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the-insomniac-emporium · 3 years ago

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Mia Deserved Better: An Analysis of RE8's Themes/Symbolism

Foreword: I would like to thank @lepusrufus for posting about both Mia and Miranda, and at one point directly saying that Mia deserved better, which is a large part of what caused me to start examining her role in the canon story. Now, I will say that this post, like some of my previous explorations of Village (such as my attempt to determine Donna's age), will not be the best organized. My ADHD makes such things rather difficult for me. However, I have tried more than usual, and have broken up this "essay" into several distinct sections. Still, I am worried that my thoughts will not be as concise or coherent as they were inside my head.

Under read-more for length and spoilers for RE8: Village.

Introduction:

Village is, inarguably, about parenthood. Is it a horror game? Yes. Is it also science fiction? Also yes. But is it still, at its core, a story, and therefore contains imagery, symbolism, and themes? Yes. Now, you may be wondering what this has to do with Mia deserving better. My proposal is as follows: While Village is overall about parenthood, it is more about motherhood than fatherhood. Furthermore, Mia's background + actions from the previous game tie her story directly with Mother Miranda's, making their potential interactions massively important to the story... and could have served the theme beautifully. The missed potential in her involvement in the story is honestly a little bit absurd.

Now, let's examine each of the Four Lords + their sections, as the beginning of analyzing the game's theme.

Lady Dimitrescu + Castle:

Ah, perhaps the clearest (albeit unimportant) bits of theme within the whole game. We are immediately presented with another parent, with three daughters she loves very, very much. Initially they work as a team to capture Ethan, easily overpowering him. When they do split up, each still has dialogue regarding their family members. Each of the daughters expresses a desire to be like their mother/make their mother proud. Lady Dimitrescu herself gets very upset every time one of her daughters perishes, and delivers some important dialogue about this in her final confrontation with Ethan.

To paraphrase, Lady D says that Ethan has done something unforgiveable, caused damage that can never heal, and deserves to die before his daughter. That last part is interesting, in the sense that Lady D seems to believe that outlasting your own child is a fate so terrible that she would not wish it upon anyone, including the person who killed her daughters.

Throughout her dialogue and actions, Lady D serves as an important figure of a living mother. What do I mean by that? Well, the only other mothers we see in game are Mia and Miranda. The former doesn't show up until almost the end of the game (seeing as the "Mia" at the start is not actually the real Mia), while the latter does not have a living child, and her behavior has (presumably) changed quite a bit since that loss. As Ethan goes through Castle Dimitrescu, he watches (he causes) Lady D to go through what Miranda did all those decades ago. When we see her loss, when we experience her loss, it is something we connect with, even comparing it (as Lady D does) to Ethan's loss of Rose.

For the more visual side of symbolism, we can turn to Lady Dimitrescu herself. She is very tall, is visibly older than the majority of the Village cast, and has a fairly classic (old-school) motherly look. Everything about her reinforces her position as an example of a mother, especially when she's with her daughters and becomes such a strong figure of protection. Her height allows her to seem the caretaker for her children, even though they are scary/intimidating in their own right.

Donna Beneviento + Waterfall House:

Yes, the baby/fetus/monstrosity is part of this. No, it is not the only bit of thematic work in this section of the game.

To begin, you can find out that Donna is officially the adopted daughter of Mother Miranda. Her birth parents are dead, implied to be from especially tragic causes (more than is the norm when it comes to "orphan making"), and she has suffered greatly from it. We see that she has been seemingly neglected by Miranda, and is incredibly isolated. The tragedy of her loss, along with the consequences presented by it, are something to keep in mind further down the road, when we inevitably deal with Ethan's own death.

One of the consequences of the environment Donna was raised in is, arguably, her reliance on Angie. While interpretations of their exact relationship (aka how much control Donna actually has at any given point) vary, the two very clearly have something akin to a mother/daughter vibe. Alternatively an older sister/younger sister sort of thing. This shows in the way that Donna holds/carries Angie, as well as the contrast in their demeanors. Moreso, the fact that Donna gave a part of herself to create Angie is almost enough to make the symbolism nonnegotiable.

