Their friendship was odd, though, because Laurel would tell stories about things that happened to Daphne and make them her own. The Other Mother's sadistic smile after Coraline tells her that if she loses the game, then she would allow her to sew buttons over her eyes. Winston explodes Jenry's world with one question: Why is the young man so interested in his son Jasper? It was Winston's daughter, Juliet, who was his mother's lover. Juliet is the parent he should be looking for-his another mother." Victims, Soul Extraction: The Beldam is shown to kidnap and store the parents of her victims, as Coraline's parents were held captive by her in the snow globe. When freed, seemingly due to being removed from the other world and returned to reality, they emerged without any memory of the experience and their appearance slowly reverted to the original. She is also able to claim the souls of her victims, such as the spirits of the three ghost children, whose souls were trapped in the other world, bound to their eyes which now belonged to the beldam. This prevented them from moving on. The loss of him fills her body, courses through her veins. And now, as her memories replay over and over, she can’t help but feel it all—the sadness, the loss, the love she had and perhaps still has for him—flowing into her limbs, making her skin twitch, her fingers ache, till it spills from her eyes as tears.”

Most of them have limited free will as the Beldam sees them as slaves, fit solely for the purpose of luring her victims into the Other World. However, she gives some of the inhabitants more free will to make the illusion of their loving and friendly personalities more "genuine". This is seen with the Other Wybie, who was given the most free will since the Beldam knew that the cause behind most of Coraline's frustrations with the real world was Wybie's annoying personality.But the other world really tells us more about the beldam than anyone else. Because everything there is her creation, the other world shows us how the other mother thinks about things. Basically, she gives everyone the superficial things that they seem to want, but she doesn't understand anything about love or family or friendship.

The Other Wybie shoves Coraline to the tunnel so she could escape and closes the door behind her, sacrificing himself to save the latter]The job's location was not the best place to be with her paranoia and the history of the mansion. Odd things would happen and strange sounds would occur that had Daphne second guessing her leaving. How Billie took over the caregiving of her daughter to the point of obsession was very strange. Overall, I found the book to be dull. I could see some people liking this if you want a heartwarming story told from the perspective of a 13 year old boy. Because someone pretending to be Jane has already collected Florrie. And now the little four-year-old is missing. Some fans speculate that when the Beldam told Coraline that "everyone has an other mother", she was actually telling the truth and not simply using figurative speech. This would indicate that many more of her kind exist. Considering that the Other World is implied to be older than the Beldam and that she has no true power over it (she can only manipulate objects in the Other World), this could be the case. And so begins a struggle for Coraline's soul. Gaiman is too intelligent and subtle to invoke the supernatural - this is much more mysterious than that - and too wise to let Coraline face the horrors alone: she has an ally in a sardonic and very feline cat. But the dangers are real, and part of the richness of the story comes from the fact that it offers many meanings without imposing any. For example, when the other mother shows Coraline a mirror in which she sees her real parents, and hears them seeming to say "How nice it is, not to have Coraline any more . . . Now we can do all the things we always wanted to do," we can see for a moment what it would be like to read the story as the acting-out of some unconscious sense of rejection on Coraline's part; but it is touched on so lightly that a moment later it's left behind. The story is much too clever to be caught in the net of a single interpretation.