Märchen Line — Absent Throne

They say the Armada builds character, but it's hard to build well on a faulty foundation.

Märchen Line is a free game created by Nth Circle for the Spooky VN Jam 2024. You can download it here. Please support the creators! The article doesn’t contain any direct story spoilers, but it does talk about some of the game’s themes and implications. If at any point you feel intrigued enough to try and play it, it literally costs nothing to do so! You can always come back to this article later.

also, this article is very much inspired by the Spec Ops: The Line episode of Zero Punctuation. I hope I could capture the hopelessness :)

The throne is empty. Silence reigns across the hall. While the still burning viscera of what once was the meaning of the cosmos finally becomes inert, the offspring of the universe, human beings like you and I, look silent and agape. What can we do if not look, when the spine of creation itself falls in front of our very own eyes?

But the corpse isn’t real; the throne’s a metaphor, and it’s all happening in your head. It’s a rhetorical exercise, an attempt to visualize a universe where whatever it is that guides us simply stops. A universe where we’re absent of purpose. Can you imagine it? No. Really, can you, or do you merely think you do?

Endless debate and argumentation have been made about the issue of humanity. What makes us human? Is it our ability to reason? Our conscience? Our sentimentality? Our dexterity with complex tools? Maybe a bit of everything mixed? There isn’t really a clear division, partly because we can’t go back in time and make a precise, exact measurement. One day, a long time ago, we were animals. Another day, sometime later, we were humans. But in between there is an eternal, millenary transition.

Then the point is moot, really. An exercise for anthropologists and philosophers. Decidedly: we are human. I am human, you are human. What else do we need? We can’t just question what is right in front of our eyes, right?

But we do. Over and over again, we question the humanity of “the other”. We strip them of theirs, we break it down until it crumbles. That’s not human. You aren’t human. I am human. And I’m not what you are. So you’re not human.

A great deal of suffering comes from the fact that even this separation is a difficult, fuzzy ordeal, that might crumble under stress and examination.

But dehumanization is a tool, a tool for us to retract from a difficult thought, a complicated situation. How could they have done this? It’s because they’re not humans. Less than humans. A perversion, cruelty incarnate. Sick people, walking disasters, horrors.

We avoid blame during atrocities, pretending that we are incapable of making mistakes and immune to manipulation. I know. I always would have known. But we can’t say for certain. Neither you nor myself can know who we would have been in different places, different times. You have the “correct” perspective, always, in all moments, it’s unlikely, laughably so. It’s a way to center ourselves as better, as inherently good, as opposed to the others, the co-opted, the lesser.

Does this mean that misguided people are justified? No. Hell no. A lot of them are horrible, cruel, ill-meaning persons. They use hate and manipulation to enable crime and catastrophe against other human beings. And a lot of them: yes. They consider their victims inhuman. Exactly the same mechanism.

It’s precisely this “othering” of our fellow human beings that makes us so excellent when it comes to starting conflicts with each other. History quickly becomes a parade of injustice and atrocities, where prejudices start, expand, and in response a new prejudice arises, pushing in the opposite direction. This continues until the universe cools out for good.

Just in case, I’m not attempting to do a centrism here, in which I sit on the fence and pretend everyone’s the same while I’m some kind of genius. People are looking for positive change, and as a result, they look down on people who oppose them with uninformed and prejudiced retorts. These oppositions usually resort to hate, violence, and harassment, to perpetuate their status quo.

But this, too, begins the same process: the separation between ourselves and the others. Even if a group is well-meaning, in the long run, dehumanization will start to occur. And, since the other side is probably dehumanizing them already, both processes feed off each other, pushing them further and further toward… Well, the end result of unresolved strife is… war and violence.

There isn’t a clear answer to this that I can think of. I don’t have one. Do you? We can’t “better communicate” our way through the world until everyone agrees. For the rest of time, humankind will probably fight itself, as people try to impose their beliefs over others. A compromise might be attempted, but at the end of the day… that’s just a way to make both sides unhappy, and as power concentrates, the scales might start going one way over the other.

If person A wants to preserve life, and person B wants to extinguish it, what’s the middle point?

We’d be fortunate, then, if — as it happens in Märchen Line, a visual novel/dating sim by Nth Circle — we were forced to unite around a common good. That’s the quickest, easiest solution. It’s so obvious, right? A new other. An external other, which we can antagonize, keep in our minds as an eternal enemy, the reason for our suffering, and the motivation to be better.

