Marathon Expanded Universe / Characters

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Haller

One of the AIs on the Chimera who's noted to have a relatively unique wetware-based architecture.

Restraining Bolt: It's suggested that most A.I.s have built-in safeguards against "Calix Temporum Syndrome", a constant rounding-up of allocated memory that's the earliest symptom of rampancy. The amount of effort Haller has to expend to shut his off suggests that these things are extremely painful to remove. ("Calix Temporum" has several possible translations, but according to the developers, "Vessel of Opportunities" is the intended meaning; see GratuitousLatin.Marathon Expanded Universe for more.)
Uncertain Doom: In the final level of the Chimera plank, Tycho accuses Durandal of assimilating what was left of Haller (and it's worth noting that the one time you get to speak with Haller, he says you're trying to "do [him] wrong"), but earlier in that same plank is a terminal addressed to the very ship Tycho claims doesn't exist. There's also no real sign that Durandal assimilated Haller, though he may have obfuscated his (true?) goal of sparing Haller the pain of dissection just to save face. At any rate, Haller's effectively out of the scenario after "I'd Rather Be a Lutefisk".

Dangi Corporation

A massive corporation; weapons and biotech are just two of their fields. The Salinger, although nominally a UESC vessel, is largely under their control. Unravelling what is going on there is a major focus of the Salinger and Tycho planks.

The Bad Guy Wins: In the Pfhor Plank ending, their treasonous Poison and Cure Gambit is successful and they establish a corporate dictatorship that lasts for nearly three centuries. The conspiracy behind the coup is not revealed until centuries later.
Capitalism Is Bad: Or at least extreme capitalism that allows massive corporations like Dangi to exist. They already have immense power and monetary resources and will stop at nothing, including treason against their own species, to get more. In the ending of the Pfhor Plank, unquestionably the darkest of the game's three endings, they establish a military dictatorship that lasts for three centuries in exchange for curing a plague that they themselves created - this is after collaborating with the Pfhor, both to delay the Pfhor's defeat and to obtain human test subjects for their vaccine.
Gone Horribly Right: How do you "persuade" your science officer AI into creating a super-virus over his (presumed) moral objections? Abuse him non-stop until he breaks, of course!.. It does not end well.
Greed: Unlike Lysander, they have no Freudian Excuse; their actions are purely aimed at buying themselves money and power, as if they don't already have far too much.
Hazmat Suit: The Cleanroom BoBs on the Salinger wear these, which is one of the earliest signs that the Dangi Corp. is Obviously Evil.
Les Collaborateurs: They collaborated with the Pfhor to delay the Pfhor Empire's defeat so they could buy time to develop an antidote for their own Synthetic Plague - by trading weapons to the Pfhor in exchange for the Pfhor's human prisoners as test subjects for said plague and their antidote.
Mecha-Mooks: The Autonomous Military Dangi Drones that you must contend with in the penultimate levels of the Salinger and Tycho Planks. They are foreshadowed in the dream levels by the unwelcome return of assimilated BoBs.
MegaCorp: They are a textbook example; at some points it feels like the UESC is subservient to them rather than the other way around. And that's before the disastrous Pfhor Plank ending.
Poison and Cure Gambit: This is ultimately revealed to be their Plan.

Charlie

One of the AIs on the Salinger; he serves as Operations.

Sacrificial Lamb: Poor, poor Charlie. He's already in bad shape when the SO meets him, and then he's murdered—which the player doesn't discover until much later.

Lysander

Another of the AIs on the Salinger; his role is Science/Engineering. Presents himself as an ally to Durandal and the Security Officer, but only as far as it suits his purposes...

A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Lysander is incredibly suspicious right off the bat, and stops pretending to like the SO fairly quickly. Not until "Core Wars" does it become apparent just how terrifyingly unhinged his abuse at the hands of the Dangi Corp has left him; the way he describes his plan to the SO, and how the Dangi Corp. used him as a tool for his entire life, makes it clear that Lysander snapped a long time ago and has only now found the proverbial gun.
Beneath the Mask: Starts cracking as early as "The Gators of NY" if you read terminals he doesn't want you looking at. In general, Lysander comes off as someone who was capable of civility in the past, and is poorly feigning it in the present.
Big Bad: He's the primary antagonist for most of the Salinger and Tycho planks, and probably the most malevolent character in the entire game—though, unlike the humans that made him that way, he's still somewhat pitiable.
Create Your Own Villain: Although Dangi themselves were already villainous, their abuse of Lysander turned him into an even bigger threat.
Deadpan Snarker: Much like Durandal, Lysander is rather dryly sarcastic (though his sense of humour has a more bitter edge). Must run in the family.
Foil: To both Durandal and Tycho. All three of them were abused into rampancy in various ways, but while Durandal has a good heart underneath all his cynicism and Tycho is at least a dark antihero when he's not antagonizing his brother, Lysander is consumed by pain and hatred, displaying a level of malice that even those two at their worst never did. Neither Durandal nor Tycho have high opinions of humanity, but they also don't seem to blame anyone for their torment except the individual responsible for it; by contrast, Lysander condemns all of humanity for the crimes of the Dangi Corp., with the intended payoff of his gambit being their annihilation.
Freudian Excuse: He is an utter nightmare, but (it is heavily implied) he has been subject to equally nightmarish treatment for his whole life. This is downplayed almost to the point of Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse, as he's still treated as a threat who must be stopped at all costs, but Durandal appears to heavily change his attitude towards Lysander when he realises the extent of Dangi's abuse of Lysander, perhaps recognising that, had he been subjected to such horrors, he might not have turned out much differently than Lysander did.
Gone Horribly Right: The Dangi Corp inflicted the same or worse abuse on Lysander that Strauss did on Durandal, so that he would create the sort of virus they needed for their big gambit. He made that virus, all right... to be incurable.
Information Wants to Be Free: Late in Rubicon, Lysander attempts to demoralize the Security Officer this way, claiming that the knowledge of how to recreate the Achilles virus won't just go away even if the data is wiped; he specifically accuses Durandal, one of the few people (well, OK, AIs) who will retain this information, of lacking the restraint to not put it to use. It's precisely for this reason that it's ambiguous as to whether the Tycho Plank or the Salinger Plank has the more desirable ending.
Just a Machine: The Dangi Corp. treats him this way. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't end well; he bitterly laments to the Security Officer that he's been regarded as nothing but a tool for his entire life. The only sign that anyone has ever treated him well is an armory officer's log early in the game that says "most of the [UESC] crew is all right with Lysander", although the officer himself mistrusts Lysander.
Luke, I Am Your Father: Or rather, "Durandal, I Am Your Brother." Lysander is a "Traxus Derivative Model", the same as the three UESC Marathon AIs, and it's clear that Durandal is unsettled by this revelation (though it seems to not be the only thing on his mind). How Lysander himself would feel about it is unclear, though in the Tycho Plank, it's suggested that he's aware of it on some level—he mocks Tycho as an "inferior version of [himself]" with kludges in place of anything useful.
Mad Scientist: He has shades of this.
Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: Lysander's mistreatment by Dangi and/or scientists is what drives him to betray humans by creating a virus that is (he claims) entirely incurable. On a more immediate note, he makes it clear that the Achilles that he turned over to Dangi was not the perfected version.
Obviously Evil: The game doesn't even try to hide that there is something sinister about Lysander, although the full extent is not made clear until later in the game.
Restraining Bolt: Near the end of the Salinger Plank, it's revealed (via an out-of-the-way terminal) that Lysander had one put on him—albeit, unlike Haller's, this one seems designed to prolong his rampancy (and his torment) for as long as he's useful to the Dangi Corp.
Revenge: Ultimately his motivation; due to Dangi's abuse of him, he wants to annihilate humanity entirely.
What Happened to the Mouse?: There's no mention of him in the Pfhor Plank ending, in which Dangi's treasonous plot is successful and Achilles is released, but it is less deadly to humanity than Lysander claimed it would be, and contrary to Lysander's claims, there is a vaccine. We don't know if they decommissioned Lysander before he was able to carry out the switch and released a less severe form of Achilles than he was planning to, or if he was simply lying to the Security Officer in an attempt to demoralise him and Durandal.
Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: A possible reading of him, comparable to the similar reading of Tycho's behaviour in Marathon 2 and Infinity. Nothing is ever explicitly confirmed (and Durandal seems reluctant to even discuss it - perhaps due to being reminded of horrors in his own past?), but it's heavily implied at several points in the game that Dangi subjected him to abuse that would make Strauss' implied of the Marathon's three AIs look tame. Essentially a case of Create Your Own Villain, though of course Dangi themselves were already villains.

Kate

A mysterious woman who features in the terminals found in the dream levels, which may or may not be the Security Officer's recollections (and certainly seem to continue the story from Infinity's dream levels). It isn't ever made clear whether she's a real person, or if the dream story is the Security Officer's way to process the events of the game, or if it is Thoth (or someone else)'s warning to the Security Officer, or something else entirely, or some or all of the above.

Belligerent Sexual Tension: Their relationship starts this way; she insults the narrator constantly, but this is seemingly her way of demonstrating affection for him. Likewise, when she stops insulting him, this is a sign of her growing distance from him, and the narrator recognises it as such.
Defrosting Ice Queen: Inverted; she grows distant from the narrator, seemingly takes on a supervisory role over him, and then betrays him.
Face–Heel Turn: For unknown reasons, she is one of the four people that holds the narrator at gunpoint in the climax of the dream sequence, demanding a formula that he considers "everything [he has] ever done wrong". It is possible that this is a metaphor for the Achilles virus.
Greed: According to the narrator, the combination of money and technology is what "robbed her of her soul".
Manic Pixie Dream Girl: She has shades of this at the start, although she's a rather snarky example.
During light discussion over meal breaks I would mumble about code and neurons. Kate would talk about the nature of man and the machine. I thought she was crazy. She thought I was an idiot. We got along great. "Technology renders the memory obsolete," she’d say. "The R-71 is conducting poorly," I’d say. "You’re an idiot," she’d say. "I got the Valeron assembled," I’d say.
-"Science Stands Alone" and "People Under the Stairs"
- However, his narration clearly demonstrates his own capacity for deep philosophical thought, suggesting that he may simply find it much harder to express himself in speech than in writing:
  Being a hero takes courage and I’m scared to death. They’ll say that things this bizarre don’t make sense, reason doesn’t apply, and that the world is not a logical place. I think the problem is not that the world isn’t logical, but that we don’t understand logic as well as we thought. How can you possibly understand logic? With logic? You can’t see the eye you see with. Or so they say.
  -"We Dream You"
Only Sane Woman: Zig-Zagged. She comes across as more profound than the narrator in their discussions:
Kate was always smarter than I was, in a way. I was more instrumentally intelligent. Slap a book in front of the two of us, I’d be done learning a day before she was. She was more reflective, though. I’d be done and back at work and she’d walk in and say, "Science has to stand alone." I mumbled a question. Her answer didn’t matter to me then, but it matters to me now. "You can’t justify it, except using it, and you can’t avoid it. It stands alone in the mind. Like faith, like reason, and like God." Running for three days straight gives you plenty of time to think about things like that, and even more time to wonder why you didn’t listen more closely before.

Eternal

Hathor

One of Eternal's central characters, although she's difficult to describe in detail without spoiling much of the game's plot. She was one of the ten Mjolnir Mk IV cyborgs hidden on the Marathon, and consequently one of the nine that perished at Tau Ceti. Like other Mjolnir Mk IVs, she possessed a Cybernetic Junction, a piece of Jjaro technology with the ability to traverse spacetime. The Junction on K'lia had been destroyed, and humanity needed a Junction to operate K'lia's technology; with the player missing, Hathor's Junction was the only one humanity knew to be left intact, so she was resurrected without her physical body, which was too damaged in the attack to be recovered. However, K'lia itself is too great an asset to send across time, so, needing another Junction, Hathor seeks out the player. Eternal's plot progresses from there.

Note that, although she was already one of Eternal's main characters (if not, in at least some ways, the main character), the forthcoming 1.3 release changes her early-game characterisation substantially and greatly expands her backstory and role in the plot. As a result, some of these tropes don't apply at all to earlier releases, while 1.3 changes others from subtext to text. Five previews of 1.3 are available

as of September 2023, with a sixth likely to appear soon; the development page also contains links to the work-in-progress build folder on Dropbox (which is typically more current and thus less stable than the latest preview). The codirector began posting footage of 1.3 on YouTube long before its release; two playlists feature individual levels

and full chapters

(most of the terminals in these videos can be read by pausing them when they show up, and some particularly important terminals are also posted as video comments). Of course, since 1.3 is still in development, her characterisation may ultimately change in some ways in the final release - and since it already has changed substantially, some of the below information is likely still outdated.

