White Space
 | WARNING: This article contains spoilers for the main story of OMORI. |
| White Space | ||
|---|---|---|
| ||
| role | suppresses the truth | |
| route | Both | |
| characters | ||
"Welcome to White Space. You have been living here for as long as you can remember."—The player's first introduction to White Space
White Space is a location in OMORI. It is Omori's home, and the place he almost always begins in whenever Sunny falls asleep. White Space is the opposite of Black Space.
As the name implies, White Space is primarily a void of white with very few notable features. The main area of White Space is Omori's blanket, which has a laptop, a box of tissues, Omori's sketchbook, and Mewo, Omori's pet kitten. A black lightbulb hangs just above Omori's blanket, dangling from a wire that seemingly connects to nothing.
Red Hands roam outside of White Space's main area and will chase Omori on sight. If they catch him, they will teleport him back to his blanket.
Story
After the death of Mari four years ago, Sunny's repression of the truth began with the creation of White Space, as well as his alter ego Omori. The one constant of Headspace, White Space serves as a safe, if dreary, place for Sunny to escape from reality. The only thing that ever changes is the lightbulb, a curious object filled with pitch-black darkness instead of light. If a lit lightbulb represents "the birth of an idea", then a black lightbulb is "the repression of an idea" — it serves as a visual metaphor of Sunny's repression of the truth, and its darkness pulses stronger the more the truth begins to leak out into the world of Headspace, often in the form of Something.
White Space is where Sunny almost always begins every new dream segment, taking on the form of Omori to explore Headspace with his friends. For much of the game, this and its nature as a way for Sunny to escape from reality remain White Space's only purpose. However, near the end of the game, White Space takes on a more significant role.
Sunny Route
In most cases, when Sunny falls asleep and enters White Space, he immediately fuses with Omori in a cutscene, but after Sunny has reconnected with all of his friends in Faraway and found the strength to face his fears, Sunny will materialize in White Space that night and will remain himself. Omori will remain on his blanket and will simply watch Sunny, showing no desire to fuse. With the door to Headspace missing, Sunny's only option is to examine the lightbulb. Ready to confront the truth, Sunny smashes it, ending his repression once and for all, much to Omori's shock. Sunny is promptly expelled from White Space, and finds himself in Black Space, where he battles Something for the last time and prepares to remember the truth.
After learning the truth behind Mari's death, and a disastrous encounter with Basil, Sunny finds himself within White Space again for the last time. In this instance, almost everything in the room is gone, except Omori's blanket and the wire the lightbulb used to hang on. Omori himself stands on his blanket, staring at the bare wire. When he notices Sunny, he immediately attacks him; White Space will serve as the game's final battleground as the two fight to determine Sunny's ultimate fate.
Omori Route
 | WARNING: This section contains spoilers for the alternative routes of OMORI. |
Should Sunny completely ignore the real world outside of his house on all three days, he will have no desire to find the truth, and thus Omori will have no reason to be hostile. After completing the last of his chores on One Day Left, Sunny attempts to fall asleep, but succumbs to his self-hatred and guilt as Something appears to consume him, before Omori "saves" him by fusing with him — this time permanently as he assumes complete control over his mind and body.
White Space will have multiple subtle changes after this event. The lightbulb will continue to pulse erratically with darkness; it will return to normal once Omori defeats and represses the Lost Library phobias. Defeating them will also cause Omori's laptop to, upon interaction, return him to an altered Black Space. Most notably, if Omori chose to cut open and kill Mewo in the Punishment Area, she will be completely absent, and will remain so for the rest of the game.
Creation
White Space was the first thing Sunny's mind created after Mari's death. It is described as "an emptiness, a home without warmth. A place to survive, but not to live." by the Branch Coral found in Deeper Well.
Daddy Longlegs explains in the Lost Forest that Sunny's desire to explore his mind became strong enough to create a world for himself, so he created Headspace, an idealized world of his own.
There he found short lived peace and escapism from the truth. He started shutting himself in start to live within his own world where nothing went wrong, his friends were still together, and Mari was still alive. Even though he got accustomed to Headspace after a while, his mind still found ways to confront and remind him of the truth.
To deal with this he created Omori, an alter ego. At night, he assumes his identity and leaves Sunny behind.
Trivia
- White Space's main area is laid out exactly the same as Mari's picnics.
- At the beginning of the Two Days Left dream, Omori will instead wake up in Neighbor's Room. Attempting to reenter White Space will result in him seeing Something through the door hole, before noting that the door is locked.
- If Omori stays in one place for a certain amount of time, he will sit down.
- The knife's spawn location at the beginning of the game is always random except if the player interacts with Mewo last, then it will always spawn south.
- The headspace map will always spawn south if the action prior was done at the start of the game.
- There are 12 spots where the knife can spawn into.
- According to the Omoriboy comics, the floor to White Space is always cold, explaining why Omori sits on a blanket and why the heat from his laptop "feels nice."
