Friday 31 October 2008

A realisation I thought I'd share....

Excerpted from a comment I posted over here:

[...] for me, what's interesting about AT1 is that in some ways it's really Mir's story-- Mir's and Lyner's, a story about how he grows to realise what she used to know but forgot, and how the two of them bring that knowledge together to change the world for the better.

I find that a pretty potent realisation, since while it's obvious to anyone that the story of Ar Tonelico is about realising that conflict only begets more conflict and that the only way to escape the cycle is to put our weapons down, the particular symmetry being employed here is something I hadn't quite noticed before.

Two people, at the beginning of Ar Tonelico, exist in very different worlds, mutually unable to understand each other, mutually antagonistic. Yet they both have the capacity to understand each other perfectly; they just need to realise that. Lyner has to learn how; and when he decides to reach out to Mir he learns, through Harmonious, that she'd already known all along. They both, in some sense, grow towards each other, and what had seemed like an unbreachable gulf at the beginning of the game turns out to be complete understanding.

Just another of the little ways in which I think AT is surprisingly well-done.

2 comments:

Velivolum said...

Your interpretation makes a lot of sense because, if I'm not mistaken, the function of Harmonious is just that--to create a level of sympathy between two people and essentially "harmonize" their feelings, thus mollifying conflict. Is this part of what you were trying to get at?

...So there's an AT community on LJ now? Awesome. (I'm subtlesword over there, though I tend to lurk most of the time, haha.)

Ayulsa said...

Yes, that's right. That and the fact that Harmonious was crafted out of her love for humanity are pretty strong indicators that she intended to use the song to bring about peace.

It's pretty much my belief that's she's always wanted a world where no one would be mistreated and everyone would happy; at first she planned to create that using Harmonious, and then when they took that away from her after years of mistreatment, she snapped and decided to create Reyvateilia by force, eliminating the human race, who she saw as fundamentally cruel and only likely to misuse Reyvateils if they were allowed to live.

A lot of Mir's dialogue, if you choose the bad ending, also demonstrates that she understands perfectly well, in her more lucid moments, that conflict only leads to conflict. See my post on it here. It's a pretty harrowing conversation to engage in shortly before you then strike her down without mercy.