Basil (Omori)

Basil is one of the main characters in the video game Omori, and is also one of the most crucial to its overall plot. He's part of Sunny's former friend group.

Character
Name:	Basil (stylized as BASIL)
Occupation:	Gardener
Relationships:	Sunny (Omori) (best friend) Aubrey (Omori) (friend) Kel (Omori) (friend) Hero (Omori) (friend) Mari (Omori) (friend; deceased)
Fandom:	Omori
Other:
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Canon

Headspace

Basil is a rather timid, yet friendly male child wearing overalls and a flower crown over his head. Alongside Mari, although his weapon is a pair of gardening shears, he is mostly averse on fighting and going on adventures alongside his friends (except later on the Hikokomori route), preferring to tend onto his own plants and flowers near and around his home, right down southward of the Vast Forest Area. Besides showing humility and care towards anything he encounters, Basil also has considerable knowledge of flower terminology, ascribing each of his other friends in Headspace with a particular flower/plant that corresponds to their individual personality. In this case, Basil's own flower motif is the sunflower, as he likes to "see the brighter side of things".

Much later on, before the real world segment first kicks in, his unexpected disappearance at his own home kickstarts Omori and his friends' journey towards finding him throughout the expansive dream world itself.

Real world

Whereas his Headspace counterpart is more jovial, albeit more reserved, Basil in the real world, per the current-day events of the game, is far more inverted, being unable to fully control his emotions at times, and is more likely to undertake drastic measures, most often verging towards suicide, despite him sharing some of the qualities his younger Headspace counterpart has, like his hobbies of gardening of photography. He also shares much of the same clothing as Sunny currently does, yet with a slightly different color scheme; in terms of location, he lives in his grandmother's home, one street perpendicularly away from both Sunny, and Kel and Hero's, along with his caretaker Polly.

As for the tragedy surrounding Sunny's childhood friend group, he alongside the aforementioned character share a grave responsibility upon Mari's untimely demise, with the former witnessing in abject horror the eventual accident at the latter's home four years prior to the storyline's present, and then afterwards, reluctantly helped Sunny in framing it as a suicide, to cope with the loss of her older sibling.

Depending on the player's own actions in the real world segments, how Basil will act in turn will alter the ending for them; either only him will survive, or Sunny will, both won't, or both will make it to the end, slowly but steadily mending past wounds and hardships with the rest of their friend group afterwards.

Fandom

With how the real world and the other dream world (known as STRANGER in-game) Basil have spoken and acted throughout much of the game, much of the fandom has had simply found it hard to symphatize with him, especially his crucial connection with Sunny in regards to Mari's prior tragedy; other fans, with an objective eye, have fought back with respectful analyses of the character, noting that while Basil indeed is a problematic person due to the way he dealt with everything around him, not to mention the lack of any available therapy around Faraway Town itself, he still gets some merit as one of the most sincere and honest portrayals of childhood trauma, if not lesser than Sunny's own. Thus, a schism has eventually formed within the fandom's greater scope, between those who abhor Basil as someone guilty of their own action, and those who see him as a misunderstood humane character.

On the positive side, Basil can also be seen as a nature-enamoured pacifist, as well as an effeminate, lovable gay person, the latter due to his best-friend status with Sunny, to which it carries over to the console-exclusive Boss Rush section of the alternate Hikokomori route. There, in their own Release Energy animation, the two in their respective dream world counterparts can be seen cherishing each other, in the form of holding hands. A short fan video edit on Youtube takes this up a notch, by redrawing said animation to depict both Omori and Basil in a much more affectionate manner. Said video, which garnered around 409,149 views as of November 23, 2023, caused considerable confusion amongst the fandom, especially LGBTQ+ members and proponents of the Sunny/Basil (Sunflower) character pairing, but of which veered on the positive side, with one commenter noting that:

So the more homophobic the enemy is the more gayer the attack is xD @rsg5314

Fan Works

Aural

• Stranger - by evidentlyfresh (2022)

Meta/Further Reading

• Omori Basil Analysis | How One Day Utterly Broke Him - by JJCGames; a deep-dive character analysis on Basil's personality and history, and how Mari's untimely tragedy greatly affected him alongside Sunny, his best friend, even years after in the storyline

Resources and Links

• Basil (Omori) at Archive of Our Own
• omoribasil tag at Xitter