Which brings me to today, in which both my writing and some personal jank led me back to Paradise Lost.

I took a Milton course in college, and judging by the notes in the margin of my Milton textbook, I didn’t have that great a time with it. Most of the notes are me telling Adam or someone to shut the fuck up for some contrived sexist nonsense, and then other notes trail off into a series of questions about how simple, meek obedience is the closest human nature can get to a pre-sin existence, and how baffled I was by the concept. As someone who overthinks the hell out of anything, this didn’t really sit well with the me of my early twenties. Me as I am now, in my early thirties, I find it more horrifying than anything else.

But I digress. The point is: I’m re-reading Paradise Lost, and it reminded me of the final paper I wrote for that class, in which I argued that if Lucifer had a bride he’d be happier and better off and probably wouldn’t have gotten up to half the mischief he did. I pulled from the text, as well as a few of Milton’s sonnets, to argue my case — primarily that a marriage of equals is one of the best ways to make someone satisfied and strive to be good — and I got an A+ on it. My professor’s only comment was he couldn’t tell if I was serious about this or not, but that I nevertheless argued my points well. (Joke’s on him, I was super totally serious.)

I really wish I could find that paper to see what my main arguments were, but I think a lot of it had to do with how Lucifer and Adam are both “firstborn” of God (Lucifer as the highest archangel, Adam as the first human), and whereas Adam was given a wife to act as a companion, Lucifer had no one (and it’s clear by his actions that he wants a companion–see also, the angels who rebelled with him; how Milton made Lucifer “give birth” to Sin while he was still in heaven [she sprung from him like Athena did Zeus]).

I think I also hinged a lot of it on how Lucifer goes to Eve first and doesn’t tempt her by appealing to vanity, but rather appearing to her in a private, intimate moment (her dream!), giving her a gift, and sharing in the intensity of that epiphany with her. Lucifer’s temptation of Eve was rooted primarily in encouraging her own innate curiosity and interest in learning to flourish independently, without having to rely on Adam’s perspective. Lucifer’s temptation showed Eve that she wouldn’t have to rely on anyone else–she wouldn’t have to content herself with quiet, meek obedience. She deserves the chance to be an intellectually active, curious person who seeks out her own answers through experience. And Lucifer chooses Eve specifically to tempt in such a way because he sees her as worthy and capable of this intellectual independence. Adam clearly is not.

To quickly sum up for those who haven’t read the poem, Lucifer and Eve first “meet” when he shares a dream with her. After a long hard road outta hell, Lucifer infiltrates Eden, crouches next to Eve as she sleeps, and whisper-weaves a dream to her. She follows the voice in her dream to see Lucifer in his angelic state standing by the tree of knowledge — y’know that big ol’ forbidden tree. She watches as he takes a bite of the fruit, then offers it to her to eat, and together they ascend into the sky. Which, y’know, holy shit that’s adorable and darkly romantic, so good job making me wanna go on a lunch date with Lucifer, Milton.

When Eve wakes up, she tells Adam about her dream and he’s like OH DON’T WORRY HONEY THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS–and Milton goes out of his way to describe Eve’s tears in response to Adam’s attempt to comfort her. I always took that to mean the opposite of what Milton intended (that she was so ~meek and scared~), but that she was not only sad that it was just a dream, but that her husband was rude enough to tell her that it was an ~evil dream~. Like… who the fuck asked you, buddy? She just told you about her dream and how surprising it was. Never mind the fact that Adam would have no idea what the fuck evil was since he hadn’t eaten from the tree of knowledge yet, so… y’know… how could he comfort her about something he doesn’t even know? But a man’s lack of knowledge has never before stopped him from contributing his opinion as if it’s hard fact, so I don’t see why it’d be different here.

Anyway — in the poem, in this scene, Eve had what is probably her first dream showing her darker, hidden desires. This was a dream that reflected something personal and intimate, something that was entirely hers. It was a dream that had a strange meaning, and wasn’t just her brain recounting all the stuff she and Adam do day in and day out. This is the first time her dream shows her something that hasn’t happened, and is probably indicative of something stirring within her that she hasn’t been able to address or properly understand. This is the first time Eve gets to have a dream that reflects her — she says that she hears a voice calling to her in the dream, and she follows it; she’s alone in the garden except for this angel, enchanted and enthralled. This is her personal, private, intimate experience with a desire she hasn’t yet been able to either verbalize or even share with the one person with whom she has to share everything.

That Adam’s response to this truly moving, profound experience is to tell her that it’s evil, but not to worry, that doesn’t mean she’s evil, is so fucking obtuse. His stupidity is almost cruel, and it just shows to me that Adam is not the least bit worthy of someone with a mind like hers.

I know that’s not what Milton was getting at, but the fun part of being a literature major is you can argue any opinion you have provided you back it up with something in the text, and my argument is that neither Milton nor Milton through how he wrote Adam could possibly conceive of the depth and magnitude of a woman’s imagination, much less her capacity for curiosity and independent experience, a real true longing for that freedom. Only Lucifer could understand this about her, see it, sympathize with it, encourage her to harness it, and assist in this effort because he and her are of similar minds. Like calls to like, and all.

I feel like Milton probably had to backpedal with this, since by making Eve have some deeper curiosity and interest in independent thought or knowledge at all he’s (1) actually giving her a personality, and (2) probably taking away from the whole intended impact of the fall of man as one of a state of innocence crumbling into a state of misery. This is probably why, when Raphael pops in for a visit and starts giving Adam a long-ass history lesson about Lucifer’s rebellion, the creation of Earth, Eden, and Adam himself, at some point Eve just decides to get up and leave the room. Milton describes this decision as Eve not being able to understand what they’re talking about, and that she’d rather hear Adam explain it to her later, which is about as laughably stupid and sexist as all the times Milton goes out of his way to remind you that Eve’s naked in almost every scene she’s in.

I was confused by Eve leaving the room during the re-read. Why wouldn’t she want to know these things? I thought back to Eve’s dream, and Lucifer’s temptation — that she could know things, that she is already happy now, but can be happier still — and that no one else is worthier, and then it hit me: she’d rather daydream about the angel who came to visit her, instead of sitting around as the third wheel to the angel who came to Adam.

And can you blame her, really? In the dream Lucifer says, “Happy though thou art / Happier thou mayst be, worthier canst not be.” He’s acknowledging that whatever contentment she feels now could be greater— remember that, because later Milton equates an angel’s knowledge of happiness as happening only through love.

It’s the last part of the quote that sticks in my brain — worthier canst not be. Now, unless I’m reading this wrong, I’m pretty sure he’s saying that no one but Eve is worthy of that kind of happiness. Think about that. No one else is worthier! So far, the only person to look at, treat, or even talk to Eve like she’s a person of her own mind is Lucifer himself, who, to Eve, is just a figment in her dream. As far as she knows, she dreamt up an angel that came to visit her personally, privately — and only her. I can’t blame her for leaving the room so she can hang out among the flowers with her own thoughts for a while.

Curiosity and also introverted, pensive isolation fits with how Eve is described in Paradise Lost, so I don’t feel like I’m pulling this out of the air. Adam mentions that Eve seems better fit to be alone and in her own company than he’ll ever be, and the fact that Lucifer was able to share this dream with her suggests, to me, that he was able to pull something from inside of Eve in the first place — her knowledge of the forbidden tree, her curiosity, her desire to be treated and seen as an equal. She’s a woman with a will and agency that no one, save for Lucifer himself, ever seems to acknowledge or even address.

Eve’s characterization in Paradise Lost is a woman who is loving but not gullible or easily swayed (see how she banters with Lucifer when he’s a serpent, see how she argues with Adam when he insists that she shouldn’t leave his side, despite all the work they have to do). She’s naturally curious, a little naïve, but still eager to learn, yet she must always learn things through Adam’s perspective, never from her own. Her dream is the first chance she gets to experience how it feels to do something for her own sake— granted in the dream Lucifer hands her the fruit after he first tastes it, but it’s still something she clearly thought about doing, thus why she did it at freakin’ all (plus, y’know, the whole “holy shit an angel came to visit me and me personally” thing).

I highly doubt Eve left that room because she was too dumb to know what they were talking about, or that she preferred to hear Adam’s version later. Milton says that’s her reasoning, but based on how she was written in the poem already, I’d like to think Eve was probably leaving the room because she’d much rather daydream about the angel who visited her and flew with her through the sky. She’d rather sit and think about the angel who called her worthy and capable of a deeper happiness, instead of repeatedly insisting that all she had to do was be obedient and turn to Adam for answers.

I’m not alone in seeing Eve as nuanced, reflective, and slightly restless, either. Lucifer isn’t the only one to acknowledge that there’s something special or even powerful about Eve in and of herself. When he’s talking to Raphael, Adam acknowledges that Eve is so self-contained and has her own rich, inner world that he thinks she has no need of him, yet he will always need her:

Yet when I approach / Her loveliness, so absolute she seems / And in her self complete, so well to know / Her own, that what she wills to do or say, / Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best…

Raphael’s only response to this is to be like uh, hey guy, that’s not how she was made, you have to see yourself as her superior or else this shit isn’t gonna work. Which… y’know, if Adam comes to the conclusion that Eve is self-contained and complete in a way that he can never understand, and that her perspective is worthy of consideration because it sounds like the arguments of a reasonable, rational, intelligent mind, isn’t that something he freely decided on his own based on his perception? It’s not Raphael’s place to tell him not to think like that–just like it’s not Adam’s place to tell Eve that her dream was evil when he has no such knowledge of evil at all.

And I can see why Lucifer would go to Eve in the first place — he was in a similar situation of made by something divine, yet told and taught and treated as an inferior to that divine. Eve was made from Adam because Adam was lonely; she was made from the same life already made by God, yet told that she was inferior. And any time she seems to express an independent thought, or any time Adam thinks that maybe she’s smarter in some things than he can ever be, Milton makes sure to remind us that no, this isn’t right.

And that’s not fair. Not only is it unfair, it seems pointlessly malicious, especially for a divine creator to do to his own creations (to make one of the other, yet insist she is inferior). Like Lucifer says: Not just, Not God.

As a side note on the subject of angels and love, Adam outright asks Raphael if angels don’t also fall in love with pretty things, and if they do fall in love, do they express that love through touch? He brings this up to defend himself against Raphael’s chastisement, to which Raphael smiles and says that the way celestial spirits embrace is something that transcends flesh itself. He says that they, angels, are happy, and “without love no happiness”–meaning, they couldn’t be happy if they couldn’t feel love.

Remember what I said earlier, about Lucifer saying Eve was happy but could be happier? Replace “happy” and “happier” with “in love” and “loved more.”

On the subject of celestial spirits embracing in a way that goes beyond touch, look again at Eve’s dream. Lucifer touched her mind, he shared a dream with her — this kind of contact is so personal and intimate that I don’t even think I need to say… that it is? There is no more intimate bond than the sharing of two minds, especially in dreams — fiction has used this repeatedly, even if it isn’t always in a romantic way. Intimacy doesn’t have to be romantic: it’s something that’s so private, so personal, so intense that it transcends the body. But considering the way that Lucifer treats Eve and even thinks about her, I feel like I’m within my rights to say this intimacy is romantic. Their dream is an embrace that is a way of transcending flesh itself. Lucifer told Eve that she was happy, but could be happier. She loved now, but could feel a deeper, greater love if she extended her hand, gained knowledge, removed herself from meek obedience — and that greater happiness, that greater love, is what he offered.

And it’s not just Eve being a pretty face that draws Adam and Lucifer to her — as I said earlier, she’s smart. She’s clever, despite her naivete, and she’s clearly got something more to her than what Adam’s made of (a rich inner mind, an independent sense of self, for a start). In fact, she makes a few arguments in the text that are probably accidental mirrors of things God Himself has said. (I say accidental because I highly doubt Milton intended to make Eve thematically echo the divine — he seemed more interested in making himself “justify the ways of God to man,” which… ok, pal.)

God repeatedly says that He gave mankind and angels the freedom to choose as they see fit, because blind praise and obedience mean nothing if it’s coming from a sycophant. Praise and goodness, if not tested, is not true praise or goodness at all. Eve gives a similar argument when she tells Adam they should split up to get their work done quicker, and he whines that (1) Lucifer will tempt her at some point, so she shouldn’t leave his sight, and (2) he needs her, so why can’t she cling to him the way he clings to her? She tells him: what is faith, love, virtue unassayed / Alone, without exterior help sustained? Essentially saying, what good is any of my goodness if it’s not put to the test here and there? She rightly snaps at him that the simple act of temptation isn’t indicative that she’s going to take the temptation — to think that Lucifer would succeed is to damn him and her in the process, without ever knowing if it’ll actually happen. She continues, saying that Adam shouldn’t be so worried and convinced that their happiness would be easily destroyed just because of temptation. She is making the same argument as God for testing mankind’s goodness/devotion, and honestly, she’s not wrong.

Modern day people with faith — myself included (Christopagan, heyo) — struggle constantly with the back and forth of having their faith “tested” by misery, by loss, by grief; by their own anger, by their feelings of abandonment or worthlessness; by the preponderance of horror and hate and pain in the world, and the seeming lack of anything good or just. They — we — have to look at these awful things, have to endure them ourselves, and constantly come back to the same question: how can we have faith in the goodness of a God if this is the world He made for us?

To put this in a non-secular context: self-care and healing/recovery is a constant cyclical process, not a straight line. There will be times when you will relapse. There will be times when you backslide into bad habits, into painful thoughts, into behaviors that only harm and hurt. This will happen, again and again, and your only option is to pick yourself up and keep moving. You did not fail, and you are not a failure; your health isn’t immediately doomed to never improve just because you had this relapse. These painful upsets on the road of recovery — road of, not to — are your test, and a bitter lesson to learn, and really, the only comfort to take from it is to see just how much you’re able to endure.

Now, in self-care and healing/recovery, this lesson, this test, isn’t as awful as it might seem. It’s a decision we come to again and again, a process of healing and recovery done to ourselves, for ourselves. In a religious context, all that agency and self-actualization is removed from our power, leaving us with the painful discontent of not knowing how to proceed.

That Eve is brave enough to say that her goodness and their happiness — their love — means nothing if it doesn’t come up against opposition or tests makes her all the more deserving of someone who is likewise courageous in the face of terrifying uncertainty. She’s asking to be tested so she can know her true strength — that takes so much courage, so much inner strength, that I’m not surprised Adam can only whine and bitch about the one aspect of it he understands (Eve wants to leave, and doesn’t care about his feelings). Adam definitely is not the kind of person who can understand or even willingly accept the idea of having his emotions and convictions tested. But you know who is? Lucifer.

