#code whalefall crit

[nancy-plays-dutp]

Theme in Code: Whalefall

Aight, lets talk about Code: Whalefall and Theme. I really think this story had so much potential, and just wasted it all. I will be discussing various theme inconsistencies; if you saw the story a different way you are valid, and feel free to tell me about it! Keeping in mind that this story was very confusing to read I'd like to establish that if I get any of the actual facts of this story wrong, then that's still a fault of the narrative for being unable to get its point across. There were lots of plot threads that to my recollection were left hanging, so if they were resolved and I just missed it then that is also bad and absolutely was not a good resolution. But I honestly think a lot of the stuff was just dropped. Trigger warning for discussion of suicide, ableism, human experimentation on children, child abuse, and slavery. This is going to go through the entire story, with very many spoilers, so I'm going to put most of it under a cut. This will also mainly just discuss theme; my other thoughts about this book are found in this review. If you haven't read it but you're okay with spoilers (and I don't really recommend playing this story or feel like the element of surprise is important, but its up to you) then feel free to read on!

The premise of CW has the amnesiac MC searching through an unfamiliar sci fi world for clues about her past. This isn't the most original of concepts, but it can be done well and lead to very interesting stories.

There are three types of enhanced humans who are introduced. Cyborgs are humans with electronic enhancements, binoids are robots made to be as human as possible (with implanted human organs), and androids are robots that look like humans but are still robots. There are also just ordinary robots, which do not look human and have programming and serve different tasks. Now, any piece of sci fi that introduces robots automatically introduces questions about what it means to be human. Usually it allows for themes of free will and choice to be explored, as well as nature versus nurture. Are you who you were born/ created to be, or are you who you choose to be? What does it mean being able to choose? If robots tend to have personalities and free wills then it starts to become an allegory for enslaved minorities who are viewed as "less than human." It can also be common for sci fi narratives to discuss disability, as cyborgs could be viewed as humans with advanced prosthetics, and many robots are written to have characteristics that are also common in people who are neurodivergent (such as not understanding sarcasm, talking with mainly facts, inability to process  emotions, and awkwardness in social situations). Whether a narrative does these themes justice is an incredibly complex topic and one that I am not discussing today. I am simply pointing out the themes that usually happen in sci fi stories with the elements present in CW.

Is it possible for a story to have these elements and not discuss these topics? Absolutely! CP30 didn't have an existential crisis about free will in A New Hope. But CW sets itself up to discuss these themes by constantly reinforcing narratives about control and autonomy, and technology versus nature. 

This is most obvious with the MC, who in the first chapter is imprisoned and wears a "white jacket", a high tech suit that controls her actions and prevents her from taking any action to free herself, and its stated that this jacket was used on people undergoing cyborg experiments. The binoids that help her are not free agents, and are "employed" by the lab (but no clarification is given about what choice they have in this employment, nor what benefits and payment they receive). Although these are institutes dedicated to the creation and study of cyborgs the scientists and managers in charge are all non enhanced humans, with cyborgs working under them.

As for androids, the most impactful character we meet in the narrative is Yukari, who works as a dancer in a hidden theatre. She appears kind and caring, and the MC frequently points out that she has no real feelings, and can't be trusted, and is not actually human. In response Yukari agrees with this and alludes to a past where she was treated as an object, and not being a "real person." 

With that kind of setup I expected her and the MC to realize that in the ways that matter Yukari is a person and deserves to be treated as such. She as written as well as any other character, with dreams and desires and motivations to match, and thus to the reader she is a person. This makes the conclusion of her arc that much more disappointing.

The story reveals that Yukari is an android assassin, who is currently hiding out in this theatre as a dancer. Yukari does not appear to enjoy her career, and indeed seems haunted by it and wishes that she didn't have to kill people. She expresses a desire to protect the MC and keep her from being hurt, and repeatedly begs her to run away with her to somewhere far away where their pasts can never catch up with them. Her dancing career is entirely unrelated to her assassin career and she appears to have taken it on out of genuine enjoyment of the art; the circumstances surrounding who her owner was and how they feel about this job are left very unclear. At the end you find that Yukari has destroyed her energy core (the heart and mind of an android) in an attempt to resist being controlled. I believe she was ordered to kill the MC, and her resistance cost her everything. We actually get an album picture of this, with the caption "Only Choice- we can't choose how our journey begins, but we can choose how it ends."

