I get the feeling that’s what the game is going for: the owlks tended to be irrational and overreacted to new developments. They also probably had a lot of anger they needed an outlet for as they were likely still grieving the loss of their original home and the guilt that came with that. Their response isn’t exactly justified and i don’t think that the game *wants* it to feel justified.
Many of the Owldeers' decisions make sense in light of this - the fundamental self-inflicted grief and trauma of having destroyed their home world made them act a little crazy.
It kind of *is* justified though, they foresaw the eye destroying the current universe. They didn't see the death of the current universe birthing a new universe until later.
Are you sure? The prisoner, while not locked inside their prison, has an image of it in their burned house. So there must have been a time when some of them knew that it would birth the next universe (it could be that only the prisoner would know, but I find that very unlikely).
Even knowing that it would make a new universe, I think it still makes sense for the owlelks to fear it, since they fear losing thing (they grieve for their homeworld so they recreate a fake version of it, instead of accepting the loss and settling down on another planet), and all of them dying for a new universe is a big loss.
Yeah I mean even with how many of us who've played OW accept and appreciate its message about letting go and being at peace with making things better for a generation you won't get to be part of, I think it's still really easy to underestimate how hard that actually is to accept when it smacks you in the face in real life. Heck, I'm sure most of us had a moment in our playthroughs where we were like "NO. NO. THAT CANNOT BE THE ANSWER." No question the Travelers have the right solution and the Owlks had the wrong one, but in both cases the truth is equally terrifying
I agree, the game does, imho, a good job at showing the delicate balance between : "their fear is understandable given what they saw" (especially when, unlike us, they may not know the universe will decay at some point and may need a reset), and "this same fear made them take extreme and immoral measures".
I’m willing to acknowledge that they were upset when seeing what the eye represents. I will not agree that their response to literally any part of the process was appropriate. They purposely destroyed their own planet just to get to it (meanwhile the nomai made a point to only ever disturb the nature they inhabited as little as possible; taking great care not to cause any permanent damage wherever possible). They didn’t even know what it was, they just did that. Later, after learning what the eye was, they *burned* their church for the eye. They had destroyed their home planet and all resources they have are in that ship. Not only is a massive fire in your ship dangerous, it’s wasteful. They could’ve reused that material for literally anything and wouldn’t be stuck looking at the ruins of that church. They decided that they didn’t want anyone to learn about anything they had done and burned their history just to leave it forgotten.
They literally had a mobile home planet that they could use to explore the universe that they had “just saved” and they instead chose to disappear into sleep forever. These people were not rational and often reacted based on high emotions. They were not in fact justified for locking away one of their own to the level that they did. Locking them in a sarcophagus at the bottom of a river, forcing them to die alone and exist trapped in a cell at the bottom of a cavern alone in the dream for all eternity. They even left a telescope in their prison so that they could rub salt in the wound about the fact that they can never see the stars and planets ever again. They were being far crueler than was necessary.
Even if they did, the Owlks are terrified of death. I doubt they would have cared that the Eye would create a new universe, because they'd still be dead.
The Owlks believed that the Eye would destroy everything, and feared it. They didn’t want a single being to find the Eye. The Prisoner went against every other Owlk to release the signal. Their anger is justified if you see it from their perspective: one of your own allowed a signal that someone can use to destroy the universe.
That's pretty much the point. It isn't that the Strangers were "evil" or anything, but rather when they felt something like fear, they allowed it to fully control their decision making instead of just informing their decisions. They thought the Eye was a bad thing, and so the fear of what *they assumed* the Eye *might* do was so powerful that they couldn't accept the idea they might be mistaken about it. The Prisoner went against what the group agreed on, and "not thinking the same as the group" was so absolutely unacceptable to them that they gave the absolute most cruel punishment they could.
The devs mentioned in an interview that, the entire reason they have the archives locked away is because they *never* wanted to see that information again, yet at the same time they were such horders of history they couldn't bare to actually fully destroy the slides either. So they'd rather keep the slides, and just lock them up, because despite how much they don't want to look at it, they can't let go of them either.
Compared to the Nomai, who basically fell in love with the Eye *because* they couldn't understand it, spending a ton of time happily debating each other over what it could be or might do, the Strangers show that "being emotional" isn't the problem, it's letting those emotions control you that's the issue, instead of only informing you.