I think Lucifer saw the potential in Eve to be far greater than the man she was made from, which he clearly also thinks about himself (or else why would he think himself worthy to overthrow God?). As I said, like meeting like. With this in mind, there’s really no reason why he wouldn’t want to help lift up a person whose innate curiosity and intellectual ambition was being held back by someone else. If Eve was made from Adam, then that means they are of the same substance and thus equals — so why isn’t she allowed to both be treated as and exist as an equal?

I think this is why, when Lucifer sneaks into the garden a second time, he wishes that he’ll find Eve alone, and Eve specifically:

He sought them both, but wished his hap might find / Eve separate, he wished, but not with hope / Of what so seldom chanced, when to his wish / Beyond his hope, Eve separate he spies.

He watches her work and is totally smitten by the mere sight of her and the private corner of the garden where she works, as it is her sanctuary, her personal, inner space (much like her dream):

Such pleasure took the serpent to behold / This flowery plat, the sweet recess of Eve / Thus early, thus alone; her heavenly form / Angelic, but more soft, and feminine, / Her graceful innocence, her every air / Of gesture or least action overawed / His malice.

There’s so much to unpack there alone (and don’t think I’m ignoring the whole “flowery plat, the sweet recess of Eve” as a sexual metaphor — because I ain’t ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)).

Lucifer compares Eve to something angelic (like him, and what he used to be), and how even just the way she moves and exists awes him, to the point where he can overlook his own pain and bitterness. But then the longer he watches her — like any great pining scene of a gothic romance — Lucifer starts to feel bitterness again, because he’s looking upon something he cannot have:

But the hot hell that always in him burns, / […] And tortures him more now, the more he sees / Of pleasure not for him ordained.

Milton makes Lucifer lament that Adam is ~better~ (lol okay), but Lucifer immediately continues in praise of Eve, namely how she’s fit to be loved by the divine, not human:

She fair, divinely fair, fit love for gods, / Not terrible, though terror be in love and beauty

Not terrible, though terror be in love and beauty. Even though she is beautiful and lovely — even though he sees her as beautiful and loves her — Lucifer doesn’t think she herself is a terror. Compare that to how Adam’s response to Eve’s dream is that it was evil, bad, wrong.

Lucifer looks upon Eve, reflects on everything that she is inside and out, and is smitten at the damn sight of her. Where Adam turns this into possessive, clingy behavior, Lucifer expresses it as admiration and devotion. He gives and does for Eve (gives her a dream, draws her to the tree, gives her a good argument and a chance to eat from it), he doesn’t demand and take — which is all Adam ever does.

And if that doesn’t really convince you, just go look at the lines again: Lucifer admits to being terrified of her beauty! He acknowledges the power in her and in the affection she stirs in him! He compares her to the divine itself! And sure, the next lines talk about how he doesn’t understand love and “feigns” it, saying it’s just disguising his hate, but that strikes me as Lucifer rationalizing the emotions he feels, overcome by the bitterness once again about how he was struck down, and how he thinks of all that he was when he looks upon her. She reminds him of the divine status that he lost, and a part of him will always admire it, cherish it, seek it, and love it. And Eve lets him experience this.

Much like Adam insists that he can only know goodness and virtue if Eve is literally right next to him, Lucifer relives his own lost station when he looks at her–but he doesn’t demand that she stay with him so he can cling to her, needy and possessive. Instead he steps forward to tempt her, to give her knowledge like the divine–to make her achieve her full potential. By tempting her, he gives her a chance to elevate herself further, to be free of the restrictions unjustly placed on her despite her not being inferior. She’s treated inferior, made smaller and meeker. Lucifer wants to raise her up to be what she could be if Adam — and God through Adam — weren’t holding her back.

This is why finally, when Lucifer does speak to her, his temptation is about how wonderful she is as she is, how she looks much like their divine Maker, and how she’s worthy of being adored as a goddess among gods. For Lucifer to make this his temptation–that she isn’t far removed from the divine, that she was made in His image, instead of being “further off” from it as Adam claims–is almost compassionately kind and considerate, a stark contrast to the depiction of Satan as the father of lies and deceit.

That he who sought to be equal to God, believing himself to be made of the same substance of God (because Lucifer didn’t even know his own origins, and thus couldn’t see himself as lesser than the thing he was made from), would in turn reach out to help someone who he sees in a similar position to him is the sort of stuff romance novels are based on, okay? It’s intimate, it’s compassionate, it’s caring, it’s tender — and it’s steeped in shared bitterness, shared suffering, shared hidden, churning emotions that are neither understood nor accepted by those around them. And his temptation isn’t deception. Lucifer is telling Eve that she’s made from something divine and is thus a part of it herself— and she is. She was made of Adam, who was made by God. So why is she treated as something lesser? Just because Adam, and God, say so? That’s not fair. Likewise, Lucifer is an angel made by God, so how is he in any way inferior to God? Just because God says so? That’s not fair, either.

The fact that these words make their way into Eve’s heart suggests she also believes herself to be Adam’s equal, and this is why Lucifer’s temptation is a temptation to begin with. It has to be something she wants in order to be appealing in the first place. She’s being validated and seen as someone with a will and agency and worth in her own right, and she’s being told this by the one who rebelled against God because he saw his own worth as being equal, too.

And if Lucifer says you’re the damned closest thing to divine he’s yet seen since his fall, you know that’s high, sincere praise.

A friend of mine on Tumblr, queenmelisandre, had this to say:

I love everything about this. Just a small addition, one of the things that always bothered me was how God, Raphael, Milton etc also attributed the fall of man to Adam. As if it didn’t matter that Eve at the fruit first and then offered it to Adam (and he decided he couldn’t fucking be without her so he ate it, not because he wanted knowledge). It’s just, so belittling–it suggests that her actions, desires, and pursuits don’t matter in the grad scheme of things, unless they impact or are filtered through Adam. Lucifer’s genuine interest in her is just…so refreshing

I had nothing more to add to that besides keysmashing, but eventually I did come up with a response:

I love that Eve hesitates after eating the fruit, wondering if she should give it to Adam. Milton frames it as a mixture of not being sure if she should share it and inevitable because that’s how the story goes, but I like to imagine it’s Eve hesitating to give this to him because it’s her experience, her epiphany/awakening. Ultimately Milton makes her share it with him because, well, that’s how the story goes, but her hesitation in doing so always charmed me. It made me think Eve knew that Adam wasn’t really worthy of her, or appreciative, or even someone she wanted to share such things with. She wanted to be separate, but the narrative demands that she has to do it, so…

So when she does finally offer him the fruit, Adam’s so clingy and needy and possessive of Eve that he says he’ll do this ~sinful thing~ for love of her, because he can’t live without her–which is just so manipulative and awful. He doesn’t see himself as a whole person without her (which is an amazingly horrifying way to make her removal from him as a kind of wound from which he will never recover, and a sort of life-long obsession with keeping her as a way of reclaiming her/making himself whole through her, without ever achieving that independence and personhood on his own). Adam’s clingy possessiveness of Eve persists even after the fall, when he says all this awful shit about her after they’re condemned and evicted from Eden. As if he didn’t make the decision to eat the fruit, too! As if he didn’t decide to say yes! As if she’s to blame for a decision he freely made!

Ultimately what I’m getting at here is that Lucifer sees Eve’s potential and wants to help her achieve it. Adam just sees her as something that belongs to him, even to the point of not letting her out of his sight. And I’m not saying I’ve got the brainstormin’ of a 100k word slowburn soulmate hurt/comfort Lucifer/Eve fanfic in the works, but I am saying that I’d like to have Milton spin in his grave at the mere thought of my writing it.

The following post is tiny essay of sorts about Chapter 10 of Kiwami, titled Shape of Love, about the force of love in the Yakuza series overall, and about one of the characters who is ultimately destroyed by the very love he holds dear: Akira Nishikiyama.

Full disclosure: at first, Nishiki didn’t impress me much. Before a Shania Twain song starts playing in your head, allow me to press on: it wasn’t that I disliked Nishiki. I just didn’t feel much for him at all. His role in the story right up until the third act of Kiwami is that of a man who constantly bungles and fails, bristles against any perceived comparison between him and Kiryu, and then lashes out against those he thinks are calling him a failure. There are a few people who do indeed say he’s a fuck up, but their ranking in the yakuza hierarchy can either prevent him from lashing out, or demand that he save face when he’s insulted by someone beneath him. The problems Nishiki faces are often out of his control, but the way he tries to solve them are all so inept and poorly thought out that the problems then get worse.

I didn’t blame him for these problems–not really. My disinterest and detachment in him was coming from a place of confusion. Every time he appeared in a scene, I kept asking myself: What was Nishiki’s purpose in the story? He’s Kiryu’s closest friend, yes; they’re sworn brothers in the yakuza as well, true–but what was his narrative purpose? What did he bring to the story? Was he created just to represent the tragedies of a man who is also instrumental in his own problems? That’s all fine and good, but I prefer character arcs of people struggling but learning something, even if what they learn is fundamentally flawed, detrimental, or downright wrong. Such arcs should be dramatic without being grimdark tragic, IMO.

And then, right around the chapter titled Shape of Love, something happens with Nishiki’s character. I won’t spoil it in great detail, just in case someone wants to play the game, but I will talk about it in broad enough strokes so you get the idea of what it means. So, spoilers from here-on in.

Up until before and after Chapter 10: Shape of Love, Nishiki’s role in the story was never to learn in a constructive way, or grow into a competent character. His role, for better or worse, was the guy who gets kicked around by things outside of his control, then succumb to his own shortcomings/failures, until all that bending finally made him snap.

There is this amazingly powerful scene where he stares at the blood soaking his hands, and then uses those same stained hands to push his hair off his face. This small gesture is a transformative act: he is altering his appearance with the blood he’s spilled. The life he’s taken is now changing his own life, darkening it, damning it, turning him from a man into something far closer to–not a monster, not really, but something violent and vicious and broken.

And that’s when it hit me: if Kiryu is constantly resisting the darker demands of being a yakuza, and Majima exists as a man fully entrenched in the darkness, the violence, the chaos, then Nishiki exists to show us how a man can break, moving all too easily from Kiryu to Majima.

Nishiki’s arc is basically what we don’t see in Majima’s. We see Majima in Yakuza 0, and at the end of that game he’s clearly sliding into his Kiwami personality: chaotic, unpredictable, more than a little terrifying. The Majima we see in Kiwami is a completely different person altogether from the man in Yakuza 0, but the game doesn’t cheat us out of showing why someone can be pushed to that breaking point. It shows us this through Nishiki’s own breakdown, which bridges the gap from someone who just had a bad fuckin’ day to someone who has been broken and doesn’t care, bringing him to his blood-stained, slicked back, “gives no fucks” final form.

With this new perspective, I can see why I was so dismissive of him earlier: Nishiki’s role isn’t to succeed. It isn’t to learn and become better. He’s a character built into the story to fail, because he has been let down by his father figure, by his own bad decisions and failures. He is proof that you can try as hard as you want and still come up short. And that’s a really amazing gamble the writers took, because appreciating him requires you to see him at the end of his arc.

My buddy Sam brought up a good point about Nishiki as well:

“So the purpose of Nishiki’s character is two-fold:

• to show just how thoroughly yakuza life can break a well-meaning man
• to subvert the “love conquers all” trope, because the writers go out of their way over and over and over again to harp on and actively show how much Kiryu and Nishiki love each other.

Kiryu makes mention of that at the start of chapter 9. He thought that the strength of his love for Nishiki meant that things would work out, because why wouldn’t that have been enough. But it’s not, because he interfered with Nishiki facing consequences for what he did, so karma had to come back around and get him a different way, and when it did, it was far worse than going to prison would’ve been for [Nishiki].”

This discussion reminded me of when Sam and I were first talking about Yakuza. The nuanced character drama baked into the Yakuza story reminded me a lot of Genji Monogatari. Both stories at their core are about a man whose greatness often causes him to suffer. And I don’t mean greatness as in, “oh he’s just a good dude,” I mean he embodies some intangible Thing that makes him set apart and more put upon by fate than anyone else in the story. Those he cares for or are close to are likewise targeted by fate by proximity to his greatness, and that’s how I see Kiryu’s whole story, basically. Because he’s exceptional, he is singled out by fate, and so his actions have significantly more dire consequences (and his gains have that much more emotional weight–and that much more agony if they’re subsequently lost).

The people both Kiryu and Genji care for are also pulled into that circle of fate’s critical eye and damning hand. And sure, they gain the almost indescribable pleasure at being loved by someone so exceptional, but they are also burdened by all the pressures and downsides that prestige ushers in.

And it’s funny–despite being a romantic, I only think ‘love conquers all’ works in situations where that love is put into a really specific kind of action. It’s hard to define, and it’s probably one of those things that just depends on the narrative love exists in, but in the end, love is only as capable as the people who feel, express, and act on it.

This realization is, I believe, the most important part of being a romantic. That’s why I go so hard for love as this transformative power in real life and in fiction; it’s why I think of love as something to we should all aspire to have and feel and express. Love is an emotion we have access to but at times even CONTROL. Our love for another person–a spouse, a friend, a family member, etc.–can transform us as people, and change our lives and how we exist, but love alone isn’t enough to bear the burden of life. Loving, being in love, expressing love, allowing it to fill our hearts and lives is almost like possession. We become someone extraordinary through love, but none of that inherited greatness matters if we can’t also use love to transform ourselves.

So in that light, the whole idea of karma and fate being these omnipresent forces in Kiryu’s life, and by extension Nishiki’s, makes absolute sense to me. Hell, I’m already of the mind that love is a looming force that manifests in tricksy little ways, both good and bad. For fuck’s sake, the root for passion is pati, which means SUFFERING. To love is to suffer — but even so, it’s a pain that matters. Love and the people we love are worth it.

To sum this all up, much like the theme woven into the very title of The Shape of Water, Kiwami also asks us to think about the intangible, amorphous, ever-changing presence of love as it fills us. The shape of love is like water, like blood, either in our veins or staining our hands; love is like tears, like any liquid that sustains us or pours out of us when we’re grieving. Love, like water, is both a source of life and destruction–love is water is nature, untamed and yet also soothing. It cradles us, holds us close, and also has the power to crush us completely.