We also see that Donna has a strong understanding of family/family dynamics, through the way that she uses her powers to manipulate Ethan. She dissects his connections to Mia and Rose, taunts him with the lengths he's willing to go to save his child, then shows him a grotesque version of parenthood: The aforementioned fetus monster. Does the monster represent Ethan's fears, or Donna's?

What if the monster is how Donna sees herself, in some way, perhaps thinking that it's her fault her parents died? Bit of a stretch, but it's not a keystone of my theory, so I'm just throwing it out there. We could, however, go a step further and ask ourselves if Donna has noticed the way Miranda neglects her, and the fetus monster is how Donna thinks Miranda sees her. A baby, true, but grotesque, so terribly imperfect compared to her "real daughter" (Eva, obvs).

Regardless, the monster presents an ugly side of parenthood. It shows us the blood, the hunger (with the way it repeatedly attempts to swallow Ethan whole), the wailing. If Lady D shows us the love of parenthood, the bond, Donna in turn shows us the hate, the misery. Everything that one must endure to reap the rewards of family.

Lastly, we get one last bit of symbolism with Donna's death: We play a game with Angie. A childhood classic, hide and seek. Ethan chases her down repeatedly, stabbing away, seemingly only hurting the doll. But what happens when he kills Angie? It turns out that he killed Donna. You kill the child, you kill the parent. A reinforcement of the connection that comes with parenthood, along with another notch in Ethan's family-murdering belt (not saying that he's the "true antagonist" or anything, just keeping track for one of my later points).

Moreau + The Reservoir

Let's get the worst possibility out of the way: Moreau, weakest and sickest of the four lords, lives in a reservoir, where he is relatively safe. To defeat him, you have to drain the water, forcing him onto dry(ish) land. Paired with the main ideas of his section (which I will detail after this nightmare), one could theorize that he's meant to represent birth itself. Again, he's safe in his ("womb") water, and becomes vulnerable when he leaves (like a fragile newborn). Kinda gross, in my opinion, and also not a strong enough connection for me to care much about. It was merely an interesting (albeit horrifying) enough thought that I felt it warranted sharing.

Moving on to the big stuff with Moreau: He's a baby. Evidence: Whiny, has difficulty moving around, struggles to adapt to his growth, throws up a bunch, loves his mother very much, cries for his mother when he's in trouble, etc. Although Mother Miranda does not care for him, he clearly cares for her, and plays yet another role of an abandoned child (like Donna). Without Miranda there to protect him, he perishes terribly, crying out for someone who does not care to answer.

Hearing him cry out for Miranda, over and over, only for her to continue ignoring him is a key piece in the build-up to our confrontation between Ethan and Miranda. The game, in many ways, centers around the comparison between the two. In my humble opinion, Mia should have been involved in this comparison, as opposed to supplying the solution to the result of said comparison. Yes, I know that was a lot of words that don't mean much yet, but trust me, I'm getting there.

Heisenberg + The Factory

Ironically, of the four lords, Heisenberg is the most similar to Mother Miranda. In his massive factory, he is alone except for his numerous experiments, the results of decades of playing God. In comparison to Ethan + Mia, Heisenberg represents artificial parentage, or more accurately, the artificial creation of "life". While the others Lords also performed experiments, they used living subjects. Heisenberg instead chose to use corpses, which he then "brought back to life" with cybernetics + his powers, a somewhat futuristic version of Dr. Frankenstein.

Together, Miranda and him show a rotten side of parenthood (whereas Donna + Moreau showed us the uglier side of the children themselves). To put it simply, they are bad parents. They throw their "children"/experiments into the fray, uncaring, using them as pawns for their own greater gain. The most important part of this is that Heisenberg offers to "help" Ethan: By using Rose as a weapon. In his act of refusal, Ethan demonstrates one of several important distinctions between himself and Mother Miranda. Where she is willing to use her "children" (read: lives that she is responsible for) as tools, he is not.

