I Think This Post Solved Nearly All Of The Confusion That Comes With Respawns Being Canonized, And Especially

I think this post solved nearly all of the confusion that comes with respawns being canonized, and especially with some of the introductions of Downpour because the slugcats were originally a mod that VideoCult canonized. However, I think some of those special cases actually deepen these themes of qualia, and despite the confusion should be considered part of the story. After all, Downpour did have a lot of work done on it by VideoCult to make the More Slugcats mod fit.

The first question is always "why didn't Arti's spugpups come back?" Or any slugpups for that matter, why do they seem to die forever? The answer is that tie of mental state to spiritual state, and how qualia links everything together. So, the slugpups are simply not developed enough to respawn alongside you, and stay in your cycle. I believe they still respawn, but in another cycle, or "plane" as Gnosticism would say, at a point before they met you.

This is also what I think is meant by the echoes, where your cycle has to converge with theirs to percieve them, and even then only temporarily. Each creature is locked in its own personal plane, where it respawns at the last moment of concentrated qualia. The echoes even show this, like the Farm Arrays echo reminiscing about their life in the Farm Arrays, confused why they still look at this simple farmland even as it becomes overgrown and eventually snows over. For the Slugcats, a shelter is exactly that moment of qualia, where the experience of peaceful rest is not related to the previous events, and sleep serves as a way to ease the transition between death and rebirth.

The next question is Hunter. Why is he on permadeath mode with a time limit? Again we go back to that link between the physical brain and karma, Hunter has cancer. And not just any cancer, he has The Rot, which is explicitly a brain cancer that infects nueral tissue. When he dies, either before the time limit or when he reaches it, the Rot completely takes over before he can respawn, leaving behind the Hunter Longlegs that we see in Gourmand's campaign if you failed a Hunter save before playing Gourmand. It's possible Hunter does respawn, but before the start of his campaign and before the Rot stopped him from being able to keep the qualia of shelters, perhaps in the arms of No Significant Harassment like he sees when he ascends.

That would explain why we always have the chance to replay the campaign and avoid dying this time.

Next, Saint. What the hell is happening with Saint? To begin, the oversized and difficulty-spiked elephant in the room is Rubicon.

Why is there an entire area of shuffled up rooms, some from regions long before Saint's campaign, that is nearly as big as Five Pepples' interior down here? Why is it clearly trying to stop Saint from perpetuating what seems to be his own cycle of becoming an echo only to be returned where the campaign began and somehow reverted to normal, by a ghostly slugcat? I think it's explained by what you said about the Void Worms being responsible for the creation of new worlds, as well as by how the Void Sea works. What we are told us that the Void Sea eats up the world from below as new particles are added on top, burying what came before. If the Void Worms can build a new world, then building Rubicon as a prison for Saint isn't too far fetched. Whatever the reason for its creation, it must be slowly taking resources away from their efforts to layer the new world on top, because by the time of Saint's campaign the Void Sea seems to have eaten way past where it did before, without any clear layering on top.

Saint is trying to Ascend EVERYTHING. He's trying to get the Void Sea to eat up the whole world, one cycle at a time, one ascended Void Worm at a time. He's trying to wipe the slate clean, but why? I think the answer is simply it's his purpose. He has been purposed to Ascend the Iterators, and there are too many of them, in too many different cycles, for him to get them all manually. He does not want to wipe out the Void Worms, only leave a blank slate for the new world to be built from. Saint gives Karma 10 to every creature he comes across, preparing them for when the Void Sea consumes them. It may explode their brains while he's at it, but it's mercy compared to the perpetual torment of deathless memory. Saint is ending the world, and here that is good because it means a new world will be built on top using the sacrifice of all those forcibly Ascended, repopulating all of the Void Worms he had to Ascend to get here. It may not be a good ending for the world, but it is a new beginning for what will replace it when nothing remains.

I'm shocked how well I was able to see all of @grunckle 's observations about the story's themes fitting Downpour, but it does make sense since VideoCult took a lot of creative liberties with the More Slugcats mod. I could probably go on more of a tangent about how Gourmand follows the tenet of Qualia and memory preservation while disobeying almost everything about Ancient culture, or how lizard lineage could work despite the slugcat resetting to before they killed the lizard if they die, but I think this post is long enough and I'll leave someone else to phrase all that better than I can.

Qualia and Ascension in Rain World

(To clarify I'm mostly talking about base-game lore and not including Downpour, but honestly most of these things can transfer over)

Qualia

One thing that’s relatively hidden in Rain World’s text and subtext is the concept of qualia. Qualia is described as being, “sensory experiences that have distinctive subjective qualities but lack any meaning or external reference to the objects or events that cause them.” It’s a personal sensory experience that cannot be comprehended by another person other than the individual themself, and are often hard to convey via language.

Qualia is a reoccurring motif in Rain World, but what’s more important is the way in which it’s conveyed to the player. The picture that’s painted is that of a world or civilization that placed a great importance on the individuals’ experience, and it’s shown through pearls or environmental details.

Here are some examples of qualia appearing in the text through pearls.

“It's qualia, or a moment - a very short one. Someone is holding a black stone, and twisting it slightly as they drag their finger across the rough surface. The entire sequence is shorter than a heartbeat, but the resolution is extraordinary.”

“A memory... but not really visual, or even concrete, in its character. It reminds of the feeling of a warm wind, but not the physical feeling but the... inner feeling. I don't think it has much utility unless you are doing some very fringe Regeneraist research.”