Despite being a crime drama with a lot of gritty elements, it really isn’t a stretch at all to say that love in ANY form is one of the core driving forces of the Yakuza story: love for friends, family (found or blood related); love/fascination for your darker urges and violent tendencies; love hiding as greed which is basically lust; love for an ideal that drives you to be the person you WANT to be/your idea of success; desperately needing the love/support of those closest to you and suffering for its lack. It’s why Yakuza 0 has Makoto Makimura as the pivoting point for the game’s story: her love for her brother, her brother’s love for her; Majima’s love for Makoto; Kiryu’s admiration for Tachibana, and the latter’s likewise starry-eyed fascination with Kiryu; Nishiki’s love for Kiryu, pushing him to the point of contemplating murder in order to keep Kiryu safe. It’s love, motherfuckers. Love is at the core, the coeur, the heart of it all.

The shape of love transforms to fit the person it possesses, while also changing the person feeling it. And sometimes that very act destroys us, breaks us–which is exactly what Nishiki’s arc is all about. It’s the destruction of a man who fails at every turn to hold onto who he wants to be, and to who he loves. And sometimes that’s the only lesson to learn: the shape of love can’t always be grasped, and the act of trying to hold it can only wear us down.

Yet even so, it’s worth the price. How can it not be? To think otherwise is to take the meaning, the worth, the very heart out of love itself.

One of the things that stood out to me right away about Yakuza was that Kiryu was absurdly nuanced for a main male lead in a crime drama. He is clearly written to be a fantasy for both men and women to admire, and this appeal is blatantly obvious even across a cultural divide. I think the key difference–and the key to the success–of Kiryu’s characterization is that he appeals to women as well. The female gaze is integral to Kiryu’s characterization, and this does him a tremendous service while it also enriches an already compellingly complex narrative. Suddenly we’re not just dealing with a ridiculously buff guy who can carve a path of destruction with ease, all the while navigating the often brutal territorial pissings of a crime-filled underworld. He’s a man with a piercing, swift gaze, deep, at times quiet voice; a man who is supportive and attentive, a man who often goes out of his way to help others, often for no reason besides the fact that they need it.

There’s a sub mission in Yakuza 5 that has him help a young woman, who he barely knows, come to terms with her intimacy issues. This eventually goes so far as to her asking him to join her in a love hotel (which is exactly what you think it is). The quest ends with him not sleeping with her, much to her chagrin and bewilderment. When she demands an answer, he tells her that there’s more than just one way for two people to connect and be intimate.

He doesn’t say this to trick her–he already passed on a chance to have sex with her, so what would he gain with a lie? He doesn’t say this to tell her what he thinks she needs to hear: he’s answering a question she asked. He says it because this is something he believes, and it’s something he thinks she would benefit from considering. And that, that right there, sums up what makes Kiryu so different as an ideal of masculinity.

He is drastically unlike Nathan Drake, who is clearly meant to be a white American male’s ideal man (self-involved, selfish, emotionally immature and unavailable, incapable of communicating, incapable of treating his wife with an iota of respect, where everything in the story hinges around what he wants to do, instead of what’s the right thing to do). Kiryu not only has meaningful, real, powerful relationships with the people around him (people of any gender!), he can actually speak to them–even if he has this weird inverse considerate problem, where he can be so considerate that he is somehow inconsiderate because sometimes he chooses to withhold his opinions/feelings so as not to burden anyone else with them. And an important aspect of Kiryu being able to communicate with others is knowing when to listen.

What I want to focus on primarily is spoilers for late game Yakuza 0, so if you haven’t got that far, you might wanna skip this. I don’t think it matters much–the following mini-essay means very little removed from context–but, still. There’s your spoiler warning.

Which brings me to my next point: Kiryu’s very brief on screen time with Makoto is so much more meaningful, moving, and all around important to me than a single conversation that she and Majima have together. And it stems mostly from Kiryu’s attentive silence when she confesses her past to him.

Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy Makoto and Majima’s dynamic. I like that during her time with him, she began to be more assertive, and realized that she could make her desire to be stronger become an actual decision to be the very same. She develops as a character not through or because of Majima, but it still happens during her time with him.

And yet he is so inept at just being in her presence. He can’t handle the sight of her crying. He fumbles when she panics, panic that he causes. When she speaks, he often fills her pauses and silences with his own commentary. Majima’s tactless and blunt and yes, I get that some people are like that, but it’s basically like talking to a child. Or, y’know, a grown man with no sense of emotional maturity. So when Makoto tells him she wants to get stronger, that she wants to change and grow, she does this while also walking away from him, turning her back to him.

By contrast, when Makoto confesses the last, painful scrap of her past to Kiryu, she’s facing him. Sure, she’s blind, but this small change of body language is huge. Not to mention the fact that while she’s talking, Kiryu is turned to face her, quietly attentive. When she pauses, he doesn’t rush in to speak–he listens to her, waits for her to continue. When she starts to cry, his response isn’t to panic because oh no! A woman is having an emotion! I don’t know what to do! His response is to give her a few moments to cry, crush out his cigarette, and acknowledge the pain she’s in, the pain she’s been through, and encourage her to decide what she must do next.

He doesn’t decide for her.

He doesn’t leave her alone to figure it out for herself.

He doesn’t panic at the sight of her panic.

He says, very tenderly, that all anyone is left with when they stand alone in the darkness is a choice: you can stand still and cry, or you can choose to make that first step. And Kiryu tells her, again, with no need to say such a thing because he has nothing insidious to gain by such a promise, that he will take her as far as she needs. “I’ll get you as far as the starting line.” And what Makoto does from there is her choice.

In terms of “shipping,” I don’t think I’ll have any strong feelings towards any particular set of characters (no matter what art I reblog on my Tumblr, tyvm). And even as I write this post praising the interaction of Kiryu and Makoto, brief though those interactions are, I acknowledge that it’s a relationship built to be impermanent. Kiryu/Makoto only works in the short term because he even defines his role as helping her get to a certain place and then giving her a chance to move on.

Even though they don’t spend as much time together as she does with Majima, Kiryu and Makoto’s interactions are more meaningful for me, because Makoto appears in Kiryu’s arc with most of her inner doubts and personal conflicts stripped away. She’s finally ready to take a stand. She’s finally ready to move forward, to make all her wishful thinking into doing. And yes, she might be afraid and confused, but she’s doing what she can to move forward despite all that.

So even if Makoto needs protection in the ‘someone’s got a gun pulled on you and Kiryu’s gotta bridal carry you to safety’ sense, she is far from a powerless, passive character. She is someone Kiryu can help not because she’s helpless, but because this is a dramatic story of human nature and the complicated weavework of our relationships. And also she’s made a decision that he can help her see through. And this help is something he offers to her, without her needing to ask for it, without him acting as if he knows better or is somehow inherently superior. He just offers it to her because it’s the right thing to do.

This act of compassion on Kiryu’s part is one of the more quietly powerful, tender moments of Yakuza 0, one that will always move me as strongly as it did the first time I saw it. And it’s really interesting to see Kiryu, fuckin Kiryu, male and female power fantasy extraordinaire, basically take a back role in this nuanced story as a vehicle for Makoto’s continued character growth. Y’know, the sort of thing a female character might be relegated to in any other story.

To go back to the scene where Makoto’s telling Kiryu about her mother’s death, this is where I really knew that Yakuza was something special, that Kiryu was someone who I would forever admire and take an invested interest in watching. He doesn’t comment during any of her pauses. He LISTENS TO HER, and the game keeps cutting to show him sitting there, turned to look at her, rapt, attentive. It shows a respect for her that she’s been struggling to gain throughout the entire story so far. She was kidnapped and sold into sex slavery, and was so traumatized by that that she actually lost the ability to see. People might scoff at that being a “soap opera illness,” but as someone who has survival sexual trauma, the idea that such brutality would leave some kind of mark on her never struck me as all that far-fetched. I bear similar wounds from my trauma, too. People just can’t see them.

This is why any little bit of respect and consideration shown towards Makoto goes such a long way in Yakuza 0, and it’s all the more meaningful when it’s things like Kiryu listening to her because… she can’t see it. SHE CAN’T SEE THE WAY HE LOOKS AT HER. So his respectful attention isn’t even done with the intention of gaining anything from it. It’s so perfect. And it’s so SMALL; this shouldn’t be such an extraordinary thing, but it IS.

And I just can’t believe that anyone who looks at Makoto would be mad at her for not being “””Active”” (re: a fighter) in Yakuza 0, when THE ENTIRE THIRD ACT HINGES AROUND THIS ONE TINY WOMAN CONTINUING TO DRAW BREATH AND BE SAFE AND ALIVE. Makoto motherfuckin’ Makimura has dozens of yakuza clamoring to find her, hurt her, control her, get her on their side, get her inheritance, etc. The story very clearly revolves around her, despite the various dramas and problems of Kiryu and Majima’s lives being threaded through.

The fact that Makoto is the hinge upon which the story and Kiryu and Majima’s respective character arcs pivot, is fucking amazing. She is a woman who has lost and suffered again and again, with very little time to recover from any of it–and yet she continues to push forward. Even if she needs a little encouraging nudge, it’s her decision to take those next steps. Likewise, the story and the men in Yakuza 0 can only progress when she chooses to do the same. The men in her life can only take her so far, and she knows it — and the story knows this, too. And once Makoto gains the power of her own momentum, she thrives.

Author’s Note: This is part one of a multi-part essay drawing thematic and character parallels between Fallout: New Vegas’s DLCs with the Dark Souls series, namely the Ashes of Ariandel DLC for Dark Souls III. It was all going to be in one part, but that got way too long even for me. Hell, this essay’s already long enough. So I split it up, and I hope someone out there is interested. Someone besides me, I mean.

Please bear in mind that this essay is going to touch upon the subjects of abuse and sexual trauma, and how it feels to be the survivor of both. If that’s upsetting for you, you might want to skip the first section of this essay and jump to section two: Part Two: Sins, Sickness, and Sanctuaries.

I recently beat Ashes of Ariandel, and experienced a surprisingly powerful reaction to the story and the characters contained therein. Everything from the setting, to the music, to the cut scenes separating the different phases of the final boss fight left a mark upon me.

This isn’t exactly unusual for me. I get invested in fiction probably to absurdly deep degrees, but I’m not embarrassed by this. I’m happy that I’m able to recognize emotional depths in video game writing, and there was something about Ariandel that really spoke to me. It moved me in a way that matched up with some deeply introspective discussions I was currently having in my weekly therapy sessions. This is especially unusual for a game whose story is notoriously vague, forcing the player to connect the dots themselves.

As I reflected, I also realized that Ariandel wasn’t just a nice diversion from the main game, with a boss whose difficulty set off a bunch of salt on the internet. Its characters and its story offered one of the most cathartic experiences in video game storytelling — something that, until now, only one game had successfully accomplished.

That game was Fallout: New Vegas.

Part One: Trauma, Identity, and Memory

Back in the autumn of 2015, I breezed through all of New Vegas’s add-ons in the span of two weeks, scouring every inch of the new maps in the hopes of getting all I could out of the experience. I even repurchased the GOTY edition for my shrinky-dink little laptop, just so I could replay it all without having to fight my PS3 (bless its heart, it crashes if I play New Vegas for more than two hours at a time).

Regardless of technical issues, I’ve never before had an experience with a video game quite like what New Vegas offered. I’d been moved by other games, sometimes even to the point of tears, but never before had I been completely satisfied with both gameplay experience and a personal appreciation of the characters and story. And certainly never before had the writing in an add-on expansion moved me more than some base game stories designed to tug at your heartstrings. It was so clear to me that the writers and the developers of New Vegas really cared, and cared enough to even make the DLCs enjoyable in ways that challenged us as players, and also satisfied those who could recognize overarching themes and parallels.

Playing video games or engaging in fiction of any kind can be an act of escapism, but for me it’s an effort to process what’s happening in my life, or in my mind, and try to find guidance. I’m always looking for ways to sympathize — or outright empathize — with characters in fiction, because all good, consistent writing offers us a chance to see the humanity of every character. Even if they aren’t good people, a good character is someone whose motives you can understand, even if you personally disagree.

Please bear that in mind when you read what follows, and remember that I am speaking fully from my subjective experiences, and present very little here as objective fact. Hopefully the differences should be clear.

As a trauma survivor, the double-edged process of holding on and letting go to begin again is a theme that is constantly visited and reexamined in my weekly therapy sessions. It’s something that’s weighed on my mind for over half of my life, regardless if I was in therapy or not, forcing me to constantly ask (and despair at) the question of my own identity. Who am I without my traumatic experiences? What is left of me if you remove these experiences from my memory? There is even a whole section of my life I can’t remember because my mind purposefully blocked it out due to it being so close to when I was raped. My memory of those weeks is just gone, a blank slate upon which nothing can ever be written.

I personally believe, and I think very few people will argue with me here, that our identities are made up of our experiences, our emotions, and our memories. But this brings little to no comfort to a trauma survivor, whose experiences include abuse and assault, whose memories hinge around these things, and whose emotions are in constant flux because of it. How can I separate who I am as a person, a woman, from the terrible things men did to me?

With dire bullshit questions like that spinning around my head from a pretty young age, hopefully you can see why I reach out to fictional characters as a means of connection and catharsis. I want to really hammer this point home, so forgive me for really twisting the knife in here. For those of you who understand what I’m talking about, please skip this next paragraph. For those who don’t, read on.

To be a trauma survivor means you are constantly caught between a wound and recovery. You are a ruin, but you’re also a functioning, breathing, thinking, feeling person (some of the time). You’re alive under all that hurt and horror, and you have to figure out which is less painful: staying in the wound, or cleaning it out and trying to heal. Neither option is easy, and neither option has any guarantee of success or safety. For the past nineteen years — over half of my life — so much of my identity has been wrapped around the abuse and assault that happened to me, and the way they’ve shaped my mind to the point where I don’t know where my identity stops and my damage begins.

Now that I’ve made you deeply uncomfortable, allow me to bring forth my first point: all of the aforementioned DLCs also approach the problem of trauma, identity, and memory. They do so not just by their individual plots, but also through characters whose arcs are meant to be parallels and foils for the protagonist, our player character. All of these DLCs offer characters who are trapped in their own trauma/identity/memory cycle, seeking sanctuary and comfort.

Let’s start with Sister Friede, from Ashes of Ariandel.

As far as villains and eventual bosses go, to me, Friede is by far one of the most sympathetic figures in Dark Souls III, and perhaps the trilogy as a whole. I previously posted a mini prototype essay explaining her emotional impact on me, and I would like to use this part as a chance to further expand on the points I almost made there.

