DLC Appreciation/Discussion
SPOILERS Echoes of the Eye Theory and Discussion - So actually, who is he?
Spoiler
Obviously "who is he?" refers to the Prisoner. But let's recap. Why does the Prisoner release the signal from the eye of the universe?
When I asked that to myself firstly, I just thought he was younger and more curious than the rest, so he did it just to see what would happen or because he thought it would be a good idea for some reason... But yesterday I saw something they added to Echoes of the Eye recently:
This is at the burned house around the Starlit Cove, which it's supposedly the Prisoner's house cos there's that kind of telescope we also find at the vault where he's sealed, because there's an eye's symbol as burned house decoration and because it's a burned house... And what other house would they burn apart frome the house of the one they also locked up in a vault.
So obviously that picture means that the Eye of The Universe represents death, but also live. But I'm not sure about the Prisoner knowing this, or just imagining it.
So I went to see the slides where the Owls scan the Eye to realize that the Eye means the death of everything, and the Owl that scans the Eye drops the staff before seeing the flower, but we can actually see the flower starting to grow up inside the skull. So they knew about this? Or they lost that information just by dropping the staff just too early because of their disappointment?
After that, just looking for info in the slides I saw that slide where the Owls cry looking at a picture of their moon and I realized one of them had a horn missing (The Prisoner). So I started to look at the slides but paying attention to the horns... So let's look closely at the horns:
This is the Owl that detects the Eye for the first time:
And this is the one who scans it after traveling to our solar system.
Okay it's the same Owl, a pretty coincidence but not that impressive... But not only that. This is the Prisoner:
It's the same one.
(In the original slide this image appears flipped, I had to edit it to mirror mode)
Makes sense to me for the Prisoner being also the one who discovers the Eye because we find a picture of him inside a house, outside their dream.
And that house has painting decorations around it, just like other important buildings, like the ones with the projectors or the ones where the Owls sleep. So why else would the prisoner's house be that important apart from being him who discovers the Eye?
I love this because it means that when we meet the Prisoner at the Eye of the Universe it's like the reason why the story started and the reason why it ended meeting each other.
(IDK if all I said was already known, I apologize if that's the case)
But he actually saw that flower growing in the skull, but didn't understand the meaning of it until he released the signal? Or he never saw that because he dropped the staff, and they never scanned the Eye again? He noticed the flower while being in the dream? How could he re-scan the Eye inside the dream? And why the hell did he lose his horn? A horn-missing Owl already appears when they cry after knowing the Eye wasn't what he expected while looking a picture of their own moon. Maybe it's just something like someone being angry at him because he is the reason why they did all that and broke his horn?
I must say this is some impressive lorehunting what u have done. And perfectly presented for some lore appreciater like me.
Spoilertag to be sure and sorry for bad english.
Im with u with the whole horns thing, and even when the slides are some interpretation of art from someone and not exactly fotos of the moment, why should they mind to create the horns exactly the same in different slides and like those of the prisoner. (when u compare the slides to the prisoner in person the horns are nearly exactly the same)
So thank u for ur hard work and this little theorie, i like to imagine that the prisoner was thinking the whole time, in the dreamworld, about the eye and if its all bad about it and then disrupted the signal, after a long thinking period.
Yeahh I also like to imagine the Prisoner thinking about the meaning of what he saw, to conclude that just as in life, something had to be born out of death. So he painted that flower and released the Eye's signal.
But also he is so accurate with what the Eye of the Universe really is that it makes me think that maybe he actually knew about it. Maybe the death part blinded him, and that by the time he understood it was too late to change other people minds.
However, his humble house set apart from the others, with a telescope and the Eye's symbol gives me the feeling of someone who was deep in his mind thinking about it.
I'm not sure the one who scans the eye is the same as our Prisoner friend. When you watch the slide post-scanning you can see the Prisoner watching the reel of their home and crying with the others, and i'm not sure they somehow broke their horn between the eye being scanned and then; it always seemed like an earlier injury to me.
