#do you think they are constructed as parallels or am i delirious?

[sprawa-przybyszewskiej]

I would like to present (extremely briefly; it's more of an invitation to their thoughts rather than anything else) two approaches that touch on a creative technique used by Przybyszewska, which has been spotted by some of her scholars, albeit each in its own way. Ewa Graczyk maintains that Przybyszewska did not write a historical drama in any way, but rather described a completely different reality, an universum in which the same events happen, but which doesn't take place on Earth, with us in it. She describes, then, something which I call The French Revolution', taking after mathematics' nomenclature. Kazimiera Ingdahl, on the other hand, spots traces of gnostic and manichean ideologies in Przybyszewska's writing, which, as we all know, are based solidly on the contrast between Heaven and Hell, knowledge and numbness, soul and mind. I mention them here solely to point out there is a dualism in her works, it is important and easily recognizable.

I have nowhere near the amount of erudition these scholars do, so I will constrict myself to some more visible matters. In my previous post about Antoine, I've made a remark that stuck with me for far longer than I had expected, and so I decided to elaborate on it.

The passage I'm talking about is this: because it could potentially reveal Saint-Just as another Danton-like minded individual, looking for power for himself through sacrifices of others. I want to explore whether Przybyszewska really did construct both of them alike?

To me it appears very probable, as crazy as it sounds. First of all, ALL of the personages are created in some reference to Robespierre. He is the only singular, original mind amongst them all, not to mentoin an axis around which other revolve, and so all of them, whether we like it or not, are somewhat similar to each other. Second of all, she clearly went in the direction of mirroring certain scenes, ideas, expressions (which I personally love to track down and compare them later), and it's exactly the same when talking about certain individuals. The two pairs (Robespierre – Saint-Just and Danton – Desmoulins) come to mind right away. They are constructed as parallels at least in some aspects and at least to some extent.

Wouldn't that, however, put Saint-Just and Desmoulins on the same/similar level, aren't they the ones who creat a parallel pair? Well, yes and no. I think they are a unit when it comes to personal matters, for rather obvious reasons. But I also think they are both put in similar situations, and yet their thinking is polar opposite of each other. They are both allowed to Robespierre's most personal sphere, and yet their reactions are completely different, which is one among the reasons as to why one of them meets a sad end by all accounts, and the other can die somewhat happy (as I will always mantain: if Przybyszewska managed to finish Thermidor, I am one hundred percent sure she would depict Antoine as one dying boldly and proudly, if only beause he died for a great cause and alongside Robespierre). On the other hand, spiritually and mentally, Camille resembles Maxime way, way more than Danton. They are both... maybe not exactly soft, but emotional. The main difference between them is Maxime is able to rein his feelings in when necessary (again, not always, not completely; vide his late night visit at Desmoulins', vide his attempt and saving him from the Luxembourg Palace), but as far as differences go, this one is actually minor. They are put in different positions, but their reactions are similar.

I would also wager to say Saint-Just and Robespierre don't have that much in common with each other in the plays, leaving out their political stances and their relationship. They are very different in terms of character traits: Maxime is more forgiving, calmer, quieter in all aspects. Antoine is more of a quicksilver, and also is regarded more as a tool in Maxime's hands, which I mean in the best way possible. While he has his own opinions, sometimes quite different to that of Robespierre's, he only entertains them in Maxime's presence, so that no one can put a splinter between them and turn them against each other. When they are turned against each other (during their quarrels, yes, but also during Thermidor, which is a beautiful study of such a case), he defers to Maximilien humbly and holds no grudges against him. This is pretty much the only soft side he ever presents to the audience, for when facing any other characters, he is sarcastic  if not downright hostile, the only exception I can think of being Eleonore. He's not gentle, not even with Robespierre whom he respects so much.  (I cannot get over how badly Wajda interpreted this in his movie, where in his very first scene Antoine brings Maxime an apple-tree branch in full blossom; while a sweet gesture, it made little sense, for the director not only didn't establish their special bond in any way, cutting their very important scene in Act II and a lot of their exchange of words in Act V out, but completely ignored the fact that in the play they did talk about trees blossming, but it was Maxime who pointed this out to Antoine. Honestly, it would make much more sense if in the movie he was the one giving Antoine flowers; altough I don't trust it would be executed well, so perhaps the best scenario would be to drop it altogether.)