As the new recruit, nicknamed “Pauper”, you become part of a group of adolescents that recently joined the Armada. Particularly, a force dedicated to a single mission: exterminate the cancer. Fight alien, cruel, evil beings. They obtain pleasure from killing humans. They have been doing it for millennia, and it looks like it will keep happening until someone wins and the other loses — or until the universe cools down for good.

The strong worldbuilding guides us through a series of foundational texts, aggressive principles, and mythology which the youth uses as a guide to see everything through the blurry lens of the human spirit. That unique, special thing that makes them worthy of being the descendants of the Father, and proving themselves in battle. Through massacre, they prove themselves talented, beautiful, and superior as a species. This is what makes us special. Our boundless capacity for war.

An “other” that nobody defends. An endless, unavoidable war. A monster so evil that we don’t even need to justify anything. Just do it, go ahead! It’s war. War forever. If hard times make strong men, then we can be strong men forever.

Not everyone chooses this life. Through the evocative and charismatic dialogue of our heroes, we can get a glimpse of the world beyond, their day-to-day, the banality of human life. Even so, war is still there. As a threat, as a motivator, and as an engine for their society. War is the way they stay together.

The war machine is, of course, excellent: perfectly capable of making an empire prosper. How could it not? How could you not accumulate power, when we all rally around the flag, when we all know death is waiting for the moment we let our guards down?

Pain and suffering become a blessing for humankind. What else do you need? Pain makes us stronger. Aren’t we stronger than ever? Better, better than ever.

The homage to Heart of Darkness (and inevitably, Spec Ops: The Line) looms large above Märchen Line. The ideal of glory and fighting for your nation is exposed as a little more than a simulacrum. A human construct, built from wilful thinking and a need for meaning, order, and knowledge.

Even if you’re not religious, there’s surely something, a central idea, a thought, a value, a core, something, that keeps you being yourself. A fundamental truth, something that guides you across your everyday life. Doesn’t even need to be a deity. Just a purpose, a life’s calling, a meaning. Even just the mere idea that you give yourself your own meaning.

Is it better than anything else? Is there a difference, in that inner working between you and any other person in the world? That central idea makes you who you are. It aligns your life, your social context, and your narrative, in a single cohesive direction, in a single unit of meaning: you. Being able to identify this feeling, this idea, and then analyze and actualize it, gives you control over yourself.

And this core… well. It gives you peace. Stability. It might not feel enjoyable at all, but it all makes sense, the world is like this and that’s why this happens. This is what I can do about it.

When we cross the threshold, as Konrad did the moment he entered the space station, what do we have on the other side? The world, ever changing. The truth exposed, along with a crude realization:

Indifference. Absolute… emptiness. The opposite of peace is… nothing. Nothing, all-encompassing. An inescapable silence of the universe.

It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t have meaning, because it was never about you, regardless of how you feel or how much you tried to make it seem like it did.

And when the time comes, was it worth it? So much time improving stats, so much time bettering your relationships. Things can’t be measured on points, most of the time. It’s far simpler: you are able, or you are not.

And sometimes the result is indistinguishable from luck, from mere coincidence. It happened. Just like that. Things randomly aligned and you got here. Welcome, get comfortable.

If God could talk, what would He say? Who would Them be? Even the all-powerful, omnipotent version of a deity, is a simulacrum. The idea of the “all-encompassing” filtered through our fleshy brains, hell-bent on making it make sense. If such a thing existed, why would be able to even think about it?

You and me, now. We’re human beings. And that’s it. What makes and unmakes us is human. In the short term, at least: what’s worse for humanity, than humanity itself?

Everything that’s a threat to us nowadays, we built it. Our ideals, our sense of what is and what ought to be, guide us in a certain direction. As we start to wake up and realize the damage we did to ourselves and each other, we quickly try to change course. Quick! There has to be another way. One that’s not an eternal conflict between “ourselves” and “the others”, and the destruction of everything else, in the process.

But is it possible? Can I talk the universe into stopping? Does the voice in my head have meaning? This monologue. This uncontainable stream of thoughts. It’s me. This is me. But it’s also this body, these hands. This knot in my stomach.

I am human. I act because of what I see, and what I appreciate. Because of what makes me myself, and because of the things I want for me and the world.

In that sense, I am the same as any other human being…

… but, I can’t agree with them. And what they’re doing is not something I can compromise on. So on we go, in constant, perpetual war. Until one of us wins, loses, or the universe cools down for good.

---

hey, if you liked this article, consider buying me a coffee! no worries if it’s not possible, your readership means the world to me :) see you soon!