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Ostricho:

Who are Nana’s parents, anyway? Within the world of MOTHER 3, there is nothing to imply that any of the surviving residents of Tazmily Village are her kin. She stays alone at the beach, which she certainly seems to be quite fond of. In her own words, “Everyone hates me, you know. They all say I talk too much and never shut up.” These are hardly the words of someone with caring relatives. No, Nana appears to be all on her own. She seems to be somewhere around Lucas’s age, as evidenced by her height before and after the three-year transition. So what’s her deal? Who raised her? If not her parents, where are they? Why doesn’t she have any?

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Parentless

First, let’s discuss Nana’s parentage. I deduce that whoever they were, they no longer exist. They have since passed on, and they must have died sometime before the Egg of Light was used to reset everyone’s memories. After all, Hinawa’s death was referred to as the first time to people of Tazmily Village “truly knew sadness”. This means that any other tragic deaths must have happened before their memories were taken from them. This could include a countless number of people, but we can at least deduce that this includes Fuel’s mother and both of Nana’s parents.

Therefore, it seems that the identity of her parents cannot truly be deduced. Perhaps they have since joined the ghosts of Osohe Castle in their piano-playing parties every night, or perhaps they passed a long time ago in the world that the White Ship abandoned.

However, there are more implications to this prompt than just the identity of Nana’s parents. We are far from the stopping point.

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False Families

If Nana is truly parentless, then who raised her? She does not seem to have any close bonds with the other villagers of Tazmily. After all, she goes as far as saying they all hate her, as previously stated. “I’m not sure why,” Nana states at one point of the game, “but none of the family members in this village really look alike.” These are choice words for someone who has probably spent time analyzing the features of the townspeople in an ill-fated attempt to find her own family. Aside from being evidence for Nana’s status as an orphan, it also has a more important implication. This implication is, of course, that a majority of the families in Tazmily Village are not truly biologically related, and that they have been simply fooled into thinking that they were by the Egg of Light.

Is there any weight to this statement? I believe some amount of the villagers truly are kin. With all due respect to adoptive families, I believe that all of Lucas and Claus’s parents are most likely Flint and Hinawa, in order for the events of the game, and the final battle, to hold their emotional weight. After all, a flashback seems to show Flint and Hinawa speaking over the cribs of Lucas and Claus at an early age — hardly the sort of memory to be falsified when Leder himself admitted that the memory implanting was a rushed process. “In truth, we HAD wanted to create an entire plethora of myths and legends,” he states in Chapter 8, “but our story was made in such a hurry that we weren’t able to. It’s a real shame.” I doubt such detail would be given to the exact moments of a child’s birth while rushing to implant false memories. This is a pretty good indication that Lucas and Claus are, in fact, the true children of Flint and Hinawa.

So where’s the cutoff? At what time were children beginning to be born on the Nowhere Islands to the people of the White Ship? Fortunately, we can use our previous assumptions about Nana, Lucas, and Fuel in order to find the point in which children were first born on the islands.

We know that Nana’s parents are gone, passed away before the Egg of Light took the memories of Tazmily Village. In addition, Fuel must have already been born by this point, in order for his mother to pass and not be “the first death”. Therefore, we can deduce that Nana and Fuel were the last children to predate the Egg of Light. Lucas and Claus must have been some of the first to come after it.

This combines the idea that many of the families are not truly kin, and the idea that some from after the Egg of Light are. I think it is a safe assumption that almost all children older than Lucas are not truly the children of their alleged parents. The only exception to this rule would be Fuel, whose age borders so closely to the time in which the Egg of Light was used, that there was no time to replace his recently passed mother.

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A Rushed Job

So why was Nana simply not assigned parents, then? Well, I believe this is for the same reason that Fuel did not receive a new mother before the Egg of Light was used. There simply wasn’t time. After all, the line from Leder I provided above confirmed the process was rushed. Fuel didn’t necessarily need a mother in order to be raised. Yet the question remains — why not just placed Nana under the care of someone else? Why not just make her the adoptive sibling of Fuel, for example? Was it really that rushed?

Perhaps it was. And, this may be a little outrageous, but I want to say that there was a filing error.

I think this panicked, desperate memory removal was so rushed, that Nana was left abandoned for this reason: her name was too similar to Nan’s. I think it’s very possible that as the villagers mixed them up. Something like this:

“Okay, we’re running out of time here. Has Nana been assigned a family?”
“Hmm? Nan? Uh, yeah, we’ve taken care of her already.”
“Awesome, no time to double check, let’s keep going.”

It sounds silly, but I think it’s very possible.

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Growing Up

If Nana was one of the youngest children, and her parents died before the village’s memories were erased, and she was completely overlooked, then how the heck did she make it safely to the adolescent years? This is where I’m proposing a link between her and the beach. She sure does like the ocean, after all. She’s one of the last people to leave Tazmily Village. And she’s quite the chatterbox.

I think she was risen by the creatures near the beach. They’re certainly a lively bunch, after all. There’s the pigeons nearby that certainly love to coo and cry. There are Imitation Crabs that hang out nearby. There’s evidence of dolphins in the area from the ear bones that wash up on the shore. And there’s even rumors of mermaids. It’s possible that any combination of these intelligent animals helped Nana eke on by. Of course, even if they played a minimal part, she may have received some assistance from the nearby villagers. Yet her connection to the beach remains strong.

There’s a lot to consider from all of this. The mystery of Nana may never truly be solved, but there’s plenty of evidence to point us in the right direction. One thing is for certain: Nana was a victim of the rushed memory reset, and as a result, she never found a new set of parents to call her own.

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When you are in Summers, Ness gets a little crazy after eating some Magic Cake given to him by the Captain’s wife. It actually transports his conciousness to Dalaam where he watches as Poo completes his Mu training. How did a simple piece of cake cause this to happen?
You can write this as silly or as serious as you want. Just make sure to stay on topic!

