!! CAUTION !! SPOILERS!!!! DO NOT READ ON IF YOUR STILL PLAYING THE GAME.

This may not make total sense, but ive just found some interesting themes and ideas since finishing the game..a key theme being 'Hollywood Vision.' keep this in mind whilst reading.

Something i read from the games writer saying jason is an unreliable narrator and dont take things that happen at face value. and madness/sanity is a key theme in the game. you never view cutscenes from outside of jasons 1st person view or any of the game for that fact (which was intentional apprently). Madmen arent aware their mad, they seem totally sane and incontrol. ? hurmm? maybe i see why you never leave his view?

plus the game kinda goes out of its way to make sure you think jason and his mates are shallow white yuppy western trustafrians from sunny california. to me it felt like they wanted you not to like or really care for them.

so it got me thinking , maybe alot of the things that happen are slightly exagerated or morphed by jason, possibly through all these drugs and being put through a initial traumatic exprience. im still however unsure exactly what could of been imagined or not..but alot of the story did seem over hollywoodised and abit cliched at times, even tho it worked and was fun. kinda of how a young cocky white guy from sunny calfroinia might imagine or fantasize in such a situation, or would like to believe.

for example: its all about you! everything rests on you. white young cocky western outsider is in line to become the leader of a native ancient tribe and save them and lead to glory and freedom. whilst having sex with some hot women along the way too. its all been made obviously racist in a way and cliched. this is where the writers where saying dont take it at face value. so somewhere around here i believe jason is thinking alot of this up, and the fact it is soo cliched its almost like he's taken it from watching too many hollywood movies.

one i know for sure when this is happening is when your in the helicopter with your bro at the end and land of valkary starts playing. thats straight out of apocolypse now, like literally. and from reading about the depth of this games story they wouldnt be soo blunt to do something soo obvious for sakes sake. also when you give a 'brave heart' speach to the tribe about leading them, im sure that never happened. this was not long after vaas had poisned you. hes definately seeing situations as a fantasized american hollywood dream.

Im still not 100% with exactitys but the more ive been thinking about it and reading some interviews from the games writers things are making sense, but not always on the same level, which can confuse me when im making links. but i think it was intentional as they said they wanted people to be discussing different theories for a while after the game. they also said paying attention to the c.s carrol quotes at the time there given with certain story moments. theres one line i kinda remember from alice in wondrland is where alice says: but how do i know whos mad?"the chesire cat replys , " but you have f*ck/kill/find them,". that last word quickly switching. a little glimpse at your potential fate? i thought that was pritty cool.

One thing before i move on too. theres something weird about the boss fights. im still totally in the dark about whats happning, but i know summit weird is going on, apart form maybe the vaas one which i explain below. are you tripping off your nuts off, as everything goes odd in the room. even more weirdly after you kill hoyte and come around theres like 15 corpses in the room? what the hell actually happened? and the fight with buck, disco lights start flashing. it dont add up?

in someway i think buck has slightly been exagerated or even made up by jason to some extent. becuase when your told to find a man called buck. jason goes, "his name is buck , and he likes to f***." then later on you find out hes been sh*gging and raping your mate. coincidence? planted an idea in your own head? maybe jason preconcieves this idea and just imagines thses extra hollywood film nastitys. also he keeps popping up at random times whilst on your treausre hunt quest, then just dissapears. jasons all like "have you got a tracker on me or summit." but buck never replys.

Vass..

a friend said whilst playing he thought they could be the same person, but insome ways they are. but more youve led a mirrored path with differences.

Vaas was a native corrupted by an outsider(hoyte). Jason is an outsider , corrupted by a native (citra) for instance.

Vaas was in line to be the ultimate warrior and lead the natives. That was until he found out the truth (being raped and sacraficed by your sis) and decided to side with hoyte instead of killing him. the whole thing sending him mental but even more so for working with hoyte! thats what i meant about him speaking the most truth. he knows your being played and your path as he did the same thing. he keeps giving you clues. he says your/we're f*cked!!

remember the trippy bit just before you fight him you see yourself flicking between vaas, even where citra is riding you it switches to vaas. hence he and you are/where leading the same path. thats why citra calls vaas 'the coward' for not seeing it through.

