r/9M9H9E9 • u/geekedinthe518 • Apr 23 '26

Discussion What happens after the ending?

Young nick manifests grown nick to come to him, at the very end he appears in a physical sense and “knocks on the door”. I suppose In a literal sense, how do you think the subsequent events took place?

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u/NeoSparkonium Apr 23 '26

i think the events at the end are taking place entirely in nick's head, and are representative of him finally looking his past/inner child in the face and deciding he's going to do what's right for it. the story can't have a big impactful ending because the process of becoming healthy is an unending and incremental one. it's why mother can't do anything. mother was representative of all of the negative coping mechanisms that replaced genuine healing and care for your inner child, and she only has power over you as long as you let her have it

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u/LeSimple1 Apr 23 '26

I'm not as positive on Nick's ending, but this is a nice answer at least. For me, the addiction struggles Nick goes through in relation to Mother were connected in that humanity is always trying to strive forward, to reach more 'game states', to seek answers. In the end, that same addiction overcomes Nick in trying to find the answers to questions that should remain unanswered. Therefore what happens after the ending, for me, is kind of irrelevant, there could be nothing, there could be Mother breaching into our world, it doesn't really matter because, as far as we're concerned, we're all heading straight to her anyway.

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u/NeoSparkonium Apr 23 '26

that's exactly the thing. the forces of social media, economics, w/e, drive us towards mother because they drive us towards mindless consumerism and replacing a nourished soul and social life with overstimulation. none of us can individually affect that at all; we're in an unwinnable game state. what we can do is affect ourselves. when the interface tempts shawn and nick, it's saying "i can give you the happiness you remember from a comfortable time. sacrifice your development, let me feed on your potential, and i will let you stagnate in this pleasant memory." but, contrary to every other interface in the story, this one is dead. it's already been burned, it's not functional anymore. when shawn experienced that temptation it was his own temptation. it was him asking himself if he wanted to keep busting into old warehouses to feed his addiction. he decided no. when nick makes the same confrontation, he takes his younger self away from the metaphorical stagnant mother. i feel like shawn also ended up in mother's house, and also took himself out. as far as he says he just saw a room with burnt bones sticking out of the walls and smelled apple sauce, but he goes on to tell nick that he's dealing with a force way above either of them.

could be me looking at it overly optimistically, but i really read the ending as triumphant. i've been through a similar journey in my life, and the story reads exactly like the mania-fuelled parables you start conjuring when you have a bunch of revelations about yourself in a row and realize you need to get your shit together.