Jak and Daxter/WMG

SPOILERS AHOY!

Gol and Maia are in an incestuous relationship.
Judging from the... strange way they treat each other, it's not that far off. All the dark eco they've come into contact with has physically and psychologically altered them. Who knows what kind of insanity it all may have caused, to the point where they... You get the idea.

The precursors are actually near-powerless
There's obviously the bit that they depended on a 15 year old boy to save the world, but more relating to the joke when. The only power the precursors have shown is that of.

The Dark Makers are robots.
Three versions to this WMG: Supporting Evidence:
 * All the Dark Makers are robots.
 * Some of the Dark Makers are robots.
 * All the Dark Makers are some ambiguous biological-mechanical form of being.

1. The regular Dark Maker foes more closely resemble the Precursor Robot boss fought at the climax of Act One than they resemble the Precursors.

2. Cyber-Errol: "It seems that my digital self can communicate with these poor tortured minds quite well." Directly to the Dark Makers' minds, or through some more conventional communication link?

3. Strong physical resemblance and design themes between the Dark Maker's version of the Titan suit and the Dark Makers themselves.

4. The ambiguously biological-mechanical form of the Terraformers. They have the same number of eyes, general skin design and offensive capabilities. They're even referred to as Dark Makers by Cyber-Errol.

5. Admittedly, the regular Dark Maker mooks vanish when they are killed, just like the Metal Heads, the Freedom League guards and the Marauders. The flying ones, however, explode, much like the KG Robots, and the Terraformer blasts itself apart.

6. Terraformer has thrusters under its body, as well as detachable legs.

7. Can't claim this myself, as I haven't played TLF, but apparently Daxter's Dark Eco form looks nothing like a Dark Maker (will someone please confirm this?). If so, then since Dark Makers are corrupted Precursors, but Daxter is also one and yet looks nothing like the ones seen in Jak 3, presumably the real corrupted Dark Makers either were hidden or had sent the Dark Maker ship as a probe. Or TLF is Fan Discontinuity. You decide.

Verdict?


 * I've played TLF, and I can confirm that Dark Daxter looks nothing like the Dark Makers in Jak 3. But TLF is Fan Discontinuity in most circles as well, so I guess it doesn't matter.

The events in Daxter are just Daxter spinning a yarn, and are highly exaggerated.
Implied in the last cutscene. Explains why there were no Metal Bugs or Kaeden in Jak 2 - Daxter did work as an exterminator, but he was just handling regular bugs with regular equipment to earn some cash, which he fluffed up into an epic tale of adventure about smiting mini-Metal Heads with flamethrowers and ultrasonic bug grenades in an effort to steal some limelight from Badass "Metal Head Masher" Jak. Kaeden was a rival exterminator or other enemy of Daxter who got turned into a Big Bad for the sake of his story.

The events in Daxter are just Daxter spinning a yarn, and are completely fictional.
Alternate version of the above WMG. Daxter really did spend those two years searching for Jak, and just made up a goofy, lighthearted story to tell Jak after the fact, either because he didn't want to trouble Jak with the real story of the horrible crap he went through as a tiny, nearly defenseless critter in a hostile, unfamiliar world, or because he's a braggart who can't resist telling outrageous tall tales. After all, the idea that Daxter really did forget about his best friend and spend almost two years goofing around while Jak was being tortured by Praxis? Ouch.

TLF takes place in an alternate universe that bears a coincidental resemblance to the J&D universe in some ways.
Hence the many differences in the world, character personalities.

Light eco powers in Jak 3 correspond to the powers given by all the other eco colors.
Light flight is the only power exclusive to light eco.
 * Green Eco = Healing
 * Blue Eco = Flash freeze (Jak isn't actually manipulating time, he's just cranking the blue eco speed boost Up to Eleven to get a Bullet Time effect. Notice how the screen gets tinted blue when flash freeze is used.)
 * Red Eco = Light shield (Red eco powers defensive weaponry in Jak X, including two shields that look nearly identical to Jak's light shield.)
 * Yellow Eco = The source of Jak's Very High Velocity Rounds when he shoots things while using flash freeze. Alternately, Jak might have the ability to shoot fireballs or something similar to the original yellow eco powers(he did it in the final battle of the first game, after all), but never had any need to discover/use it because the morph gun already serves that purpose.

