jtr7 on 17/12/2008 at 01:39

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It goes beyond that. There are too many changes made to the final part I just can't get behind, or find a canon-respectable excuse for. One story, three parts.

Ya lost me. But then, I'm only one voice, here, representing only myself. My work is done. :)

Beleg Cúthalion on 17/12/2008 at 09:26

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Just before jtr7 does all the work in pointing out your canon violations (:p), one more thing I already noticed some time ago here at ttlg: Isn't the climax in fact in the middle (third act of five) in the classical drama while the big boom at the end is the catastrophe (maybe you use different terms, but it sounds to me as if the whole thing changed because of that). So speaking the climax would be rather Constantine's revelation.

jtr7 on 17/12/2008 at 19:56

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Before he ever ruins the ritual, Garrett shuts down the portal anchors to a specific Maw branch to shut off the influx of newborn Maw Beasts streaming into The City. As you can see in-game, nothing else really happens to the branch Garrett himself and the Trickster are in, but the branch that is generating Maw Beast foetuses may well be unhinged and decimated, the Maw Womb made barren. If the portal remained open, perhaps the destruction on the other side would've been perceivable.

Perhaps Viki was in her own branch, preparing TreeBeasts for war, and/or rallying the pagan human worshipers. Don't forget this TDP canon: She knows The City, she has contacts, she worked for Raputo, imported pagan stuff, and was seen as potential competition to wardens. In Gold, she sells information. There's plenty she could be doing "topside" to help usher in the Trickster's darkness. She could've been on the other side of The River, in the other half of The City, perhaps in Auldale, none of which needs exposition. She does leave Con's side, often.

In TMA, the original Maw map, including the highlighted automap pieces, was included in the folders for whatever reason, but of course, it wouldn't have made sense for Garrett to have it on him, and could've been included for one of a dozen reasons.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the points of the septegram represents darkness. Larris made a decent suggestion, and I think the sword could become useless...brittle, or something.

There's no reason the caverns have to collapse. I know you aren't having him travel as far or go through as much Maw as he does in-game. If it was collapsing, he'd never make it out. It would have to wait for him to leave first, as if the Maw was taking its time dying so Garrett could escape. If the elements that are clearly Trickster-made, Trickster-enhanced, were to annihilate itself, that icy slope could become bare rock. I submit that the caverns are simply earth, not held in place by magic, though some pillars could be.

He has two eyes again. Clearly, Garrett does not have his flesheye back. Clearly. He calls anything in his possession his own. He can't pry open the prongs and take his eye, because it's all been mineralized and fused together.

As I said, The Eye goes where it wills. TDP canon: it was locked in a vault repeatedly, and yet was repeatedly found floating above the altar anyway. TDS canon: it goes where it wills, and has always done so. TDP & TDS canon: the Keepers have a strong connection to it, and that connection allows them to contain it. TDS canon: it has a pact with the Keepers, and a Keeper was sacrificed for it as part of the agreement. It amuses itself at the terrible expense of others, yet is committed to upholding its end of the agreement.


Tricky had no desire to kill all The City's inhabitants, nor did Gamall. Only Karras was planning on total genocide, the others were going to create an enduring waking nightmare.

As you well know, I'm thinking of TDP with knowledge of how the story continues beyond it. No happy ending...the neutralization of The City's corruption has only just begun. No tying up of loose-ends...they are tied up years later, as part of the continuing plot.

For the most part, I've allowed myself to ignore story from the Gold missions to work with your ideas, but I'm not going to support ideas that disregard the whole of TMA and TDS, but I can respect your desire to write a story where Gold, TMA, and TDS do not exist. I don't think this thread would have gone on as long if I had understood from the beginning that this was about rigid containment of TDP-only ideas, minus most of the final cutscene, with no room for the whole trilogy, and that you really wanted to eliminate the possibility of a continuation, and discard the bigger picture quite thoroughly.

jtr7 on 17/12/2008 at 21:42

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Really?:wot: :wot:


We do not see eye to eye, but the script ideas were tolerable and even exciting up until the end. It really does just end, all tidy. My comment's only baseless because you know what you are doing and believe in your cause. I, however, have no frame of reference to know what you are doing, or why. :) As I stated earlier, if I can understand why, I can work with it. What follows is the result of casting a broad net to cover many areas.

It seems dumbed down, rather than smartened up. Efficiency has come at the cost of humanity and honesty--things don't end well, and shouldn't end well for a thief who's robbed the citizens of The City indiscriminately, intruded upon and stolen from and harmed hundreds, more like thousands, directly, and mostly indirectly. He gets to go back to his regular lifestyle, but the peace is tenuous. Being forced to save The City is...like...karma, man. He's not in as much control as he thinks he is over his own life, and now he knows it, but he's denying it. Everything he does fulfills prophecy and it pisses him off, until the end of TMA, when he tries embracing it instead, and finds it's actually fun to push the Keepers' buttons, and scoff their authority, and get away with it, for a brief time.

