The Unbread Twins Explained (Spoilers)

So, I'd be interested in hearing your take on how the headspace skeletons work because your analysis is really good and I'm stumped on them. There's so many of them, do you think they're from cycles that ended in death instead of being "completed" with saving Basil, or can that happen multiple times per cycle, or what? They seem different from what happens when you lose a battle, since in those you become toast. Anyway love your blog and analysis you are the backbone of this fandom

The Unbread Twins Explained (Spoilers)

The Unbread Twins are based on Daphne and Bowen. More specifically the bored, exhausted, "dead inside" chanting we see them do while hawking their bread at the family store.

Like every other major boss, (Spaceboy, Sweetheart, etc) the Unbread Twins are an allegory for Sunny himself. They represent the misery and exhaustion that come from the perpetual depression and anxiety he's trapped in. And after their fight they end up leaving just like how Sunny considers leaving the house.

Dream Kel even notes, "Its a big awesome world out there" beckoning the twins to go outside. This is probably an intentional detail given that Kel has been knocking on Sunny's door for months.

Simply put, the Unbread Twins represent the exhausting nature of having to maintain the Headspace Cycle, which they refer to as an "endless circle of bread".

Now these thoughts can be taken literally, as in, these are what Sunny think the real life Daphne and Bowen are feeling, and are using their plight as a symbol for his own situation.

However, there's also a chance they are being literal. As in, they actually have been in Headspace since its "inception" and are serving some sort of function in maintaining the world.

Bread and the Headspace Cycle

For many people, the symbolism of the Unbread Twins stops here, however, there could be much more going on. And there are some ideas that require some speculation on our part.

Consider what we see them do before the boss fight:

Their job is to produce "bread", a food-like NPCs, and send them out into the world. But its interesting to note that the portal shows a digital image of the NPC it requires, almost implying that it can show other images and they produce other NPCs.

And while this may be off topic, this concept is very reminiscent of another ghost, featured in Luigi's Mansion, Vincent Van Gore.

In that game, every ghost in Luigi's mansion is based on a "portrait" including Vincent himself. However, throughout the mansion we see tons of common ghost enemies, that don't represent any real person. In a shocking twist of world building we discover at the end that all of these ghosts are just paintings made by Vincent. The Unbread Twins might be this games' Vincent Van Gore.

All of this is purely speculation, but throughout Headspace we see a great number of NPCs that don't seen to have any specific real world inspiration. We have to consider the possibility that every smaller NPC was created by the Unbread Twins. That every creature in this world is considered "bread" on some sort of level. Even the main party. The Unbread Twins even address the party as "bread" when they a approach before the battle, thinking they've return for revenge. After all, when a party member is downed in battle they turn into toast, and are revived by "life jam".

After the accident, Sunny never wanted to see a unconscious body ever again.

So instead he sees bread, even in the overworld.

But this is just what Sunny, as Omori, sees. Every other dream creature sees them as bodies. And eventually they become skeletons and thus become visible again.

The unsaid implication is that every death/ game over is canon.

Headspace is just a videogame in Sunny's mind, and every game over results in 3 more skeletons added to the pile. We see a ton of them in the gut of Humphrey, the "final battle/boss" of Headspace.

Its stated by the voice after the Humphrey fight, that we see these skeletons all over headspace, and most of them find their way down to Deeper Well and the Abyss.

After Omori wakes up from the game over, he has a new party who have all the memories of the previous reset.

The real question is what do the enemies and bosses know about this. Why isn't there a pile of bones in Spaceboy's room for example? Why doesn't he mention their previous fights with them?

We do see some of these bones in Sweethearts castle, so its implied that they died to Sweetheart in the past. What's most likely is that the enemies, like Sweetheart, have their memories reset after each game over and just clean out the area. In fact its possible that whole enemies themselves get reset from time to time.

Omori's power has its limitations however, and some of the creatures are able to remember things past the resets due to having some sort of "third eye or sixth sense", as stated by Mr. Outback.

So yes, bread and toast are clearly associate with death and bodies in the game, but the real question is why? Why does bread play such a huge role in the mechanics of death?

Bread as the body and Sunny's guilt

"I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” John 6:51

First let's address the obvious:

Yes, the real world inspiration for the bread is the toaster in the treehouse. And yes, downed party members become toast as a joke. A play on the idiom; "toast" as in "your toast now."

Furthermore, I want to stress that I am not a religious expert, nor is this meant to be a Catholic interpretation of the subject. I normally wouldn't bring religion into these explanations, but I get the sense that OMOCAT might have intended for us to consider this.

It is never outright said, but it is heavily implied that that Bowen and Daphne are Catholic, or the Omori universe equivalent, since we see the preacher wears a white collar as well.

Catholics believe in a concept called the "real presence of Jesus in the eucharist" which in laymen's terms means Jesus was being literal about the bread and wine being his flesh. In OMORI we see the same thing, where flesh and bread are interchangeable.

Furthermore, we need to consider the purpose of communion. This is a gross generalization but basically in ancient times you had to sacrifice an animal, an unblemished lamb, for the forgiveness of sin and you had to eat it. In communion, Jesus functions as the lamb and by eating the bread, you absolve yourself of guilt.

The religious symbolism crops up again in the fight with the snow angels, setting a precedent that Sunny has been shown to use religious symbols to appropriate guilt onto himself.

In truth, Sunny feels immense guilt over what he did to Mari. And so Sunny is killed over and over again in this dream world almost as a sacrifice for what he did.