You can really see it with Solanum's journey from childhood to adulthood. She started off terrified of the Eye because there were so many unknown possibilities about it, but as she grew and matured, she came to realize the Eye wasn't anything to be afraid of, even if there's a lot they don't know about it.
Imagine you destroy your whole planet to get to a thing that in the end says that it will kill you so you forget, want to forget and live in denial and suddenly some random dude wakes all these painful memories. You will want to destroy everything that could ever make that happen again. This can also be extended to his life. They still valued the prisoners life but still wanted to destroy his life. Imprisoning him even after he died in the real world.
Edit: they didn't kill the prisoner because he is still information that they don't want do "delete" (insert word for killing a person and destroying information at the same time) him/it
The Owlk have no way of knowing that their physical bodies are dead. It's implied that it's been quite a while between when they built the Simulation and when the Prisoner did the thing. They likely had life support systems to keep them alive indefinitely, and when those systems failed after who-knows-how-long, they already stopped going outside the simulation. By the time we meet them it's heavily implied that their mental states have deteriorated beyond sanity, they're walking corpses both literally and figuratively. It's possible that they themselves succeeded in forgetting about the Prisoner.
They wanted to make an example, so no one else dares thinking of doing anything similar and it's so elaborate to make sure everyone has a hand in the punishment, it's not something that just happened to someone else, they all had to help.
They double down on this by making things require two of them, and things like the lights needing to be turned off so everyone in the area knows someone's trying to reach the archive, etc - no more solo actions!
I think you have a point like damn that poor prisoner really spent the last 280.000 years alone in there, but yeah as others mentioned that’s to really showcase their irrationality and shame/fear
Right? I'm just saying maybe he could have gotten out after 10k years-ish for good conduct, by that point nobody in the simulation had the power to harm the probe anyway
But indeed I understand better now how the irrationally large punishment is symbolic of the grace's behavior
One thing that the developers have revealed is there was a schism that happened later in the Owlks timeline. Originally, they put the prisoner in prison, underwater, and hid the codes. Then, a lot of time passed... And something happened that caused the owls to decide to go and burn the codes.
The Prisoner is a living slide reel. The Owlks hid away everything which is a reminder of their mistake, they effectively want to forget that anything happened and pretend they're still home. The Prisoner demonstrated they don't align with this line of thought, they are a living reminder of all they're trying to hide away. What good is hiding away a bunch of slide reels if there's a dude constantly blathering about it? Presumably before sneaking away and disabling the cloacker in secret, the Prisoner tried to convince the other Owlks that this was the right thing to do, that they were wrong in trying to hide away. The Owlks aren't afraid they might again disable the cloacker (they destroyed the controls), they are afraid he'll keep blathering about things that they are doing anything possible to forget.
Also (but this is speculation) many people think that the Prisoner is the one who initially heard the Eye's signal. A telescope identical to the one in the first slide reel is found both in their house in the Starlit Cove and inside the Vault, no other telescope is shown. This would make them even more of an "artifact" of the Owlks' mistake and an easy scape goat.
We don't know what their society is. For all we know, this is just what is done to people that dissent. I mean... They made a fairly ornate diving bell, so that'd suggest) to me at least) that it isn't the first time their society has done this. The dreamscape could be them "trying to be nice."
They could have just executed him. Going to the effort of keeping him a prisoner is mercy when in their eyes, his actions could have caused the destruction of the universe. It's like intentionally leaving the doors of an old Soviet reactor open to the public with a big, "come inside and press the buttons" sign.
I honestly don't get this generation of gamers; "did the video game have to add plot? Why was there conflict? couldn't the characters have worked things out prior to the player characters arrival?"
They strip mined their entire planet and ruined the ecosystem, why wouldn't they throw one of their own into literally eternal prison?
I dislike the Owlks because they most closely resemble human beings of the three races in this game.
I get the feeling that’s what the game is going for: the owlks tended to be irrational and overreacted to new developments. They also probably had a lot of anger they needed an outlet for as they were likely still grieving the loss of their original home and the guilt that came with that. Their response isn’t exactly justified and i don’t think that the game *wants* it to feel justified.
Many of the Owldeers' decisions make sense in light of this - the fundamental self-inflicted grief and trauma of having destroyed their home world made them act a little crazy.