Thematically, this shows that Yukari had a self beyond her programming and orders, and fought to preserve that. It has her as a tragic figure, with an oddly fumbled death. All of this conflict happens off screen, when it would have been a more compelling story if you'd actually gotten a chance to be present during this struggle and try to save her. Of course I would have loved a path where you could actually save her, but if the storytelling demanded it she could also have been left with just a tragedy. Having all of this struggle happen offscreen detaches it from the player and makes it feel incidental that you were there, like you're looking into a story that you don't belong in. This is made worse by the fact that the MC recovers very quickly from this death and doesn't remember Yukari after that stage, and none of her experience really impacted the end of the game or any decisions or beliefs the MC had. There is no reflection on Yukari having free with and making a choice to defy her programming, or any awareness of what this could mean for androids at large if they can feel emotions and want to make choices but are enslaved to the will of their owners and treated as objects. It makes Yukari a baffling figure because she doesn't really add anything to the story, being either an obstacle who attempts to keep you from the main plot or an incidental anecdote where you see things happen to her but ultimately fail to have any actual affect on her life, and she on yours. Every stage with Yukari could be replaced with very little consequence, as the only plot point she serves was letting you hide in her theatre, which easily could have been just an abandoned hiding spot.

As an aside, I suppose there's also one point where she releases you from prison, but there's nothing about that scene that guarantees it needs to be Yukari. I don't remember it ever being explained how she got in, and while it could have been her security clearance another character could have easily "hacked the system" to get in. In essence her character could have meant a lot, but ultimately lacked a resolution and had no impact on the main character arc or storyline.

This is made all the worse by the inclusion of the binoid characters. As robots with human organs and thought, they are regarded as "more human" than androids. We don't get to know any binoids very well, as they serve to mainly feed us meals and deliver instructions while we're at the main labs, and honestly could have easily been androids. Worst of all is at the very end of the story, when the MC has destroyed project cyborg and is escaping the ruined lab, there's a brief scene where she comes across a group of binoids who are sitting around in the collapsing building. She urges them to get out but they tell her that they can't, because they are binoids and their programming keeps them here. They seem to be quietly grieving their fate and happy for those who got out. And here the MC delivers a baffling speech about how the binoids are simply hiding here waiting to die because they're afraid to live without instructions. Since all the scientists are dead they have to start making choices for themselves and don't want to, which is also why they chose to work here for so many years. So to reiterate, the MC tells a group of characters who are often read as an allegory for slaves that they are only in this position because they choose to be, and can simply break out but are too scared to. And their response indicates that she's CORRECT, as they talk about how scared they are of living their own lives. Not only is this strange given the allegorical implications of binoids, but it also directly contradicts Yukari's death. If they could simply "choose" to not follow their programming, why did that same decision destroy Yukari? Could she also have chosen to not be an assassin, and just decided to die? I suppose that's the difference between an android and a binoid, but no such difference is ever present in the narrative. And what does that mean, if some people are born just wanting to be servants while others don't but can't escape that fate without dying? It's a thematic mess, and the kindest thing to do is just assume that it doesn't mean anything. The androids and binoids are just window dressing and have nothing to do with the narrative themes of the story. So lets look at our main cast for our themes.

Roni should have been in the main cast so I'm covering him here. He's a small spherical robot sent by Z to help you. He takes the R2D2 approach to robot characters, as in he never expresses a sense of self and is simply there to help you. At one point in the story the MC discovers that Roni is actually being controlled by a human, which is played as a huge betrayal, and then we never learn who was controlling Roni. And just to be clear, the robot didn't do anything. Somebody else said "you know there's a person controlling the signal of that robot" and that was the betrayal, not some action Roni took to hurt you. So the betrayal is explicitly misunderstanding that Roni was not being controlled by a human, but without any kind of reveal there is no resolution for that. So I suppose the frustration could be the fact that the MC didn't know, which would lead to a broader theme of secrets. Lets explore that one!

Both of the love interests, Z and Mitchell, are keeping secrets and information from the MC. You have no memories at the start of the story and gradually uncover them, and there are multiple points where you have to lie and hide your mission from a companion so they don't just leave you behind and go to complete your mission for you. This serves to actively rob you of your agency, since you're reliant on these other characters to explain what's happening and you also can't rely on any of them to help you make a decision. The MC's meltdown appears partially influenced by frustration over this lack of information and trust from those she's come to rely on.

This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you how this is resolved. I have some bad news instead. The story decides to reveal that there is somebody speaking to you from inside your mind compelling you to be upset, and if you give in to that voice you go berserk and "lose control to your programming." This is never explained in the route where you resist the voice and decide to not kill everybody. Then the story just continues on to its end. The characters express that they care about you and then you can pick to go off into the sunset with Z, Mitchell, or Roni. Never at any point does the MC bring up the lack of information and how that affected her agency. It's partially acknowledged in the Roni ending, when the MC states how she's now comfortable with not knowing everything and needing to discover her life, but she was only not comfortable about that when she was also being used as a pawn by others, or being trapped and physically unable to seek answers! She actually spent a while hanging out in the theatre with Yukari and seemed pretty content with not knowing about her past, and only left when people started hunting for her.

