With this lie, she convinces the children to kill Brown, beating him to death. This sends Wendy into a jealous rage she makes a story up about a stray dog who kills children. This is because Wendy and Jennifer were best friends – until Jennifer finds a puppy (“Brown”) whom she forms a bond with and spends all her time with. Wendy, who is at the centre of the Red Crayon Aristocrats, has a paticular vendetta against Jennifer. This is certainly the case between Wendy and Jennifer.

It is often a world which relies on seeing others as irrelevant, a make-believe fantasy that centres on the girls’ apparently unique relationship. They can be dangerously complicit relationships girls can form intense bonds that border on infatuation and obsession. As I wrote in my last post, Rule of Rose is about the dark side of female friendship. In fact, the game suggests that the massacre is caused by the hysteria created by the young inhabitants of the orphanage and in paticular, the intense friendship between Jennifer and Wendy, and the souring of this friendship. However, I read this symbolically – as a child, Jennifer placed the blame on Wendy for what happened. The Wikia places the blame on Wendy because the game shows Wendy to be the one who brings Gregory in on a leash. This definitely has an avenging angel vibe about it. So, not only does Jennifer provide him motivation through the storybooks to commit the massacre, she also hands him the gun to kill himself. It is also significant that Jennifer can kill Gregory herself (bad ending), or give him the gun to commit suicide (good ending). And what are the subject matter of these stories? The bullying and abuse she faces at the hands of the Red Crayon Aristocrats, the little girls who live in the orphanage…īy telling him these stories, she motivates him to kill the children…Īt the end of the game, she sets Gregory loose on the orphanage, where he kills Wendy along with the rest of the children and, finally, himself. Though Gregory makes the storybooks, at the end of the game we learn Jennifer tells him the stories. He takes in Jennifer after her parents died in an accident, before Jennifer is admitted to the local orphanage. We discover at the end of the game that Gregory is the storybook maker, a man who has gone mad with grief over his dead son. Rule of Rose is structured through a set of storybooks which act as chapters, each one exploring a “princess”, one of the orphans who torment Jennifer. The writer of the Wikia page suggests that it is Wendy who is to blame for these events, but there are several holes in this story: why did Gregory kill Wendy and not Jennifer? And is it plausible that Wendy would be able to “train” a man to act like a dog? It also ignores that this is primarily a story about the fantasy world that is built between female friends. IMO, the Wikia’s account is overly literal – it does not take into account the fact that this game is told from Jennifer’s unreliable perspective. This is different to the account on the Wikia page, which places the blame squarely on Jennifer’s best friend, Wendy.

Jennifer is the one who convinces Gregory to kill the children. This post has a rather radical assertion to make about what really happened at the orphanage…

In reading the plot of the game on the Rule of Rose Wikia, I realised that my interpretation of events was rather different…*heavy spoilers up ahead* I decided to write this post because of an analysis I read which I didn’t find totally satisfying. Rule of Rose is all about the unreliability of memory and the differing perspectives one has as a child and as an adult. You might ask “what do you mean, what happened? Can’t you tell?”, but horror often relies on ambiguity to create tension and mystery, and Rule of Rose is no exception. To ask “what really happened?” after playing a fifteen hour game may seem strange.

Rule of rose love suicide