#right now what we know about the watcher may well be akin to a vanilla player doing their first run blind

[praisethesuns]

theories about the watcher and what it entails

obligatory MASSIVE FUCKING SPOILERS under the cut. this post will discuss one of the endings of the campaign, the path required to get there, and what it means about the greater world of, well, rain world.

this is the product of a considerable amount of contemplation and thinking too hard; it is also just a theory for now although i really do think i am onto something. further information as more of the watcher releases may change things but i want to record what i've concluded so far for posterity.

to also note: i do not have the dlc myself, and most of my conclusions have been drawn from watching others' playthroughs and piecing together the game's mechanics and dialogue. if how exactly one goes about something in the watcher is inaccurate, that is my bad.

to also also note: i tend to be rather verbose when it comes to explaining things. i do hope it is not too grating.

SO WHAT THE HELL IS UP WITH THE WATCHER'S SECOND* ENDING???

*i consider the "rot"/"prince" ending watcher's second ending, with the OAOA echo's (who i will be referring to from now on as top, due to their name in the files being implied to be "spinning top") as the first

for starters, i think a recap of what the second ending entails is pertinent - that explicitly stating what occurs is tantamount to untangling what precisely is going on.

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the rot-prince's ending in the watcher campaign requires you to visit the outer rim and create rifts from it to the other new regions of the campaign, with every new rift to a region turning the latter region purple on the greater map. sheltering in these purple-marked regions results in purple rot encroaching further through these regions. creating rifts from these regions to other regions will spread the rot further; and reaching the ending requires most regions to be corrupted, followed by visiting the throne one final time.

returning to the throne several more times along the way, the watcher will meet the titular prince (again, that is what they are referred to in the files), first as a presence as they climb the tree, then as an individual (arguably even puppet? which i will expand on later), who can be spoken to and interacted with past a certain point.

on the final meeting, however, the prince's puppet will be silent and still. the world will warp, and karma flowers will bloom from their head. the following cutscene depicts thousands on thousands of karma flowers growing, the darkness and purple of the outer rim's rot overcome with golden light.

at this point, then - credits roll.

so what exactly happened here?

COLOUR THEORY, THE GREAT PROBLEM AND A BRIEF RETURN TO VANILLA - PRELUDE

to start, the rot we see throughout the watcher campaign is very clearly purple - a departure from the blue we see in vanilla's campaigns within five pebbles. this colour is present as a motif throughout all this path of the watcher's campaign - the purple of the corrupted regions, the purple of the rot.

but the presence of purple is especially notable because of one key thing - purple is the complementary colour of yellow (especially in the RYB colour model - and to note, blue is the complementary of yellow in the RGB model, but we will focus on the purple here)

yellow, a colour associated with many things in rain world. ascension, karma, enlightenment, void fluid. this places the purple of watcher's campaign as a very deliberate inversion of what we traditionally associate with the process of passing on that the ancients/forebears/benefactors idealized so much in rain world. and this inversion in and of itself inverts once more at the end of it all, as all the outer rim is overcome with yellow in the final cutscene.

granted, while i consider the downpour and watcher dlcs to be very mutually exclusive branches and expansions of vanilla, there is a particular mention of inversion in downpour that i think should be noted.

throughout the broadcasts of downpour, an iterator with the tag "NGI" repeatedly refers to a "transcendental inversion", pushing it as a theory towards the solution of the great problem. while they are disregarded by the other iterators in the chats, the idea of a transcendental inversion being heavily involved in the solution sounds rather familiar, no?

it's the final culmination of the prince's ending where all the purple in outer rim inverts to yellow.

