WMG / Strife

The Entity is not as bad as it seems.

The Entity. Psychotic Cosmic Horror hell-bent on twisting all sentient life to its will? Or Starfish Alien unknowingly mind raping the poor locals, unable to even understand what effect it's having on the Puny Earthlings? Or worse, unfortunate space traveler desperate to survive after crashing on a strange planet, willing to do anything to survive and possibly repair its spacecraft? Wait, it gets worse. The game doesn't explain in too much detail what resulted in The Entity crash-landing on the planet...intentional alien invasion, or pure mistake? And what if The Entity was fleeing from others of its kind, wanted for the destruction of other planets? Or even worse, fleeing from something even worse? Gives a few good ideas for Strife 2, doesn't it?

• That idea is utterly insane, and yet oddly awesome.
  • Jossed. It even claims it's there to consume humanity. It causes evil where it goes and feeds off that evil until the race is destroyed, then repeats for the next planet.
    • Does it? Ending narrations claim this, but that's from a perspective of one of the humans getting screwed over. Who knows what alien motivations the Entity has?
  • Maybe it's Eden or Abaddon. Abaddon is a similar Entity, who got up to… something hanging around the solar system for centuries, while Eden definitely crashed into Earth and had similar genocidal plans for humanity after feeding off of certain action like the Entity in Strife.

Macil is a victim, and not a villain

Sure, Macil turns out to have a Spectre and turns evil sooner or later, but why is he hellbent on stopping the Order and getting the vaccine against the virus? Why trusting him over the Oracle gives you a better ending? Macil probably is the hero he seems to be, seeing as he can show concern about the player and the Order, unlike the Oracle who is rotten to the core and hides it poorly. However, he got a part of the Sigil himself and it's clearly corrupting him. He is fighting an internal struggle and losing, and turns fully insane when you fight him in the good ending. In the Oracle route, he still has part of his sanity, and only reveals his Spectre and evil side when you are sure he is the bad guy and try to kill him. Possibly he saw no other choice but to fully submit to the evil taking him over on purpose, to defend himself? After all, killing him early is not the good choice.

The Oracle is specifically the reason Blackbird is hunted down and impersonated by The Entity in the Bad Ending

This thought came to me while addressing a headscratcher entry, namely the question of at what point does Blackbird get replaced with a fake during the Bad Ending. The two most visible potential causes between the endings are Macil dies early, and The Oracle is left alive until the end. While it's possible that Macil's death temporarily threw The Front into chaos and Blackbird was captured as a result of that, The Oracle working behind the scenes to indentify the mercenary's contact and target her seems like a plausible scenario as well. It's made clear that The Oracle is running mind games and working to covertly sabotage The Front by directing them to turn on their leadership, and pulling a Kill and Replace plot on the person running Mission Control for their most visible problem solver seems like an effective extension of that. Plus, of the Sigil wielders overtly affiliated with The Order (assuming we count Macil as merely insane and not a mole for The Order), The Oracle is the only one to have been in direct contact with the mercenary, and by extension indirectly in contact with Blackbird.