WMG / Stray (2022)

Main character is still a juvenile cat

• They didn't look like a kitten but they lived with the others which I am assuming from the same litter. Adult cats usually lives independently, not with a family. Unless it was a mother with her kittens.
  • However Adult Feral cats have been known to form colonies, that spend quite a bit of time together.
    • On the other hand, feral cats do not hunt or explore together, so it seems unlikely they're a colony... Unless you look at the WMG below.
• Plus, MC played with other cats just like a kitten would. Adult stray cats usually have no interest in such.
  • Actually, feral adults do socialize and play with other cats and even raise kittens communally (though they are more likely to do so with relatives). The existence of a colony requires an adequate food supply though. But this is the far far future, so cats could have evolved to hunt in packs like lions do. Based on appearance I would guess The Cat is either a juvenile or a female (no visible testes, no scruff/bulk that is typical of unsterilized males)
    • The cat is confirmed male.
• You get to see the cat's teeth if the cat was bitten by the Zurks while facing you, and you get to see a full view of cat's teeth in the end scene with B-12. The cat has two sets of canines: typical of juvenile cat that still have their milk teeth.

The plague that killed humanity is part of the bacteria that became Zurks

• We don't know the time period between the creation of the trash eating bacteria created by Neco Corp that became The Zurks and the plague that wiped out the humans, so it could be that the bacteria caused the pandemic in the underground city.
  • This is further supported by the complete absence of any animal life, even in areas without Zurks.

Cats are developing sentience

• The Player Cat is significantly more intelligent than even the smartest cats in real life. This is because cats in this world are becoming sentient, developing improved social ability, possessing stronger social needs and emotions, improved linguistic understanding, complex thought and problem-solving ability, etc. This is why B-12 doesn't only talk about the companions giving him hope. The cat has proven that sentient biological life will continue too.
• More point for this: B-12 who was human interacted with the cat as an equal. It's understandable for Companions who doesn't know what a cat is, but B-12 doesn't seem surprised and considered the cat's intelligence like it's a normal thing. Humanity already modified the plants and bacteria; it would be no surprise if they also uplifted animals' intelligence before they perished.

What deactivated the Sentinels?

• In the ending, Clementine is confronted by a pair of Sentinels, which deactivate as soon as they are exposed to sunlight. The cause is not stated.
  • It seems unlikely that sunlight was the direct cause, unlike the Zurks. If intense light was all it took, surely the residents of Midtown would have clued in and installed hidden spotlights or the like. More importantly, robotic infrastructure is less often vulnerable to this sort of thing.
  • It is possible that opening the city terminated their justification for existence, thus detecting sunlight set off a Logic Bomb.
  • It has been suggested that B-12 uploaded to the network and took out the Sentinels. That this happened the exact moment sunlight touched them was coincidence, but in this scenario deactivation around that time would be expected since B-12 would have been working on it while the roof opened.

Only a short amount of time passed in the game

• There is no food down there, only water, and the cat still healthy enough to do all the running and jumping. It's probably only a day or two at most.

The game is setting up a sequel or DLC

• The game ends in an open-ended way and still leaves room to close up some ties. Mainly whether the cat reunites with its family.
  • The Control Room reveals the city's name is Walled City 99. While B12 assumes humanity is extinct elsewhere, this name implies there's still other locations where humanity might have survived.
  • Hopefully it will explain whatever those eyes are in the sewers.

B12 is not the only uploaded human

• The device B12 used to upload their mind is seen in their flat, but an identical device can be seen in Antvillage. This implies the technology was widely spread; others might have also wound up trapped in the network like B12.
  • It's worth wondering if maybe part of the reason the robots evolved the way they did is that human minds trapped in the network subtly reshaped their programming.
• If there is someone else, it's probably Blazer as explained by the WMG below.

