#not very plausible theory checkpoint

[nettleshuttle]

i know it’s far from congruous with the canon, but i really like to think of different dimensions in arc v as sort of worlds without protagonists?

in the synchro dimension, some things stay the same although yusei isn’t there. jack still becomes king, one way or another, crow’s still a police-fighting rebel with a few kids under his protection, the city is still divided the way it used to in 5ds — but then so many things are different: the characters haven’t met yusei, he hasn’t made his mark in the city, hasn’t transformed it the way he had in 5ds. similarly in the fusion dimension: asuka and ed are still quite similar to their gx counterparts, but they’ve never met jaden because he’s not there in this universe. and same, of course, goes for kaito and the xyz dimension.

that’s why all the characters we know from other series seem so strangely changed, so unrecognizable at times, so wrong — they bear traces of the people we’ve gotten to know through the rest of the shows, but it’s like they’ve been reset to the pre-development phase. it used to really get to me while seeing arc v kaito or ed, because why would they act like that? but they’re not the characters from gx and zexal anymore, much less from the ends of respective shows, after all their growth. i know it doesn’t even overlap with the totality of canon information we’ve been presented, though i could speculate that the rest of canon casts are not there because that’s the extent of the protagonists’ influence, but it doesn’t make that much sense. still, i don’t really care.

what i truly like about this headcannon (can i call it one?) is how it emphasizes the crucial characteristic of every ygo protag — the way they exert so much positive influence over anyone they meet. the way they change people for the better, and they make such a big difference, both for individuals and their whole respective worlds. makes me nostalgic, for some reason.

[timeclonemike]

Axiom Verge: Setting and Plot Analysis

This has been bouncing around in my head for a while, so I’m going to just put it down for posterity.

Axiom Verge is a side scrolling platformer in the Metroidvania Style. Half of the game is exploring and getting new equipment, then backtracking to try that new equipment on old areas to look for secrets impossible to find earlier. The player controls Trace, a physicist who has his experiment blow up in his face, and then wakes up in an alien world fighting for his life.

I’m dropping a Keep Reading Cut here since the discussion will mention spoilers and lots of them.

There’s three main issues I want to talk about: Simulation Theory, the Alternates, and Trace’s Characterization. There may be other, smaller tangents that will get mentioned in passing.

Simulation Theory: This is a philosophical theory that posits the entire universe and everything in it is the result of a simulation being run on a computer. (I have numerous problems with it myself, but those are not germane to the analysis of this game.) In Axiom Verge, this theory is true, but the “simulation” just happens to be a sidescrolling platformer. Most of Trace’s weapons are deliberately designed to invoke classic console game glitches; a gun that causes enemy behavior to glitch out called the Address Disruptor, a lab coat that lets him noclip through walls, and the counterpart to the High Jump Boots from Metroid is literally a device that changes the local laws of physics so Trace can jump higher. There’s even a  device that functions like either a password system or the old game genie / game shark cartridge add ons that let people change the game in different ways, and it’s the only way to get to several secrets and the gear they hide.

About halfway to two thirds of the way through the plot, it’s revealed that all this equipment that Trace has been finding is equipment that Trace originally created. After the lab accident, Trace not only came up with a way to prove Simulation Theory, he managed to design hardware based on the theory. Some of the documents found in the game are from Trace, including an extract / excerpt from his original paper, with a quote that was important enough that it made it into the actual trailer.

Axiom 1(c): Any algorithm giving rise to cognitive entities will be perceived as reality by the entities described.

This, I think, is used to deliberately invoke the idea of the Simulation Theory, and all of the events of the game take that theory to it’s logical extreme; if the universe is a computer program, it can be hacked, it can glitch, and it can crash, which raises two important questions.

Question One: If the universe simulation starts to glitch out or corrupt, what would that look like to the people in that universe? A number of notes found in the game refer to something called the Breach; in game, it looks and sounds like some sort of graphical or audio corruption, and one note calls it “a forced re-linking of the lattices underlying adjacent universes.” The Breach is also responsible for the “Secret Worlds” of Axiom Verge, where assets and set pieces are randomly thrown together with very little internal logic. These Secret Worlds are almost certainly a reference to the “secret worlds” found in the original Metroid game, not just in style, but thematically as well. The Metroid secret worlds were created when the game accidentally started reading its own code as level data. With that as context, the note describing the breach suddenly makes more sense.

Question Two: If the universal simulation should be fatally corrupted or even crash, what happens next? This is only indirectly touched on in two parts of the game, one note describing the backstory of the world of Sudra that Trace is exploring, and the “pathogen” that was released on the world. In the note about old Sudra, it’s said that the people of that world had achieved untold heights of technical and scientific knowledge, but weaponized it and caused untold calamities before they got to the point that they were unwilling, or unable, to continue fighting. Given that they ended up creating at least one weapon that Trace can find, the flamethrower, and hid it in a cave using a literal password system, I think it’s plausible that the Sudrans were actually on the precipice of just such a disaster. In fact, it is entirely possible that they created the Breach itself either as an accidental result of their fighting, or as a deliberate ultimate weapon. This position is supported by the language of the notes referring to the breach and anything related to it with weather terminology; in order to capture the Rusalki, a storm-related machine was activated, and in the events of the game proper the Rusalki can’t get close to the Breach Attractor as long as it is powered on.