Miscellaneous Symbolism/Imagery:

The old hag is one of my favorite parts of Village. She's seemingly nuts, has a crazy old lady laugh, wears bones that make soothing bone noises when she moves, and she draws lots of symbols in the dirt. If you look closely (I can provide screenshots if anyone desires, but it will take a bit of work to get them onto my computer), she's drawing one of the most iconic images in the titular village: The winged unborn. This symbol acts as the key you build up after every fight with a Lord, understandably called the Unborn Key (which turns into the Winged Unborn Key). Whether this counts as foreshadowing towards the hag's identity reveal is technically irrelevant, but I like to think it does.

In essence, you build up the key, this depiction of an infant, to progress in the game. The more wings it gains, the closer you are to your goal of rescuing your child.

The cadou itself is very clearly fetus-shaped. Furthermore, the only place within the human body that we know it ever gets implanted is in the "tummy" (thanks Moreau), aka roughly where someone's womb is/would be. Every infected person we see presumably had the Cadou implanted there (though I think it would be interesting if implanting it in different spots caused different mutations. of course, that is a discussion for another day). To become immortal, you have to "bear" a "child". Does it get more direct than that?

Mother Miranda gained her immortality in part for her grief at the loss of her child. She embodied the despair that Lady D spoke of, becoming an eternal source of anguish. Just as the loss of a child is a wound that lasts forever, so too would Miranda last forever (well, until Ethan comes along).

Mia is a loving mother, who puts up with the BSAA making her move across the world, deals with the complications of having a mold husband and mold baby, and has proved herself (see her section in RE7) to be an immense badass. Previously I had forgotten that, and even embarrassed myself in the comments of another person's post by implying she wasn't a tough, ass-kicking machine. Y'all remember feral Mia? People talk about "poor Ethan's arms", but sometimes we forget that Mia was one of the people who did a number on them. Furthermore, she's one of the only living people (from outside the village) to have any connections (pun intended) to Mother Miranda. They worked together, although possibly not directly, on Evelyn. If anyone in Village has a chance of really understanding Miranda's plight, or knowing the truth behind it, it would be Mia. Yet we don't see them interact a single time. Which leads me to the next section...

Conclusion On Theme + Missed Potential:

Okay, okay, so it's pretty obvious at this point that, as previously stated, the game's theme is parenthood. Every section has its symbolism, the story is very obviously about a man trying to rescue his daughter, etc, etc, but what's the point? Is there a lesson, or a more focused interpretation of the central theme? Let's take one last step back, and focus on something I've mentioned a few times now: The comparison between Ethan and Mother Miranda.

Recurring dialogue from Ethan, Alcina, and Mother Miranda all point towards the developers acknowledging that the characters are similar, but there's nowhere near as much conversation about it as I would like. Several times we have the antagonists ask Ethan how he's so willing to kill someone else's child, or prevent them from (essentially) doing what he's doing (aka saving his daughter). While Ethan responds with a mix of "well you started it" and "aghhh fuck-a-you, bitch", there's a much more solid, unspoken difference: Mother Miranda sends her underlings to kill, so that she may revive her daughter. Ethan kills (read: does the work himself) to get his daughter. The difference is much bigger, and more important, at the end of the game, when we realize just how far it goes. Ethan dies to save his daughter. Time and time again Mother Miranda has killed others for her work, but in the end she is stopped when someone willingly dies to stop her.

Where does Mia come in? Mia, the badass mother, the one who once worked alongside Mother Miranda, should have been the nail in the coffin. She is the one who survives, who lives on to raise Rose, she is the silent solution to Ethan's sacrifice. Miranda, you fool, what could you have accomplished if you had held onto your makeshift family? Through Mia (and Chris, to a lesser degree), his "loss" becomes a victory. There's a certain poetic justice that comes with Rose's full family being instrumental in saving her, when Miranda so readily spurned her own family.

Mia could have had an actual conversation with Miranda, their history giving the latter a reason to actually listen. I'm not saying that Miranda would have changed her mind/plans, but the conversation would have been a well-needed contrast to Ethan's "arggg what the fuck is happening, I only have two reactions to things. agg fuck you". Additionally, I feel that Mia (who was captured and had to endure who-knows-what) deserves the opportunity to be the one who points out Miranda's mistakes, who delivers the final "fuck you" to her. More than that, she's the one at the end who can say that hey, maybe she can understand some of what Miranda did. Was there anything her and Ethan wouldn't have done to save Rose? As much as Ethan is a foil to Miranda, Mia could (and should) have played a similar role.

