This post is meant to highlight examples of split states that keeps popping up
Tabitha and Jim have a conversation about the first time Jim met Tabitha's parents. When she says "I was terrified my parents were gonna hate you," he says "But they didn't, though. She gives a strange look and a nearly 4 second pause before flatly saying "No." This suggests that her parents ABSOLUTELY hated him, and she just never told him. The story exists in two states at once. This seems like a little bit of a stretch, until you take into consideration that the scene has Jim literally tearing off a piece of the orange Tabitha is eating. Now this seems pretty inconsequential, but trust me, it is part of a larger pattern.
Jade obviously has his conversation with Tom about Schrodinger's cat, the infamous thought experiment about a cat being alive and dead at the same time. Interestingly, this thought experiment was supposed to highlight how the idea of superposition doesn't make any sense.
Julie tells Ethan "once you're dead, you're gone," only to be contradicted by her mother, who says that because monsters don't exist, the monsters never killed Norman. Norman is alive and dead, if you take Julie and Tabitha's assertions together.
Boyd and Sara have a sort of strange conversation in the woods
SARA: Do you think they know where they are?
BOYD: What?
SARA: The bugs, the cows, birds. Do you think they know the horrible things they're surrounded by? That they aren't where they should be or... Does Mr. Worm just think "Here's some dirt," just like any other dirt?
BOYD: You know, if you cut a worm in half, it grows back into two worms?
SARA: What's your point?
BOYD: My point is worms are fucking creepy. I'm sure it feels right at home here.
The worms feeling at home in Fromville perhaps means that there's something about Fromville that aligns with the ability to cut something in half and have two equally viable offshoots.
The monsters seem to have two forms, their human form and their monster form.
Fatima can apparently split her perception between her own body and Smiley's
During season 2, the instagram account posted SEVERAL characters with their head split in two
JIM
KENNY
JULIE
DONNA
SARA
BOYD
VICTOR
TABITHA
I don't know if I'm allowed to link to it here, but if you track down the early draft of the first episode of the show, the FROM logo is cut in half horizontally
The creators say that the people pulled in to Fromville are at crossroads in their lives
Sara was able to hear the music box (and importantly, where it is located. it wasn't simply an ambient sound) when they were at the ruins, which suggests that she is perceiving some sort of superimposed, parallel existence on top/undereath theirs. The dungeon is simultaneously there and not there.
So this idea of things being split just keeps popping up. But what does it mean, and how does it explain why Boyd is special?
Well, I think that all of this splitting ties back into what the man in yellow says about the fact that there's no way to change a story once it's been told. Like I explained in my earlier theory, I think he is being more literal than we give credit. Once you literally tell a story, the events of the story can't be changed, but an untold story is malleable. They're malleable because Fromville operates partially (or perhaps entirely? not sure) like quantum physics. Before measurement, a particle exists as a distribution of all possible states. Upon measurement, it collapses to one defined, discrete thing. The "story" of Fromville may work the same way. Telling the events to someone else, or recording them, collapses the wave.
I think that Boyd is special because his unshakable willpower gives him an unusual power over this collapse. He can manifest specific outcomes through sheer force of will. I suspect the town is particularly interested in breaking HIM because this power is a fundamental threat to whatever this place is. But if that's the case, why do they need to break him first? Why not just kill him outright?
Well, I also suspect that because the town runs off of this splitting/superposition, dying with conviction interrupts whatever happens to people who die in the place. The two (what I believe to be) benevolent ghosts we see are people who died with a kind of certainty that is unusual in Fromville. Father Khatri was reproducing the Bible from memory, and the guilt from failing to do his duty as a priest drove him to nearly jump off a bridge. Tom did not hesitate at all to go help get Tabitha. He was unbothered with the antenna experiment because he had his own conclusions about the place that he held very strongly. He converted the gas station into a bar. Like Boyd, he didn't just accept what the town gave them, he reshaped it. But even if this speculation on what the ghosts are is wrong, the fact that Jade and Boyd are the ones that see them supports the idea that possessing a particular degree of willpower makes the town categorize you as a bigger threat.
Boyd went out into the forest with conviction that he would find resources. So he did. He commanded Donna not to die, so she came back. He POSSIBLY made that door under colony house appear. I'm not that high on that one, but I know it's often listed when people talk about this topic. The town needs him to die broken, because otherwise he will continue on like Khatri and Tom, and become a player against the man in yellow, or whatever entity is controlling this place.
The idea that Boyd's willpower is what makes him special aligns with Kenny's claim that people who can't adapt to the place are the ones that don't last. Jade says "I don't just sit around, accepting the world as it is," and he starts to be driven insane by the symbol. Someone like Boyd disrupts this pattern. To be a person that can simultaneously resist passive acceptance of the situation while also retaining their sanity is a very unusual and powerful thing here. If the people are pulled in to the town because of their open-ended potential, someone who can actively control those outcomes is extremely dangerous. Perhaps this is part of why they didn't kill Randall either. Popular assumption is that it's to enable tension to grow, but Randall actually has been pretty calm. Perhaps they COULDN'T kill him yet because he's one that would come back as a "ghost" or whatever they are.
Returning to Tabitha and Jim's recollection of meeting her parents, it makes me wonder what happens when two people remember a story differently. In this place, do both remain true, or does one told version have to "win"?
