I'm taking the time here to engage with some of the themes and questions that are raised in Dawntrail in an earnest and thoughtful dialogue.
Setting the debates regarding the sentience of the Endless and whether or not the WOL and Co genocide an entire group of people, I want to engage with other themes that are loosely touched upon but never fully explored. (Yes, Dawntrail's philosophical writing is incredibly half baked but there's still somethings we can engage with in it.)
One of the questions asked in Dawntrail is about how individuals and collectives deal with grief, death and memory.
We see traces of the conversation the writing is reluctant to have, and that is about how societies process grief, their funerary rites, celebrations or lack thereof. We can see how, in some societies, the process of grief, or lack thereof, is transformative or induces stagnation.
We have four primary examples of death, funeral rites and processing the finality of life.
The first is the Yok Huy who intern the memories of loved ones upon stone monuments, some of which are held high above the clouds on the tallest mountains. They also have cave painting murals and oral traditions of great suffering and grief over loved ones lost to a lethal disease.
There is great care and reverence held for their passed loved ones, from retellings and recounting of memories of the dead along with handcrafted funerary stones that immortalize them among those who have passed on before them.
The second we have is the people of Mamook. Death and grief are inconvenient to these people; to them it is a failure of their society, once that values the eugenics program to try and raise a new 'Blessed Siblings' so that they may thrust upon them the grief and burden of leading their people out of poverty whilst walking upon the corpses of all other dead children that came before.
It is through Mamook that we see the callousness of hands that fashioned the death of hundreds of children, the shame in memory of their short lives, the refusal to acknowledge this death in their culture and the haphazard disposal of dead childern interned in vases sunk deep underwater in the Skydeep Cenote. This veritable graveyard of dead children is addressed in game and the discussion of their proper burial rites given more consideration after the Rite of succession. The people of Mamook remove themselves from the guilt of shame of death and swear to give these young children proper burials and respect while leaving behind old customs built from shame and refusal to truly acknowledge the sheer amount of death and lives snuffed out.
While grief may be held within the individual hearts of the Mamool Ja, formal remembrance or acknowledgement is considered taboo. And while the Mamool Ja mourn in private, it is only by truly acknowledging the dead and that which lead to it that the process of grief can truly be made and allows the people to move on towards a brighter future (as witnessed by their acceptance of Sharlyan technology that would allow them to achieve stability through new methods of agriculture).
The third is the monuments to the then-living Dawnservant. His living memory immortalized in stone, a testament to his past and current self borrowing from traditions of the Yok Huy. One could argue the stone monuments are a testament to the Dawnservant's arrogance, to allow himself to be immortalized in stone, entombed well before his time. It could speak to the foreshadowing of his death and how future Dawnservants will be required to follow in his footsteps to keep his own dreams of the Peaceful, Unified Tural alive.
Another interpretation is that of the an important historical figure, one admired by the collective, chosen to be remembered as a monument to the greatest achievement in living memory, the unification of an entire continent of peoples under a single banner of peace. It is out of reverence that Gulool Ja Ja is immortalized.
The stone monuments are a cultural touchstone, where one great person is remembered above all else, who will eventually be elevated to a defied status due to his actions and the legacy he left behind.
And lastly we have the Endless of Living Memory. Alexandrians have little concept of death or the fear of which it brings. Death, as the writing of the game insists, is not part of the Alexandrian culture. Those who die are removed from the memory of the peoples and squirrelled away to a place above the clouds where no mortal hand can reach or touch. It is paradoxical in nature. A place for the dead that only simulacrum of the dead can experience. They exist by the will of one, that of the Endless Sphene (and, by extension, Calyx ). To maintain the memory of these people is to deny the living the right of grief, the right of mourning, the collective remembrance of those departed and what honor (or dishonor) it affords those memories.
It is diametrically opposed to the cultures explored above. It speaks to a world that denies that which ends the thread of time known as life. It denies one's right to remembrance, to grief, to choose to forget, to choose to move on. In essence, to remove death from society is to stagnate society for, without death there cannot be mourning and, without mourning there cannot be the ability to move forward. In this, the living people of Alexandria are denied the full scope of reality and their birthright to remember their lineage. They are swaddled into a bubble of stagnant bliss, coddled from the harshness of the world. Without funerary rites, without cultural practices and remembrance, the people of Alexandria are doomed to a curated experience of all of which life has to offer and through that they become complacent.