When so much of the story and symbolism revolves around Miranda's experience as a mother, it only would have been fair to shine a light on her equivalent. Her better.

There's more I wanted to say/feel like I didn't properly get across, and I might add more to this at some point, but it's 5:40 AM right now, and I'm starting to feel like my brain is slowing down, so... Feel free to reblog/comment and add your own thoughts!

#mother miranda #mia winters #ethan winters #rosemary winters #resident evil: village #re8 village #god what do I tag this as

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years ago

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Game 359: Might & Magic: The Lava Pits of Aznar (1983)

I feel like we’ve seen that dragon before. Interesting logo for Sanctum (bottom right).

Might & Magic: The Lava Pits of Aznar

United States

Sanctum Software (developer and publisher) Released 1983 for Apple II

Date Started: 27 February 2020

Date Ended: 29 February 2020

Total Hours: 6

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: (To come later)

Ranking at Time of Posting: (To come later) This is an interesting but frustrating game, created three years before its more famous namesake debuted. It’s so obscure that I can’t imagine Might and Magic Jon Van Caneghem creator ever heard of it. A search today finds a couple file hosting sites, a MobyGames entry, and a single ad from a 1983 issue of Creative Computing. Sanctum Software (of Springfield, Virginia) seems to have existed only for this game, and I can find no trace of author Rick Hoover.

Aznar was one of many early-1980s attempts to mimic the tabletop RPG experience in a text-based computer game. Its approach is similar to the better-known Eamon (1980): the player creates a character which is stored on a “hub” disk. Once loaded from that disk, he can then set out on adventures in any number of “module” disks. Hoover only ever created one Might & Magic “module,” but he clearly intended to create more.

There are some ways in which he accomplished his goal admirably. Aznar is much larger and longer than an Eamon adventure or even any of the Maces and Magic titles. It takes place in an interesting setting: a ruined fortress sitting atop a volcano. I was never able to find any documentation for the game (there’s a lot of in-game documentation, but it’s all about the mechanics), but the goal seems to be to find and defeat the High Lord of the fortress and retrieve his magic amulet. The fortress is a sprawling place, but with logical clusters of rooms forming living areas, a dungeon, and guard quarters, as well as places where the man-made parts of the fortress transition memorably to caverns and underground hot springs.

My map of the game (click to enlarge).

The game is a proper RPG and makes use of its character elements. During character creation, players choose the character’s race (human, elf, dwarf, hobbit), alignment (chaotic, neutral, good, evil), and class (warrior, wizard, and thief). Of these choices, the class is the most important. Each comes with a set of skills or (in the case of the wizard) spells that will see them through the adventure and must be used judiciously. Each class has its own way of navigating through the dungeon and solving puzzles, much like the later Quest for Glory series. So where a thief might pick a lock, a wizard will cast “Open Lock” and a warrior will just smash the door. But one thing I like is that warriors are not just unnuanced brutes. They have their own set of skills–“Power Leap,” “Tower of Will,” “Battle Lust,” and “Death Blow” (as well as the aforementioned “Smash”)–to see them through the adventure.

Character creation.

The character’s race matters less often, but it does matter. Elves and dwarves are alerted to some traps, for instance, and hobbits avoid damage that some other characters take. On studying the code, I don’t think that alignment matters at all. Of the four attributes (strength, dexterity, wisdom, and charisma), I’m not sure charisma is ever called into play, but it’s possible (I think) to create a character so dumb he can’t even read, which blocks several parts of the dungeon and may even prevent winning.

The wizard gets across a lava pit in his own way.

The game also has a more advanced combat system than most text-based RPGs of the era. The game brings up your enemy’s statistics along with your own and asks what type of attack you want to make. You either enter the name of a weapon or a special type of action like BACK STAB (for thieves), DEATH BLOW (for warriors), or BURNING HANDS (for wizards). Each class has to be careful about over-using skills during combat because they have a limited number of “class points” and need to save as many as possible for puzzles. You get experience for combat and solving puzzles, and you level up several times during the adventure. There are also (trivial) considerations of food and sleep.