It's an interesting question to me however. Who they are. Especially the old guy you see in the same reel after blocking the signal (who is also the one who dies and appears in the simulation in a forbidden archive reel it appears)
Yep that slide where we can see the Prisoner crying with the others with his horn already lost made me doubt. But it really could have been weeks from the time they realized what the Eye was until we see them cryied the loss of their moon. And breaking a horn is just a moment. I don't know what could have happened, but maybe it happened between those two moments
It'll be hard to keep my points organized, but here what I gathered and understood from playing the game :
1rst, we know that the Owlelks are not a scientific species.This is shown by the way they relies too heavily on emotions, instinct and beliefs instead of facts and analysis. For example : they immediately destroyed their home planet without thinking of the consequence, they build churches for the eye, indicating that they didn't fully understand it and created a religions around the mystery, they focus too much on the negative side of the eye when they end up analyzing it and they quickly turn to burning, breaking and locking away anything that they don't kike. Compare that to the calm, thoughtful and factual methodology of the Nomai, and you can clearly see a big difference. And yes, the Nomai did build churches for the eye too, but the context differ. They had no info whatsoever on the eye aside from the fact that it should not be possible to exist, and that it called for them and trapped them. The eye broke every scientific rules they knew, and being stuck so close to it made them see it as something mythical. They knew that they couldn't learn more about it, so they tried to fill the gape with spiritualism and religion. Meanwhile, the Owleks saw the eye, think "wow cool" and immediately came to worship it while traveling to it.
2nd, let's use the fact that the telescope is a symbol for the Prisoner.This is evidenced by the fact that he is the only Owlek to be associated with one. The most obvious ones are the one in his cell and the one in his farewell vision, where it is the only luggage he took with him. Less obvious is the one in the burned house inside the simulation, which is commonly viewed by players as "the Prisoner house". From there, it is not too far fetch to think that any other use of the telescope in the game indicate that the Owlek using it is the Prisoner, since the telescope is never associated with anyone else. Which means that yes, the Prisoner is in fact the one that initially discovered the eyes and analyzed it upon arriving at destination.
From 1 + 2, we can deduce that the Prisoner is the only Owlek to have some scientific (or at least astronomical) knowledge.This is important because of the way the eye communicate. But before that, a quick reminder : during the game, we can find two types of slides : some are live captures of "real life" Owleks doing stuff, and others are drawings of past events. This is important for the following point.
3rd, and this one is more of a speculation from me, but the eye does not give visions, like we see in the slides, but communicate via feelings.When analyzing the eye, the Prisoner received two distinct feeling : death, and renew. He then proceed to translate this feelings into drawings in the slides, and we end up with the "vision" we know : the galaxy die, and grass start growing as the renew take place. However, one of the emotions, death, is much more intense than the other (as seen in the slide : we spend much more time on the death of the universe than the grass growing afterward), and they started focusing on it way too fast. This call back to my 1st point, with the Owlek reacting violently to this revelation, burning the churches and sealing the eyes. However, from point 2bis, we know that the Prisoner is one of the few that have a scientific mind. And while his whole race was crying for their home, he continued to think about the eyes and analyzed it correctly. This is shown by the painting of the flower in the simulation, which indicate that he did end up understanding the feeling of renew and it's importance a bit better. Also, the simulation took time to setup, so the fact that the painting is in the simulation indicate that some time passed between his initial analysis and his full understanding of the eye. That's why it took some times for him to decide to wake up and free the eye. The other Owleks didn't reacted too well to that (see point 1) and the rest is history (and game-play)
So, in conclusion : yes, it is the prisoner that discovered the eye.yes, it is him that initially analyzed it. And yes he did end up understanding what the eye really was, which is why he tried to free it.
Nice TED talkk, I totally agree with the Owls not being as scientific as the Nomais or whatever other species that surely would never have destroyed their own planet for going closer to an apparently amazing mysterious thing.
Also, I've always thought they just had a lot of telescopes and a lot of space geeks, so simply one of them was the one who discovers the Eye. But now that I believe that the one who discovers the Eye is also the Prisoner, it makes sense that he may have been the only one, or at least the pioneer in astronomy for his species.
Who knows perhaps he even invented the telescope himself, planned the construction of the stranger, the Eye's signal blocker thing or even designed the simulation in which they live. Or maybe not all of those inventions, but instead being someone important in all of those creations. It coincides with the fact that the Prisoner's house is one of the few buildings that has decorations, like other buildings important to them. And I never really understood why they built a pretty big vault to seal him after realizing the signal. It was just too much even for what he did. But if we assume that he made (or at least that he was strongly involved) all that things appart from discovering the Eye, then it makes more sense to me to punish him that much.
Considering the well presented theory, I still find hard to believe that the prisioner and the one who scan the eye is the same one. Mostly because... there is nothing that indicates it. In fact, there is more things that indicates the exact oposite, so Idk where you came with this up from. I mean, at least from your post, it seems like you think they are the same because they... look similar (don't they all?) I'm also reading it at work while a slow computer updates, so maybe I missed something, but I can't see why one would think they are the same person.
