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vore_and_peaceSo, in my app, I avoided certain spoilers. I did this because I know a bunch of people ARE just playing, and it's a scene that, if early-ish in the game, definitely has more impact if you see it and have to play through it than if you hear about it.
That said! There IS something I want to essay about on that very topic, so if you are trying to avoid DDS spoilers, do not click this cut:
So before I talk about Jinana's advance planning of her own death, I want to briefly touch on the difference between emotions before awakening and after!
"Why you do this", you might ask. "Why you set it up like that". Well, because both topics tie to her death and I don't want to set up TWO spoiler-filled essays, and because knowledge of the one helps explain the other!
So it's like this. Almost all the characters in the DDS games are AIs -- at least, all but two in the first game area, and quite a few of these characters are carried forward into the second game (though the world in the second game is a real one, so they're dealing primarily with natural humans). I say 'natural' because I want to stress that the degree of their creation is to a point that other than certain tip-offs (like lol their hair and eye colour) they are physically indistinguishable from humans. Both can be affected by the same 'disease', both bleed the same, etc etc etc.
The big difference, of course, is that humans are born .... sentient/self-aware/with free will and irrationality.
I don't want to say that the AIs don't have this, but they definitely start out with it on a different level. They have "fully functional virtual egos", and think things through, but with limited knowledge based on logical and efficient response. Their conversations are flat and unintoned at the start of the game. Sentient but not overly emotional. Self-aware? Yes, they have names and identities, but little to differentiate one 'person' from another except in mild ways. They are very rational; right at the beginning, Argilla (our bastion of human kindness *g*) mentions to Serph that "new recruits are always available, but a leader is irreplaceable. Remember that."
That said, once they get Atma, that starts to change.
The "awakening" is the biggest step; usually accompanied by a big emotional spike, it basically tears down the walls in one go and drags a strong emotional "ego" to the forefront. It is visually notified, so the player can be quite aware of it: the eyes change color and there is a noise like a metallic clang. Without knowing the significance it's a "huh" detail, but once it clues in it... clues in. And not only the main characters "awaken"; villains, allies, even NPCs. You can't see the visual notifiers with the NPCs, but occasionally in conversation with them they'll have an emotional moment and suddenly swith from formal dialogue to a more relaxed one.
However, once they have Atma? Even pre-awakening, they have emotions. They may do a good job of hiding it for whatever reason, but they have them; mild, perhaps, not quite enough to define a person, but there. Gale in particular struggles with this, because he defines himself by his cool and rational response, but deep down he's a rather passionate person, so he spends much of the first game fighting with his emotions so that he can not awaken.
Jinana, too, demonstrates the pre-awakening emotions very strongly. She is constantly sad. Sad in a reasonable, efficient, dealing-with-problems way, but sad nonetheless; Argilla notices it at their first meeting and calls her on it. She has to explain to Jinana what sadness is, but once she has, Jinana agrees with it. Even pre-awakening, Jinana's personal preferences, choices, and decisions are based on a strong moral core.
And that is unusual for the "free will" issue I vaguely touched on -- being AIs, they were originally bound by a set of laws on behaviour. They will kill or be killed, conquer endlessly, end battles quickly and efficiently; if a tribe kills the leader of another tribe, that tribe must join them. The leader's word is law. Betrayal is unheard of. As the lifebood of the tribe the leader is irreplaceable.
Once they get atma (and thus their emotions begin to fluctuate) this begins to change as well. People start forming alliances; some others develop sadistic tendencies. Some choose not to kill. Some, in the end, decide they don't WANT to go to the Nirvana they're programmed to long for. People start backstabbing and betraying. Leaders may make personal choices to give up their tribe in exchange for something.
Which seems like a good lead-in to the second topic: Jinana planning her own death, and how it doesn't make her a bad leader, imho.
From the moment Jinana awakens, she does not want to kill any more. She will if she must, or if it's for the greater good of her tribe -- for example, the alliance with the Embryon angles them into killing Mick (her enemy and the enemy of her tribe) and letting them get Mick's territory. It is quite clear she views Mick's death as necessary, if distasteful.
Beyond that, though, she is not interested in killing to preserve her own life. The thought is extremely, extremely unpleasant to her, even pre-awakened. And so she refuses to devour others.