Like our player character, Friede previously failed to link the First Flame. In Dark Souls vernacular, this means she tried to restore the Age of Fire and push back the encroaching Darkness — and failed to do so. To add insult to injury (and make no mistake, she has a burn mark on her face, to further drive this point home), this failure didn’t even bring the comfort of a physical death. Unkindled Ash are the resurrected bodies of previous people who didn’t link the Flame. They are the memories of failures, brought back to some semblance of life, and forced to try again. The very existence of an Unkindled One offers an unbreakable link between memory, identity, and trauma.

But even though she got a do-over on life, Friede didn’t want to try again. She wanted some place to hide, some place she could both protect and feel at home. So she retreated into the Painted World created by Ariandel and took the place of a Sister, a religious figure of devotion and worship among the Forlorn.

Clearly Friede received some sort of personal satisfaction from this, not to mention a great comfort at finally succeeding at something.

“Ihave long stood beside our blessed Father, and the rest of the Forlorn. But Forlorn thou seemeth not.” (Source)

This is understandable, considering how she came to be in the Painted World in the first place. She didn’t chose to be Unkindled Ash (her sister, Yuria, states that Friede is “[a] poor wench turned to Ash, who would abandon Londor…”), but she did choose to become someone special in the Painted World. And yet, when it comes time to step aside and let the world end so that it can be reborn, Friede holds her ground and refuses to let it happen.

Once you receive her soul, it reads that Friede “was the first Ash to enter the painting, but together with the good Father, they chose rot over fire.” (Source) I have to admit, this confused me at first. Confusion isn’t a new thing in the Dark Souls universe, but what particularly perplexed me about Friede’s choice was that it didn’t seem to line up with things she had already said. When you speak to her after opening up a secret shortcut, Friede says, “Be forewarned, eager Ash: Should this world wither and rot, even then would Ariandel remain our home.” (Source). It seemed to me that Friede was saying even if the Painted World were destroyed, she would still belong there. So why, then, was she so against its death-rebirth cycle?

And then it hit me: It’s not the rot that she’s afraid of. The rot is a slow death, gradual, almost peaceful. It’s not an immediate, absolute consumption — unlike fire.

And maybe she wasn’t the only one afraid of fire in the first place. After all, Friede isn’t the only one responsible for that decision. Her soul states that she and Ariandel made the decision together — Ariandel, the creator of the Painted World. Together they chose rot over fire. Fire in all its forms was anathema to Friede at this point, so much so that, despite the Painted World’s miserable, literally rotten state, that filth was still preferable to letting it burn. This decaying world was still her home — her sanctuary — and so nothing about it needed to change.

To Friede, the Painted World still served its purpose and primary function: it was a home. She chose suffering and rot (clinging to life) over the fearful unknown (death-rebirth). Friede’s statement also raises an interesting point. By freeing the Painter and helping Gael in his quest to bring fire to the Painted World, we think we’re doing the World a service. We’re cleansing it, making it better, purifying it, etc. — but Friede insists we’re wrong. She’s essentially saying that for all its problems and corruption, this World is still a haven, and will remain as such no matter how horrible it looks on the surface. The parallel between this world, Friede’s attachment to it, and our character’s efforts to restore the Age of Fire in our world are obvious.

Friede is clearly eager for control, a desire that is not one born from a blind lust for power or vindictive viciousness, just like her seclusion in the Painted World wasn’t one of greed or tyranny. It seems like the sorrowful retreat of a woman who felt she had no other place to go, and wanted so badly to mean something.

“Now, return from whence thou cam’st. Thou’st a place in that world, and that alone is cause to rejoice.” — (Source)

These are not the words of a vindictive, vainglorious woman. These are the words of a woman who knows exactly what it means to feel rejected, unwanted, and alone — a woman for whom even a rotting hell can be a sanctuary. One that she is willing to defend to the death.

Things are similarly dire when it comes to Dead Money, the Sierra Madre, and the characters trapped within. The Sierra Madre is no longer the sanctuary of comfort and healing that it once promised before the war. Both time and a toxic cloud have devoured it, converting the resort into an almost literal ghost town. It is here that the Courier and their companions are forced to confront the more painful elements of both identity and human nature if they want to survive.

Each character in Dead Money, even the main antagonist, is holding onto the past or a figurative/literal wound, defines themselves around it, and is suffering because of it. They must choose whether or not to hold on to this old hurt, which shapes a significant part of their modus operandi and their current raison d’etre, or to let it go and move on.

This is absolutely intentional, because each time we meet a character in Dead Money, we learn both their names and their primary source of pain. It’s almost like we’re going around the circle in a support group, and people are standing up to introduce themselves and what makes them suffer.

Let’s start with Dog/God.

Dog/God is a Nightkin super mutant, and that alone makes him susceptible to acute mental distress. The Fallout series establishes super mutants not just as humans infected by the Forced Evolutionary Virus, but as a group of people eager and willing to rally around a leader, a Master. This is important to bear in mind when you first meet Dog/God, who is himself a walking example of the super mutants’ two defining, polarizing traits: they are freakishly powerful, and they are capable of organizing around someone intelligent, thus making them more dangerous.

When we first meet Dog/God, he is locked in a cage and currently in his ‘God’ persona, an eloquent, irreverent voice of both reason and dignified bitterness. He seems to hate his Dog persona as well as the DLC’s main antagonist, Father Elijah, whom Dog calls Master and is slavishly devoted to, much to God’s chagrin. This is why he’s in the cage in the first place: God willingly locked himself up, denying both his personalities freedom so he could stay safe from “the Master,” and prevent Dog’s propensity for getting in harm’s way.

This ‘harm’ isn’t just his unwavering obedience to Father Elijah. It’s also Dog’s habit of actual self-harm, as well as the literal power of Elijah’s voice and the hold it has over Dog/God. Hearing Elijah’s voice forces the change between God and Dog, effectively putting the other persona “in a cage,” making either one a prisoner in their own mind and body.

And yet, despite the two voices sharing one body, they do not share memories, emotions, or even knowledge.

Dog/God are distinct identities, two different people forced to wear one body and be ever at odds with each other. Dog is obedient, loyal, and the only thing he likes more than doing what his Master says is when it’s time to eat. God wants so desperately to be in control, even going so far as to starve himself and carve his name into his chest to remind him not only of who he is (God), but also who he can become (Dog). As if this weren’t harrowing enough, God admits that he has no fear of death. “I’d rather be free,” he says, “let go of this shell, than have it cage me any longer.”

This confession is surprisingly close to Buddhist philosophies, namely that life is suffering, and clinging to desire only invites more pain. By letting go of desires, by learning to accept the transient nature of life’s experiences, we free ourselves from suffering, and only then can we truly live. This philosophy can also be seen in Ashes of Ariandel, in which it’s thematically represented by the death-rebirth cycle of the Painted World.

God/Dog’s very name is a philosopher’s treasure trove of introspective analysis. By naming himself God, he’s revealing not just his desire for absolute, unwavering control, he is declaring himself to be the ultimate power in his life, even above a Master. The inverse of this is obviously Dog, an animal known for its loyalty and obedience, a creature who not only needs but adores a Master, someone to serve and be rewarded by.

Sister Friede in Ariandel is also a character caught between painful dualities. Her garb tells us that Friede discovered “a people she wished to protect,” and then “assumed the precise form that they yearned for.” (Source) She became both an object of devotion and a powerful influence, and lives among the Forlorn, a ragtag assembly of people for whom the outside world offers no sanctuary. This includes the Corvians (humanoid avians who are truly wretched to behold), the Millwood Knights (hulking, Nordic figures who once lived in a fabled forest near an Ethereal Oak), and the Farron Followers (members of Farron’s Undead Legion, who are themselves a successful example of a Lord of Cinder). For one reason or another, all these creatures gathered in the Painted World, looking for a new place to call home. And it is here that Lady Elfriede adopted the title of Sister Friede — Sister, not Mother, and certainly not Master/Mistress. Whatever Friede wished to be, it was not someone in absolute power, but someone you could relate to, someone you could connect with and trust — someone like family.

The overall message of Dead Money is that the hardest thing a person can do is let go, and each character in the DLC is a masterfully nuanced example of this, even before we learn what their individual quests are about. They are walking, talking, breathing examples of people who cannot let go, because so much of who they are is woven through pain. They are, in a sense, no different than Friede and the Unkindled Ash, walking memories of failure, comprised of bitterness and sorrow.

Which brings me to Christine Royce, mute prisoner and survivor of Elijah’s brutishly horrific science experiments.

Christine is a former Brotherhood of Steel Scribe, who has some dark, personal history with Father Elijah. She joined a splintered faction of the Brotherhood, called the Circle of Steel, and was assigned to hunt down and kill Elijah for his numerous, horrific crimes. This ultimately led her to the Big Empty, the location of the Old World Blues DLC, as well as her first round of facial scars. It also eventually led her to the Sierra Madre, where she would be further brutalized.

It becomes immediately clear to us that Christine cannot speak. She has a scar around her neck, one that’s relatively new when compared with her other extensive damage. It is this scar that renders her mute: her vocal chords have recently been ripped out.

It should be of no surprise to anyone, considering what I’ve mentioned about myself already, that I felt a strong, immediate attachment to Christine. That attachment went so far as to feel somehow protective of her, and also personally responsible for her continued safety and happiness, leading me to be as nice to her as I could possibly be. In a way, offering her kindness and compassion was a way of offering it to myself — or letting myself experience the sort of post-trauma aftercare that I never received in my own life.

I connected with Christine not just because of the damage done to her, or how I personally could relate to being rendered helpless and powerless myself. It was in the little things, too, the surprisingly serendipitous coincidences. Her name is rather close to mine (Christine, Kristin); we’re both queer women (she’s a lesbian, I’m bisexual), whose relationship with another woman ended because of outside influences; and we both have a tendency towards dramatic haircuts (I’ve never gone so far as to shave my head). Our significant differences, apart from her not being real, was her mathematical knowledge and technical know-how. I also don’t have a voice as nice as Laura Bailey’s. Alas.

Lest I paint too dark a picture of Christine, I want it known that she is by all means not presented as a poor, sad victim. Indeed, the reason why her condition is so horrifying is because she is otherwise an imposing figure. The more you talk to Christine, even before she’s able to speak again, the more she’s conveyed as a deeply intelligent, clever, observant woman for whom survival has never been an issue. She may no longer be able to read or write, but she’s fully capable of understanding numbers, solving equations, and strategizing.

More than her resourcefulness, Christine is also a fierce, fearsome woman in her own right. She was an assassin for the Circle of Steel, and was not only brave enough to track Elijah down across the Mojave, she was talented enough to get into not one but two pre-War ruins in the attempt. By her own admission, Christine has done “worse things” than some of what she sees in the Sierra Madre. Yet even so, what was done to her still shook me to my core.

Watching Christine stumble out of the Auto-Doc for the first time gave me chills. Here was a woman imprisoned inside something that was meant to help her — something that, instead, terrified her to the point she became severely claustrophobic. I experienced similar bitter ironies in my own life, also associated with places of healing. After I was sexually assaulted, I walked around my high school in a daily daze, often taking shelter in the nurse’s office because I could think of no other place that would be safe for me to break down and cry. I would pretend that I had something wrong with me physically just so I could curl up in the corner and grieve. But much like the Auto-Doc’s inability to repair Christine, holing up in the nurse’s office was just a vicious reminder that no amount of physical care could repair what had been done to me.

If I could, at this point in time, crawl inside a different world — say, a painted world — that was made specifically as a sanctuary for the hopeless and the lost, I would have done so in a heartbeat. If I could also become someone who was adored and admired by the people of that world — say, a Sister— I would probably take that chance too, because the distance of that devotion would both let me connect with someone else, but also keep me safe. I could be loved without ever being touched. And if I could cling to this world, despite the rot and the corruption that seeped into it, I would absolutely have held onto it for as long as I could.

Christine herself is no stranger to the double-edged nature of both wanting to connect to someone, and the pain that connection brings. “Love makes people do strange things,” she muses, after her voice is restored, and we start to unravel the mystery of the Sierra Madre. She further adds that “it can drive you crazy, sometimes, if you can’t… connect.” (Source) While it wasn’t officially confirmed, astute players of New Vegas can connect the dots here: Christine is speaking from experience. Specifically, she’s most likely talking about her relationship with another queer woman in the Brotherhood of Steel, who also had a connection to Father Elijah. She’s speaking of none other than our base game companion, Veronica Santangelo.

This is what makes Christine’s condition, and her single-minded focus on killing Elijah, even if it costs her own life, all the more heartbreaking. She doesn’t have to dedicate herself to revenge. There’s a whole wide Wasteland out there for her to live in — what’s more, someone who loved her, someone who still remembers her fondly, is alive there, too. Much like Friede, Christine has someone who cares about her, someone to whom she could easily reconnect with if she only tried. But that doesn’t seem to be an option anymore. Like Friede, Christine is focused entirely on her pain, and how to avenge it, no matter what it costs.

As I mentioned, later in Dead Money, Christine’s voice is restored — but not to her own. Through a weird quirk of the Auto-Doc’s programming, she now has the voice of Vera Keyes, a woman inextricably tied to the tragedy and enduring legend of the Sierra Madre. (Vera is also voiced by Laura Bailey, which is a weirdly cool, meta way to connect Vera, a female Courier, and Christine Royce. A female Courier, who is also voiced by Laura Bailey, is hearing herself talk to herself in a completely different body, with different memories, and from a completely different point in time. Talk about disassociative episodes.)

That aside, when Christine regains the ability to speak, we ask her if the Auto-Doc can fix her scars. “No,” she says, her voice grim. “They go a lot deeper than that.”

There is so much depth packed into those two simple sentences that I almost think it would be absurd to try to unravel them. It’s heavy. It’s painful. But it’s also strangely freeing. Because Christine is still alive. She is a survivor, hellbent and determined to take back control of her life — and if that just so happened to end in Elijah’s murder, then so be it. We can even get revenge on Vera’s behalf, if we so choose. And that’s a big time Trauma Survivor Mood(TM), a gratifying, vengeful satisfaction we can only ever achieve in video games due to, y’know, laws and stuff.

The last thing I expected from Dead Money was a personal confrontation with my need for vengeful justice mixed with the healthier, far more difficult freedom of letting go and learning how to heal. I did, however, expect to get the chance to gun down the fuckers responsible for these fictional women’s suffering.

Which leads me to Dean Domino.

Dean Domino is also a prisoner of the Sierra Madre and Father Elijah’s scheme, and just like our other companions, he bears obvious physical wounds. He is a non-feral ghoul, which pretty much makes him an Undead in Fallout terms. He ages very slowly, is sustained instead of harmed by high levels of radiation, with the only downside of looking downright horrible. Also his limbs are in a constant state of perpetual necrosis.

