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waffliesinyoface · 2 years ago

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okay so, foreword: i havent actually finished Atelier Ryza 2, i don’t even have the full party yet, so some of this might be actually brought up and/or contradicted at some point and I just haven’t gotten to it yet. But will that stop me? No.

putting this under a readmore because, uh. I meant to just type up one or two paragraphs but then it got away from me!! Whoops!!! This might be completely incomprehensible to people who haven’t played Atelier Ryza but if you haven’t noticed I’m insane and this blog is my tool for screaming into the void.

alright, so, in the time* of Atelier Ryza, alchemy is a forgotten art. Initially, I was like “Oh, it’s probably just not a thing on Kurken Island, because it’s a small farming town in the middle of fucking nowhere, but then in the second game Ryza moves to the capital city and nobody knows what the fuck it is. When you explore the ruins of various fallen civilizations, it’s referred to as “The Art That Transcends Human Knowledge” by ghosts of fallen explorers. It has been lost for a long, long time.

*(i’m not sure if the atelier games are set in alternate time periods or alternate universes or alternate continents or what, but afaik, with the exception of Pamela, they don’t interact outside of their respective series)

The only other person in the trilogy to know what alchemy is is Empel, who was explicitly the Royal Alchemist of a kingdom in the past. They don’t say which it was, but I’m like 99% sure this is a Van Hohenheim situation where he's like. Stupidly fucking old. I don’t think it was the Klint Kingdom specifically, because he’s still looking for the gates to the underworld, and if he were a high ranking member in their society, he would’ve known where they were? But given the Klint Kingdom was the last major civilization before Ryza’s time, and nobody knows what alchemy is now, I’m willing to bet he predates them.

Given his animosity for anything involving the Klint Kingdom though – him refusing to use the recipe for the prosthetic because they made it, the way he takes pleasure in atomizing any Klint ruins he finds in the Underworld (in the DLC), etc – I’m going to bet that he feels responsible for them, in some way.

Canonically, what we know is that at some point in the past, he was the Royal Alchemist of an unspecified kingdom. He made some explosives for someone without knowing what they were going to do, got implicated in the coup d’etat they attempted with those explosives, and has been wandering since then. At this point, he’s likely not as naive anymore, but he’s not exactly bitter yet.

Here’s where we get into speculation: based on his appearance/personality/fundamental desire to help people, I’m willing to bet that he was an actual teacher at some point. He stumbled onto the Klint Kingdom in its early stages, saw that they didn’t have alchemy, so he taught people how to use it so that they could better their lives. (Like, for example, giving them the ability to desalinate sea water and make it drinkable.) The Klint Kingdom becomes a major alchemical power. Which means they use it for everything - not just tools, but weapons, and armor, and portals to other worlds. He doesn’t just hate the Klints for colonizing the Underworld, he hates them because he made it possible for them to do that.

There’s a time period between the end of the Klint Kingdom and when he met Lila. Given the way he reacted to their recipe for a prosthetic arm, I’m willing to bet he wasn’t just wandering around in that time. Alchemy caused the coup d’etat that led to his exile? Alchemy led to both the rise and fall of Klint? Fuck alchemy. No one gets to learn it anymore. He’ll go to every castle, every library, every fortress he can find, and burn it all to the ground. Clearly, humans can’t be trusted with this.

There’s a possible play on words in japanese, even – alchemy is 錬金術 - renkinjutsu - whereas “forbidden technique” is 禁術 - kinjutsu. So, you could theoretically* write alchemy as 錬禁術 ? IE: swap out the kanji for gold with the one for forbidden. I don’t think they ever actually do that, but like. The potential is there.

(*i only know a tiny smattering of japanese, forgive me if this actually mangles the pronunciation)

At this point, Empel is like. Extremely bitter. Yeah, he’ll go around saving people when shit hits the fan, but he’s not going to be friends with them. If people ask, he’ll tell them he’s an alchemist, but he doesn’t explain what that means. People see him use bombs and he’s like “its magic. don’t worry about it.” He distances himself from townsfolk, he has contingency plans for getting run out of town, etc. Whether that’s because he thinks people are scumbags or because he thinks of himself as poison who deserves it is up to interpretation.

