Part 1 - I create animations and art for USSR-horror.
Part 2 - I create fan art based on dark and fantastical fandoms.
This is Part 2. I love Rain World, and I love create artwork depicting its ancient civilization.
(Rain World) complete-ish story analysis of The Watcher
The Watcher is a contentious DLC, but it’s also got the richest story Rain World has ever told. This long ass post dissects The Watcher’s narrative with a specific focus on its central question:
When the world beneath your feet cracks and crumbles, will you hold on to all you once knew? Or dive into the unknown?
This post goes through the main story and picks out important elements to form an overarching reading of the whole DLC. It also doubles as a general recap to make sense of The Watcher’s more cryptic storybeats, but it’ll overall be a lot less confusing if you’ve played the whole thing yourself.
⚠️ SPOILERS FOR THE WHOLE DLC (v1.5 CONTENT!) ⚠️
Nothing lasts forever. It all decays, crumbles, disappears. Let me re-frame that core question: in the face of great upheaval, will you cling to a dying past? Or embrace the future, and become something new?
Think about this question as you read. It will tie things together.
Spinning Top: childhood lost
Formation of the “watcher” identity in intro
And through the middle of it all, a lonely lost slugcat trying their best to outlast the ravages of a warped world.
Watcher’s story begins with their childhood getting cut short. An unknown slugcat attacks their family. Watcher’s parent and sibling run up to fight the attacker, but Watcher cowers behind a tree, too scared to act.
The unknown slugcat likely killed their targets. But Watcher, who lived due to their fear, learns a violent lesson: to survive, you must distance yourself and hide. Watcher is taught a survival mechanism that involves inaction; passively observing their world—hence the name, “Watcher”.
As a result of the reclusiveness beaten into them by nature, Watcher is lost and lonely. It’s implied that they yearn to return to a safe home with companions, so when they meet Spinning Top, an attachment to the Echo quickly forms.
Spinning Top wanders into Watcher’s reality
Typically, an Echo is a terminally aloof being. They barely pay slugcats any mind, only using them as an audience for the Echo’s strange musings, and then send the rodents off with a small gift.
Spinning Top, the Echo of a child, shares that same deeply detached personality. When Watcher first meets them, they jeer at how funny it is that Watcher excretes, and how the slugcat will eventually meet the same sorry fate as their own shit. Spinning Top is so divorced from corporeal existence that it’s the most interesting thing they see in Watcher.
But Watcher is not deterred. Spinning Top is a potential companion and friend, and despite the Echo’s jaded and strange nature, they embody a spark of childlike kindness that appeals to Watcher. Spinning Top makes an effort to genuinely talk to Watcher despite the latter not having the gift of communication, and Spinning Top’s gifts are greater than Karma, as they attune the slugcat to the ripples that constitute the countless realities of the world.
Watcher resists detachment and searches for their companion
Eventually, Spinning Top pulls Watcher into a complete mess of strands, connected together not by gates but by tears in reality. Here, Watcher is lost. Each world offers a completely unique threat: burning fire, flaying winds, churning floods, and ruthless swarms. None of these places offer Watcher the familiarity or safety of a home. When they do return to the closest thing to home—the base game regions—Watcher finds them consumed by corruption. Watcher will never find any anchor of comfort here.
And as Watcher’s control over the ripples grows, their capacity for detachment becomes even stronger. They begin to actively tear apart the fabric of reality around them, drifting randomly through worlds at their own will. The nature of their camouflage is revealed to be Ripplespace, a layer of reality where Watcher is truly, truly alone. If anything, Watcher’s powers only enable their detached, evasive, and fearful tendencies even further. Why shouldn’t they just resign themselves to hiding in a corner of Ripplespace forever?
In spite of this development, Watcher pushes against their passivity. Spinning Top acts as a sort of anchor against the madness of the strands, a familiar friend who offers kindness. Long ago, Watcher froze in the face of peril. But now, every time Spinning Top disappears, Watcher follows and follows. They no longer simply survive and observe, but actively take risks and explore. And by utilizing the same listless powers as their friend to achieve this, Watcher comes to understand how their struggles overlap and empathizes with Spinning Top.
Spinning Top’s dream - left behind
When Watcher reaches maximum Ripple, they dream of a void. Suddenly, their old family passes by them, happily running up to a great golden light in the distance. Watcher briefly chases after, but like the violent memory from long ago, they freeze in their steps. Their family is gone, and Watcher is alone again.
