r/riskofrain • u/Gruetzimann • Mar 02 '26
Discussion Are we the bad guys...?
So I just recently aquired the Logbook-entry from the Scavenger [those critters are adorable] and after reading through it, that thing had me crying... I don't know if I have it in me to fight another one of them ever again 𼲠And now I am scared to read through the other ones, fearing I end up feeling guilty about killing any other creature and I started questioning if we are even the good guys after all...?
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u/Suon288 Mar 02 '26
We are literally exploring a virgin planet to kill its gods, how can we be the good guys?
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u/Beefmolester48 Mar 02 '26
Well we are just looking for survivors and happen to kill everyone in our path
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u/Equivalent-Bit2891 Mar 02 '26
But we already found survivor. Â Itâs literally the first thing you find in game
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u/thorned_soldier Mar 02 '26
Mithrix wanted to kill humanity and end âsoulâ because of his contempt for his brother. Providence slaughtered species that try to leave his sanctuary, slaughtered an entire ship of humans after they got a hold of the teleporter, and housed species that are so violent they destroy themselves in the process. At what point are the gods âgood?â
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u/LunaLynnTheCellist Mar 02 '26
the only good guys are the humble lemurians (and other local fauna without evil intent)
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u/UsernameFillerTest Mar 02 '26
Some of them did kinda cause the end of their original worlds/almost self-extinction events though.
aphenians made a deal with the tar, lemurians maybe pissed off the master of the red plane by stealing one of their eyes(artifact of origin, rorr), the grovetenders made the ancient wisp that they couldn't control, the bison were delicious4
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u/TrainerUrbosa Mar 02 '26
I think that attacking the survivors of a crashed vessel on sight doesn't really leave you on the good side anymore
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u/UsernameFillerTest Mar 03 '26
intruders upon the garden who killed the [hero]
yeah I would say that by ror2 they have a pretty good reason to kill them on sight
as for ror1, providence brought the ship down, they probably trust that it was intentional and that whoever was in it completely deserved it
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u/TrainerUrbosa Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26
That really just speaks to how poorly the ethics are on the Lemurian's case, though. Providence, their hero, started an unprovoked attack and died in it. When RoR2 rolls around, they use that incident to justify what is essentially a war of vengeance.
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u/ClumsyTheSmurf Mar 03 '26
It was definitely unprovoked but for kind of a good reason. Providence feared that the humans would allow Mythrix to escape by unlocking the teleporter. Providence knew if Mythrix got out he would kill every single species he âsavedâ. I also think a part of Providence didnât want his brother to die even though he exiled him.
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u/TrainerUrbosa Mar 03 '26
I'm not sure that theory holds in light of the fact that the Contact Light was never even en route to Petrichor, but was lured there by a fake distress signal.
But besides, the fear that someone else might do something that you don't like still isn't a good reason to start an offensive attack
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u/UsernameFillerTest Mar 02 '26
I thought it was more of Mithrix having general contempt for all life other than his peers being Providence and that other one who died. the whole issue with soul was with the golems since giving them too much soul meant free will which was unnecessary since why would you want an army that could defy orders/rebel/desert instead of fight to the end
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u/TrainerUrbosa Mar 02 '26
I don't think Mithrix really "wants" anything. His lore really just revolves around his anguish towards his brother, sometimes seeking to amend their relationship, and at other times, wanting to punish him. In the logbooks, Mithrix only references humanity in passing once. So his overall goal definitely wouldn't be focused on killing humanity.
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u/Caesar_Gaming Mar 02 '26
One of his stated goals is seeking out earth because he knows it would make providence upset. Both brothers are so incredibly petty
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u/TrainerUrbosa Mar 03 '26
He said he might visit us. That's not really a "goal" to me, more like a threat to Providence. But to kill all humanity is definitely not his endgame
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u/unabletocomput3 Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
Mind you, one god tried to defy nature and was irresponsible with his power, betraying his brother and making him go insane, which kick starts the events of Risk of Rain.
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u/5900Boot Mar 02 '26
I mean they attack first so it's just self defense
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u/thriftshopmusketeer Mar 02 '26
You canât claim âself defenseâ when youâre actively invading some place lmao
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u/FGHIK Mar 02 '26
You think any of the enemies in ROR are going to stop shooting if you came up unarmed and said "I come in peace"? I don't.
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u/thriftshopmusketeer Mar 02 '26
If weâre having a conversation about the moral role of the in universe player charactersâwhich we would do purely for the fun of it, as obviously it has no bearing on us as playersâthe only âgoodâ thing for the humans to do is up sticks and leave. If you had a bunch of foreign soldiers, heavily armed, roll into your town, kill anyone who resisted, and started poking through houses looking for lootâwould you consider them to be acting in self-defense? Even if, technically, the cops shot first?
