Not enough slander in the Obra Dinn fandom for that dumbass glowing watch trail thing that consistently tries to send you on a wild goose chase over a memory corpse that was found like 5 feet away from where you’re currently standing. Stop doing loop de loops in the fucking air 60 people have died
(the hat is there just as a silly extra to see how the design would hold up with the full ensemble. I don’t think they’d be wearing a hat during the investigation)
- referenced some fashion illustrations from the early 1810s so I’m not sure if the style would have already been there in 1807 but eh close enough I guess
- I did modify some details a tad bit but I tried to keep it mostly accurate. I was going to add a watch fob, but I got lazy. Plus you don’t see any chain attached to the watch in the game.
- honestly this took way longer than necessary. Too many clothing options to choose from. Spent way too much time overthinking things
As a student, I was terrified of those crab riders. So much so that I couldn't sleep at night x))
But I also wanted to draw one. After who knows how long, I finally got around to it
Okay no but for real this time. I've slept, and I'm ready to spoil the whole movie for everybody. Get in the clown sub with me for a second, I have shit to say.
Also - please don't read this post if you haven't seen the movie. This puzzle has been genuinely delightful to tackle, you should do it for yourself if you can.
First disclaimer, I don't actually have all the answers. But I am pretty damn confident in the ones that I have, unless explicitly otherwise indicated. Also, I still don't know where Meat Man Two-Jaws lives. If anyone has info on him, don't tell me. I want to figure it out, too. He's definitely physically in the sub, though, because we hear him clank out of and back into some hole or another every time he makes an appearance, so my initial theory that maybe he can manifest in and out was incorrect in that aspect. I highly suspect he can get into the largest pipe on the right side of the sub, but I have no proof of this so far. It's also possible there's another piece of the grid that comes up, and he stays there underneath the floor. As we see with Simon's detaching arm, we know that once you are part of the crew part of the ship the ocean, you stop being solid in the sense that we're used to people being solid. Everything regenerates, mutates, changes, detaches, and forms new unnatural connections. And from there, let's actually get into it.
First and foremost, Simon is right. About most things, but primarily about his theory that the universe has not disappeared, only their fleets have. This is important for next to everything that comes after, so it comes first. On the first watch, this bit of his dialogue hit like a wet glove, because it is so clearly exposition - meant to change the narrative from the struggle of a doomed species to introduce the idea that maybe that premise was false from the start. It is deliberate and it is strategically placed; it is exposition, rather than mere reflection of Simon's character. In order not to distract the audience from the existential core horror of extinction, any other bit of optimism could have been used to highlight his personality if his theory was not fundamentally important; he could have mused about humanity's future, or naïvely hoped for a different planet that they might find to sustain life, one just like the ones they had before, with trees, with light, somewhere out there away from this hellscape. Instead, what he says, isn't that more likely? That all the stars, all the other planets, all of the rest of humanity, didn't just get wiped out, only they did - changes the entire premise of the film.
So what is going on? What is actually going on?
In the film, we have a scene where the children aboard Eden are watching the stars go out, and insisting that they can still see the light, so the stars must be there. Their hopes are crushed by adult pessimism: that is dead light. The stars are long gone, only the light still travels, and every day it dims, every day more go out. There is no hope out there. They are gone. Everything else is gone, only they remain.
They, as in the fleets in the planetary system of the blood moon, specifically. Only those fleets remain.
All of what is left of humanity is there, in that same planetary system, it seems by those same moons. While the stars are going out, much of the window through which the children are watching is covered by the red moon below. The intro, as it reads, states that one of the moons is different. There is no mention of other straggler fleets arriving in this system from outside of it, no mention of anybody ever leaving, no mention of them travelling there from elsewhere to discover it for the first time after The Quiet Rapture. It is happening while they are already there. Everyone they can contact afterwards is within this system; they have no proof that anybody else has disappeared beyond their subjective perspective of not being able to see or contact them anymore, and Simon, perhaps retaining his childish hope, has caught onto this flaw in the logic.
But why, then? Why did nobody head out to confirm? How do we know they didn't?
