The Final Choice
The story really only offers one way in which you can interact with it, and that is through a single choice that you have to make between what the narrator does at the end. She can either "Ask for Help" or "Keep it to Myself", shown in the picture above. Ask for help appears as what looks like a text box coming from the character's mouth, emphasizing the part about the narrator speaking up and finally talking about her problems. Meanwhile, the "Keep it To Myself" looks like a slowly over flowing sack coming from behind her, like she's bottling all of her feelings up and it's going to cause her to burst. Both of these depictions give hints as to what the final results of this choice may lead to.
These choices are important not only in that they decide the path of the narrative, but they also highlight the choices that someone actually dealing with these issues has to make every day. Where it may seem like an obvious choice to a person reading through this work, it's an incredibly difficult choice for those who are suffering from an eating disorder. Asking for help is hard as it requires that they admit something is wrong not only to themselves, but also to others. This is exemplified by the next parts of the story as the narrator spills everything to her mom, how hard it's been, what's been hurting her.
Afterwards, the mother hugs the daughter, the daughter's mind now cracked open. This could either mean that her mind is fractured and broken, as having a disorder means you aren't in perfect mental health, or that her overflowing brain finally was given release and she broke down the dams holding back her emotions. Either way, this is a moment of reprieve for the narrator as she can finally let go and get the help she needs.
However the other path leads to not nearly the happy ending as this one, with her keeping it to herself and never fixing anything. In the end, she winds up dead, her body a shadow of what it used to be. In this ending, the narrator accepts her death at the hands of her disease willingly. To read mroe about death and accepting death, click here to see Will's analysis of Dawn and how death affects its narrative.
Either way the story ends, Reverte emphasizes that this should not be end for anyone's story and prompts the reader to seek help. No one can get through something like that alone.
In order to learn more about eating disorders, click here.
This story is a great example of the argument brought forth by Flanagan and Nissenbaum in "Values At Play", that games and other works of New Media can and should contain values and expose the reader to said values in an attempt to cause them to focus and question their own values and morals. Reverte does this by creating a narrative built around mental illness and self-image, causing the reader to question their own sense of self-image and anxieties.
Table of Contents
Continue to the Lobotomy to read more about loss related to mental illness: