William Oh–Mary and Thomas Oh parent-child relationship

William Oh’s relationship with Mary and Thomas Oh is the emotional and motivational wound at the center of his early life. Their disappearance leaves William without certainty about whether they are dead, still climbing The Tower, or pursuing a mystery they valued above their family. He responds with anger, denial, and a determination to gain enough power to find them, so the parent-child relationship survives not as an ordinary household bond but as an unresolved demand for explanation and accountability.

Absence and Uncertainty

Gertrude tells William that five years have passed and that his parents are most likely dead. William refuses to accept the conclusion. He points out that Gertrude had already said they were gone three years earlier and proposes that they may simply have climbed farther up The Tower this time. The exchange establishes the defining condition of the relationship: Mary and Thomas are absent, but their absence has never been conclusively interpreted. To William, “gone” can still mean hidden, delayed, or unreachable rather than dead.

That uncertainty is intensified by the practical emptiness surrounding him. In the same conversation, William demands to know where his servants and shoes are, while the older emotion he keeps sealed away briefly breaks through. His anger is not directed only at immediate inconveniences. It is the pressure of a life in which the people who should have explained their choices are unavailable, leaving him to reconstruct their motives from fragments supplied by others.

The Parents as Climbers

Gertrude explains that she once Climb[ed] The Tower herself and reached the Twelfth Floor. Her experience allows her to distinguish between two kinds of Climbers. Some pursue money and power and eventually stop between the Eighth and Fifteenth Floors after establishing small kingdoms. Others become addicted to the challenge and to uncovering The Tower’s mystery. Mary and Thomas, she says, belonged to the second kind.

This description revises William’s understanding of his parents. Their continued absence was not presented as a simple failure of affection or responsibility; it was connected to a consuming intellectual and existential pursuit. Gertrude describes the Tower as containing vestiges of an unknown past that cast doubt on accepted knowledge. She also recalls a particularly disturbing discovery: the outline of ruins matched the layout of William’s hometown, including the location of his father’s bakery. She has seen too many strange coincidences to dismiss such a resemblance as illusion, and she believes that the questions generated by these discoveries drove Mary and Thomas onward.

Gertrude nevertheless refuses to offer false reassurance. If Mary and Thomas return, she says, they could illuminate The Tower’s mystery better than any other Climber, living or dead, but she tells William not to hold out hope. The parents therefore become paradoxical figures: they may be among the most important interpreters of the world, yet they have become nearly inaccessible to the child whose life they shaped.

William’s Anger and Objective

When Gertrude asks what kind of Climber he wants to become, William initially says that he wants money. He then abandons that answer and says he wants power sufficient to decide the course of his own life. In the same declaration, he names his parents as the object of his pursuit and says that he wants to track them down and give both of them a thrashing for their irresponsibility.

The formulation reveals how closely love, resentment, and agency are joined in William’s response to them. Finding Mary and Thomas is not merely a rescue mission or an expression of filial longing. It is also an attempt to reverse the helplessness their disappearance imposed on him. Power would allow William to choose his direction rather than remain subject to the consequences of choices made by absent adults.

Gertrude challenges the goal by asking what William will do if his parents have already passed from the world. She frames his pursuit as a possible dedication of his life to pain, struggle, and death in service of a hopeless objective. William answers with grim humor: he should choose an achievable goal that includes punching his father in the face as a byproduct rather than making that act the destination. The joke does not dissolve the hurt. It converts an unattainable emotional demand into a practical climbing objective while preserving the promise that he will eventually confront the people who abandoned him.

Memory, Rumor, and Public Identity

William’s parents also become part of the public mythology surrounding him. Jason Salazar promotes a story that William was born on the Hundredth Floor, where lethal Miasma granted him abilities beyond human comprehension. When questioned about the parents of this supposedly extraordinary figure, Jason names Mary and Thomas Oh. The claim is sensational and unsupported, but it demonstrates that their names function as recognizable clues to William’s identity.

The rumor produces a concrete reaction from a scar-faced Climber at Brenda’s Inn. After hearing that William’s parents were Mary and Thomas Oh, the Climber pales, rises abruptly, and leaves while dragging a teammate with him. The scene suggests that the names carry significance beyond William’s private grief, even though the evidence does not disclose what the Climber knows. His reaction turns the missing parents into a possible link between William’s personal history and the wider, dangerous world of The Tower.

As William’s reputation grows, stories about him multiply further. Climbers claim that he can turn into lightning, that his missing hand became a cursed talisman, or that he survived being struck in the face by a lightning bolt. These tales distort the facts, but they preserve a residual truth: William is unusual, visibly marked, and connected to events people cannot explain. Mary and Thomas remain part of that same unstable narrative field, their disappearance feeding the sense that William’s past contains a secret large enough to attract fear, speculation, and pursuit.

Legacy and Continuing Search

The relationship’s decisive consequence is that Mary and Thomas define William’s future even while absent from it. Gertrude’s account gives him a choice between pursuing wealth or power and pursuing the mystery that consumed his parents. William chooses power, but his stated objective remains inseparable from finding them. Their example also places a possible path before him: he can climb for material reward, or he can become one of those who continue upward because the structure of The Tower challenges everything they believe about the world.

William’s parents therefore leave him two inheritances. The first is abandonment, experienced as anger, uncertainty, and the fear that he may never receive an explanation. The second is a direction of inquiry: The Tower may contain buried evidence about the past, including evidence capable of explaining both the world and the disappearance of Mary and Thomas. William’s pursuit begins as a child’s demand to confront irresponsible parents, but the surrounding revelations make that demand part of a larger investigation. Whether he finds them or only follows the questions they left behind, his relationship with them transforms personal loss into the force that sends him upward.