Is this theme hidden in the past that she discovers? If you take a specific route Mitchell tells you that your mother was involved with an incident where a meteorite exploded and infected people with Element Q, which gave them superpowers but also cancer and killed everyone. But your mother was pregnant with you, so you survived and were born. And your father is a lead scientist at the Cyborg project who was searching for a way to make sure you won't die, so you went to a planet with a different time flow for 10 years your time and grew up while he researched things, and now you're back. Apparently Mitchell wanted revenge on him so that's why he kidnapped you, but he's changed his mind. So to summarize, everything that is special about you is because of events you had no control over that happened before you were born. You have no relationship with your parents and don't even seem to express a need for that, as the MC expresses fondness for her grandfather who raised her. You also lived for an entire decade on another planet, and either regain no memories of this place or find none of them important enough to recount. This backstory is a muddled mess that delivers absolutely no character; you made no choices that brought you here, and have all the value of a highly sought after family heirloom lamp.

This could be rectified if the MC reacted in some way to this throughout the story. During the part where you meet up with the roving bands of Rough Riders, the MC could ponder joining them permanently and living life on the road, with no rules or expectations and nobody to control her. She could actively express a desire to leave this planet behind and seek a way to return to her homeworld. Or she could be curious about this place and seek to gain new skills, like hacking or mechanics, that could help her here. She could even take a side in a huge conflict that splits the world, since we're introduced to several.

The story shows us the Oasis, which is a place where technology is banned. Robots and cyborgs are not permitted, and the MC notes that this is the only place with children. People talk about the Oasis saving them from the evils of a society filled with technology. The story also states that most children are created in a lab called the Nursery, because the human birth rate has dropped (the cause of this is contested in the story and is never resolved). Perhaps the MC could think of the ways that technology controlled her and decide that the Oasis is the right place to live; by contrast she could think about Z and Roni, a cyborg and android, who helped her, and decide that the people are unfairly prejudiced against technology and seek to resolve this. Neither thing happens. She ends up being vaguely suspicious in the same way that she is of everyone, as in expressing distrust but rarely letting it affect her actions or deciding on her own course of action. She stumbles across the titular plot, Code Whalefall, meant to assassinate the leader of the tech city, but the actual objective is to destroy the lab (including the Nursery) and thus the MC decides that maybe she should try to stop the devastation of the entire human race.

Lets take a look at the two villains we're given in this plot. We have Mr X, the scientist head of the corporation and a shadowy figure. He remains that way to the very end, because the confrontation with him doesn't even have a proper sprite. He gives a speech about transferring his mind into a computer and then vaporizes himself and is never mentioned again. Ms Marsh is the villain we have more interaction with; she used to be a scientist at Zeta labs, but after her adopted son was killed in an experiment she went mad with grief and decided she needed to destroy all science.

Is the lesson here that technology is good or bad? Because the MC never takes a side. At the end of the story you're met with a choice to help Z destroy the Project Cyborg lab or help Mitchell save the tech in it, and you decide on a compromise of destroying equipment and keeping the data, and running experiments with oversight. So there is no clear answer here, only a grey area, which wouldn't be bad if your MC didn't happen to start in that grey area. Neither Z nor Mitchell ever expresses any change in their beliefs about the value of technology. And the baby thing is not mentioned again either beyond saving the Nursery. In Mitchell's path you decide to name the babies together because he'd only given them numbers, which honestly sounds pretty dystopian to me. But we're never given a resolution on this, nor on what will happen to the Oasis now that their leader has gone mad and absconded (I think she was thrown out and then she was killed but its honestly hard to remember), nor on what the research for Project Cyborg will be used for now.

There is one more thing that could be a theme in this story, and that is trauma. Both your companions have gone through awful things in their past that have shaped their life, from Z feeling regret for being unable to protect you and your grandfather to Mitchell witnessing cannibalism on the streets as people starved. This leads Mitchell to kidnap you and seek revenge, while Z... protects you, which I suppose is meant to be a bad thing but nothing bad comes of it. One could argue that towards the end Mitchell becomes more optimistic about human life, hence naming the babies, but it certainly doesn't feel like that was a character arc you helped him go through considering how you barely talked to him about his beliefs outside of a setting where he was actively holding you captive. Most of this change took place while you were at the Oasis and he wasn't even there.

