[Spoilers] Is Athena the protagonist from the first game?

[Capri Animated]

I'm kinda confused here.

[Alcator]

Nguyên văn bởi joridiculous:

Nguyên văn bởi Alcator:

Let's agree to disagree.

play this game and pay attention to dialog. nuff said

The androids in TP2 are clueless -- they idolized Athena, calling her Founder and giving her mythical abilities, and as she clearly says, she didn't like it.

They are all unreliable narrators.

[Alcator]

(btw, I just replayed the "awakening in the Robot City" bit, and it spells it out if you ask for the excrutiatingly long version: "We call her the Founder, although the name she took was Athena". I believe this supports my argument that Athena is the name of the first robot in the real world, not the name of the protagonist of the first game.)

[Rushin]

They are the same entity/being. Unnamed first, then known as Athena or Founder depending on who's concerned.

[Alcator]

Nguyên văn bởi Rushin':

They are the same entity/being. Unnamed first, then known as Athena or Founder depending on who's concerned.

Well, that's the philosophical question, isn't it? Are we just vessels for a 'soul/consciousness', or is there more to us? Plus, TTP2 says that Athena dreamt and felt like Elohim, it would then follow that she had part of Elohim in herself, and we certainly didn't play as Elohim in the first game -- and neither did we play as Milton, whose code we apparently have in ourselves in the sequel when we talk to ourselves in the Somnodrome.

[Destructoid666]

Yet the game -ttp 2 - repeats again and again how Athena is the one who "fought" against Elohim and escaped the simulation.

[Lucathegreat]

Literally the first sentences state this, so yeah

[therealsandor]

Question is, who do you define as the protag from the first game - the simulated entity you have been playing as? If so, all the other "people" in there were you as well, just different iterations of you with slightly altered parameters based on experience, and you died in the end, regardless of your choices - since you were never actually even alive, just a simulation, with the express purpose of learning, dying, and being fed into a "follow up" actual real-world machine to be stored in / start life as.

The other point of view to take is that the actual protagonist of the first game is the "person" you experience all this as a stream of hundreds, thousands of years of memories, all collapsing into one single bitstream being uploaded into your mind in an instant, aka the gold disk, which then makes you, the robot that stands up, goes out and pets the cat at the end on the dam, Athena. Who is also, as previously explained, allmany of those "people" before her combined and poured into her metal skull to create her personality.

So Athena is everyonean amalgamation of many people from Talos 1, including a bit of Elohim and Milton even IIRC (but correct me if I'm wrong on that), and in T2 you play as Athena, so you play as "every" character from Talos 1, therefore by default also playing as the protagonist, however you defined them earlier.
As pointed out below that conclusion was BS; of course you don't play as Athena but save her in the end. But other than that, you are, AFAIK, still made from the same "people"/software, so... arguably...

[Alcator]

Nguyên văn bởi therealsandor:

and in T2 you play as Athena

<-- this does not seem correct.

[Rushin]

Nguyên văn bởi therealsandor:

and in T2 you play as Athena

I hope this is a typo because I cannot imagine how one could go through the story even skipping all the dialogue and cutscene mindlessly and still end up with this conclusion. Athena is a central plot point from intro all the way to the finale.

[Wintermute]

Nguyên văn bởi Rushin':

Nguyên văn bởi therealsandor:

and in T2 you play as Athena

I hope this is a typo because I cannot imagine how one could go through the story even skipping all the dialogue and cutscene mindlessly and still end up with this conclusion.

I'm in gialogue with Miltahim right now, and absolute majority of the dialogue options for greeting him imply that you, indeed, are the protagonist of the first game.

[therealsandor]

Oopsie, indeed, that was a hit-and-miss :D I had the "Athena=T2" thing stuck in my head without thinking, where she was the goal instead of the protagonist, of course you don't play as her but free her in the end.

So instead, you are created from the same gold master (presumably? Is that ever expicitly said?) as Athena was, which means... still that you were kind of the same person as in T1, unless, you know, you weren't. :p

She created the first disciples or what they were called here, so... presumably, same stock? Also for all the 987 +x that followed? But not sure about that one anymore.

As for x, there's Miranda (Alpha) as well as the DS01-DSxx guys on the dam (non-canon presumably, only reachable via glitches) :p Plus maybe anybody else Lifthrasir created on his journey...

[Alcator]

Nguyên văn bởi therealsandor:

Oopsie, indeed, that was a hit-and-miss :D I had the "Athena=T2" thing stuck in my head without thinking, where she was the goal instead of the protagonist, of course you don't play as her but free her in the end.

(...)

She created the first disciples or what they were called here, so... presumably, same stock? Also for all the 987 +x that followed?

1. No worries about the mistake, happens to the best of us :-)
2. During the first scenes in the Robot City, you are greeted by the Mayor who has number 472 (or some such - definitely starting with a 4), and the murmuring from the people around you, when he mentions "the Founder", is "He never MET the Founder!" -- which means Athena left the city way before #500.

Nguyên văn bởi Wintermute:

Nguyên văn bởi Rushin':

I hope this is a typo because I cannot imagine how one could go through the story even skipping all the dialogue and cutscene mindlessly and still end up with this conclusion.

I'm in dialogue with Miltahim right now, and absolute majority of the dialogue options for greeting him imply that you, indeed, are the protagonist of the first game.

... rather, that you all are coming from the same Gold Disk which now contains also Milton's code (because one of the options in T1 was to take Milton "with you", and it is apparently the canonical thing that happen). So, Milton and Elohim both assume you have, at the very least, the same personality as whoever escaped TTP1 first (Athena).

[therealsandor]

Yeah, that was a big old brain fart on my part xD

But they've still built new people after she left, and from the same blueprint, didn't they? In terms of hardware and software that is, so, I suppose everybody is kind of a descendant of Athena who is a descendant of more or less all of Talos 1.

Heh, which of course also opens the floor to more discussion of descendant vs. same person... especially in the context of iteratively built software. Personally I believe once I named a software project it stays the same regardless of how many iterations it goes through. So......... they're all Athena but (chose to?) diverge(d) mentally.

Forks, if you will.

In terms of humanity, we're all built on the shoulders of giants as well and live better and know more than anybody in history before us so... I guess we're all Hitler, Gandhi, Einstein, Oppenheimer and just a little bit of Salvador Dali as well. I mean, yeah, duh... or duh it?