This leaves Antoine and Danton as the unlikely pair. Here I wouldn't necessarily say they are put in different positions (following my train of comparison), because – depending on if you believe the confrontation between Danton and Robespierre to be honest or not – there is enough evidence in the play to mantain both of them want to  establish power over nation through Robespierre. Danton is the villain of the play, but he isn't blind, he too wants to use Maximilien as a face of the dictature, as a tool to obtain more "normal" power for himself (normal power here would equal to money, respect, high office; the "abnormal" power is what Robespierre sort-of-dreams-of, an influence over people to direct them into doing what is necessary for the good of the whole of the nation, or better yet, the world). And Antoine wants more or less the same thing, the exception being he doesn't care at all for personal gains. He doesn't necessarily believe in Robespierre's visions of the future, one could even argue he doesn't understand them (this is clearly shown in Thermidor, where he reacts with a headache once Robespierre unfolds his plan in front of him: Stop it, Maxime. I can't keep up with you anymore.); he does, however, see the neccesity of establishing the dictature or some other extraordinary mean to obtain the total power over the state. Both he and Danton are blessed with a far-fetching political vision, the only thing differentiating them from Robespierre is that he's a much more brilliant chess player than any of them, when they can see few moves forward, he's already seen all the possible outcomes of the match. And all of these outcomes are bad, for Maxime is characterised as a pessimist, while Antoine and Danton are, generally speaking, optimistically inclined. Youthful foolishness indeed, except Antoine is not foolish! He's just optimistic. In Danton, the optimism takes a form of boldness and bravado, in Saint-Just it manifests as an unwavering faith in the one he considers to be so much more superior to himself, and also a certain amount of contempt for the ones he considers to be inferior. This is another trait he shares with Danton, and we have to admit, Przybyszewska did a really good job at presenting the same trait in them both in such different ways, that we like one, hate the other.

There is also the matter of how they treat Camille and what they think of him. Here, both are jealous, I think. Jealous of the special place Camille has in Robespierre's heart, scornful of his abilities as a politician and a journalist, disinclined to him as a person. Danton cares for him as far as his utility in being a leverage on Robespierre goes, but I don't think he hoards any warm feelings for him personally, and I don't say it only because he was willing to sacrifice Camille purely out of spite. A much better example to show what I mean is that Danton seems to have a much better functioning, more honest and professional relationship with Delacroix than with Camille, whom he keeps in the dark about absolutely everything from start to finish. I don't know if it was meant to be a symbol or not, but in their very last scene in the jail cell, Camille has to beg Danton not to snuff out the candle, which Danton does, albeit very reluctantly. In turn, Saint-Just talks about Camille in language dripping with contempt and jealousy of purely personal kind, offending him left and right, right to Robespierre's face – not to hurt Maxime, but to "open his eyes", so to speak. In one particularly harsh sentence he compares Camille to a dog, a child and a prostitue all in one breath. He not only doesn't regard him as an opponent, but barely recognizes him as a human being worth respect, in which he is sadly very similar to Danton.

Weirdly enough, they both regard Maximilien as human, which I think is interesting to notice. It would be really easy to write them in such a style that leaves way for them to see Robespierre as something more, something almost extraterrestrial, somebody who posseses abilites greater than normal humans do. And yet:

The first image is from The Last Nights of Ventose, my own translation, and it's directly from Antoine's compassionate speech. I didn't include Robespierre's response, because he just deflected, but deflection does mean he doesn't fully agree, so it's yet another similarity.

One more thing that comes to mind in a comparison like this is that Danton threatens Robespierre with the ultimate power. He doesn't think that Maxime will be able to live with it, with himself, if he ever decides to go this one step futher and become a dictator. Is this is because he wouldn't be able to live with himself, or does he truly underestimate Maxime, or he simply wants to make sure Maxime would not go in this direction precisley because he knows he would then be ustoppable? How very telling then, that in Antoine's mouth the very same thing is not a threat, but a promise! This ultimate power is born out of necessity, and it's a grace for the whole nation, because no other person could bear the weight of this "crown", but Maxime.

