Milton's room is a logo of a moustache and a crown which I will just call the crown logo for the sake of this video the King's signature mark is the crown logo it is seen all throughout the kingdom and it is seen all throughout Milton's room in addition they both wear crowns in person as well interestingly the King reveals a drawing of his first house as he calls it in the unfinished lawn in what remains of Edith Finch there is a similar room with heavy natural light a few photos a rug and a fireplace they look quite similar finally my favorite indicator is the most subtle of all the King er calls a childhood moment in which he made his first sand castle it was unfortunately toppled over and that made him very sad the King hated the sea and all because of his very first castle it was the only one he had ever come close to finishing and it took him a single day but then the tide came in and washed it all away he vowed that someday he'd build a kingdom that would last forever but there is not a single grain of sand that exists within the kingdom where he lives in the unfinished Swan if you look at the surrounding environment of the Finch house it is clear as day that there is grass trees rocks and everything in between and there's a small beach that has some sand on it that is most likely where Milton and the King made their first sandcastle I [Music] really wish that it is truly all folks but it's not see we have made the parallel between the two games but what happened to Milton the connection we have examined between the two games has helped me draw a fairly logical conclusion regarding the mystery of Milton Milton suffers from schizophrenia and accidentally caused his own death now I know a lot of you are wondering how I thought of that from the little detail that existed within the games what remains of Edith Finch provided the foundation and details for the theory while the unfinished lon sealed the deal on this theory let's first analyze why this is certainly possible what remains of Edith Finch is quite a realistic game it depicts real ways people met their death for the younger players characters it could be argued that they're not as realistic but I would like to say that because they are young the developers wanted to use more imaginative imagery involved in order to create that childlike perspective for example Gus did not actually swoop up chairs with his kite but it's such a young age he probably imagined colliding with the furniture or how Greg pretended he was a fraud when he was under water in the bathtub regardless all of the deaths have logic except Milton's by comparing the seemingly rare but possible deaths that occur among the family it seems impossible that amongst such realism a kid can simply hop out of a fake door and go missing forever that's because he did it that unexplained mystery is out of place there has to be a more logical solution now let's talk schizophrenia schizophrenia is a mental disorder in which a person struggles differentiating reality from fantasy the most clear symptoms are vivid hallucinations and they can include any and all of the five senses we can do great things together you and I I like you unfortunately I'm a little change at the moment and I can't help you realize your true in addition schizophrenic SAR often delusional lethargic disorganized in speech and in physical space though suffering from the illness are often very impulsive and childlike now how can we determine for sure that Milton is kids of phrenic well to be honest we can't unfortunately this is the problem with the theory I can't prove with 100% certainty that Melton is schizophrenic but I can make a damn good case for it let's start with genetics 1% of the world's population is diagnosed with schizophrenia just think about that for a moment you're in a room with 100 people assuming everyone is under the age of 45 there is at least one person in that room with the disorder or one person that will develop the disorder until they reach the age of 45 that's pretty crazy when you think about it that said 1% isn't very high but we can increase that percentage for sure let's look at the family tree of the finches and see if dr. knuckles can examine them in any way shape or form well there is Milton but I'll go into depth on him later then we have Louis now Louis is the best example of someone with schizophrenia in the game this whole playable experience revolves around captivating hallucinations which ultimately lead to an accidental suicide we can also see Louis lifelessly shut down from his mother as she pleads for him to go home his drug use state of isolation lack of motivation and prime target teenage years for the disorder make him an extremely viable candidate to have schizophrenia to further prove this the best evidence we can find is in the psychiatric note in which Lewis says my imagination is as real as my body that's about as far from as you can possibly get my imagination is as real as my body he told me it was hard to argue with him based on his vignette and the psychiatric report by the doctor it is more than fair to say that Lewis has schizophrenia then there is Edie yeah the sweet loveable granny isn't all that innocent the most glaring piece of evidence for Edie having schizophrenia is in her vignette she explains that the tide rolled far out and she wandered into the water which had turned to just rocks at that point well this is certainly possible the things she found within where normally the water would be is not so realistic she sees a deer at first which is definitely possible as the deer could have probably run out into the forest looking for something and stumbled upon this rocky area that had normally been water but it's not that likely but you know what let's give her the benefit of the doubt but it's hard not to argue this is the case from hallucinations when she opens a completely intact gate that is submerged under water for years you mean to tell me that this gates may perfectly like this for 80-plus years it was under the water plus being closed and not being able to show a single hint of water damage to the gate not bloody likely