“This one... is authored by Five Pebbles, when he was young. There has been an attempt to scramble the data, but it's sloppily done, and most is still somewhat legible. It's written in internal language, or thoughts, so it is hard for me to translate so you would understand.”

But the most prominent examples of qualia and it’s importance in this world are the Memory Crypts and possibly ancient naming conventions. The deep purple pearl (shortened) found in Shaded Citadel states,

“In this vessel is the living memories of Seventeen Axes, Fifteen Spoked Wheel, of the House of Braids (…) Seventeen Axes, Fifteen Spoked Wheel nobly decided to ascend in the beginning of 1514.008, after graciously donating all (ALL!) earthly possessions to the local Iterator project (Unparalleled Innocence), and left these memories to be cherished by the carnal plane. The assorted memories and qualia include:”

Ancients likely mutated their own neural tissue into the cabinet beasts we see in Shaded, which were used to store their memories and qualia before ascension. Even james said once "how 5 pebs got the rot is a good hint here" in response to someone asking how cabinet beasts work, and how they're made.

Adding on to this, ancient (and iterator) naming conventions seem to be built off of the concept of qualia, with them focusing on individual images or experiences.

Nineteen Spades, Endless Reflections

Droplets upon Five Large Droplets

Two Sprouts, Twelve Brackets

Looks to the Moon

Generally, this all points to a world focused on the expression and preservation of the individual experience. You could even consider some of the echo dialogue as more evidence for this running motif, but I already have too many quotes lol.

Ascension

So now time to talk about my interpretation of ascension. In short, you turn into a worm, but I should probably explain more than that.

So its been surfacing on rw-tumblr that the light in the end of the game is called the egg in files. Although file names shouldn't be taken as fact or canon, it is pretty obvious given the birth imagery.

But something a little lesser known is what happens to the worm that takes us down to the void-sea depths. Void worms normally have a bright glowing effect, on their body, which is present for ours as well. But after it unhooks us, it swims down, and when it passes us on it's way back that glowing effect is gone.

To be honest, I don't really think this can be interpreted in many ways, but the most obvious one and the one I personally subscribe to is that the worm laid the egg. Biology and spirituality really aren't that different in Rain World, it's implied that karma is stored in the brain through Five Pebbles's slideshow. Adding on to that, we see voidspawn after eating an iterator neuron. One's spiritual state is innately tied to their mental state, and that dictates what and what they can't perceive.

And for that reason I decide to take a more biology leaning approach to what happens in the ending. At face value, we are fertilizing the egg of a void worm to be reborn into a voidspawn.

Not only do void spawn and void worms have multiple characteristics in common, (worm like bodies, tendrils/tentacles, glowing heads, void spawn look microbial and void worms are likely some of the oldest "life" in game)

but voidspawn are seen inside egg-like coverings and share the same egg light seen in the end of the game, confirmed to be the same thing by Videocult in a livestream they did.

I believe that all this points to ascension being re-birth into a voidspawn, which eventually undergoes metamorphose into a worm. Higher-dimensional beings, who manifest and give birth to a new world.

So how does this tie in with qualia? Another thing you might know is that the area in which void spawn are most plentiful is Shaded Citadel and areas in Shoreline near Shaded. And shaded is absolutely packed with Cabinet Beasts, even outside Memory Crypts. I believe these qualia-storing creatures are what manifest voidspawn.

From what we see in ascension, it still looks physical and largely based around the real world. Hunter still has his scars and see's an iterator, survivor sees the slug tree in a more mystical and formless state, and monk sees survivor frankly just looking like a normal slugcat. I think that ascension is a product of qualia. We transcend our earthly knowledge via the egg, and our own qualia is used to give birth to a new world. This is why voidspawn appear most in Shaded Citadel.

Now I won't be getting into Void-Worm theories too much here, I'm mostly focused on ascension but I can't ignore the Gnosticism parallels. For those who don't know, Void Worms heavelly resemble the Yaldaboath from Gnosticism, and running with that some people theorize that, like the Yaldabaoth, void worms are responsible for manifesting the material world. Ascension seems to be a mix of the concepts of Gnosis and Nirvana, but I believe it might lean more on Gnosis.

From my limited knowledge, Gnosis is a few things, some of which being a state achieved from experiences or intuitions, and an essential part to salvation is personal knowledge. While researching a bit, I came across this text by Peter Wilberg called "From NEW AGE to NEW GNOSIS" which brings up some comparisons between Gnosticism and qualia as well.

"Gnosis is subjective knowledge of an inner universe made up not of matter, energy, space or time but of countless qualitative spheres or ‘planes’ of awareness – a knowledge obtained directly through inter- subjective resonance. It is the subjective science of this inner universe."

One thing though that has been brought up when discussing this is how this can be consolidated with the tone of the ending. It is pretty un-ambiguously happy, but if we're going with the Void worm Yaldaboath theory then that would put a bit of a sour twist on it right?

I agreed with these for some time, but now I actually think it ties in perfectly with Rain World's core themes as stated by the devs, "overcoming differences and finding empathy." I don't think the void worms are "evil" or malevolent, but I think they (and subsequently us after ascending) play a key role in demonstrating this theme.

By manifesting the physical world, we allow these souls to experience life and develop their own qualia so one day they can ascend themselves. We are shown compassion, and pass it forward.