Also i dont think vaas is dead. just beofre you trip out he stabs you with a knife that has drugs on , then walks off.i think thats all that happened. then you begin trippin. also did you notice the knife was the ancient one you just gave to citra.? hurrm? then you apprently kill him, but you never see the dead body and just wake up strangely at citra's palace and she's all like "he's dead." sounds fishy to me. remember after yuo supposdly kill him . hes lying on the floor next to you, then his eyes flcik open and the sequence ends. also the boss fights all have something weird about them , but this is the only one where you dont see a body afterwards.

ive got a theory vaas and citra maybe conjured a plan both getting what they wanted(the knife being a clue?). vaas wanted out from being a puppet to hoyte , so fakes his death. citra wants you to think he's dead becouase you want revenge and otherwise you'd never see killing hoyte through which is what citra wants. rthis game i believe is about you thinking its all about you and your destiny crap, but infact the whole time your just getting played.

My whole theory makes abit of sense with the endings , mostly the second i discuss. firstly , you think your mates are tw*ts, and in hollywood films these types of idiots are usually get killed off, or the audience wants them to be killed. but when it comes down to it, its harder than it seems . not as good in my opinion but i get at what they where trying to say with it. as i can imagine people playing this game and throughout saying i dont give a sh*t about these d*cks. there all annoying and shallow, yet after the whole thing end up saving them.

the 2nd option to apprently live with citra an be the ultimate warrior seems intruiging to pick and probably the more hot headed all f*ck yeah type would choose. and the consequneces are abit of a middle finger to you for being soo big headed. because infact you were delusional and were being used like a puppet. hense killing hoyte , getting raped then no longer needed ,so killed. its like " you win! f*ck you, you stupid american tw*t! I never needed saving"!

Id be intrigued to see what others have to say or add to my ideas.

@HarknessRed: Having just completed the game today I was overall extremely disappointed with the story. I felt it was the weak factor in an otherwise great game. The exploration, the world, the combat - it all felt great, however I put alot of stock in stories within games and this just fell flat. I didn't care about Jason as a character, Vaas was a great character that was squandered far earlier then he should have been.

I can see where you're coming from with your theories, however - I would have felt a lot better about the story over all, had they actually explained themselves. It's all well and good us sitting down and saying 'well maybe Jason is crazy or hallucinating' but right now - its just poor story direction and gapping holes in the plot. A better resolution would have been to pull back the curtain later in the game and show us why some of this stuff happened the way it did. The 'boss fights' with Vaas, with Buck and with Hoyt all made no sense and if it's for the sake of DLC (which personally I doubt). I'll be very disappointed.

I really enjoyed the Hoyt card game set up, the way things were going 'your way' and then suddenly you are left without a chance and you have little to no hope of survival - it was a great moment...then that was thrown out the window and boom - random boss fight in a dark room and then 15 corpses in a room? I just left it thinking, well the story was the last thing on the developers minds. As I said, I see where you're coming from, and I'd like to believe there is more to this game then what we have - but with the credits rolling - I don't think that resolution will be found.

@HarknessRed: I think you won't get very far by trying to figure out what is the "real" stuff and what is mental. From what I've read from the developers, it doesn't seem like they made some psychological puzzle for audiences to figure out a la Memento or Inception. They just wanted to make a trippy adventure with wild visuals. If something sounded conceptually cool then they put it in and didn't worry too much about the story.

Btw, you may have figured this out already but picking to side with Citra at the end is by far the more interesting option. I recommend you play that ending if you haven't already and then read this very good if somewhat depressing article: Far Cry 3 Aims at Cliches But Ends Up Criticizing Gamers

Edit: Holy crap, I just read an interview with Jeffrey Yohalem, one of the developers. You can read it for yourself but here's the tldr. He thinks that the game is really deep and all the sequences have hidden meanings. It sounds like they were shooting for some very high minded stuff. I still think it's incoherent as hell and even they couldn't pull off what they were going for. But hey, the combat was amazing.

The "Buck likes to fuck" line was a Kill Bill reference. And I'm not sure that I'd describe the Citra ending as "rape".