Also like the Undead in Dark Souls, Dean’s mind is focused solely on a single purpose, a duty: breaking into the Sierra Madre’s vault. He credits this focus as to why he remains sane, unlike the Ghost People that prowl the Madre as mindless, feral enemies. This is also probably why Dean’s so terribly afraid of them: he knows he’s so close to becoming just what they are.

Before the War, Dean was a famous lounge singer, rich, well-known, talented — and terribly envious. Anyone who had more than he had, anyone who seemed like they were better than he could ever be, became the target of his petty viciousness. Two victims of Dean’s greed were Frederick Sinclair and Vera Keyes: the man who built the Sierra Madre, and the woman for whom the Madre was built to protect.

We don’t learn about Dean’s connection to Sinclair and Vera until much later in the DLC, though if you exhaust his dialogue and pay close attention throughout, he doesn’t exactly make his knowledge of them a secret. Nor does he hide his disdain.

His long-nurtured grudge against Sinclair and Vera is the reason why Dean’s still in the Madre after all these years. He could have left the resort whenever he wanted, as the toxic cloud that poisons and preserves the Sierra Madre doesn’t harm him. Hell, he can actually consume it, which is a totally clever, meta way to show just how toxic and awful Dean himself actually is. The only thing that forces him to stay is the explosive collar that’s now around his neck — a collar that is a grim reminder he’s no longer in control.

Control and power are two things that Dean desperately wants, but not because he’s had them taken away. Quite the opposite. They are the two things he wants to take away from anyone else.

Like the other companions in Dead Money, Dean’s quest depends on how we treat him — but it doesn’t come down to how compassionate we were. Unlike with Dog/God and Christine, Dean’s behavior hinges on how much we placate his ego, and how much we make him feel like he’s constantly got the upper-hand. We can’t at any point remind him of the explosive collars around both our necks, despite how obvious they are, nor can we ever point out that Elijah is the one ultimately in control.

And on some level, I understand this. I wouldn’t want to be reminded that some old miserable crunt has a say over whether I live or die, and I definitely wouldn’t want some stranger who just waltzed into the resort start to dictate what I could or couldn’t do with my eternal retirement. This is one of the reasons Dean calls the Courier a “tourist,” an appellation dripping with disdain which I, as a New Yorker, understand all too well.

But that’s ultimately where my understanding of Dean begins and ends. Because the lengths Dean went to ensure he was always better off, at the expense of anyone else’s happiness, are absolutely alien to me.

Dean is our only companion who doesn’t have any real trauma. He doesn’t suffer from an identity disorder like Dog/God, nor is he the survivor of brutal experiments and a heteronormative, procreation-focused militaritistic society (Christine’s been through Some Shit, y’all). He’s just a petty, cruel man too blinded by greed and his own inflated sense of worth, to the point where he will gleefully destroy the lives of anyone around him.

To return to Ashes of Ariandel, I know that I’ve thus far cast Sister Friede in a deeply sympathetic light. That’s because I personally don’t see much in the way of vindictive manipulation or viciousness in terms of her motives. What she did was wrong, yes, and it only increased both her suffering and the suffering of the Corvians specifically— but she doesn’t seem to take any pleasure in it. She isn’t like Dean, issuing threats against our life (Sir Vilhelm does that). She was a skilled warrior, yes, and was even secretly dressed for combat (the item description of her trousers says as much: “An offer of protection implies the eventual wielding of a blade, and spilling of blood”), but Friede doesn’t gloat even when she kills us — instead she scolds us, gently.

“Return from whence thou cam’st, for that is thy place of belonging. Leave us be, Ashen One. Sweep all thought of us from thy mind. As thy kind always have.” (Source)

If we are allies with her sister, Yuria, Friede has different dialogue to say — but it’s still gentle, still honest: “Return from whence thou cam’st. Yuria surely awaits thee. Leave us be, Ashen One. Thou art the Lord of Londor and have thine own subjects to guide.” (Source)

Leave us be. It’s a plea and a request in the same breath — leave us be. Even before the boss fight, she asks us repeatedly to leave, reminding us that we belong elsewhere — and that we should just forget about her. She’s telling us to let go, to move on — and we don’t. Perhaps we can’t.

Think about that. Friede knows her power over the Painted World is tenuous at best, and is now even further threatened by our presence. But she continuously gives us the chance to leave, reminding us that the option is always there to take. What’s more, she encourages us to leave, saying that no matter what we do, this World will always be her home. We might think we get the upper-hand over her, but she will always belong in the Painted World, and we never will.

Ultimately, power and control to Friede are just a means of comfort, of creating a place to call home. And that comfort, that need for sanctuary, is something Dean feels like he deserves, to the point of depriving anyone else of it. This viciousness hearkens back to old Norse sagas of a dragon hoarding his store of treasure, destroying anyone who dares stray too close.

Which brings us at last to Father Elijah.

If we exhaust her dialogue, Veronica can tell us all about Father Elijah and her connection to him. He was something of a grandfather figure to her, as well as a teacher, and he was once a Brotherhood of Steel Elder obsessed with hoarding technology — obsessed even by their standards. He was also a man who, after failing to control HELIOS One, a power station relic from before the War, disappeared in disgrace, and was presumed dead. This failure at HELIOS haunted Elijah, twisting his heart, turning an already arrogant man into a truly horrific monster, ready and willing to experiment on and sacrifice other humans to fulfill his goals.

In Dark Souls terminology, he’s basically Aldia. But even Aldia’s ultimate goal was sympathetic, even if his means were questionable and downright barbaric. Elijah’s motives are a little less relatable unless your Courier is a homicidal maniac, but even so he’s yet another example of a character whose story is indelibly marked by the tangle of identity, trauma, and memory.

Speaking of Aldia, that cool layered dialogue he has, where three voice actors — a man, a woman, and a child — are all reading his lines, as if the voice director wanted to convey that he is the voice of humanity? A villain in the Fallout series had a similar gimmick.

Earlier, I mentioned that a sign of good writing is when a story shows the humanity of its characters. Even Dean Domino, twisted and miserable as he is, is someone I can understand, even if I disapprove. Elijah’s a little trickier — his moments of humanity are few and far between, but they stand out all the more starkly because of this rarity.

Father Elijah programmed the collars to explode under two conditions: if someone tries to escape the Madre, and upon the death of anyone wearing those collars. Our lives are inextricably tied to our companions, no matter how little we like them. This forces us not just to care about them, but to ensure their survival as much as we would our own.

Why would Elijah do this? Because it was the only way to guarantee cooperation. When we ask him about this in the Madre’s vault, he expresses real, genuine frustration at human nature, at the way the numerous groups of people he assembled for the heist would turn on each other again and again, even when their freedom was so close. “Human nature is against us, always.” (Source).

Furthermore, Elijah cites the whole Madre heist as a social experiment, something he had to fine tune repeatedly to account for human nature’s propensity for betrayal. “Cracking greed, that was more difficult.” (Source) He goes on to say that he finally had to “answer[ed] madness with madness,” which leads him to ensuring cooperation among the group by threatening the entire group’s lives. “Greed can be beaten. Contained. Controlled.” (Source)

And while he’s not wrong about human nature— there are enough headless corpses strewn around the Sierra Madre that only prove his point — Elijah is far from being in the right. This a man who views both human nature and even technology as something to be controlled and conquered, as if it were creatures in need of ‘breaking in’; a man who not only predicts but instigates a sequence of servitude and submission that humans inflict on each other: “One with a collar may chain another. And another.” (Source) He is like Sister Friede, someone who believes he knows best and acts on that impulse, regardless of what other people want or demand. Both Elijah and Friede also seize upon weapons as a means of consolidating their power. For Friede, it was the Corvians of the settlement, and for Elijah it’s his quest for weapons of mass destruction first at HELIOS One, and now again in Sierra Madre, with its toxic cloud, its explosive collars, and its holographic security force.

It’s not a coincidence that our previous introduction to these collars comes from any interaction we have with Caesar’s Legion. We’re introduced to the Legion in the base game on a street lined with crucified bodies, the grim aftermath of a “lottery” worthy of Shirley Jackson’s short story of the same name. The Legion are the only overt “bad karma” faction that exists in New Vegas, (to the point where I actually feel a little silly having to point that out? They’re a dictatorship, my dudes). Because of this, players are meant to draw a connecting line between the Legion and Elijah, and what made both decide to use the collars. Both involve the removal of control and personal agency. Both are focused solely on subjugating another person for the benefit and use of someone else.

And yet, for all his homicidal, Stanford Prison Experiment-y tendencies, Father Elijah is also a man burdened with failure and regret. This is perhaps his only humanizing trait: the memory of his failure is so painful, so hated, that it twisted him into the vicious bastard we encounter in the Sierra Madre. Just like the rest of our companions, just like our Courier, just like Sister Friede, Father Elijah is a victim of the painful interplay of identity, trauma, and memory.

This ‘trauma’ is the battle of HELIOS One.

HELIOS One was a solar energy plant in the time before the Great War. Now it stands as one of the very few sources of power (both literal and figurative) in the Mojave Wasteland.

Before the current hostilities with Caesar’s Legion and the NCR, the Brotherhood of Steel tried to take HELIOS for themselves. And they held it for a time, but were unable to truly harness its power or even understand how it worked. Father Elijah was still frantically trying to crack its secrets as the NCR troops closed in, eventually forcing the Brotherhood out of the building and surrounding area, culminating in the paranoid, hidden-in-plain-sight state we find them in later on.

Elijah’s failure at HELIOS One cannot be overstated. For a man who believed technology was “designed to obey us,” this was the single most defining moment in his life — a life that, to this point, we can assume had its own various hallmarks of success. Elijah was a mastermind when it came to technology; he understood it on an almost instinctive level, teaching Veronica all that she knew. He lived a life of power and influence as the Brotherhood’s Elder, and yet this still wasn’t enough. He wanted more.

When we ask him about HELIOS One, Elijah describes it in tones tinged with reverence and bitterness. “A sun so close you could touch it,” he muses, putting us in mind of another example of man’s hubris: the tale of Daedalus and Icarus. And yet, Elijah isn’t without his own pearls of wisdom: “Failures… can provide the brightest clarity.” (Source)

After HELIOS, Elijah wandered the Wasteland, walking a path that our Courier would later take through the DLCs. He goes to the Divide (in Lonesome Road), the Big Empty (Old World Blues), learning all that he can, trying to outrace his shame. At some point he hears Vera’s voice in a Sierra Madre broadcast, promising him that he, too, can ‘begin again.’ The sentimentality of this message is utterly lost on Elijah. He outright admits it’s absurd, but says he followed the signal regardless. He then falls into the trap of the Madre, becoming a prisoner inside the casino. This is how his heist experiment unfolds, eventually leading our Courier, Dog/God, Christine, and Dean to his clutches.

All of this nuanced, truly stellar character study is woven into a plot that’s a wonderful rib on a bank heist, which is also likely a reference to the book (and later classic Hollywood film) called The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

But what about our Courier? How do they fit into this theme of holding onto pain and how it shapes one’s identity? To the possible two people in the world who have never played New Vegas, I’ll explain it as quick as I can.

The player character of Fallout: New Vegas is themselves a trauma survivor. The opening cinematic shows your character getting shot in the head. Luckily, you are pulled from your grave, and pointed in the direction where your would-be killer was last seen.

With the series’ trademark mixture of raygun gothic apocalyptic horror and satirical wit, New Vegas takes a truly traumatizing situation (an almost total-death experience) and makes it almost downright absurd (we’re saved by a robot cowboy, who is also secretly a spy, who cheerily follows us from a not-so-discreet distance). We have to follow an increasingly convoluted trail through an irradiated wasteland torn between jackholes cosplaying as Roman soldiers and the overtaxed, spread-too-thin NCR troops.

But despite the game’s admittedly charming absurdity, that doesn’t change the fact that our character in New Vegas was recently traumatized, survived, and now has the memory of this experience forever wrapped around their identity. The game even sets up this connection with Mr. New Vegas describing us as, “[a] package courier found shot in the head near Goodsprings [who] has reportedly regained consciousness and made a full recovery.”

We are known to the Mojave Wasteland as one helluva hard person to put down, as someone too stubborn to die. This experience will remain a part of our character’s identity until they either get vengeance, or give up caring. Or, as is the case with the DLC, they experience even more traumatic experiences to add to the pre-existing pile.

The set up to Dead Money is that your character follows a radio broadcast to an abandoned bunker, where they are knocked out and dragged into the Madre. As if this kidnapping weren’t bad enough, they’re also fitted with a collar that will explode if they ever try to leave the resort or if they get too close to radios and other sound devices. Your character is left with only one option: do as exactly as they’re told and maybe they’ll survive.

Dead Money presents the Courier (who has a bullet in the head and one helluva reason to get revenge already) with yet another layer of trauma. Their lives are on the line once again, not because of someone putting a bullet in their head, but because of someone else having you in their power. The Courier’s agency is torn from their grasp, reducing them to a pawn in a larger scheme.

To speak plainly, as a survivor of abuse and rape, this is a very personal, powerful thing to experience in a video game — especially a role-playing game, which by its very nature offers the player a chance to become the character they control. It’s also done tastefully — as in, done in such a way where it wasn’t some bullshit grimdark poorly written schlock meant only to shock and horrify. I can draw the parallels from my character’s trauma to my own without the game containing that message in any overt sense, and the satisfaction I get out of the game is thus all the more enriched (not to mention personal catharsis. DLC is cheaper than therapy, y’all).

Fallout: New Vegas, probably more than any of the other Fallout games, offers me this nice little sphere of personal vengeance and a stark, philosophical introspection into the overall value of revenge. Does getting revenge change me as a person? Does that anger and burning need to make right what was once wrong do anything to help me? Am I abandoning who I am by letting go of a painful truth, or am I lying to myself if I try to heal and move towards a better, healthier state of mind? Where does my identity begin: is it what happened to me, or is it how I move on from those experiences?

Identities aren’t just who we decide to be, or things we’re given. They aren’t just our names, our zodiac signs, our physical defining traits. They aren’t just who we see in the mirror. They aren’t just our failures, our flaws, our wounds. They are all these things. They are made from an accumulated mass of this tangled mess, with memory, knowledge, and experience being a major component.