if that still isn't enough she sees the house lights being turned on as she approaches it let's be clear about this - this house was submerged underwater for the exact same time as the gate almost close to a hundred years and if you still don't believe me at this point she even admits herself that she has no idea what she's seeing and she's clearly hallucinating I started seeing things but when I saw them they felt like old friends that night a lot of things came back to me things I can't explain but that I need you to try well that's not all edy is hands down the most delusional character of any person to have ever lived in the Finch house Exhibit A when describing spends death to Edith she claims he is killed by a dragon which is technically true rather than claiming a dragon fell on him while he was trying to build it for the kids she constantly keeps up the charade that Sven was literally killed by a fire-breathing dragon some could argue that this is some sort of storytelling method but in reality when you look at the way she describes things and says things it makes more sense that she's actually believing it at this point when he told people Sven was killed by a dragon she could also have said he was building a dragon shaped slide that collapsed she could have but she didn't Exhibit B not to mention that towards the end of the story she completely evades the nursing home and impulsively disappears because of her delusions about the house a final piece of evidence comes from an argument between Edie and Dawn she warns Edie about the wine with her medication till our final night together and all our final nights apart grandma you know what I said about alcohol some of your medications are very specifically left a present for you in the hallway when doing research about all the possible medication for treating schizophrenia there is not a single one of the main ten that is used commonly that can be taken with alcohol all of these schizophrenic medications have some pretty serious side effects when taken with alcohol ranging from the lowest end of the totem pole we have risperidone which will make you pass out and go to sleep all the way to the most extreme bio thysen which can actually cause death if consumed with alcohol now I understand that a decent amount of medication shouldn't be taken with alcohol but the medication combo with Dawn's concerns means that is definitely possible that Edie is using meds to treat schizophrenia if there was no harm with taking these meds with alcohol then the theory would have ended right there but meaning that there is problems with her taking alcohol with their medication it is certainly possible that she's taking medication for schizophrenia well these are the main two suspects Louis and Edie by taking a look at all of their deaths in the family tree it could be very likely though that most of the finches are affected by schizophrenia look no further than Odin Walter Gus and surprisingly Edith while the evidence is not as strong for the rest of these characters there is certainly potential Odin impulsively leaves most of his family and his life back in Norway to sail across to America mind you not to have a better life or to be in better circumstances but in order to escape a deep family curse if that doesn't sound delusional I don't know it was Walter after traumatized by his sister's death isolates himself for the next 45 years schizophrenia is most susceptible among those who are extremely isolated they begin to lose their minds Walter had nothing or should I say no one and we look at Gus remember earlier when I said that he had imagined moving the furniture well maybe he didn't imagine it but rather hallucinate it not to mention his clear disobedience intentional isolation lifelessness and prime age for the disorder Gus is a very target suspect for having schizophrenia and finally Edith this may come as a shock but by piecing together her journey through the house and how she died allows us to make this case you either believe me on this or you don't but Edie while discovering death after death does not imagine what they think but she relives them for one it is very vague to associate some of the artifacts with some of the deaths for example Barbara's is the most literal as you can be reading word by word in a story so Edith perhaps if she wasn't hallucinating that she could just follow along and gather what she got from that comic book but look for example like a more vague one Gregory's telephone conversation how can she possibly draw a conclusion of Gregory's death without concrete information the phone line conversation doesn't even remotely relate to what Gregory's doing in the bathtub it is a completely unrelated conversation so to me it seems impossible that Edith was able to get that sort of information from a non-sequitur conversation I believe that the deaths within the game are not actually realistic of what happened but more so Edith's perception of them not to mention the ending in the ending it is revealed that Edith's child goes to the house to lay flowers by now dead Edith's great it is unclear how she died but most likely due to childbirth based on what the story has given us in the decade 2010 our medical care is so advanced that it is extremely rare to see mothers die during childbirth however mothers with schizophrenia have doubled the chance of dying during childbirth and within the following year a schizophrenic female has 5 times greater likelihood to simply drop dead and die than the average female this could potentially explain why Edith is dead at such a young age despite seeming pretty healthy so on this family tree there are a number of potential suspects now back to Milton how likely is it that Milton has schizophrenia let's go character by character as Edie and Lewis are the most concrete cases of people with the disorder going right off the bat for Milton he has around a 15% chance of getting the disorder compared to the average 1% if we take into the account the other characters Milton goes from 15% to 29% at the lowest Milton is experiencing a 1% rate like the rest of the world and like everyone