Games: Tales of Berseria
The Tales of series are Japanese Role-Playing Games (spoilers throughout!). The story usually involves some band of unlikely heroes on a quest to save the world from calamity. The characters you control gain experience and become stronger through random encounters with enemies as well as fights that forward the narrative. The battle system of these games is something between turn-based (like chess) and a real-time (like boxing). Many JRPGs default to the turn-based approach. Here the “Japanese” descriptor is a reference to the country of origin but also a proxy for the visuals, which conform with the anime tropes of girls that have bug-like eyes, huge boobs supported by tiny waists, as well as guys with equally unrealistic bodies and especially misleading thick hairlines.
The Tales of Berseria has all of those elements. It couches them in terms of a story that is mature and nuanced. Instead of putting you in control of the forces of good in their battle against pure evil, you assume the role of a once kind and loving elder sister who turns into a ruthless monster. Her name is Velvet and she is out for revenge, driven by nothing but hatred. Her mortal enemy is her brother-in-law, Artorius. He seeks to remake the world in his own image of pure reason, strict discipline, and moral excellence so as to free people from their propensity for greed, corruption, and thus demonisation.
Artorius is not your typical bad boss. On the contrary, he is a paragon of virtue who understands that sacrifice is an irreducible component of any ambitious goal that elevates a person above mediocrity. Artotius embodies rationality and what would historically be considered virile values. He is the stiff upper lip kind of man, who shows no emotion, and is ready to do whatever it takes in pursuit of the right thing.
There is something noble in the traits of character inherent to Artorius; something that everyone can learn from. His problem is one of degree: he is too rational, too knightly, and thus fails to pay attention to the other facets of his being. By essentially foregoing his emotional side, by pretending to be pure spirit without a body that knows attachment and pain, he loses that finely calibrated mechanism we have to understand when something has gone too far. He can no longer feel others, as “others” are reduced to numbers, data points that need to be manipulated until the model yields the desired results.
Velvet is his overly emotional counterpart. She exhibits all the wonderful traits of care and loving, such as how she treats her younger brother. Though those too also lend themselves to disaster when they are misapplied. Love erga omnes is the kind of naivety that invites the wolf into the herd, for example. Similarly, emotional intensity has the potential to turn into uncontrollable rage and self-harming hatred when it is not framed by common sense.
Artorius is a monster for being too rational. Velvet is a monster for being too emotional. This fits nicely with the Delphic teachings on moderation and the wider Greek worldview of admixture. The Greeks think that there is no such thing as pure good or pure evil. Whatever we get can be either of those depending on its degree and the prevailing conditions. As such, we have to exercise judgement and have situational awareness. Quick-and-dirty rules do not work, not even for something as common as drinking water: the right amount is healthy, however both too little and too much will kill you.
Where we want to be is between the extremes, at a point of harmony that recognises all facets of our being and takes everything for what it is in its potential to be benign and detrimental to us. There is a side of us that is scholarly, another that is caring, a third that is lustful, a fourth that is combative, a fifth that is inventive, a sixth that is community-building, and so on. We cannot be only one. Similarly, we have a body and a mind. It is pointless to argue how one is godly and the other is not. They simply are. This is what the Greek worldview comes down to: accept the world as-is, not how you fancy it to be, recognise the multifacetedness that is germane to the human condition, and work with what you have.
Artorius wants a world of complete predictability and total uniformity. If we are all the same, then we have nothing to be jealous of, nothing to fight for, and, therefore, nothing to keep us apart. We can think of the famous song of John Lennon, titled Imagine, as a relevant contribution. The singer asks us to imagine how nice it would be if we had no differences among us, no religion, no country, et cetera. Why stop at the level of institutions though? We can extend that principle to physical traits: imagine we are all the same height, with the exact same looks. Think about how much easier it is to produce a size that fits all! Oh and how nobody will be able to out-compete the others on anything!
What Artorius and John Lennon get wrong, even if they have the purest of intentions, is that they have a prescriptive view of the world. They are arguing with the gods like spoilt children. To get what they want, they necessarily have to undo the innate diversity of our kind and of nature at-large. To every expression of individuality they will have to counter with the preponderant force of conformity, so as to maintain their order.
The ancient myth of Procrustes (Προκρούστης) provides a powerful image for this disastrous propensity for homogenisation. Procrustes is a capable man who has a John-Lennon-esque idea to make all people the same. He implements his plan by placing people on his workbench and making them fit its dimensions. He stretches the limbs of those who are shorter and he cuts off the excess parts of those who are taller. In other words, he is torturing them. Procrustes may be well-meaning at heart, yet his plan inevitably leads to cruelty. Artorius, and I would argue everyone like John Lennon, is destined to do the same even if they think they are not.
Coming back to the Tales of Berseria, Velvet grows as a character as the story unfolds. I think her characterisation is well done. Along the way she finds interesting companions who also go through their own transformations. Without going into the details, Rokurou becomes something more than the villain he is, while Magilou reveals a side of her that was not obvious.
Since I mentioned Magilou, she and her sidekick Bienfu have among the funniest supporting roles I have seen. They add much-needed levity to an otherwise grim world. It is the other lesson to be drawn from this game: to see the comedy alongside tragedy, the absurdity of drama, how it they all ancient theatre, and to recognise that we can still laugh even though we know that underneath that thin layer of politeness and civilisation lies savagery.