It's perfectly valid to talk about original intent, of course--but I think that requires pretty definite evidence. One needs to find a fact or feature that's largely unexplainable in any theory that *doesn't* allow for original intent. Then you have no choice but to accept that something was changed along the line. If you don't restrict your original-intent theories to these special cases, it's too easy to start making them right and left: "Hey, I bet everyone in the game was named Shirley, until they changed that!" Always has to be some way to rank theories in terms of plausibility, after all. God told me so.
That probably doesn't make much sense, so a couple of examples of what I'm trying to say:
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Fact set A: The Watcher has a Shade named Mazzarin working for him, and we know that in the TFL manual, Shades are said to be undead Avatara.
Fact set B: In Myth II and GURPS, Shades don't seem to be undead Avatara, but rather evil archmages who volunteer for Shadehood while still alive; and furthermore, no one in either game seems to have noticed that Mazzarin was made into a Shade.
Possible resolution: The facts from set A are remnants of an earlier story in which all or most of the Dark sorcerers are formerly Light, turned in life or in death to serve Balor and his predecessors. In the finalized story, the Dark became more of a persistent, impersonal, political stance--whether you were independent or served a greater power, living or dead, human or inhuman, you could be aligned with the Dark.
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Fact set A: In a TFL postgame pic, we see Alric holding Balor's head up before a cheering army. We also see his mangled body fly past in the final cutscene.
Fact set B: The pregame map suggests that Alric teleported the Devoid party directly from Rhi'anon--where there was no large Light army--and we know he didn't come with them to the Devoid. And, of course, he survived.
Possible resolution: Originally, TFL's plot featured The Head and/or The Deceiver and/or Soulblighter systematically destroying every other powerful character in the game--just as in the Black Company. TFL was to end with Alric dead and only The Deceiver and perhaps Soulblighter left alive on either side. In the finalized plot, however, Alric became the unequivocal hero, surviving to be the main good guy in Myth II once more.
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That's the sort of thing I'm talking about; cases where we almost *had* to invoke changes in storyline, because the alternative was having that mangled corpse be Alric's clone, or having that Shade be Mazzarin Jr. :-) I really don't think there's that kind of pressure in theories about the Head.
--SiliconDream