Ottsel Dummy is Willard, the mentally challenged miner from TPL.
After Willard fell into a pool of dark eco and ended up as an ottsel, the Precursors took pity on him and allowed him to join their group, hence why Ottsel Dummy's intelligence level doesn't really match up with the Precursors' "godly beings" status.
 * And the Mayor turned into the Ottsel Leader and the Sculptor with the Muse turned into the Ottsel Surfer.
 * Oh, and Klaww is Brutter's great uncle and Gol and Maia turned into Ottsels, got a double dose, turned into the Dark Makers and got catapulted out into space, only to return to the planet many centuries later. Oh, and the rest of the village got turned into Ottsels, too, but Kleiver ate them all.

Metal Head skull gems are actually Metal Head eggs.
The skull gems do resemble the Metal Head eggs Jak destroys at the strip mine, just smaller. The eggs at the strip mine might just be unnaturally bloated because of the large amounts of eco they were gorging on. The Metal Head life cycle goes like this: after breeding, the female carries around the fertilized egg until she dies, after which the egg pops off, absorbs the eco left behind by its parent's corpse, and eventually hatches into a new Metal Head. The only Metal Heads with skull gems were the "pregnant" ones, so to speak, hence why some of the Metal Heads dropped skull gems and some didn't. The Precursors wanted Jak to collect the skull gems and turn them over to their oracles so the eggs wouldn't get a chance to hatch.
 * If a female can only lay one egg before dying, wouldn't that mean the Metal Head population would shrink and collapse? There'd only ever be one offspring for every two breeding partners. Metal Kor also presents a bit of a thorny problem to that hypothesis since he was obviously laying eggs during your boss fight against him. Unless Metal Kor was there to supply the population deficiency by laying surplus eggs to keep up the population. Oh no, wait, that causes problems in Jak 3...
 * Solution: each egg contains a large amount of hatchlings, like spider egg sacs.
 * Different solution: every Metal Head is capable of carrying eggs, and the ones who don't have gems are the ones who just gave "birth".

"Ottsel" is a word that Daxter made up himself, not the actual name for the precursor species.
I believe Daxter is the only one who actually says "ottsel" in any of the games, and that would explain both the "How does Daxter know what he was turned into if the precursors = ottsels thing is a big secret" and "Why can't a half-otter creature swim" Fridge Logic.

There are two types of ottsels: sentient "Precursor" ottsels and normal animal ottsels.
After all, if all ottsels were precursors, and the fact that the precursors are ottsels is a big secret, how would Daxter know what creature he had been turned into? Alternately, the Precursors could be the original ottsels, while the normal animal ottsels were other animals that were transformed into ottsels through eco exposure.

The precursors' goofiness(and maybe even their ottsel appearance) was an act put on to earn Jak's trust.
Jak was angry, bitter, recently traumatized and ridiculously powerful, not to mention quite experienced when it came to destroying precursor battle robots - in short, he was dangerous. Taking a cue from the one Jak was most devoted to, they imitated Daxter's antics to the best of their ability, hoping to endear themselves to Jak with the "small goofy orange creature" routine that he seemed to respond positively to and avoid Jak turning on them/relapsing into the "I'm through saving the world" mindset/otherwise screwing things up royally.

The light eco/Light Jak tamed Dark Jak.
Hence why his only use before Light Jak was mowing down legions of enemies, but after Light Jak the dark powers could be used to conveniently blast random obstacles out of the way or sneak around invisible.
 * I'm 96.5% sure that is canon...
 * "Dax... the Dark Eco.... it feels far away... I feel better."

