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Sweety Tulip
5bf190
Alright, I just caught back up on this myself, so I want to lay down a theory of my own.
First off: what is the "basic assumption" that Weaver said we had been wrong about? I think it's this: that the hotel is necessarily evil. Or, to be more specific, that there's only one hotel entity. It may or may not be true that there's genius loci involved here, but in either case, whether it's the place or its inhabitants, we can use the idea of a hotel-entity as a metaphor at least.
Let's assume that at the very beginning of the quest, Nan was in the normal, "real" world where things are not terrible. In this world, we also know that the hotel exists, and that it's open. If Anderson is believed, it's been open for nearly a hundred years (more, by Kim's reckoning), so it must have been in business. We know, therefore, that in the normal world, it is a real hotel that has real guests and must have real staff. As the quest goes on, Nan progresses into an "other" hotel, and possibly - given the changes in the architecture - further shadow-hotels after that. Whenever she moves from room to room, when the lights go out, and possibly under other circumstances such as dreaming or interacting with mirrors, Nan may move from one instance of the hotel to another, and these different hotels can exist in different times or have different rules or inhabitants. This explains Pablo's disappearance in the first thread - he briefly resurfaced from "deeper" in the hotel, then slipped back under again. Now, some of these shadow-hotels are clearly evil and mean and wrong. Probably nearly all of them. But sometimes, inexplicable things have happened that were helpful. There was the rat, which brought food, or the space-time bending that warned Nan about her encounter with the Padre later. Most noticeably, the note from The Management, which we have here, seems to be an instance of something trying to directly talk to Nan, not another person, but also not hostile to her.
Who or what is The Management? Now I'll leave my more solid statements and get into my crazy theories. There's a sort of theme of dualism going through Nan - mirrors, dreams, light and darkness. My feeling, at the moment, is that there's the "evil" hotel, ruled by madness and fear and monsters, and a weaker "good" hotel, which I'll refer to as The Management because I think it sounds cool. The evil hotel does most of the abductions - every guest who's date ended with 6, perhaps, though I have no more reason to think that than that maybe the evil hotel's strength is strongest once every 10 years or something (santiago has said there were other guests which didn't survive) - while the good hotel tries to stop it. It took Anderson, who is a lawman, a vanquisher of evil, at the earliest time that it was possible for the hotel to take people; and later, it took Nan, who is a repairwoman, someone who can fix things.
And, on the subject of the hotel taking people, let's look at >>359084 there. Those are canvases, but they're an odd shape, aren't they? They're just the right size for doors, or beds - both a metaphor for entering and leaving, whether it be places or sleep (or dreams, such as the one in which Nan has this encounter). Does each canvas represent one of the guests taken by the hotel? Why does only Nan - and someone else, let's assume the mysterious Alan - have a clear white outline, which in her case is gradually being filled in? Is it representative of some sort of corruption? Nan's silhouette on her painting was filled in a bit more when she ran away, and the mysterious other figure wasn't filled in, just carved up.
Was Nan right to run away? That black figure was pretty horrible, but it didn't look threatening. It was curled up on the floor. The first thing the white figure did, coming out of the painting, was kneel down next to it. Maybe listening to it? Comforting it? Then it chased after Nan. Did it have some terrible intent, or just want her to come back? She heard something crying as she left. I wonder if that blackened thing - looking burnt and ruined, just like Padre's victims, and just like the mission, the house of god itself - was, in fact, The Management, Nan's feeble benefactor?
Perhaps we shouldn't assume that Nan's not without some supernatural assisstance.
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