And I am here for it. Grumpy old gay scientist Orokin couple dealing with causal problems and temporality, and how one seemingly abandoned the other, despite that not being the case. Oof. Drama.
Goblin Party @ My Brain 24/7 | A week shy of 33 before Cohost closed. Cis, ACAB forever, Trans Rights Are Human Rights forever.
RIP Cohost 2024. You were the best social media site to have ever been done. Long live eggbug. If you're seeing this in the future, on some archive, be kind to others. It's the only way things get better.
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in reply to @balketh's post:
And that ending! Whatever it is Wally's trying to put into Big Robot Man A, Kiddo's response is still to show affection and try and take away the pain. While WEARING Big Robot Man B!
So the Indifference is some kind of entity-force that the Man In The Wall can use to influence reality, but it's hard because it doesn't have a form, so it corrupts a lot of other things that already exist to fight for it, or tries to create Fragmented pieces.
The thing is... Indifference is defined as, among other things, a lack of sympathy.
So the Tenno countered perfectly - sympathy. This act cut the Khra Strand linking the Indifference to the huge robot. Khra meaning Time, often depicted by Orokin as cyclical/endless, but also the parody that it in and of itself is a lie; 'we are immortal, but we die with our sun'.
The mirror-Albrecht is concerning that it still exists as an entity, but it makes sense - beings that affected these/this Void entity are remembered by it.
What really kills me though?
Is that Mother, the Entrati quest giver on Deimos, is Albrecht's daughter.
Which means grandmother is his wife.
Which means his wife and kids had been there the whole time. Which blows my mind, for some reason.
Yeah, the more I tilt my head and look over it, I'd initially gotten the impression that TMITW was an interchangeable term for The Indifference and The Murmur were just an army manifestation of it - Like, the first real deal void demons we've seen since the Zariman Angels. That's really falling apart the more I examine it.
Obviously the negative space wedgie factor of the Z is off the charts, it's deliberately weird even by the settings' standard operating scales, so people just popping back into existence and their viewpoints influencing what's going on, its why we get this sort of gradual corruption seeping through the ship.
But if Indifference/Murmur was Of The Same Force as the Zariman stuff, it'd be thematically linked on SOME level, aesthetic, just, anything. And the brutalist desert areas in the labs, or the big viewing walls out into some kind of storm certainly depict a different aesthetic, just the whole vibe and set of ideas is completely separate.
We know Teshin's of the opinion the Angels are Of TMITW, but it could just as easilly be that they're Of The Void and the fact that Wally is out there does not mean he's The Only Thing out there.
The more I think about it, the less sense it makes. All the Z stuff looks like melted, runoff soldering. Multiple viewpoints lathing away at reality, the ships population and whatever's out there melting and running like quicksilver where perception clashes? But all the Murmur has very... I know this is an odd term to use for them, given their core design, but they're very /coherent/ and specific. They're ALL body parts, made of stone, chopped and slapped together, sure, but drawing from a very narrow range.
So, on the one hand, I agree: the visual styles between Zariman 'void' and TMITW/Indifference 'void' are very different. It's worth noting that we've been able to go to the void for years in game, at least, part of it - that being the Corrupted Orokin tileset, the corruption in which has some passing similarity to the Zariman void.
In part, I chalk this up to, I think, the team not planning ahead in design language of these elements - they'd have to have been working like 3 expansions ahead, which they might be, but IDK either way.
However, there's an in-world reason it's so fucked up: the only times we've ever seen void entities in the game, up until WITW, have all been in the void - either in the Zariman's bridged nature into the void, the Void tileset itself, inside the Railjack (seen only, not interacted with), or in Duviri (one side of the Drifter's version of the Zariman's puncture into the void - not necessarily the one poking through our starmap, which is Kiddo's).
This case with WITW is unique - the Indifference are in our dimension this time. There's nothing holding the door open for them - It's unclear atm how TMITW is getting the Indifference into this reality atm, since the original Wall that Albrecht used is on Lua, beneath the tenno void heart.
So, I can, in some respect, justify the odd look of the Indifference in part to the fact that they're a separate entity to Void Angels, which are former manifestations of Zariman crewmembers, void-corrupted. So their look, and the corruption in the Zariman, is gonna be different to the Indifference, b/c the Void Angels are already based on existing creatures.
The Indifference is literally shaping the Murmur to try and fit in our world. It's like one of those learning systems trying to figure out how to make a bipedal creature through trial and error. The descriptions of some of the enemies also suggest this in places.
Bird 3 and Tagfer also bark about this at some point, talking about how maybe it's trying to 'fit in' here, it wants to be involved in reality, but it's like a child, only much more destructive.
Given the reaction that the statue had to the Tenno reaching out, I stand firmly by my original guess that the hard counter to the Indifference is Sympathy, and extending that to the Murmur is part of how we might defeat it.
Further, this tidbit sheds more light on why they're shaped like stone with limbs:
"Mur, from Latin mūrus, is a word meaning "wall" in several indo-european languages, so technically this faction's name could be translated to English as "WallWall", which can be a direct reference to Man in the Wall."
It sounds like he's, well, because he's supposedly actually trapped in the wall (potentially because of Albrecht?), he's using what he's got/can make to do his dirty work. Limestone and limbs!