Chrono Trigger: An Existentialist Reading (Part V)

[ideas]

The Zeal story arc is the heart of Chrono Trigger's game world, despite taking place so late in the game itself. The events of 12,000 are not only central to the game's plot but to its themes; the Zeal era contains by far the most overt symbols and themes in Chrono Trigger. Despite the spike in authorial intention, though, a lot of the good stuff

Comments

Re: Dreamstone Before Lavos

[ideas]

The conventional view is that the dreamstone does not come from Lavos. I take issue with the conventional interpretation for a couple of reasons:

1. The Frozen Flame and the dreamstone have too much in common for them not to be the same type of object, if not *the same* object. It stretches plausibility to suggest that there were two red rocks that led to humanity's evolution into a feeling creature in the prehistoric era, that both red rocks were adopted by the Kingdom of Zeal for the purposes of awakening magic and accessing Lavos' power, that both rocks are essential to communing with Lavos, and that they inexplicably serve as two separate MacGuffins for Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, but that their resemblance to one another is purely coincidental.

2. The Frozen Flame is established as a splinter of Lavos that detached around 65,000,000. Given the existence of time gates and the fact that Lavos came to earth via (presumably) high velocity space travel, I find it plausible that the Dreamstone is a chunk of Lavos that arrived on the planet before Lavos did.

In all honesty, it may be the writers' intention that the two objects are separate, but I believe that if this is the case, it's a clumsy kludge intended to make Chrono Cross' rather convoluted story hang together. In Radical Dreamers, at least, the two objects are clearly one... and I don't need either sequel's crazy logic seeping into my interpretation of Chrono Trigger, anyway.