Know Thyself

I want to blog, and I know that I need to blog, but I just can’t turn my mind to something creative right now. 

Completed Kid Icarus Uprising today – awesome game, kept me busy for weeks, wish there was more by I will be busy for weeks more on higher difficulty levels.  Not sure if I will try the multiplayer, since I would have to go online.  I hate gamers online.

Xenoblade Chronicles – I was hopeful for something else, I guess.  The games controls are byzantine, difficult, and unforgiving.  I hate them!  I do feel for Shulk, though, and while I dread the plot twist that could not be more clearly telegraphed coming about the now “dead” Fiora, I would like to keep going and see what comes of long term.  The emotional depth is a large hit, and it makes it difficult to concentrate.  I feel much more tense, which is something I tend to feel often enough at work and don’t like at home.  The music is hauntingly beautiful, though, and the graphics are solid.

Haunting nightmares.  I see it coming with Fiora, but ironically or by accident of timing, Kid Icarus Uprising touched on the same idea in the final boss battle.  Changing.  Becoming one of them.  Not a new idea, in fact very familiar throughout the whole history of zombies, or werewolves, or vampires.  Now machines.  Or Hades’ underworld monsters.  It is an inherently wasteful process, the recycling of souls, and the bad guys say lots of things to justify this violence, and we stare, mortified but transfixed. 

We ourselves are changing.  Every day we change just a little bit, and so rarely by our own wills, so commonly by the world and outside pressures which grind us down.  Can you tell that my opinion of work influences this? 

And then we meet old friends again, and they see what we’ve become.  In reality, drastic changes kill us, and the essence of what we once were is lost, together with the promise.  Promise.  Ha!  Universally the road not taken, the road closed.  Promise that can no more be fulfilled.  In fiction, the soul survives such changes, persists, despite the change in form, in taste and sensibility, loses itself in the new form and belongs to it.  If the form is evil, either a giant Mechon soldier with a face or a one-eyed laser blaster with tentacles, than it will conduct itself as though that was all it was.

Except when it doesn’t.  Fiction thrives on conflict, and the greatest conflict is not always man versus beast or man versus machine, or even man versus hilariously ugly monster thingy, but man, or soul versus itself.  Conflict such as the innocent, changed by violence to a monstrosity, recognizing itself.  Knowing its’ own soul.  Know thyself.  The words etched into the arch leading to the Delphian Oracle’s chamber in our own reality.  The first truth to know before other truths can follow.  

Thanks for letting me work out my musings today.  I don't know where I am going with this.  And it is scary!