I believe you simply don't understand the significance of what you are cutting out. That has to be it. If you put all the food on your plate into a blender, you'll have a hard time convincing most people it's still the same meal. You've removed the texture, the distinct attributes, the joy of having more of one thing, less of another, a taste of this, a taste of that, the way it looks, the chewing, the savoring, the swallowing, all different... You could offer someone an apple, and they may take you up on your offer, and then they realize what you called an apple was really applesauce. Yes, they are both apple, but what is in mind is different, portability is different, and dish-washing may be involved, how one may save it for later changes. Including only pieces of elements from the other games, without their complete and expected context, is changing them from the original meaning into something else, and I wouldn't state they have been retained. Keep the context, or allow them to exist, but don't lock anything out. Leave their seeds for others to grow, at least. The use of symbolism as a thing, as a plot device, and as world-building, are all relevant and make Thief feel bigger and broader. I tell you, you are cheapening Thief by trying to distill it too far, and too early, removing key ingredients. It'll be a frikkin' McDonald's burger instead of one made at home by someone whom friends hope to be invited over for burgers with. (That should be the end of that analogy. :p ) If you were only cutting things out for time's sake, I could work with that, but I don't agree at all with cutting something out because it's deemed inconsequential when I know it's not. Changing the nature but retaining the superficial quality?

I don't care if it doesn't matter to Garrett as a person, but it matters very much to the other characters, and they will do things that will affect Garrett's path and the world around him. A butterfly effect, but not so subtle as that. He is relative apathy surrounded by fanaticism. He's more one with The City than he cares to admit. He lives in The City, and The City is also a main character. The factions are all facets of the same thing. They all have an "us vs. them" lifestyle. The humans need layers to make them human. You've cut away critical parts, forgetting the symbolism, forgetting the influence these things have upon each other, the player, the motivation behind even minor characters' actions, who the factions are and what they mean to each other. They aren't just in opposition, they share a lot in common, too. What you have chosen to discard, in the finale, are things that would cause a shift in why characters do what they do, and how they see each other. Here, at the end, you are turning characters and people into plot devices instead of whole beings, and packing a lot of commercial devices into it to get a formulaic reaction. It feels like a cop-out. Layers, details, world-building, people's beliefs. These things need to EXIST. The monsters are not gone, they are pushed back to a comfortable distance. The layers and details and incidental fluff all serve very well to make it seem greater than it is, and the devs rarely wrote anything that wasn't woven into the quilt. What I have enjoyed so far is when something isn't locked out of existence, and is even relegated to the background but still there.

There are so many layers...that people CAN glean what they wish. If you wrote this screenplay for yourself then it may please you perfectly, but sharing these ideas with the community, the natural consequence is that you're removing something that someone else considers important. I had hoped you would not lock anything out, letting it all exist so most fans could enjoy it. Just to be clearer on my stance: There are many things about all the games I do not like, some not at all, but I recognize that as personal. The larger you create the world by simply allowing things to exist, the more people can find themselves within it, and they are your audience. As I continue to read the archived threads, and the newer ones, I'm observing the patterns. Asking what is liked by most, by some, by few, and are the cases made for or against something understood by most, by some, by few? I have used these to fashion my views regarding public projects in the Thief universe. I also have my own stories and personal tastes regarding Thief, but they are mine, and I don't expect to share without my tongue in my cheek, or to show a different take.

Deviate too far, and it's only fun fan-fiction, which, by itself, is worthy of respect, but I wouldn't call it faithful. Writing new stuff and exposition for it to replace the cut material misses the point of cutting stuff to begin with, and has an undesirable ripple effect. It should not make the games look any more ridiculous, or confuse people who see the movie first.

The Eye isn't called The Eye AND blind for no reason, it has a history preceding TDP, and has a future based on why it exists in the first place. The Eye does not just exist as a plot device to give the Trickster something to covet, and Garrett to acquire. Giving the Eye sight is to create a snowball effect of prophecy fulfillment, wiping out corruption one (or two) factions at a time, knocking the people back to square one, to keep the ultimate balance, which is about keeping the childish bickering greedy citizens alive, instead of allowing any group to wipe the other out. Giving The Eye sight means Garrett is The One, The One True Keeper, the "thief" the Glyphs protect from the Keepers by never calling the thief "The One" or giving away what Garrett is destined to do. Giving The Eye sight means it can do what The Eye was destined to do, and that is NOT projecting the HeartsMaw reality into our own! The Eye is given sight so that it could be activated by The One because the Keepers have become corrupted by Orland's unbalanced leadership. The Eye's purpose in the trilogy is NOT the Dark Project. That is Tricky's purpose. Tricky's corruption leads to Garrett getting The Eye and providing it with fuel to become The One. With the flesheye, The Eye is attuned to Garrett, The One True Keeper, the only Key to activating the Final Glyph, the failsafe. The Eye is NOT incidental.

