Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-14138255-20141031002615/@comment-11188061-20141201052935

Shadow at Morning wrote: Oh, I've no trouble letting go of the notion that Yang's doing some projection. If Raven appears later with the exact same face, I'll be perfectly fine.

Mostly, I included it as a sop to those people objecting on the grounds of the first-order oversimilarity. That led to the crazy theories, like long-lost twin, time travel, or alternate dimension bullshit. Here, of course, we've fairly conclusively demonstrated that they look less similar than previously thought. As a result, I no longer need to include that aspect in my formulation of the theory. I do still like the idea, though, probably in a less or invisible form, with features too subtle for them to render.

To explain my theory, though: Yang knows a little about her mother, including her appearance, based on old photographs. This, combined with subconscious expectations, drawn from both the photos and looking in a mirror (due to family resemblance and imperfect memory of the pictures), overlay slightly in the dream, resulting in a face she sees which is slightly off from her actual face, not the least because she's not particularly skilled in aging people from photographs. She catches a glimpse of a person when Raven opens the portal, and Yang, suspecting that it's her mother, has the dream in which the face her dream gives her mother is idealized, and based on a number of sources, none of which are her actual, current face, since it's aged.

Essentially all I'm saying is that the face in the dream is constructed only from Yang's idea of what her mother looks like, since Yang never saw the masked woman's face in the train. There's a simple but decisive contradiction here. The mask. There is zero reason Yang would project her 'mum' wearing a Grimm mask, and down to such fine detail too. If she had seen it before in the past she didn't even need to ask 'who are you' already.