Lore thread

Hey, I just noticed that in one level in Adventures, the player leaves the Captain behind whilst some Toads are surrounding both of them and in the newest level in the Easter Update, it reveals that he was held prisoner. Huh, subtle storytelling!
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Let's talk about Dark Rayman.

"Who?" you may ask. Why, I'm referring to the concept that the developers have tug-of-warred with for far too long: who and what is Rayman's evil doppelgänger? Allow me to quote myself from the Rayman Adventures topic:

Sabertooth said:
Rayman 1: Dark Rayman/Bad Rayman is a spell created by Mister Dark. Obviously a bad guy.
Rayman Origins: Dark Rayman is a character created by Mister Dark, and he's a good guy now, or at least acts like one.
Rayman Legends: Nevermind, that guy from Origins was just a troublemaking doppelganger named Raymesis. The REAL Dark Rayman is in Invaded levels and will chase you as he did in Rayman 1.
Rayman Adventures: Actually, that guy from Legends was just a big movie fan. Also his name is Shadow Ray, even though we explicitly called him Dark Rayman before.
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Quite a confusing scenario, I'd say. And this isn't even going into the Dark Rayman from Rayman Arena; that, we'll get into later. Now to quote Bradandez from the same topic:

Bradandez said:
Maybe every Rayman doppleganger reforms to being a good guy after their "creator" is defeated? They have no master, so they can be their own person.
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This, I feel, is the easiest solution. After breaking free from the control of their respective wizard creators, each clone abandons the title of "Dark Rayman" and takes on a different name of their choosing. This explanation leaves us with three separate characters:

Raymesis, the evil clone created by Mister Dark who appears as a villain in Rayman, Rayman GBC, and the edugames; and as a playable, seemingly benevolent character in Origins, Jungle Run, Legends, Fiesta Run, and Adventures. He still has a dislike for Rayman, but after the final defeat of his master (probably in Rayman GBC) no longer has ultimately malevolent goals and is willing to set aside personal hatred to fight against a common enemy.

Shadow Ray, the evil clone created by The Magician who appears as a villain in Legends and as a playable, completely benevolent character in Adventures. His master, The Magician (all five of him), was sent to a hell planet in outer space to be tortured for eternity, thus effectively defeated for good. He has a love for cinema, which is why his body is completely black rather than having different colors like Raymesis.

Dark Rayman, the evil clone who has only appeared in Rayman Arena and has no backstory whatsoever. I invite anyone to help me out with this one, because I've got nothing to say really.

Now, I hope that many will read this explanation and see its merits. I don't think this will remain consistent with future games or even affect Raywiki (which still somehow refers to the villain in Legends as "Bad Rayman", implying that the educational games take priority over the latest main installment in the series), but it will work just fine presently for all us continuity nerds.
 
The problem with RayWiki is that we really need to keep speculation to a minimum, and present things as is, conclusions are left to the reader. I agree that this whole thing with flip-flopping Rayman's clones is getting rather crazy, and we should probably have another rethink as to how we approach the matter.
 
I definitely don't think that this theory should be incorporated into Raywiki. I just think it has a problem of prioritizing old names over new ones--"Bad Rayman" is a horribly outdated moniker that has been long since contradicted by official main series games. That's been a pet peeve of mine for several years now, but I know there's not a lot I can do to convince the higher-ups.
 
Hmm, I wonder if it'd be best to do as we did with Raymesis. We keep the Dark Rayman article about any non-sentient spell clones (including the DarkRay from Legends), and we have another article about the sentient characters (so a separate one for ShadowRay), and note the potential of a relationship. It's not a proposition I like from a lore standpoint, but I feel it's probably the least speculative.

As for the theory, I definitely like it, headcanon accepted.
 
Personally, I would view Bad Raymans from Rayman 1 and Origins/Legends as different; the Bad Rayman from Rayman 1 doesn't quite resemble the Bad Rayman (Raymesis?) from Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends. Besides, the backstory would make zero sense; Ubisoft merely feels that they need to include an 'evil' counterpart to Rayman without caring for lore at all. Dark Rayman - from Rayman M / Arena - is wholly different too.
 
It seems a bit silly to treat all of Rayman's evil duplicates as distinct characters. I'd just consolidate them all to one article, Dark Rayman, and discuss each manifestation in chronological order, leaving the character's nature up to the reader's interpretation. "It is unclear whether the Bubble Dreamer confuses Raymesis with Bad Rayman or simply makes a joke about their resemblance"? Come on, the authorial intent is crystal-clear. The idea that the one in Adventures dyed himself in tribute to classic films is just a contradictory origin story, and there are loads of those - we didn't create a separate article for the version of Rayman who got his helicopter power when he was attacked by a parasitic wig, did we?
 
That would be fine if Raymesis had disappeared after RO and we could just assume he was retooled into the Invaded antagonist, but he stuck around. The fact that there are two conceptually-identical characters coexisting in the same game with no explanation is what makes this confusing, not the conflicting backstories. I am doing my best to view this from a speculative, wide-eyed fan perspective rather than a black-and-white corporate one, because it's rather obvious from an outside viewpoint that it's inconsistent unexplainable fuckery.

