S.T.A.L.K.E.R was trying to tell us the entire time. What was the hidden good ending? The player had to see through the false promises of the Monolith, and if he did, he discovered the true ending - that the Monolith is a bait to control normalfags, promising great things to keep them brainwashed. And what was the big secret behind the monolith? It was actually controlled by
a COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS machine operating on the collective minds of a small group of scientists who were gaining god-like powers through their memetic strengths
and as Strelok, you could choose to either destroy it or join them. If you destroyed it, you got the good good ending where the Exclusion Zone and all its horrors and mutants vanish. The illusion vanishes. Strelok lies down in the fresh new grass and breathes a sigh of relief. However, if you foolishly wavered at the last moment and were tempted into joined them, you were lost to their delusions of trying to control the world and having infinite power.
The monolith would give you everything you wanted, and if you fell for its ruse it would end your life by turning your own desires back around on you and killing you with it. In the ending where Strelok wishes for money from the monolith, he's killed by an endless rain of gold. The monolith promised you everything all game long, and only if you found the secret plot did its true nature become clear. Most players never even realized any of this was a part of the game.
I disagree. Watch the ending in question and think about the intent of the developers regarding what story they wanted to tell us.
Cooper Powell
C-consciousness being the masterminds behind the Zone is a shit idea that ruins all the mystery to it. The power that pushes you to the Zone is that of the unknown, take it away and it's all Illuminati bullshit like in Lost Alpha.
Rule number one for fictional mysteries: seek answers, struggle to know more, but never reach the ultimate conclusion.
Jackson Clark
The Monolith component of the STALKER setting is nothing more that a bunch of sci-fi tropes, stop blowing this out of proportion.
Ian Garcia
If the C-Con were true masterminds, The Zone would have never been. C-Con just awakened powers that were always there, slumbering beneath the surface.
Aaron Bennett
Memetic synergy novices don't understand the importance of analyzing real-life narratives through coincidental similarities and themes in storytelling
STALKER has been a Holla Forums mainstay since stalker summer 2007, and there's a damn good reason the game has so many devoted long-term fans
Trivialize everything, it's at your own expense
Logan Lee
Honestly what was the meaning of the end to SoC? What I got from it was that the zone never really existed in the first place, it was just hallucinations of everyone. In real life the world was fine.
Jayden Allen
No fuck that bullshit, that is how you get Lost and other pretentious crap.
A good fictional mystery holds until the end and you are satisfied with its conclusion. They are one time use only. If there is no conclusion, there is nothing to solve and with it the reason for the mystery dies. And if a mystery has no reason or point, then you are just doing random things for the sake of randomness.
Josiah Hall
Stop trying to sound tough and putting things you don't understand down out of fear. You are the voice of insecurity.
Hudson Smith
The problem with Lost is that there was no mystery, not that the mystery was being kept hidden. The writers were just making shit up as they went along. You get this a lot in TV programmes that revolve around some central unexplained mystery or conspiracy.
Juan Hernandez
Stop trying to sound like you're right. Not giving answers absolutely is hack work.
Brandon Hernandez
Good stories are intentional. Lost existed to make money. To use a popular example, Breaking Bad was planned to have six seasons in advance.
Dean Koontz writes trashy books, does that impact the value of real authors and their creations? No, of course not.
Noah Watson
You come into a discussion swearing and in full attack mode. If you want someone to explain somethng to you, it's better not to antagonize them.
Camden Cox
Now you're just being retarded: had Lost been Stalker, then the island's mystery would have been just a hidden machine. People would have equally bashed the finale for being a literal deus ex machine, "lol a computer did it". Instead they should have explained everything, down to the use of the mysterious energy, but fail to understand its true nature and danger due to hubris.
Wyatt Clark
This is halfchan levels of discourse now. A complete waste of time.
Gabriel Richardson
Kindly go back to plebbit
Luke Howard
No user, you are the metastasizing cancer.
Liam Sanders
You are the one incapable of having a discussion, faggot
Jose Jones
This means fuckall unless the developer actually went on record and reported said intent. Event if they did, it wouldn't matter since CoP canonically establishes that the Zone did not dissappear when the C-Consciousness was destroyed. Stop pretending you can read minds.
Charles Clark
What about the zones in other continents then?
Ian Lewis
...
Henry Nguyen
Citation needed, faggot. The game was pretty obvious with the monolith not being the real ending
Lucas Morgan
u gay
Henry Adams
Also, thank you. Pretense is the absolute fucking worst. Pretense is the definition of evil.
Luis Rogers
That's right, this is why post modernism is garbage.
Matthew Martin
I disagree completely. To me it was a great twist. You have all this weird anomalous stuff happening, mutants, mind-broken zombies and brainwashed religious fanatics who think they get divine visions and voices speaking to them and in the end it turns out to be just a group of Ex-Soviet scientists experimenting with telepathy and consciousness. I thought the way Stalker mixed supernatural with science was brilliant.
Hunter Powell
I disagree with OP's hypothesis that destruction of CC is the right option, but I agree that there are obvious memetic ties that the adepts of Hermemetic Order should investigate. Fact is, it came out in 2007, the year things went to shit, and yet it was good and is still fondly remembered and modded.
Now, thing is, though, OP, in Stalker universe the Zone was caused not by original Chernobyl disaster, but experiments completed afterwards. So disappearance of zone entirely as some sort of illusion is impossible as it would still exist, still irradiated and ruined, plus the sequel implies that there was no positive change. So I have reason to believe destruction of collective consciousness was, in fact, a mistake that just trapped the character in another illusion, whereas in the true other ending he sacrifices himself, own individuality and life, to maintain the consciousness running.
