Lost and confused

グーラ領 · The Gormott Province

The Mismatch Of My Body

Mechanically speaking, the Blade system in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a really cool piece of game design because of how it handles physical embodiment. When a character awakens a Core Crystal, they're taking a piece of raw data and forcing it to compile into a person right in front of them. Blades are literal, walking manifestations of environmental and personal information. In the real world, having a body is a gamble of biological probability and agonizing puberties. In Alrest, your body is an uncompromising, hyper-literal manifestation of your internal truth. The data generates the form every time.

I'd been reading Whipping Girl a few months before I played the game, and while it hasn't aged well at all in a plethora of ways, I did like the chapters where she talks about the concept of subconscious sex. The human brain expects the body to possess certain characteristics of gender, and when the physical self totally fails to match up with the mental self, the system starts throwing errors. The brain expects a specific set of physical inputs and gets noise back. I was watching the opposite of that process happen in-game. The Blades exist in a state of alignment between their internal data and their external reality.

Remember that scene on the ship after Rex gets stabbed through the heart by Jin? Pyra pulls him into that dream of Elysium and asks him to place his hand on her chest so she can share her life force with him. She places it over her Core Crystal, asking him to hold the most exposed piece of her existence. She is splitting her own core identity down the middle and shoving half of it into his dying body to keep him breathing.

I've been trying to write a blog post about all of this for a few years now, mostly because I was trying to articulate why this, of all JRPGs, was fucking with my brain. I was typing out these long paragraphs about Pyra's hyper-femininity and how comforting it felt to watch someone walk around in a body that matched her soul. I had to stop typing because the reality of my own life at the time caught up with the text on my screen. I looked down at my hands resting on the keyboard and understood that my desire to inhabit a hyper-feminine form was a desperate plea. I was a trans woman looking for any possible way to make my own internal data finally compile into the correct hardware.

インヴィディア烈王国 · The Kingdom of Uraya

Breaking The Chains Of Your Mind

EST. 4*** — SPONSORED BY ALDOMAR BOOKS

I was playing through the back half of Uraya, right at that moment where Mythra, the other half of Pyra, finally wakes up. The character literally splinters into two different women under the pressure of watching her surrogate father figure get murdered.

Any MMO player knows about how much hostility you are allowed to make before something wants to kill you. You are always managing threats, and figuring out exactly how much space you take up on the field so the boss doesn't snap around and KO your entire party. Xenoblade handles this beautifully in its combat, especially once you start hot-swapping between Pyra and Mythra. You get to constantly balance the flow of combat by swapping between two characters to survive encounters that would otherwise kill your party.

Severe trauma rewires the brain’s survival systems. Structural dissociation is what happens when the human mind hits a failure state and partitions itself to create a separate, controlled interface to safely interact with a hostile world. When you look at the text of the game, Pyra functions as a constructed survival mechanism. She exists entirely because the world demands marginalized people be soft, demure, and palatable to avoid drawing violence. She cooks, she speaks gently, and she's constantly apologizing for taking up space. Mythra is the loud, abrasive, destructive reality of the self that got shoved into a locked box because she drew way too much aggro from the rest of Alrest.

Trying to play the role of the harmless, non-threatening trans woman is the most exhausting shit in the universe. I realized what I was doing to myself after coming back to write this after a few years. I had spent years desperately trying to round off all my edges, performing this hyper-apologetic version of femininity because I was fucking scared of what would happen if I took up any real space. You eventually hit this threshold where you realize that if you actually want to survive and live your life, you have to let your own uncontainable, abrasive Mythra out of the cage. Letting your unfiltered self exist in public usually pisses a lot of people off and trashes the delicate social mechanics of your daily life. You lose friends, you draw threat from the general public, and you make everything more tedious. The only alternative is suffocating to death behind a polite, acceptable smile.