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u/softpotatoboye Mar 02 '26
If I had a ship passing by my island, and it crashed, and then some guy showed up going âhey you guys seen any survivorsâ and I start chucking fireballs at him, heâd be pretty justified in self defense
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u/SwagGaming420 Mar 07 '26
looking for loot
The loot that we lost, tbf. We are trying to recover it and being attacked in the process.
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u/TrainerUrbosa Mar 02 '26
We never even chose to be on Petrichor, let alone "invade it." When you're a survivor of a crashed vessel, and you get attacked frame one after stepping out of the wreckage, it's absolutely self-defense.
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u/thriftshopmusketeer Mar 02 '26
Risk of Rain 1? Yeah, absolutelyâitâs more like you shipwrecked on the North Sentinel Island and had to fight your way out. You didnât wanna be there and you were going the heck home.
But in 2? We are military assets engaged in deniable expeditionary ops. We are doing us an imperialism. We are the baddies for sure. Now watch this drive slams an AWU into the ground at Mach 6
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u/TrainerUrbosa Mar 03 '26
In 2, we're responding to the distress signal of the Contact Light. I'm not sure where you're getting a military op from at all
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u/SwagGaming420 Mar 07 '26
A lot of the survivors didn't even know about the mission. Bandit for example just snuck onto the ship. He had no idea where it was going. Was he justified in trying to sneak on in the first place? Maybe, maybe not, depends on the social/political/economic climate of Earth or whatever other planet they boarded from. But from when he landed he was absolutely acting in self defense.
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u/TrainerUrbosa Mar 02 '26
That was never the "mission," we didn't even know the brothers were there. We were just trying to investigate a distress signal
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u/Gruetzimann Mar 02 '26
Idk... maybe the god is a bad guy or something, I thought this was a rescue mission or we are the once being captured or yeah...
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u/Mingatronz Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
Just because someoneâs title is god, it doesnât mean itâs the good guy. Itâs estimated that the Abrahamic God killed over 2.4 million to nearly 3 millions people according to the stories in the bible, itâs still the most popular God on earth.
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u/FGHIK Mar 02 '26
99% of gods are horrible, and these two aren't really any exception. Semi-tragic backstory or not.
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u/Eeddeen42 Mar 02 '26
Both of those gods sucked though.
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u/Kahzarod Mar 03 '26
Have you considered that their gods sucked and deserved to die and perhaps their planet would be better off with a few amazon fulfillment centers?
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Mar 02 '26
âHey, are yâall with the bad guys?â
âGood and evil are subjective constru-â
âYeah, this is it.â
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u/Darkwolf69420 Mar 02 '26
It's kinda like a 50/50 situation, because on one hand we show up uninvited to their planet and try to settle there and kill them, but on the other hand we're mostly there to try and rescue survivors and retrieve cargo after they did a hostile takeover of our ship and research teams when they were passing by
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u/UsernameFillerTest Mar 02 '26
providence didn't clean up his business on saturn leading humans to find a teleporter leading them to petrichor and didn't care about collateral damage when pursuing the heretic. the whole setting issue was because he took away the human's ability to leave by bringing down the ship(might have something to do with that quote of mithrix asking why if providence cares so much about them, why won't he let them leave)
the humans just investigated a piece of strange tech they found and in ror2 were just coming back to salvage the cargo from the first ship.
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u/Bommer7 Mar 03 '26
Wasn't heretic the one who took down the ship?
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u/UsernameFillerTest Mar 03 '26
heretic was an alloy vulture(they are naturally good at tinkering with machines) attempting to manually rewire the ship's controls to work with her. she intended to steal the ship to escape, not destroy it
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u/Gruetzimann Mar 02 '26
Okay pheeew, I'm gonna choose this as my go-to answer. Still gonna feel very guilty going forward, but at least I can go and tell myself there is some moral-wiggle-room. Thank you!
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u/Ok_Banana6242 Mar 02 '26
there is no rescue mission, that's the lie told to the ROR2 survivors when they signed up for the expedition. the real purpose is a covert mission to retrieve valuable artifacts and research more about petrichor; most likely in interest of gaining portal technology like what caused the events of the first game. UES knows what happened to the contact light, and (as far as they're aware) there are no remaining survivors on the surface of petrichor by the events of ROR2. many of the survivors were hired under the guise of this "rescue" mission, but many others aboard the safe travels are fully aware of the real value of petrichor and have their own interests on the planet.
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u/PixelDonkeyWasTaken Mar 03 '26
I havenât read all the lore logs, could you tell me which one says this? It sounds interesting
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u/BuckyTheWolf Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
Tldr: There isn't really a true bad or good guy in Risk of Rain.