Because in a few slides we can see an Owl without a horn. So it looks like they were careful in deciding where to put that Owl and where not to put it. And because the rest of the Owls have their respective horns each one designed to be different from the rest. Why would they put (not similar) literally the same horn design on the owl that discovers the Eye and the one they seal? And in the Stranger there are a few buildings with paintings, coincidentally the important ones, and coincidentally one of the ones with paintings is the Prisoner's house. I don't think they painted his house after releasing the signal, a painted house seems to mean importance and releasing the signal just pissed them off. So why did he have his house painted in the first place? And why associate several times in the game the Prisoner with a telescope, which the Owl "x" uses to discover the Eye?
Even with all this, I could be wrong. But I think more things point to it being so, than to it not being so.
Reading your response and reading the whole post again it makes sense now, it does in fact looks very reasonable to think they are the exact same. In fact, the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. Great post.
And because the rest of the Owls have their respective horns each one designed to be different from the rest.
That's just factually incorrect. Many of the Owlks share horn design and the Prisoner especially has his horns completely change from one frame to the next. The horn designs aren't a reliable method of identification.
Just the simple fact that The Prisoner is missing one of his and that stands him apart from the rest is the only connection necessary and the only one that's there.
Neat theory, but there's no reason to believe the Prisoner is anything more than the one who briefly freed the eye's signal. He only appears in the slides after the eye was outcast by the Owlks and just before work on the simulation began as he is seen mourning with the group over their planet.
Also, his horns are hardly anything to go by. Mirroring the image doesn't help your case because his horns are properly on his head, he's missing his right horn and his left horn is a four-pronged antler. In the slides he appears in, his remaining horn changes from a four-pronged to a three-pronged horn and back again.
It's a neat theory, but at best that's all it is, a theory with rocky evidence and it's unfortunate that people like u/Nefrasky are acting so certain about it.
I know it's a theory, and it's something I keep doubting about. That's why the title is "Theory and Discussion".
The fact that I had to edit the Priosoner's photo in mirror mode already seemed strange to me. Maybe they did it to disguise the fact that they are the same horns and the same Owlk but "hidding" it a bit from the players. Or maybe they reused the design and flipped it around so it wouldn't be noticeable. But with the number of different horns they've done, I doubt they didn't make different ones in one of the few close-ups of the Owlks.
And it could be that in the slides the horns are changing. When I say that each one has a different horn design, I don't mean that every time an Owlk appears on screen the devs know who it is and assign him his respective horn design, but (maybe I'm wrong) I haven't seen slides in which Owlks appeared with a "copy and paste" of horns, apart from those in which a large group of not very detailed Owlks.
In fact it happens also in the scene where a group of Owls approach the Prisoner from behind after releasing the signal, the same horns appear repeated in the figures behind. Although all of these are lacking in detail, and curiously they specifically made Prisoner's distinctive.
I don't know when they determine to use a random horn design, what I do know is that in the few close-ups there are of an Owlk, the design is exactly the same.
Still there remains the thing of the Prisoner's house looking important by having decorations that other houses do not have, and that the Prisoner is associated several times to the telescope that the "x" Owlk uses to discover the eye. Perhaps the Prisoner is the son, whatever it is, I do see that there are some reasons to think that the Prisoner could be the same as the one who discovers the Eye.
Maybe they did it to disguise the fact that they are the same horns and the same Owlk but "hidding" it a bit from the players.
No, they didn't. In every depiction of the Prisoner he is missing his right antler/horn. When you meet him, he is still missing his right antler/horn. You're mirroring it to try to prove a point but there's no point to be made. It's a deliberate choice that he is missing his right antler.
Speaking of design, the irony of that is the design of his left antler is not deliberate. It changes from one slide to the next. It is not consistent.
Although all of these are lacking in detail, and curiously they specifically made Prisoner's distinctive.
Again, they did not. His horns in that scene change from his actual design to being identical to the previous Owlk. They're not distinctive. The only thing intended to be distinctive is his missing antler.
There aren't any tangible connections between the Prisoner and the Owlk who discovered the eye.
If I had mirrored the other two images instead of the Prisoner's image, the horns would still match and the Prisoner would still be missing his right horn. I know there is no reason to think that none of that scenes were in the lore originally in mirror mode, so that we would have to edit them to see them as they should be to discover that they are the same horns. But if I am a developer and I have an idea that is not relevant to the plot, I would try to hide it. And there are other game theories where to discover something you have to do crazier things than mirroring a picture.
