Happy Valentines For The Milkshake/Trinkets Nation!!

been playing rain world and thinking about saint again recently

full rain world spoilers below

I hate the "saint is the triple affirmative" interpretation. hate even more how it appears to have become the accepted truth in the fandom

first off, my dislike for this interpretation is not logical. it isn't something I can be convinced out of using canon evidence, because my reason for not interpreting the story this way is not evidence-based, it's because I don't find it to be a satisfying conclusion to the entire story of rain world.

but here's some rambling about logical reasons why it doesn't make sense anyway

if saint was created as the triple affirmative by sliver, that makes them extremely old - they came into existence LONG before spearmaster's campaign even started. if they came into existence with the purpose of ascending iterators, they sure took a long time to ascend any iterators - like okay, travel time and whatever, but you'd think they'd get at least one or two more before all the iterator comms break down entirely post-spearmaster. SM and hunter managed to get from SRS and NSH to the pebbs/moon area pretty quickly.

they also have fur, which seems to be an adaptation for the cold judging by the lizards in the campaign, despite the world not being cold at the point at which they were created. this could be easily explained by sliver just being very forward-thinking, but...

if sliver created saint, their entire triple affirmative thing comes across as incredibly thoughtless, which imo contrasts with sliver being forward-thinking enough to make saint immune to cold. like they finally created the magical rat that will ascend them all but didn't even think to send out a message beforehand like "hey guys I'm trying something new if I send out the triple affirmative and die right after this it worked and you should be visited by a flying green dude with an ascension beam at some point in the future"

there's also the thing of... wait so how does this whole iterator ascension work again? cause saint's timeline loops. after they ascend, they end up back in sky islands, with the iterators back where they were. this could be explained by "later playthrough loops aren't canon and pebbs and moon are ascended if you got em" but there's literally a specific gameplay mechanic - carrying stuff in your stomach between campaigns - meant to make it clear that the campaign is a loop.

anyway. the real reason I hate the theory isn't related to any of this - it's that it absolutely destroys pebbles and moon's story, thematically speaking.

sliver of straw's triple affirmative/death is a random event that could mean basically anything. the futility pebbles felt around trying to solve the great problem caused him to assign meaning to sliver's death that wasn't necessarily there - they found the solution, and it was self-destruction. that's what they were trying to tell everyone. it wasn't a random event, the triple affirmative was real. one of the bugs in the maze found the way out, and he's going to prove it to everyone by following them and escaping.

and that's what leads to the events of the main story. this random event - this horrible tragedy, the death of someone who seemed to mean so much to so many people - was assigned meaning by someone desperate to prove that his entire existence, and the existences of everyone around him, are not futile. the ancients created the iterators without knowing whether the answer to the great problem could ever be found, and this is the result of that.

a nihilistic, hopeless person, abandoned by his creators to work forever on an unsolvable problem, assigns meaning to a random tragedy, and tunnel visions on what he has to believe is what he's been looking for - because it is an unimaginable understatement to say that the alternative would be worse than death. and then, in his self-destructive desperation, he kills his sibling* and dooms himself to the slowest, most painful death imaginable. this is the legacy of the ancients' dead society, the result of all of their stupid ideals and obsession with karmic perfection. (*as far as he knows)

but saint being the triple affirmative undermines all of that. not only does it make sliver's death less of a tragedy and more of a noble sacrifice - like yeah, sure, they were loved, but solving the great problem was far more important - but it also makes pebbles look less desperate and more just kinda stupid. like you thought that the solution was self-destruction? nah, it's a magical flying rat. in this version of the story, pebbles wasn't striving for something that didn't exist, he was just not smart enough to figure out the real solution.

even outside of canon evidence, that sucks. it causes pebbles' story to go from being about how you should value the people around you over the impossible striving that life always seems to expect from you or you're gonna end up hurting them and yourself to how you should just be smarter to find the right solution to all of your problems.

anyway as for my own interpretation of saint, I think that the campaign is just a representation of what it's like to be an echo. reliving the moments that led up to your failed ascension over and over, reaching maximum karma and gaining superpowers because you're just that karmically pure - you are a saint, after all - and then letting your ego consume you at the crucial moment of ascension, over and over again, cycling into infinity. (I don't think they actually had superpowers prior to ascending, I just think that they kinda thought of themselves so highly that they thought they should have those powers.) then contrast this with the world as the age of the iterators and the rain finally ends, and you have an unchanging echo reliving the same few cycles over and over contrasted with a world that is, at last, changing and moving on.

yeah it doesn't make sense with the joint iterator dialogue in rubicon (at least, the final line doesn't make sense). I don't care. it's what makes me happy as an interpretation. you can pry my morally dubious hypocritical ego-driven saint from my cold dead hands

The narrative really doomed this bug huh

None of this is real, is it?

(more of my human/cyborg iterators au)

Sasha talking in 3 languages

Sasha <3

"Little creature? On the floor of my can? What brings you here?"

"As you can see, I am concentrating to the best of my ability to figure out a very personal problem for us iterators." "What is that in your hand?"

"A pearl?"

"I suppose I haven't read many pearls in a while, so I suppose that I can divert some of my processing power to reading it for you."

"…"

[ The pearl is highly invasive, loud and unusually distressing to decode. As if the message is written in all caps. It details Pebble's inner paranoia and fear, which leaves Moon to realize that her actions were unknowingly causing her brother an inevitable death. ]

[ As this is being processed, the Moon's chamber begins to tremor violently. It seems as though a horrible mistake was made. Something undoable. ] "Oh no, no, no." "What did I do?! My work, Pebbles, I—" [ Her body would fall down onto the ground, as she sat there defeated. ]

"..." "I almost had the answer."

"I could've... helped every iterator."

"…"

"Leave."

I really hate that so many people can't tell a difference between "lost media" and "commercially unavailable media".

Like there's a TV tropes article that calls the SNES Lion King game "lost media".

No? We have ROMs and there's carts on ebay?

But it's no available in the Nintendo Switch store, so it's "lost media".

Like, don't get me wrong, the fact that there's so many games (especially Nintendo console games!) that you cannot legally purchase right now is definitely a problem, but it's a mostly separate problem from lost media, which is where there's no archived versions anywhere, and it's potentially completely lost.

FIVE PEBBLES, NO SIGNIFICANT HARASSMENT, AND SEVEN RED SUNS (ALL FROM RAIN WORLD)

(ONE OF) THEIR SHIP NAME(S) IS LITERALLY TRIPLE DIVORCE

Five Pebbles, No Significant Harassment. and Seven Red Suns from Rain World are Divorced!

sorry im thinking about how vi spends her teenage years being discouraged by her peers & talked down to by her sister, having no support for what she wants to do because no one thinks she can do it, so when she leaves she's believed herself to be perfectly self-reliant and not needing anyone else, where the only reason she teams up with kabbu is so she can get her permit

how praise really does get her anywhere because nobody gave it to her before, and the only reason she doesn't ditch kabbu is because he called her a reliable teammate, how that was enough for her to feel guilty and come back in spite of her fear

and how fast-forward to the termite kingdom she says her dreams are coming true, how she welcomes the support of others when she used to think she didn't need it, how she reconciles with her sister & the hive because her friends teach her that it's not worth it to hold petty grudges, how her abandoning kabbu becomes a point of teasing bc they all know she would never do something like that again & i just

I have a headcanon that p03 was originally planned to be in Waste World, but after it flopped, he was repurposed. Sometimes Rebecha likes to remember the old times.

p03 will keep ranting about gameplay anyway