So, when he sees Ryza and co. getting their asses handed to them by a giant weasel, he’s obviously gonna help out, right? Just throw one bomb at it, then carry on. No reason to stick around, no reason to get attached, etc. But then... Ryza comes back and asks about alchemy. He sends her off on a fetch quest to get her out of his hair, and this doesn’t even dissuade her a little bit. She’s bright and cheerful and a friendly face who doesn’t immediately regard him with suspicion so he’s not going to tell her to piss off, but he’s not exactly open with her either. So he “teaches” her alchemy. He doesn’t have the heart to tell her no, but surely if she thinks she just doesn’t have the aptitude for it then she’ll give up and go on her way. (Gameplay wise, this just leads into the minigame, but I like to imagine that in-universe it’s a little more complicated than that.) He doesn’t actually explain how to synthesize anything, he just makes a green supplement and says “Okay your turn.”

But Ryza apparently does have a natural talent for understanding the process intuitively, and succeeds. As a teacher, he’s thrilled. She has talent. She could be great. The satisfaction of seeing a pupil do good. But as a person? He can’t.

His official explanation for why he can’t teach her any more is that his arm doesn’t work and therefore he can’t do anything other than simple alchemy, so she should just learn as she goes. But he doesn’t need to be able to do it to teach it, teaching is largely theoretical. The real reason he doesn’t teach her is because she’s bright, and cheerful, and friendly, and he doesn’t want to taint her. He doesn’t want her to inherit his legacy. She’s got talent and drive and passion and (in his mind) unlike him, she is a good person. So aside from a few pointers and tips, he refuses to actually teach her his methods.

When she makes the prosthetic for him he’s initially furious because he knows that recipe, he knows where she got it from, and he’s despairing because it means she’s following in the footsteps of the Klint Kingdom and it’s all his fault because even that was too much. And then Lila essentially slaps him and tells him to stop being such a fucking dumbass, because no, she’s not. It doesn’t matter where the knowledge came from, she made it because she wants to help people, and it’s what you do with it that matters.

This is both her telling him that he doesn’t have to worry about the tragedies of the past coming about again because Ryza’s not the kind of person who’d let that happen, and also telling him that it’s not his fault. He wanted to help people, and it blew up in his face, but that doesn’t stop him from being a good person too. So shut the fuck up, fix your arm, and stop sulking, you big baby. (she loves him, but he is. frustrating. at times.)

At the end of the game, when you get the core of the queen and can make the red stone, he forgets himself and gets excited because imagine the possibilities. The Klint Kingdom used that to make so many of the relics of antiquity, after all. (My justification for why he didn’t know how they pulled it off was because even if he was the progenitor of alchemy for the kingdom, they still went on to research independently after he taught them.) So for a moment, he forgets what happened in the past, and goes mad science mode.

BUT. RYZA’S A GOOD PERSON. Recreating the marvels of the Klint Kingdom with the same power source? The thing made from the queen after devouring large swaths of land (and people)? Absolutely not. If she used it to try and recreate the tech of that era, it would mean the tech would be dependent on the same source. You can’t do alchemy without gathering materials, and if the things she makes require that as a material, the pattern would repeat again, and the mistakes of the past would be repeated.

She’ll use it to fix the power source on Kurken Island, but only because it needs to be fixed right now, and that’s what it runs on. But it’s only a stopgap measure until she can figure out how to make something better. No one else knows what the generator runs on, no one else will know how it was done, and it won’t happen again because she’s going to make something better her own way. So the Klint Kingdom had fancy artifacts? Fuck it, who needs ‘em.

If he had taught her alchemy, she might have fallen for the same pitfalls that past alchemists were prone to, because it clearly already works. But she’s spent months coming up with her own recipes, her own methods, so the idea of falling back on someone else’s work, especially when it leads to this? Nope. Not gonna happen. The student has surpassed the teacher. And Empel couldn’t be more proud.

#Atelier Ryza #Empel Vollmer #Reisalin Stout #Atelier Ryza 1 Spoilers #i did that thing again where I went into a fugue state and was unable to stop until my train of thought finished #me: ''im going to write about this character i like''#''shouldnt take more than 10 minutes''#me; over an hour later: ''ah. i did it again.''

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