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October 24, 2005
The Tragic Hero
Note: spoilers ahead!
Earlier this year I listened to House of Mirth on my way to and from work. It chronicles the fall of its heroine, Lily Bart, from the social scene of New York at the turn of the century.
Lily is getting to be of an age where she risks becoming an old maid -- and without a rich husband nor means of her own, she also risks social ostracism. She has been raised in a such a way as to prepare her for the life of high society, bred to its charms and its mannerisms, with every expectation that her face and figure would win her a husband.
The book's central conflict is between Lily's heart and the heartlessness she would need to stay in society. Though stacked in debts racked up playing bridge, she pretends ignorance of gambling to gain the favor of a rich, if morally uptight, gentleman, only to lose it when she recklessly spends time with the man we believe she truly loves, Lawrence Selden. In an attempt to gain enough money to buy time, she asks a rich man to invest her interests for her -- only to later learn that he has been merely giving her money of his own, and expects to be repaid in ways she'd rather not. She spurns a suitor due to her distaste for how mercenary he is¹.
In a lot of ways, Lily is playing a game, but a game she cannot win due to her character; what we take as something close to moral strengths are weaknesses in the field she plays. The stakes are high, and grow higher the longer she tarries at the game -- mounting debts, the slow decline of her good looks, the gathering of enemies amongst the society ladies whose ranks she seeks to join. The end is a fitting one -- to one who can't be ruthless enough to play the game by the rules, and to play to win, there is only death. It gives the story an incredible punch, to have Selden arrive on her doorstep the morning after her (admittedly ambiguous) suicide; he came seeking to propose marriage, and instead finds her beauty coldly preserved in death.
When I was playing God of War, I came to believe that death might have been an honorable end for the hero. The only prize he sought from the gods was denied him -- that of forgetting the horror he had wrought against his wife and child. Had he descended to Hades and thrown himself in the River Lethe² rather than ascending to Godhood, the story would have tied itself up in a rather more interesting way. It would have maintained the questions of destiny and fate, and provided the hero with a different out in choosing oblivion over a lifetime of painful reminiscence. It would also have been in better keeping with Greek stories -- such as that of Oedipus, who puts out his own eyes when he learns what he has done. Even Achilles, the greatest hero of his time, died in battle to assure his immortality in verse. Raising a mortal to the status of a God wasn't a common aspect of the mythology; but then, neither was slaying one.
I've been looking for another game to treat its protagonist in this way, much like Nameless was at the end of Planescape: Torment, choosing eternal, meaningless, punishing battle for his sins.
It's not that God of War offers a bad ending -- far from it, it's very fitting. But since we distance ourselves from the characters we control, we should offer those characters the full range of experience, so that players can enjoy a broader range of stories. I wonder if they even considered that end for him -- perhaps they could have retooled that whole "fighting-your-way-out-of-Hell" into a "slay as many minions of Hades as you can on the way to the River Lethe". A level where the goal is the death of the character to cleanse him of his sins... it's interesting, anyway.
Anyway, no conclusions to these thoughts (which is why it's taken me so long to post about it, I've decided to post and conclusions be damned!), but to say that given the breadth of experiences we can give our players through these characters, why exclude the full breadth of human experience. Is it really just too much of a bummer to witness a character's mortality, no matter how justified?
¹This particular bit is a little distasteful in this day and age -- the character in question, Simon Rosedale, is Jewish, and faces a steep climb into society because of it. He seeks Lily's hand purely as a way of securing his claim to high society. The sentiments against Jews may have been appropriate to New York society of the turn of the century, but I squirmed through these sections. (back)
²River of Forgetfulness -- save yourself a trip to google or the Wikipedia. (back)
Posted by Brett Douville at October 24, 2005 10:04 PM