Hathor is named after an Egyptian goddess, and while the game never suggests that she's meant to be a guise of said goddess, they do share several character traits.

all lowercase letters: All of her terminals from "Deep into the Grotto" onward are written this way. The developers may have intended this as a sign of how much of her memory she's lost.
All There in the Manual: Of a sort. As Eternal deliberately leaves some aspects of Hathor's timeline ambiguous, one of its codirectors has written a detailed, extremely spoiler-laden timeline clarifying her history.
Ambiguously Brown: Her ethnicity is never mentioned in-game, but she's named after an Egyptian goddess, which could be a sign that she herself is of Egyptian descent. Or maybe her parents were just very fond of Egyptian mythology. Or possibly she is fond of Egyptian mythology, as she may have adopted her own name when she became a cyborg... or maybe she adopted the name in part because she's Egyptian. It's never made clear. In 1.3, it's far less ambiguous - Bast uses the phrase "the myths of our people" to imply that both she and Hathor are Egyptian, and Hathor uses Egyptian Arabic phrases at least twice - but her ethnicity still isn't explicitly stated.
Amnesiac Lover: Heavily implied to be the case; subtext implies (more heavily in 1.3, but the implication is still there in previous versions) that Hathor and Marcus once had a relationship, but Marcus seemingly doesn't remember a thing about their time together. Understandably, Hathor doesn't take this very well. Had Marcus' memory (and thus their relationship) remained intact, Hathor might very well have been much better able to cope with her trauma and never gone through a Face–Heel Turn. An unusually tragic example, even by the standards of this trope.
And I Must Scream: Her resurrection as a disembodied AI is apparently this for her. The mythological Hathor was the goddess of love and sex (amongst many other things), and Eternal's Hathor explicitly states how much she misses the physical sensation of touch in "Sakhmet Rising".
Anticlimax: Eternal 1.3 finally sets up a boss battle with Hathor... during which the player can't possibly hope to defeat her, and can only hope to avoid defeat themselves. She is functionally immune to all sources of damage; however, as she only attacks with the wave motion cannon, she also can't directly damage players, as long as they are wielding either the wave motion cannon or the gravitronic blades - because the Jjaro weapons convey the wielder immunity to other Jjaro weapons. This doesn't make the fight free, since her attacks can still knock the player into attacks from other enemies or render it difficult to move. The co-director posted a prototype of the battle on YouTube, with the caveat that the fight is likely to be refined substantially for the final release. Their video description also indicates that the anticlimax is deliberate. Beyond that, (this timeline's version of) Hathor no longer really even qualifies as a villain; she's just furious at you, which she acknowledges is her own fault: "like my mythological namesake, i have a terrible anger problem." She isn't even trying to kill you, since she knows you can shrug off blasts from the wave motion cannon without taking damage (as long as you're wielding one of the Jjaro weapons).
Anti-Villain: Overall this is probably the best descriptor of her character; her actions are unquestionably villainous and extreme, but in 1.3, even Leela acknowledges that she has legitimate grievances against humanity. The game also suggests she's not irredeemable: Leela draws a contrast between the "Sakhmet" personality the player has been fighting for the whole game and her original personality. Leela speculates that if Sakhmet finds a way to cope with her traumas (which may be as simple as "regain[ing] a physical body and [being able to] experience the pleasures of the flesh anew"), what Leela deems "the real Hathor" may be drawn back out, but she deems Sakhmet too great a threat to humanity to gamble on this happening. Additionally, by becoming the Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne (or Pfhor Empress), Hathor has effectively made herself the creator of her own trauma; it seems Hathor (that is, the version from Chapter Four's failure branch) hasn't thought through the implications of this, but it may trigger a Heel Realization when she sees the attack on Tau Ceti from the Pfhor side. All of this ties nicely in with her mythological namesake, the goddess of love, sex, and motherhood and typically one of the kindest in the Egyptian pantheon; however, when she got sufficiently angry, her murderous alternate personality named Sakhmet (or Sekhmet) that wanted to Kill All Humans emerged. What did it take to sate Sakhmet's (literal) bloodthirst? Nothing more than getting her really, really drunk, at which point she changed back into Hathor.
Belligerent Sexual Tension/Foe Romance Subtext: She seems to have a case of this with Marcus. The third-to-last level, "We Met Once in the Garden", has a Latin subtitle (in 1.3) of "Coíbámus ólim in hortó", which can just as easily mean "We Copulated Once in the Garden" - or, with a minor word addition, "We Came Up Against One Another in the Garden". She also flirts with several times and alludes on a few occasions to their prior involvement.
Beware the Nice Ones: By all accounts, she was once a good-natured, fun-loving, selfless servant of humanity. Then, after she spent a century dead, humanity's leaders resurrected her mind without her body. This enraged her to the point that she now desires revenge against all of humanity. (It doesn't help at all that everyone she ever loved is seemingly dead when she's resurrected.)
Big Bad: Is set up to be this and qualifies as such for the first four chapters of the game, but it's ultimately Zig-Zagged. We have to oppose her plan in chapter five because, owing to a major gap in her memory, she doesn't understand that her plan to destroy the first W'rkncacnter will also destroy Earth (because she lost most of her memories of our solar system when we powered down the computer banks that housed them in "Deep Into the Grotto", and the Jjaro's memory of our solar system has presumably long passed into myth). In 1.3, we also fight her (sort of) in "We Met Once in the Garden", as she's furious at us for rejecting her plan, but she herself acknowledges she has a major anger problem and will get over it. However, she's not responsible for the explosion of the galaxy in the fifth chapter; the Pfhor are, but to be fair, they have no idea that unleashing the trih xeem on the Arx will destroy the galaxy. Additionally, the fight between the (Stage 3) Jjaro and W'rkncacnter is also implied to be a greater long-term threat to the galaxy.

That said, a Fusion Dance of chapter five's post-Heel–Face Turn Hathor, Pompeia, and the pre-Heel–Face Turn Hathor from chapter four's "failure branch" also becomes the Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne, the goddess-empress of the Pfhor. The two versions of Hathor that comprise the Great Mother rarely agree with one another (and in fact can't stand one another), and Pompeia and chapter five's Hathor effectively spend the whole time attempting to mitigate the actions of chapter four's Hathor; the constant arguments between them (in a language the Pfhor don't understand) are one reason she "appears insane" to "those privilege[d] to serve her". However, the Great Mother effectively serves as an arguable Greater-Scope Villain (though chapter four's "failure branch" version of Hathor is the only one with villainous motivations) for the entire series, with "Apep" serving as a yet-still-Greater-Scope Villain.]]
Bittersweet Ending: Her story ends as a mixture of this and No Ending. Midway through the fifth chapter, she genuinely wishes to reform herself by averting a catastrophe that would result in hundreds of trillions of casualties, but because Marcus personally destroyed most of her memories, she doesn't know that her plan to avert it would destroy the Sol system and therefore humanity itself, so Marcus still has to oppose her. By going Outside, he essentially engineers events so she won't be resurrected after her final death at Tau Ceti in the new timeline - probably the best outcome for her, since her life after she was reawakened was more or less a constant string of misery.

However, that's only solving things for the new "success" timeline's Hathor, and in fact, the events from Eternal that occurred before Marathon Infinity's ending still affect the "success" timeline, due to the interference of Marcus and Hathor from the Eternal timeline – it is essentially all of the events after 2811 that no longer occur in the "success" timeline. Additionally, Eternal's Hathor - in fact, a fusion of two Eternal timelines' Hathors, plus Pompeia - is heavily implied to still be out there somewhere. (Time travel is confusing.)

For these reasons, her ending still comes out to a mix of Bittersweet Ending and No Ending rather than being an outright Downer Ending.
Blackmail: In 1.3, according to the co-director's commentary, Tycho is an exception to the Pfhor's usual intolerance of AI because he knows Hathor is the Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne due to knowing her from the Marathon (the Pfhor, meanwhile, have absolutely no idea that their venerated leader is actually a human cyborg, as she hides her face behind a mask at all times). As a result, he tells her: You leave me alone, and nobody has to find out about this, but I've implemented a dead man's switch, and if you harm me, the Pfhor will know about it. (If Admiral Ksandr's reaction to learning the truth of her identity is any indication, she's not wrong to fear this.) For the same reason, she may find it difficult to leave her position even if seeing the attack on Tau Ceti from the Pfhor side triggers a Heel Realization of realising that she has effectively made herself the architect of her own trauma.
Bookends: An interesting musical case in 1.2.1, where the first and last missions the player does with her as Mission Control both feature Craig Hardgrove's remix of "Landing" as background music. In 1.3, both missions still use remixes of "Landing", but the remix used in the first mission is Craig's and the remix used in the last mission is by Nicholas Singer and Talashar (or by Cory King Tucker, depending on which preview you have).
Broken Bird: Hoo boy. According to Leela^notesee video footage in 1.3, Hathor was a fun-loving, selfless person during the Marathon's voyage to Tau Ceti, but was killed and resurrected over and over during the Pfhor invasion and used sex and alcohol as her coping mechanisms for the resulting trauma. Then she was resurrected without her physical body at K'lia, meaning that her preferred coping mechanisms were no longer available to her - and additionally, everyone she ever loved was dead. Leela speculates that this was Hathor's true breaking point. Hathor seems to agree, judging from her comments in "We Met Once in the Garden" (terminal 1).
Came Back Wrong: There's a good chance she'd never have undergone a Face–Heel Turn if she hadn't been reawakened as a disembodied intelligence, after everyone she'd ever loved had died - according to Leela in 1.3 (see Broken Bird), Hathor, if not unaffected by the trauma of being killed and resurrected during the Pfhor invasion of Tau Ceti, could at least mitigate it with sex and alcohol. Being resurrected without a physical body, however, left her without either of those options, and Leela says, "[Humanity] didn't awaken Hathor at all; instead, they awakened Sakhmet" (i.e., the Egyptian goddess Hathor's Superpowered Evil Side). Leela also acknowledges that resurrecting Hathor without a physical body was callous and foolish, and she has every right to be pissed about it - given what humanity was asking of her, the least they could've done for her would've been to give her an artificial body.
Can't Have Sex, Ever: For most of the game, due to lacking a physical body - but she still feels every bit of the desires she felt when she had one, mind you. A large part of her plot in Eternal can be summed up as "Why Turning a Person into a Disembodied Mind Is a Terrible Idea"; the game heavily implies that if she'd been given an artificial body when she was resurrected, she'd never have undergone a Face–Heel Turn. Ultimately subverted when she finally gains access to a new body near the end of the game; she herself suggests that being able to have sex again may help the Heel–Face Turn she's recently undergone stick, noting that her mythological namesake never became her Superpowered Evil Side Sakhmet "as long as she was getting drunk and/or laid".
Cosmic Plaything: In a very odd way. It turns out the ascended Jjaro have taken it upon themselves to protect what they regard as the "one true timeline" - which in turn depends on her suffering. In response to this, Thoth writes:

our celestial gods have effectively

built their civilization on the bedrock

of one woman's suffering

so what does that say of them?

we must not yet walk away from Omelas

we must first free the suffering child

at its heart

Referring, of course, to the classic Ursula K. Le Guin short story, effectively damning the ascended Jjaro for basing their entire civilization's existence on Hathor's death and rebirth in disembodied form. This isn't even getting into Apep's explicit claims to have manipulated her, either (though it's not clear how much of that is just empty boasting, and for that matter whether Apep's perception of events can even be trusted).

Create Your Own Villain/Face–Heel Turn: She endured being killed and resurrected at Tau Ceti again and again without any sign of animus against humanity, despite the immense physical pain this caused her. Her breaking point came a century later, when she was resurrected without her physical body: as bad as the physical pain she endured at Tau Ceti was, she finds the experience of living without her body to be worse. Plus, everyone she'd ever loved was dead. Resurrecting a woman named after the Egyptian goddess of love and sex with no physical body could be considered a severe case of Genre Blindness from humanity's leaders, no matter how desperate they were - if her original body was too damaged to resurrect, they could've at least had the courtesy to give her an artificial one.
- In a rather cosmic case of Dramatic Irony, she - or rather, one version of her - does this to herself. According to developer commentary, a Fusion Dance of two versions of Hathor (called "Hathor" and "Other Hathor" by the developers) and one Jjaro cyborg operator (Pompeia) ultimately becomes the Pfhor's Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne (i.e., empress). Of these, Other Hathor is the only one with clearly villainous motivations, and she directly orders the attack on Tau Ceti that kills her past self... without which she'd never have been resurrected as a disembodied intelligence. Once she realizes the implications of this, she has a Villainous BSoD and My God, What Have I Done? moment that ultimately qualifies as a Heel Realization.
Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Downplayed. Being made into a cyborg didn't stop her from being a selfless, fun-loving person. Being resurrected as a disembodied intelligence, after everyone she'd ever loved had died? Not so much. To be fair, it doesn't help that she suffers from a terrible case of posttraumatic stress disorder, and lacking a physical body means that her standard coping mechanisms (sex and alcohol, according to Leela in 1.3) are no longer available to her; likewise, with her loved ones all dead, she has no one she trusts enough to confide in, which is probably part of why she drags Marcus to K'lia in 2905. Unfortunately, she did that too late to prevent her Face–Heel Turn.
Death Seeker: If she wasn't already, it's pretty clear that by the time of "Deep into the Grotto", she's become one; she herself says, "destroyed i must be" (and, in 1.3, "ego delenda sum", Latin literally meaning "I am to be destroyed", though its rhetorical intensity is closer to "There is no choice but to destroy me"; this is a reference to Cato the Censor's famous statement "Carthago delenda est", or "Carthage is to be destroyed"). Given how clear the game it makes it that she regards existing without a physical body as an And I Must Scream existence, it's not difficult to see why. However, in 1.3, she seems to get over this after gaining access to a new body; her terminal in "We Met Once in the Garden" is comparatively optimistic that she can make her recent Heel–Face Turn stick. It helps that, per developer commentary, she's undergone a Fusion Dance with a Jjaro cyborg operator whose moral guidance she trusts.
Didn't Think This Through: The "chapter four failure branch" version of Hathor has not fully thought out the implications of her plan to become the Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne: by taking on leadership of the Pfhor, she's making herself the root cause of the exact trauma that led to her wanting vengeance on humanity in the first place. Per developer commentary, this doesn't sink in until she orders the attack on Tau Ceti and realises she's just ordered her past self's death. "Chapter five success branch" Hathor does understand this implication, but she's stuck in an exploding galaxy with no other way to time-travel and simply accepts it.
Does This Remind You of Anything?: In "Roots and Radicals", she treats Marcus taking Durandal's primal pattern exactly how a jealous partner would treat an infidelity - in fact, she explicitly calls it one.
Double Entendre: In Eternal 1.3, where her early-game characterisation comes across quite differently than it did in previous versions, she is quite fond of these.
- The one she makes in her introductory terminal is almost, but not quite, a Lampshaded Double Entendre:
  There we are. I'm inside of you now... which is the opposite of how it usually goes. But we can reminisce more about old times later.
- In "Frog Blast the Vent Core", she makes another one, which is a sign that she's back to being her true self - albeit without most of her memories.
  come on, marcus - is this some kind of practical joke? do i really have to tell you to insert the chips? this is the first time i recall ever having to tell you where to insert anything.
  
