NOTE: POTENTIAL SPOILERS ITT. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.
So I was reading through the CE strategy guide after I finished my playthrough, and I noticed there were a couple of things in Durance and GM's stories that I hadn't encountered, or even seen hinted at. Like, at all. One of them was pretty major, namely the reason that Grieving Mother is called as such (iirc it is implied in-game that she has forgotten herself, and not explored further). It's possible that I just somehow managed to pick the wrong conversation options or otherwise somehow not satisfied the requirements to get these stories, but being as I hadn't seen any hint of them at all, I thought I'd post here.
The guide has this to say about Durance's character, and his internal conflict:
Durance was a priest of Magran who helped build the bomb that destroyed St. Waidwen. The others who worked on it were killed, but Durance survived. He is an anti-authoritarian wanderer, who has particular dislike of the Aedyr Empire (and Readceras). He despises Eothas and anyone who worships him. Durance spent many years following the Saint's War, rooting out Eothas sympathizers; then not long after, rooting out those he believed responsible for the Hollowborn crisis. This led him to torture and ruin the soul of the Grieving Mother (in defense, she was forced to wound his soul to make him stop). Neither one of them recognizes the other when and if they meet.
Durance does not know why his Magranic colleagues died or why he was spared, but he assumes he did wrong by his god. Over time he comes to learn that the gods are not unlike the authority figures he so often finds himself at odds with, and that he and the assassinated Magranic clergy were nothing but pieces in the gods' games. The Grieving Mother and Durance may come to odds or reconciliation over the course of the game.
Similarly, for the Grieving Mother:
The "Grieving Mother" (GM) is a cipher who acted as a midwife in a local community. She was blamed for the births of other Hollowborn children in her community and, specifically, she was punished viciously and unjustly by Durance who saw her as part of the Hollowborn crisis.
The Grieving Mother's powerful cipher abilities cause awareness and perceptions to slide off of her, and she is difficult to recognize. Many simply see her as an unremarkable peasant woman who travels with the party and is not worth addressing.
She sees others through their souls, not their physical appearance. She does not communicate with people in the environment; although she may counsel the player on a course of action she feels strongly about and will warn the player of danger whenever possible. She is strongly motivated to end the Hollowborn crisis (even if it causes other problems), and she believes the Watcher is necessary for this to happen.
She does not blame Durance for the violations that were done to her soul and her body. She does not recognize him when he is in the party, as his soul is different from when they first met. The damage she did to him, arguably in self-defense, was considerable and far outweighed what was done to her. She is not an anguished figure. In many respects, she is quite serene and calm, even when inflicting harm on another (and she would kill without hesitation to protect her primary goals: ending the crisis and protecting the player). She often prefers to speak through visions rather than words.
GM is in a state of deep mourning. Her substantial desire to see her children resurrected may lead her down a dark path.
These characters' stories seem to have substantially changed between the time that the guide was written, and release (so, potentially fairly late in development). Here is a list of the things that I have found to be inconsistent with the story I experienced in my playthrough:
- In my playthrough, GM never made a comment about Durance, or vice-versa (although it would make sense that Durance would not initially address GM).
- In-game, Durance does not seem to initially be aware that his colleagues were killed. This is a revelation to him relatively near the end of the game.
- Grieving Mother is not blamed for the birth of Hollowborn children, but fears that she will be blamed, and her story is based around the steps she took to ensure that she would not be blamed.
- There are hints of ending the Hollowborn crisis causing "other problems", which was not implied in the final game.
- The fact that Durance's soul is damaged (and he is therefore undetectable to Magran) in-game would be totally explained by the fact that it was damaged by the GM. In the release version, Durance does not seem to be aware that his soul is damaged. I think it is explained by Durance saying that while the rest of his colleagues were killed by the Godhammer, he survived and his soul was only partially destroyed.
- There are no mention of GM's children in the game. This is the big one!
Interestingly, I managed to dig up
this interview with Chris Avellone before release. It's quite a long interview, so I'll quote the relevant part:
A few, I suppose. At a high level, this may be shooting myself in the foot, but I've become increasingly interested in narratives without words, especially after New Vegas (where prop placement told better stories, imo).
At a specific level, in Eternity, the original premise of the companions I wrote (Durance and the Grieving Mother) was unpeeling the layers and discovering what they were at the core – unpeeling these layers involved slipping stealthily into their unconscious, a dungeon made out of their memories. There, the player could go through an adventure game-like series of interactions, exploring their memories using psychological items important to both your character and to them as emotional keys to thread your way through the memories – but carefully, without revealing your presence. The memory dungeon was to uncover their shared history, how it impacted you, and the core of who they were as people.
And their core was pretty unpleasant. Both of them were very bad, very weak people, committing not only violations on each other, but on the player as well. When faced with the discovery that your allies, even if they fiercely support you and fight for a larger cause, have some pretty horrid faults, what do you do? Do you pass sentence? Do you forgive? Do you assist them to reach an understanding? And what I found more interesting with the spiritual physics in the Eternity world is that a death sentence isn't a sentence – killing someone actually sets a soul free to move on to the next generation. So if you intend to punish someone in a world like that, either out of revenge or to correct their behavior, how do you do it when execution is not an answer?
The elements above got stripped out of the companions in the end, so I'm happy to share it here (and I may re-examine it in the future). Overall, I thought they raised interesting questions for the player to chew on, and it was interesting to explore those themes, as most game narratives and franchises wouldn't allow for such examinations – still, Eternity was intended to be a more personal project for Obsidian where we can stretch our narrative legs more, both in structure and themes.