The main difference between Saint-Just and Danton, I think, is something which we have to believe, it's not written clearly anywhere, and this is also the thing I briefly touched uppon in the aforementioned post: we have to believe that Antoine has pure intentions, because we sure know Danton does not. These were the embers fueling the suspiscion in Maxime when he couldn't understand why Antoine would possibly push for the dictature so much – is his heart pure? This sounds overly dramatic, perhaps, but I think this dramaticism aligns perfectly with Maxime's overall characterisation. I think all readers believe in his good intentions, and the parallels constructing the characters help immensely in this judgement, for if Danton is rotten to the core, Antoine is as steady and pure as a marble column. Robespierre even calls one a pig, while the other deserves to be named an Apostle of liberty.

There is, however, another similarity between them, too. Both Antoine and Danton are willing to be dishonest in order to achieve their goals. This is this one thing that's hard for Robespierre to swallow, for he – like Camille – values honesty really highly and if he could, he'd always act honestly. Saint-Just, not to mention Danton, has no such scrupules. He sees the greater necessity as something erasing all other circumstances, and for this greater picture he is willing to sacrifice some of his integrity as a human being. With Danton, the situation is even less complex, for I don't believe he would be sacrificing his integrity in any way – this dishonesty lays at his very core and comes natural to him.

The arguments Saint-Just presents, and which differs from Robespierre's point of view, are also different from that of Danton's. Danton's vision of the present is filled with contempt for the people, for the masses who are less brilliant than him and few others are. It is worth noting that Przybyszewska really did think like this, this is something she believed in and while reading Danton's speeches in Act II Scene 3, what we actually hear is her own train of thoughts. The only difference is that she didn't disdain the people they way he did. She thought that being a mass, an unnamed pulp of flesh is not a bad thing (it was perhaps unfortunate, and I am sure thinking she was a genius like Robespierre helped her in maintainign this view). Base material is a nourishment for those who will lead these masses. We – the lesser people – are absolutely necessary for them – the greater ones – so that they can lead us out of the night and into the new epoch of enlightement, and there is nothing humiliating in being this nourishment/tool/base. Danton understood it only partially, for he wasn't ready for the greatest sacrifice of all: to be a genius, one has to get rid of everything personal, all needs and desires must be kept aside, and never again spoken of. Robespierre understood it, and I think Antoine did too. I think the best evidence for it is that he said, that he doesn't consider himself to be Robespierre's equal. Recently I hoped to prove it was a silent declaration of love; now I want to point out it is one because it showed Robespierre that Antoine understood this great sacrifice one has to make in order to be a leader, and in his own way, he has already done this. He has brushed aside personal vain and glory, his amour-propre, he degraded himself in order to magnify Maxime's importance. Danton may say: It's you whom I adore, but it is Antoine who shows it through his actions as well as his words.  

[scrawnytreedemon]

Shit I’ve Been Winding Up For A Long Time Now But Am Very Aware Will Probably Hold No Relevance Should I Actually Go Into This More--

This is about Bhunivelze.

I.

You know, when I was chilling out, on my bed, that evening on that half term in early June, deciding to check up on ClementJ64′s FF retrospective because-- Hey! It’s been awhile, I wonder if he’s got around to doing the final bit of the FFXIII saga --You know, I was there, chilling, just for a laff. Just a laff.

The rest of that week was spent spiralling into a hyperfixation I absolutely did not anticipate in any way, shape, or form, because the way they introduced that character was “wwhdhfjjhHJDFJKHKJHW H A T??”

That retrospective and a good amount of wiki-scrounging is all I have as a basis for this. This is not a coherent character analysis-- Though I might tag it as that for ease of access. This is not, by any means, the thoughts of someone deeply familiar with FFXIII on the whole beyond plot synopses and overarching themes.

I don’t think I’m brave enough for that.