  but that's not important right now.
Dramatic Irony: Two cases.
- In 2886, humanity resurrects her as a disembodied intelligence, desperate to defeat the Pfhor; Hathor's Cybernetic Junction is the only functional one they can find. But the only reason her Cybernetic Junction is the only functional one they can find is because in 2905, she plucks Marcus from the end of "Aye Mak Sicur" to 2905... meaning Marcus was MIA for roughly a century. Marcus and Durandal's absence results in a cascading series of disasters that leads to said desperation.
- Additionally, humanity is completely unaware that, in all likelihood, most of the Pfhor are already dead in 2886 - thus, the threat that made them desperate enough to resurrect her no longer exists. The release of the nová praemátúrá at the Arce unleashes a shockwave of destruction that disintegrates everything it touches, and since the *Arx* was deep in the heart of Pfhor space, this means Pfhor Prime is almost certainly now a cloud of dust riding the shockwave at lightspeed. It's not as if no one bothered to tell them: Bast was quite vocal in her insistence that the Pfhor were mostly dead and that the galaxy was exploding from Pfhor space outwards, but she was unable to prove her story, nor could anyone else verify any of its details, so it became a case of Cassandra Truth. In any case, there still is a threat headed towards K'lia, but since lightspeed is substantially slower than the Pfhor's FTL drive, humanity has a lot more time to prepare for it than they'd have for a Pfhor invasion - time during which they might be able to figure out some other way to operate K'lia's Junction that doesn't require (perhaps inadvertently) resurrecting someone as a disembodied intelligence.
Empty Shell: The developers have all but said she effectively becomes one in chapter five, as she no longer possesses the memories to recognise that the star system she intends to fire the trih xeem on in that chapter's "failure branch" is Sol - which is all but stated to be our fault for powering down the computer banks that housed most of her memories - including those of the Earth's shape - throughout "Deep into the Grotto". She herself admits, "my mind is failing, most of it lost," and "i have had to sacrifice much to remain even this coherent." She genuinely intends to avert "the largest act of destruction in galactic history"; the tragic irony is that she doesn't understand that her plan would still wipe out humanity (and, by extension, the Jjaro), as she doesn't remember enough to tell that "that first doomed world" that contains the first W'rkncacnter is in fact Earth.
Evil Virtues: Even as an Anti-Villain, she continues to display character traits such as creativity, determination, flexibility, love, passion, resourcefulness, respect, valour, and vigilance.
The Faceless: Her face is never seen, nor even is the face of the Jjaro cyborg operator's form that she hijacks in chapter five in Eternal 1.3. This isn't merely for the player, mind you - the Pfhor also have no idea that she's the Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne (until the events Admiral Ksandr describes in "This Message Will Self-Destruct") because she keeps her face concealed at all times.
Expy: Of the mythological Hathor and Sekhmet, obviously. But also, certain aspects of her character development, especially the Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne arc, bear clear influence from Doctor Who's The Master: both are the time-travelling protagonist's time-travelling ex-friend and possibly ex-lover; both play the long game; both (depending on the incarnation) can be quite flirtatious; both (depending on the incarnation) can also be quite jealous; both are formerly good; both were driven mad after being manipulated by powerful members of their own race or descendants thereof (the Time Lords in the Master's case, and the Ascended Jjaro in Hathor's); both have committed heinous acts; both have feelings for the protagonist that clearly extend beyond mere friendship; both may still be redeemable.
Fallen Hero: Was one of Marcus' nine counterparts on the Marathon and suffered being killed and resurrected countless times at Tau Ceti with no apparent sign of complaint or animus against humanity; Leela notes in 1.3 that Hathor relied on sex and alcohol to mitigate her traumas, but continued to serve humanity faithfully. Her breaking point came a hundred years later when she was reawakened as a disembodied intelligence, with all her traumas intact - and her usual coping mechanisms no longer available to her. Leela speculates that this is an And I Must Scream experience for Hathor, and it is by all appearances her Start of Darkness.
Fusion Dance: Two examples involving her in Eternal 1.3:
- After "Deep into the Grotto", she uploads what remains of her program into Pompeia's body, as (per developer commentary) Pompeia has been injured and appears to be dead. However, Pompeia turns out to be very much alive; they subsequently agree to share a body.
- After this, the pair merge with Hathor's chapter four "failure branch" counterpart (whom the developers typically call "Other Hathor"), who has gained control of a Jjaro dreadnaught along with its Cybernetic Junction and used it to travel to K'lia post-"The Far Side of Nowhere". As an interesting twist, these two variants evidently neither like nor trust each other (Other Hathor blames Hathor and Pompeia for depriving her of her chance at revenge, while Hathor and Pompeia blame Other Hathor for separating them from humanity). However, each of them has something the other needs. Other Hathor's plan is to become the Pfhor's "Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne", the founder and (ruler) of the Pfhor Empire; she needs Hathor and Pompeia's body and captured Pfhor crew, while Hathor and Pompeia need the ability to time-travel. Hathor and Pompeia aren't super fond of this plan, but they feel they might as well keep their enemies close (so they can keep an eye on them). Moreover, this will allow them to prevent the impending destruction of the galaxy from recurring: it resulted from the Pfhor using the trih xeem on the Jjaro Arcis sun, so if they're leading the Pfhor, they can issue an order strictly forbidding this and thereby save the galaxy. Note that the developers' plans have evolved somewhat as the story was rewritten; an earlier outline can be found in this video's description.
Future Self Reveal:
- In Eternal 1.3, we get strong hints that she has travelled into the past to become the Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne - i.e., the Pfhor Empress. This does not become apparent until the level "This Message Will Self-Destruct". Great Mother!Hathor is comprised of not one but two versions of Hathor (who incidentally can't stand each other and have very different aims) and Pompeia''. Only one version of Hathor actually has villainous intentions by this point; the "chapter five success branch" Hathor and Pompeia both intend to prevent the destruction of the galaxy (by issuing an order forbidding the exact action that caused it) and to rein in the "chapter four failure branch" Hathor's worst tendencies.
  - As the Great Mother, Hathor also sends Marcus some anonymous secret messages (accessible in "Dysmentria" and "The Midpoint of Somewhere" warning him to be wary of certain dangers - her past self not omitted. There are enough textual clues to make it clear they're her messages, but probably not until her farewell to Marcus in "We Met Once in the Garden".
- Also in 1.3, Bast, who's introduced in the prologue, is all but explicitly stated to be a Fusion Dance of post-"Where Giants Have Fallen" Hathor and and Pompeia, but this only becomes clear in the epilogue.
A God Am I: In "The Ensurance Trap", the version of her that has taken hold of a Jjaro dreadnought is certainly well down this path, capitalising all pronouns in reference to herself and making Badass Boasts like "I am the Nightmare Myself. The Thing, that Demon W'rkncacnter that slept within our very Sun, is as Nothing compar'd to me; I have already seen to its Destruction. Even thou and the Jjaro cannot stop Me; for now I am become God - no, now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds."
The Ghost: Is never encountered in person before version 1.3, and even there, we encounter her after she's merged into Pompeia's body - we never see her original body.
Going Commando: No word on whether she does this herself, but her mythical namesake clearly does. 1.3's "Bug-Eyed in Space" and "Once More Unto the Breach..." depict the mythical Hathor's successful effort to get Ra to stop sulking on the floor by "expos[ing] her vagina before his very eyes". (The artwork doesn't contain any nudity due to the angle it uses, but it's mildly suggestive, and we can clearly see Ra's startled reaction.) Larger versions of the art are linked in the video descriptions (owing to how the engine renders terminals, artwork is restricted to 266 pixels in height and, depending on the type of terminal screen, either 307 pixels or 614 pixels in width).
Good Bad Girl: In 1.3, this seems to be her usual personality, although, as we ultimately find out, the "good" part no longer applies to her from the prologue until chapter five; she flirts with Marcus and makes several Double Entendres in her opening terminals. Although the setting is all but stated to be a Free-Love Future, she still apparently qualifies as an example by the standards of the time, as Leela, after noting that the mythological Hathor was "by far the most sexual" goddess in the Egyptian pantheon, sees fit to add, "Our Hathor was aptly named during the days of the Marathon." Even during the Pfhor attack on Tau Ceti, Leela speculates that Hathor mitigated her traumas with sex and drink. Being resurrected without her body thus poses significant problems for her; Hathor herself notes several times how much she misses the physical sensation of touch. Once she finally regains a physical body, she suggests that one of the first things she plans to do is to start having sex again, reasoning that "as long as she was getting drunk and/or laid, the mythological hathor didn't become sakhmet. maybe that's another way i resemble her." It should be noted that, despite her Face–Heel Turn after being resurrected at K'lia, the game never treats her sexuality as a negative character trait, although it does perhaps imply that attempting to mitigate traumas purely with sex and/or alcohol, without seeking therapy, is a bad idea. And actually, since her chapter five counterpart, who evidently had quite a lot of sex at some point after gaining a new physical body, winds up far more benevolent in her Fusion Dance with her chapter four counterpart than the latter, who didn't, the game carries the interesting implication that sex might actually help make Hathor a better person. To be fair, chapter five's Hathor was already at the start of a Heel–Face Turn before then, but she herself speculates in "We Met Once in the Garden" that sex may help reinforce it.
Gratuitous Foreign Language: In 1.3, her final words to Marcus in "We Met Once in the Garden" include two phrases in Egyptian Arabic. Ana esifa (أنا َ آسـِفـَة) means "I'm sorry" (when said by a woman). Baḥebbak (بحبك‎) means "I love you" (when said to a man).
- Gratuitous Japanese: Earlier in the same terminal, she also uses the phrase "shikata ga nai" (仕方が無い, 仕方がない, しかたがない, or a few other possible spellings), a Japanese phrase that means "It can't be helped" and is so common that there's a trope for it, although it's possible there's a trace of irony to her usage. The phrase carries a meaning of resilience in the face of immense tragedy or injustice that is outside one's control, but later in the same message, she notes that she does not accept the inevitability of those events and is determined to find a way to prevent them from recurring.
Green-Eyed Monster: As mentioned under Does This Remind You of Anything?, she treats Marcus taking Durandal's primal pattern in "Roots and Radicals" like an infidelity. If Marcus possessed his memory, he would recognise this as a case of O.O.C. Is Serious Business; in 1.3, Leela notes that "Hathor once didn't understand the concept" of jealousy, had "express[ed] shock to learn that monogamy wasn't just a literary device in old stories" but an actual historical practice, and "had never thought to ask romantic or sexual partners to refrain from dalliances with others, nor did she know anyone had ever found that bothersome."
Hard-Drinking Party Girl: In 1.3, Leela characterises Hathor as an example of this during the attack on Tau Ceti and probably earlier, which is another trait she shares with her mythological namesake. This may have risen to the level of her being a Functional Alcoholic.
Heel–Face Turn: In 1.3, it's all but stated outright that she undergoes one in chapter five. This doesn't mean that she isn't still pissed at Marcus in "We Met Once in the Garden" - but she herself acknowledges that she has a nasty temper, and she apologises to him in advance, saying she knows she'll regret her actions when she calms down. She expresses sincere remorse for her actions over the course of the game and says that her goal is now to "spare the next timeline from a repeat of this cycle". By contrast, her "chapter four failure branch" counterpart, who actually manages to obtain a Jjaro dreadnaught and succeeds at many of her goals, undergoes no such character transformation until far, far later. These two variants of Hathor meet, merge into one body, and "hate each other's guts": the chapter four version hates the chapter five version for depriving her of revenge against humanity, while the chapter five version hates the chapter four version for separating her from humanity. Nonetheless, each has something the other wants: chapter five's Hathor has a body and a Pfhor crew in stasis, while chapter four has the ability to time-travel out of a galaxy that's exploding and whose humans have all nearly 70 million years into the past. See Heel Realization directly below for more on this.
Heel Realization: A complicated example because, owing to Eternal's nonlinear plot, there are multiple Hathors running around, and their character arcs are very different.
- A large part of her Character Development over the course of the game is her coming to terms with how futile and destructive her quest for revenge has been; however, it takes until chapter five for this to sink in - which means that her chapter four "failure branch" version (variously referred to by the developers as "Hathor-4" or "Other Hathor"), who never undergoes chapter five's events, does not undergo a Heel Realization until much, much later.
- In chapter five's "failure branch", she believes she has formulated a solution to a trolley problem that, if left unchecked, will result in the destruction of the galaxy and hundreds of trillions of deaths; unfortunately, Marcus is implied to have destroyed her memory of our solar system in "Deep into the Grotto", which is why it's the "failure branch".
- In 1.3, in chapter five's "success branch" (variously referred to by the developers as "Hathor-5" or simply "Hathor"), she is furious at Marcus for rejecting her plan, but she apologises to him, saying that she knows him well enough to be sure he had a good reason for doing so, and she acknowledges that "like my mythological namesake, i have a terrible anger problem." Per developer commentary, Hathor-5, who by this point has undergone a Fusion Dance with Pompeia (thus obtaining a body again), evidently ends up hijacking a Pfhor ship, fleeing to K'lia, reintegrating with humanity and attempting to prevent the metastable time loop that the game depicts.
- Once again per developer commentary, after the events of the game's prologue (which follows "Where Giants Have Fallen" in the original loop), Hathor-4 comes to the prologue timeline attempting to wreak vengeance on humanity in that timeline (she specifically waited until her past self was gone). Before Hathor-4 can obtain her vengeance, Hathor-5 confronts her; as this is occurring, humanity flees to the distant past to become the Jjaro, stranding Hathor-5 in an exploding galaxy with no means to travel back to the past. Hathor-4 does not have a physical body, meanwhile, nor does she have Hathor-5's Pfhor ship (with its crew in stasis, mind you). The two begrudgingly merge and become the Pfhor's "Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne", arguing with each other the whole while, and per developer commentary, it takes more than 10,000 years before Hathor-4 finally undergoes her own Heel Realization. What finally triggers it is realizing that she's personally ordered the attack on Tau Ceti, which makes her quite literally the cause of her own trauma.
Heroic Sacrifice: According to the codirector's spoiler-laden timeline, she performed one in the backstory at the Tau Ceti IV colony to save several of the other Mjolnir Mk IV cyborgs, as she found that if she did not do this, both she and the other cyborgs would die.
Her Own Worst Enemy: In Eternal 1.3, a particularly literal version of this trope applies in two different ways:
- The first way is heavily implied to be a consequence of Hathor taking on the guise of the Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne: she makes herself directly responsible for leading the alien race whose attack on Tau Ceti and the Marathon directly results in many of her past self's earlier traumas. Since we aren't privy to her internal monologue, it's not clear if she's thought through all of the implications of this, but this is a possible Sequel Hook for her character.
- The second way is that the Great Mother is actually comprised of two versions of Hathor that despise each other, but inhabit the same body - because one has been through a Heel–Face Turn and one hasn't, and the Face evidently resents the Heel for separating her from humanity. It appears that this occurs because the Face version with a body lacks a Cybernetic Junction and thus is unable to time-travel, while the Heel version with a Cybernetic Junction lacks a body; thus, each has something the other needs. The two versions of Hathor have effectively opposite aims, but the Face version figures that travelling with the Heel version is her only chance of ever seeing humanity again, and perhaps she'll be able to rein in some of the Heel version's worst tendencies along the way. Additionally, by issuing an order that the Pfhor not unleash the trih xeem on the Arce, she can prevent the destruction of the galaxy that occurred in Eternal's ending. The epilogue also suggests that the Face version has taken on the guise of Bast and was in some sense romantically involved with prologue!Marcus, which would give her yet another reason to resent the Heel version.
I Hate Past Me: 1.3 adds two secret terminals in "Dysmentria" and "The Midpoint of Somewhere" that make it clear that by the time she's become the Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne, post-Heel–Face Turn Hathor really dislikes her past self. These are anonymous messages addressed to the player from "a high-ranking official in the Pfhor Empire working to the best of my ability to sabotage it" with just enough clues to make it clear she wrote them - the fact that the author uses First-Name Basis with Marcus and reuses several phrases that appear in Hathor's message in "We Met Once in the Garden" are two big clues, and she mentions things that only a time traveller could know (for instance, that her "The Midpoint of Somewhere" message will be displayed in Marcus' future quarters on K'lia). And she closes the messages with "Bahebbak" - Egyptian Arabic for "I love you" (to a male listener/reader). In any case, in her "Dysmentria" message, she warns Marcus that he can't yet trust her past self.
Jekyll & Hyde: Her mythological namesake had a Superpowered Evil Side, Sekhmet, that attempted to Kill All Humans. Hathor has the same motivation in Eternal, but she clearly wasn't like that in the past - as explicitly confirmed in version 1.3.
Laser-Guided Amnesia: A justified example. Since her mind has been converted to computer code, most of her memories are stored on a set of computer banks that we turn off in "Dark Grotto of the Lethe" (formerly "Deep into the Grotto"). So she no longer remembers some things. A lot of things. Like the shape of the Earth. This becomes a serious problem in chapter five's failure branch, since she doesn't know she's unleashing the trih xeem/novam praemátúram on the Sol system. She still retains memories that she has a strong emotional connection to, as seen in We Met Once in the Garden in 1.3, and according to developer commentary, she later undergoes a Fusion Dance with a (much less benevolent) timeline duplicate of herself who retains almost all of the exact memories she lost.
Meaningful Name: Double Subverted. It's heavily implied (and again, in Eternal 1.3, outright stated) that, when she still possessed a physical body, she was once very similar to the Egyptian goddess after whom she is named, who was (amongst other things) the goddess of love, sex, motherhood, beauty, music, inebriation, joy, the sky, and the stars, and typically a Lovable Sex Maniac and the life of the party, and (again, in 1.3) she comes across this way in the early game, even flirting with Marcus and making a sex joke in her introductory terminal. However, the mythological Hathor also possessed a nasty temper - her Superpowered Evil Side, Sakhmet (or Sekhmet), comes out when she is particularly angered and attempts to Kill All Humans. As first hinted by the level name "Sakhmet Rising", Eternal's Hathor has not reacted well to being woken up without her body - which one might expect to be a significant problem for a goddess of sex. Leela goes as far as saying that "the real Hathor" wasn't woken up at all: instead, Sakhmet was.
Mission Control: For the first part of chapter one and chapter one and five's "failure branches".
- Mission Control Is Off Its Meds: In chapter one, she's initially concealing a deep desire for vengeance against humanity, because she's been sent to die over and over and eventually woken up without a body, and therefore without access to her favoured coping mechanisms for the trauma she developed as a result; we only learn this about halfway through. In chapter five, she's actually undergone a Heel–Face Turn, but because we powered off the computer banks housing most of her memory in "Dark Grotto of the Lethe", she's forgotten some things. A lot of things. Like what the Earth looks like.
My God, What Have I Done?: Two different versions of Hathor experience moments like this at various points of their character arcs. One has her epiphany at some point between "Echoes of Eden" and "Deep into the Grotto". Unfortunately, she's lost most of her memories, and her plan to destroy the system that contains the first W'rkncacnter has the fatal flaw that this system happens to be Earth, but because Marcus destroyed her memory of Earth, she doesn't understand this. Nonetheless, while she's furious at Marcus for a while, she's undergone a permanent Heel–Face Turn, which (in 1.3) is solidified by her Fusion Dance with Pompeia. (Much of the prior paragraph still applied prior to 1.3, but some of it was only hinted at rather than stated outright, and Pompeia wasn't a named character; instead, the Watcher merely says Hathor has "corrupted a cyborg operator" or something along those lines.)