It is through the protagonist's willingness to engage with death, to participate in the finality of life, to engage with their loved ones in their final moments that they find the courage to move on and forward. There can be no clear skies above Alexandria while the spector of death looms unaddressed.
With the acknowledgement of beloved Queen Sphene's death, the people of Alexandria choose remembrance, they choose to move forward (for a time). It is then not surprising when the Alexandrians, freshly met with the concept of death, that they should chose once again to free themselves from it (for grief is uncomfortable and progress is not always linear). (It is unfortunate that the writers here choose to revive the original Queen Sphene but, perhaps, the spector of death can be of some comfort when it takes on the visage of a beloved figure.)
The questions asked of the player, after engaging with these themes, that of death, grief and memory, whether it is right at all to remember the dead and how, if any, response to death is correct.
It is here that I posit a philosophical conversation about, not so much ethics or morality, but on how and where and should people be remembered.
Should we remember people through murals and stone portraits, tombs or effigies that can be left to the interpretation of time?
Should we let only those of historical significance be remembered both in time and as a cultural cornerstone of society?
Should we care to give funeral and proper burial at all, especially if the means of death are unclean and difficult to process?
Should we choose to forget it all; death, grief, the people we love in trade for a blissful, ignorant present?
Or should we choose to recreate those we have lost in simulacrum to save ourselves the grief of their absence, the grief of losing the memories of who they once were, to immortalize them as we wish them to be, who we believe(d) them to be forevermore?
It is curious to me that, though the game handles its themes very poorly, that the discussion of death and funerals, legacy and tradition, the will to move forward verses the want to remain in stagnant bliss are not more pronounced. It's even more curious to me that, given the original moniker 'Golden Legacy', the start of a new chapter should entail such difficult conversations of death, funeral rites and memory (especially after Endwalker, an expansion that deals heavily with death).
Though, I suppose, in a way, we've be told the answer from the beginning. To quote Louisoix of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, "For those we lost, for those we can yet save."
Continue reading...
Setting the debates regarding the sentience of the Endless and whether or not the WOL and Co genocide an entire group of people, I want to engage with other themes that are loosely touched upon but never fully explored. (Yes, Dawntrail's philosophical writing is incredibly half baked but there's still somethings we can engage with in it.)
One of the questions asked in Dawntrail is about how individuals and collectives deal with grief, death and memory.
We see traces of the conversation the writing is reluctant to have, and that is about how societies process grief, their funerary rites, celebrations or lack thereof. We can see how, in some societies, the process of grief, or lack thereof, is transformative or induces stagnation.
We have four primary examples of death, funeral rites and processing the finality of life.
The first is the Yok Huy who intern the memories of loved ones upon stone monuments, some of which are held high above the clouds on the tallest mountains. They also have cave painting murals and oral traditions of great suffering and grief over loved ones lost to a lethal disease.
There is great care and reverence held for their passed loved ones, from retellings and recounting of memories of the dead along with handcrafted funerary stones that immortalize them among those who have passed on before them.
The second we have is the people of Mamook. Death and grief are inconvenient to these people; to them it is a failure of their society, once that values the eugenics program to try and raise a new 'Blessed Siblings' so that they may thrust upon them the grief and burden of leading their people out of poverty whilst walking upon the corpses of all other dead children that came before.
It is through Mamook that we see the callousness of hands that fashioned the death of hundreds of children, the shame in memory of their short lives, the refusal to acknowledge this death in their culture and the haphazard disposal of dead childern interned in vases sunk deep underwater in the Skydeep Cenote. This veritable graveyard of dead children is addressed in game and the discussion of their proper burial rites given more consideration after the Rite of succession. The people of Mamook remove themselves from the guilt of shame of death and swear to give these young children proper burials and respect while leaving behind old customs built from shame and refusal to truly acknowledge the sheer amount of death and lives snuffed out.