When Watcher relives their tragic past, their family is quickly followed by hordes upon hordes of slugcats, all darting into the light. This foreshadows Spinning Top’s own struggle, a child whose entire species ascended while they alone remain. Watcher’s ripple powers seem to deepen their empathy, manifesting an impossibly accurate picture of their companion’s pain.
The children move onward
Watcher’s journey to find Spinning Top also begins to affect the Echo as well. The presence of a companion reminds Spinning Top of their long-lost “creche days” among mothers, fathers, and fellow children. Eventually, Watcher even joins them in the lonely plane of Ripplespace, and it is this that prompts Spinning Top to face their past.
In their former bedroom, Spinning Top reveals a sorrowful hypocrisy. They find corporeal life to be an undignified soup of proteins and acids, and yet they endlessly yearn for the warmth and comfort of their childhood. Spinning Top is scared to let go of it all. None of their loved ones stayed behind as fellow ghosts, and the only individuals who did were other aloof, afraid ghosts. Spinning Top is no exception.
One child learns that they’ve stagnated for far too long, and they must move onto whatever comes next. Spinning Top accepts the unknown, and disappears into the white door of ascension.
The other child learns that it’s okay to take action; to embrace the childlike joy and curiosity that they’ve beaten down for so long in order to survive. Watcher dives into Spinning Top’s toys, and old scars begin to heal.
Both children learn to grow and mature. They do not languish in the grief of the past, and accept the hurdle of change that they must bring on their own.
Prince: twisted regression
What if Watcher went the other way? Instead of maturing, what if they clung even more desperately to their old desires?
The Rot is easily the most potent symbol within the story of The Watcher. This section is the longest.
The unfortunate mess
Nothing lasts forever. It is an indiscriminate, all-encompassing fact of life that everything eventually declines and dies. The Rot is the most pure form of this idea: it is a mindless mass that consumes everything it touches. “After a point it’s all like this”, Spinning Top states when in a rotted basegame region.
Watcher’s story develops on this in a very interesting way, where a certain strand of the Rot has evolved and become sentient. The Sentient Rot is capable of spreading across the ripples and consuming the entire world, but most notably it is spread specifically via the actions of other characters. Spinning Top accidentally carries it into the basegame map because they are childish and reckless, and Watcher intentionally spreads it hoping that it will help them reconnect with their past (something to be discussed in more detail soon).
The Sentient Rot holds the “living memory” of the things it consumes, allowing it to “protect” the past—or at least a twisted version of it. As such, Sentient Rot infestation becomes a symbol for a character who is “stagnating”. Instead of accepting losses or looking to the future, they remain attached to old desires and woes. As time passes, these desires become harder to obtain, and slowly destroy the individual who clings tight. This self-destruction is the Sentient Rot consuming their surroundings.
Consider how Watcher’s exploration through the basegame map is quickly consumed by the Sentient Rot. With this in mind, Watcher getting sent across the ripples by Spinning Top becomes a blessing in disguise. Even though the sudden change brought great confusion and commotion, it was their only escape from the infestation. If Watcher was given the option to stick around, they would’ve literally been devoured by their desire to return to the past (that is, their family & home). The whole prologue is a fairly literal depiction of Watcher’s core question: hold onto the past, or dive into the unknown?
Additionally, the Sentient Rot also does not disappear when Watcher hides in Ripplespace, because the rot of stagnation is a fundamental struggle. Watcher can hide from outside dangers in their bubble of isolation, but it’s not enough to escape the festering from within.
The birth of Prince
After performing a wrong warp, Watcher eventually ends up in Outer Rim. No region identifies with the concept of decay quite like the rim. Physically, it’s at the edge of the world. Temporally, at the edge of time. All life, all development is gone. This is the perfect place for the Sentient Rot to fester, which begins to ironically grow a great tree in the bowl of a starcatcher to the west.
Watcher climbs up this tree, named The Throne. When Watcher reaches the top, they are given a Karma Flower that allows them to leave, at the foot of a giant Rot bulb. Whatever thread they escape into is then infested with Sentient Rot. If Watcher returns, they’ll find another flower, and a new path, and a chilling, painful voice. The entity inside the Rot bulb, having suddenly gained a sense of self, now speaks to Watcher, describing how it evolved from a mindless mass to an enlightened, singular individual. And then, when fed enough, the bulb hatches.