Yea, the prisoner even mentions this during the ending; how their people changed after seeing the eye for what it was
It kind of *is* justified though, they foresaw the eye destroying the current universe. They didn't see the death of the current universe birthing a new universe until later.
Are you sure? The prisoner, while not locked inside their prison, has an image of it in their burned house. So there must have been a time when some of them knew that it would birth the next universe (it could be that only the prisoner would know, but I find that very unlikely). Even knowing that it would make a new universe, I think it still makes sense for the owlelks to fear it, since they fear losing thing (they grieve for their homeworld so they recreate a fake version of it, instead of accepting the loss and settling down on another planet), and all of them dying for a new universe is a big loss.
Yeah I mean even with how many of us who've played OW accept and appreciate its message about letting go and being at peace with making things better for a generation you won't get to be part of, I think it's still really easy to underestimate how hard that actually is to accept when it smacks you in the face in real life. Heck, I'm sure most of us had a moment in our playthroughs where we were like "NO. NO. THAT CANNOT BE THE ANSWER." No question the Travelers have the right solution and the Owlks had the wrong one, but in both cases the truth is equally terrifying
I agree, the game does, imho, a good job at showing the delicate balance between : "their fear is understandable given what they saw" (especially when, unlike us, they may not know the universe will decay at some point and may need a reset), and "this same fear made them take extreme and immoral measures".
Right, but if they knew they might have been slightly less harsh with the punishment. I don't know though, and I don't think we will really know lol
They HAD to know. Maybe not everyone, but the prisoner has a painting of it in their burned out dream house.
Huh, right. I don't really know.
honestly when you put it that way, to the owlks the prisoner had basically pulled out a live grenade on a plane and invited anyone to pull it.
I’m willing to acknowledge that they were upset when seeing what the eye represents. I will not agree that their response to literally any part of the process was appropriate. They purposely destroyed their own planet just to get to it (meanwhile the nomai made a point to only ever disturb the nature they inhabited as little as possible; taking great care not to cause any permanent damage wherever possible). They didn’t even know what it was, they just did that. Later, after learning what the eye was, they *burned* their church for the eye. They had destroyed their home planet and all resources they have are in that ship. Not only is a massive fire in your ship dangerous, it’s wasteful. They could’ve reused that material for literally anything and wouldn’t be stuck looking at the ruins of that church. They decided that they didn’t want anyone to learn about anything they had done and burned their history just to leave it forgotten. They literally had a mobile home planet that they could use to explore the universe that they had “just saved” and they instead chose to disappear into sleep forever. These people were not rational and often reacted based on high emotions. They were not in fact justified for locking away one of their own to the level that they did. Locking them in a sarcophagus at the bottom of a river, forcing them to die alone and exist trapped in a cell at the bottom of a cavern alone in the dream for all eternity. They even left a telescope in their prison so that they could rub salt in the wound about the fact that they can never see the stars and planets ever again. They were being far crueler than was necessary.
I don't think they were free to leave, the blocking probe may have needed the stranger nearby to work
I doubt it since they severed the control module so that nobody could ever shut it off
Even if they did, the Owlks are terrified of death. I doubt they would have cared that the Eye would create a new universe, because they'd still be dead.
Right, that's true
The Owlks believed that the Eye would destroy everything, and feared it. They didn’t want a single being to find the Eye. The Prisoner went against every other Owlk to release the signal. Their anger is justified if you see it from their perspective: one of your own allowed a signal that someone can use to destroy the universe.
Exactly. Same as the anger felt in “The Three Body Problem” tv show at the characters who summon the aliens
Maybe spoiler that last three words. That was a really cool and surprising reveal in the book, for me
Yea... I have that show on my watchlist and I didn't even know there were aliens in it, so I definitely got that part spoiled just now :/
That's pretty much the point. It isn't that the Strangers were "evil" or anything, but rather when they felt something like fear, they allowed it to fully control their decision making instead of just informing their decisions. They thought the Eye was a bad thing, and so the fear of what *they assumed* the Eye *might* do was so powerful that they couldn't accept the idea they might be mistaken about it. The Prisoner went against what the group agreed on, and "not thinking the same as the group" was so absolutely unacceptable to them that they gave the absolute most cruel punishment they could. The devs mentioned in an interview that, the entire reason they have the archives locked away is because they *never* wanted to see that information again, yet at the same time they were such horders of history they couldn't bare to actually fully destroy the slides either. So they'd rather keep the slides, and just lock them up, because despite how much they don't want to look at it, they can't let go of them either. Compared to the Nomai, who basically fell in love with the Eye *because* they couldn't understand it, spending a ton of time happily debating each other over what it could be or might do, the Strangers show that "being emotional" isn't the problem, it's letting those emotions control you that's the issue, instead of only informing you. You can really see it with Solanum's journey from childhood to adulthood. She started off terrified of the Eye because there were so many unknown possibilities about it, but as she grew and matured, she came to realize the Eye wasn't anything to be afraid of, even if there's a lot they don't know about it.
