thoughts on Sanchez
Hot on the heels of seika's entry about vengeance, though I was thinking of this last night before I saw it....
When that moment came to pass in Suikoden I, I remember thinking -- somewhere amongst the chorus of "...You bastard. You utter bastard." -- "please, don't make me responsible for whether this man lives or dies." Suikoden has a habit of doing that -- you are the commander, after all -- and I figured this was going to be the last or near-to last in a series of increasingly tough moral trials that I, as Merid, would be put through.
It turns out that the game doesn't actually let you make the decision (from what I read of the dialogue, I'd interpreted it that he was to be executed, but from what I've read of other people's interpretations thereafter, I might have been reading that wrong), and I was in some sense relieved -- cowardly, yes. But this wasn't because I was afraid that, in the heat of an emotionally charged moment, I might decide to order his death. I knew I wouldn't do that, because vengeance was not what my Liberation Army was about, not what the world I was trying to build was about, and to continue to enact it would be perpetuating the cycle of wrongs. Rather, I felt conflicted because, even though I knew it was not what Mathiu and Odessa would want, I still felt a twinge of ingrained "morality" that said, "if you don't want to avenge these people -- if you care about his life more than the fact that he killed them -- then they don't mean enough to you". Of course, that's an utter crock of bull, but there was still some underlying, kneejerk current of feeling that said that if I chose to spare the killer of people I cared about, those people would perceive me (posthumously or otherwise) as not really caring about them at all. Because if I did, I wouldn't be able to control my emotions, right? Even now, making this post, I'm still having flickers of that wariness; the feeling that someone is going to come out of left field and go, "but I would think you cared about me less, if that were me. And I think you cared less about those people, for making (or wanting to make) that decision."
I didn't really reflect on it so much at the time, but looking back at it later, I've realised two things. One, that this is a mindset that Suikoden very much caused me to challenge and reflect upon -- I don't know if, in another game before Suikoden, I'd have made the same decision -- and that I can't overestimate how vital this is. I may have had a grasp of vengeance being wrong before, and some of the reasons for why, but I wasn't able to sufficiently deconstruct why people feel it's right to have an answer to that. And two, that this mindset is impossibly subtle and pervasive; that it's something that worms its way into the core of people, that is present in collective society on a fundamental level, even if we say that we believe that vengeance is wrong. We live in a society where, at the very least, even if you wouldn't support the literal position of having them put to death, it's felt that it's natural to want child murderers, terrorists, sexual offenders, to die. That's the least you can feel, in response to the fact that they've wrought such injustice. To want to see them gone, no, to see them punished, to see them suffer, isn't "vengeful"; it's a natural response to anybody who commits horrific acts -- notwithstanding, of course, that "horrific" is a loaded word and its applicability is very much in the eye of the beholder, and that from a different perspective the motivations and actions of one who would execute someone out of vengeance can be considered horrific. Tabloid newspapers love this word; it's a shortcut to emotional response, some might argue a cheap one, and the problem is, it's a shortcut that works. Describe something as "horrific", and people who aren't inclined to think on these matters much beyond that will feel that they have to be in opposition to it, and that any opposition, even murder, is somehow more just than the acts of the "horrific" person simply because they have been defined such.
This is the kind of often-unchallenged response that we need to step back from and actually consider objectively if we're going to advance as a civilisation. I'm thankful to Suikoden for making me do so.
...unrelatedly, I saw a thrown-out Christmas tree on the pavement with the trash while walking home today. It was a real tree, a live one; it had shed a good portion of its needles over the ground. I'm still cringing in sympathy thinking about it.
[EDIT: *notes time of posting* ....NOT INTENTIONAL. =P]
When that moment came to pass in Suikoden I, I remember thinking -- somewhere amongst the chorus of "...You bastard. You utter bastard." -- "please, don't make me responsible for whether this man lives or dies." Suikoden has a habit of doing that -- you are the commander, after all -- and I figured this was going to be the last or near-to last in a series of increasingly tough moral trials that I, as Merid, would be put through.
It turns out that the game doesn't actually let you make the decision (from what I read of the dialogue, I'd interpreted it that he was to be executed, but from what I've read of other people's interpretations thereafter, I might have been reading that wrong), and I was in some sense relieved -- cowardly, yes. But this wasn't because I was afraid that, in the heat of an emotionally charged moment, I might decide to order his death. I knew I wouldn't do that, because vengeance was not what my Liberation Army was about, not what the world I was trying to build was about, and to continue to enact it would be perpetuating the cycle of wrongs. Rather, I felt conflicted because, even though I knew it was not what Mathiu and Odessa would want, I still felt a twinge of ingrained "morality" that said, "if you don't want to avenge these people -- if you care about his life more than the fact that he killed them -- then they don't mean enough to you". Of course, that's an utter crock of bull, but there was still some underlying, kneejerk current of feeling that said that if I chose to spare the killer of people I cared about, those people would perceive me (posthumously or otherwise) as not really caring about them at all. Because if I did, I wouldn't be able to control my emotions, right? Even now, making this post, I'm still having flickers of that wariness; the feeling that someone is going to come out of left field and go, "but I would think you cared about me less, if that were me. And I think you cared less about those people, for making (or wanting to make) that decision."
I didn't really reflect on it so much at the time, but looking back at it later, I've realised two things. One, that this is a mindset that Suikoden very much caused me to challenge and reflect upon -- I don't know if, in another game before Suikoden, I'd have made the same decision -- and that I can't overestimate how vital this is. I may have had a grasp of vengeance being wrong before, and some of the reasons for why, but I wasn't able to sufficiently deconstruct why people feel it's right to have an answer to that. And two, that this mindset is impossibly subtle and pervasive; that it's something that worms its way into the core of people, that is present in collective society on a fundamental level, even if we say that we believe that vengeance is wrong. We live in a society where, at the very least, even if you wouldn't support the literal position of having them put to death, it's felt that it's natural to want child murderers, terrorists, sexual offenders, to die. That's the least you can feel, in response to the fact that they've wrought such injustice. To want to see them gone, no, to see them punished, to see them suffer, isn't "vengeful"; it's a natural response to anybody who commits horrific acts -- notwithstanding, of course, that "horrific" is a loaded word and its applicability is very much in the eye of the beholder, and that from a different perspective the motivations and actions of one who would execute someone out of vengeance can be considered horrific. Tabloid newspapers love this word; it's a shortcut to emotional response, some might argue a cheap one, and the problem is, it's a shortcut that works. Describe something as "horrific", and people who aren't inclined to think on these matters much beyond that will feel that they have to be in opposition to it, and that any opposition, even murder, is somehow more just than the acts of the "horrific" person simply because they have been defined such.
This is the kind of often-unchallenged response that we need to step back from and actually consider objectively if we're going to advance as a civilisation. I'm thankful to Suikoden for making me do so.
...unrelatedly, I saw a thrown-out Christmas tree on the pavement with the trash while walking home today. It was a real tree, a live one; it had shed a good portion of its needles over the ground. I'm still cringing in sympathy thinking about it.
[EDIT: *notes time of posting* ....NOT INTENTIONAL. =P]