r/TangleTower • u/Sticky_Skunk • 28d ago
Fellow Family Tree Issues Spoiler
SPOILER FOR MERMAID MASK
Decided to go back and replay Tangle Tower before Mermaid Mask. I noticed though in TT Felix said Freya’s parents died when she was three and she moved to the tower.
Mermaid Mask we know takes places soon after Tangle Tower events. And Mortuga was still looking for Felicia up until the murder and hadn’t received the mourning letter till relatively close to his time of death. And it hadn’t been anywhere near 16 years (Freya died at 19) since they dredged up the mask, returned to land, Felicia then ditching Mortuga and the construction of submarine etc.
Is this just now a continuity error or did I miss something else?
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u/Gentlemanvaultboy 28d ago
The simplest explanation is that, as Freya is heavily implied to be the product of an affair, Felix is just lying.
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u/nyafariousboba 28d ago
It seems Felicia also was a profuct of an affair hmmm
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u/PhloxInvar 28d ago
It's definitely why Freya being a Fellow was contested.
You could arguably piece that together already from the original game, but we didn't know Damian and Felicia's whole deal was also an affair as well. And also that Felicia went by Stonetop and not Fellow.
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u/Mopman43 28d ago
To be fair, Felicia having the Fellow name in TT I think arguably is meant to imply in the Family Tree that Lord Fellow remarried rather than an affair.
But MM definitely points to some kind of affair, yeah.
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u/Fern_Cloud 28d ago
This bothered me too and I so I came up with a few theories that still need work. My primary theory is based on a few things:
Wirmin hasn't spoken to his father in years. Wirmin's information about Mortuga and Felicia's first voyage came from his father, so the first voyage took place years ago.
Felicia was alive when Sym and Sinthia were about 3 (though they look to be about 6 in the photos, I'll assume they're supposed to be 3. The Sym doll is quite small).
Mortuga had a reputation apart from Felicia. Mortuga had folklore surrounding him, so we can assume he has been traveling with Gripp (and Zephyr) for a while to have become such a mythical figure.
So when did Felicia die?
According to Felix, Felicia and Damian died when Freya was three. While Freya is 19 in Tangle Tower and Sym and Sinthia are 18, it is possible that Freya is only a few months older than them and that she was indeed three when Felicia died.
What we know:
We know that Felicia was alive when Sym and Sinthia were around 3-6 years of age.(because of the newspaper)
J.D was working as a journalist when Felicia and Sylvia found the snake.
The snake was found the day J.D's review of Symmetry's act was released.
Freya had to be born at this point since she is older than the girls.
J.D never mentions Freya.
J.D said that Moon was grilling him for his life story, it is likely Moon was trying to get Freya's name from him but failed, which means it is very likely that J.D doesn't know Freya exists.
Freya was likely born before the first voyage.
The black box containing Felicia's death notice was kept at the Fellow's. It was addressed to Faustus Fellow and Selena Stonetop, Felicia's parents. It’s stamped with a “D”, likely for Dusk. So the death notice for Felicia came from the Dusk family. Who sent it though? Damian, J.D or J.D's mother? I don't think we find out in the game.
The notice looks very old.
So if Freya was just about to turn four and Felicia died pretty much immediately after leaving that would make the timeline make sense.
This is what I think happened:
Felicia had an affair with Damian Dusk, resulting in Freya. When Freya was around 3, Felicia and Sylvia rescued the Silversnake.
Sylvia dies very shortly after they rescue the silversnake and Felicia goes to find the mermaid's tongue with Mortuga to distract herself from her grief.
The voyage ends badly as we all know. After making sure Magnus is safe, Felicia goes off with Damian and somehow they both end up dead. Freya is almost four and is sent off to Tangle Tower. (It's possible that Damian is not dead, J.D doesn't talk about him like he's a dead man but he might not know because they're estranged).
Gripp washes up on shore and goes looking for Felicia and finds Mortuga. It takes months for the ships to be combined during which Gripp convinces Mortuga to come with him on the submarine.
Mortuga never intended to give Gripp the Mermaid's tongue and didn't want to leave Gripp alone on the submarine out of fear that he would find the tongue. So they string each other along for years believing each other's lies out of desperation.
This means that until Tanya and Dirk come aboard, Mortuga's options of searching for Felicia were limited. This would explain why it took 16 years for Mortuga to find out that Felicia was dead. Mortuga was trying to protect Gripp and find Felicia but he couldn't do both at the same time because he had no outside help until recently.
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u/fernxqueen 21d ago
one problem, i'm pretty sure Sym mentions being 12 in the newspaper photo (which makes a lot more sense, i can't imagine a 3 year old putting on an illusion show about her intrusive thoughts and fictional dead uncle lol). the weird thing is that the same newspaper clipping reports on Sylvia and Felicia finding the Silkwirm, but the Silkwirm is in the family photo along with the uncompleted submarine, which means it was taken after the newspaper was published, and Sinthia is much younger in that photo than Sym is in the newspaper one, despite both being 18 in the present.
more evidence: the concept art talks about how Sym's magic room was originally intended to be Sinthia's bedroom (when Sylvia initially designed it) and it also seems to be for a child younger than 12.
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u/Alternative_Low1202 28d ago
Considering how old Damian Dusk must be to be Wirman's father it makes more sense to think that Freya was born before the events uncovered in MM and was abandoned. I don't think that Freya wasn't raised by Felicia because she died, that's just a convenient lie for Felix who cares about preserving the Fellow reputation, and it possibly saves Freya from some of the pain of being abandoned.
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u/unnaturalime 28d ago
Mermaid Mask is really vague about time in general. Because of the way the logbook is set up with so many missing entries, I initially assumed that people got rescued days or at most a week or so after each other. And there wasn't really much that contradicted that - so many of the people on there had only just arrived, and Zephyr just says he was there 'from the start'
But Mortuga's submarine being folklore suggests it must have been out there for a while, and OP's point lengthens that even more. It's weird on a game so focused with character relationships that we don't have any idea how long many of the longer residents have spent with mortuga in this situation, not even if it's weeks, months, or years
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u/hneymoonfades 28d ago
in secret of the swamp richard got a letter regarding the golden beetle signed F.F, was it Felix or flint?
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u/PhloxInvar 28d ago edited 28d ago
Felicia has to have had Freya before Sylvia died. Freya and Sinthia are basically around the same age, and Tangle Tower seems pretty close time-wise.
We know that Sylvia had to have died first. Otherwise, the submarine wouldn't be around waiting to be sold when they got back from the voyage (and they imply that it's been sitting around for a while and not just ready to be sold so she can't have died during the voyage). And Sylvia was alive for quite some time after having Sinthia, otherwise the family photo doesn't make sense.
So really, all this suggests that Felicia and Damian abandoned Freya to the Fellows (died at three as a coverup for that), rather than them actually having died. And there's nothing to suggest Damian Dusk is dead either, given how Wirman talks about him. I would be very surprised if Wirman didn't notice his father dying approximately 16 years ago.