In the case of Z this actually ties into the one traumatic memory the MC recovers, of the death of her grandfather in a fire that appears to have been started by Z. He doesn't give a straight answer until the end of the story, when he tells you how your grandfather had taken Z in but made him promise to destroy the lab and all his work if the government ever showed up. And as if in a comedy movie, guess who immediately shows up and forces Z to torch the place. Despite his best efforts the grandfather perished in the flames. The story makes you go through a "character arc" of forgiving Z for his actions, but given how vague your memories were in the first place and how Z has literally done nothing but help you I had a hard time believing that the MC was really betrayed by him. But she acknowledges her grandfather's death was not her fault, letting go of her trauma. While Z... does not change. I guess he doesn't have a character arc, unless it was learning to tell you what happened, but since he doesn't really give a reason for not telling you and that's never discussed it's not much of a character arc.

Ms Marsh is a more compelling character for recovering from trauma, since it makes her want to destroy all of humanity, but then she's defeated. I suppose the MC could be set up as a foil to her, but their situations are incredibly different. Ms Marsh was a scientist conducting experiments on children who'd been taken from an orphanage, and she happened to grow fond of one of them who was then killed and refused to face her mistake, deciding that technology must be to blame. There is objectively nothing the MC could have done to prevent the death of her grandfather, nor did she take any action that lead to it, and she doesn't even blame herself for it. Is the foil Z? But once again he's a child who cannot be held responsible for the situation, who did exactly what the trusted adult in his situation ordered. He absolutely could be traumatized by this because he blames himself, but the story never resolves it. There's never a moment where he decides to live for himself and forgive himself for what happened, and his entire life still revolves around protecting the MC to make up for the past.

Not to mention how trauma is actually used as a positive thing in two other plot points in the story. The first actually happens with Z, as he was being made into a cyborg and had to watch his friend be murdered in one of the experiments which was the catalyst for him becoming the most powerful cyborg in the world. It's stated that this trauma allowed him to "break through his human limitations" and "upgrade" his mind as well as his body, and he's continually acknowledged as skilled and capable explicitly because of this trauma. The argument of these scientists is that the pain these children were subjected to was worth it because of the results of the cyborg project, and this is never something discussed in the narrative. In this case Z did not overcome trauma and that was actually good for him.

The other case of this is Cora, a side character who you meet in the Oasis. She's a young mother who is non-verbal, reportedly as a result from trauma from her life before the Oasis. Yet when the Oasis becomes evil her baby is stolen from her, which makes her angry enough to start speaking again so she can give the MC some exposition and help her escape. Which to me is insulting both because I was very excited to have a character with a disability be treated with respect and instead got a magical cure of the power of motherhood, and also the MC had absolutely nothing to do with this. It was just a coincidence she happened to be around to witness it. But the idea that Cora was able to overcome her trauma with more trauma just doesn't sit right to me.

Cora, when combined with Yukari and the binoid problems we discussed earlier, seems to indicate that one can just choose to overcome trauma if they care enough. And maybe that's the lesson of the story. Yukari and Ms Marsh didn't care enough to overcome their difficulties and so they died, while Cora did so she can talk again. The binoids need to care otherwise they can't overcome their programming. Z cared about his dead friend but apparently didn't care enough about telling you the truth. And because Mitchell fell in love with you and now cares about things he's willing to give children names instead of numbers. If you can't tell, I'm not a fan of this conclusion. Which is also because it doesn't even make sense. The MC cares a whole lot at the start of the story about uncovering her past, which leads to nothing. She actively can't overcome her difficulties with the power of caring a lot, and neither could Yukari or Z, which you could probably tell from this conclusion making them terrible people.

Ultimately Code Whalefall baffles me because not only do I not understand the theme, I can't even tell which theme they were attempting to go for. Every theme they bring up or establish is directly contradicted or offered no resolution, making me think I was reaching when I saw that theme in the first place. But what are we left with? An MC who took down two powerful leaders? Is the lesson that leaders are terrible people? But you immediately appoint Mitchell to lead the labs, so I guess leaders are good as long as they're people you trust, which is an incredibly simple theme that we didn't need a three chapter book to explain. Is the theme about being your own person? If you look at just the MC deciding to not care about her past then maybe, but that's not something seen in any other part of the story, and is actively contradicted by Z's resolution of continuing to live for you. The theme isn't even about being open to discovery and learning things about a new world, because most information is not learned at all, and what little information they get has little to no impact on anything.

I do think this story could have been good, if they'd just picked one theme and expanded on it instead of trying to fit in as many elements as possible. For a story that was so long they sure did fail to explain so much, and the pace was terribly slow. Agency and meaning had all been stripped away, leaving nothing but an empty shell in desperate need of some drastic rewrites.