Alright I'm slightly losing my mind over having no one to talk to about Saint's campaign while I wait for friends to finish Rain World so...

These are the main interpretations I've seen online. Please feel free to elaborate/ramble in the tags, especially if you pick the "other" option. I'm curious

Might make some other polls. I have a lot of thoughts if you can't tell

What if I want to hear your thoughts on the void worms and saint and how people see them? What then? Because now I'm curious ngl (no pressure tho)

Ah I certainly could try to get my thoughts in a row, and was sorta planning on it once I got a sideblog set up (I have it but its WIP at the moment) I can sorta cover what I primarily think though, a bit less properly thought out and in order. Warning for Downpour endings.

New addition made after I typed everything: I did not hold back this is so long. I went insane okay

*Small Note, I know Rain World is themed heavily around concepts of Buddhism and it's teachings, but for the most part I'm not really gonna invest much in that for my own thoughts on the things in it.

I'll start by saying I have a lot of complex thoughts on Saint, I don't dislike their campaign (It's neat!) but I do have hm… certain feelings on the what it communicates and how it communicates it, but I'll also say I think I interpret Rain World in a very different way than a lot of people do, or at least have a "second half" to the thoughts people tend to express, and the way Saint plays out gives me conflicted emotions from those feelings. That and with RW's inspirations its just… easy to be conflicted emotionally. Without going to far into things I guess you could say that in many ways I see Saint as a bad thing. Not really a villain but a… negative. It's complicated and I don't really have the words for it right now, other than I think RW does a lot with its themes of life and death and Saint complicates it as an outside force imposing a solution. And perhaps that statement there makes the caption on the art a little more clear- "Do you think yourself above it all?" as something that could be the statement of either Saint or the Worm.

Jumping from that to the "how people see them" I often see a sort of expression of surprise, mostly playfully, about how the solution turned out to be a slugcat (Saint). The idea there is a sort of novel "Ha! Its this silly little forgettable creature" but in what way is Saint any different from the worms? Are the worms not also creatures, just ones that live in an environment most cannot? They are massive and incomprehensible from our perspective, but thats hardly a new thing- there are some things just above peoples ability to understand, and that really doesn't make them abnormal or unnatural. I suppose I find the whole placement of the worms as some sort of divine creature or gods to be misplaced because even within RW the concept of a god is recontextualized- Five Pebbles gloats to the player that they are "Godlike in comparison" while rotting away from the inside and crumbling to pieces, because at the end of it all his position doesn't save him from the mechanisms of the world, even if he stands high above many of the creatures of the world and would be "incomprehensible" to a lizard or slugcat in the same way a giant space worm would be to us. Are the echos, ghosts as they are, gods? So what does it even mean to be a god, in the context of rain world?

There's another aspect, which is that ultimately the worms still lie at the heart of the solution, the final step when the survivor leaps into the void is to have themselves plucked by the worms and ascended. When artificer dives into the sea, the worms reject them for their incomplete karma (They observe them, and then leave, forcing artificer to just continue swimming), and they dissolve. They don't become an echo, they just fade away in the waves the void. Its not so much the just void sea that does the ascension- its the worms within it too. In this aspect Saint is very similar to them- but forgoes the void. To make a bit of a joke, a worm off the string.

So going back to my first statement on Saint being a bad thing… I said I wasn't going into it but damn, I am, a lot of people seem to view the void ends as some sort of "Life sucks, and then you die" kinda thing. Life sucks, you fail over and over, its unfair and horrible and then you die. And in the context of Rain World you die, and then you wake back up in a new life and start it all over again. But people tend to interpret this so… pessimistically. When actually Rain World, even the base game, actually holds a lot of love for that cycle as something worth it. Survivor wakes up after a traumatic event and they fail over and over, they exist in a frustrating environment they have no control over and no real help for- but its through those failures that they (you) get better. You fail less, you learn, you understand. And even if things stay unfair eventually you get your bearings and you can face that uncertainty with more confidence, you grow and establish yourself- you can even start going outside your safety nets and still succeed. To quote the actual achievement for survivor- "This land has become your home". The fun of Rain World, the part that sticks with people- is when it finally clicks and they start to get it, when they get just a little bit better at understanding the world they live in, the creature they are, and can find the fun in a world that is scary and unfair but something you can overcome if you just keep trying.

And that's the beauty of a life- that despite that suffering you can still get back up again and do better. You can do worse. But you still get back up. In the wide scope of Rain World's reincarnation, you can fail so badly its lethal but still, ultimately, try again. The world around you is cruel and unfair but not impossible. There can be rain and blizzards so awful that most things can't survive them but some things can, and will. Life finds a way. Even ascension, the escape- is something you can only get after you've gotten good enough to make it there. You learn how the world works, make peace with it. And at the end, if you so choose, you can take this and complete your cycle via ascension.

Downpour spins this all very differently with its endings- instead opting to give the slugcats ways to indulge in their lives- to find their homes, their families, find friends… It very much indulges in the exact opposite of ascension- a reverence for life, overcoming the suffering in return for the good. Attachment to the world. In Artificers case, they can indulge in such simpleminded lust for revenge and violence that they can lock themselves at karma one. It begs the question- is giving this up something to be desired? Is an attachment to life good or bad? If you know there is a solution to simply cease existence, what does it mean to take that choice? The Echos says as much- The Ancients understood how the aspects of how their world works. They sought such, and some failed, others didn't. Some resent their failure. Others made peace with it. Some don't understand why it was ever something anyone wanted. The rest ceased to be.

And I guess that's where Saint comes in as something I have conflict over. With the void worms there's an aspect of choice to choosing to cross yourself out. Saint acts as a solution to the fact some creatures cant possibly even know there is a way out of life to seek. The struggle for survival is, of course, a struggle after all. Death is something creatures want to escape, but failing to do so just means returning to the escape again. But what does it mean to take that choice from something that doesn't even know it has it? Will Saint take that choice from things that know it, and wouldn't want it? The iterators want it, sought it, direct those who ask to it, but that was the purpose of their whole creation. They are satisfied with Saint's choice to do so, but if the Ancient in undergrowth were still around, what of them? They seemed to not want to seek such a thing at all, moved by some unknown pressure. The world teems with life still- a harsh blizzard, a burning desert, these are not lesser ecosystems than a forest or a city. The world is not barren, not empty, and when the Ancients' towers finally crumble away into unrecognizable scrap and dirt made of rust, life will continue to pull themselves from the dust.

Its sad, its solemn to think that one day everything here and everything there will become nothing recognizable. That any link between past and future may vanish so thoroughly that no lines can be drawn between them… but it is also kinda beautiful in a way. The stubbornness of it all.

Perhaps this is just a very long way of saying I would become an echo.