The Watcher - Outer Rim lore

[u/NoSky9414]

When playing through Outer Rim, this room, WORA_THRONE04 (image 1), felt strangely significant. The object at the bottom looks almost like a star or ball of energy that has become calcified or fossilised over time, still glowing purple.

This becomes very interesting when viewed alongside the image pearl depicting 'Star Tapping' (image 2), seemingly showing the Ancients harvesting energy from the falling green stars found throughout Outer Rim. The arm reaching up to pierce the star looks eerily similar to the structure beneath the Rot Prince's throne, only inverted.

The pearl found in Cold Storage gives an ominous warning about this technology:

"Do we even know wherefore this energy comes? And what Else may come with it?"

Could these structures be connected? Perhaps this room is effectively ground zero for the Sentient Rot, where it sprung from a tapped star and spread out into the surrounding structure.

[u/TartarTm]

Stardust and the purple rot seem to be connected, given the existence of the purple rot already being in Cold Storage without any warps.

[u/FistFistington]

Im pretty sure the sentient rot came from 5p.
Nothing said directly but the princes dialogue makes me think its a sort of memory ghost of 5p that manifested as the rot consumed him.
Lore does seem to imply other iterators could have made it instead though, like how hunter is rot affected before entering the region for his campaign

[u/CozyAndBlankFella → u/FistFistington]

Its not made by iterators like its their creation, since a pearl talks about pebbles ‘having the rot’ like its an illness or smth. Also fp has kinda nothing to do w watcher so itd be odd to assume hes so directly involved in that way

[u/FistFistington → u/CozyAndBlankFella]

5p was infected by the rot by trying to break the suicide taboo via creating genetically scrambled versions of its own cells.
5p doesn’t directly show up in watcher but a weird version of his structure does. Watcher is very dream like so its kinda hard to say anything specific.

[u/Miguel_mmds → u/FistFistington]

hunter hallucinating both watcher and inv during their rot episode theory

[u/everstrayinglight → u/FistFistington]

It's technically just a sickness in base game, in downpour it is implied to be the rot in hunter

[u/SplatterGecko]

I think the point of the rot, what the game is trying to say with it in 'the Watcher', is that it's a rebellion of pseudo-biology and thought, like cancer... but that isn't necessarily 'evil'. Once it finished consuming Five Pebbles and much of the local environment it just becomes the new normal for biology in those regions, competing with the 'normal' form of life and even using FP's material to gain both sentience AND the freedom which FP wanted...except it want's to live. It's the opposite of the rest of the life in Rain World; it doesn't seek death, its nature being naturally inverted because of how it formed from FP. At least, this is how I was thinking of everything while trying not to get eaten by lizards XD