An Ena Fancomic
Sorry I forgot to upload to Tumblr for one million years. Publish date 8/4/25. I had a lot of fun constructing this comic and playing with the meta and experimentation that comes with Ena media. Was really happy with how this turned out. Enjoy! :)
Playing dbbq again, even in a speedruny way just running through everything ive already seen is reminding me that Video games are literally good.... And despite the endless bitching i do because i don't like how almost everybody else ever talks about Video Game (sorry 😭). I literally love video game and it is beautiful and brings me joy....
(the one at the end of the game, not the red one in the beginning)
The realm of the Lonely Door as we know is made up of a bunch of different locations. There's the light & dark Uncanny Streets, the Purge Event, the Bathroom, the Lost Village, the secret rooms inside the ship, etc etc. But after the smoke is turned off, Ena returns to a gray landscape filled with altered elements of each.
Why?
Oh you are absolutely on the right track here.
Further evidence to your claim: the flavor text for interacting with the fountain you mention In the Bathroom
Perhaps it has something to do with the Lonely Door realms’ function as a place of recreation and retreat?
Most entities inside that Door are either seeking the Bathroom - a place Froggy associates with avoiding responsibility, or the Purge Event, which is illegal and fun and absolutely not what anyone’s ‘supposed’ to be doing. Point being, the main draws of the realm are how it can distract you.
So under that lens, I could see the smoke functioning as an illusory veil; something that lets you blind yourself to your true circumstances, and indulge in the lie of comfort.
Another thing to note is Froggy’s reaction to the smoke. He compares it to cigarettes and also… naphthalene? The compound in mothballs? Both these are objects which pollute and poison the air, one more intentionally than the other. It clearly has a hazardous impact on him, but other entities seem to prefer its presence - perhaps exactly for those effects?
There’s also the elephant in the room of the Bathroom having weed leaf decals on its walls.
I vaguely remember hearing that those leaves have non-drug related symbology, but the initial impression remains. It certainly does no favors to the smoke’s seeming purpose as a recreational vice.
To preface, only a portion of these observations are likely to have any lore or thematic significance. This list is mainly to document aspects of the game I found notable, small as they may be.
Recently in trying to come to a logical comprehension of the abstractness and esoteric narrative of ENA, I eventually came to speculate that all episodes' Enas are different ones. I even mention this in the tags of this post that I chose to not add and instead screenshotted them to preserve them.
The reason I came to speculate this is simply because I'm the sort of person who tries to make the incomprehensible, comprehensible. If something appears to have at least enough sense and continuity to it to not be complete 'nonsense', then I will persistently attempt to break it down into something that makes logical sense and unearth a "true/concrete understanding" (much to my own chagrin and annoyance. Motifs and patterns and connections-making brain is too used to doing this that I can't really "turn it off"). I am also aware that that's not what ENA is about— at least not initially, given the hourglass dog unlockables in DBBQ make mention of "lore" within the ENA universe (but even I'm skeptical as to how the word "lore" is being used, because I'm doubtful it's used to mean 'a canon' of sorts).
But ENA as a narrative is more akin to Hylics than something like your standard JRPG: there's a world and a relatively understood comprehension of how the laws of it work (to an extent) and things like entities and recurring people, but there's no real overarching plot to them— though Hylics doesn't exactly fit 1:1 with this description as both games do have a sort of plot, but the first game's is a lot more mere happenstance and not something like a "god-given quest".
Or in short, things really happen just to happen. DBBQ is to ENA what Hylics 2 is to Hylics.
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Oh also I haven’t seen this documented yet, but the toilet shrine full of incense will play music when you idle by it long enough.
The latter half seems to say “it is the only moment that you crave”, but I’m having a hard time understanding the first verse. I’m also not sure what this could’ve been sampled from, if anything.