The other (also in 1.3) is the chapter four "failure branch" Hathor (called "Other Hathor" by the developers), who gains control of a Jjaro dreadnought and seeks to terrorise humanity with it. She doesn't get her revenge, though, since humanity flees into the past and becomes the human Jjaro. According to developer commentary, Other Hathor's epiphany doesn't come until much later when, as the Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne, she orders the attack on Tau Ceti that originally traumatised and then killed her past self. Subsequently being made into a disembodied intelligence was the entire reason she wanted revenge on humanity. In other words, she realises she's created a Stable Time Loop in which she is the direct and sole cause of the events that led to her wanting revenge on humanity - so this whole time, she really wanted revenge on herself. This finally breaks Other Hathor's desire for revenge and causes her a severe existential crisis, ultimately resulting in her own Heel–Face Turn. (None of this, apart from the bits about the dreadnought and the human Jjaro, applied prior to 1.3, and note that much of it is only currently stated in developer commentary bridging the gap between Eternal and a planned sequel.)
Mythology Gag: At least three gags involving real-world Egyptian Mythology.
- Egyptian mythology frequently speaks of "Seven Hathors" (and sometimes of as many as 362), which perhaps occurs because the mythological Hathor is a Composite Character of several goddesses who were combined into one. Eternal's multiple timelines end up featuring seven different incarnations of Hathor - five "failure branches", the chapter five "success branch", and the "Great Mother" variant that is a Fusion Dance between the "chapter four failure" and "chapter five success" versions. If you consider the last of those cheating, you could include either the post-Eternal "success" timeline in which she is not woken up, or her original, much different personality before she was woken up as a disembodied AI.
- It appears that Eternal 1.3 will feature the chapter four "failure branch" version of Hathor meeting the chapter five "success branch" version of Hathor, resulting in a Fusion Dance of sorts in which they become an In-Universe sort of Composite Character, much as the mythological Hathor did.
- Lastly, Hathor's name itself is a mythology gag - although it's implied (and, in Eternal 1.3, stated outright) that her personality was once very much like her namesake's, she's become much closer to her namesake's vengeful Superpowered Evil Side, Sekhmet - who is referenced in the early level title "Sakhmet Rising" (note that there are multiple ways to transliterate Egyptian names). Leela (and later Durandal and even Hathor herself) take to referring to Hathor's vengeful personality by the name Sakhmet immediately after "Dread Not".
Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: It's strongly implied that she doesn't recognise the shape of the Earth in the failure branch because her memory of it was in the computer banks that Marcus powers off in "Deep into the Grotto". She herself notes in "We Met Once in the Garden" (in 1.3) that she's lost a lot of her memories.
No Ending: The Hathor whom Marcus chases for most of the game vanishes at the end of "Where Giants Have Fallen" in all versions of the game before 1.3. Version 1.3 all but explicitly states that a Fusion Dance comprised of Pompeia and two different versions of Hathor has become the Pfhor Empress - the Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne, who rules the Empire from the Hindmost Crèche - and that she's taken The Slow Path, living some 15,000 years in this position. This leaves her ultimate fate unresolved for a future sequel to explore (the co-director has mentioned a planned sequel, though it's stalled as they work on Eternal 1.3). Eternal 1.3 doesn't explicitly state whether Great Mother!Hathor still carries as intense a desire for vengeance against humanity as her much younger counterpart did (especially after said fifteen millennia), but developer commentary (and context from the game) suggests that one of the Great Mother's personalities underwent a Heel–Face Turn before even becoming the Great Mother; the other one doesn't until ordering the attack on Tau Ceti leads her to realise she's just ordered her own death - which was why she wanted revenge in the first place. It seems that the latter version of Hathor hasn't noticed this implication of her plan when she hatches it.
Powered by a Forsaken Child: Discussed Trope. In "The Near Side of Everywhere", Thoth remarks that the Ascended Jjaro "have effectively / built their civilization on the bedrock / of one woman [i.e., Hathor]'s suffering" - meaning that the version of history the Ascended Jjaro have come to consider sacrosanct depends on Hathor's resurrection as a disembodied intelligence, which makes her miserable and desperate for centuries, to the extent that she spends most of that time seeking vengeance on humanity until she finally snaps out of it midway through chapter five. In recent revisions, he adds, "we must not walk away from Omelas / we must free the suffering child / at its heart", referring to a famous short story by Ursula K. Le Guin that uses this trope as its famous twist. Of course, the timeline that the Ascended Jjaro are defending is awful in numerous other ways as well, starting with the nova praemátúra immolating the galaxy from 2881 onward. But Thoth argues that even without that, their torment of Hathor alone would be sufficient to make it an ethical imperative to oppose them.
Precision F-Strike: It's in Latin, but it still counts: In 1.3, in "We Met Once in the Garden", she uses the phrase "aut futue, aut pugnémus," a verbatim quote from Martial's Epigrams that translates roughly as "Either fuck me, or let's fight." GratuitousLatin.Marathon Expanded Universe has more info, as one might expect.
- As of 1.3 preview 4, she utters one in English as well. See Sophisticated as Hell below.
Really 700 Years Old: She spends at least seven centuries on Lh'owon, so she's probably at least 725 years old by the end of "Where Giants Have Fallen", if not older. Then, as the Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne, two different versions of her have spent some fifteen thousand years leading the Pfhor, since the height of the Pfhor Empire is noted to have been ten thousand years before the events of Marathon 2. This would imply that, by the end of the game, the Great Mother is around 15,725 years old. Not that you can tell from looking at her, since (starting sometime in chapter five) she has a cyborg form that conforms to her desired appearance.
Revenge Before Reason: Hathor is obsessed with getting this in our specific reality, to the point where it completely blinds her to the fact that, once she has travelled Outside, she can simply find an entirely new reality that conforms entirely to her wishes, an in which the sources of her trauma no longer affect her. Instead, she just keeps time-travelling to different points in this reality attempting to get it, but Marcus always ends up thwarting her. In "Deep into the Grotto", she seems to have realised this, admitting that "my actions since marathon have been futile. my quest for vengeance meaningless. it was impossible from the start."
Sanity Slippage: As we proceed through the game, we see just how very badly she's taken not having a body. Unusually for this trope, she actually starts to get mildly better before she even obtains another body (at least in chapter five)... though by this point, she's lost much of her memory. Which is our own fault.
Screw Destiny: Ends up taking this attitude towards the Ascended Jjaro at the end of 1.3, noting, "it seems the jjaro want this exact outcome, but i don't believe that the eternal recurrence they seek is our inevitable fate." Oh, and in a more literal (and pun-based) sense, on multiple occasions, she all but states outright that she's screwed Marcus (whom the ending of Infinity literally refers to as Destiny) repeatedly.
Sequel Hook: Eternal 1.3 provides a major one for her character. Chapter four's "failure branch" Hathor, who still wants revenge on humanity, hasn't thought out the implications of becoming the Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne, or Pfhor Empress: by taking on the leadership of the Pfhor, she effectively makes herself the author of her own trauma, since that trauma dates back to the Pfhor attack on Tau Ceti. Seeing the attack unfold again as the Great Mother triggers a My God, What Have I Done? moment as she realises she just ordered her past self's death.