Doing battle with an ogre.

Unfortunately, the game undoes itself with a horrible approach to its parser. I’m going to assume that it came with a document explaining the most common commands and thus forgive it for making me figure so much out on my own, but even then there are lots of problems. I’m no programmer, but my sense of most text-based games is that the commands are independent from the immediate situation. So if you’re playing Zork, for instance, the game recognizes GET LAMP as a valid command even if there’s no lamp in the area. It then feeds you back with a context-specific error message like “there is no lamp here.”

What Mr. Hoover seems to have done is to define the list of valid commands for each room at the moment that you’re in the room. Thus, if you type OPEN DOOR in a room that has a door, no problem–the author anticipated that. But if you type OPEN DOOR anywhere else, the game has no idea what you’re talking about, and you get a generic error message (“I do not understand this”) as if you’d typed gibberish.

I’m in front of a golden door. I have a golden key. It shouldn’t be this hard.

What makes this approach particularly infuriating is that the author wasn’t consistent in his anticipation of commands. Sometimes the room is waiting for you to type LOOK, sometimes EXAMINE, and sometimes SEARCH. There are times that the verb is enough and other times where you have to specify a particular object. This is particularly annoying in places where the game didn’t even bother to highlight the object in the description of the room, or even mention it. There’s a hallway where, in order to get a password to a later room, you have to SEARCH WALL even though ever room has walls and there’s nothing special about this one’s. There’s a room where you have to SEARCH OGRE to get a set of keys, but the game didn’t bother to tell you that the dead ogre is in front of you. There are a couple of rooms in which you have to intuit that LEAVE is the way out despite the command not being used anywhere else. I had to inspect the game’s code when I was stuck in some of these situations.

Another oddity is that there is no sense of permanence. You can’t drop objects, for instance, and the game just adds most items you find to your inventory automatically. It’s common for the game to immediately transition you to the next room when you find a secret door or pick a lock, but when you return to the original room, the door is hidden and the lock locked again. Although it’s generally good about remembering that you already killed certain monsters, there are a couple of rooms in which you can type ATTACK repeatedly to fight the same monsters indefinitely.

And then we have the spelling. While most of the text is well-written, it is peppered with the occasional howler of an error, as when in the instructions the author seems to think the singular form of THIEVES is THIEVE. Even worse is when you have to deliberately misspell what you want to do. A thief has to SNEEK throughout the game, and if you want to find the 300 gold pieces hidden at the bottom of the COULDRON, you’d better spell it that way.

A misspelling mars an otherwise decent description of a torture chamber.

The game begins at the locked door to the fortress, where right away the character has to use of his skills or spells to get in. A bridge crosses a moat of lava on the other side, and a dexterity check determines if the character makes it across (with a loss if hit points) or dies immediately in molten rock. A trap must be disarmed on the next door or else the player experiences another instant death. In the fourth room, he has a limited amount of time to search it (for an orc sword and a note) and to reach the attic (for some gold, a battle with a stirge, and a golden key necessary to exit the fortress later) before the room collapses. If he gets out before he collapses, he finds himself in a hallway with no way to get back to the entrance, and things are quite a bit less deadly from then on. There are only a few instant deaths and the player can save anywhere.

An early room.

The main part of the fortress has some memorable encounters:

A group of half-orc guards drunk on ale in a storeroom. One of them is sober enough to fight and must be defeated. In an alcove of the room, the player discovers a troll feasting on one of the half-orcs and must kill it, too. A watery cave with a broken sword in the water. If the player tries to investigate the sword, a slime drops on him from above and must be defeated. A waste room with a plank crossing it. Careful players must find a quiet way to cross; otherwise, an otyugh erupts from the water and does battle. There’s a magic sword called “Ewansil” and a suit of leather armor hidden among a pile of bones in a fountain room. If the player enters a kitchen, the terrified staff jumps down a trash “shoot” to escape him. If the player follows them down the “shoot,” he finds (fatally) that it goes directly into a lake of lava. I guess he was so scary that the staff was willing to commit suicide. Entering a small cave, the player finds a bunch of statues of previous adventures in realistic, lifelike poses. He has only a moment to think “uh-oh” before he’s attacked by a basilisk. The creature gets very favorable rolls with its gaze attack and is tough to defeat.