第三章 · The Land of Morytha

Late in the game, the party falls down into the rotting, rusted graveyard of Morytha. There's this devastating scene where everyone else is asleep by the campfire, and Mythra sits down next to Poppi to look out over the decaying skyscrapers of a dead human civilization. You have these two entities sitting in the dust: a divine weapon of mass destruction engineered by a god, and a mechanical robot built in a dingy basement. They end up making this high-five pact in the dark, promising to take each other out if either of them ever becomes a threat to the rest of the world.

Mechanically speaking, Poppi is completely isolated from the standard game systems. Regular Blades awaken naturally from ether data, but Poppi's gotta be bolted together, and powered up piece by piece. Upgrading her requires you to sit there and grind this arcade minigame called Tiger! Tiger! for hours just to extract enough ether crystals to modify her internal components. Marginalized people can find power in embracing the label of the synthetic or the unnatural. Claiming the identity of a cyborg is a middle finger to a heavily policed society that is obsessed with biological purity and natural order. Poppi is powerful exactly because she was built from scratch outside the established rules of biology.

That fundamental disconnect from the natural order completely alters how you interact with other people. When the general public looks at you and sees a aberration or a biological mistake, you bypass the standard of social interaction. You don't need to spend three years making small talk at coffee shops to become friends with someone who is stuck in the exact same hostile environment. You lock eyes with another trans person and it's like... you form an immediate pact on day one. You instantly understand the shared goal of keeping each other alive through whatever bullshit the world throws at you.

There is a panic-inducing reality to loving people whose very existence is constantly legislated against. When Poppi refuses to break her promise to Mythra at the end of the game, standing there bawling her mechanical eyes out because she cannot bear the thought of hurting her friend, it fucking wrecks me. That scene captures the fierce, protective desperation of trying to keep your friends safe in a world that fundamentally wants to dismantle you down to the bolts, so well. Finding that kind of beautiful solidarity in the middle of our decaying civilization is the only way any of us actually make it to tomorrow.

ITEM · NOPON MASK

世界樹 · The World Tree

MyName Is -

You finally hit the endgame and start that incredibly long, agonizing climb up the roots of the World Tree toward the orbital station. I was over eighty hours deep into this save file at this point. I bet y'all get it, but there's this kind of exhaustion that sets in right before you finish a giant game, where your body wants to shut down but you are running on stubborn momentum to see the end of it.
By this time, you're scrolling through cluttered inventory screens, filling in hundreds of nodes on Blade affinity charts. There's this concept from Jenny Rice called the "awful archive," which is the idea that big piles of unstable, weird, unorganized evidence eventually accumulates into a coherent, stable thing if you pile up enough of it. Video games fundamentally train you to be an archivist of your own junk. You hoard all these disconnected stats, and fragmented upgrade materials for eighty hours until they eventually snap together and form a cohesive language that you become fluent in, and I think that's kinda cool.

That archival process is represented in the game through the emergence of Pneuma. When you finally hit that big moment, the Aegis fully awakens and the game gives you Pneuma as the literal fusion of Pyra and Mythra. She is a fully synthesized being constructed from all the fragmented, traumatized pieces of her past forms. Society doesn't hand trans people a neat story about who they're supposed to be or how they fit into the general population. We have to construct their own identities from scratch. You have to gather your own awful archive of disconnected evidence. You hoard weird childhood memories, scattered flashes of gender euphoria, clothes you stole from a sibling's closet, and a folder of digital avatars, and you compile all of that junk data until you finally look at the aggregate shape and recognize yourself in it.

Eventually, you beat it, and the credits roll. I walked into my bathroom, flicked on the harsh overhead light, looked at the tired reflection in the mirror, and realized the actual work was just starting. I had spent so long writing this thing, and now I actually had to do something about the where I was at in my life. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is literally a story about traumatized people surviving a dying, ruined world by deciding to put each other back together. There is an unrelenting hope in taking that exact same energy and dragging it into the real world. I had finally gathered all the data, I had successfully compiled the self, and now I was going to actually live.

And I did.