This doesn't mean she denies it to her tribe (though there may have been a bunch who tried to follow her and ended up hungrier than expected, because as you go through the Maribel's base you hear a looot of hungry voices fantasizing about getting the chance to eat the main cast). In fact, when the Embryon show up and suggest an alliance, she asks them to make it through her base unscathed and then they would discuss it; if they fail, well, the tribe is hungry. She respects the need to eat to live, and doesn't disrespect those who choose to live that way.
She has just decided that it is not something she could live with doing. She finds Atma a terribly sad thing, a curse that only causes more conflict. However hungry she gets, she'd rather die than kill needlessly, over and over again, just for the sake of sustaining herself.
That said, she's the tribe's leader. She is well aware that when she's gone, if she dies without being killed, her territory will be in dispute in a way never anticipated by the Karma Temple. She is also the protector of her people. Leaving her tribe without a leader is just... unimaginable.
So she knows she's going to die, but needs to find a way for a leader to take her tribe. And then the Embryon show up, as I mentioned, offering alliance!
There are two things she needs out of a leader for her tribe: someone strong enough to protect it, and someone kind who will not eat their own if it is not absolutely necessary. So she sets trials for them before she will ally. Making it through the base proved their strength. The latter is proven when Serph and Argilla deny Heat the right to eat Bat, despite it being perfectly acceptable under the new Karmic law of atma, and they can't give their reasons (or rather, Argilla can't) as more than "I don't want to!".
This is enough; when Jinana chooses to ally with the Embryon, I believe she is aware that she cannot live for too much longer (starving herself to death as she is), and intends for the Maribel to fall under Embryon leadership after that. The Embryon would, after all, take care of them.
What she couldn't anticipate, of course, was that if you don't devour, you snap and berserk after a time! Nobody knows onscreen yet. It isn't until she starts to lose it that Mick (who had beaten her into the point of losing control) says he saw that happen to some of his men, when they "go all demon now, eh?". It went against her plans, honestly; I do believe that she would have tried to plan for it if she'd known, but she didn't, and so it caught them all off guard. Even then, I think she was mildly relieved at being killed by the Embryon; it meant her tribe legitimately belonged to them. Certainly, she expressed relief at their strength in being able to take them down.
of course, she awakens after that, shortly before she dies, because after all that, Argilla is willing to cry for her and she does not feel alone. But that's another story!
I just had wanted to talk a bit for Jinana's planning her own death, because I don't view it as an... irresponsible thing for a leader to do given how much work she put in to making sure the tribe would be taken care of. It was just monkey wrenched by an insanity she couldn't have known about.
That said! There IS something I want to essay about on that very topic, so if you are trying to avoid DDS spoilers, do not click this cut:
So before I talk about Jinana's advance planning of her own death, I want to briefly touch on the difference between emotions before awakening and after!
"Why you do this", you might ask. "Why you set it up like that". Well, because both topics tie to her death and I don't want to set up TWO spoiler-filled essays, and because knowledge of the one helps explain the other!
So it's like this. Almost all the characters in the DDS games are AIs -- at least, all but two in the first game area, and quite a few of these characters are carried forward into the second game (though the world in the second game is a real one, so they're dealing primarily with natural humans). I say 'natural' because I want to stress that the degree of their creation is to a point that other than certain tip-offs (like lol their hair and eye colour) they are physically indistinguishable from humans. Both can be affected by the same 'disease', both bleed the same, etc etc etc.
The big difference, of course, is that humans are born .... sentient/self-aware/with free will and irrationality.
I don't want to say that the AIs don't have this, but they definitely start out with it on a different level. They have "fully functional virtual egos", and think things through, but with limited knowledge based on logical and efficient response. Their conversations are flat and unintoned at the start of the game. Sentient but not overly emotional. Self-aware? Yes, they have names and identities, but little to differentiate one 'person' from another except in mild ways. They are very rational; right at the beginning, Argilla (our bastion of human kindness *g*) mentions to Serph that "new recruits are always available, but a leader is irreplaceable. Remember that."
That said, once they get Atma, that starts to change.
The "awakening" is the biggest step; usually accompanied by a big emotional spike, it basically tears down the walls in one go and drags a strong emotional "ego" to the forefront. It is visually notified, so the player can be quite aware of it: the eyes change color and there is a noise like a metallic clang. Without knowing the significance it's a "huh" detail, but once it clues in it... clues in. And not only the main characters "awaken"; villains, allies, even NPCs. You can't see the visual notifiers with the NPCs, but occasionally in conversation with them they'll have an emotional moment and suddenly swith from formal dialogue to a more relaxed one.