There’s also the matter of the “pathogen” that is unleashed on Sudra by the antagonist. If you made a list of synonyms for pathogen, you’d find “Virus” on that list. In light of the Simulation Theory, it’s not even that much of a jump to go from “pathogen” to “computer virus” and this is supported by noted left by the various bosses before they are completely transformed by it; one of them deliberately points out that the algorithm that defines them is itself twisted and corrupted.

The Alternates: One of the big plot twists halfway to two thirds of the way through the game is that the player character Trace isn’t the same Trace that got caught in the lab accident; that’s just where Trace’s memories of Earth stop. The original Trace was left blind and paraplegic by the accident, which didn’t even have anything to do with his physics experiment; a pressure valve froze and that caused an explosion. Trace ended up having a revelation while recovering and developed a revolutionary new theory; the media loved it, but the scientific community ridiculed it and him. They gave him a nickname: Athetos.

Conveniently enough, Athetos is the name of the antagonist of the game, who unleashed all the chaos on Sudra in the backstory.

Trace is actually a clone created from Athetos, as are all of the game bosses. These clones were created by the game’s version of the Save Point, called Rebirth Chambers. The original Trace was completely healed of all injuries from the accident, and there’s a hidden area with his old wheelchair and a note explaining what happened.

The main reason I’m bringing this up is because I saw an explanation video that stated that the Athetos variants created by “Prime Trace” were from alternate universes. The evidence from this was referring to a specific note talking about algorithms across universes, but the problem with this theory is that there is one part of the game where two Rebirth Chambers are actively being used to create more clone variants. So the multiversal theory didn’t even NEED to be invoked, we already have cloning.

However, that note in particular is important because I think it describes the video game phenomena of multiple lives. The relevant test goes “the instances which do not cease carry on for those that do. For most of us this happens without us being any the wiser.” If you’re playing a game and you fuck up and die, you restart at the last checkpoint / save point / level intro / what have you. Again, Axiom Verge explores what a video game reality would look like from the inside.

Trace’s Characterization: If Trace has one defining trait, it is his pacifist nature. He keeps trying to talk his way out of boss fights (which almost works once) and as soon as he realizes that he and Athetos are the same person, he wants to talk to the guy to figure out what the hell is going on and why Athetos has done all these things that Trace would never consider.

This is something that I have NEVER seen fully addressed as far as the plot goes, so I guess I have to do it.

The note next to Trace’s old wheelchair is signed Trace. By the time it was written, Trace had already been healed by the Sudran Rebirth Chambers. However, in the note, while he was impressed with the technology, he understood that it was too dangerous to even try to bring the technology back to Earth in case what happened to Sudra happened to Earth as well.

This is in complete conflict to what Athetos tells Trace at the end of the game before the final boss fight. In that same cutscene, Athetos also says “If I tell you too much, your captors will have to kill you.” (Athetos is referring to the Rusalki, who have control over both the Rebirth Chambers and the “nanogates” inside Trace that allow him to come back to life after dying.) In that context, Athetos making the claim that he just wanted to bring the technology to Earth and was willing to destroy Sudra to do it sounds like a cover story; he couldn’t tell Trace the real reason without putting Trace in danger, but he needed to tell Trace something that both Trace and the Rusalki would believe. (Given that the Rusalki have been lying to Trace since the moment he woke up from the Rebirth Chamber, the can’t really claim the moral high ground here.)

There’s one other important detail about that note found with the wheelchair: “We are going upstream - to the Filter, or whatever lies beyond - for answers.“ Now, upstream could mean several different things. It could refer to an actual stream, implying that Trace arrived at Sudra near a body of water near a Rebirth Chamber, and the stream led to civilization. The word Filter, on the other hand, could refer to a machine called the Power Filter that Trace has to activate in the game and seems to be tied into the power grid for Sudra’s technology, in which case upstream meant following the power supply for all the amazing tech to figure out how it works. Finally, there is the possibility that “upstream”  and the “Filter” refer to the Breach Elevator and what lies beyond; Athetos has his main base in the game in this space elevator kind of machine that is implied to pass through the Breach.

Each one of these scenarios is equally plausible until Thomas Happ makes a sequel or officially supports a given theory on social media or something like that. What each of these things has in common, though, is that it raises another question. Whether it was encountering an alien civilization for the first time, or discovering how the Sudran technology worked, or discovering what lies beyond the Breach...

What did Trace find that was so awful that it made a peaceful, pacifist scientist willing to commit genocide?