#anne boonchuy dies

On impulse, I rewatched The First Temple before watching The Beginning of the End, which proved to be an excellent idea. I was always confused why the first temple had this added emphasis: no title sequence, twice the length as the other temples. 

With the new episode out, and Darcy’s threat to kill Anne, the answer is clear. The First Temple foreshadowed every death in the series.

Our first indicator is an off-handed line Marcy gives. “No frog, toad, or newt has ever survived the temple.” But the weight of the foreshadowing falls in the games they play.

First, Marcy gets so caught up in making sure that the Rubik’s cube is in the perfect configuration, that she doesn’t care how she’s hurting her friends. Similarly, Sasha got so caught up in controlling Anne, that she didn’t realize how she was hurting her. And then she did, and decided to fall off a cliff and almost die.

The second one is, of course, Amphibia’s witty and somewhat infuriating way of teasing Marcy’s death. In the temple with the green squares, there are two ways to die. One is by being crushed. The other is by being burned alive by a blade-like flame. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Their third trial was the one that confused me, though. It taught humility, which I took as an indicator that the temples are malicious in nature–Marcy has an ego problem, meaning she bounces between extreme confidence and extreme humility, defaulting to the second as her more basic response, and a benevolent wit temple would teach her about the balance between those things.

Well, now it all makes sense. We’ve got a chess board, similar to the one Andrias set up. We have most of our characters on the good side, except one, dressed in black, helmet on her head, unwillingly forced to try to kill the people who she so deeply cares about.

Then, what Anne says to Hop Pop? “Just because I’m mad at you, doesn’t mean I want to kill you!” That’s the key to Marcy’s forgiveness of Anne and mostly Sasha for being shitty friends.

Meanwhile, the end of the game was the chilling part. Marcy flipped the wart. Got rid of her lead, the one player she needed in order to win.

Anne is the one player we need in order to win.

Hence, Anne will die, to save the game. They have to forfeit, because Andrias cheats at the game (brings dead people back to life), so they will have to cheat at the game as well.