Hey who asked for more rambling?
My brain has since been molded into a self actualized and cognizant form now that I am no longer high school aged when the first hlvrai series came out, so I actually have worthwhile headcanons about hlvrai this time around.
I think it’s a little hard to tell where hl2vrai is going to go in terms of what we have so far (tho I do have some opinions on stain and alyx (Alex? Idk what the vrai spelling of her name is lol)
But taking a trip back down hl1vrai lane, I always kinda interpreted Benry AS the nihilanth. Like to start out. I didn’t see his relationship to his role on xen explored upon much not in a not-a-game context, but whenever I did see it, it was usually in terms of Benry somehow replacing the nihilanth.
So this “theory” (I guess?) makes the most sense the series being interpreted the most literally, being about a person playing a video game. But it does work better with the added information from hl2vrai that seems to imply the game is some kind of living world. So the game was probably running on its own at least a little bit before Gordon started playing too. Giving this time to happen before the events of the series.
It’s also kind of implied Benry has some sort of control over the game’s code in some way. Or at least able to break it even if he doesn’t know why. I always took Benry’s place in xen to be the intended ending for his character, but not what he wanted. So he takes every opportunity to try to prevent Gordon from getting to the end of the game because Benry knew they would have to fight and kill him then. The first thing he did to try to stop this is to paste himself over a security guard in black Mesa, essentially making himself look like an entirely different character than the main antagonist. They would still need to kill him to beat the game though, so that’s why he’s constantly trying to stop Gordon, why he gets the soldiers to attack him, and why Benry starts asking to go back right before they go through the portal.
Other things I would put down as parallels at least would be how the black mesa sweet voice kinda looks like the energy attacks the nihilanth does, the glitching during his fight scene (I’ll touch on this in a sec), and the stuff Benry lies about.
He tends to lie about backstory things specifically, like “playing in the mud or sand”, it sounds like he’s making up the names of his friends on the spot, and (I know the payday streams aren’t canon but it still adds to his character) the “my brother took my account” just sounds like a my dog ate my homework excuse.
I think it’s because all of the other sentient npcs have a background programmed into them, like they have these story beats that they can pull from in order to make “realistic” conversation with Gordon. But since Benry was programmed to be the space god you kill at the end of the game, they didn’t give him one. But he knows in order to be “Security Guard Benry” he needs a backstory, so he just makes stuff up that sounds like he has a human, normal npc life.
With the glitching in his boss fight, since it’s his model deforming and distorting, (given amble suspension of disbelief of what goes on with video game models) it could be something along the lines of his code trying to switch back to the nihilanth model and Benry not wanting it to.
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