Reading the vast yet surface-deep lore on those wiki pages on my birthday while in a delirious state of mind was enough to make me somewhat nauseous.

Do you think I’m going to go through all of that in real time?

(Someday, someday.)

Ugh, I don’t know how to begin, but let us, I guess. I’d recommend you read this church-mime-demiurge’s FF Wiki page if you want the same level of base-knowledge I had, and maybe the aformentioned retrospective if you want the experience, because I don’t think I have the wherewithal to get into all of that from the bottom-up.

I am also, so, so fucking sorry for any remaining FFXIII fans in advance. There is like, a good chance I may be butchering the characterisation completely, so bear with me here.

With that... we begin?

Where do we even start with this guy?

How on earth to you begin to explain the absolute monolith you’ve constructed from crumbs of a Guy, some material no doubt spliced in from the Pale King, Sephiroth, y o u r  o w n  G o d  O C and other characters, and the mountains of religious trauma you carry around at all times that is probably the only reason you’ve been able to latch on as hard as you did?

I’m going to try.

What gets me, in summary, about Bhunivelze is how he’s a prime example of how love and concern can become deadly forces if in the wrong hands. His first acquainting with human emotion was by deceiving and possessing Hope, reverting his body to a teenage state, and planning to live among humanity through him. He sees human sorrow and suffering, and decides that, to End This(because it must be ended, you see) he’s going to destroy all the souls of the deceased that make up the Chaos that’s been eating this world for the past five-hundred years so they all forget and Are Happy. :).

Capital G God here hasn’t been present for the vast part of human history because he’s hidden himself away from Everything due to paranoia from killing his own mother and throwing her body into the Cosmic Basement, THEN creating the beings that would come to create humanity and OTHER beings because he didn’t have the keys to the cosmic basement. And also he believes death is a thing because she’d’ve somehow cursed all things to pass(including him) out of Spite.

Which explains why he’s so fucking averse to it and anything to do with it.

Bhunivelze, to put it lightly, is Shit at stepping into others’ shoes and Getting their experiences-- All the FalCie in FFXIII are, but him especially. It’s clear(again, in the f u c k i n g JP--) that he makes attempts to sympathise with them and does what he can to help, but it’s with such a loftiness and a complete inability to Understand why anyone would want grief, The Worst Fucking Experience In Existence, and even less why they’d be willing to Go Up Against Him And HisThe New Perfect World just for it-- And what would it matter, anyway, forgetting their loved ones. It’s not like you can grieve lost memories, right?

Right.

It reminds me of when at the end of the story of Job in the Bible, where, after putting this man through hell on earth, God rewards Job by giving him ten new children to make up for the ones that he lost. I. And that’s fucked! Nothing can replace the sheer uniqueness of each individual person you loved so dearly! But if you were a nigh-omnipotent deity high and mighty, with a cursory, almost mechanical knowledge on the functionings of the human psyche, that would seem adequete; enough.

Bhunivelze is doing that on a cosmic level.

I now want to get onto the romance: that being, his affections for Lightning. I don’t know how much I’m going to say, but it’ll probably be alot. It’s something that hits very close to home.

There is this... thing, within certain branches of Christianity, perhaps even in those of various Abrahamic faiths, where God’s love is posited to be the love-- The ultimate, most-fulfilling, all-encompassing love you could ever imagine --Because, well, he is love, so the story goes, and so often the best way to convey that is through the imagery of...

Marriage.

Giving up yourself so completely, to serve, to be the Bride; to be bound by him for all eternity; and for there to be no higher bliss than this.

This angle is pushed on young girls and women the most; from the mere parallels to the woman’s role in marriage, all the way down to downright-horrifying ultra-Evangelical purity pacts. With men, God is your dad, your best bud and confidant, your boss, your king, your this, your that, and the ‘marriage‘ as it were is relegated to a sort of half-thought; a metaphor.

For me, God was an attempt at all that, and my arranged groom.

(It was almost incestuous; was incestuous, that my own Divine Father would reach for my hand in marriage.)