While grief may be held within the individual hearts of the Mamool Ja, formal remembrance or acknowledgement is considered taboo. And while the Mamool Ja mourn in private, it is only by truly acknowledging the dead and that which lead to it that the process of grief can truly be made and allows the people to move on towards a brighter future (as witnessed by their acceptance of Sharlyan technology that would allow them to achieve stability through new methods of agriculture).
The third is the monuments to the then-living Dawnservant. His living memory immortalized in stone, a testament to his past and current self borrowing from traditions of the Yok Huy. One could argue the stone monuments are a testament to the Dawnservant's arrogance, to allow himself to be immortalized in stone, entombed well before his time. It could speak to the foreshadowing of his death and how future Dawnservants will be required to follow in his footsteps to keep his own dreams of the Peaceful, Unified Tural alive.
Another interpretation is that of the an important historical figure, one admired by the collective, chosen to be remembered as a monument to the greatest achievement in living memory, the unification of an entire continent of peoples under a single banner of peace. It is out of reverence that Gulool Ja Ja is immortalized.
The stone monuments are a cultural touchstone, where one great person is remembered above all else, who will eventually be elevated to a defied status due to his actions and the legacy he left behind.
And lastly we have the Endless of Living Memory. Alexandrians have little concept of death or the fear of which it brings. Death, as the writing of the game insists, is not part of the Alexandrian culture. Those who die are removed from the memory of the peoples and squirrelled away to a place above the clouds where no mortal hand can reach or touch. It is paradoxical in nature. A place for the dead that only simulacrum of the dead can experience. They exist by the will of one, that of the Endless Sphene (and, by extension, Calyx ). To maintain the memory of these people is to deny the living the right of grief, the right of mourning, the collective remembrance of those departed and what honor (or dishonor) it affords those memories.
It is diametrically opposed to the cultures explored above. It speaks to a world that denies that which ends the thread of time known as life. It denies one's right to remembrance, to grief, to choose to forget, to choose to move on. In essence, to remove death from society is to stagnate society for, without death there cannot be mourning and, without mourning there cannot be the ability to move forward. In this, the living people of Alexandria are denied the full scope of reality and their birthright to remember their lineage. They are swaddled into a bubble of stagnant bliss, coddled from the harshness of the world. Without funerary rites, without cultural practices and remembrance, the people of Alexandria are doomed to a curated experience of all of which life has to offer and through that they become complacent.
It is through the protagonist's willingness to engage with death, to participate in the finality of life, to engage with their loved ones in their final moments that they find the courage to move on and forward. There can be no clear skies above Alexandria while the spector of death looms unaddressed.
With the acknowledgement of beloved Queen Sphene's death, the people of Alexandria choose remembrance, they choose to move forward (for a time). It is then not surprising when the Alexandrians, freshly met with the concept of death, that they should chose once again to free themselves from it (for grief is uncomfortable and progress is not always linear). (It is unfortunate that the writers here choose to revive the original Queen Sphene but, perhaps, the spector of death can be of some comfort when it takes on the visage of a beloved figure.)
The questions asked of the player, after engaging with these themes, that of death, grief and memory, whether it is right at all to remember the dead and how, if any, response to death is correct.
It is here that I posit a philosophical conversation about, not so much ethics or morality, but on how and where and should people be remembered.
Should we remember people through murals and stone portraits, tombs or effigies that can be left to the interpretation of time?
Should we let only those of historical significance be remembered both in time and as a cultural cornerstone of society?
Should we care to give funeral and proper burial at all, especially if the means of death are unclean and difficult to process?
Should we choose to forget it all; death, grief, the people we love in trade for a blissful, ignorant present?
Or should we choose to recreate those we have lost in simulacrum to save ourselves the grief of their absence, the grief of losing the memories of who they once were, to immortalize them as we wish them to be, who we believe(d) them to be forevermore?
It is curious to me that, though the game handles its themes very poorly, that the discussion of death and funerals, legacy and tradition, the will to move forward verses the want to remain in stagnant bliss are not more pronounced. It's even more curious to me that, given the original moniker 'Golden Legacy', the start of a new chapter should entail such difficult conversations of death, funeral rites and memory (especially after Endwalker, an expansion that deals heavily with death).
Though, I suppose, in a way, we've be told the answer from the beginning. To quote Louisoix of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, "For those we lost, for those we can yet save."
Continue reading...