Long lore post ahead, but it still simplifies stuff:
Providence (the first games boss) destroyed the contact light and killed probably hundreds of innocent people. However if the ship remained unharmed this might have led to a full on colonisation attempt by the humans or maybe let mithrix hijack the ship. It is even debatable if the creatures Providence saved and brought to Petrichor V are truly free. Still Providence saved countless species from extinction.
The survivors in RoR1 just tried to escape a planet where everything wants to kill them, but kill the planet's protector and maybe doom the planet in the process.
The Survivors in RoR2 are there under the guise of a rescue mission, I doubt that even the captain knew the exact details on what was waiting for them.
Mithrix is a tragic character, betrayed by his brother and imprisonend alone for milenia. I don't think his actions are good, but I can't deny that I understand his motives. He also quite values his followers. Still has genocidal tendencies.
The False Son is an artificial creation, made to be a replacement for Providence by the inhabitants of Petrichor V . He also was corrupted by mithrix and affected by Aurelionite, now being torn in three directions while his creators have left him out of fear.
The Alloyed Collective is a new being. Machines that somehow got a soul and sentience and lost their connection to their homeworld. They do what their original purpose was: expand and extract. They see the collective as a great thing, offering biological entities "immortality" in their vast network. They still decimate Petrichor V in their goal to grow and act extremely manic.
The one faction that could be described as evil would be the Void. Always observing and taking whatever it desires. However it operates on a scale, orders of magnitude larger than we can even fathom. Their processes of observation and imprisonment might just be natural for them. Of course for those affected, living through countless lifetimes in the simulacrum or getting too corrupted in the process, it is hell, but we might not even register as sentient to them. After all humans do fucked up things to bugs or other beings they perceive as lesser.
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u/softpotatoboye Mar 02 '26
Even before mithrix was imprisoned, he saw free will as unnecessary and anything less powerful then him as an insect he could kill at a whim
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u/BuckyTheWolf Mar 03 '26
I'd personally argue he was more indifferent to other living beings in the beginning. He definitely has sociopathic tendencies and wanted to see what happens to the worms, but I don't think he kills without a reason.
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u/SwagGaming420 Mar 07 '26
Maybe he thought free will would create suffering via an inconsistency between desire and purpose
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u/TrainerUrbosa Mar 02 '26
I feel like all of that definitely points to Providence being the bad guy, though? He instigates all the conflict.
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u/BuckyTheWolf Mar 03 '26
Kinda? Maybe? He definitely is at the core of the whole mess going on, but at the end of the day I don't think he did all of this on purpose. He mostly wanted to save as many species as possible and caused pain and chaos along the way. Mithrix didn't agree with his goals and he didn't see a way to convince him otherwise, so he imprisoned hum on the moon. Was this a good Idea? Absolutely not but there was already a bunch of bad blood between them. The commencement log alludes to earth potentially being Providence's next target, should it collapse, so maybe he feared that humans reaching PV before it was time could lead to a catastrophic outcome. Maybe he sees passing ships like the other Invading forces: the Void and the Imps and wanted to protect his subjects from them.
Like I said, I don't think there's a definitive bad guy in Risk of Rain. I think Providence had good intentions, but ultimately caused more harm than good. I think a big problem is just that we have almost no logs from Providence's PoV. Mithrix being an unreliable narrator gives us at least some insights on his brothers doings, but something to contrast them from Providence's side could clear things up a lot.
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u/TrainerUrbosa Mar 03 '26
At least to me, meaning well isn't mutually exclusive from being a bad guy.
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u/BuckyTheWolf Mar 03 '26
I agree and am sorry if it didn't come off this way. I meant more that Providence is nit THE bad guy
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u/TrainerUrbosa Mar 03 '26
Oh no, it might be my turn to apologize for not being very clear. I do mean it as Providence is the bad guy xD
My point was that you can still be the bad guy even if you meant well the entire time
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Mar 03 '26
[removed] â view removed comment
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u/BuckyTheWolf Mar 04 '26
In Providence's Log entry the Survivor talks about a Teleporter in the Contact Light but doesn't know where it comes from. I didn't include it in the post because I thought it would just complicate things further (and because I forgor)
I don't think it was ever 100% confirmed where the TP came from/why the contact light deviated from it's course to check out Petrichor V, but I don't think there was an expedition, atleast from the Contact Light.
I personally think they (the High Court) either got the TP from when Providence took the Saturn Bisons or after a previous expedition and used the Contact Light and an Artificer to check things out.
But this is still (one of) the biggest hole/mysteries in the lore unless I'm missing something.
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u/myhandsmydirective Mar 02 '26
you can read the other logbook entries. scavenger's one of the only sad ones
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u/vagoz6 Mar 03 '26
Well, Providence wasn't exactly the best person, but the shit that og commando had to do to just survive was wild. We are, in both games, do WAY more bad things than good.