There is something off with Blazer

• Namely, the fact he is the only Companion addressing the main character as a cat. Companions in the slums doesn't know what a cat is. Some like Doc mistake us as a Zurks, while others in the midtown think it is a fuzzy robot. Not even Clementine ever addresses us as a cat.
  • There's also his decision to betray the Cat and Clementine for a reward and his smug behavior afterward. Compared the most Companions who are generally pretty easy-going and reasonable, Blazer's behavior is clearly atypical.
  • Clementine does address the player as a cat one time (in the note about clues for her location).
  • Plenty of homes and businesses in 99 have one of those "waving cat" maneki-neko statues on display. So there's cause for the Companions to have a word for "cat" in their language, even if the notion of cats as living animals rather than household knickknacks has been lost.
• The only other person who ever address us as a cat is B-12 who was human.
  • Not quite, the shopkeeper you steal the jacket from will refer to the player as a cat in one dialog.
    • Momo also refers to the player as a cat in one dialogue.
• So it's either Blazer is somehow well informed about the Outside that he knew what a cat is, or he is an uploaded human like the WMG above.

The Companion had a different way of telling time

• One of the Companion said he was more than 300 years old. Momo also makes a note of how robots gained consciousness after a long time (about 7 million years if a year is 365 days).
• However, their clocks have 16 numbers. So this would mean 'a day' for Companion is not 24 hours. We also don't know if those numbers actually mean an hour or something else.
• Unlike humans of old, they can't actually use sun or moon to tell the time either.
• In short, those 300 years old Companion (or 7 million years that takes them to be sapient) isn't actually the same as human years.
  • To support this, when B12 remembers they were human, they say they were trapped in the network for "hundreds of years". This implies a much shorter timeframe than the 7 million of the note.
• This might have been inherited from the humans. Experiments have shown that without the sun to moderate diurnal rhythm, human bodies can adapt to different lengths of days. The Control Room might have decided that a different length day would either improve productivity or decrease resource consumption, forcing a new "day" length on everyone.
• Possibly the Companions' systems require periodic moments of downtime for recharging, software updates, and other self-maintenance. Any time-measurement system or calendar they came up with, independently from humans or external environmental cycles, would probably be based on that.
• Or maybe the 2544875556-day figure is simply wrong, being an example of how the robots' knowledge of history is piecemeal and flawed.
  • Computer memory corruption often manifests as a wacky number since even a single bit flip in a higher memory location, or the memory getting overwritten by a random value tends to translate back to decimal as nonsensically large.

The scientist used to have a dog/cat

Why else would they have a vest in their flat?

• Maybe that's part of why they wanted to immediately help the Stray; they were already a cat lover in life.

The scientist was male

B12 refers him using male pronouns after all at the memory of playing video game, back when he did not know he was the scientist himself.

• B12's evident familiarity with barbershop culture, as revealed by a Memory discovered in one such location, would tend to confirm this.

The game takes place in the same world as NieR: Automata.

• Humans being wiped out by a plague. Robots replacing them as the new dominant numbers in the world. A robot helper named B-12. The fact animals still exist in the world, so cats existing isn't a stretch.
  • The Walled Cities weren't created to survive a plague; they were created to ride out an ecological collapse. The plague was likely either a result of the poor living conditions in the City or a strain of the Zurks bacteria.
• Or it takes place on the world of Wall-E. Wall-E is alone cause all the other robots are on the walled cities, and all the humans are gone from the plague or left for space.

The eyes on the walls are adult Zurks.

• Much like real-life barnacles, Zurks are mobile larvae able to move around, but once they mature, they root themselves in place and become sessile adults.
  • It could also be a hive mind, with the sessile adult Zurks relying on mobile larvae to bring them food, and the largest adult Zurk, the "big eye", controls the rest like a Hive Queen.

Animals on the outside are semi-uplifted

It was a last-ditch effort by humanity to preserve their culture. It didn't quite work because the affected creatures didn't develop the anatomical alterations required to run a technological society but it still gave them markedly increased intelligence and an innate ability to understand some human languages.

The cat's family searched for MC after they fell down

• We don't see the rest of the cats after Stray fell into the chasm down below but if you meow in Dead City, you can hear faint meows from above. So, it's possible that the other cats began searching for the player after they fell down, hoping they can find Stray by calling out to them.
  • On a related note, they probably also had to search for a new home, as the accident that caused MC's fall also bent the pipe they'd used as a bridge so far askew that they can't return to the alcove where the littermates last slept.