Simply because they've been reduced to burning up the lowest amount of resources to survive, to last for the longest extent of time that they can. You cannot head out into space, looking for something that might be out there but just as well might not, if you cannot even manufacture a new piece of glass large enough to fit the porthole of a submarine. Or grow another fucking tree because you have no soil to plant it into. They have nothing to waste on a suicide mission of that scale. They have no food, they have no fuel, they have no means of manufacturing pieces for their ship, they don't have the manpower to stretch any thinner ("too few to rebuild, too many to feed - humanity decays"). They're running out of everything. Whatever means of travel they've used to get about the universe, they now cannot use without the risk of losing the entire associated population, the entirety of its resources, all of it: there is no destination, no direction, no communication, no spare parts, no food, no fuel, nothing. So they've settled with exploring what they have at hand, which is this group of moons. In that system one, only one, of those moons holds an anomality. It has multiple oceans, but even out of those oceans, only one has anything in it. And it coincidentally hosts an intelligent being strong enough to bend reality and tear apart the fabric of time and space.
A god that only sees through a pinhole, and hungers.
What is the pinhole? This thing lives in its ocean, but it can speak to people, it understands them to its limited, predatory capacity; it not only mimics, but it replicates. How? By assimilating everything it touches into itself. Stealing bodies, stealing minds. Its body is made up of parts of other beings, as we can see particularly hauntingly in the promotional images. Human bones, teeth. Human, because presently, what it is hunting is humans.
When we hear the recording from the crew of SM-8, they state: "it is us." And they don't just mean that the blood is human, made of people, but that it quite literally is them; it is copying their own genetics, it is turning into them, becoming compatible with their tissues, their DNA. The blood itself changes just as much as the bodies it touches change. It is a rapid mutation. The whole ocean is human, because what it is replicating is human; it becomes what it comes into contact with, and finds an acceptable medium between the two that allows them to become the same being.
There is that long-standing theory that the blood ocean is made up of all the people who disappeared, but I strongly believe that the ocean isn't technically anybody in specific. It's replication, because this thing merges into other things, and takes from them upon itself and gives from itself back to them. I think the blood, more than anything, is akin to digestive juice but... neural; it is fundamentally part of the entity that resides within it, the whole ocean being a part of its body in a way. The second that blood enters your bloodstream, it begins to shift your genetic makeup. From the very first moment, you become linked to the being's hivemind, which is itself at the core but more readily, the parts of its composition that you can communicate with, that can talk to you, that have the closest resemblance to you: in Simon's case, another member of a crew sent down to explore the depths. Another crew abandoned and condemned. They are alike and they understand each other, therefore, they find each other first, and connect.
But to become part of this hivemind fully, it is not enough to be linked. You have to consume a large quantity of the blood; you pretty much have to do it voluntarily, because a drop here and a drop here does nothing more to Simon than make him feel deeply unwell, and it takes time for the transformation to happen. It is only when he is taken from his ship to meet with the being, and agrees in a pact for his survival to take on its blood (to "be one with it through blood"), that his nature and form truly begin to change. Until then, he has only been linked, and sick from exposure. The crew on the other sub is explicitly also shown to drink the blood. They also imply they've attempted to synthesize food out of the blood: they confirm it is possible, but should not be done. Something is wrong with it. Presumably with the technology that Ava states their sub had and which can no longer be replicated included something that allowed them to try this synthesization through the samples they were gathering. They're all "infected" by the time the end comes. They may drown, but they do not die.
Similarly, we have Simon's Eden forebearer (Meat Guy Two-Jaw) in the SM-13. He never leaves the sub - he becomes, somehow, a part of it. Again, I don't know where this bastard lives, but he clanks in and out from the moment that Simon has first been initiated. He comes out to give Simon clues, to lead him on his path down to the discovery that he will eventually make with the SM-8. What his choice ultimately was we do not know (or if we do it's told in the rapidfire mindmelt scene that I need thirty more watches to follow), but clearly in the end he couldn't die and has been assimilated, because his voice is one of those that taunt Simon after his pact is made; "After all, I am the one that told you to cross the wires." Simon then rejects him, because at this point he knows that the man speaking is no longer the man who left him the note, and addresses the being which has taken control of his mind that "you are not brother of mine."
This man, as a part of the entity that is not physically tied to it, appears to serve as a satellite body for it instead, controlling Simon's submarine while he's passed out and going through the changes to his body after his pact with the being was finalised, maybe to keep it safe from the undulations of the seafloor, and the quakes that Ava describes early into the movie. When Simon wakes up, it has been "days" since he was last heard of - days since the start of the movie. The ship has been reverted to its prior state, time has been turned back (in this timeline, he never went anywhere; the photos he took from the tunnels are all gone), but his body remains fundamentally changed, because he still went through what happened to him, even if the timeline has shifted around him. Similarly, after Meat Guy Two-Jaws passed, the sub was returned apparently normal, while he has been reduced to the mutated monstrosity that we then meet him as. I think it's safe to say that by his end the sub was anything but normal, given that it begins to bleed plasma and go through changes the very second it is introduced into the ocean; I'm not sure whether it was fixed by humans after Meat Guy's death, because Ava seems mighty evasive about the plasma condensation, but more likely, it was reverted just like it was reverted for Simon by the entity's ability to twist the time-space continuum. And maybe Ava actually didn't know what was happening to it, then. Surely knew it wasn't normal condensation, but how much she knows, we don't - but I digress.