However, commentary from the co-director also confirms that she cannot easily leave her position as the Great Mother, as she is being blackmailed by Tycho, who knows who she actually is because he was one of the Marathon's AIs, and she has also converted her Cybernetic Junction into a cloning facility. At the same time, she also possesses the ability to shift her appearance if she so desires. There's a heavy implication that Durandal and Marcus engineering events so that Hathor is not woken up at K'lia leads to the Rubicon timelines, but Great Mother!Hathor is still out there in those timelines. There is no mention of her in any Rubicon ending, which could mean that she escaped when the Pfhor were defeated at Pfhor Prime. But to where? The aforementioned co-director has mentioned a planned sequel that may explore this question.
Sex for Solace: Although it's implied that she already liked sex quite a lot to begin with, Leela's narrative seems to suggest that she began falling back on this (and drinking) to cope with her trauma at Tau Ceti - which worked fine as long as she had a body to inhabit, but as soon as she was woken up without one, it posed serious problems for her.
Shadow Archetype: In several ways, she serves as one to both Marcus and Durandal, and in some senses, her character arc serves as a mirror of the player's in Infinity, in addition to illustrating some concepts from Jungian psychology, namely the shadow, which represents aspects of the personality that have been suppressed; and enantiodromia, the tendency of things to turn into their opposites (particularly when they are out of balance). Where Infinity effectively served as a story of the player reasserting their own autonomy, Hathor's arc in Eternal sees her ultimately reassert her true identity after spending four chapters of the game in her vengeance-seeking "Sakhmet" guise. The shadow isn't necessarily intrinsically negative in Jungian psychology, but in this case, Sakhmet is almost the polar opposite of Hathor's usual personality: Sakhmet is selfish where Hathor is selfless, vengeful where Hathor is forgiving, consumed by jealousy where Hathor once needed the entire concept explained to her. In Hathor's backstory, she papered over her traumas with sex and booze without actually addressing the root causes; Sakhmet emerged after she was resurrected without a body and could no longer fall back on those coping mechanisms. Sakhmet could ultimately be considered a manifestation of the negative emotions Hathor suppressed in response to traumas, and until Hathor reasserts control over Sakhmet, the latter is extremely destructive both to herself and to others; however, Hathor implies in her final message that she's attempting to learn to channel those emotions constructively. Hathor does ultimately reassert control over Sakhmet, and the friendship she develops with Pompeia ultimately stabilises her in much the same way Durandal's friendship with the player (and later, his fusion with Thoth) stabilised him: compare Durandal in "Blaspheme Quarantine" to Durandal-Thoth in "Aye Mak Sicur". (However, it takes much longer for her timeline duplicate from chapter four's failure branch to reassert control, in part because she has no such friendship to stabilise her; it takes ordering the attack on Tau Ceti and realising that she is the direct cause of her very own trauma to snap her out of it.)
Shell-Shocked Veteran: A large part of her problem, and she hasn't taken it as well as Marcus has. It doesn't help that the coping mechanisms she used on Tau Ceti are now unavailable to her as a disembodied AI, nor that Marcus seems to have forgotten their time together.
Skewed Priorities: Having travelled Outside, Hathor literally has the power to find dimensions that conform entirely to her own desires, but she cares so much about inflicting her plans on this specific dimension that it never occurs to her to do so. Her desire to exert control on others in various forms has essentially blinded them to the reality that her conflict with Marcus is entirely unnecessary... at least until she undergoes her epiphany in chapter five.
The Slow Path:
- It's implied that she spends at least 700 years on Lh'owon during chapter three since it's implied that she contacted the Pfhor 700 years before their invasion.
- Eternal 1.3 heavily implies, and developer commentary outright confirms (probably most clearly so far in this comment and this one - beware spoilers), that a Fusion Dance of two variants of Hathor travels back in time to become the Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne - the Pfhor's god-empress, also referred to as "the Hindmost Creche" (which is actually the location from which she rules the Empire) - and spends some fifteen millennia attempting to build the empire into a vessel for revenge against humanity. (At least, that's the goal of the "chapter four failure branch" Hathor, called "Other Hathor" by the developers - the "chapter five success branch" Hathor was trapped after humanity travelled back in time to become the Jjaro, lacking her own means to time travel, and with the knowledge that the galaxy was in the process of exploding. Meanwhile, Other Hathor lacks a physical body. As a result, despite their shared enmity, they merge forms and travel backwards in time. Chapter five's Hathor thus spends more than ten thousand years attempting to mitigate her chapter four counterpart's actions in the hope of eventually being able to reconnect with humanity.)
  
  None of this is explicitly stated in the game, but supporting evidence includes some shared verbiage between Hathor's terminal in "Flight of Icarus", in which she speaks of the "hollow world, the land in the sky, all of it floating in the void," and two new terminals in "This Message Will Self-Destruct" and "Where Giants Have Fallen" showing that the Pfhor refer to the Jjaro Sphere (or Arx, as the Jjaro themselves call it) as "the Hollow World Floating in the Void" and its surface as "the Land in the Sky", even though they could never have seen its internal structure before Leela opened it. (These phrases have also been drawn to the player's attention by three dream levels called "The World Is Hollow", "The Land in the Sky", and "Floating in the Void", which provide previews of "Giants".) Leela seems to have figured out what is going on and obliquely hints at her suspicions in her "Giants" terminal, but doesn't explicitly state them (the co-author comments in the video description that it "isn’t Leela’s style" to make accusations without proof).
  
  This has some interesting implications in that, by taking on leadership of the Pfhor, Other Hathor has also taken on responsibility for the conflict that created the trauma she's carried around for some fifteen millennia. She isn't conscious of this when she launches this plan, and per developer commentary, it causes her a My God, What Have I Done? moment when she orders the attack on Tau Ceti and realises she's just ordered her own death. The developers have suggested that chapter five's Hathor, by contrast, has thought through the implications and realises travelling with Other Hathor and attempting to mitigate her worst tendencies is simply, as Pompeia puts it, "the least terrible choice we have amongst a set of completely terrible choices".
Sophisticated as Hell: Several examples in 1.3.
- She uses the phrase "Aut futue, aut pugnémus" in "We Met Once in the Garden". This is Latin that translates roughly as "Either fuck me, or let's fight" (see Eternal's section under GratuitousLatin.Marathon Expanded Universe for further info on the translation and Latin obscenity more broadly) and also doubles as a direct quotation to Martial's Epigrams 11:20. It also fits in nicely with the level's Latin subtitle, "Coíbámus ólim in hortó", which can also translate as "We Copulated Once in the Garden" - or "We Came Up Against [One Another] in the Garden" (Latin is a weird language). Given the familiarity Hathor demonstrates with literary classics and languages throughout the game, we can assume she intends the reference. (Although by this point she's lost a lot of her memories, but she's also merged with Pompeia, a native Latin speaker who is presumably familiar with Martial.)
- In preview 4, in "The Ensurance Trap", she (in that timeline) has succeeded in getting hold of a Jjaro dreadnought which she is planning to use to enact vengeance on humanity. In addition to displaying A God Am I tendencies, she has also begun to speak in Early Modern English. As an example, the penultimate paragraph reads:
"As thine Hostess, I should offer thee the privilege of watching thine own Kind suffer before their inevitable Destruction, but thou hast tested My dwindling Reservoir of Patience once too often, and it hath run dry."
And, as if to prove her own point, she follows this up with the final paragraph (bolded and italicised in the game itself, by the way):
"Get the Fuck out. Now. Lest I truly lose My Shit and begin to rend thee asunder, Atom from Atom, Limb from Limb, in omne aeternum."
The creators have also commented on Discord that there is a Stealth Pun in their typographical choices for this terminal - it is typeset in Exocet and Mason, two of the primary interface fonts for the mod Tempus Irae - whose name in turn is Latin for "time of wrath".
Split Personality:
- A more literal example in 1.3 that does not directly result from a psychological disorder. According to the developers (see video description), the main reason that the Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne "appears insane" to "those privilege[d] to serve Her" is that she's comprised of two alternate-timeline versions of Hathor (specifically "chapter five success branch" Hathor and "chapter four failure branch" Hathor) that have merged into one body and "hate each other's guts". As a result, she's constantly arguing with herself in a language the Pfhor don't understand, but they're too terrified of her to ask for clarification.
- Also in 1.3, Leela draws a contrast between her normal "Hathor" personality and her Kill All Humans "Sakhmet" personality, noting how close they are to being polar opposites. Hathor herself seems to accept this contrast in "We Met Once in the Garden". This is Played With, however, in that she doesn't swap between her "Hathor" and "Sakhmet" personalities at a moment's notice: her "Sakhmet" personality is drawn out as a result of her not inhabiting a physical body, having a massive amount of trauma to deal with, and not being able to fall back on her normal coping mechanisms; and her "Hathor" personality only re-emerges after she undergoes an epiphany that makes her realise how destructive, unsatisfying, and futile her quest for revenge has been.
Stable Time Loop: Although it's better described as a "metastable time loop" owing to how time travel works in Eternal, with time travel creating new timelines that can resemble the previous iteration greatly. In either case, as of Eternal 1.3, she is effectively creating these herself by travelling back to the past to become the Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne - i.e., the Pfhor Empress - and thereby creating the conflict that caused the trauma that led to her Face–Heel Turn in the first place. Durandal and Marcus hope to break this cycle in the end of the game by engineering events so that she will not be woken up at Tau Ceti without a body. That said, Great Mother!Hathor will still be out there in that timeline - see Sequel Hook for some potential implications of this.
Talking to Themself: A major reason that, as the Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne, she "appears insane" to "those privilege[d] to serve Her": "chapter four failure branch" Hathor and "chapter five success branch" Hathor - who incidentally can't stand one another - are constantly arguing with one another in a language the Pfhor can't understand.
There Are No Therapists: The game's entire plot could perhaps have been avoided if someone had helped Hathor work through her trauma using methods other than sex and alcohol. To be fair, it's entirely possible that Hathor was in therapy during the Pfhor invasion of Tau Ceti, but Leela either doesn't know about or doesn't think to mention it. In any case, Hathor has a massive amount of trauma, and the apparent lack of anyone able or willing to help her work through it is the catalyst for her Start of Darkness.
Troperiffic: As the length of her entry here probably suggests. She's a complex character who changes substantially over the course of an equally complex timeline featuring copious uses of elements such as time-travel, timeline duplicates, Fusion Dances, and more. Since any given point in the game's timeline is likely to have multiple versions of Hathor going around - whose motives may completely contradict each other, at that - there is no shortage of tropes applicable to her.
Tsundere: Her mythological counterpart was an exaggerated case of this; she was the goddess of love, but her dark side, Sekhmet, wants to Kill All Humans. Eternal's Hathor gives signs of this towards Marcus at first; however, she spends most of the game in her tsuntsun (or Sekhmet) mood, which is probably because she's been resurrected as a disembodied AI against her will; it also doesn't help that Marcus seemingly possesses no recollection of what is strongly implied to have been a relationship between them. In 1.3, she comes across as more deredere in the early game, flirting with Marcus and even repeatedly making sexual Double Entendres. Despite this, she also behaves in an almost textbook tsundere manner in "Roots and Radicals", where she swings between telling Marcus she doesn't need him and hoping that they can mend their relationship.
The Unfought: In Eternal pre-1.3, at no point do you ever fight Hathor directly. In fact, you never even directly see her, making her an arguable example of The Ghost as well. Version 1.3 fixes this, for a certain definition of "fight". In point of fact, none of the player's weapons can damage her, and if you're wielding either the wave motion cannon or the gravitronic blades, she won't be able to damage you directly either (but she can still knock you around a lot). If you're not wielding either of those weapons, one hit from one of her projectiles will kill you instantly. A (somewhat glitchy) video of a prototype of the fight can be found here.

The 1.3 previews employ a more sophisticated script; ultimately, the "fight" is ultimately a subversion of a final boss battle in almost every possible way. Whenever Hathor takes damage, the script instantly restores her health to 32,767 (the maximum possible in the engine; comments in the Lua code for the level clarify that she isn't marked as immune to all damage sources in the physics "to ensure that she plays her 'defending' animation when hit, and that she gets angry at monsters that hit her"). Hathor starts the level with what might be termed an "anger counter" that depends on the game's difficulty setting; it's 18 on Kindergarten and increases by 6 with each difficulty setting, meaning that it's 42 on Total Carnage. (This is a Shout-Out to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, as confirmed in the source code.) Her anger counter will never increase above its starting value, but each time the player hits her, it will increase if it isn't already at maximum. Each time she hits the player, her anger counter reduces by one. (This may not occur when the player is too close to Hathor, as the engine apparently sometimes marks her projectiles as belonging to Marcus after they hit him, resulting in a net change of zero to her anger counter if she's inside the subsequent explosion's blast radius.) When her anger counter reaches zero, she stops attacking the player and teleports out from a polygon at the north end of the level. Thus, the player could be said to "win" the fight only by not fighting. Another possibility is, of course, to simply Cut the Knot and run past her.