So what hope do you have, if all of the aforementioned is wrapped up so tightly with pain, with loss, with suffering? These are all the questions New Vegas’s DLC forced me to confront through the avatar of my Courier, and they are all questions I once again wondered as I played through Ashes of Ariandel. They are also things I ask myself constantly in therapy, and is part of the reason why I hold these add-ons in such high regard.

Part Two: Sins, Sickness, and Sanctuaries

In Dead Money, the Sierra Madre is a resort casino built prior to the war that annihilated the entire planet in nuclear devastation. It’s immediately clear to the player that the Sierra Madre is emblematic of the world in Fallout at large: rife with danger, littered with grim reminders of a lost past, yet also containing small shards of hope — or, in the Madre’s case, treasure.

Before the war, the Sierra Madre was a secluded, special resort, whose very invitations were a sign of exclusivity. It has its own form of currency, a highly specialized holographic security force, and a casino containing all the promises of entertainment. It’s a place for people to find pleasure and comfort — and yet the recorded message urging people to find the Sierra Madre is both enticing and haunting, like a pre-War siren song reaching out to troubled, sorrowful souls:

“So if life’s worries have weighed you down, if you need an escape from your troubles, or if you just need an opportunity to begin again, join us, let go, and leave the world behind at the Sierra Madre grand opening this October…” (Source)

The important part are the arc words: begin again. Through this we can safely state that the Sierra Madre was both a place of comfort and retreat — in short, a place of belonging.

The Ashes of Ariandel DLC takes place in a Painted World, similar to the Painted World of Ariamis from Dark Souls I. These Worlds are havens for the unwanted, the outcast, and the Forlorn — i.e., anyone who has no place in the outside world.

Sound familiar?

It’s unknown how people enter the Painted World. Maybe they hear about it in stories passed around from the mouths of travelers. Legends are, after all, a fantasy world’s version of a radio broadcast. Maybe they feel drawn to the World through some eldritch compulsion, similar to the natural curiosity that would bring the Courier (and the player) to an abandoned bunker in the first place. The point is, if they feel like they belong in the Painted World, they end up in that very place and call it home.

Furthermore, this World is a place for dreamers. According to Daisuke Satake, one of the art designers in Dark Souls I, the Corvians of the Painted World were people who wished to grow wings. This wish was so powerful that it transformed their bodies into pathetically horrific creatures. In Ariandel, the Corvians’ gruesome appearances are offset by their passive, almost timid nature. They are meek, emaciated, sickly beings, some barely able to stand, who squawk pitifully as they lay collapsed on the ground.

The Painted World is also a haven for those who worship the goddess Velka, an obscure figure in the already vague world of Dark Souls lore. From in-game text, Velka is said to be the goddess of sin, and her statue in the Undead Settlement also possesses the ability to absolve you of both wrongdoing and remove any Hollowing.

In game mechanics terms, “sin” happens if you attack another character (say, a merchant) and accidentally aggro them. To undo that damage, you go to this statue and offer souls to have your “sins” forgiven. But the fact that Velka can also remove Hollowing is rather interesting. I’m not entirely sure what to make of it, but I do want to point out that the only other Unkindled Hollow we meet in the game is Friede, the main boss of Ashes of Ariandel. It doesn’t surprise me that she would gravitate towards a world that was the center of Velka’s worship, nor does it surprise me that she would sit rapt and attentive at the feet of Velka’s statue.

Being the goddess of sin doesn’t mean Velka venerates or glorifies in it. Sin has to be Velka’s domain and within her control if she’s able to remove it from those who worship her. How else could she get rid of sin, if she didn’t fully understand and grasp what sin is?

Despire her obscurity, Velka is a merciful figure in the world of Dark Souls, and her presence and the power of her worship is similar to the Sierra Madre broadcast, inviting the forlorn and the downtrodden to take comfort within its walls. Also, as a fun side-note, the Sierra Madre broadcast was made by Vera Keyes, who is herself a central figure of the Sierra Madre’s secrets, including its treasures and its tragedy. Vera Keyes, Velka.

But I digress.

Both of these sanctuary worlds are also home to an unstoppable force of destruction. For the Sierra Madre, it’s a red toxic cloud that permeates the air, slowly eating away at anyone who breathes it in. For the Painted World, it’s the sickly red “rot,” which can be found bubbling out of the ground and spreading fast across the settlement. (Side-note: there’s a fun bit of bilingual wordplay happening with the red rot in the Painted World, and the German word for the color red — which is also spelled rot, albeit pronounced differently. Call me silly, but I think this was intentional on FromSoftware’s part, especially considering the Germanic origins of other names in the DLC {Friede, Vilhelm}, as well as the Millwood knights’ appearance.)

The rot is, unfortunately, completely inexplicable. We never know how it started, or why. Much like the fading of the First Flame, it is simply something that happens, something that cannot be stopped, only responded to. This tragedy is all too familiar to me, in the scope of abuse and trauma, and despite the obviously different scenarios, the feeling of hopelessness and defeat remains the same.

My theory — and take this with a grain of salt — is that the rot has to do with the mental state of the people who live in the Painting. As more forlorn, miserable, lonely people gathered in one place, the more their dark feelings manifested physically, becoming the blood red, maggot-filled rot that is now slowly devouring the Painted World from within. It wouldn’t be the first time something in the Painted World transformed because of powerful thoughts: as mentioned above, the Corvians only exist because they wished to have wings.

And yet, much like our own questions about existence and the nature of our world, will understanding its origins ever get us anywhere? Will knowing why the world exists, and why decay is inevitable, give us the power to stop it? Obviously not. In the Painted World, the rot is just a condition the people have to accept. Like everything involving life and death, it’s something out of their power, something they can only respond to. The rot is a natural state of being— the rot, like death, is the natural progression of life.

The Sierra Madre’s toxic cloud has a less vague origin story. It existed before the War and has been the subject of study both then and now. Father Elijah says that “it decays all it touches,” and even after all his time in the Madre, he hasn’t found a way to stop it. The only people who seem to tolerate the cloud are Dean Domino (since he’s a ghoul), and the feral locals in the Madre: the Ghost People.

Much like the necromorphs in Dead Space, the Ghost People cannot die by normal means. You need to dismember them to keep them down permanently, a task made all the more difficult thanks to your Courier losing their weapons when they’re taken to the Madre. The Ghost People are, even at their worst, a scary frustration, something to be avoided by stealth or run frantically past (guess which one I did). But they also are a victim in Dead Money, they’re just too far gone to reach out for help or even know they need it.

As we continue through the Sierra Madre, we piece together the story of what happened to the resort before the bombs fell. During the resort’s construction, a gas leak injured several people on the crew. This accident wasn’t the first of its kind, nor would it be the last. Eventually, an airborne toxin started to seep in from the ventilation system, damaging the lungs and tissue of any who were exposed.

As we soon uncover, the source of the toxic cloud wasn’t a natural disaster — it was man-made. Worse, it was man-controlled. Researchers from the Big Empty, a nearby laboratory for some of the most brutal pre-War scientific experiments, purposefully designed and placed the toxin below the Sierra Madre. Like most horrific science experiments in the Fallout series, this was done for no reason other than to satisfy their curiosity. It was decision made with a total lack of compassion for the people who would suffer.

The researchers did this without anyone knowing, and what’s more, it was an experiment within an experiment. They also gave the workers hazmat suits, the very same ones we see the Ghost People wearing, in order to test how well they worked. In short, they didn’t. Exposure to the toxic cloud eroded the metal locks on the suits, forever trapping whoever was wearing them inside.

But what about the founder of the Sierra Madre? Who funded this ambitious project, and who inspired it all, and why? And how are they all connected to the Madre’s current decaying state, a manifestation of the figurative toxic greed that permeated the resort’s origins? The answer lies with three people: Frederick Sinclair, Vera Keyes, and our very own Dean Domino.

Part Three: More of Fire than Blood

Much like Ariandel, the “father/creator” of the Painted World, Frederick Sinclair was both the mind and money behind the creation of the Sierra Madre. Unlike Mr. House from the main game, who is a notoriously reclusive, Howard Hughes-esque wealthy man obsessed with preserving the glory of the Vegas strip, Sinclair is depicted as a gentler man, tender of heart and persistently optimistic. And yet, much like House, Sinclair develops a keen interest in security and weaponized technology.

Despite suffering several financial setbacks before the war, Sinclair refused to give in to despair — he did, however, develop an understandable obsession with security, leading to the holograms that haunt both the resort and the casino. On terminals scattered throughout the resort, we find reports from frustrated security personnel lamenting the long list of prohibited items (including liquor and chems), as well as the confiscation of any object that is either radioactive or foreign. What’s more, we learn that Sinclair repeatedly encouraged the workers not to interfere with the holograms in the casino— after all, the holograms were only there to keep people safe.

The holograms are emblematic of a larger issue within the Madre, one that is easy to overlook due to the nature of the Mojave Wasteland and its lawless ruthlessness. Less keen-eyed players would probably gloss right over the vending machines supplied with whatever a resort resident might need, and perhaps they wouldn’t even look twice at both the resort security and the lethal holograms within the casino. It’s just another example of the sort of pre-War paranoia that ultimately proved fruitless when the bombs fell. Right?

It is clear that Sinclair not only wanted to keep people in the Madre safe, he wanted to keep them independent for a long period of time. This explains not only the defenses, but the vending machines and why they’re so well stocked with food and medical supplies. They were meant to help people in the result of an attack — say, from an enemy country who was in a resources war with the United States.

The Sierra Madre was, in a sense, a fallout shelter and a micro-city, utterly independent and defensible. But Sinclair wasn’t just trying to create a self-sufficient society in the very likely event of war. He had another purpose — indeed, a specific person — in mind when building the Madre.

And that person was Vera Keyes.

The Sierra Madre resort-casino was just that, but only in name. Multiple people, both before the war and after, describe it like a fortress — and that’s exactly what it was. With its ever-vigilant security force, hermetically sealed doors, and emergency broadcast system, the Sierra Madre was built to endure and protect. The security in the Madre was so specific, and so sensitive, that a lockdown notice could be issued for just about anything. That’s because Sinclair was dead-set on keeping Vera safe, no matter what.

This reminds me of another relationship, one that was most likely also built on protection and trust — a trust so deep that one of the pair willingly mutilated themselves for the sake of the other. A trust that created unwavering loyalty, to the point where all one had to do was say a word, and the other would obey without question. A bond between two people who were companions in suffering and survival — two people who took shelter in a self-sufficient sanctuary that, tragically, was not built to last.

What if one of the pair was a painter, one who possessed not just the skill but the power to create a world? And what if he found a woman who tried to save the world — and failed? What if her story moved his heart past pity to genuine sympathy? And what if he decided to create a world for her, a place where she and other heartbroken, lonely people could belong?

The game doesn’t outright say that Ariandel made the world for Friede. I fully admit that it’s just a headcanon of mine, but it’s not an entirely baseless theory. Friede and Ariandel’s lives are tethered in a way that I think most players of Dark Souls III tend to miss, despite it being boldly declared in both fire and blood. My proof for this claim is the second phase of their fight, both what happens before it and what happens during.

After you defeat Friede, she collapses on the ground, and her blood seeps out across the tiles.

Her blood continues to run down the room, leading right to the urn Ariandel keeps clutched in his hands, an urn holding both the Painted World’s sacred fire and his own blood. As per Friede’s request, Ariandel covered his eyes throughout the first phase of the fight, so he had no way of knowing you defeated Friede until he saw her blood pool around the urn. He trembles in horror before letting out a visceral, heart-wrenching howl of agony.

Ariandel then proceeds to tear himself free of his bonds, and seizes the urn, which he then beats viciously on the ground, spilling blood and fire on the trail leading back to Friede. He does this again and again, screaming all the while, as if it’s his very life that’s threatened. It’s also the same rhythm of a heartbeat.

This scene is more than just a gruesome twist of the knife on the developers’ part. It’s more than just a humanizing moment for a man who is monstrous to behold and impossibly gigantic, a man who looks more beast than human. It’s the developers literally drawing a line across the screen, forcing us to see the connection that unites the two. It is a blood bond — and it is blood, after all, that is the secret source of the Painted World’s power. As if that weren’t enough, during the fight Friede will fall to her hands and knees and heal both herself and Ariandel — they share one life bar, after all, proving that their lives are inextricably linked.

The Rose of Ariandel, a flail you can craft from Friede’s soul, states that, “Ariandel, being the restorer of the Painted World, knew that it was painted with blood, and only blood could protect the secret.” (Source) This secret could very well be the fact that the Painted World requires such a sacrifice in order to be made. And it is with his own blood that Ariandel is able to resurrect Friede — Embering her in the process.

Allow me to quote from casitive/angelnomoon, a fellow Medium author, about the purpose of Embers in Dark Souls III:

Embers in Dark Souls III as stream-watcher “Tobi” pointed out, are so coveted by Ashen Ones because with an Ember an Ashen One becomes more real. In gaining a heightened sense of tangibility, the Ashen one gains a heightened power and health. (Source)

The only way an Unkindled Ash can come close to truly being alive is through an Ember — they quite literally immolate their body in the process, growing stronger despite the flames.

What interests me about this boss fight is that Ariandel Embers Friede by himself — not just once, but twice. The best “gotcha” moment of the Ashes of Ariandel DLC is the surprise third phase. Ariandel and Friede collapse once again, seemingly defeated — but with his last ounce of strength, Ariandel embraces the urn, bursting into bloody fire before disappearing completely. We then hear his voice, speaking the prophecy that brought our player character to the Painted World in the first place — but he’s saying it to Friede. “Thou’rt Ash, and fire befits thee, of course…”

This is an act of creation that is the etymology of the word “inspire” (to breathe life into). Once again, Ariandel acts as the creator, only this time he is also the kindler. He restores life to Friede not once, but twice, each time using his own blood and the feared, flickering flame. The sad irony isn’t lost on me, that the very thing Friede was afraid of was the only thing that could bring her to life.

In order for you to fully grasp the visual impact of the above, please take a moment (well, ten minutes exactly) to watch the boss fight in full. Consider it a nice diversion from this freakishly long essay.

But what does this have to do with New Vegas?

Sinclair’s attachment to Vera wasn’t as dramatic as restoring her life through fire and blood, but it was similarly devoted and woven through with pain. His focus on security and self-sufficiency was a bit overzealous, and ultimately disastrous, but he is also by far the first and perhaps only man in the Dead Money story that showed any actual care for a woman’s well-being.

Yet I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the hidden truth to Sinclair and Vera’s relationship: it was all a lie. A lie Dean Domino helped orchestrate.

