Plus, I knew the plot before Pillow did, so that served to add another layer.

What you said about the Luteces is so freakin’ spot on. When we play games, we try to get the game to react in ways we wouldn’t expect it to. Pillow brings up Morrowind, in which you can kill Vivec on a whim and totally bring down the entire plot to the point of making the game unfinishable. It also makes me think of the Mass Effect 3 extended ending DLC, in which my glib comment of “Oh, you have a gun now? Shoot the Star Child!” resulted in GAME OVER, MAN. Whoops.

On that note, ME3′s ending sat fine with me, although the DLC did provide answers to questions like, “did my team just freakin’ die?!” We picked the Synthesis ending for ME3, because Hikaru Shepard’s journey had always like it was going to end in sacrifice, and it was sad but felt natural.

Fallout 3 didn’t sell me on it _at all_. Sure, there was an emotional connection to the player character, but the thing that chafed was that it didn’t HAVE to be that way. Who cares if your dad was the one who put it into motion? It’s a really faulty reason for you to be the sacrificial lamb when you could, at that point, have at LEAST two companions who were completely immune to radiation. Either of them could have gone in and done the job with no consequences other than huraah, the job is done! So the fact that the game was like, “okay, either you go in or you force this other lady to die for you” was so weirdly contrived and had a feel of “BUT THOU MUST!” rather than a truly inevitable result. I personally found the DLC to be less “man I wanted the story to continue” and more “that was… pretty bullshit.”

Infinite’s ending was a mix between the two, because I have HELLA PROBLEMS with “infinite worlds”… since I think about the idea a lot on its own as a philosophy. I feel like with ACTUAL infinite possibilites, that means that one of those Elizabeths drowning Booker should have been kind of a dog person or had her skin turned inside out or at LEAST one where she was Ebenezer instead! Besides, they only erased Comstock from the worlds where those Elizabeths ever existed. Are there worlds where Comstock wasn’t a crazy religious zealot and instead had a farm somewhere in Pennsylvania? Did they destroy that guy, too, just in case? Auuughhh!

That, and the game seems to imply that Bookers 1-121 did not make it back to the lighthouse (the man, the city) so I’m endlessly amused at the idea of another world where Booker gets to the point of no return, and upon being asked if he wants to go forward, says, “Nope!” and shoots himself.

How now, brown cow.

However, your analysis was not only one of the most interesting and gripping criticisms of a novel i’ve ever read, but it also pretty much blew my mind. I’ve never seen anyone analyze the mark on Price’s forehead as anything more than a hallucination by Bateman. The other thing I really enjoy about your analysis is that it holds it’s own pretty much independently from how one views the whole “hallucination” debate. Also, Divine Comedy and Macbeth are two of my favorite works of literature by far, and to see them both related to a novel that I have had little interest in is invigorating.

This was excellent. I hope you end up publishing stuff like this.