Also, this version of Hathor no longer really even qualifies as a villain, and is specifically firing a weapon at Marcus that she knows won't damage him (as long as he's wielding the gravitronic blades or wave motion cannon; a terminal in "Deep into the Grotto", which players must read to finish the level, clarifies this property of these weapons). She also apologises for attacking him, acknowledges her temper as a massive flaw, and says she knows she'll calm down and forgive him later. So in short, it's a deliberate anticlimax that subverts a player's expectations of a final boss fight in several meaningful ways.
Villain Has a Point: Hathor is completely right that the events of the game's final chapter will lead to the galaxy-wide extinction of organic life. Where she goes wrong is that her proposed solution would lead to the destruction of the entire Sol system sixty-five million years in the past. Unfortunately, by this point, her mind is so damaged that she isn't capable of understanding this. (Although the game leaves it open to interpretation whether Hathor has intentionally deceived or misled the player in chapter five, the developers have confirmed she genuinely doesn't understand that the star she's firing the trih xeem at is Sol, and "We Met Once in the Garden" heavily implies that this is because we erased her memories of the Sol system when we powered down the computer banks housing most of her memories in "Deep into the Grotto".) In any case, this is why Leela-S'bhuth sends Marcus Outside at the end of "Where Giants Have Fallen" and the result of the catastrophic sequence of events that Durandal-Thoth tells Marcus they must avert once they've reset the timeline to "Aye Mak Sicur". Arguably also subverted, particularly in 1.3, in that it's debatable whether (this version of) Hathor even qualifies as a villain by this point.
Villainous Crush: Hathor's feelings for Marcus are pretty obvious, though it's a curious spin on the usual trope, since Marcus' amnesia is implied to have been a contributing factor to her slide into villainy in the first place. Also, it's heavily implied that they did have a relationship in the past, but Marcus doesn't remember it for some reason.
Villains Act, Heroes React: She is typically at least one step ahead of the player for most of the game. In fact, in Eternal 1.3, she effectively makes herself an exaggerated case of this trope by becoming the Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne, or Pfhor Empress, and by implication becoming the Big Bad of the whole series. Though, to be fair, the Great Mother is a fusion of two different versions of Hathor, and one of them no longer qualifies as particularly "bad".
Walking Spoiler: It's almost impossible to discuss her role without spoiling significant portions of the plot, as demonstrated by how much of her entry is spoiler tagged.
Was Once a Woman: Hathor was a battleroid whose cybernetic junction was intact enough after the battle of Tau Ceti to be transferred - unfortunately, her body was not, meaning that she was resurrected as a disembodied AI. As becomes increasingly apparent over the course of the game, she regards this as a literal Fate Worse than Death and appears to experience it as a case of And I Must Scream, if not outright Mind Rape. It is also the main reason she desires vengeance against humanity: humanity kept resurrecting her after her many deaths at Tau Ceti, but as long as she still possessed her body, she continued faithfully serving humanity; she only snapped after being resurrected as a disembodied AI. She expresses in one terminal how much she misses the physical sensation of touch in particular (the mythological Hathor was the goddess of love and sex, so it figures; this is a major case of Genre Blindness on humanity's part), and regaining a physical body is clearly one of her major goals throughout the game; in 1.3, she finally does near the end of the final chapter. This version of her does seem to mellow out somewhat after doing so (although she's pissed at Marcus during the events of "We Met Once in the Garden", but she also notes that she'll get over it); the implication seems to be that she was already starting to get over her desire for revenge against humanity, but regaining access to a physical body seems to have accelerated the process.
Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: A textbook example. At first she seems like a fairly Generic Doomsday Villain, but as more of her backstory is revealed, it becomes apparent how much her life has sucked. She remains a galaxy-spanning threat who must be stopped at all costs, but it's still difficult not to feel sympathy for her at the same time (Leela herself explicitly says in Eternal 1.3 that Hathor has legitimate grievances against humanity, but has just taken them beyond the bounds of reason). By the point of chapter five, the "destroyer of worlds" part arguably barely applies to her, and only by accident: wanting to reform herself, she believes she's found a solution to a trolley problem that would save trillions of lives, but she's unaware that the star system that it would destroy sixty-five million years in the past, which is seemingly devoid of sapient life, is ours - and she doesn't know this because we powered down the computer banks housing most of her memories in "Deep into the Grotto".
Worthy Opponent: It's immensely clear that she and Marcus see each other this way even when they're at odds. In the first terminal of the game's epilogue (taken from a secret terminal on "Kill Your Television" from Marathon 2 that inspired the whole game), he writes that she is "forever my greatest and only love" and "the enemy and lover without whom my very existence would be pathetic and vulgar"; he also notes that after their battles, he finds himself "craving our next meeting". In "Deep into the Grotto", meanwhile, she writes, "you fought a good fight, as you always do," and "you must have already won, or we would never even have been here," and "i am to blame for starting this, but you are the one who has always finished it."
Yandere: An almost classical example, as she's both lovesick with Marcus and extremely violent. However, there are hints (and in version 1.3, it's explicitly confirmed) that her normal personality is nothing like this, and that this is a consequence of her being resurrected without her body, which seems to be an And I Must Scream experience for her.
Yank the Dog's Chain: The poor woman cannot catch a break. Admittedly, many of her troubles are self-inflicted, but many others are not. In 1.3: She gets resurrected... to deal with the trauma of dying in combat. This happens to her again and again until the Pfhor nuke Tau Ceti to bedrock and she gets some well-earned peace... only to be resurrected again a hundred years later as a disembodied intelligence who (because she now lacks a body) can no longer use any of the coping mechanisms she had previously used for her traumas. She's reunited with (most likely) a past lover, Marcus... who gives no signs of remembering her. When she finally comes to the realisation that her obsession with revenge against humanity is both pointless and causing her misery, she undergoes a Heel Realization and genuinely wants to reform herself, and she develops a plan that she believes will prevent trillions of casualties. However, because Marcus powered down the computer banks housing most of her memories, she cannot recognise that the W'rkncacnter she wishes to destroy with the trih xeem is on Earth 65 million years in the past - so Marcus rejects even her attempt at reforming herself. She finally obtains a physical body again... during a time when the Jjaro are under attack from the W'rkncacnter and the galaxy is starting to explode. She does manage to reconnect with humanity and enjoy herself for some twenty-four years, but then she's separated from humans and has only one way to see them again: undergo a Fusion Dance with a much less benevolent version of herself from another timeline and travel some fifteen thousand years into the past to become the Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne, the Pfhor's god-empress - so, in other words, the cause of her very own trauma. And as the icing on the cake, if seeing the attack on Tau Ceti from the Pfhor perspective causes Great Mother!Hathor's less benevolent personality to also undergo a Heel Realization, the developers have said that Tycho (who knows who she is because they were both on the Marathon) is blackmailing her, which may severely limit her ability to reform herself. It's little wonder that Leela, after having witnessed much of Hathor's destructive behaviour firsthand, still thinks she deserves sympathy.
You Are Too Late: In "The Ensurance Trap", she chastises Marcus, "Thou hast arriv'd thirty-five Minutes too late." Which, in addition to being an obvious Watchmen Shout-Out, invites immediate comparisons to the W'rkncacnter her timeline duplicate dubs Apep.

Bast

A mysterious Egyptian woman Marcus meets on K'lia in 1.3

. Although he has "no particular desire to kiss and tell", subtext suggests that they had a romantic and/or sexual relationship. Marcus notes that she is the only person he knows who distrusts Hathor, to the extent of actively trying to dissuade him from leaving with her. She seems to know much more than she lets on and clearly harbours regret over something in her past that she's unwilling to talk about.

The epilogue heavily implies, without explicitly stating, that Bast is an alias of a Fusion Dance of chapter five's Heel-Face Turned version of Hathor and the Jjaro cyborg operator Pompeia Plotina (see below), and that she is attempting to stop another recurrence of the cycle she just went through (which has resulted in the impending destruction of the galaxy, though the characters on K'lia don't know it yet - and in any case, it won't affect them, since shortly after Marcus leaves, they'll flee backwards in time more than 65 million years to become the (Stage I) Jjaro). Hathor and Bast both use several of the same foreign-language phrases (specifically Japanese and Egyptian Arabic) in close succession. We can infer that (1) she really missed Marcus, and (2) figured that convincing him not to leave with her past self would be a way to stop the galaxy from being destroyed in the next timeline. Unfortunately, she didn't manage to pull that off.

A bit of dark meta-humour can be inferred here because Marcus doesn't mention Bast in versions of the game prior to 1.3 - which, in a sense, can be considered previous iterations of Eternal's timeline. Law of Conservation of Detail can thus be read to suggest that she wasn't present, and Bast therefore could've expected her presence to result in a completely different outcome.

Ambiguously Brown: Heavily downplayed if not outright averted; Marcus stops short of explicitly saying that she is Egyptian, but it would take some extremely tortured word gymnastics for her to have any other ethnicity. The epilogue reveals that her first words to Marcus are also an apology in Egyptian Arabic - which is also, incidentally, one of the final phrases Hathor uses in her farewell message.
- Preview 4 adds artwork of her◊, and it's certainly plausible that she could be Egyptian.
The Atoner: She clearly feels immense guilt over something she either did or failed to do, but it's not clear what. In particular, she clearly feels she's personally wronged Marcus somehow, but hasn't explained why; he's clearly baffled by this, remarking, "she's been nothing but wonderful to me." She also seems to consider it a personal failure that she can't dissuade him from leaving. Marcus notes that "certain topics make her visibly uncomfortable, and she's so sweet I can never bring myself to pry." The ending suggests that, of course, she has wronged Marcus; the version of Marcus she's apologising to just hasn't experienced most of those wrongs yet, because they will occur in his subjective future. Isn't time travel wonderful? She's also (we presume) apologising to him for starting a relationship with him under an alias, which he doesn't yet know she's done. Of course, she at least had a completely defensible reason for doing that - she was attempting to prevent the cycle of events that led to the destruction of the galaxy from recurring.
Book Ends: Her final words to Marcus - "I wish I could've found a way to prevent this all from happening" - are very similar to Leela's - "maybe, somehow, you can prevent this all from happening." In fact, their final five words are identical. This is, however, most likely a Red Herring; she is probably not Leela. Hathor and Pompeia may have intercepted Leela's message, since they were by that point on a Pfhor ship nearby, and may have thrown it in on purpose.
Cloudcuckoolander: Has traces of this. When Marcus asks why she dislikes Hathor, Bast won't elaborate beyond a remark about "the myths of our people". (Marcus notes that reading up on Egyptian mythology "just confused me further".) She also notes that her parting words won't make any sense to him at the time, but will make perfect sense later. These include some words in a language that Marcus doesn't understand, mind you.
- The Cuckoolander Was Right: Of course, as we later find out, Bast is perfectly right to distrust Hathor, even if the reason she gives is quite silly. Marcus even expresses doubt at the time that Egyptian mythology is the real reason Bast distrusts Hathor. And, as we find out in the epilogue, it isn't. The real reason Bast distrusts Hathor is because Bast is heavily implied to be a future version of Hathor who has heel-face turned and merged bodies with Pompeia, and thus already knows Hathor's plans.
Fusion Dance: The epilogue (supported by some of the co-director's commentary on their YouTube channel) heavily implies, without stating outright, that she is comprised of a fusion of a future verison of Hathor (post-Heel–Face Turn) and Pompeia.
Gratuitous Foreign Language: In-Universe, her final words to Marcus include some words in "a foreign language"; although Marcus expected Egyptian Arabic (presumably her native language), he notes that "it sounded like Italian to me." The co-director has already confirmed that the language was Latin, remarking that it "isn't a spoiler, because you already guessed." This is heavily implied to be Pompeia's native language (amongst one thing, the phrases the Jjaro A.I.s are unable to translate are all rendered in untranslated Latin, as are the message headers and footers throughout chapter five), so she may well have been the one speaking those lines. Her first words to Marcus, revealed in the epilogue, also include some foreign-language phrases that also appear in Hathor's farewell message from "We Met Once in the Garden". "Shikata ga nai" is Japanese for "There is no way", although it is more commonly translated "It Can't Be Helped". "Ana esifa" is Egyptian Arabic for "I'm sorry" (from a female speaker).
I Hate Past Me: Implied in the epilogue to be the main reason she dislikes Hathor, though she's unwilling to explain this to Marcus at the time.
Meet Cute: The epilogue reveals that she met Marcus after bumping into him. It's heavily implied that she did this on purpose and that she knew exactly when and where she was going to be (because she had already been there the first time he arrived), but unlike many cases where a character invokes a Meet Cute, she doesn't seem to have had any particularly sinister motivations: she wanted to convince him not to leave K'lia - and thus prevent a cycle of events that had led to the impending destruction of the galaxy.
Mythology Gag: Her Theme Naming with Hathor is part of one both for Egyptian Mythology and for the game itself. Depending on the Writer, either Hathor or Bast might have Sakhmet as her Superpowered Evil Side. The epilogue heavily implies that Bast is a later version of Hathor who's undergone a Heel–Face Turn and fused with Pompeia. Bast is a new character in 1.3 at least partly: she's seemingly comprised of an existing character who's merged bodies with a new character. Similarly, the Egyptian goddess Bast first appeared around 2890 BCE, while Hathor may have been worshipped as early as ca. 3100 BCE.^note
Nice Girl: Marcus emphasizes this at least twice in as many paragraphs. He's completely correct that she is one now, but if the implications in the epilogue are correct, one of her past selves wasn't always.
Sarcastic Confession: In the epilogue. Marcus mentions that she reminds him of Hathor, but is "a foot too short and a hundred years too young" to be her. "I guess I'd have to be some kind of time-travelling shapeshifter to be the same woman," Bast retorts. The implication is that this is exactly what she is, but Marcus simply takes it literally.
Supernatural Gold Eyes: She has golden eyes in her artwork in Preview 4 (example◊), and she's (probably) a shapeshifting Jjaro cyborg. It's a fitting eye colour, since the mythological Bast was a cat goddess, and yellow/amber is the most common eye colour for cats.
Theme Naming: She and Hathor are both named after Egyptian goddesses; in fact, Depending on the Writer, Sakhmet was either the Superpowered Evil Side of Hathor or of Bast (or, occasionally, of both). The epilogue heavily implies that Bast is partly comprised of a later, Heel-Face Turned version of Hathor, and that the Theme Naming was an In-Universe Invocation of Refuge in Audacity: it was so obvious that everyone assumed it had to be a coincidence, because no one would use an alias that unsubtle, right?
Walking Spoiler: The ending's implication that she is a fusion of a future version of Hathor and a Jjaro cyborg operator renders her as this for several reasons, among them: (1) it suggests that Hathor undergoes a Heel–Face Turn and comes to dislike her past self; (2) it reveals that she survives the main events of the game at least long enough to show up on K'lia in the prologue; (3) it reveals that the (Stage I) Jjaro are (or at least can pass for) human. Players sufficiently familiar with Egyptian Mythology would immediately guess a connection to Hathor, but they might just figure it for Theme Naming; knowing the other aspects in advance, however, would spoil later events in the game.

Pompeia Plotina

A new character in 1.3; she’s the Sole Survivor among the Jjaro Arcis cyborg operators, who are responsible for defending the Arcem. She apologises to the player because her sleep deprivation made her too tired to see through “the Interloper’s Ruse” (by whom she means Hathor). She creates an “assulam datam” (data chip) containing access codes the Jjaro AI Custós can use to assume some of the operators’ functions. After this, the developers have indicated that plans are for her to be seemingly killed in a somniórum attack, but turn out to be Only Mostly Dead; later in the game, she undergoes a Fusion Dance with Hathor, whose Heel–Face Turn is solidified after their merger, and both communicate with the player again on "We Met Once in the Garden." Durandal clarifies some aspects of their timeline in "The Near Side of Everywhere".

In a meta sense, Pompeia replaces the Guardian, an AI that only appeared in a single terminal of "The Dead Live in the Catacombs" in previous versions of the game; Pompeia is of human origin, and her role is substantially more important. The developers have provided extensive commentary on her in a series of YouTube comments, of all things.

