@emilyisemrys hiii hope you don't mind me tagging ya but I wanted to reply on a proper post <3
first of, thank you sm!! yes I have full intention of dissecting the whole movie, even if it takes me a while <3 I don't have that much freetime of late but this has been a fun project, so I will continue. i also have some more meta and theory posts on the slow cooker cus they will require a bit more reading and foundations to stand up on.
I do wanna reply to both the tags and your message cus, I have a theory that connects the both of them! cus the audience is not just a parallel to the Pinhole God, but the audience is a separate God, and I think that God is the Seed Tree
It involves some egregore and tulpa creation theory and well as some gnostic principles, but to make it very short: The Pinhole God sees Simon as the Butcher, and names him as such. "A God makes sense of what it sees, despite what it should be". The Eye sees Simon only as an equal in violence and murder, and thus won't let him go.
The audience however knows Simon far deeper than this, we have seen his vulnerabilities, his gentleness, his regret and guilt. He's not just violence, and that side of him is often shown towards the Pendant, the seed of the Tree. It literally plants a seed as the audience mind that Simon deserves more, deserves better. We make sense of what we see by creating a broader but still incomplete vision of Simon. Those eflashbacks are not because of the hivemind, but rather the audience as an entity seeking to understand him.
What Simon should be, is free, not just one more soul to be swallowed up by Eden or the COI or the blood. The audience is witness to that injustice, and we have tied him with the Seed, just as he has tied himself to it. That Seed becomes a vessel of this connection, from who Simon is truly and our idea of him. That is the same seed that breaks through and "saves" him through rebirth as a tree.
Which is another tragedy. We are no better than the others who have tried to protect him and onlt ended up hurting him as a result. His mother's love is a knife, Eden wants him to be a Butcher, the COI wants him to be lesser than the cause, Ava wants to spare him from execution but just draws it out by letting him make amends through compulsory service, the blood wants to make him one with it, Elli wants to have him around for as long as he has oxygen for it, and the Seed turns him into Soil.
