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animalinvestigator · 2 years

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Id love to hear your extensive belle character analysis

x2. It's a bit difficult to just broadly say anything about belle because, like pretty much every character in petscop, theres about 20000 different ways you could look at her and a lot of mechanisms that we only get little glimpses of, so a broad question like "what's belle's DEAL" is hard. No one knows for sure, and i think thats very deliberate; ultimately, petscop is a story presented to us by as early as the 9th episode through a filter of what the family considers "important" and what contributes to their narrative, and belle is tacitly not that, unless she happens to be near to the other things that ARE important to them (Rainer and paul, namely.) and thats actually probably a big part of her big inner conflict -- I'm gonna get more into it under the cut.

Essentially her entire conflict, character arc, and motivations, are only visible during the instances in which it intersects with Paul and care's. Here's a few things we know about her without having to extrapolate:

Belle is lina leskowitz's adopted kid. The where, when, why, and how of this is never stated. Garalina/rainer may have been involved. See new life letter in 23 and OST ending. As demonstrated in 22, she seems to be pretty insecure about her status as "family". She's touchy about it.

Sometime around 1995-1997, belle was involved with the initial testing of the game, when she became involved with rainer, who appears to have attempted to rewrite her identity-- the mechanisms, timeline, and reason for this is something we can only make educated guesses about. (All of this information is in episode 12; it must be between 95 and 97 because petscop did not exist until 95 and rainer either died or disappeared in 97.)

Belle has a copy of the game that she has apparently left on in accordance with rainer's instruction since ~2000. She is extremely knowledgable about obscure functions of the game, and adept at a skillset unique to it -- note her speedy in-game typing, knowledge of the nifty function, and expertise with the piano.

Contrary to the implication in the game that she is "stuck" somewhere, this is only true of her in-game avatar. The reason why she became softlocked in her room is pretty apparent considering the way rainer talks about the results of their collusion in 12. Nonetheless she's free to do whatever in the physical real world. See episode 22. (Game theory HATES this video because paul and belle go hang out at 7 11)

Belle is at least at the beginning of the series feigning ignorance about her involvement with the game. We learn in 22 that she is the person who paul was initially addressing the videos to, and that person also apparently expressed doubt about whether or not paul was lying about petscops existence.

Belle is in some capacity at multiple points in the series sharing a physical space with marvin, and passing his messages along to paul. (This assumes pink tool is belle, but their handwriting is identical if you look at it, so I hope that's not too contentious.) See episodes 5 and 7. She seems to have some ulterior reason for wanting to get the machine in the game working.

This is slightly less self evident, but it appears she does have a degree of genuine care for her brother; she tries to get him out of a dangerous situation in 23 though its ultimately futile, is apologetic about the circumstances, and appears to attempt to comfort and reassure him in the OST ending -- I'm going to talk about belle like she might be a pretty self serving person with some emphasis on how it negatively effects paul in a minute, so i thought it was important to list this too.

And honestly, that's about the extent of it. Everything you could possibly come up with is entirely composed of those 7 things that are essentially everything that's even remotely concrete. Everyone has to draw their own conclusions on how they feel about belle from all of that. There's a couple other bits and bobs of evidence that are more questionable that I'm also going to bring up, but that's the meat of it.

From this base of evidence i've put together some things that make pretty decent sense to me. I can relay them to you, but they're no more true than anything anyone else could assume given the same evidence. Maybe it will make sense to you, maybe it won't.

One last thing before i lay it out, I can't really get into the deeper reason why I think this way because it would be an even longer essay, but i'm working off the assumption belle's adoption had very little or nothing to do with petscop. Some people will talk about her being adopted into the family because of her participation in the testing but thats contingent on the notion that garalina is like an actual company and I literlaly cannot get into that but for the sake of simplicity we'll assume that the timeline goes belle was adopted -> belle tested petscop -> events as opposed to belle tested petscop -> belle was adopted -> events.