Out of the several other beings that we perceive throughout the movie, it's almost impossible for any of them to be independent and not connected to the hivemind of the main entity. They live in its blood, they serve its will. They are its limbs, the same as Meat Guy. (Also, sincere apologies to Two-Jaws if he had an actual name at any point of the film. This is unfortunately the only way I know him.)
Now, it seems that after a being has been assimilated into the hivemind, they remain, in some capacity, themselves. They remain perhaps even unaware of their own fate, stuck in the moments before their bodily deaths, believing that they are still their own thing, and are capable of "forgetting" the assimilation, the grim truth of their present state - until the entity takes control of them. The voice of the SM-8's crewmember in the speaker cries and begs for salvation until she gets too close to revealing the information that the entity cannot allow her to forward; they got too close, the answers are right there, it is taunting her, endlessly, but she's no longer capable of free will, she cannot remember and she cannot relay. This is torturous to her, and it maddens her, her own lost freedom, her own lost self, and the knowledge which she needs needs needs to know needs to relay needs to get out which is more important than any other thing but which is forbidden and just beyond her reach, constantly forgotten over and over again - "some things are too dangerous to remember".
But what IS the entity hiding? What knowledge did the SM-8 gather?
They learned that the whole thing, The Rapture, is a trap. A massive, cosmic spider's nest, at the core of which lies this stealth-predator, this anglerfish dangling the (literal) light of salvation in front of its isolated victims at the bottom of a sea. The crew of the SM-8 know, or at least hold the keys to unlocking the knowledge of what the being is, how its trap works, how it caused The Silent Rapture ("Or at least a fraction of it", which... uncomfortably implies it may not be the only one of its kind. That it may just be a part of a network, part of a whole species, that is capable of twisting reality and harvesting infinite knowledge from other forms of life. But again I digress.)
The existence of a "solution" to their problems, if anything, proves that Simon's theory of the lost fleet is correct: the only thing that they could have found out that would "change everything" and truly save humanity is the knowledge of a trap. They have not discovered utopia, they have not found edible food, they have not found a fucking space ship supermarket full of parts or a ticket to some paradise planet where they can settle down to rest and relax and repopulate. They've discovered that the whole thing is a lie, that they are the isolated ones, that the rest of the universe still exists out there - beyond this entity's grasp, outside of this spider's web. The light is there. It's possible the light is a very literal light at the end of a tunnel - a slit of a gateway that leads back to the outside universe.
Which, look. One of the things I very much do not know is how the anglerfish dimmed the lights and cut the contacts. I assume that they are in a pocket dimension, inside some kind of a shimmering separation from reality, in a bubble that keeps them from seeing or contacting anything outside the trap's perimeters. But, given that the thing also has this very literal light, maybe it can bend it somehow so that it is quite literally able steal it and stow it away. I haven't seen this movie enough to figure out how the powers work or what the actual mechanic of the trap is. I have no idea what the SM-8 exactly discovered. It could be just the very knowledge of the nature of their reality, or an actual gateway out, a tear in this reality/timeline they're in, a black (white) hole, just information about the being and how it's manifesting the boundaries of its pocket dimension or an illusion that surrounds the moons; I don't know.
The point is - within the black box, they have the evidence of this discovery, and the knowledge of how to get out. They might know this based on what they physically discovered, or only because they ate their synthesized food and gained access to the knowledge that is too dangerous to remember, but whatever it was, it was recorded. They know (desperately, in their deepest levels of subconscious, embedded into their very survival instincts) that it needs to pass back to the surface, and the parts of them that are still their own strive to help Simon recover that knowledge, and finish the job that they started. But they have no real free will, and the entity fights hard through them when Simon turns back to recover the black box.
What I found interesting, and showing, about the dichotomy of the voices and parts of the hivemind is especially how they both grieve Ava's death and taunt Simon in rage with it - but in doing so, they reveal something very crucial to Simon. When Ava dies, the voices state, almost longingly; "Painless."