watching this video right now but most likely he's at a 15% rate in order to get the disorder and that's pretty high at the possible highest rate of developing schizophrenia he's at 29% but wait there's more this is simply taking into account the gene pool of his family but not Milton himself when he disappeared Milton was age 11 age 11 is the prime age for developing schizophrenia as disorders most common among young men aged 10 to 18 with schizophrenia developing within those first four years between 10 and 13 in addition Milton like his brother Lewis isolated himself constantly through the separation of his room from the rest of the house he was in his room constantly painting by himself without anyone else by his side when taking all of this into account Milton's likelihood of developing schizophrenia has jumped from a fair rate of 15% to around 25% not to mention that if the extreme percentage is true at around 29% the naught of statistic jumps to around 40% goddamn that is a lot of percent now finally here's what I believe happened in Milton earlier I said that Milton used his magic paintbrush to jump from one game to the other not one game to the other but from one until state to his mental state of someone affected by schizophrenia I believe that what remains of Edith Finch is actually a prequel to the unfinished long game a game that is about Milton's hallucination before he died in the unfinished wand the king claims to have left his first house the one we distinguish as the finch house earlier to which he walked into his garden into his kingdom the garden area resembles the front driveway of the finch house with the trees in the bench both have very similar feels afterwards I believe Milton continued his elucidation into the forest to which he died due to either starvation and dehydration or an accident as he was hallucinating for some time perhaps days the lack of water food and sleep could have killed him more likely I believe that the environment around him caused his death around the Finch house is heavy forestry and cliffs Milton wandered too far tripped on something potentially Iraq and fell to his death and drowned perhaps after he died the finches could not locate his body and reported him as missing the last piece of evidence that I want to bring up is how the games tell their stories if you look at what remains of Edith Finch we see Edith Finch walking around the house and reliving and telling stories the unfinished Swan on the other hand is very very very different as opposed to having a first-person perspective of all the events that occurred the unfinished one is told as a story but that has already taken place in the past it is important to note that looking at the storybook it does look like a child's book as the pages are very horizontally extended a big book with not that many pages and a lot of art in it is generally tended to be a kids book and most kids books out there aren't nonfiction most of them are just funny stories based off of maybe other folktales and things like that they're not meant to be taken seriously but why is this important this subtle distinction pretty much proves that the story of the unfinished Swan is fiction while the story of what remains of Edith Fitch is true what do I mean by this from the crossover moment where Milton was fine one moment and then the next moment he began to experience signs of schizophrenia he crosses over to another story that's fiction the story of the unfinished Swan according to Milton is completely fictitious as it is a hallucination it's hard for him to distinguish what's real and what's fake the story of what remains Edith Finch is Milton's reality and the story of the unfinished Swan is his fantasy in a game of realism I always know that there's something off about simply jumping through it and going into another game it just doesn't make sense there was something more sad and sinister than that I believe that the curse talked about in the game is not actually a curse but instead a series of mental health disorders that has claimed the lives of many people within the family remember that's just a theory a game theory thanks for watching I'm sorry I've never done a game theory so I kind of feel like I had to do that anyway guys I really hope you enjoyed this video let me know in the comments below if you agree if you disagree if you have some more questions ask because I'm always up for debate and I'm always up to hear what other people think about this if you enjoyed that drop a like down below subscribe if you have not and as always I will see you guys in the next one peace out

Channel: KnucklesUp

Views: 315,676

Keywords: What Remains of Edith Finch, Milton, KnucklesUp, Milton theory, What happened to milton, milton edith finch, edith finch, milton finch, game theory

Id: ApKv60YFaDY

Length: 21min 55sec (1315 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 09 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Dead-Sync]

As someone who just finished the game, (and definitely saw the nod to The Unfinished Swan but didn't realize it went so deep). I roughly came to the same conclusion myself, although I didn't think schizophrenia for every one.

I think the conclusion I came to was that the family experienced an unfortunate series of deaths (mix of mental disorders, medical issues, and accidental deaths), that tend to be described in a fantastical way.

For example,

I think Lewis represented depression (hence the suicide).

Molly, I wonder if she died by accident from eating a tube of toothpaste and going to bed. Apparently, a tube of toothpaste has enough flouride to kill a child.

All in all, I don't know exactly why this family has so much bad luck in that regards, and maybe that's something I'm missing or just something we need to suspend disbelief to appreciate the game. obviously, there is some of that there. As locking up and preserving rooms is not normal haha. However it does make for a great literary device, so it's ok to let some realism go for the sake of storytelling.

[u/Orgotloth]

I’m fully convinced that this game is about a family’s struggle with schizophrenia.