The eyes are symbols, harbingers of what's coming. What Garrett and the factions go through is both good and evil. Evil to them, but good for humanity overall, good for The City in the end. Yin and Yang (a symbol used in-game). The Trickster's Dark Project, Karras's heretical works, Truart's "new age", the Keeper's failsafe, all symbolized by eyes (the TDS City Watch even more so). The Trickster's third eye, Karras's "watchers", the Keeper quote "who watches the watchers?", and the name "City Watch", all tie into the eye symbology. Garrett's eye symbolizes the Metal Age, as well as the melding of metal and flesh, and his flesheye symbolizes the Unwritten Times, as The Eye is able to do its thing only because of Garrett's flesheye. Let's not be so quick to unwrite the Thief universe.

The Eye in TDS has several lines teasing Garrett about his missing flesheye and how it's seen many interesting things with it, and the Keeper treatise on Garrett tells of the eye removal and mechanical replacement, and there are pagan lines teasing Garrett about his one eye. The mechanical eye connects Karras to Garrett, and also represents the reasons why Karras wants Garrett murdered. He knows his skills, he gave him the eye in hopes he would be on his side when his radical movement gained momentum, and Garrett just took it without acknowledging the one who gave it to him and Karras made no ally. The Thief 2 Gold revisionists will certainly be interested to know how you would excise the mechanical eye from the games and cutscenes. The mechanical eye is not a power-up without the scouting orbs and zoom. I understand Truart needs no reason from Karras to go after Garrett, but the implication is that the City Watch is going after him harder than the other criminals, and Truart has actually been hired to kill him. Yes, the T2G revisionists would be interested to know how much would be left, and how much new fiction would have to be written to tie things back together.

Bafford's sceptre, Trickster's sceptre: bookends (thanks Mr. Brown!). :p

The Maw continues. The portals continue into TMA. TMA shows the Maw is doing okay without Tricky, different, but not undone. It matters. After Viki is gone, there is good indication the Maw plays little part anymore. The pagan sapling has to be shipped in from somewhere, then planted, the elemental cocoon needs fueling, and the pagan cornerstones need mossing to increase the pagans' power--subtract the game-mechanics and the story tells you they are weak. Even Dyan makes decisions based on Viki's final instructions. The Maw is Pagan Heaven and it exists. They go there for strength and protection, and desire to go there when they die. They speak of The Green, and Viktoria is The Lady, and the Lady of the Green. Lotus expects to go there when he asks Garrett to kill him. Viki draws her strength from there and she fears she can only take with her into Soulforge what strength she already has. It's ingrained in the pagan way of life, and it goes beyond religious belief. It's fact.

[INDENT]"Lit up the lights o' the Gathering Place,
'til all of thems glows round the Woodsie Lord's head.
Then open them eyes of the Jacksberry Giver,
by bringin the rubies and then placing thems there.
Jumps in His mouth, when glows it all red,
for these is the way to them lair of the greens, the maw of them earthsies and court of us dreams."[/INDENT]

They don't just jump into a maw to go to their hawt green Mama in The Maw (groan, sorry 'bout that). Viki isn't demoted to "den mother" to a pack of pagan people. The Maw must exist or the ripple effect harms a faction before it is time. TDS is a world without the god-like nature guardians, and only the worshipers to maintain what they can. The portals are gone.

Come on, the game fiction was written by MIT grads, who had read the books and watched the movies I listed above. Those stories aren't superficial, and even the fluff has it's purpose.

I could go on and on. I'd be shocked if someone really wanted me to. :wot: I'm really holding back, to be honest. Yes, I know full well how scary this is. It's even more frightening to know I barely looked at the files or games, only double-checked the City Watch banner from TMA to verify the eye on it, and to copy the M10B05 pagan quote above. I will stand up for the whole of Thief because the fan community is diverse, and diverse in what Thief means to them, and these mini-theses (rough-draft brain-dumps!) are me standing up for the community of Thief fans as a single entity, the whole Bell curve of them. Okay, not the cranky WTF Quake-types or the trolls, but for the most part. One person's junk is another person's treasure.

jtr7 on 18/12/2008 at 02:26

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Me? No.

;) <---Not winking, just happy to not have one of his flesheyes.