Prince, having just been born from the Rot of all things, is too naive to give any weight to the concepts of suffering or conflict. They view Watcher as their savior for “feeding” The Throne and helping bring Prince to life. They dote over Watcher, laughing and cheering even if the slugcat pelts them with rocks and spears. The Throne even grows an entire shelter to cater to Watcher’s needs.
Prince’s dream - Watcher is enticed by rotten comforts
After Watcher meets Prince, they experience another dream. They wake up in a dark sea and swim toward a light, surfacing into a warm forest identical to the one they grew up in. Visually, the sequence reflects Prince’s ascension into a singular individual with a supposedly higher purpose, now able to perceive a world they love and crave.
However, the presentation of the dream shows that Prince strikes a sinister emotional chord with Watcher. The slugcat feels alone and lost, but Prince is an adoring companion who offers a familiar home, not unlike the tree that was ripped away from them. In Watcher’s eyes, The Throne is an opportunity to return to how everything once was. No longer wandering, no longer alone. Would it really be so bad if Watcher strengthens this bond, and helps their new friend flourish?
Watcher spreads the infestation to every pocket of reality that they can reach. By desperately striving to secure a friend and reunite with the past, they have ravaged their whole world. But what do they have to show for it?
Prince, the oxymoron
Prince leads an oxymoronic existence. On one hand, Prince believes they are an “evolved” or “mature” individual. Like the iterator(s) that the Sentient Rot has consumed, Prince tasks themselves with ending the cycle. However, they consider themselves “something new”. They are allegedly aware of how the iterators failed, and they believe that they are more capable of actually succeeding than the iterators ever will be.
This is where Prince’s naivete creates a critical misjudgement. Despite having a technically “evolved” form, Prince seeks to achieve their lofty goal via the most regressive, basal method possible: consume everything, across all spacetime. The iterators sought to create a path for all life, no matter how simple, to grow and improve spiritually. Prince effectively seeks a devolved form of the task by dragging the world down into a primal state of being, driven solely by hunger.
Prince’s most dire mistake, however, is that they want to secure a perfect, unchanging state where everything can be preserved. In their words, “a living memory of all life, forever!”. Nothing lasts forever, not even the horseman of death itself. So when Watcher spreads the Sentient Rot further across the ripples, Prince’s kingdom eventually loses control of itself—and like a balloon popping, Karma Flowers erupt from the Rot. Prince is paralyzed, and their dominion ends with a whimper.
Watcher is tragically left in a worse position than when they started. They chose a path of stagnation: after indulging in companionship and comfort that was too good to be true, they ended up alone in a rotten wasteland of their own making.
Weaver: learning adulthood
Even if the Sentient Rot has infested every region and effloresced, Watcher can continue. It is possible for them to rebound, and follow a greater path.
Watcher stumbles upon a godly mentor
When Watcher tears open their own warps, it catches the attention of another entity. Returning to the region, Watcher finds the warp closed by The Weaver. They are a booming, godly figure who seeks to restore order to reality. Upon their meeting, Weaver thunders forth a strange metaphor to Watcher:
CONSIDER: A droplet of rain pierces the still water. A ripple, A ring, ever expanding.
Within the cosmos, Watcher’s life expands outward like the ripples of a droplet: in every direction there is a different parallel self, a new possibility of Watcher’s existence.
CONSIDER: Movement along the circumference of a ring. From one eye a loop, from one eye a spiral, from one eye the motion of a line.
The cycle is driven by movement along the ring of a ripple. This experience is deeply personal, and it can be perceived in completely different ways. The previous species never came to a consensus on how it worked, after all.
CONSIDER: A second drop. A thousandth. A multiplex of rings, spirals, interacting in countless ways. A froth. A seeth. An effervescence of disruption!
Every single living being has their own droplet, their own ripples, and these countless instances of life intermingle and tangle to create reality itself.
NOW: An understanding. A path. A purpose. Movement along the line, from distant to origin. From spiral to loop. From loop to point. An understanding!
Weaver teaches Watcher about a new path; a higher calling than flitting across strands. Watcher can escape the impending ruin of decay by seeking ascension. Somehow, Watcher can unravel their ripples, pulling them back into the starting position of the droplet, and this will unite their alternative selves into one. Watcher can ascend.
For a normal slugcat, their alternative selves are separated by different physical bodies. By rising their Karma and entering the Void Sea, a slugcat will dissolve their physical body, allowing for all those selves to individually reunite as one at their metaphysical origin point - The Egg.