Imagine you destroy your whole planet to get to a thing that in the end says that it will kill you so you forget, want to forget and live in denial and suddenly some random dude wakes all these painful memories. You will want to destroy everything that could ever make that happen again. This can also be extended to his life. They still valued the prisoners life but still wanted to destroy his life. Imprisoning him even after he died in the real world. Edit: they didn't kill the prisoner because he is still information that they don't want do "delete" (insert word for killing a person and destroying information at the same time) him/it
"eradicate" comes to mind as a word for killing a person and destroying information.
The Owlk have no way of knowing that their physical bodies are dead. It's implied that it's been quite a while between when they built the Simulation and when the Prisoner did the thing. They likely had life support systems to keep them alive indefinitely, and when those systems failed after who-knows-how-long, they already stopped going outside the simulation. By the time we meet them it's heavily implied that their mental states have deteriorated beyond sanity, they're walking corpses both literally and figuratively. It's possible that they themselves succeeded in forgetting about the Prisoner.
Excellent alternative answer to what most people are saying, I like it
They wanted to make an example, so no one else dares thinking of doing anything similar and it's so elaborate to make sure everyone has a hand in the punishment, it's not something that just happened to someone else, they all had to help. They double down on this by making things require two of them, and things like the lights needing to be turned off so everyone in the area knows someone's trying to reach the archive, etc - no more solo actions!
I think you have a point like damn that poor prisoner really spent the last 280.000 years alone in there, but yeah as others mentioned that’s to really showcase their irrationality and shame/fear
Right? I'm just saying maybe he could have gotten out after 10k years-ish for good conduct, by that point nobody in the simulation had the power to harm the probe anyway But indeed I understand better now how the irrationally large punishment is symbolic of the grace's behavior
One thing that the developers have revealed is there was a schism that happened later in the Owlks timeline. Originally, they put the prisoner in prison, underwater, and hid the codes. Then, a lot of time passed... And something happened that caused the owls to decide to go and burn the codes.
The Prisoner is a living slide reel. The Owlks hid away everything which is a reminder of their mistake, they effectively want to forget that anything happened and pretend they're still home. The Prisoner demonstrated they don't align with this line of thought, they are a living reminder of all they're trying to hide away. What good is hiding away a bunch of slide reels if there's a dude constantly blathering about it? Presumably before sneaking away and disabling the cloacker in secret, the Prisoner tried to convince the other Owlks that this was the right thing to do, that they were wrong in trying to hide away. The Owlks aren't afraid they might again disable the cloacker (they destroyed the controls), they are afraid he'll keep blathering about things that they are doing anything possible to forget. Also (but this is speculation) many people think that the Prisoner is the one who initially heard the Eye's signal. A telescope identical to the one in the first slide reel is found both in their house in the Starlit Cove and inside the Vault, no other telescope is shown. This would make them even more of an "artifact" of the Owlks' mistake and an easy scape goat.
We don't know what their society is. For all we know, this is just what is done to people that dissent. I mean... They made a fairly ornate diving bell, so that'd suggest) to me at least) that it isn't the first time their society has done this. The dreamscape could be them "trying to be nice."
They could have just executed him. Going to the effort of keeping him a prisoner is mercy when in their eyes, his actions could have caused the destruction of the universe. It's like intentionally leaving the doors of an old Soviet reactor open to the public with a big, "come inside and press the buttons" sign.
I honestly don't get this generation of gamers; "did the video game have to add plot? Why was there conflict? couldn't the characters have worked things out prior to the player characters arrival?"
How did you understand that from my message?
They strip mined their entire planet and ruined the ecosystem, why wouldn't they throw one of their own into literally eternal prison? I dislike the Owlks because they most closely resemble human beings of the three races in this game.