However, once they have Atma? Even pre-awakening, they have emotions. They may do a good job of hiding it for whatever reason, but they have them; mild, perhaps, not quite enough to define a person, but there. Gale in particular struggles with this, because he defines himself by his cool and rational response, but deep down he's a rather passionate person, so he spends much of the first game fighting with his emotions so that he can not awaken.
Jinana, too, demonstrates the pre-awakening emotions very strongly. She is constantly sad. Sad in a reasonable, efficient, dealing-with-problems way, but sad nonetheless; Argilla notices it at their first meeting and calls her on it. She has to explain to Jinana what sadness is, but once she has, Jinana agrees with it. Even pre-awakening, Jinana's personal preferences, choices, and decisions are based on a strong moral core.
And that is unusual for the "free will" issue I vaguely touched on -- being AIs, they were originally bound by a set of laws on behaviour. They will kill or be killed, conquer endlessly, end battles quickly and efficiently; if a tribe kills the leader of another tribe, that tribe must join them. The leader's word is law. Betrayal is unheard of. As the lifebood of the tribe the leader is irreplaceable.
Once they get atma (and thus their emotions begin to fluctuate) this begins to change as well. People start forming alliances; some others develop sadistic tendencies. Some choose not to kill. Some, in the end, decide they don't WANT to go to the Nirvana they're programmed to long for. People start backstabbing and betraying. Leaders may make personal choices to give up their tribe in exchange for something.
Which seems like a good lead-in to the second topic: Jinana planning her own death, and how it doesn't make her a bad leader, imho.
From the moment Jinana awakens, she does not want to kill any more. She will if she must, or if it's for the greater good of her tribe -- for example, the alliance with the Embryon angles them into killing Mick (her enemy and the enemy of her tribe) and letting them get Mick's territory. It is quite clear she views Mick's death as necessary, if distasteful.
Beyond that, though, she is not interested in killing to preserve her own life. The thought is extremely, extremely unpleasant to her, even pre-awakened. And so she refuses to devour others.
This doesn't mean she denies it to her tribe (though there may have been a bunch who tried to follow her and ended up hungrier than expected, because as you go through the Maribel's base you hear a looot of hungry voices fantasizing about getting the chance to eat the main cast). In fact, when the Embryon show up and suggest an alliance, she asks them to make it through her base unscathed and then they would discuss it; if they fail, well, the tribe is hungry. She respects the need to eat to live, and doesn't disrespect those who choose to live that way.
She has just decided that it is not something she could live with doing. She finds Atma a terribly sad thing, a curse that only causes more conflict. However hungry she gets, she'd rather die than kill needlessly, over and over again, just for the sake of sustaining herself.
That said, she's the tribe's leader. She is well aware that when she's gone, if she dies without being killed, her territory will be in dispute in a way never anticipated by the Karma Temple. She is also the protector of her people. Leaving her tribe without a leader is just... unimaginable.
So she knows she's going to die, but needs to find a way for a leader to take her tribe. And then the Embryon show up, as I mentioned, offering alliance!
There are two things she needs out of a leader for her tribe: someone strong enough to protect it, and someone kind who will not eat their own if it is not absolutely necessary. So she sets trials for them before she will ally. Making it through the base proved their strength. The latter is proven when Serph and Argilla deny Heat the right to eat Bat, despite it being perfectly acceptable under the new Karmic law of atma, and they can't give their reasons (or rather, Argilla can't) as more than "I don't want to!".
This is enough; when Jinana chooses to ally with the Embryon, I believe she is aware that she cannot live for too much longer (starving herself to death as she is), and intends for the Maribel to fall under Embryon leadership after that. The Embryon would, after all, take care of them.
What she couldn't anticipate, of course, was that if you don't devour, you snap and berserk after a time! Nobody knows onscreen yet. It isn't until she starts to lose it that Mick (who had beaten her into the point of losing control) says he saw that happen to some of his men, when they "go all demon now, eh?". It went against her plans, honestly; I do believe that she would have tried to plan for it if she'd known, but she didn't, and so it caught them all off guard. Even then, I think she was mildly relieved at being killed by the Embryon; it meant her tribe legitimately belonged to them. Certainly, she expressed relief at their strength in being able to take them down.
of course, she awakens after that, shortly before she dies, because after all that, Argilla is willing to cry for her and she does not feel alone. But that's another story!
