The way to Jakuri's heart....

Apparently, this is to be the 100th post on exec_harmonious. Given the purpose for which the blog was opened, I can't think of many more fitting subjects for this anniversary post than my completion of AT2, on Jakuri's route.

Spoilers for the entire game and for Jakuri's path follow, blacked out for your convenience. Don't read until you've finished the game. (Spoilers for WALL-E, too, if you were planning to go see that movie. Yes, I am comparing the two. Don't ask.)

Ever since I finished AT1 and started dwelling heavily on Mir's role in the game, I've been hoping to see a game in which Mir finally fulfils her childhood dream: the creation of a perfect world. Her dream was never a flawed or selfish one; it was only the methods by which she attempted to realise it that left something to be desired. I'd always hoped that we'd get to see her in a position to finally craft her utopia-- one much more positive, one much more pure, than one that requires genocide in order to bring it about.

From the events that transpire in AT2, one of my biggest speculations about how the series will go has, I think, been confirmed. Simply put, the AT series is, overarchingly, about Mir. It's about one person's quest for a paradise.

Born the most powerful being in the world with a heart full of hope, she was pushed so far into negativity by human mistreatment that for a time she sought to tear the world in two in order to accomplish her dream of utopia. Yet eventually she overcomes this, and continues to work for a perfect world. For large parts of the first game, we've no idea that it's her story. She's not even named. But over the span of the first and second games we see that her plan for the world's future has shaped, underpinned and intertwined with a good portion of the events of the series so far, and that the individual struggles that happen along the way, while important, are also wholly dwarfed by the sheer scale of her plan. Metafalica is small beans to her; she doesn't, ultimately, have a huge investment in its happening. She's got bigger fish to fry, much bigger than Metafalica, much bigger than saving the people of an entire continent. She wants a paradise for the world.

In AT1, she is thwarted from making it, and ends up realising that her way is not the right way. In AT2, one is created, but it won't serve all the people of the world. In AT3, presumably, she plans to finally bring her world-renewal plot to fruition... and what a wonderful world it will surely be, better than either Metafalica or Reyvateilia could ever have been, exclusive of large parts of the world as they were.

Very few other stories to date have followed such an interesting character as Mir: a good-guy-turned-bad-guy-turned-good-guy-again who dreams on a much grander scale than most of the other characters can conceive of, and who, if the plot's focus on her is anything to go by, is likely to ultimately make her dream a reality. True utopias aren't often created in RPGs. Mir is one of the few characters who I believe could do it.


Turning away from Mir's grander dreams and towards her more immediate life plans, I did rather like her ending. It's full of all the same ambiguities and conditionalities that have characterised her Cosmosphere; she's constantly at pains to point out that she has a lot of reservations regarding ever being with a human, and that it may very well not work out long term. She's not willing to say forever. She's not even willing, even at the climactic moment, to say that she loves Croix. She's making it crystal clear, in case he had any doubts whatsoever, that things won't be easy for him and she won't go easy on him. The relationship is to be conducted entirely on her terms. I wouldn't expect any less from Mir, and I'm glad she was done justice here.

I also do particularly like that the way to her heart, ultimately, was through a song. This seems particularly fitting for Mir, who needs, perhaps, more than any of them, to be related to as a Reyvateil, to be approached on her own terms rather than forced into a human-normative mould regarding relationships. Croix, in the end, couldn't win her over with human gestures, human kindness. She'd seen in the past how fake such things could be. The only way he could persuade her was through the language that could speak to her on a core level, the language she knew could not lie; the language of song.

If any scene between the two of them was truly romantic, I think it was this one. It's a love story in which a human encounters an alien being, falls in love, and, at the climax, professes that love using the alien's own methods of communication, foreign as they are to him. I think this is important, because-- if you'll allow me to delve into film/literary criticism for a spell-- there are far too many stories in which the alien character, who in symbolic terms is representative of "the Other, people who are Not Us", eventually comes around to human, "normative" ways of thinking, and thus transcends their "lesser" alien nature and becomes acceptable as a being equal to the humans. The climactic moment of these stories, often, comes when the alien finally learns to do something humanlike that we see as endearing, such as hug or kiss or say "I love you".

Take WALL-E, for example, Pixar's latest blockbuster movie about robots in love. Even though neither of the main characters are human, or have reason to act in human ways, the climatic moment of romance comes when the more alien robot is able to imitate the more human-like robot. At first, she doesn't understand the meaning of holding hands; but WALL-E, who's watched human movies, teaches her that this sentiment is a great way to express her feelings. When she finally does so, abandoning her alien-like personality temporarily in exchange for a more human-normative one, we recognise this as a good thing, a beautiful, positive moment. She's changed. She's become more appealing to us-- because she's become more human.

Now, I rather liked WALL-E, don't get me wrong. I thought it had a lot of good feminist messages in it, for one thing. I'm just pointing out that this is a trope that's endemic to Hollywood, perhaps to our current understanding of narrative in general, and that it's not a particularly good thing. If the unfamiliar always has to become like the familiar before it can be seen as "good", that sends the message that those who aren't like most of us, those who seem strange and foreign and Other, must succumb to our way of thinking, to the normative, dominant culture, to be acceptable.

And so I liked AT2's twist on this message. All Croix's human words will not woo Jakuri, nor does she particularly want to be wooed. She's not eager to concede to him; she's not a savage looking to be made civilised. She's perfectly content to remain as she is, and she'll quite happily move on without him if he doesn't do something. He is the one who has to prove himself worthy of her, not the other way around. He is the one who has to change, to show that he understands her way of life, because she will not bow to him, not one inch.

So he sings to her, in Hymmnos. Because that's the language she understands best. Song is the energy that drives her life. She's not just a human with an install port; she's a Reyvateil, through and through, an utterly alien being. Croix will have to understand that if he wants to have any chance of building a life with her. And so he shows her that he does.

And while I'm still not convinced that any human is truly a good match for her, if Croix did anything, in the whole of the game, to prove that he comes anywhere even close to being potentially worthy of her-- to prove that he's even in the ball park-- it was that. And I liked that, because I wouldn't have wanted her to settle for anything less.

(It was a nice song, too.)


Also, note that I probably won't be updating Reyvablog until Monday, due to generally being busy with personal stuff (and having to work out precisely where the current plot arc is going). Expect the next post then. :)