One might assume that the Magic Cake was stuffed with drugs that transported Ness to Dalaam, but what if it is something different?

What if you are meant to take the term ‘Magic’ Cake literally?

In other words, what if the magic cake is in fact imbued with PSI power? Prophecies have given the information that there will be four heroes that defeat Giygas, but there was no way to get communication going between Dalaam and Eagleland. Thus, although the sailor and his wife no longer know, ancient ancestors were given this Magic Cake and told to someday feed it to a ‘boy and his companions.’ This cake was imbued with a sort of halfway teleportation power, allowing Ness’s consciousness to travel to Dalaam in order to observe his future partner and know that he was on the right way to them.

Thus, only by eating the magic cake was Ness and the others able to meet Poo.

One must wonder what the customer reviews for Magic Cake were over the years, with hundreds of customers seeing Dalaam whenever they ate the cake. It must have increased knowledge of culture throughout the world, as so many people would be observing Dalaam.

And that’s the explanation for the mysterious abilities of Magic Cake. So long ago imbued with PSI, these cakes were given to the sailor’s ancestors to someday give to Ness.

Magic Cake is perhaps one of the most confectionaries that Ness and his friends consume on their entire adventures. Along with Saturn Coffee and Tenda Tea, this is one of the food items in the series that is often — and perhaps, dare I say it, lazily — compared to hallucinogenic drugs. The last time I submitted to a Theories prompt regarding the Magic Cake, I hypothesized that a New Age Retro Hippie had dumped his product into the cake. Hilarious, I know. We all have to start somewhere, I guess. But let’s take a close look at this. Could such a cake possibly be a hallucinogenic drug? I, for one, am going to answer with a hard no. The answer? Perhaps it’s even stranger.

Supernatural Symptoms

“I used all leftover materials!” the woman who prepares Magic Cake declares in EarthBound. Seems odd — what the hell were the leftover materials!? — but Tomato’s excellent Legends of Localization book shows that the original intent of the Japanese text was that she used “the last of her ingredients”. I would say we can strike down any assumptions that she accidentally added in “leftover” drugs right here. Furthermore, what happens afterwards may appear to be a vivid illusion, but the events that transpire with Poo and Dalaam are very, very real. It is as if Ness somehow took a back seat in Poo’s mind and watched as all the events transpired.

Unless Ness had a hallucination that somehow managed, by complete coincidence, to match up 100% with reality — the drugs theory is dead. That is, of course, anyone was actually taking it seriously in the first place. That is, admittedly, something I doubt.

Not only does Ness seem to watch as actual events happen in Dalaam, a most peculiar thing happens at the end of it all. Poo, learning the power of Teleport, is able to warp directly to Summers. Peculiarly, this is an ability that is only supposed to work if one has previously visited a destination. It is as if Ness and Poo’s minds were linked. I propose that, under the effects of the Magic Cake, Ness experienced Mu Training alongside Poo. Likewise, in the same manner, Poo “experienced” being in Summers — which is why he was able to warp there. While it is possible that Poo has visited Summers in the past, I feel like if this were true, it would trivialize the party taking the Sky Runner to Summers in the first place. Why hadn’t fate sent Poo their way earlier and saved them a lot of detours?

Why does any of this mind linking stuff matter, anyway?

Magic in MOTHER

Magic. It’s a peculiar thing, especially in the world of MOTHER. After all, Itoi twisted the norm on magic by reskinning it as psychic powers in his first game. For something to truly be magic in this series, you know it must be special. The Magic Cake is just one of those things. Magic Pudding, Magic Tart, Magic Truffle, Magic Butterfly. Each and every one of these magical things has an identical effect — recovering the psychic points of the party. Of course, as we know, psychic powers and the mind are inherently linked. It would seem, then, that this concept of magic ties closely in as well. Combine that with the Magic Cake, which I propose has the ability to link minds together, and you begin to see a trend. (Though I suppose the Magic Fry Pan does not fit with this trend. I would gloss over that normally, but I feel like it’s worth noting.)

EarthBound Beginnings, likewise, has its own fair share of magic items. Magic Candy, Magic Coin, Magic Herb, Magic Ribbon. Of course, there’s only one place where any of these items can be found, and that’s Magicant, the realm of the mind.

The trend continues. It’s even in the name of that strange little half-world, Magicant. Through a couple of pink God’s Tails scattered throughout the world, the physical meets the metaphysical, and the body meets the mind, and minds meet as bodies. It’s a strange gateway, one that can certainly be referred to as magic. But what if there’s more to these God’s Tails than a pathway to Maria’s mind? What if there’s something special about the composition of the God’s Tail and the magic food items as a whole?

The Secret Ingredient

I’m not even sure, but why not, it’s theories. I can throw out speculation if I want. Beats calling it cocaine.

What if the material that the God’s Tail is composed of is the same substance that makes other things in the world of MOTHER magical? A pink, otherworldly substance, one that potentially occurs naturally. It opens pathways into the minds of other people, as seen when Ninten and his friends can explore Maria’s Magicant. That’s her own consciousness right there. They share experiences and memories in that alternate world. And if Ness shared Summers with Poo and Poo shared Mu with Ness, then we’re already seeing an overlap.

Such a material, I propose, may be some sort of hidden element. A material that stimulates the mind and allows it to go beyond its normal limitations. Perhaps this can be seen in the form of Magic Pudding, with a mere increase in PP. Perhaps this is witnessed with the Magic Cake and the out-of-body experiences it induces. And in its largest, purest quantities — the God’s Tails — it allows someone to physically vanish from the real world and transform into nothing more than a thought.

Now that’s one hell of a leftover ingredient, if you ask me.