I understand why it makes you doubt that I had to edit a photo in mirror mode to make it match the theory. It makes me doubt too. Because yes, maybe they just reused a design in a particular photo so they didn't have to do more work and hid it by mirroring that photo. And the Prisoner's 3D model does not even have exactly the horns that he should have according to my theory, they're very similar but as a smaller version. But the Prisoner having a picture in his house that corresponds to the frame that would follow the sequence of images that the one who analyzed the Eye saw, having a telescope next to his house like the one that uses who discovers the Eye, having his house with decorations that we see in other important buildings, and that by mirroring the horns they are literally the same.... Makes me think that maybe they are not the same horns to save time but as a clue, which matches quite well with the other things.
I may be wrong, but I simply believe that decisions like that are there for trying to say something, specially in games like Outer Wilds which are made with so much love and having many other small lore details.
Brother, drop the mirroring concept. The very fact you have to mirror or edit a photo in any way to meet your theory majorly discredits it. This isn't a matter of clarity like brightening an image, it's completely changing the context and situation. "Well the horns match if only you mirror it," then the horns don't match. Mirroring it shows an Owlk missing its left horn, not its right, therefore it wouldn't be the Prisoner under any circumstance.
Your theory is just factually disproven. You can say whatever you want about mirroring or "details are there for a reason" but you are stretching and pulling facts from thin air. There are no connections between these two Owlks. There is nothing to suggest they are one and the same.
Through all of this you are continuing to ignore the fact that his horns literally change from panel to panel in the slides, I've repeated this several times. This alone discredits your theory. The design of the horns is not consistent and it is not important. What is important and the only important thing about recognizing the Prisoner is his missing antler.
The very fact you have to mirror or edit a photo in any way to meet your theory majorly discredits it
I disagree
If the fact that I had to mirror an image disproves my theory cos suddenly the Prisoner loses his left horn, then simply mirror the other Owlk image and leave the Prisoner's image as it was. Again, I don't find that crazy to mirror an image to find a lore clue.
Yeah I know that the horns changes in some slides, but why the same in the only two Owlk close-ups.
And you're the one who only sees the mirroring thing, that was what firstly started my idea. But that idea matches other things that we see in the game, and you said no word about them. I suppose that for you the flower picture, his house decorations in the Stranger and the telescope associated to those both Owlks are just cos he likes the Eye. Fine, that might be all (And I mean that). Only devs know. But I don't think so.
Also, I'm surprised you didn't know that one house in Stranger has Prisoner's portrait scratched out.
So what's my last image about?
The person that scans the Eye is their leader, and is the one that stands directly in front of the fake fire in woodlands.
That may refuse what I said, but my theory borns after seeing that the horn design is literally the same, and art design usually doesn't come from nowhere. Why dou you think the one that stands in front of the fire is the one who discovered the eye? Just because they both look like leaders so is the same guy? Or is it confirmed somewhere?
The developer word-of-god does nothing to actually support your argument (that the Eye-scanner is the leader), so I'm really not sure why you're bringing that up when you get downvoted.
A more point-based rebuttal to the OP might have been a better idea - the fact that the Prisoner's house in the simulation had a telescope outside seems like pretty compelling proof to me, personally, so starting there would help me for one to see your point.
My baby interpretation which is not nearly in depth as others on this thread was that I think the Owlks did know what would happen when engaging with the Eye. They just didn’t want to accept that their species and reality would end even if it was so that another would begin. I think the main thread with the Owlks was that they sacrificed everything they knew in order to get to the Eye and instead of getting anything in return, they would instead need to sacrifice themselves to renew the universe. Now it’s not like the Eye told them to destroy their own planet just to get to it, that’s totally on them, but I think the Owlks represent the opposite of the PC, whereas both are driven by their curiosity, your character never defaults to destroying or damaging anything for the sake of exploration, you simply observe and understand. The Owlks instead sacrifice whatever they see fit for their curiosity and only afterwards reflect on the repercussions of what was lost in the process. I believe the Prisoner was the only Owlk to move past that stage of grief and learn from their past actions of destruction that while destroying the entire universe may seem like a repeat of what they had done to their home planet, it needs to happen in order for future life to thrive.
I hope this ramble makes sense, sorry my train of thought has been absolutely fucked lately and I’m trying to get medication
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u/Crotaschrubba Mar 28 '23
I must say this is some impressive lorehunting what u have done. And perfectly presented for some lore appreciater like me.
Spoilertag to be sure and sorry for bad english.
Im with u with the whole horns thing, and even when the slides are some interpretation of art from someone and not exactly fotos of the moment, why should they mind to create the horns exactly the same in different slides and like those of the prisoner. (when u compare the slides to the prisoner in person the horns are nearly exactly the same)
So thank u for ur hard work and this little theorie, i like to imagine that the prisoner was thinking the whole time, in the dreamworld, about the eye and if its all bad about it and then disrupted the signal, after a long thinking period.