Watcher’s situation is more complicated. Spinning Top gifted godlike powers to Watcher, but the slugcat is also supernaturally blocked from pursuing ascension. Watcher’s ripples are all tangled by the warps that cross between them, which keeps the slugcat trapped in this not-corporeal, not-incorporeal state.
Watcher grows, and their scars heal
Through their meetings, Weaver passes down their divine gifts onto Watcher. The slugcat gains the ability to banish the Sentient Rot, seal all warps they travel through, and cleanly warp without creating a tear. And for every warp Watcher sews shut, Weaver assists them by sewing another warp of their own.
Consider how the metaphor of ripples connects to the world map; a big tangled ball with the Daemon “droplet” at the center. Watcher’s world map is quite literally an extension of their own self (or more accurately, selves). Watcher is marked by a great deal of trauma and struggle, which twisted and tangled their world into one full of tears in reality. Weaver is effectively a mentor figure who teaches Watcher to both help the world around them whilst healing themselves, which comes in the form of dispelling the Sentient Rot and closing the warps.
After all the warps have been closed, Watcher is transported to... the beginning of time, possibly? The specifics aren’t too important. Here, they find the Weaver, who gives their final teaching to the slugcat:
Two big, beady eyes.
The specific meaning of this reveal is extremely open, but I see it as Weaver trying to convey the similarity between Watcher and Weaver, as the two characters’ eyes are nearly identical. In spite of the immense difference in size, powers, and metaphysical knowledge, Watcher has begun to close the gap. It is possible for a little slugcat to achieve the very same radiance.
And then, Weaver is gone.
Ascension: growing up
In computing, a “daemon” is a background process which lies dormant when not in use. Within the region of Daemon, Watcher can find three pillars which correspond to each of the main characters. The left pillar awakens when Spinning Top departs from the world. The right pillar awakens when Prince is born. The central pillar awakens when all of the warps are closed. Awakening all three pillars causes Daemon to initiate the final act of this story.
When considering the requirements to awaken Daemon, and the events that soon follow, it is implied that the function of Daemon is to unlock Watcher’s metaphysical evolution—the daemon drives ascension.
Watcher gains closure
Movement along the line, from distant to origin. Weaver's teachings become reality. Watcher is torn to the beginning of their journey in Hydroponics, and then Outskirts, and then to the endpoints of their three companions. Spinning Top and Weaver are gone; they accomplished what they wanted and moved on.
Prince’s conclusion is particularly special. Watcher meets Prince in a crumbling, sloughed Throne. Prince is happy to see their friend one final time, and grants them a parting gift: the mark of communication. Prince proclaims that they are more similar to the iterators than they once thought.
Prince granted enlightenment to Watcher. This act is plainly antithetical to Prince’s old ideology of embracing animalistic chaos, but there is beauty to this contrast. Prince was once the epitome of “spiritual immaturity”, and they were gravely punished by the universe for this. But even an individual like Prince can mature and develop, rising from that state of ultimate failure. Now, Prince sits among a bed of Karma Flowers, in harmony rather than conflict.
Finally, Watcher is returned to the tree of their childhood. Overall, this sequence is akin to Watcher gaining closure on their old life, as they approach the cusp of what lies beyond.
The truth of the ripples
In this final sequence, the underlying fabric of reality is revealed to us: the ripples and cycles are caused by rings of countless selves, which orbit throughout the cosmos. These rings are managed by the Daemon monoliths, which are the proverbial “droplet” in Weaver’s teachings.
Earlier, Watcher set the stage for evolution, and now their awakened Daemon performs its function. It rearranges their ripples into equilibrium, making them all truly parallel. Every single one of Watcher’s selves are now in the caves of Depths, on a united path to ascension.
The Choice
As every single instance of Watcher dives into the sea, they are no longer bound to the limits of the cycle. Watcher could ascend, transforming into something new, or they could cling to the decaying old world and haunt it as a ghost.
Watcher is offered a choice: will they hold on to all they once knew? Or dive into the unknown?
Watcher embraces the unknown. In the beginning of the story, Watcher’s childhood was ripped away from them. Here, they choose to leave—and enter adulthood. They ascend, evolving into a young god.
Closing remarks
Watcher's world crumbles around them. Their family dies, their old lands are consumed by Rot, and they are spat out all over the earth. Transformation is thrust upon them.