That’s never a good sign.

In a “great hall” upstairs, the player finds a secret door in a fireplace. This goes to a series of tunnels that end in a cell in the dungeon. (There are prisoners, but they’re all mute and insane from torture.) Searching the other cells results in getting surprised by an ogre and tossed back into jail, so once it happens once, you have to pre-emptively ATTACK the ogre the next time, get his cell keys, open up the sixth cell, and get a hint to use the magic word ELWENTHRAL when stuck on the water.

Later, in a lower area, some stones cross a boiling underground lake and lead to the treasure chamber, where the player loots 500 gold pieces. (There other opportunities to get smaller amounts throughout the fortress, but no place to spend it.) Using the magic word produces the boat, which the player can then sail downriver to a hydra’s lair. I think this was supposed to produce a hydra, but the game was bugged and no command worked while in the lair, so I just left. You then have to climb down a well, and go through some other passages.

Summoning a magic boat.

There’s a secret door that only opens with a password; a set of runes only tells you to “speak the word” to open the door. You can spend a frustrating hour trying to figure out what the word could possibly be, or you can remember your “obvious clues” in cryptic crosswords and realize that what you want to say is literally THE WORD.

Later, there’s another room where you’re asked a password, and you’ve had to search a wall to find that the “gambler’s password is look backwards.” But it’s not LOOK BACKWARDS; it’s LOOK, backwards, or KOOL.

You pass through a room with a genie by just giving him your real name and defeat a two-headed troll in a “shaft room.” Climbing down the shaft puts you in a cool cavern, and this is where my game ends. There’s something bugged in the program that prevents the command prompt from loading in the cavern, so the game just hangs.

The last screen that I can experience.

However, I can tell from the game file that I’m very near the end. I’m supposed to search the cavern to find a wight, kill it, then search again to find a trap door in the floor. This leads to an encounter with the High Lord. Killing him lets you take his amulet, and the gold key found very early in the game (pity the player who didn’t think to type SEARCH in the attic) opens the doorway out. The fortress rumbles and crumbles behind the player as he switches back to the “genesis” disk to save his progress. I was so close I’m going to call it a win, though if someone who knows more about what they’re doing wants to fiddle with the code, I wouldn’t mind seeing if there was a final graphic or something.

My character aged six years in the dungeon, and judging by the code, it’s possible for you to spend so long trying to solve the game that the character literally dies of old age.

My character towards the end of the game.

Without the ability to at least scan the text in the code, I wouldn’t have gotten very far in the game–the parser would have defeated me–and in the day, I would have felt that the game’s advertised price of $39.95 was absurd. I presume other players felt the same way, which is why we never saw a second adventure.

The game has an okay combat system, but the “most advanced combat system” might be pushing things.

Aznar gets a 18 on my GIMLET, doing best in “gameplay” (4) for its modest length and replayability, “character development” (3) for the way it actually uses the character during the game, and “magic and combat” (3) primarily for the use of magic in puzzle-solving as well as a few combat tactics. It has no NPCs and no economy, and I set “graphics, sound, and interface” to 0 since it has no graphics or sound and the interface is punishing. (I normally wouldn’t punish a text-based game for a lack of graphics and would have given it at least a 1 if the text hadn’t been full of errors and the parser hadn’t been a nightmare.)

My final battle, against a two-headed troll.

This is certainly one of the last text-RPG hybrids that we’ll see. It’s interesting how so many of these games didn’t quite come out right despite (presumably) the greater ease in programming a non-graphic game. I think a truly excellent text-RPG hybrid, fully evoking the experience of a tabletop gaming session, is possible, but I suspect we’ll never see it.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-359-might-magic-the-lava-pits-of-aznar-1983/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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