Raywiki I believe should include all interpretations of "Rayman's evil clone" under one article but still treat them like separate characters, as Raymesis and Shadow Ray physically appear in the same game as separate entities. But that's neither here nor there.
 
Sabertooth said:
Raywiki I believe should include all interpretations of "Rayman's evil clone" under one article but still treat them like separate characters, as Raymesis and Shadow Ray physically appear in the same game as separate entities.
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That doesn't make them different characters. The Magician physically appears as five separate entities in Legends. Regardless, there's no reason for the article to make judgements beyond simply collating the information provided by the games themselves. Dark Rayman is a hazy archetype that manifests in slightly different ways, and the current solution of requiring the reader to cycle through four different articles to get all the relevant information (diluted with speculation and rationalisations) is far from ideal.
 
Sabertooth said:
Raywiki I believe should include all interpretations of "Rayman's evil clone" under one article but still treat them like separate characters, as Raymesis and Shadow Ray physically appear in the same game as separate entities. But that's neither here nor there.
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this.
 
Master said:
Hmm, I wonder if it'd be best to do as we did with Raymesis. We keep the Dark Rayman article about any non-sentient spell clones (including the DarkRay from Legends), and we have another article about the sentient characters (so a separate one for ShadowRay), and note the potential of a relationship. It's not a proposition I like from a lore standpoint, but I feel it's probably the least speculative.
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As I told boombo by PM, this is my suggestion.

Clearly, Bad Rayman is a spell, which is cast in the original game and Legends by different wizards. It has no persistence, as it dies when Rayman dies or finishes the level, and therefore is essentially different from the new characters that may look identical to it but actually have a backstory (even though these sound more like jokes than actual stories).
 
I think at this point I would go for an article for the same character but with different approaches from game to game. "In Rayman 1 he is Bad Rayman and does x", "In Rayman Origins he is playable and has got this", etc. What I wrote is merely indicative, not really something to write like this but hopefully it shows my idea. I think different articles for, allegedly, different characters would confuse people even more than anything else.
 
Uhm, I've been thinking of this quite a lot recently since I re-started playing Rayman 3 a looot more....
Has there been another hoodlum attack before the one in Rayman 3? I mean, in the heart of the world the Grand Minimus says "Just as I thought, André isn't dead" which might mean that this is not the first time André appeared in the glade, and it also would explain how they got an entire hideout with all kind of stuff, which is of course impossible to build in one day (And Rayman 3 takes place in a single day if I recall) so it could be possible that the GBA version of Rayman 3 happened before the console version, and since in the end of Rayman 2 Razorbeard escaped from the pirate ship and is seen flying in the credits, it makes sense that in the events before Rayman 3 for the GBA he created yet another army of Robo-Pirates that he then decided to use to capture André.
 
What if Andrè was an evil spirit, a different kind of nightmare, that Polokus managed to trap inside the essence of a Red Lum, so that he wouldn't have caused trouble? Or at least, the god tried to transform him in a positive spirit (like the Lums), but Andrè's malevolence was too powerful even for the god and he managed to escape from his fake body? It is a theory that I had in mind since when I started to understand the world of Rayman a bit further then what I though as a child.
 
That's an interesting theory and it might explain how André first appeared in the glade, nice :)

Also, this is something I've been wondering for quite a lot, why the heck is most of Rayman's lore told through sites?
I mean, it's not that bad but most of these informations get lost in time, for example there's a lot of important stuff told only on the sites:
R2
Operation Kidnap and the galactic Circus
Ly being a feline creature and a Princess
The island of Phris
Polokus having a wife and the teensies being his sons and daughters
R3
Great Spirit Palmito
The story of Begoniax and her beauty potions
The family of Razoff
 
I agree, it's a shame that we don't have the possibility to explore the lore a bit further. There are so many interesting factors hidden in the whole game.
It would also help to explore the characters and develop them in a new way.
 
BUMP-itty-BUMP-itty-BUMP

I'm concerned about what appears to be a prevalent interpretation of Razoff's in-game biography, at least judging by the wiki. Let me quote it here:
Rayman 3 said:
A master predator, the son of Count Zaroff – a most dangerous game-hunter, if ever there was one! – and grandson of Nimrod and Artemis, Razoff holds the chair of Cynegetics at the University of Tyr-Kainkou. At least, that's what he claims...
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Now, it seems that that stuff about Zaroff, Nimrod and Artemis is taken at face-value, and so the "that's what he claims" is taken to apply only to the bit about the university chair. That doesn't feel natural to me. When I read it, taking into account that all the "information" is in one sentence, I get the strong feeling that it's all hogwash. The fact that Nimrod and Artemis are mythological figures adds to this suspicion.

Now, I know there's a Shoedsackovskaïa family, with a hunting tradition, but I really don't think it has members named Zaroff, Nimrod or Artemis.
 
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