Watcher can refuse to acknowledge their new existence. They can attempt to "freeze" the progression of the world with the Sentient Rot, but the world simply continues along, now damaged. Ultimately, their best choice is to accept that things have changed, and to look toward the future. By doing this, Watcher helps a friend along their own journey of self-acceptance. They mend the world around them, mend themselves, and eventually evolve into something greater, something that they truly desired.
Through the pain and the confusion, they embrace the unknown.
Thanks for reading! There's a lot of finer details within The Watcher that have their own analytical juices and wonders, but I wanted to only focus on the broad-strokes elements here.
Watcher has a whole lot of pretty crazy lore that simply didn’t fit into this post. Why are worms such an important physiology to this world? Why do I think all ascended beings become Void Worms? What’s the deal with the Elder Ripplespawn? What about stardust? What in the world is a Bone Shaker? I might make another big post like this, specifically about my favorite details and theories.
The true nature of the cyclic world (cerebral realms) is brain, and you can see it slowly get unveiled as the worlds get pushed to the fringes of reality
Fetid Glen has a lobetree (C10) and sentient rot spores floating through it. Fetid is also a future alternate version of Salination (see F05), and both regions only connect to each other and Shattered Terrace, which is incredibly odd.
Perhaps Fetid is not meant to exist, and is being pushed further and further outwards by the ripples. The brain-thoughtform nature of the world slowly beginning to bloom right before you
All the rot (vanilla) regions have the braintree talks and lobetrees too, the Unstable Fringes. OTR does as well, but you see it paired without the rot!
It's clear that the braintree stuff comes first, and THEN the rot
(Notice how similar the stalks seen here are to the Brain Tree from the kickstater? The one that never got implemented but was apparently somehow important? Isn't that so fucking awesome. I always stood by you Brain Tree :) )
As the brain world nature of these strands becomes apparent, it becomes unstable and begins to decay and fall apart. After all, if you had your skin peeled off, wouldn't it get infected more easily?
The rot that Watcher drags along with them is not the same. There is no brain-related imagery that comes with it. Instead these odd trees show up, along with the rot and goop we all know
What's happening in Watcher is that Spinning Top and Watcher have basically been touching the diseased corpse of fringe cerebral realities never meant to be explored and getting all that disease onto perfectly fine realms
Thankfully, because none of these realities are of the True Material, the world isn't going to end or anything
The cerebral realms, the ones your mind is stuck in- the STRANDS- are all simply shattered reflections of a TRUE reality in which your body ACTUALLY lies. The one where you wake up, eat, survive, and shelter again. The one where Hunter delivers the payload. Not the ones ST mentions where you are eaten by crawling and flying things
Also considering these realms are all thoughtform realities caused by material realm brain activity it makes sense why they would also fall apart so easily.
These realities are the unfortunate, tangled mess
The tall, messy fur you crawl through
The fishing net that traps you
It's not JUST about escaping the material reality, its about escaping the constantly moving and shifting brain worlds your mind and soul are trapped in. The Cycle.
Why is it like this? I don't know. This is just how Rain World's metaphysics works
I've seen a number of people claiming that the Watcher DLC has no story and that the slugcat has no characterization, but I definitely think it's there.
(SPOILERS FOR THE WHOLE DLC!)
There are no spoilers for the secondary ending until about halfway down, where there is a warning.
Adventurous...
Since this post gets a bit meandering, I will spell out the general framework of the story here:
The Watcher is a shy, lonely individual who desperately struggles to find companionship after their childhood was cut short. They will go to great lengths to achieve this connection.
Timid mouse
"And through the middle of it all, a lonely lost slugcat trying their best to outlast the ravages of a warped world."
Why are they called the Watcher? It's due to their nonconfrontational, withdrawn demeanor. This is immediately apparent in the intro dream:
When Watcher's parent steps up to fight the aggressive slugcat, Watcher's sibling joins in. But Watcher just hides away, afraid to confront the danger. It's unclear if their family survived the tussle, but they never reunite again. Watcher's shy demeanor has severed them from their family.
Time passes and Watcher grows a bit older, wandering around in what seems like a futile search for their family. Here, they meet Spinning Top, the child Echo.
A desire to bond
Within the DLC's story, youthfulness is tied to a fear of isolation & loneliness.
Spinning Top has been lost & drifting for a long time. When they ascended, they feared the loss of connection to their old life and their loved ones. So they remained on world, searching for a sign that their loved ones still miss them.
