Note: This was originally posted on The House in Fata Morgana’s Steam community as a guide. Reposting it here in case anything ever happens to my Steam account (knock on wood).
Ever wonder why the White-Haired Girl’s name was never shown onscreen in the first half of the game? On my first playthrough, I had assumed the author hid her name in order to create intrigue around her identity, since that was one of the central mysteries of the story.
Door 1:
Door 2:
Door 3:
However, in the context of the entire story, there’s more to it than that: I’d argue that the “censoring” of her name is actually clever foreshadowing of Michel’s gender issues revealed later in the story. Keep in mind that Michel is our POV character (i.e., we as the audience only see/hear what Michel sees/hears) and that “Michel” and “Michelle” are pronounced exactly the same.
First, let’s look at another example of “censoring” in Door 1:
This is Mell waking up from a nightmare in which Nellie was killed by the “witch’s blood.” Morgana’s backstory reveals this scene to be what had actually happened before Mell committed suicide in his previous life (Morgana was just using it here to torture Mell in his sleep). Here the word “sister” is blocked out by Mell’s subconscious mind as a sort of defense mechanism against the mental trauma of that dreadful memory.
So in this case, what appears to be a clumsy way to hide future plot points from the reader actually serves a purpose in the larger overarching narrative.
Once we have that established, let’s go back to Michel.
For his entire life as a mortal, Michel had been rejecting the feminine identity imposed on him by others. In the first half of the story, he was a “destitute soul”** with no identity and a very hazy memory. Nevertheless, the name “Michelle/Michel” still sounded vaguely familiar to him. When he hears it in the first three doors and learns that it’s the WHG’s name, Michel subconsciously rejects the possibility of such a meek and feminine woman as being the same person as him despite her eerily familiar physical appearance. So his mind, as with Mell’s in Door 1, blocks the name out as a defense mechanism. This manifests itself in the game’s script as “xxxxxxxx” whenever “Michelle/Michel” is uttered.
**If you don’t recognize this phrase, play this game a second time and note what the protagonist is now referred to as in the interface.
In Door 4, notice how the WHG’s name stops being blocked out by Michel once he learns that it is no longer “Michelle.” The same happens to the name “Michel” as it’s now associated with a man (i.e., Door 4’s fictional version of himself):
Even as an amnesiac ghost, Michel still firmly clung to his identity as a man, which speaks to just how important it was to him. Michel blocking out the WHG’s name when viewing the first three doors also demonstrates the extent of his mental trauma after being misgendered and mistreated in his previous life.
Once he had regained his memories and identity in the second half of the story, he no longer had trouble discerning the difference between Michel (himself) and Michelle (the WHG). Thus, in Door 6, both “Michelle” and “Michel” are now properly displayed in the dialogue:
Addendum: The Maid’s Insanity
If you’re observant, you’ll notice that in the screenshot from Door 2, the WHG was saying “Michelle” whereas the Maid was saying “Michel”:
In Door 3 however, both were now saying “Michelle”:
If you recall at this point in Door 6, Giselle had already lost her mind, choosing to accept Morgana’s gaslighting — that her love for Michel was merely infatuation with the WHG and her tale. After experiencing the heartbreak of failing to reunite with Michel three times in a row (none of the three incarnations of the WHG had remembered her), her memories of the real Michel were now completely repressed; in their place were merely adoration and pity for the WHG (aka Michelle) as a storybook character.
This is some next-level foreshadowing.