Dean knew Vera long before Sinclair ever did— he gleefully declares that he’s the one who made her career in the first place — and because of his own envy, he coerced Vera into tricking Sinclair. Dean’s greatest flaw is that he can’t stand to see anyone else happier than him. And Sinclair, despite his financial troubles, still maintained the hope that things would work out. This infuriated Dean, and he felt he had to act.

Vera doesn’t seem to be a willing participant in this scheme. In the casino we discover a holotape where Dean flat out admits to blackmailing her, threatening to reveal her Med-X addiction if she doesn’t comply. And we also know that Sinclair wasn’t completely in the dark about Dean’s plans. Sinclair’s final note admits that Vera confessed everything to him just before the bombs fell, though it’s likely that Sinclair even knew about it beforehand: he has two “last” notes, one much more bitter and cruel than the other, which was most likely written before Vera’s confession. In it, he writes:

“I hope [the treasure vault] leaves you as empty as you’ve left me […] The casino was my gift to you, and you now will be its heart for all time.” (Source)

Either because of guilt or genuine affection, Vera eventually told Sinclair the whole, rotten truth. Considering what we hear of Vera’s last words — words that were recorded by the very security holograms meant to keep her safe — it seems Vera felt something for Sinclair at the very end. She clearly thought of him as a figure of safety and comfort, someone who would protect her:

“Sinclair? Sinclair, where did you go? Why did you leave me here? Why… […] I’m so sorry, Sinclair. Sorry, I… I should have trusted you.” (Source)

And why wouldn’t she? He did, after all, build an entire fortress all in the effort to keep her happy and safe. But Sinclair didn’t just do this out of love — he did it because Vera was suffering.

Through the Auto-Doc in Vera’s room — which would also be her tomb — we learn that Vera had a terminal illness, and was in constant pain — hence, why she had a Med-X addiction in the first place. She didn’t know that she was ill, and it’s likely that she never even suspected her body was destroying itself from within. Only Sinclair knew about this illness, and it is this reason why the entire Madre was built to Vera’s every need. Sinclair knew her time was running short, and he wanted her last days to be as peaceful, as happy, as comfortable as they could possibly be. Even though her days were numbered, he wanted to give Vera a sanctuary where she could still hold onto the hope that change was not only possible, it was ever within her grasp. She could, despite her flaws or fears, wake up with each coming day and begin again.

There is another final note to Vera, one Sinclair wrote after she confessed the plot: “This place will keep you safe. I know while you did not love me, you did not mean any malice in what you did.” (Source) In this note, Sinclair also explains that there is enough supplies to keep her safe until help arrives, and the emergency signal will ensure someone will come for her.

But as we’re all too uncomfortably aware, that’s not how things turned out. The emergency signal that was meant to be a cry for help instead broadcast Vera’s voice across the Wasteland, inviting people to visit the Sierra Madre and take comfort in its walls. For hundreds of years, this message lured people to the Madre, to its secrets, to its trap, all the while the security holograms patrolled the casino wearing Vera’s face, repeating her dying words in an endless, eternal echo.

And people think Dark Souls is bleak.

Part Four: Company in Misery

Perhaps the only bright, hopeful part in these games’ themes of trauma, identity, and memory mixed in with broken worlds is the fact that our player character doesn’t have to go through it all alone. Our companions are not just dressed up escort missions. They are fully nuanced people, whose fates and lives are within our hands.

Dark Souls III doesn’t allow you to have companions in the way New Vegas does, but you do meet with friendly NPCs and other characters who are on their own personal journey. Furthermore, some NPCs become eventual bosses, further cementing the emotional ties and high stakes should you choose to form an emotional bond with them. What matters is that you make a connection with someone else who understands what you’re going through. This connection both enriches and deepens the experience with the games as you play through them — or at least, that’s what happened for me.

This connection — these characters and the confrontations you have with them — are also an important part of the trauma/memory/identity process. The games are asking that we look outside ourselves, at someone else who is in a similar situation, and learn something from them.

In Dark Souls III, our player character is drawn into the Painted World for two reasons: we are Unkindled Ash, and thus are one half of a prophecy about two Ashen Ones entering the Painted World; and we are also the only one capable of bringing much-needed fire to the world, as we are both an outsider and the other part of said prophecy.

Gael, the NPC who leads us into the Painted World, is found in a chapel praying to a hidden statue of Velka in the hopes that she will bring someone to help. We are that someone. Furthermore, Gael is from the Painted World himself, and escaped through no small effort on his part in his quest to cleanse his home and see its death-rebirth cycle restored.

While in the Painted World, specifically in the Corvian Settlement, we find a friendly NPC who tells us that the nature of the Painted World is one of cycles. Once the World starts to decay (in this case, when it starts to grow rot), they all agree to burn it down and create a new Painted World. This is agreed on in a committee, or perhaps in some kind of democratic process, and it’s a cycle that must continue, as it’s the only way to heal and begin again.

Only this time, the World isn’t burning. It’s rotting, and what’s more, someone is deliberately keeping the World from this cycle of death and rebirth, going so far as to imprison the only other painter who could make a new world.

For all her sympathetic reasons, Friede was still going against the wishes of the Corvians who agreed to burn the Painted World. She’s still causing suffering, however unintentionally, and she’s still prolonging her own personal misery by refusing to let go of a rotting world. What’s more, she’s blind to the strong ties she has to those around her: Ariandel, and the loyal knight Sir Vilhelm who followed her into the Painted World and remained ever devoted to her. What’s more, she has a family in the world outside the painting, one she knows is alive and well. And yet Friede never returns to Yuria, never makes mention that this is something she ever considered doing. Nor can we even ask her.

And then there is our player character, Friede’s fellow Unkindled Ash, perhaps the only one who could fully understand her misery and need for comfort. Yet we’re never allowed to offer her any support. We aren’t allowed to say anything, due to our player character being voiceless. This voicelessness, this inability to convey that we understand and even sympathize with Friede, was the more frustrating part of Ariandel for me personally, and is the only thing I dislike about the Dark Souls series.

Perhaps my only complaint about the Dark Souls series is that it doesn’t allow for personal face-to-face dialogue-heavy interactions with its NPCs. For an RPG, there is remarkably little ability to flesh out your character as an actual person, apart from your own personal backstory. There is no cleverly written dialogue box that pops up, allowing us to choose different responses based on how we want to play our character, and it’s this very lack that makes Friede and our player character’s connection all the more poignant, as it is something they are unable to expand upon. I guess that’s why fanfiction exists. And this essay.

This inability to connect with Friede only makes me more keenly aware of how much I wanted to reach out to her, in a way that’s similar to Christine taking my Courier’s hand and squeezing it gently. Luckily, New Vegas allows me to make interpersonal connections in spades, albeit with fake people. Fake, really messed up people.

Once we finally break into the Sierra Madre casino, Elijah raises the stakes even further: he wants us to kill off our companions, ultimately declaring them to be useless to his goal now that the casino is open. Their collars, the very collars he put on them in the first place, interfere with the ambient music playing in the casino, and he needs this music to play so he can use Vera’s voice to open the treasure vault. The fact that our collars will explode shortly after we kill our companions is just a risk that Elijah demands we accept — we can, after all, outrun the signal long enough to get back to safety.

After all this time, and after everything we’ve been through, is murder really the only way to end our time with our fellow prisoners? The irony of this isn’t lost on me. As Dean said — albeit about Sinclair — “people are the architects of their own misfortunes.”

Our companions are well aware of Elijah’s orders, and depending on how we’ve treated them up to this point, they respond differently to reuniting with us. Our first confrontation takes place with Dog/God.

When we meet him again, Dog/God is in a truly miserable state. The walls between his two personae are crumbling, and we overhear him speaking frantically in the two voices, cycling back and forth from God’s plaintive pleas, and Dog’s grim determination.

After hearing what Elijah, his “Master”, has decided to do, Dog vows to burn himself, the casino, and everyone in it to the ground. God, terrified of enduring any more pain, wants to talk Dog out of suicide. It is here that we learn the sad truth: God always needed Dog more than Dog needed God.

Since New Vegas is an RPG that actually understands the value and importance of player agency, we have several options to choose from — and those choices splinter off into even more options. We can either get Dog to ‘eat’ God, and be free of the voice, or we can convince Dog to see us as his new Master.

If we choose the latter, we can then:
—tell Dog to kill himself (you fucking monster)
—tell him to obey God and go to sleep (still heartbreaking, but less terrible).

At some point in this conversation, God will emerge and say, “All I wanted was for him to listen to me, take care of him, keep him from hurting himself. […] One day, when he’s ready, I’ll let him out… when we… understand each other.” (Source) I’ve little doubt that God will make good on his word, although I can’t see this understanding happening while one is in power over the other.

Your other option is to merge the personalities into one, as the previous screenshot showed. What follows is one of the most beautifully written strings of dialogue I’ve seen in a video game. It’s an honest but sincerely kind conversation, bridging the gap of a suffering, fractured mind with one that still maintains its total faculties. Our Courier can act as Dog/God’s therapist, guiding them through a visual meditation where he imagines the other voice not as something to devour, but a mirror, a reflection of his own self. And finally we can ask him, “[y]ou’ve hurt yourself inside. Do you see now?”

I’m not embarrassed to say I genuinely teared up at this conversation, because I could very well have been asking myself that same thing. All my years after my traumas have been marked by pain of both the internal and self-inflicted kinds. I have scars on my body that I deliberately put there, because I, like Dog, believed that pain would “protect me.” I’ve long since stopped that, because I realized that all the pain I could inflict didn’t make up for the larger pain I was still feeling. Like Dog/God, I deserved to live a life, deserved to have a body, that didn’t hurt anymore.

Merging Dog and God will forge a totally new identity, a mind with no memory of his previous selves, or even of our Courier who worked so hard to heal them both. “You’ll be alone,” God says, sincerely concerned for our safety, “at the Old Man’s mercy. Like Dog, like me.” But we aren’t alone. We have our memories, and we have the new man that Dog/God will become, even if he’s a stranger to us.

After the two personae merge, a new one is born. Nameless and confused, he looks at us and says that we’re somehow familiar. What’s more, he has a sense of gratitude towards us.

Our Courier can bring Dog/God not only to a place of healing, but to a state of being that is now totally within his own power. No longer will he have to live in fear of Elijah’s voice and its transformative power. No longer will he have to resort to self-mutilation and starvation just to keep himself in control. Dog/God is free and safe — he’s able to begin again. In this moment, we are like Ariandel speaking the prophecy to rekindle and resurrect Friede once more.

Our final encounter with Dean Domino was less cathartic for me — although I had, up to this point, gotten on his good side.

Par for the course with his ego, Dean considers you a threat if you in any way reminded him that he wasn’t in total control of the situation. Even if you displayed basic, competent intelligence, Dean will consider this an insult. He will consider you hostile, and refuse to help you navigate the lounge safely. You can, however, trick him into revealing a safe path through the room, which is a lovely example of an idiot being hoisted by his own petard.

If, however, you placated his ego, he greets you warmly, calls you partner, and asks for your help. He warns you about the holograms and tells you which door to take so you can hide backstage and be safe.

Either option ultimately gets you backstage, where you get his blackmail tape, and learn what he did to Vera and Sinclair.

The backstage confrontation can go one of two ways:
 — hostile, if we were ever ‘rude’ to him
 — — we can then fight him
 — — or we can use speech checks to talk him down, getting him to admit his involvement in ruining Sinclair, and why he’s so hellbent on getting into the Madre’s vault. He then fights us.

If you placated his ego, you can talk peacefully to him. He’ll explain his plan to let the both of you survive what’s ahead, as he knows how to get into Sinclair’s suite. He also confesses to being the one that put Christine in the Auto-Doc in the first place — meaning he is responsible for ripping out her vocal cords. He did this so he could later use her voice (as Vera) to break into the vault.

This is around the time where I shot Dean in the back and looted his corpse. And that’s all I have to say about this shitlord.

Fuck ‘im. Let’s talk about Christine now.

(I’m exaggerating my dislike of Dean just a bit here. He’s a great example of a bad person who is a tremendously good character, one that I think really does add more dimension to the DLC than the other companions, who are all sympathetic even if they’ve done questionable things. By including a character who is so clearly interested only in himself, and in knowing that other people see him as important, it makes the whole “have your group survive because their lives depend on yours” dynamic all the more complex.

I do, however, also like the way his tux looks on my female Courier, so it’s six feet under for you, Domino.)

Christine is the last companion we encounter. She was taken to Vera’s suite, specifically to the Auto-Doc inside the room, and depending on how we treated her up to this point, she can either help us or make life more difficult.

Each companion in our heist has a role to play. The second act of the DLC involves our Courier escorting each one of our companions to specific spots on the map. Christine must be taken to a switching station, and it’s here we’re given a choice: we can trick her, the severely claustrophobic mute woman, into going into an elevator, or we can find another way.

If we didn’t trick her (and why would you, you absolute monster), she helps us find a way into the suite, navigating through the security and other technical troubles. If, however, we did trick her, she’s understandably vengeful and furious, to the point where our final confrontation has her become a suicide bomber, charging towards us, ready to take the both of us out in one final act of rage. Really can’t say I blame her.

All throughout this perilous journey to her suite, we hear the very same voice Christine now has also coming out of the security holograms patrolling the floor. It’s Vera’s voice, forever preserved in its final moments, begging Sinclair to let her go.

Right up until the moment of her death, the holographic system recorded Vera, keeping a close, protective eye on her. This is how Vera’s voice becomes the “key” to entering the vault. Through a freak accident, Vera’s voice became part of the security system that still thrives in the Sierra Madre.

Brr.

As another side-note, this adds a weird but interesting bit of meta strangeness. Vera’s voice, and now Christine’s, is supplied by Laura Bailey — who also does the voice of a female Courier. All these women are prisoners of the Madre, with their personal agency torn from them. They are all trauma survivors, damaged, furious or terrified — and they all share a voice.

When we finally reunite with Christine, if she trusts us, she expresses that she’s glad we survived, and she finally confesses why she came to the Sierra Madre: to kill Elijah. “I had to find a new purpose, same banner.” She tells us about how her relationship with another woman failed, and how painful it can be if, despite love, two people still can’t connect.

Once we explain why Vera’s voice — and now Christine’s — is so important, she expresses concern about letting us confront Elijah alone. We can ask her to trust us, but this is a request she finds difficult to accept.

“I can’t let go. Every time I’ve thought about it… […] he needs to die. […] I need to be sure. See his eyes, his face, as he dies.” (Source)

And even though you can’t let Christine do it personally, you can still swear to take care of Elijah yourself. This was a promise I was all too ready to make. It was the only chance I had to get the kind of revenge I wanted, after all.