The way i see it is this: the core conflict driving belle's actions both leading up to and during the story is an insecurity in who she is and where she fits in her family. the family outside of lina, paul, and rainer, seem completely unconcerned with her; they crop her out of videos, they don't seem even remotely bothered or interested when paul mentions her, they don't seem to care much about her presence at all. if this is the way things have been since she was a kid, it would explain her insecurity in the present when referred to as 'not family'; and rainer would be exactly the type of person to see a child being treated that way and figure that he could "fix" it, espescially considering his apparent belief that someone can be subsumed into whatever "family" means to him through certain means (see caskets in episode 20). No matter what exactly it was that happened there, the result is the same: it appears to have messed her up pretty bad. She ended up in a transitory in-between state ; whatever this process involved, she started it, she made significant progress, and ended up permanently changed by it, but she never completed it. In this way, belle is stuck between two selves, and with rainer gone, she has no """Guidance"""" as to how to consolidate them. This is where i think her behavior in the actual meat of the series comes from. It seems that she came to the conclusion at some point that this in-between state was very real, and that she needed to finish what got started back when she was a kid. ...which would explain pretty well why she's consisntely subjected herself to the game for such a long time. things like the needles piano that she's become exceptionally good at were both portions of the process she was apparently taught could rewrite her identity (and maybe make her a real member of the family) and also the only things she could access from her little softlocked room. for an absurdly long amount of time, she's been practicing, trying to find some kind of solution that could close the loop so to speak. to me, this is her deal. she wants to Be Finished. she seems to take it extremely seriously. whiiiiiiich gives her reason to be colluding with marvin: he is aware of how to do that, and it seems like he tells her how. even though this is clearly not a beneficial situation and in petscop 5 seems to be putting her in active physical danger, she has freedom to come and go as she pleases and still willingly and continually gets involved with marvin. the way i see it, Its an extremely elaborate self harm game that she's playing in a desperate bid for closure. this is why i've recently started to feel like she might not actually be as averse to paul playing the game as i initially felt . her getting out of her softlocked room is something that only paul could help her with, and only paul could gather the other 500 pieces necessary to power the machine -- the process requires both copies of the game with pieces in it (marvin's copy does not have them.). in a wacky coincidence, belle seems to be able to have the ability to manipulate some portions of the game world, and the door that allows paul into the main corridors below the plane opens up with a tone that is distinctly linked to the times belle fucks with the game world. as unsafe of a situation that it put paul in, belle's big chance to finally resolve this 20 year old internal conflict that seems to have been commanding her life since she was a child opened up the second paul found that game. and when you think about it , espescially given pauls very stubborn personality, "I don't believe you" is not a very good way to get someone to not play a game. in fact, it kind of sounds like something someone would say when they realyl want you to play a game! Just some food for thought. ultimately, she does end up finishing the process, before paul does -- her egg is in the locker, finally, after 20 years of her menu space sitting there unused and incomplete. doesn't seem like she feels very good about everything that happened though.

Hopefully my logic makes sense here. I feel like i've integrated the information in the way that makes the most sense to me, and hits hardest! As always all of this is just the way i put together the informaiton presented and not at all something that I consider textually correct, it's just my own inner world here.

Sorry this got extremely long, but if you have any questions about any of it, I'm happy to answer too : ) Hopefully it was interesting to hear about

#Long ass post im so sorr yi think about her so hard

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upsyturvyy · 2 years

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My thoughts on the separation of Belle and Tiara. This will be incoherent.

Something that has plagued my simple mind about Petscop ever since I plunged head-first into is... who actually is Tiara. Everyone's first response is just "Tiara and Belle are the same person... you idiot." And like yes I know that..! Tiara is an identity that was forced onto Belle as a child and felt the need to use in order to feel accepted. But!! Who is the actual Tiara? Is there even an "actual" Tiara, or was that just a title made up as practice? I've been wracking my brain for months and I think (think) (key word: think) I may have come up with something that maybe probably might make sense. Probably. Let me know if there are any inconsistencies, mistakes, bits of information that I left out... and all that. I'm bad at writing, so bare with me.