Zbaltazar was physically injured in the Sewer

Consider the following :

• His photo with Clementine looked different compared with his conditions now. Something must have happened to him between Slum and Antvillage... aka the Sewer.

• The manifesto said they had to go Outside at all cost, yet he stayed on Antvillage. He is already risking his life to go through the sewer, so why stop halfway?

The conclusion is: He must not have a choice. He was physically unable to continue the journey so Clementine must leave him behind.

• This also explained why Clementine stayed in Antvillage long enough to teach younger bot instead of continuing straight to Midtown. She hesitated to leave her companion behind, but eventually moved on.

• To expand on this, he was meditating because it is the only thing he can do that doesn't require a lot of physical abilities.

• Alternatively we're shown that the robots have batteries, and can overheat, like B-12. If Zbaltazar ran out of battery, or his body was destroyed to an extent by the zurgs, then the only option he has is to be uploaded to a network, like B-12; Antvillage Network to be precise. That's why he cannot move from there, and why he had limited functions when he contacted Momo.

Grandma's knitted clothing is designed to cool its wearers, not keep them warm.

• Garments made of wire filaments would tend to channel heat away from a robot's body, not trap the heat they generate internally like regular fabric. Eliot wasn't shaking because he was cold, he was shaking because his systems were on the brink of overheating due to faulty venting from his systems' internal fans. All reference to the poncho keeping him "warm" actually meant "at optimum operating temperature", i.e. warm as opposed to hot rather than cold.

Cats haven't changed since humanity hid underground because they didn't NEED to.

• Cats are already highly adapted to changeable environments. They're also intelligent, and social creatures when they feel like it. Plus, they were never domesticated and selectively bred into docility as dogs were. They merely decided to live alongside humans and haven't changed much since.

The backpack wasn't just a backpack.

• It was a wearable medical/nutritional support appliance, originally designed to keep pets that wore it fed and stimulated via painless subdermal spray-injectors. This explains why the cat isn't starving and yowling for food by the end of its journey, as well as why it doesn't keep pausing in its quest to take an hour-plus nap.

Stray takes place in the same universe as WALL•E

It just takes place either in a different area or time period (maybe both). Buyn Large and whatever company created the virus could’ve been two competing companies trying to help the world with different robots and/or “environmentally friendly” ways. After operation Clean Up was discontinued people still on earth due to not being able to make it to the ships for any variety of reasons decided to create other ways of clean up and created Zurks which led to a plague that wiped out any human survivors still on earth.

Cats are the largest surviving predatory animals, at least in the vicinity of 99.

If bigger, cat-eating predators such as eagles or coyotes were still around, there would be strong selection pressure on the feral cat population to eliminate visually-conspicuous coat colors, like MC's orange or the white markings on two of MC's three siblings. As it stands, MC's all-black sibling already has an inborn stealth advantage for sneaking up on pigeons; if bright fur also increased the odds of getting eaten, you'd expect cats to all be black or dark tabby by now.

The eyes in the sewers aren't just a freak variant of Zurks.

They're the result of another human's botched attempt to upload themselves, that'd Gone Horribly Wrong. Specifically, one of the last plague-survivors tried to use the sarcophagus which B12 recognizes in Antvillage to merge with the city network, but was attacked by a Zurk before the sarcophagus was sealed. Rather than transfer the human's consciousness into the network, the upload malfunctioned and merged their consciousness with the Zurk, and therefore, with the Zurk-bacterial colony's organic proto-Hive Mind. Driven insane by the mergence and desperate for any remotely-familiar sensation, the resulting fused entity force-grew innumerable eyeballs in the sewer Zurk-colony's Meat Moss, and assumed control over the eggs and Zurks within its range of awareness. Ravenous with Zurkish hunger and helpless to move or escape the tunnels, it still remembers what it once was. When the giant eyeball locked its gaze with B12's and flashed hypnotically, it wasn't just doing so because it was malign: it was jealous that the Scientist had succeeded where its human self had failed, and escaped its own loathsome fate.

---