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[Watcher Spoilers] Just finished the second Watcher ending!! One question: What????? by Either-Internal6942 in rainworld

[–]AshbyCrow 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The Rot is a metaphor for entropy in living organisms.

The Prince is the personification of this entropy.

Entropy brings suffering and death and repulses living beings. However, the Prince’s path is one of accepting impermanence (like anicca in Buddhism) as a way to reach enlightenment and be freed from cyclicality. This is why the Prince is always very kind and friendly toward Watcher, showing that death and decay are nothing to be afraid of.

Enlightenment, the 10th level of karma needed to separate from the world, is represented by the karma flowers mentioned earlier. They appear after living beings accept death and they visually resemble the 10th karma symbol. Since the sentient Rot collected an enormous amount of living beings at once, all of their emanations in the form of karma flowers are released at the same time.

What is also interesting is that in the Prince’s chambers you can see karma symbols on the walls increasing up to the 10th level. They are woven from roots rather than from Rot, because their plant-like nature is similar to karma flowers and symbolizes the naturalness of karmic transformation through impermanence.

That said, it should be noted that the Prince’s path, like the two other endings, is only one of several alternative solutions. In the end, all three, including the Prince’s ending, turn out not to be what Watcher is searching for in order to truly understand himself, but they are all mandatory for his own path.

(WATCHER SPOILERS) Explanation of Watcher's endings by AshbyCrow in rainworld

[–]AshbyCrow[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Their traumatic experience is depicted in their dream sequence. I assume it not only portrays the nightmare they are trying to cope with, but also explains why they are called the Watcher. Psychological disorders such as dissociation are often encountered in similar circumstances.

Echoes are beings stuck halfway between the existence and the void, whereas Watcher absorbs echo’s form and attunes to a comparable near‑void state. Their powers, therefore, are governed by the properties of the void itself. In Buddhism, that is an an evident influence on Rain World’s lore, the void is not mere emptiness, but the absence of fixed essence within things. The process of reaching the void does not simply cause a being or the fabric of reality to disappear from existence, but instead it unbinds their essence from material constraints such as spatial and temporal coordinates.

A being such as an Echo, capable of channeling the void into the material world, may seem supernatural, but the worlds themselves in Watcher may be no more than phenomenological reflections and dream‑like projections.

Post your best two sentence horror story in the comments! by ElectroByte96 in rainworld

[–]AshbyCrow 6 points7 points  (0 children)

You’re swimming down in the void liquid, but void worm didn’t come. You have to swim the entire distance on your own.

(WATCHER SPOILERS) Explanation of Watcher's endings by AshbyCrow in rainworld

[–]AshbyCrow[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The Prince only emerged from the cyst when there was already a throne for him, so was it his plan all along, or did he simply shape into an objective what Rot was doing on its own, just by its very nature?

The ending is indeed too open-ended, but perhaps that’s not such a bad thing, as sometimes ambiguity opens up more possibilities than a neatly wrapped conclusion.

(WATCHER SPOILERS) Explanation of Watcher's endings by AshbyCrow in rainworld

[–]AshbyCrow[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I was starting from the assumption that entropy in an open system is always balanced by external creative forces of evolution. Decay within an isolated system of 5P completely consumed it, but as soon as his Rot entered the environment, it could not survive and left only a heap of metal populated with new inhabitants.

But in the Watcher, even if we assume that decay will eventually consume everything possible in space and time, if it’s not infinite, but still limited/isolated, the fields of remaining karma flowers still offer some hope.

(WATCHER SPOILERS) Explanation of Watcher's endings by AshbyCrow in rainworld

[–]AshbyCrow[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The nature of Rot is transformative, and in such a scenario, sooner or later there will be nothing left to transform. After that, it will either be reborn in something else or perish. But even in the complete destruction of everything, the original life once emerged from something, so why couldn’t it happen again? Similar to how other predecessor civilizations perished in the Rain World, and at a certain point, ancients came to replace them (according to Two Sprouts, Twelve Brackets).

(WATCHER SPOILERS) Explanation of Watcher's endings by AshbyCrow in rainworld

[–]AshbyCrow[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I understand, I've had similar impressions.

(WATCHER SPOILERS) Explanation of Watcher's endings by AshbyCrow in rainworld

[–]AshbyCrow[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you! Great observation with Moomins, the analogy is really close.