Exploring the World of Splatoon

Mem Cakes

Let's get out of the way the ones this can be used for.

Pearl. Agent Eight first meets pearl in the deep sea metro rather early on, and quickly becomes an important person in the octoling's life. It'd make sense that the memories would form into a mem cake.

Ranked Modes and Trees. Looking at the chat rooms you can see multiple instances of pearl and marina talking about the surface to 8. So I think it'd make sense that over the radio or something, they'd tell them about the plant life above ground (especially marina since I think she'd want someone to know what that's like instead of taking it all in full force like she had to) and the different turf modes to get 8 more excited. This one is more of a stretch though, and it's possible this could also be premade memories from inkling history lessons underground to get a feel for the surface when the octarians planned to take it over?

Shop keepers + The Judds + Mr Grizz. It's a lazy excuse we're using for so many but it's all I can think of to say pearl marina and the captain told 8 about these people too. There's just no way I can think of that she'd already have memories of them before the metro.

(I wanna point out Mr Grizz's mem cake. I feel so bad for 8 because in the Poem of that one: oh what I'd give to be employed! Better, I'd say, to work for pay, than ride this subway through the void" it implies that she'd honestly rather be out there risking her back for a greedy radio then go through this hell and I just want to hug her so badly)

Now, that just leaves a few sections of mem cakes left.

The salmonids, the clothing brands, and the clothing.

The salmonid memories, this one is a huge stretch as we're using some lore that might not be canon?

The splatoon manga is not one people tend to read since it's more marketed towards younger audiences. However, in one of the series when the characters Goggles, Mask, Emperor, and Gloves go to work a salmon run shift, goggles falls into the water on the boat ride back to inkopolis. See the thing about this is that he doesn't just get splatted, he falls into the deep sea metro.

Now, this is confusing for so many reasons?? Because in the chat logs marina states the deep sea metro and kamabo co seem to be somewhere like a whole new dimension from inkopolis, so saying it's just under the waters of the salmon territory seems too simplified. I wanna go into this more on its own one day.

However, as much as the manga lore branches from the game lore, it gives a reasonable explanation on how 8 knows about salmonid. It's highly possible kamabo co purposely made their facility underneath the salmonid ocean so they could purposely fall in and experiment on them. The beginning where you chose an octoling very much hints that 8 was in that testing lab before she lost her memories, and could have seen different salmon in there. Again that's something I want to go on about another time.

The clothing brand one connects with the clothes. Humans tend to throw trash in the ocean, and sometimes trash that isn't intended to go into the ocean ends up there anyway. It is highly possible old clothing items end up in the ocean and down the same way goggles and (possibly) the salmonid do. Or, the trash ends up underground, and maybe 8 in the past has found old inkling clothes lying around, and has seen the branding on them.

Evidence for the clothes underground are with the poems, like how 8 says with the skalop hoodie "it's too frigid to be exposed!" Which could relate to the exposing octarian armor. The neon sea slugs shoes has part of the poem that describes finding these shoes as "a stroke of luck" which could hint how clothes don't seem too common underground.

Now, this next part is short. How do the mem cakes bring memories back?

Simply put I think you eat them. They're called "mem(ory) cakes" for a reason. They're consumable memories! How that works scientifically? Ehhhh maybe I'll research that another time.

What's more curious is how come they form in the test chambers? My theory is that it has to do with the idea that 8 was at kamabo before losing her memories, and the mem cakes are part of their experiments. This is getting too long though, so I'll revisit that idea another time. Gotta save stuff to talk about in other chapters after all!!

So what did you guys think? Got any theories of your own? Any ideas for future theories, or any characters you want my headcanons of? Let me know below!

Stay fresh everyone :)