The very first mention of Tiara is when Rainer mentions her talking about rebirthing:

"Tiara says that some young people can he psychologically damaged 'beyond rebirthing'."

At the time of that quote, or when Rainer was making the game and put that quote in there, Belle most likely was a child.. I imagine her being slightly older than Care, but still around her age. So, it doesnt exactly seem likely to me that she had any kind of concept of what rebirthing is, or what psychological damage even meant. It's just rather dubious, to assume a child said something like that, I think.

This is also (to my knowledge, at least) the only reference to the "real" or "original" Tiara. Like all things in this God forsaken series, things would be so much easier if it had been explored just a teeny tiny bit more...

However, since that's all we're given in terms of who Tiara may be, the rest I can do for now is speculate.

It's also important to note Rainer's... resistance? Refusal? To refer to her as Tiara (I would even exaggerate to call him pissy over it lol). But we know how Rainer made a huge, big, dramatic deal over how Belle "gave up" and isn't Tiara, so it doesn't exactly make sense to me that he's referring to her (Belle) in that quote. So, who is Tiara, actually?

My thoughts is that she's some kind of psychiatrist, or therapist, or doctor. Perhaps she was even Rainer's therapist, and is the one who introduced him to the concept of rebirth therapy? (That last part might be a stretch, though.) However, the point is that she very likely played a large role in Rainer's experimentation with rebirthing. She may have introduced him to it one way or another, and he showed it to Marvin who wanted to use it to birth Lina through Care.

It's also important to note that Petscop itself was likely used as a child therapy tool. Each child had a save that recorded their controller inputs, we see a TV with Petscop booted up on it in a childs' classroom, and during the "egg hunt" the dialogue "have you caught every egg in the office?" could have been referring to a therapy office (the word office just always jumped out at me. Instead of "room" or "class" or whatever, it's an office. It was just interesting to me). Also, shortly after Paul enters the Newmaker Plain, one of the first rooms he enters appears to be a doctor or therapist office with the dialogue "Care left the room."

Jumping around a bit here. I should also bring up the (attempted) rebirthing of Tiara through Belle. My question is, why was Tiara being rebirthed? And what happened to her?

She possibly could have died, or disappeared, or had something happen to her. It's possible nothing happened to her, and she was just used as a baseline for Rainer to practice with.

We know he failed, and we know that Belle still wanted to be referred to as Tiara for a while afterwards. It's commonly agreed on that this is because she felt the need to take up the role of Tiara in order to feel loved or "part of the family". In episode 23, we see a letter to "Tiara" Leskowitz from her mom (who is theorized to be Lina Leskowitz) which is titled "Your New Life Letter", referring to her "new life" as Tiara. The letter consists of her mom very emotionally expressing her love for her daughter, telling her how she wishes everyone treats her with respect and how she misses her while she's at school, reassuring her how no matter who she is, she will always be loved.

Another thing to mention: when Paul asks the tool who Tiara is, the response is "Petscop kid very smart," in reference to Belle quickly solving all the puzzles. Why would it be referring to her as Tiara, when Rainer calls her Belle?

Probably the same reason Belle wanted to be called Tiara; because if she's Tiara, she's "part of the family," whatever that means. This, for me at least, raises the question of who the tool is supposed to be... But I think that's too big of a fish to catch right now. It might just be Rainer. Idk.

As of right now, I think that's everything I wanted to cover... I will add more if anything crosses my mind. Sorry for having a small brain.

#can u hear the rusty cogs turning and smoking inside my dusty brain #petscop #tiara leskowitz #help me !#istg im probably silly rn...#belle leskowitz #my brain is shattering like a wine glass #plsssplsplwplwpalsss tell me this makes sense...!!!!!!!!!!#hydro.txt

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