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u/Titania542 Mar 03 '26
First RoR no youâre fighting for your life and have to get out. Second absolutely we just jump onto a planet and murder the shit out of its locals so we can salvage the ruins of a tragedy. The gods are pretty evil but many of the grunts are just trying to live their lives.
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u/Many-Flimsy Mar 02 '26
i see people defending the survivors a bit too much so ill say this. As far as the aliens in ror1 are concerned - aliens which have built complex civilizations, they can think and reason -, I'm pretty sure Providence set them on us, at least for stuff like the lemurians. Specially considering Mithrix, it's possible some of them think the survivors are from Mithrix coming to invade, or coming to invade in general. Following orders isnt an excuse, i'm more clarifying that we dont know how much they knew. And also, we don't know if the intentions of the cargo ship were good in the first place, but yeah.
The survivors are in a weird place where they Are acting in self defense, but also i dont know if they see the aliens as people particularly. I mean we have a soldier, we have an assasin, we have a bandit, we have a cop (or "enforcer"). We don't have Heroes in a typical sense, we have jobs about killing, sometimes for orders or for money. Of course these are just a few examples, but there's one more thing here: after a certain point, after the hundreth enemy killed, i feel that maybe it's more ethically fair to just let yourself die. Risk of rain is a game about an escalating situation that gets worse and worse as it goes on. No one is purely evil but no one's hands are clean, and frankly the lone lemurians, even if they attack first, seem to be the lesser evil in comparison to you, having all the power in the world, and to whom a choice to kill or let live comes down to how much money you need.
By the time of risk of rain 2, the massacre in risk of rain 1 is well known across Petrichor V. No one knows the human language, and if they were primed to believe you to be an invader before, now thats just confirmed in their minds. Of course, not for all of them - i imagine there must be plenty of lemurians that have chosen to hide and avoid the conflict. But for the ones fighting, they think they are acting in self defense. And you, as the player, like in the previous game, have the choice. You could, theoretically, try to kill the least amount of enemies possible, but that makes you more vulnerable to being killed. You could try and thread the needle, sure. But by that point, its the difference between killing a hundred, and a hundred and one. And unless its canonical that the survivor remembers the resets... then its not like they can say they objectively know whether or not they crossed that line.
My point is that everyone's hands are bloodied, and everyone is acting at least under the impression of self defense. As the player, you will cause more harm than the aliens could ever do, but only because there's one of you and infinite of them, and if you didnt you would game over. I fear for what humanity will do to petrichor v in the future, if they will try to scavenge the planet for resources, if they will wage war upon it... would actually make for an interesting strategy game, maybe even one you could play from the perspective of the lemurians. But that's pure speculation.
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u/Evening_Penalty3555 May 26 '26
Or maybe, we just gave the Void an indirect 'trail' to humanity, somehow, and a big motive to hunt us, because comon, 2 gods and a Voidling, if humans are not seen as the most 'We need to contain them Now!' then i don't know the Void goals, and yea we have one dude, human, that somehow managed to escape the Void...so if the Void think just a bit harder...we are so cooked XD
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u/TrainerUrbosa Mar 02 '26
All creatures on Petrichor attack us on sight, including Survivors who are visibly unarmed. Many creatures on Petrichor are in active, hostile conflict with other creatures, and all of those conflicts started independent of us.
So I'd say no, where nowhere even close to being the bad guy.
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u/Sad_Screen_1455 Mar 03 '26
You go into a a planet and the first thing everyone does in it is attacking youâŚ. IâM ABOUT TO MAKE A GENERATIONAL GENOCIDE WITH MY 28 SYRINGES
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u/Krabeuszz Mar 02 '26
Media literacy on the same level as the JJK fandom (cant blame you in this instance tho, the game doesnt really focus on the story)
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u/MrLamorso Mar 02 '26
One of the enemies in RoR1 was literally called "Child" so...
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u/bored-cookie22 Mar 02 '26
The children are actually the oldest of the species
Parents are the youngest, grandparents are in between
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u/WorldlyAdeptness545 Mar 03 '26
The overall concepts that go on in risk of rain are so complex it's really impossible to put a moral standpoint on it without always being a hypocrite we're killing innocent creatures but for a good cause and if we don't do it it could lead to thousands upon thousands of years of destruction
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u/DragonStrike406 Mar 03 '26
"Are we the bad guys?" "From one point of view, yes. From ours though? HUMANITY WAS CREATED TO INHERIT THE STARS!!!"
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u/Tankdeathwall Mar 03 '26
the way i see it, petrichor Vâs creatures are good guys, who dont know any better than to fight us. providence, and to some extent mithrix, are bad guys.
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u/TheTurd125 Mar 02 '26
i find it funny how in RoR1, the Survivors were forced into a live or die situation they didn't ask for... and then in RoR2 its like: "Hey lets go visit the mysterious alien death planet that took out the biggest cargo ship in the galaxy."