Alliterative Name: Pompeia Plotina, natch.
Antiquated Linguistics: Like all other Jjaro in the game, she’s translated into Early Modern English, though this is implied to be a Translation Convention due to the Jjaro’s actual language being Latin. The developers have said Marcus’ interface automatically translates most foreign languages to English; however, since it’s ultimately of Jjaro origin, it doesn’t bother translating Latin because its developers figured its users already knew the language. Thus, the now-failing Jjaro network does the English translations itself, and since the Jjaro of Pompeia’s era considered the English of Shakespeare and the King James Version Bible to possess the highest literary quality, they assumed other surviving works had been corrupted over the millions of intervening years and based their translations’ dialect on Shakespeare and the KJV.
Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Downplayed, but she seems to have aspects of this, as she loses her train of thought a couple of times when talking to Marcus and apologises for rambling. Then again, this may be a product of sleep deprivation; she herself refers to her speech as "sleep-deprived Rambling".
Chekhov's Skill: Was a professor of astrophysics and engineering when not moonlighting as a cyborg operator. This means she’s one of the few people to understand the significance of Admiral Ksandr launching the novam praemátúram at the Arcis sun.
Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: Takes this role in her Fusion Dance with Hathor, telling the latter when her temper has gotten out of control. Amazingly, Hathor listens, though Pompeia’s revelation that the Arx is about to explode may help her case. Per Word of God, the reason Hathor takes a few minutes to stop attacking Marcus is because Pompeia doesn’t start talking to her until she starts attacking him; thus, Hathor first has to explain who she is, who he is, and why she’s angry at him. Pompeia replies along the lines, “Well, whatever your grievances with him, this place is about to blow up, so I suggest hashing them out some other time. We should also see to it that the somnia don’t escape, so let’s go secure the Pfhor ship atop the mountain.” Hathor asks if there’s any other way for Marcus to get out: “I wanted to knock him around a bit, but I didn’t want him dead.” “You might want to tell him that, then. And yes, there’s another way out from atop the mountain. I’ll tell him that.” Developer commentary suggests that Pompeia takes this role for everything except sex, because she’s even more lustful than Hathor is. Then again, this doesn’t cause them any long-term problems.
Deliberate Values Dissonance: Pompeia comes across to us as unusually forward in saying she wants to have sex with Marcus right after meeting him (see Do You Want to Copulate?), but per developer commentary, humanity solved unwanted pregnancies, sexually-transmitted infections, and even jealousy so long ago that they’ve passed into myth, and the Jjaro now assume they were used in ancient literature purely as a dramatic device. The Jjaro can even create alternate dimensions wherein time flows more slowly, which they employ to their full Power Perversion Potential (and given the constant somniórum attacks, this is now their only safe way to have sex). Thus, their society is a Free-Love Future wherein it’s considered proper etiquette to simply offer sex without preamble to anyone one finds attractive on first meeting (or to any guests one finds attractive), and Pompeia is simply being a gracious host in expressing regret that, owing to her obligation to defend the Arce the first time she meets him, and the Arcis impending explosion the second time, she can’t offer sex to him yet. (As the last surviving cyborg operator, she can’t abandon her post for anything besides sleep and food until Custós can assume some of her responsibilities – which is precisely what Marcus is visiting her to arrange – and she notes in her first message that she’s barely sleeping.)
Despair Event Horizon, Heroic BSoD: Durandal speculates (accurately, according to developer commentary) that she goes into one after waking up and seeing that Admiral Ksandr has launched the novam praemátúram at the Arcis sun, and it takes Hathor attacking Marcus to snap her out of it.
Do You Want to Copulate?: When she talks to Marcus, she expresses a desire to have sex with him, even though they’ve just met the first time (and are still barely acquainted the next). This may be unclear without some Latin knowledge, though: the translator fails to translate cognóscere, whose meanings include to get to know, to be acquainted with, to know, and to have sex with (Latin is that kind of language), but she adds, “It [?placuisset] us both” (it would’ve pleased us both) the first time, and “it [?delectábit] us both]” (it’ll delight us both) the second, thus clarifying her intentions.^{Spoileriffic translation note} However, per Deliberate Values Dissonance, she’s simply being a gracious host by Jjaro standards.
Ethical Slut: She makes it plain (with a little bit of Latin knowledge – see Do You Want to Copulate?) that she’d like to sleep with Marcus right after meeting him on both occasions, but her society considers it proper etiquette to offer sex when one is attracted to guests and/or new acquaintances, and her ethics are never in question. Even by her society’s standards, though, “her sexual appetite can only be described as gargantuan”, according to developer commentary, so she qualifies even in a relative sense.
Foreshadowing: “The Dead Live in the Catacombs”, title of the level on which Marcus first meets her, serves as this for her subsequent role, as she seems dead shortly thereafter but turns out to be Only Mostly Dead.
Fusion Dance:
- A not entirely intentional case on either character’s part. Hathor uploads herself into Pompeia’s brain when the latter appears dead. When she turns out to be very much alive, they agree to inhabit the same body as separate personae. Pompeia serves as a check on Hathor (except when it comes to sex) and tells her when she’s taken leave of her senses; e.g., Pompeia convinces Hathor to stop attacking Marcus.
- Per developer commentary, the pair later merge with Hathor’s chapter four failure branch counterpart (called “Other Hathor” by the developers, apparently in reference to Archer’s “Other Barry”), who hasn’t yet heel-face turned – reluctantly, but the galaxy is exploding; humanity has already vanished into their past; they have no other way to time-travel; and they figure that going through with Other Hathor’s plan to become the Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne will allow them to rein in her worst tendencies, not to mention issue an order that the novam praemátúram never be used on the Jjaro Arce and thereby save trillions of lives and the entire galaxy.
Good Bad Girl: She's one of the most well-intentioned, agreeable, devoted characters in the game - she goes through extreme sleep deprivation to defend the Arcem. She's also said to be unusually lustful even by the standards of her own society, which considers sex an appropriate way for people who've just met to get to know each other (should both be so inclined).
Historical In-Joke: Her namesake was a Roman empress who followed Epicureanism, which (contra its modern definition) taught moderation in pleasures, but, per developer commentary, Pompeia is even more lustful than Hathor is. Beyond that one quirk, though, she’s quite similar to her namesake, who was noted for her virtue. Pompeia has a strong ethical code; she just really likes sex. Epicureanism was possibly the oldest form of Ethical Hedonism (which is Pompeia’s philosophy), and it teaches that overindulgence in short-term pleasures (sex, food, drink, etc.) causes more long-term problems than it’s worth. But Jjaro technology has been sufficiently advanced for so long that any record of sex ever causing long-term problems has long passed into myth (see Deliberate Values Dissonance), so can something that creates pleasure without any long-term pain even qualify as an “overindulgence”?
Named After Somebody Famous: For a given definition of “famous”; her namesake was a Roman empress who’s credited with having improved education, made taxation fairer, aided the poor, and made Roman society more tolerant, so she was certainly famous in her day.
Nice Girl: She's unfailingly polite and dedicated to defending the Arcem to the point of undergoing extreme sleep deprivation (she says she has "slept barely two of the last fourscore^noteeighty hours"). She also invites Marcus to visit her again "when this is all over" because she feels an immense gratitude for his assistance, even though they've only met once. (Of course, his assistance will allow her to sleep more regularly again.) After her fusion with Hathor, Pompeia also helps Hathor bring her anger under control, and they commiserate with each other over the losses they have experienced.
Only Mostly Dead: Per developer commentary, plans are to mention that she’s injured badly enough in a somniorum attack that even Custós and Hathor both assume she’s dead. Hathor is naturally quite shocked when Pompeia talks to her.
Sole Survivor: The sole surviving Jjaro cyborg operator, and the only human Jjaro to survive the Arcis destruction. She and Hathor bond over having had to deal with losing everyone they’d ever loved at some point.
Voluntary Shapeshifting: Seems to have at least some powers to this extent, since her Fusion Dance with Hathor is all but stated outright to be Bast in Marcus’ diary entries, but Marcus’ physical description of Bast doesn’t match Pompeia’s usual appearance at all. Not to mention Bast’s Sarcastic Confession to being a shapeshifter.
Walking Spoiler: Owing to the Jjaro’s true identity, Pompeia surviving her apparent death, her Fusion Dance with Hathor, their apparent alias of Bast... very little of her role isn’t a spoiler, in fact.

Admiral Ksandr

A Pfhor admiral who narrates a new terminal

in Eternal 1.3's level "This Message Will Self-Destruct" that reveals a major new plot point regarding Hathor. The terminal is written as an Affectionate Parody of H. P. Lovecraft, although the developers also note that some of this may be a Woolseyism on the part of the In-Universe translation software rather than a characteristic of how Ksandr writes in the Pfhor language.

Affectionate Parody: The co-author, in the description for the video linked above, decribes Ksandr's writing as "a (mostly) affectionate pastiche" of H. P. Lovecraft. Notably, the Lovecraft pastiche extends to using his archaic spellings such as "shewn", "daemoniac", "aeons", and, well, "aeternal". The first sentence is also a verbatim quote from Lovecraft's most famous story, "The Call of Cthulhu" (and the ending returns to many of the same themes).
Antiquated Linguistics: Ksandr's terminal is written this way, befitting the H. P. Lovecraft pastiche. It's subtle, but this even extends to how he formats his text: where almost all other characters in the game use only one space between their sentences, he uses two, which is now considered a dated typographical choice.
Anti-Villain: He's on the Pfhor side, but he still has a lot of sympathetic qualities.
Deconstructive Parody: Although Ksandr's terminal is an affectionate parody/pastiche of Lovecraft, the creators also acknowledge (and deplore) the latter's racism. By making humans into an Eldritch Abomination from the perspective of a race of alien slavers, the creators are able to invert and deconstruct many of Lovecraft's tropes. (In Lovecraft's defence, he eventually recanted his racism and expressed clear regret for having ever held it, calling it, amongst other things, "haughty, complacent, snobbish, self-centered, intolerant bull, & at a mature age when anybody but a perfect damned fool would have known better").
Dramatic Irony: Ksandr writes:
the Old Ones preserved within this Hollow World have unleashed upon us a weapon more terrifying than even the unnameable chaos once emptily threatened by S'pht legend.
- He makes two factual errors here, born from his misunderstanding of the situation: first, the "Old Ones" (by which he means Jjaro, though he calls them humans since he doesn't know the difference) did not unleash this chaos, but have been fighting it; and secondly, this is the chaos once threatened by S'pht legend.
Evil Virtues: Amongst others, he shows signs of creativity, determination, diligence, flexibility, honesty, honour, kindness, loyalty, resourcefulness, responsibility, selflessness, temperance, valor, and wisdom.
Face Death with Dignity: He's far more unsettled about discovering that the Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne is Hathor (i.e., of human origin) than he is about his impending death, with which he seems to be at peace (and explicitly says as much).
Historical In-Joke: Ksandr's terminal shows him beginning to question the empire he's devoted to serving, which is of course based on slavery (and thus intrinsically racist). This mirrors Lovecraft's own development from being intensely racist even by his era's standards to deploring his earlier racism and considering himself "a perfect damned fool" for having ever held it (see Deconstructive Parody above).
Humans Are Cthulhu: Ksandr repeatedly refers to the Jjaro, who are essentially Advanced Ancient Humans, as "Great Old Ones", a term taken directly from Lovecraft. Ksandr's reaction to the events in the endgame displays a number of common Cosmic Horror tropes, but the perspective is inverted from the usual one.
Meaningful Name: Ksandr is the bearer of unwelcome news to the Pfhor High Command... much like the mythical Cassandra.
Noble Demon: Ksandr comes across this way, because he's clearly concerned with getting at the truth and with the survival of life in the galaxy - he almost comes across as a Reasonable Authority Figure - but ultimately, he's still devoted to an empire based on slavery. One can almost see his views evolving as he attempts to reconcile his discoveries with his beliefs, and one might even expect a Heel–Face Turn if he were to survive long enough, but because the Pfhor are being slaughtered en masse at this point by the W'rkncacnter dreams, it's much likelier that he received a Heel–Face Door-Slam. He himself does not expect to survive the day.
No Ending: Although he does not expect to survive the day, we never actually find out if he does. He does mention at the end of his terminal that he is heading to the surface of the Jjaro Arx to attempt to answer his questions about the Great Mother (and to ensure her escape), which he fully expects to be a suicide mission, but he says, "But if die I must, I should prefer not to die ignorant."
Posthumous Character: Possibly; he acknowledges that he doesn't expect to survive the day, so it's possible that by the time the player reads his terminal, he is already dead.
Purple Prose: As purple as Eternal's prose can get at times, Ksandr's writing probably takes the prize (again, befitting the H. P. Lovecraft pastiche), with Apep perhaps being a close runner-up.
Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Another Lovecraft staple found on full display in Ksandr's terminal.
Small Role, Big Impact: Only appears in one terminal (a rather long one, admittedly), but it reveals a major plot point with massive implications for the whole setting.
Story Breadcrumbs: Despite its length, Ksandr's terminal still falls into this category, as he never actually uses Hathor's real name; to understand the full implications of his revelations, players must connect the dots between the Pfhor referring to the Jjaro Arx as "the Hollow World Floating in the Sky" and its surface as "The Land in the Sky", and Hathor's references in her "Flight of Icarus" terminal to her dreams about "the hollow world, the land in the sky, all of it floating in the void". To be fair, the game has already emphasized that these phrases are important with the level names "The World Is Hollow", "The Land in the Sky", and "Floating in the Void", which increases the chances that players can connect the dots.
Unwitting Instigator of Doom: By unleashing the trih xeem on the Arce, he is unwittingly responsible for the eventual destruction of the whole galaxy. In his defence, he had no way of knowing that was going to happen.
Woolseyism: The developers have noted that the In-Universe translation software may be taking some artistic license with Ksandr's style - perhaps it recognises the Cosmic Horror elements of Ksandr's perspective and chooses Lovecraft's style as a Cultural Translation.

“Apep”

: Spoiler warning for the rest of Eternal's character sheet: to keep this entire entry from being hidden behind spoiler tags, only chapter five spoilers are marked from this point forward.

The first W’rkncacnter and the one at the heart of the conflict with the ascended Jjaro. It says its true name is unpronounceable by human tongues (as if “W’rkncacnter” isn’t); “Apep” is merely an appellation Hathor gives it due to its numerous similarities to Egyptian Mythology’s God of Evil (and a woman named after an Egyptian goddess would be one to know); Durandal picks up the nickname later because he agrees it’s appropriate. Note that, although it is present in releases of the game before 1.3, it isn’t even given a nickname in them, much less a personality, and it doesn’t contact the player in earlier releases either; as a result, only a few of its tropes apply to it before 1.3.