Ava never becomes part of the hivemind, because she was never exposed to the blood, and she simply dies as people do when they are killed. This is very important to Simon, who on the other hand has made a pact to give up everything - his body, his mind - just to survive, to this entity which seeks to consume him now. But now, as the movie is coming to a close, Simon knows too much to want that: he has learned that there truly are worse fates down at the bottom of that ocean than running out of oxygen. He said he's never had anything to lose, all he wants is to live - but at the end, at the very precipice of too late, he knows that he did have something, has something of immense value that can still be taken away; his free will, his own self, his very humanity. He has knowledge that this being wants, he is its pinhole view to something important: "You saw into it but what did it see in you?" He doesn't want to give that away anymore. So, though his body is almost gone, his mind is almost gone, he is still his own person. He is every bit still human, he is humanity, for now he is still free, uncontrolled, and he doesn't want to lose this, doesn't want to give it away anymore in exchange of a fate that he has truly come to know would be worse than death. He doesn't want to be stuck there at the bottom of the ocean forever as a part of something else that uses him like a puppet, that dangles him out to other prey like a piece of meat to lure them in.
So he straps up the black box with his only means of survival, and does the only thing he has left to protect his freedom: he forces the entity to break their pact. If his body dies, then he cannot merge into the hivemind. He rams the entity, he breaks its teeth, he does everything in his power to piss it off to the point where its desire to assimilate him is overcome with its desire to destroy him, whatever the cost. And it does exactly that - with the last, haunting words in the voices of Simon's lost kin: "And pray that you stay dead".
Which, I don't know if we know if he did. His body was so far gone, his mind was so tied up into the being's, that I don't think we can know. If the entity itself couldn't be sure, then we, as the audience, cannot either - or can we?
So finally, for one more mystery: I've got no fucking idea what happens to the thing when it bites into the sub and explodes into a network of branching roots. There's something going on with the cracked pendant and the tree here that is a whole another unknown, incomprehensible to me. Did Simon fucking kill it somehow? I don't understand. I don't know. Maybe it just violently, suddenly, unexpectedly gained awareness of Tree and shapeshifted into one, and now the ocean is sap. I don't know. I don't have a fucking clue. But this is what I've got, and some parts of it, I am 100000% sure about. Others, eh.
Not so much.
I might also be making this whole thing up and hallucinating vividly, but for one moment, I swear I saw the light. Humour me.
Edit: Honorary mention to the alternate Meat Guy theory, as reminded by @nappi, that it's all Simon from top to bottom in that sub. This theory is supported by the way Simon is shown to be in two places at once during the introduction of Meat Guy and the reading of the convict's message, as well as the paralleling of Simon's reflection with the prior convict's last recording. Imho this is just as valid as a theory, or even more so, than the one where these are separate entities - but I personally took a divergence from it because of two main reasons, first being that we hear convict's voice in the hivemind, and second being the existence of the pendant, which Simon never has upon coming into the sub for the first time, and cannot receive unless he plants it in himself. Simply put: if he doesn't have it, he cannot put it in for himself to find, either. But I did also wonder whether this is even the first time that Simon's playthrough of the game starts. Maybe he's just another restart.
It's fascinating to compare what we can deduce of the SM-8 crew's encounter with the Light (the Research Lead and the Research Assistant, that merged to become the Monster), and Simon's. It's also... kinda funny.
Both the SM-8 crew and Simon went inside the Light-- this tear in reality, this pinhole through which an ignorant God glimpsed their Universe and caused the Quiet Rapture. It's unknown if the God offered the same deal to them as it did to Simon ("I see you." "I see you." "Agreed.") but it's highly likely. Since both the Research Lead and the Research Assistant were there to record the last message on the SM-8 black box after having "went in" and seen the God, it's safe to assume that the God spat them back out alive, just like it did Simon. But one of them had been drinking the blood, and was mutating. Eventually, both women turn into what we see as the Monster, bursting out from the SM-8 and leaving that massive hole in its side.
So far so good, it doesn't seem that different. The blood was mutating Simon into a similar monster, trying to merge him with his ship; either ingested or simply having touched skin or eyes, the blood's effect is inescapable. But at the end of the movie, as the Monster tries to stop Simon from propagating knowledge of the Light, she yells "Why you, Simon? What did it see in you?". And, well, what does make Simon special?
Simon didn't give a fuck about the Light, and if I were the God, I'd honestly be a little offended.