== Daxter's role is deeper than Plucky Comic Relief; his comforting familiarity/distracting goofiness/whathaveyou was the only thing keeping Jak sane from Jak 2 onward, particularly where Dark Jak was concerned. == Pretty common Fanon, and Daxter does seem to be the only one who gets many smiles(not of the "yay, I get to go kill something/blow something up/do something dangerous" variety) out of the rather angsty Jak, not mention snapping Jak right out of Dark Jak mode in the beginning of Jak 2, and safely riding on Dark Jak's shoulder while he goes berserk on hoards of enemies. Furthermore, it's possible that, as Jak became more comfortable with this new world he found himself in, had Dark Jak balanced out with Light Jak and began to form close bonds with people other than Daxter(particularly Keira), his need for Daxter diminished, hence the rather cold, dismissive behavior towards Daxter in TLF. (...or else HIG just doesn't know how to write Jak and Daxter's relationship.)

The Lost Frontier was somehow influenced by The Edge Chronicles.
Pointy-eared Sky Pirates on the edge of the world, eh? It could be a coincidence, but there's also precursor text on Phoenix's airship that translates to "open sky", a phrase repeated constantly throughout the Edge series.

Jak will eventually become his own ancestor via time travel, making the House of Mar a loop that begins and ends with Jak.
In other words, the answer to the "Is Jak Mar or a descendant of Mar?" question is "both."
 * We know Jak is descended, or at least related to Mar. He is referred to as the "Heir of Mar" in Jak II and explicitly says in Jak 3 that he and, by extention, Jak, come from the House of Mar. So if Jak really is the original Mar, he is his own ancestor, no ifs or buts about it.
 * Plus he could just be named Mar after his original ancestor.

"Real" Precursor Orbs are actually small, coin-sized objects. They only appear large in-game to make them more convenient to collect, gameplay-wise.
Crazier things have been used as currency in real life, but paying for things with large quantities of football-sized artifacts still seems rather awkward.

Onin was once a Heroic Mime, like Jak originally was.
Furthermore, when Jak becomes old and sagely, he will become mute once more and become an Onin-like soothsayer, with Daxter his snarky interpreter.
 * Does that mean Pecker is also a Baleful Polymorph? Mind Screw alert!

Daxter is an orphan.
After all, we never saw his parents in TPL and they've never been mentioned. One would think that telling his parents would have been one of the first things they would have done after his transformation. Plus, he elected to stay in the future/present instead of going back to Sandover... wouldn't he at least have thought about seeing his family again before making that decision?

Jak's Uncle is Mar
It's very ambiguous whether Jak IS Mar or named after Mar. Personally, I like the latter the best since it gives off a more defined legacy, plus it gives Jak's Uncle a place in the actual timeline. Jak's Uncle could have been in cahoots with either Samos or the Precursors to watch over young Jak when he was sent to the future. Perhaps knowing of what's to come, he would create Haven City sometime after the 15-year-old Jak travels back to his true time period. True, there is a statue of Mar in Jak II who looks nothing like him, but I always chalked that up to people "fluffing up" the myth of Mar and creating what they assumed Mar looked like. I mean, it HAS been 300 years.
 * "I say, Jak old boy, if you happen to find any statues of your old uncle, be sure not to blow them up even if some fat man in a floaty chair tells you to, will you? Jolly good."

The Precursor's can turn into beings of Light Eco, but choose to stay as Ottsels most of the time.
When Jak turns into his Light form he looks to be composed of pure Eco/Energy, kinda like the humanoid Precursor hologram we see at various points in the series. Daxter himself is proof that one with Precursor blood can transform into another form after being exposed to large amounts of eco, much like Jak and the people of Aeropa. It's possible that the Precursors are the Light Jak equivalent to the Dark Maker's Dark Jak, and that they just use the holograms because they don't feel like staying transformed all the time, preferring their Ottsel forms.
 * This would actually help explain why the Precursor Stone was considered by Kor, the mortal enemy of the Precursors, to be a Precursor Egg, and why it was able to generate so much energy. There really was a young Precursor in the Egg, it was just in its energy form, being used as a battery.

Jak losing a number of his Dark abilities at the start of Jak 3 is caused by heatstroke sustained in the Wasteland.
Such as Dark Giant and Invulnerability. After all, according to Damas he was very close to death.