This desperate pursuit has led them to travel across reality for eons and eons. By the time Watcher meets them, Spinning Top is now combing through places that have no relation to their life. Spinning Top won't find any sign of grief or remembrance in Coral Caves or Rusted Wreck, so why are they drifting along these pointless locations?
Spinning Top's loneliness and persistence arose because, as a child, they lacked the experience of maturing and could not handle the radical acceptance required to ascend. They are scared to accept the truth: their childhood has come and gone. Their loved ones eventually moved on and also left the world behind. Spinning Top is the only one holding onto this long-defunct family.
Shadow reflecting radiance
Watcher and Spinning Top are very similar characters. Both are lonely children that have been severed from their parents and siblings, and wish to revive the childhood that was ripped away from them. They're desperate to rekindle some kind of connection.
Throughout the campaign, Watcher continually searches for Spinning Top because they're the only individual that Watcher has seen who could bring a greater connection than chomping, fleeing, or stabbing. They even give Watcher the gift of infant godhood!
These childlike characters both find companionship in each other. In fact, Watcher's companionship is what gives Spinning Top the strength to return to the location of their actual memory, and confront the truth of their loneliness.
"All my mothers and fathers and crechemates who went along without me… Do they note my absence? I've traveled from the furthest future to the very seed of our past, and I see no evidence. Only echoes and strays. Aloof. Alone. Afraid."
Spinning Top accepts that it is best to grow up and move on, and so they disappear, finally ascending for real. Watcher, however, does not seem to learn the same lesson from this journey.
While they may seem happy playing with toys, it's still a symbol of juvenility. Despite everything that has happened to them, they still embody a desire to recapture their lost childhood.
And now, Watcher is alone once more. Soon, they will seek out a new companion.
Ripplespace as a symbol of isolation
Before I discuss the second ending, I want to talk about Watcher's abilities and the symbols they embody.
The ripple-world that Watcher is (accidentally?) transported to by Spinning Top is a continuation of the aching, drifting nature of these two characters. They are unable to stay in place for long, constantly seraching for a sign of connection.
Watcher's "gift" of invisibility is a clear extension of their characterization. They tackle threats by hiding away, slipping past unnoticed. As their Ripple level rises, the cloak begins pushing Watcher further out of their typical plane of reality, creating tears into a wholly different plane. And when they reach the (as of now) maximum Ripple level, Watcher is fully pulled out of the material plane and into Ripplespace. Here, they are truly alone except for the primitive, gnawing voidspawn.
Every gift seems to give way to a curse of isolation. Watcher has to detach themselves from reality itself to survive, and the gift-giver Spinning Top leaves them behind.
Endless hunger
SPOILERS FOR THE SECOND ENDING.
SPOILERS FOR THE SECOND ENDING.
Here's a cool divider.
While the purple Throne Rot seen across the campaign may not play by the same rules as Five Pebbles' Rot, its behavior is equivalent. The Rot is the ultimate embodiment of primal struggle, a collective consciousness of brain meat that forever hungers to consume as much of the world as it can reach. It is not unintelligent, but it is very one-minded.
From The Throne itself, a giant flower blooms and gives birth to the Prince.
The Prince is a piece of the Throne Rot that has partially separated itself from its collective consciousness. It is an individual connected to the Throne Rot, but it has its own mind.
"STARVING, pressing, grinding, SQUEEZING against... us? But now... I? A... SELF. And… an OTHER."
The Prince is an imitation of an Iterator puppet. This part of his identity causes him to believe that he was born to solve the Big Problem, by assimilating the entire world into the Throne Rot.
"The imperative that was in THEM [the Iterators] remains in me."
"Imagine: a single substrate… Life! (...) Nothing lost. No one lost. From bug to god, all as one. A TRUE end to the pattern."
I personally don't believe this was the original goal of the Throne Rot, but rather the Prince instinctually assigning purpose to his new life as an individual. He rationalizes his intrinsic hunger to consume in the lens of a "higher" ideal.
You can see how the Prince reflects Watcher's desire for connection in a deeply twisted manner. They're both in an endless pursuit to connect—Watcher offers itself to others as a companion, while the Prince takes companions and forces them into himself.
Opposing will
The Prince loves Watcher. He considers them to be a great friend, as they are the primary individual responsible for spreading the Throne Rot and the only one to have witnessed their genesis.
"You have done so much for me, I will not burden you with my troubles. Please, rest here as long as you wish. You are always safe here, my dear friend. You, who were there for me."