Once we finally speak with Elijah, we can try to hold him accountable for all the terrible things he’s done, taking the high road and standing on wholly moral ground. He’s less than impressed, and declares that we are no different from him. His proof is that we followed the Sierra Madre’s signal just like he did, and that we are responsible for him taking us prisoner.

Holy victim blaming, Batman.

It is in this final confrontation that we learn why Elijah had to plan this heist in the first place: for all his arrogance and intelligence, he ended up trapped in the casino with no way out. Held prisoner, and determined to outwit technology that had already outsmarted him, Elijah also reveals what his larger plans are for both the Sierra Madre and the Mojave as a whole.

The Sierra Madre, with all its technical prowess and hologram security, is a weapon, something Elijah wants to unlock and wield against the Mojave. He also wants to use the toxic cloud in this effort. The cloud protects/preserves the casino, and he can use it to both preserve and cleanse anything else.

As Elijah is waxing somewhat poetic, but mostly mad, about the hologram security, he seems to recount his failure at HELIOS One, conflating it with his hopes for his upcoming reign of terror. “It’s like holding light in your hands: can’t fight it, only watch it burn.” (Source)

I was astonished when I went back to Dead Money to take notes for this essay, and I heard Elijah say these words. To me, in a post-Dark Souls mindset, this stood out as a glaringly clear yet admittedly coincidental tie between the two series, not just because of the light/fire motifs, but also the underlying themes of failure, greed, and fear. Dark Souls takes this idea and puts a dark fantasy spin on it with the Age of Fire and the Age of Dark.

The only reason why we have to Link the Fire in Dark Souls is because Lord Gwyn, the god of sunlight, was too terrified to let go of the power he held. So he sacrificed himself to the First Flame, thus damning the world, and humans, to a cycle of endless light. This forced every living thing, including the world itself, to undergo a superficial rekindling and resurrection way past its necessary lifespan. The light preserved and destroyed at the same time.

You know what that sounds like?

Damn.

Just like in Fallout, where technology and atomic power was both a force of creation and tyrannical destruction, light, fire, the sun, everything that should create and sustain life in Dark Souls is instead a horrific kind of necromancy, a blight, a curse of constant life and non-death. Light and fire are things to fear, to suppress, to control. What’s more, the Kiln of the First Flame looks like ground zero of a nuclear explosion.

Father Elijah’s musing that light cannot be fought or held also reminded me of Sister Friede and Father Ariandel, and their efforts to quell the fire at the heart of the Painted World. Like Lord Gwyn, they sought to control light. But instead of linking the fire, they saw it as something to suppress — all the while this very fire was necessary for Friede to regain some semblance of life.

Despite our ability to talk with Father Elijah, we cannot fully reason with him. He’s too bitter, too angry, and has had too much time to nurture this hate and hurt. To paraphrase The Dresden Dolls, all of his blind ambition left him deaf with perfect vision.

It wasn’t just about the HELIOS One incident, although he was obviously eager to make up for this past failure. He was also still seething about the NCR’s victory, still furious that pre-War technology could outwit and even trap him, and still frustrated that human nature, and its pesky habit of betrayal, got in the way of his desire to conquer the Sierra Madre vault for so long. And through all this lies his own twisted dream to start over, to begin again — by force.

“Wipe the slate clean — make the Mojave like it was meant to be: undisturbed by man.” (Source)

Father Elijah wants to stand atop HELIOS One like a god, wielding an army of old world ghosts — and he wants to be alone in this new, quiet world. “In a world that’s nothing like what happened at HELIOS One.” A world without the haunting memory of his failure, where technology cannot best him, but can only obey his every command.

Remember what I said earlier, about New Vegas actually understanding things like player agency and taking that into account with the writing? Well, even if we can’t reason with Elijah, we can join him. If we don’t care about the NCR/have bad karma with them, we can side with Elijah’s dream of annihilation. He agrees with us only because he sees us as useful: we are uncompromising and resourceful. We’re a tool, a weapon, and nothing more.

This leads to a very specific ending where the toxic cloud poisoning the Sierra Madre invades the Mojave, and the hologram security now rains death upon the place. “Only two remained alive in the depths of the cloud… waiting for their new world to begin again.”

If we don’t meet these conditions, and we ask to confront Elijah face to face, he will initially refuse. We can pretend to cooperate with him, earning praise for our compliance as he then commands us to wait for him outside the vault. Regardless of how it comes about, when he finally does meet us, he will attack on sight. In this fight, depending on if they’re still alive, Christine and Dean can actually help us from a distance. If not, we’re left alone to take down Elijah and the technology he has armed and ready to strike us down.

Regardless of how we handle that final scenario — the most poetic, and my favorite choice, is to sneak past him and trap him in the vault — our Courier eventually escapes the Sierra Madre by the skin of their teeth. We return to the villa fountain, but none of our companions are there. They’re all gone, scattered — but still alive.

(Except for Dean.)

At this point, we can tune into our Pip-Boy radio to hear Elijah’s frantic, and most likely final, words. It’s a grim, grisly moment, one that made me wish I had just killed the man outright instead of leaving him to die alone. We have no way of communicating with him, but by listening to this broadcast, we can in some way keep him company, silent and hostile, in his last, bitter moments of life. And bitter they are, indeed.

“When you [Courier] die… I’ll be waiting here. At the Sierra Madre… waiting…” Malice oozes through Elijah’s every word, on par with the furious regret in his voice as he recounted his failure at HELIOS One. And in some small way, I was glad I was able to hear him say this. For a man whose life had for so long been burdened with failure, I was strangely glad to be able to spend his last moments with him, however distant and mute. In a way, he didn’t die alone, his words never went unheard, his hate and anger not unfelt.

The Grand Finale (finally)

Dead Money is full of amazingly insightful, brilliantly introspective dialogue about human nature, which is a little unexpected coming from a game that also has a sex robot named FISTO. As Dog/God says, “Hunger and control are twin greeds.” Christine also admits that “obsession is another form of greed.” And even Dean, blinded as he was by his own petty jealousy, has a pearl of wisdom to share about human nature: “people are the architects of their own misfortunes.”

In both Ashes of Ariandel and Dead Money, the main characters and antagonists are clear, tragic examples of some of the most difficult facets of human nature, even if they are not human themselves. It also forces the player to examine themselves in turn, and how we look at ourselves. We are what we’ve done, we are what we remember, and we can always only be what we choose.

Memories aren’t just bits of the past that still linger around, like our own private ghosts. They are real and true, and they shape us in ways that are no different than choices we make, or choices forced on us. Through memories, through wounds, through trauma, we must not only face the darker aspects of our identities, but learn that the only way to change, to grow, to become better or even just different people is to accept all the horrible things that helped make us in the first place. We must look into our wounds not as something to control or destroy, but as mirrors, reflections that bear our very face. And then we have to let them go.

If your companions survive in the DLC, they all take part in Dead Money’s final lines: “Finding it, that’s not the hard part. It’s letting go. It’s letting go. It’s letting go. It’s letting go.” Maybe some day, hopefully in the not too distant future, I’ll figure out how to let go, too. Until then, it’s therapy, NG+ in Dark Souls III, and yet another trip through New Vegas for me.

And so part one of this massively long essay comes to a close. Thank you so very, very much for taking the time to read this. And I hope you’ll come back to read my other essays. I’m aiming to make Honest Hearts next, but we’ll see.

❤Kristin

Author’s Note: This essay is the prototype/beta version of an essay I am currently writing, which compares and combines the thematic parallels of Dark Souls III’s Ashes of Ariandel with Fallout: New Vegas’ Dead Money, Honest Hearts, and Lonesome Road DLCs. For now, please enjoy my emotionally-fueled ramblings about Sister Friede, and how much encountering her first moved me.

In Dark Souls III, I think that to be Embered is to mix the fire of the soul with blood–this creates life or, for an Ashen One, the semblance of life. That’s why Embers perform the function of Humanity and Human Effigies from the previous games: they make us stronger and give us more life (health). But the Ashen One–the Unkindled, the Champion of Ash–the protagonist of Dark Souls III is special. They are the ashes of a failed Chosen Undead. They are the memory of failure, brought back to life ostensibly to try over again, because the world is in just that kind of dire state that it needs a memory to make things right.

Most surprisingly, Friede is an Unkindled, too. I think she’s the only other character in the game who becomes Embered, barring the Lords of Cinder and our player character. That alone makes her significant in a way I don’t think many people consider when they go into her fight. Most talk I see about Friede is just how much people hate her boss fight (which I personally don’t get — that fight was fun, y’all).

Lore states that she did not become Unkindled by choice, which makes me wonder if the Sable Church tried to make her a Lord of Cinder, similar to how Aldrich was made one by force. Regardless of how she got there, she failed to link the fire, and as a result separated from the Church and withdrew into the Painted World, a place for the Forlorn, the outcast, the rejected.

But she wasn’t alone: Sir Vilhelm came with her, as he was so devoted to her. And it’s here in the painting she chose to become the very thing the residents needed, because she herself was so lonely, so miserable, and so dejected. She wanted to belong so badly that she purposefully imitated Priscilla, the previous maternal figurehead in the Painted World from Dark Souls I. More than just a desire to belong, she wanted a purpose for being–she wanted to feel like she could do something.

The painful thing here is that she was already cared for. She had sisters (although I imagine the relationship between them was strained after the failed linking of the fire). And again, she had Vilhelm, who chose to remain by her side even after she gave him a sword as a parting gift. She even had Ariandel, who I imagine had time to grow fond of her, considering his visceral reaction to her ‘death.’ Friede’s intense focus on clinging to the Painted World, even as it slowly began to rot away, only blinded her to the value of what she already possessed, as well as the necessary, albeit painful, lesson taught by healing. Sometimes we have to fall apart before we can become whole again.

Regardless of how you think about her, I think what really gets me about Friede is that she clung so tightly to the idea that she needed to belong, that when it came time to say goodbye to the Painted World–when the citizens all agreed to burn it down, to let a new world emerge in its place–she point blank refused to let that happen. She actively chose to rot instead of to let go, to heal, because she was so determined not to fail again. Because to her, the idea of letting go was akin to failure. And for me, that hurts. It hurts because… I fucking get it. As someone with a laundry list of traumas, culminating in the fine holy trinity of PTSD, GAD, and BPD, I completely and fully understand just how hard it is to let go of past pain, past failures, and all the fury that still burns inside you. You want to make it right. You want to make it better, but you don’t know how. The wretched truth is that you can’t fix it. You can only let go of it. And that’s something I’m still coming to terms with, nearly every damn day.

I imagine it’s the same for Friede. She had already failed to save the previous world, and now this new one, her only refuge, was at risk too? She was wrong to take it upon herself to deny the people what they wanted, but she only did so because she was so forlorn herself. And I’m not saying that makes her right, but it makes what she did make sense. And it makes sense in a way that’s more human and compassionate than, say, Gwyn wanting to keep the Age of Man from happening, and thus damning us all to our wretched state. The Dark Soul (Humanity) only exists because a god was too much of a fucking coward to know when to gracefully bow out and let go — and in the world of Dark Souls, the entire world is suffering because of that cowardice.

To go back to my first point, the Ashes of Ariandel DLC shows us just what it means for an Unkindled to be Embered when Ariandel resurrects and Embers Friede by beating the (not) Lordvessel on the ground to the tune of a heartbeat, spilling molten fire into her blood. I think this is also a thematic touch for his main mode of attack in the fight: he continues to beat the vessel on the ground rhythmically, similar to how you perform CPR (albeit with less violence). Not only that, he targets whoever last attacked Friede, as if her life at that point is so precious to him that it’s something he will defend to the point of violence. In the cutscene just before phase two, Ariandel is quite literally beating and pouring life back into her, and when his body falls it’s his words that bring her back to life once more in her true, final form: Blackflame Friede.

At some point in their lives, in their time inside the painting, Ariandel recognized the power inside her–she was Ash, yes, but ash was once fire. And she could be fire again. And perhaps the prophecy that Ariandel had heard about is what led him to cling so tightly to Friede. To him, she could be the Ash that would become Flame once more — a precious flame that the Painted World needed in order to be reborn. Over time this clearly changed into what we see in the DLC, but I’m not fully interested in unpacking that.

What I am interested in mentioning is both the description of Friede’s soul, and what her sister, Yuria, has to say if you speak with her after completing Ariandel.

Friede’s soul states that together, she and Ariandel “chose rot over fire.” It was a decision they came to as one, and clearly didn’t involve and coercion. This leads nicely into my earlier argument that Ariandel clearly cared about Friede, and was attached to her in a truly powerful way — how else to explain the raw, visceral horror and agony he feels at seeing her body collapse, seemingly dead?

What Yuria has to say about her sister is the cherry on top of this already thoroughly sad sundae: “ Twas the soul of my sister. Elfriede… A poor wench turned to Ash, who would abandon Londor… If thou wouldst, let it nourish they Lordship. And in return, do her one small kindness. Remember those who stayed by her to the end, in the shadows cast by fire…”

Yuria asks the player character to gain strength from her sister’s soul, but to be kind in return. This kindness? Remember those who were devoted to her, and remember their loyalty and devotion. Don’t let them fade away as just names in your mind, or obstacles that needed to be overcome. Remember them as people, and what moved them.

Souls veterans should now be thinking about Lucatiel, from Dark Souls II, who begged us to remember her even as her own mind started to fade away. Because it is memories alone that keep a person alive even long after they’re dead. It’s not the soul — the souls is something you can pick up off a corpse and transpose into something else. But memories? Memories are untouchable, incorruptible. Memories endure. And Yuria asks us to let her sister’s memory endure, letting her live on inside ourselves.

Perhaps this is lost on most players, but Yuria, the previously rather detached, almost mercenary NPC whose cooperation helps lead the way to a new ending, asking us to be kind and remember the people loyal to Friede shows a much needed softer side to her character. And that? Honestly, all that–Friede’s motivations, her misery; the elegance in which she fights, the violence and viciousness and agony Ariandel expresses after seeing her ‘death’; Yuria’s plea on her sister’s behalf–it just… it’s so fucking much, man. It means so much to me, and it’s so surprisingly powerful, transforming what could have just been a tricky boss fight into a truly emotional story that in and of itself surpasses most base game character arcs. And hopefully if you watch the fight you can get that sense yourself:

Sources:

• Soul of Sister Friede | Dark Souls 3 Wiki
• Rose of Ariandel | Dark Souls 3 Wiki