Why is this person here? Xenoblade Chronicles 3 Part 2
Heavy spoilers for the midgame of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 are forthcoming. This theme of life and death has been prevalent in my life lately, so it’s interesting to reflect back on Xenoblade Chronicles 3 where the themes of life, death, and rebirth are so prevalent. If you need a review of Part 1, please click here.
Shock and horror come over your character’s face as they encounter a room of pods with things that look like people. “Why is Ethel here?” I don’t think that’s an exact quote, but the sentiment as you see a pod with someone who is an identical copy of a friend you lost in an earlier battle. Upon closer examination of other pods, the party sees they all contain people who have not awoken yet. While this might seem like the stuff of science future and everyone’s worst fears about cloning, I want to focus upon life and rebirth as it is a common feature in the Xenoblade Chronicles 3 world and it is key to our foundation as a people, even if we do not espouse any sort of faith or spirituality.
Everyone wants to be remembered after their limited lifespan is over in our world. Remembrance is a symbol of the community we have built, the people we have loved, and the hopes we had for the future. Religion and spirituality each have practices focused on ancestors or the afterlife to embrace a community of both the living and the dead connected to being a people. This transcendent hope of membership of "being a people” is connected to our civic responsibility as well when we think of items such as the pledge of allegiance. We build many of our practices with the hope that we are remembered by those we leave behind and ideally to embrace our community for as long as we possibly can.
In Xenoblade Chronicles 3, the opposite is true, remembrance is not important because the majority of the world’s inhabitants live less than ten terms. Old age is a rare reality as only one sect of the world still participates in what we would view as normal birth and life rituals. There are no births for most of the population and people gain loyalty to their colony based on where they are assigned. Life and death are tragic, particularly because the people who are reborn have their memories erased before they come back, so very few are aware of how life and death works in the world of XC3.
How life and death occurs sets the stage for how we build our tribes. In a world where death is more constant, tribes are less centered around individual people and more centered upon structures which prevail after death. Being a privileged white male, death is sporadic. Death happens based on circumstances and becomes its own immersion, but is not a constant force in my life. I can hold more room for remembrance because my survival is not at stake because of tension. A desire for solidarity with all creation is easier to build my life around because I am not in imminent danger from others and I don’t have a base fear of being harmed because I am different. This is the hope which comes when civilization advances enough where basic fears about survival are not an everyday dread. I know where my food will come from, I own my own property, etc. There are other dreads which come with living in modern American society, but thanks to my situation, the most basic ones are not a problem. In my philosophy training, we learned that philosophy grew because people no longer feared starvation. Arts and leisure allowed for creative advancements which helped further the growth of society. My hope for all I encounter is to help people embrace a hobby or way of life which leaves space for creative reflection and ways to prevent mental atrophy. However, this is not often possible in American culture because of the working conditions we have put on our people in order to have the basic essentials to survive.
The point is this: our proximity to death and particularly death as a constant affects our mental energy to be creative and whole. When starvation, violence, or homelessness are a constant threat, people have a greater struggle to thrive and be innovative. While death is inevitable, and we need a good reflective space in order to understand our finitude, it is also a very good thing to create a society where death is not proximate every day. Suffering is often a tool used to control and suppress populations usually for the benefit of more powerful people. Part 3 of the Xenoblade Chronicles 3 series will talk about trauma and how powerful people use personal and collective trauma in order to prop up systems which harm the common good, and get people to enthusiastically follow those systems. Our next post will look at Psychonauts 2 to give a preview for mental illness and how mental illness influences behavior.