When luring Simon towards the Light, the Monster says "A tiny glimpse of answers greater than our infinite. It burst our mind like a tick." Meanwhile, Simon is returned from his encounter with the God, and other than an understandable breakdown and doubting reality, he says nothing about the Light. The most we hear from him that's along the lines of wondering about what happened is "I might have died." And then it's right back to a purely survival focused mindset. Unlike the SM-8 crew, there's no rambling about having seen the answer to everything, something meant only for them, the promise of salvation. Simon hears the radio once more and instantly tries to reason, figure out if Ava's voice is a trick or not. Hell, even before the Monster led him to the Light, Simon doesn't really care about it. He doesn't want to get into a conversation about God, absently indulging who he assumes are survivors on the radio. He is only focused on himself: "Even if your miracle could solve all their problems, they would just... send me down again." He doesn't even say our problems!
The way I see it, the main difference between the Monster and Simon's encounter with the God is that Simon's mind didn't "burst like a tick". He doesn't ever mention the Light after seeing it, not once-- not even at the end, when the Monster constantly talks about it, when the Monster explicitly tells him "It wants you to do this!". All he does is rebel against her ("What do you know?" and "You think I'll just give you what you want?"). Simon maintains individuality where the Monster lost hers, and it's probably because the SM-8 crew were not able to hold their end of the bargain. The God saw them, but they were not able to withstand seeing it back. However, Simon did. Another potential difference is that the God returned Simon and his sub to coordinates that left him in the range of the COI tow ship radio, with his own radio fixed (after having been at the Light's 116520 coordinates, the sub is then at 462241, and not as deep as before). Couldn't the God have done the same for the women on the SM-8? It's certain the COI would've hung around and tried to find them, if the SM-8 contained such important technology.
I guess the lesson is: one needs a very strong "Fuck God, what about me?" sort of attitude when facing cosmic horrors. Clearly even the God respected that. Notably, it is the Monster and the blood ocean that constantly use "we"; the God says "I". By fulfilling his end of the bargain -- being perceived, and then perceiving in return -- Simon remains an individual, and shapes his own fate. The God "understands all that is, and all that will be", and Simon too ends up seeing glimpses of a future distorted self, missing an arm. Simon pats the sub as if it's a person, tells it "Sorry" when he punches it in anger, sternly tells it "I am trusting you on this" when navigating... and the ship becomes alive, where the SM-8 did not. The God said "Butcher" when seeing Simon, and Simon delivers on that perception ("Fine, you want the Butcher? Come on! Fucking die!"), struggling until the end and actively trying to kill the Monster-- not his fellow man, despite how potentially deserved leaving behind the black box would've been. Simon voices the belief that "when we die, our bodies become the soil", so his body becomes soil for the Last Tree, instead of another monster in the blood ocean. All along, collectives forcefully claim him against his will, but Simon wants to be free and make his own choices. Hence, he does not become assimilated.
I do think that the way the charm with the tree seed bursts with light at the end, just as Simon's eye glows too, is a manifestation of his deal with the God. After all, what does it mean for an entity that shapes reality by its very perception to understand you? To see you, and because you saw it back, to recognize you as something akin to itself?
need to buy iron lung on bluray i need to go frame by frame i need to swallow the movie whole i need to see the beast and the eye and take notes and draw stills i HAVE to decode this fucking film and i want to drink the blood until i Understand, you get me?????
The scar on her left eye; the mutation starting on his left side. He was brainwashed by Eden, she was brainwashed by the COI. Just as Simon was taught that people were soil, Ava was taught that people were tools. In the end they both abandon what they've been taught to grasp at a thin thread of hope— and it kills them. They both want to live. The only difference is who's on which side of the glass; even then, from the film's perspective, we're the ones looking in on Ava even if she's the one looking in on Simon. They're looking through the same pinhole. They're equally trapped. Freedom is a promise both of them pursue, whether it's freedom from conviction or freedom from the hell following the Quiet Rapture.
Who knows how much of Ava's humanity she has had to forsake in order to keep the dwindling remains of her crew alive? Who knows how much of Simon's humanity he has had to give up to survive both Eden and the COI?
They're the same person thrown into different fates that collide on a tangent. Abrasive; caring; killers with bloodied hands. He's the Butcher, she's the Captain. He's Simon, the listener. She's Ava, the voice. She reached down, he reached up. Their deaths meant something. They'll never see the future (hopeful or dreadful) that they wrought.
the fun thing about having a mental health crashout in your thirties is that sure yeah you're crashing out, but at the same time there's a part of you standing across the room smoking ben affleck style, going yeah yeah you're crashing out. you crashed out before you will crash out again can we wrap this up yet. and the most annoying part about it is that they're right, and that that does Not stop you from crashing out even a little. love and light on planet earth.
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