Ishikawa My Heart #1: Despair & Ideology
This series, “Ishikawa My Heart,” is an homage to FFXIV’s fantastic writing. It’s a tribute to, in particular, Natsuko Ishikawa.
In typing these entries, I will inevitably get Toni Braxton’s“Un-Break My Heart” stuck in my head.
But do I really want Ishikawa to un-break it? Or would I prefer she just break it again and again and again? Until there’s nothing left but jagged, little heart shards. Yes! A personalized heart-sundering!
After all, if anyone could threaten “such devastation,” it’s definitely Natsuko Ishikawa.
Summary of Post #1: Meteion’s disdain for the worldviews of four failed civilizations asks the players to reflect on the four Ancients held captive by her words.
Despair & Ideology (SPOILERS through EW)
Alisaie’s Clap Back:
After the Scions emerge unscathed from three recreations of the countless doomed civilizations that compose Meteia’s nest and its melody-of-mass-destruction, Meteion herself nearly collapses in despair over the Scions’ stubborn, well, lack of it.
She exclaims, “What must I do? What pain must I visit upon you to make you surrender to despair?”
Alisaie, as ever, claps back with one of Endwalker’s many variations of “In Case You Missed This Point Earlier:”
No one is unbreakable. What pains one may weather may bring another to tears.
This remark harkens back to the final confrontation with Hermes in Elpis.
Meteion reveals to Hermes that there was no belief system in the distant stars that could effectively inoculate a civilization from collapse. Instead, it was the blindsides of each belief system that, in every instance, precipitated that collapse.
As she doom-prances her way toward him, each successive story is juxtaposed with a reaction shot of a different Ancient. We watch as each of them succumb to despair by a tale to which each is uniquely vulnerable.
Hermes is crushed by Meteion’s first tale:
One race had striven to create a world bereft of animosity. They renounced relationships to avoid interpersonal strife, and in so doing brought about societal collapse.
Hermes’s story is one of isolation and depression. He’s a man who cannot connect with the people around him because he cannot imbibe their value system as his own. This outsider status is taken to such an extreme that he concludes that his only hope for connection is beyond the star itself. And, of course, we know that Hermes’s soul carries this unresolved pain through millennia of reincarnation, only to lead Fandaniel to conclude that nihilism is the only answer.
The second tale is for Emet-Selch:
One race had renounced war and devoted itself to the enrichment of its people. They were conquered. Though they destroyed the enemy in reprisal, they could not regain their former glory.
We know that every incarnation of Emet-Selch we meet - whether the duty-bound prig in Elpis, the ascendant emperor Solus Zos Galvus, or the glib Hythlodaeus/Azem hybrid he play-acts in Shadowbringers - loves the dramatic arts and human achievement. In every glory-days speech about “when the world was whole,” Emet-Selch heralds the Ancient world as one free of disparity and strife. Recall the pride in his voice as he mentions the achievement of Amaurot itself. So, of course, Emet-Selch’s unique (and Shakespearean) tragedy is to suffer millennia in a perfectly-conceived purgatory - he creates one great civilization after another, only to weaponize each in conquest and thus destruction.
Meteion’s third tale is tailor-made for Hythlodaeus:
One race had concluded that finite time was the root of all woes. Aspiring to shatter its shackles, they went in search of infinity. They discovered nothing is infinite, and that neither time nor death can be cheated. Disillusioned, they gave up on the future ─ and themselves.
Hythlodaeus is optimism personified. Even the word “die” is an affront to his bedrock belief in mankind’s benevolent stewardship of Etheirys. But Hythlodaeus’s refrain “I’m not entirely useless” as he drops a nuke on his enemies, not to mention his every interaction with Emet-Selch, remind us that this man is also a master manipulator. A charmer who loves mischief, who leads via grace, who conceals truth in euphemism. It’s little wonder such a man would find such a story terrifying.
Last but not least, the final story is for Venat. And, by extension, for us:
One race had discarded all things that gave rise to sorrow, hoping to have only joy. They found joy lost its savor in the absence of sorrow and lost their will to live.
This is Venat’s fight against the Ancients once they have created Zodiark. Yearning to return to their peaceful paradise, so much so that they’re willing to again sacrifice half of their survivors, the Ancients are even more incapable of hearing of the suffering to which Hermes tried to give voice. And, of course, the Scions are her foot soldiers in this war against sorrow and despair - our ultimate weapons being positively small - mundane and ephemeral - relative to the epic battles we fight. We find hope in the fact of life itself, resilience in the support of our loved ones, and joy in the small crevices of daily life.
On Ideology
I love this moment in Elpis, in no small part because I think it's interesting that the game seems to write itself into a sort of anti-ideological corner in which the only effective deterrent to nihilism is a micro-attentiveness to daily living and perseverance-through-suffering.
Having said that, however, I also love that the game encourages us to think critically about ideological rigidity, of ossification, as posing an existential threat to organized (human) life that transcends belief or intent.
It’s a sobering thought.
And, I think, a powerful one.