Look Outside Posting Part 2: Infectious Mutations

Look Outside Posting Part 2: Infectious Mutations

Today we're talking about the contagious mutants. The tooth family, the rats, the hands from the bus, and so on (including those, like the SWAT truck, that fuse with their victims as part of the process).

These, I suspect, are more common than we actually see firsthand.

I think the likeliest explanation for most of the groups of enemies with similar themes is that they're from one or two people getting witnessed, and then attacking everyone else around until they're all a big, happy monster family. People just looking together, if they don't merge into a single amalgamation, doesn't appear to necessarily give them similar monstrous forms.

You would also expect a lot lower than a 100% mutation rate for, say, Vincent's party, which had at least seven people present, and not that big of a window in the apartment - someone would avoid the window where weird things were happening, try to flee, or at least get killed by one of the Onlookers and end up as a corpse on the floor. Same goes for the taxidermy or frozen apartments.

I think Vincent's party had two primary witnesses: Vincent, and the Gawker in the bathroom (who's at a later stage than the others).

And for something a lot of players might never find out about - the concealed eyeball gang is actually the one and only non-ending chance Sam has in the game to get infected by a monster himself, to my knowledge. There's a random event that can occur at the table, where Sam has an intrusive thought to cut himself open and see if he has eyes inside him like the wounded man at the beginning - and there's a 1 in 3 chance that his hunch turns out to be correct. Neato!

Anyway. It also struck me as strange that, in the endings where something doesn't literally, physically, personally grow to reach around the entire earth, there isn't a whole new zombie apocalypse with whichever infectious mutation happened to fare the best in the arms race. We know that this mechanism still works after the Visitor leaves, because of the Truth ending... so what I think is that in order to be an infectious mutant, you have to be a primary witness, i.e. people you infect can't continue to spread it - naturally limiting any potential outbreaks to direct contact with their single carrier.

I searched for a counterexample, but couldn't find any among the game's enemies. Rafta was a witness herself, the pipe men that got Placide were witnesses, the Rat King has plenty of mouths to be responsible for all the rats (though I still wonder where all those people even came from).

I thought for a moment that the landlord's attack might disprove it- HOWEVER! From Memorial's account of events on the bus, all of the mutated passengers were infected by a single witness, who exploded into dozens of tiny crawling hands that climbed on everyone. Very similar to the ones that that attacker was keeping in its stomach to release onto the landlord! How...... sweet? Some of the passengers literally scooped up a little of their primary witness to share. I guess it's nice that tiny hands guy is still alive?

It also makes it a little more plausible that Sam (and whichever companions) got through hand-to-hand combat with so damn many potentially contagious creatures without anybody getting turned.

Why this happens in the first place, seems to follow pretty naturally from my previous post's theories. The Visitor isn't great at telling individuals apart at the best of times. If I hold you close, or draw your blood... the division between our separate flesh blurs, and something might slip across.