Bhunivelze experiences Emotions™ for the first time through Hope, experiences Hope’s sheer overwhelming admiration for Lighting(whether there were any baby-crush feelings mixed in, I can’t say), and promptly falls into a nigh-romantic obsession with Lightning, deciding that she will be Etro(his all-but daughter)’s replacement, will be his Goddess of Death to-be-- He even calls her as such, before the final boss-battle--

...In the JP.

What happened in localisation, probably due to a number of factors, all the way back in early 2014, was that everything emotionally challenging about Bhunivelze was scraped off, like it was extra fat, and tossed aside, leaving us with the bland, clichéd shell of a foe-god we’ve seen time and time again. And I mean everything. I mean his very love for humanity; the fact his ploy was, in his eyes, to save them. Because if they’d left that all on, then it would raise the question of even if there was such a seemingly pure, all-knowing, loving being hell-bent on setting things “straight,“ would they truly be unquestionable? Would we have the right to fight for our humanity in the face of the Creator of the Universe?

To reject a love so personal?

That’s what gets me about FFXIII’s tackling of God, no matter how hackneyed and poorly-executed. It’s personal.

It’s from a feminine experience.

I know that terming is... vague, and problematic, but the way Christianity and much of the video game industry handle femininity itself is weird and problematic, so as it stands, I’ll have to simplify it. Apologies.

What sets FFXIII’s Let’s Kill God™ plot aside from most JRPG Let’s Kill God™ plots is that with our protagonist being a woman, and one who is very in touch with her femininity alongside her sheer strength; often, in these stories, God is reduced to Yet Another Foe, expected or unexpected, and you are tasked with taking him down unquestioningly for the Good of Mankind-- You will fight God, because you are right to, and you will go man-to-man-to-however-many-men you decide to bring along for the bloodbath.

And that just, doesn’t speak to me.

Even as an Extian.

Especially as an Extian. And an AFAB one with a deeply complicated experience with my gender, at that.

Leaving Christianity was painful. Questioning God was painful. Coming to terms with the fact that I had been mentally, emotionally, and spiritually traumatised under the guise of All-Encompassing Love was so, so fucking painful. I had been taught since I was five years old to devote myself to him, spent my life desperate to feel something, anything, to stay connected because I just, I never could Feel It on a deeper level, never could Give Up Myself, all I was, couldn’t Die A Spiritual Death And Be Reborn As His Eager Vessel, thus deeming myself to be worthless and a broken vessel for years and years on end... And for all that to have been... Nothing.

Lightning is hollowed out, the shards of her dead sister ripped from her in-stasis, leaving her emotionally numb for the majority of the game, Bhunivelze sweeps it under the rug, pretends he’ll perform a miracle and return Serah to life in exchange for her compliance, then sends her on her way to do his work, all the while knowing he’s going to pull said-rug from under her and elevate her such dizzying heights in the aftermath--

That he’ll deny her humanity.

Sand down all the rough edges that make her her, and polish her up afterwards, gild her as he is gilded, make her a Goddess.

And he’ll do it all because he loves her.

You can’t fight God like you can everything else. To fight It is the fight Existence Itself; FFXIII even conveys that by making Bhunivelze’s model part of the arena; it’s baked into the fabric of the game, no matter how minute.

While Lightning Returns is far from perfect in its execution of this concept, and that in itself makes me wince, not even taking into account the horribly botched excuse for a localisation Bhunivelze endured, it speaks to me more than anything else I’ve seen so far.

And it’s helped uncover some things within me. Helped me untangle them, just a little more.

So, yeah. I have alot of Thoughts on Bhunivelze, I want to share them, and I’m kinda really sad I have no one but my currently-absent friend Vee to share them with. I could get into alot more, like his very Fucked relationship with familial bonds, and how Lightning’s role as saviour so deeply parallels the overwhelming panic and never-ending guilt of Evangelical proselytisation, but I think I’ll leave those for another time.

In short, Bhunivelze is the epitome of Divine Love gone deeply wrong; on all fronts.

And if all of that isn’t enough to intrigue you, then, in Vee’s words, Lightning and Velze are literally canon endgame Sefikura lmaOOOOOOOOOOOOOO--