#alskdflasf maybe this is why i shouldn't make posts with takes

[flame-shadow]

Thoughts on areas like the Soul Sanctum, Deepnest, or the Mantis's area?

(My brain doesn't wish to cooperate with the name)

you’re going to get all three because two of those areas are faves of mine and the last one has one of my fave boss fights :3c

[i don’t have the wiki pulled up or anything so obligatory disclaimer that i might misremember some things. also, im gonna throw all of this under the cut because this is going to be more of a stream of consciousness than an actually coherent thing]

SOUL SANCTUM

let’s just get this out of the way first - love love love love love the music holy shit. it’s not something i’d listen to when i want to chill out, but oooohhhhh those organs. and when the whispers are in there too?? and “Mage Under Glass” with the laughter??? yesss

Anyway. In general, I’m a sucker for unethical laboratories in stories and games. There’s so much potential for fucked up and creative ideas within canon and in the fan characters/interpretations (I’m looking at you, Fraught. i love you, you fucked up spider <3). 

How do you get soul? you harvest it. and you get on the king’s bad side in the process of course. and the watcher’s too, im sure. lurien’s like, ‘hey wtf those bugs are citizens under my watch. stop it’ and ‘well fuck you, im gonna point my telescope right into your office window, you soul bastard. i can read all the notes on your fucked up experiments now. whatcha gonna do now?’

How unethical were the experiments before the radiance’s insidious presence became a factor? Even if the Sanctum started as a safe place of learning, I think it wouldn’t have taken long for at least some of the bugs to start doing questionable things. Not everyone needs a moth to nudge them to cross the ethics line. But when the soul master changed course, set the scholars to study immortality, what did they focus on? improving the body so it won’t slow and cease its function as time passes? prolonging the stability of the mind so age doesn’t corrupt memories or cognition? focusing on a bug’s own soul to do something that way? any combination of this could fuck up the stability of the mind and/or body of the subjects. That’s where we get the mistakes/follies, right? too much soul for some that cause melting pretty quickly. for others that don’t have a negative reaction right away, maybe a dependency on soul is built up and must be maintained to stave off negative effects of withdrawal, then of course there’s a shortage. you can’t harvest bodies forever. maybe the souls of the infected bugs aren’t viable, maybe the infection taints them, spreads the infection to whatever bug absorbs it. there are options here.

There’s also the soul warriors. They have dream dialogue where they say something about not remembering how they have these moves or how to fight or something like that, right? so what if those bugs had souls of trained fighters like city sentries implanted in them? they suddenly have new instincts for situations that they themselves didn’t experience or train for. i kinda get neuromod vibes from this concept (from the game Prey). 

Also, the parallels between the soul master and the pale king are neat. they both have corpse pits. they both think they’re hot shit (and to be fair, they are both powerful even if they’re in different leagues). the radiance directly fucks with both of them. neither of them admit defeat in their final dream nail dialogue. (iirc, arty-cakes has made a similar observation about the parallels, but i noticed this long before they made their post. still, it’s a good observation)

uhhh okay i’ll stop there for the Sanctum

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DEEPNEST

...skitter skitter skitter skitter...

i feel so sorry for anyone who has arachnophobia and couldn’t enjoy the game because of this area. that sucks. this is one of my fave areas specifically because of the skitters and clicks and snaps and wibbly music/sound effects that occasionally made my skin crawl. 

im a fan of spiders and centipedes, and deepnest delivered! 

i have a lot of headcanon stuff for deepnest society and beasts that has little to do with the game or established lore, so i’ll leave that for another time. But for more game-related stuff, let’s see...

i think nosks and corpse creepers and grub mimics, if not different life stages of the same species, are at least related. like how wild cats and cheetahs and panthers are related but not the same. nosks have the most developed shape shifting capabilities, and they have a sort of pocket dimension that they can fold their body into so they can fit into smaller disguises (how else do you explain how large the infected nosk actually is compared to the much smaller knight that it ran around as to lure the player in? magical dimension powers is what i’ve decided)

the weaver’s den showed much more development of architecture. more metal and arches and stuff. i can’t recall to what extent the basic shapes and materials reflect parts of hallownest, but i think that place was a more recent development compared to the rest of the Beasts’ infrastructure.

PK reeeaaallllyyyyy wanted to get a tram all the way across deepnest, didn’t he? we get one tram to the eastern edge which conveniently takes riders to the ancient basin below where most of hallownest’s citizens are. but then the failed tramway that heads for the distant village. could it have been one of the lesser conditions of herrah’s and pk’s agreement? but herrah would be asleep so she wouldn’t need the tram to visit the palace or have hornet visit her. but why else would a tram be intended to cross to there? idk that one doesn’t make much sense to me. maybe i’m forgetting a detail, but whatever.

deepnest is a horrible maze that i will continue to get lost in.

[bonus - okay i’ll share this:  one of the made-up swears i use for my beast character is “writhing mass” in reference to the skittering, scuttling pit of writhing things found as an area hazard in lieu of acid. like “bloody hell” or something haha. also it’s just fun to say.]

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MANTIS VILLAGE

Alas, i don’t spend a whole lot of time in this area. I think the mantids are cool and honorable, and i apologize for my weaverlings attacking friendly mantids, but sometimes a little deepnest should be allowed to cause mayhem in the mantis village, okay?

mantis lords/sisters of battle are great boss fights. the choreography and smoothness and reflexes and aaaahhhh yeah

i seriously wonder what’s up with all the giant spikes though. like. not even deepnest has giga-spikes like that. ......actually. i wonder if those spikes are there in case the beasts overrun the village. they’d certainly be painful obstacles to beasts trying to climb out of the village and into the fungal wastes.

I think it would’ve been cool if there had been some bit of dialogue or a lore tablet that hinted at the mantis traitors. i know there’s the broken throne, but i didn’t notice that; it was pointed out to me after i’d already played once or twice through the game. don’t get me wrong- it’s a cool little thing to look back on and be like ‘i see what you did there’. environmental storytelling or whatever. but i’d like a little more anyway.

i wonder how the fungal folk feel about the mantids. i imagine they occupy their own sections of the fungal wastes and just mutually don’t bother each other. i wonder how diplomacy would work between a mantis of individual mind and a mushroom of shared consciousness? they make a nice contrast in a sharp and cutting/soft and bludgeoning way as well as a swift and silent/energetic and noisy way with how they attack and stuff.

okay that’s it. thanks for asking! if you read all of that, have a cookie

#alskdflasf maybe this is why i shouldn't make posts with takes #i just ramble instead of having cohesive ideas #still! this was fun to ramble about! #thanks for sending the ask! #rambling #flame answers #even though i feel like i asked a lot of my own questions too haha #alistairillustrates #the pale king #the radiance #soul sanctum #soul master