Watcher has finally found it—a new companion, who showers them with praise and affection. Out of an acute desire to retain this friend, they go on to spread the Throne Rot across all the threads that connect the ripple-world. Every viable world is corrupted.
Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—something goes terribly wrong for the Prince.
"I can almost feel... a will... at odds with my own."
Karma is antithetical to corruption. When the Throne Rot sufficiently engulfs the "fringes" of the ripple-world (Outer Rim and the Rotted vanilla regions), these regions become unstable and you cannot create a warp to escape them. However, there are pockets in The Throne where a bed of Karma Flowers allows you to exit. It's unknown if the phenomenon is natural or intelligent, but Karma inherently opposes the Rot.
When Watcher returns after corrupting all the regions, Karma Flower begin sprouting from the ground of The Throne. The Prince attempts to keep them in, but he ultimately fails—he freezes up, and countless Karma Flowers sprout from the corruption. The Throne Rot might not be outright dead, but its power has clearly been drained. The Prince has failed.
Karma Flowers are all over the map now. The "unstable fringes" have also been stabilized by their presence. You can create a warp to leave Outer Rim and the Throne from anywhere, and the same goes for the Rotted vanilla regions.
Going by the tone of the select screen art, Watcher just seems to mourn their loss. Another new friend, unceremoniously ripped from them.
Moving forward
Watcher cannot seem to find connection. Their family left and possibly died. They helped Spinning Top mature, but Spinning Top left—given that they viewed corporeal and primal life as absurd, they were bound to do this.
Watcher may have attained infant godhood, but their powers encourage them to hide away and detach themselves from the world, concealing them in the desolate Ripplespace with nothing but occasionally violent voidspawn.
It's almost scary how this godlet is willing to go such great lengths to secure companionship, falling for the Prince and corrupting the entire accessible ripple-world to make their friend happy. This friendship ends fruitlessly, too.
Watcher will eventually have a full conclusion to their story. So where will they go from here?
Narratively, I don't think Watcher will get what they want. Their next (and final, I believe) venture for companionship will end in ruin once again... but possibly, Watcher will recognize that while other people come and go, the only constant who will always be there for them is Watcher themselves, and they will learn to overcome the trauma and yearning of their lost childhood.
That's my slightly blunt prediction for the overarching theme of the Watcher.
Extra thoughts
Scav Prediction
I personally believe the next arc will involve Scavengers. In the old pre-release Watcher concept, Watcher journyed with an enlightened Scavenger. While James Primate has stated before that Downpour kinda stole the old concept's thunder (i.e. with Artificer), I get a strong indication that the next arc will still involve Scavengers because of the new Acolytes.
Acolytes are Scavengers who are BRIMMING with attributes that reflect a knowledge of Karma and Ripples.
Acolytes wear glowing golden masks and clothes
A faint Karma symbol between 6-10 surrounds them, suggesting that they are already enlightened (or their armor is imbued with some kind of karmic concentration)
When they are grabbed by a predator, they initiate a crazy karmic retaliation blast to free themselves (which I failed to get a GIF of)
The blindfolded Disciple Acolytes emit a sort of karmic echolocation ping that detects entities from a distance
The definition of an "acolyte" is "a person assisting the celebrant in a religious service or procession". The celebrant is someone performing a rite; often a priest. This implies the acolytes are carrying something out for a leader who is almost certainly not the Chieftain Scavenger in Downpour.
Overall, these guys know something, and I think we're going to find out why.
⚠️ Here is a reading of the Watcher's primary ending that I find MUCH MORE COMPELLING than the one I wrote. Courtesy of @characteranalysisthethird.
Spoilers for the primary ending, of course.
In summary, Watcher's ending shows that they were able to accept their isolation in the same way that Spinning Top did, and now they enjoy themselves without a pressure to fill the void that was created by the traumatic end to their childhood. Watcher does not simply ignore the lessons of ST's journey, like I claim in my original post.
When I was forming my reading of the Watcher's story, my reading was influenced by an analysis that had the bias of "ascension is evil" embedded within it. This caused me to interpret the Spinning Top ending in a way that is an utterly unsatisfying ragpull in comparison to the one here—because under this bias, how could the story not be a bad ending?
If there's any particular reading I want to advocate for, it's this one. Love it.
amandla
tangentwithtanner
titsay
jacobvanloon
turnnoffyourmind
stormborns
baratheonpilled