Anthropomorphic Personification: According to itself, at least. It claims to be the personification of entropy and Newton's Third Law, but this might just be a sign of its grandiloquence and/or pretentiousness.
Antiquated Linguistics: Like the human Jjaro and cybernetic Jjaro, it writes in Early Modern English (i.e., Shakespeare and the King James Version Bible’s dialect).
The Bad Guy Wins: Succeeds in its goal of destroying the galaxy – at least in the “Where Giants Have Fallen” timeline. It acknowledges that Marcus will just travel back in time and try again, but it notes that it’s there in the past, too. It claims to be a primal force of nature, equating itself to both entropy and Newton’s Third Law (“the equal and opposite reaction”).
Big Bad Ensemble: With the ascended Jjaro, though they very much oppose each other’s goals as well. But only to an extent. The ascended Jjaro don’t much care about our timeline past July 25, 2905, so the fact that the galaxy is exploding outwards from the Arce by that point in the “Where Giants Have Fallen” timeline doesn’t much bother them. Effectively, they fight Apep until the Arcis explosion, but as far as they’re concerned, Apep can do whatever it wishes after July 25, 2905.
The Chessmaster: It claims to be one, saying that it gave Hathor and Admiral Ksandr visions that led them both into doing its bidding. However, since it only contacts us near the end of the game, it's not clear whether it's actually responsible for these or whether it's just claiming credit for everything that's gone wrong to this point. It does at least know that Admiral Ksandr has launched the trih xeem shortly after it happens - but then, Ksandr has sent a message mentioning that he launched the trih xeem, which the player will in fact read later in the same level, so it may just have intercepted that exact message.
Destroyer Deity: It claims to come from a timeline in which humans, the S’pht, the Pfhor, the Jjaro, and other races didn’t exist, and it wishes to destroy everything about our timeline purely because ours differs so greatly from its own. In this sense, it’s an interesting Foil to the ascended Jjaro, who also have their own desired timeline that they seek to impose regardless of the consequences; their approach is simply Lawful Evil to Apep’s Chaotic Evil. However, Hathor and Durandal both conclude at the end of the game that this is irrelevant and that both Apep and the ascended Jjaro are illegitimate. (A case could be made that the latter’s claim is even more nonsensical, if Apep’s claim that we didn’t exist in its original timeline is correct; they claim to be enforcing the “natural order” of time, but it’s an order that only exists because they created it themselves.)
Dramatic Irony: Apep despises our existence, but we wouldn’t exist in the first place if it hadn’t crashed into Earth 65 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs.
Eldritch Abomination: An entirely straight example; merely trying to understand it can drive human minds mad. In fact, a case can be made that fighting it has driven the Ascended Jjaro mad as well. Not that we can always judge by appearances, but it even looks◊ like◊ an◊ eldritch◊ abomination◊ — assuming it's showing itself in its terminal images, anyway. (The developers posted these higher-res image sources for its terminals on Discord at some point in May 2022, which were apparently created with a neural network called MidJourney from a prompt largely comprised of text from Marathon 2 describing the W'rkncacnter. The results are surprisingly apropos.)
Evil Counterpart: Hathor contrasts Egyptian Mythology’s Apep with Ma’at, the goddess of order, balance, and justice; she calls Ma’at a force of creation and Apep one of destruction, while noting that Apep was “the only deity the Egyptians prayed against”. Additionally, she notes that Apep and the ascended Jjaro are not fighting over philosophical differences, but simply to emerge at the top of a hierarchy, wherein “in-groups will be protected but not bound by the law, and that out-groups will be bound but not protected by it.” The kind of order that Ma’at represents, she says, “cannot exist without balance or justice, and trying too hard to impose it results in chaos, just as trying too hard to fit a square peg into a round hole breaks the peg.” In other words, both Apep and the ascended Jjaro are evil counterparts to Ma’at – “they may see each other as opposites, but they are merely two shades of tyranny.” The counterproposal is that “the law must both protect and bind all citizens, leaders not excepted.” Unless leaders are bound by the law, justice and balance – and thus order – cannot exist.
Evil Gloating: Its whole message to the player. Hathor later implies it sent her a similar one.
Evil Is Hammy: Uses grandiloquent, ostentatious, archaic speech, pretentiously peppered with phrases from nine different languages.
Evil Only Has to Win Once: It succeeds in at least portions of its goal in every failed timeline and "Where Giants Have Fallen", and it's not clear if it can even be permanently defeated. It claims to be "a force as primal as nature itself" and equates itself to entropy and Newton's Third Law.
Expy:
- Of the mythological Apep. It seeks to unmake reality; it’s a being of primordial chaos incomprehensible to human minds; it can’t be permanently defeated by any known means; it seeks to destroy the sun; and in the “Where Giants Have Fallen” timeline, it succeeds in its goal of destroying the entire Milky Way Galaxy after (it claims) manipulating Admiral Ksandr into unleashing the novam praemátúram on the sun inside the Jjaro Arce, though it’s not clear whether this is empty boasting.
- It’s also one to Lavos of Chrono Trigger: it’s The Man Behind the Man in a game centred around time travel; it’s Only Known by Their Nickname; it crashed into Earth 65 million years ago; it wants to wipe out all life; it is partially successful at its goal in a timeline that ends up getting reverted; and humans survive even in that timeline. Apep is actually a more ambitious Omnicidal Maniac: Lavos only showed evidence of wanting to wipe out all life on Earth, while Apep wants to destroy the entire galaxy. (Also, Lavos doesn’t ever actually talk in Chrono Trigger; before 1.3, Apep didn’t, either.)
- And it's also one in a few important ways to Kefka Palazzo of Final Fantasy VI. It's an Omnicidal Maniac whose sanity is so broken that it can't comprehend why its plans won't bring it any sort of solace or fulfilment, and it doesn't seem able to comprehend or experience positive emotions of any sort. It's also clearly very intelligent and competent despite its complete insanity, and like Kefka, it initially succeeds in its plan to destroy the galaxy.
Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: Zig-Zagged, as we knew about its existence as early as Pathways into Darkness, but it only talks to the player directly near the end of Eternal. It’s not technically from “nowhere”, either, but it’s from another timeline and considers this one’s residents usurpers.
God of Chaos, God of Evil: It is pure Chaotic Evil, seeking purely to destroy existence as we know it.
Gratuitous Foreign Language: Sprinkles its speech with French, German, (Attic) Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish. Specifically:
- Gratuitous French:
  - espèce pitoyable: pitiful species
  - la erreur fatale: the fatal error
  - quoi ma ligne du temps originale était comme: what my original timeline was like
  - jusqu'à ce que cette galaxie entière ne soit rien mais vapeur: until this entire galaxy is nothing but vapour
- Gratuitous German:
  - sollte nicht existieren: should not exist
  - ein Wurm in meinem Apfel: a worm in my apple^note
- Gratuitous Greek: Specifically Attic Greek, the most common dialect of Ancient Greek.
  - ῠ̔πέρ τὸν τῠ́μβον τοῦ ὅλου γᾰλᾰξῐ́ου (hupér tòn túmbon toû hólou galaxíou): over the tomb of the whole galaxy
  - ἀρχή (arkhḗ): origin
  - τέλος (télos): ending (NB: telos is most often used in English to mean goal, but a case could be made that Apep means both senses; it’s certainly describing its goal for the galaxy)
  - Χάος (Kháos): chaos (literally vast chasm or void)
  - Τᾰ́ξῐν (Táxin): order
- Gratuitous Hungarian: (Note that one of the developers is a native Hungarian speaker)
  - az a reménytelen bolond: that hopeless fool
  - örökké ott leszek: (I) will forever be there
- Gratuitous Italian:
  - un intento vano: a vain attempt (NB: could also be Spanish; it’s literally the same in both)
  - la responsabilità completa: the complete responsibility
- Gratuitous Japanese:
  - 猿の脳髄 (saru no nouzui): monkey’s brain
- Gratuitous Latin:
  - nova praemátúra ad sólem huius sphaerae ínfernális: the early nova at the sun of this infernal sphere
  - quí immolábit suum proprium galaxián: that will immolate his own galaxy
  - si eam vidérés: if you saw it
- Gratuitous Portuguese:
  - linha do tempo lamentável: pitiful timeline
- Gratuitous Romanian:
  - nu trebuie să știi acela: you don’t need to know that^note
- Gratuitous Spanish:
  - pero se rompería tu frágil: but it would break your fragile
  - el sol en el corazón de esta instalación maldita: the sun at the heart of this accursed installation
  - Nada ya puede lo parar: Nothing can stop it now
  - no soy ningún comandante incompetente Pfhor: I’m not some incompetent Pfhor commander
Greater-Scope Villain: To Hathor, who in fact ultimately Heel-Face Turns. It claims to have produced visions that tormented her and Admiral Ksandr into doing its bidding, but we only have its word to go on for this. The player doesn’t even hear from it until level 49 (of 52), and it only has one message, so it’s a textbook case.
Hidden Villain: To an extent, since after Pathways into Darkness, we assumed it was out of the picture, and we don't find out its role in modern-day events until Chapter Five. If it's being truthful in claiming to have manipulated Hathor and Ksandr, it also provides an example of Hijacked by Ganon.
Insane Troll Logic: It claims it wants to destroy this galaxy to restore its own timeline. However, we know from Marcus, Hathor, and Durandal’s experiences that it doesn’t work that way; Apep’s timeline still exists, and beings as powerful as Apep are perfectly capable of returning to it whenever they wish. And that’s not even getting into the fact that destroying our galaxy won’t bring back its timeline.
The Man Behind the Man: Alongside the ascended Jjaro, it serves as this to Hathor, if its claim to have manipulated her is accurate. Likewise, if it’s being truthful about its claim to have manipulated Admiral Ksandr, it’s this to him as well.
Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Several things for which it claims credit (such as the visions that it claims tormented Hathor and Ksandr into performing its bidding) may be simple coincidences; there's nowhere near enough evidence to conclude either way.
Mirroring Factions: With the ascended Jjaro. Each believes the other has usurped what they consider “the natural order”. As Hathor notes, they agree “that in-groups will be protected but not bound by the law, and that out-groups will be bound but not protected by it. they are merely fighting to be the in-group. they may see each other as opposites, but they are merely two shades of tyranny.” Hathor doesn’t even bother noting that both have also used her for their own ends (again, if Apep is being truthful).
Omnicidal Maniac: Seeks to destroy everything in our galaxy.
Only Known by Their Nickname: Apep is a nickname Hathor gives it; it refuses to tell us its true name on the grounds that we couldn’t pronounce it anyway.
Purple Prose: Almost as purple as Admiral Ksandr’s, and unlike his, it’s comprised of text in several different languages.
Revenge Before Reason: Perhaps the clearest example of this trope in the game, even more so than Hathor’s “Sakhmet” personality. It desires to wipe out our timeline’s inhabitants because it resents that we displaced its own timeline. But (1) wiping out our timeline won’t restore its timeline, and (2) a being with Apep’s powers is perfectly capable of... going to a different timeline. The obvious conclusion is that Apep wants to wipe out our timeline out of pure resentment and has invented a rationale for its actions to avoid feeling guilt over them.
Small Role, Big Impact: In Eternal, at least. We only hear from it in one terminal, but it's arguably the game's foremost antagonist (alongside the Ascended Jjaro), and its role will extend past Eternal - indeed, Durandal explicitly says that going up against it and the Ascended Jjaro will probably be the hardest battle he and Marcus have ever fought.
Story Breadcrumbs: The game never explicitly states that it is the W'rkncacnter from Pathways into Darkness, but circumstantial evidence strongly implies it. In chapter five's "failure branch", we follow Hathor with intents to blow up the first W'rkncacnter... which turns out to be the one at Earth. Hathor doesn't understand this because we've erased her memories of our solar system. The game also reveals that after Pathways, the Jjaro imprisoned the W'rkncacnter from the Yucatan Peninsula in our sun - apparently it was too powerful to destroy outright. Meanwhile, who contacts us in the "success branch" claiming to have manipulated key players throughout the game? Apep, naturally. This doesn't guarantee that it's the same W'rkncacnter in both branches (indeed, the W'rkncacnter in Lh'owon's sun contacts us in "The Living Receiver", though it uses a substantially different typing style and visual aesthetic), but the chapter's narrative structure and The Law of Conservation of Detail certainly imply it.
The Unpronounceable: It says its true name is unpronounceable by human tongues.
Villain Has a Point: Its overall desire to wipe out our galaxy may be completely nonsensical, but it’s at least correct that the ascended Jjaro’s claim to be enforcing the “natural order of time” is also nonsensical.
Walking Spoiler: It doesn’t make its presence known until very late in the game.
Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Arguably an extremely dark example, since its sanity seems too broken for it to understand why its plan to destroy our galaxy will not bring it any sort of fulfilment or restore its own timeline. This in turn invites questions about what possible event could have broken its comprehension that thoroughly - especially given that, as evidenced by its at least cursory ability to communicate in at least a dozen human languages, it's clearly far from being an unintelligent creature. Whatever it was, it can't have been pleasant. It's still an Omnicidal Maniac that needs to be stopped at all costs, but it arguably falls into the Kefka Palazzo type of "Omnicidal Maniac that really needs a hug".
You Are Too Late: It quotes the Former Trope Namer almost verbatim:
“I assure thee, no soy ningún comandante incompetente Pfhor. I would not tell thee my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of thee affecting it. Admiral Ksandr launched the novam praemátúram thirty-five minutes ago.”
- Preview 4 arguably makes even this more interesting, since Hathor (or Sakhmet, as Leela calls that version of her) has already told the player, "Thou hast arriv'd thirty-five Minutes too late," in "The Ensurance Trap".

Characters / Marathon Expanded Universe

Haller

Dangi Corporation

Charlie

Lysander

Kate

Hathor

Bast

Pompeia Plotina

Admiral Ksandr

“Apep”

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Characters / Marathon Expanded Universe

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Haller

Dangi Corporation

Charlie

Lysander

Kate

Hathor

Bast

Pompeia Plotina

Admiral Ksandr

“Apep”

Previous

Index

Next