Juliette, Week 13 - When to Move On: What Remains of Edith Finch

Earning the Best Indie Game and Game of the Year award titles (along with many others) in 2017 and even more in 2018, What Remains of Edith Finch is a captivating story-telling game that takes you through the Finch family tree—containing a collection of unfortunate deaths caused by the family “curse.” Despite the seemingly crystal clear plot, the game still leaves much up for interpretation as to what the supernatural deaths are outside of their face value. 

 The game is told from the point of view of Edith Finch as it is read posthumously by her son Christopher soon after her passing. As the story progresses, more unfolds about the history of the Finch family as Edith reads accounts from members of the Finch family about each death in memorialized, museum-like rooms—perfectly preserved, even though some of them passed away decades ago—created by Edie Finch, Edith’s great-grandmother. 

To discover more about her family, Edith Finch makes her way through each room with two of them—Molly, Edith’s grandmother who died at the age of ten, and Barbara, Molly’s sister who died years later at 16—describing how they were killed or eaten by monsters. The supernatural descriptions and compelling stories, however, are exaggerations of what happened created by Edie. In reality, Molly was not eaten by a monster; she died from neglect. 

Drawings of each character are added to the family tree by Edith as the game progresses.

Many of the characters like Barbara and Molly still have debatable causes of death in the community of the game because the stories Edie used to memorialize them stray so much from the truth. Molly, for example, is thought to have died from food-poisoning, but others argue that it could have also been caused by her sickness, general malnutrition, or hallucinations that caused her to fall from her window. Whatever the case, Edie coped with her failed method of “starving a cold” that killed her daughter by turning it into a story which she later did for all the members of the family. 

At first, her “coping” was harmless, but as more members of her family met unfortunate fates, the family “curse” that had originated before Edie and her husband had even arrived in America had completely manifested through Edie’s dramatic retellings. 

My favorite interpretation of the entire game was that idea that the tragedy of the Finches explained the long-lasting and heartbreaking effects of generational trauma. Some of the analyses I looked at feared that the book that Edith passes onto her son prevented the “curse” from dying and continued the pattern of generational trauma. 

Really what I’m concerned with though, is to what extent Edie’s methods got out of control. Is it better to hold onto memories to the extent she did—leaving their rooms untouched, creating headstones for them before they even passed, creating a family built on the deaths of their loved ones—or to entirely forget them? Her methods are of course too extreme, but where can the line be drawn between properly paying respect and moving on? Experiencing a bit of loss in my own family, I’ve wondered this a bit. I’m sure it depends on the person, but it is also terrifying because if your way of coping is holding onto those who died, how might that impact the people around you as it did with the Finch family?

On the left is Calvin's room that was untouched after he passed away at eleven with his brother, Sam, still living on the right side for the seven years following until he moved out at eighteen.