(of course, for a more continuity-compliant piece of evidence, NGI's acronym has been translated in other languages to roughly mean "indigo" something - indigo, the colour between blue and purple on the spectrum. even if the inversion is not mentioned by them in canon vanilla itself, NGI's seemingly dismissable interjections may have more truth to them than their peers think.)

i believe the final cutscene of the prince's ending is us witnessing that very transcendental inversion - witnessing the triple affirmative and the solution to the great problem finally come to fruition, at the end of it all.

which is a rather steep task to fulfill! but at this point we should also dissect what precisely the great problem is, and what the triple affirmative entails.

the great problem involves allowing all the beings of the world to reach enlightenment - to allow every last living creature to thus reach ascension. this is not just for the ancients, but for the creatures as well - particularly the creatures, as the ancients believe that it is their obligation to the world to spread the capability for enlightenment.

the iterators are thus created to find a solution to this issue that fulfills the triple affirmative - affirmative that it has been found, affirmative that it is portable, and affirmative that a technical implementation is possible and generally applicable - a method to enlighten/ascend all the world that is logistically feasible to implement and carry through.

so how does spreading the rot contribute to all this?

WIBBLY WOBBLY TIMEY WIMEY... STUFF

the regions in the watcher's campaign are scattered throughout time and throughout space. this is most apparent following top's story, as the watcher follows their path through both. it is this very shadowing of top that allows them to truly move on from their echoic state in the end.

but what i find most relevant to this theory is what happens when you meet top after creating a rift without the protection of a karma flower - something directly stated as "risky". they will comment on the state of the region - a corrupted, rot-infested version of a vanilla one - and they will say that all the world looks like this "when they go too far". that the final end state of the world is rotten, decaying. i believe the fact that they take you to outer rim specifically after this conversation is them bringing you to the closest "safe" place - the outer rim's name is significant because it is the outer reach not of space, but of time. it is the furthest future before the absolute end.

so why is the world consumed by rot? what does this rot have to do with the ultimate transcension?

this likely lays within further dialogue we see from the prince themselves - expressing a desire to further their "kingdom", seeing the watcher as a friend - but these specific lines are what is most telling to the prince's nature -

"I am cataloging all things, you know. The imperative that was in THEM remains in me. But I am not wholly them, and not blind to the folly of their forbearers. I am… something new."

furthermore, the room where the prince's "puppet" (note the very specific word i am using here) is labelled as "AI" - the very same that the puppet chambers of five pebbles and looks to the moon are labelled as. this notation is nothing short of deliberate, and the prince's line (referring to THEM (the iterators), their imperative (the great problem), their forebears (the benefactors)) more or less implies that they are a successor to the iterators, but not one of them themself - they are something entirely new. combined with the knowledge from vanilla that rot comes from iterators adds a whole new meaning to it.

the prince is an agglomeration of iterators - maybe pebbles, maybe sliver, maybe more - and they are the descendant of the remains of those iterators' consciousnesses ("I am not wholly them"), with the drive to fulfill the triple affirmative all the same ("the imperative.. remains in me").

and drawing back to the solution? the transcendental inversion, the outer rim blooming?

the prince sought to expand their kingdom to all the world (all the regions in-game) so that they may fulfill what their predecessors were tasked to do so long ago. that they may unite all as one under the rot and move on from the world. not just them, but every last being that was subsumed by their infection - the iterators, the creatures, the world. all is overcome with the rot and all passes on at the very end of everything.

that this is what we as the watcher accomplish. that the ripples of our meandering and of our rifts and of our search for answers echo through space and time, all culminating in the final departure at the end of it all.

it's bittersweet, and it comes at a hell of a cost - the whole world is assimilated into one, and countless creatures and beings had to suffer along the way - subsumed and consumed by the rot and the greater intelligence it would eventually form.

but at the end of it all, the world finally moves on.

...

Thank you for reading to the end. i hope you find something worthwhile in my thoughts/crazed ramblings. i don't think this conclusion is one every rain world fan will like but this is the one that, for better or worse, makes the most sense to me. in the end, we will all have to see what comes next, what the subsequent arcs of the watcher's story tells us. what i am positing may in the end have no truth to it at all. thank you again for reading, and take care of yourself out there. <3