I just had wanted to talk a bit for Jinana's planning her own death, because I don't view it as an... irresponsible thing for a leader to do given how much work she put in to making sure the tribe would be taken care of. It was just monkey wrenched by an insanity she couldn't have known about.
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no subject
Date: 2008-03-04 06:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-05 02:48 am (UTC)We know that canonically, DDS1 was a *very* tight game. From the time of the defeat of Varin to Sera waking up in the real world, we are given a solid static time of sixteen hours and eleven minutes. Given how long that entire section takes in gameplay compared to the rest (and the fact we're never given time ellipses in the course of gameplay) we can guess that the rest of the game took place over a matter of ...days, I'd say. A week at the outside.
We also know how fast and hard hunger hits. If you have a long cutscene -- ie, a conversation of a few minutes, and let's be generous and add like an hour or so of preparation to head out and whatever on the other side -- you "grow weak with hunger". From the time it took from initial leaving of the base to beating Harley (about an hour or two play-time, we can expand that to three or four "in-game" time if we're being generous, since the only in-game ellipses you get is travel between cities; still, it's strongly implied the cities are relatively close together, imho; also, we KNOW that they didn't just walk around; there were tanks in game and we know Serph at least knew how to fly a plane, even if we never see them taking them.) Argilla grew to the point that she was on the edge of snapping -- so weak with hunger she couldn't walk on her own, with the light pulsing all over her body. Now, admittedly, that was presumably exacerbated by the fact she was *fighting*, wihch gets up her body's 'urge' to eat, but still -- we can judge the time passing from a state of hunger for how long you can go without eating FROM Argilla's response.
ANYWAY. So in my estimation by the time you've gone through Sahasrara's update to them going to see the Maribel, you've had maybe a day pass. I might be underestimating it, but still not a lot of time.
During this time, Jinana has come to the conclusion that she won't eat. As the hours pass, it will become stunningly clear to her that this means she will die sooner rather than later, and thus something must be done with her tribe.
I don't think she had any idea what, at that point, for two reasons: first, because Karma Law was so strict that most reasonable options (ie, prepare a successor) seems utterly illogical, and second, given the timeframe, she barely had a chance to think it through.
This second fact is especially clear given that it's obvious that there's problems on the homefront as atma spreads throughout the Junkyard (Jinana seems to believe it is taking some time to spread, ie, "Soon everyone in the Junkyard will be this way", which makes me think that it hit her city after the mysterious unexplained results of the Vanguards-Embryon battle came in, though that's just speculation). We KNOW what happens when the hunger first hits; we also know Jinana both survived that and have it strongly implied that she didn't devour anyone then. We do know that it caused massive losses among her own people ("Many of us have died due to this unexplained power") and I expect that there was quite a bit of getting things back in order that took place, which takes a lot of time and isn't something you can just sit and think through.
So, I feel that it was an issue much on her mind as she had time to think of it, but that was barely hours before the Embryon showed up. It seems to me like something that'd be "Well, if I am going to die, as it appears I will, I am going to need to arrange something for my tribe" but without any actual answer. Then, just as she's trying to decide what she'd need to do (and what sacrifices to make; if it became a choice between abandoning her tribe and becoming a monster, she'd pick the latter, but only if it came down to that critical point without any other solution presenting itself, imho) the Embryon show up, asking for an alliance!
And from there, I believe, the rest fell into place.
If that makes sense?
no subject
Date: 2008-03-06 04:09 am (UTC)That all makes a lot of sense to me. I'd...put my estimates of the time a little higher than yours, I think (mostly because I can't wrap my head around ending a war with 6 separate parties that fast, which is probably just my failure of imagination!), but still within the same general range. I've had a hard time getting into Jinana's head, but I hadn't put it in context of how little time she had to think about it. Really, thinking of how rushed her decisions were just makes me respect her more. Preparing a suicide on incomplete information while starving in less than a day with provisions to protect her tribe is going to fail in some ways, but she did about as well as she could've to minimize the damage. That actually makes me respect her more.
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Date: 2008-03-06 03:40 pm (UTC)But yeah, even if we up the timespan of the early part to something like three days when we count in... travel and maybe a break before going after the Maribel or something, that's... not a lot of time, especially given the implications that the tribe went kind of crazy on each other for a while and Jinana sorting them out to at least roughly organized by the time the Embryon showed up :/ I don't think Jinana did everything perfectly, and I think she was totally at a loss over some things, but -- yeah, it's one of the things that makes her playable for me, I guess.