Re: Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights
Nov. 22nd, 2022 01:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingThere are two additional things I appreciate about Ender Lilies that might be more specific to me.
The first is that the Umbral Knight is nonbinary. No one ever comments on this; it's just an aspect of the character. I love nonbinary knights in general tbh. It's nice when a character's gender is "murder, but also a little sad," and I tend to be a fan of characters whose faces are never seen.
The second is that the game explores one of my favorite themes using one of my favorite tropes. The rest of this post contains spoilers for Ender Lilies, a Breath of the Wild fic I wrote called Malice, and also Final Fantasy VII I guess.
As you might have guessed from the title, Lily is one of many Lilies. Specifically, she's a clone of the original priestess, and it's taken her a long time to wake up because she's "defective." The game hints at this in various ways by making oblique allusions to other Lilies, but you don't understand what these hints mean until very late. Honestly, it's so subtle that most players probably won't realize that the game is giving you hints at all.
I love the theme of "what does it mean to be human," and I mega-love when this theme is explored through the trope of a clone figuring out that it's a clone, especially if it's "defective" and can't successfully pass as a normal human or as the thing it's supposed to be.
Final Fantasy VII took steps in this direction with Cloud, who has one hell of a journey of a character arc. What left me unsatisfied about Cloud's story is that he ends up being totally fine and normal, while the inhuman aspects of his identity are displaced onto the villain, Sephiroth. So, in order to establish his humanity, Cloud has to deny the monstrous parts of himself. This process also involves letting go of the potential for magic associated with this inhuman identity, which is represented by Aerith.
What I'm much more fascinated by is an inhuman character leaning into its monstrosity in order to do something that only it can do for the benefit of others, which in turn makes it just as "human" as anyone else.
When I wrote my fanfic novel Malice, I started with the premise of "what if one of the Blight Ganon clones woke up in modern Hyrule and didn't know it was a clone," and then I followed this story through the process of Ganon becoming more human only to then become progressively less human. There's some serious body horror at the end, but my guiding principle was that the expression of love associated with the gore is what ultimately makes the creature human.
Ender Lilies does this really, really well. As you continue to purify blighted spirits, Lily ever-so-slowly becomes more corrupted herself. It's subtle at first, but by the last third of the game you're like, Damn girl those sure are some tentacles you got there. The character design aspects of Lily's transformation are really cool, and you also start to understand that the character is making a deliberate choice to help people even though there's no real reason for her to do so. In other words, she develops more of a human personality as she becomes physically less human.
And like I said, that's the good shit right there.
The first is that the Umbral Knight is nonbinary. No one ever comments on this; it's just an aspect of the character. I love nonbinary knights in general tbh. It's nice when a character's gender is "murder, but also a little sad," and I tend to be a fan of characters whose faces are never seen.
The second is that the game explores one of my favorite themes using one of my favorite tropes. The rest of this post contains spoilers for Ender Lilies, a Breath of the Wild fic I wrote called Malice, and also Final Fantasy VII I guess.
As you might have guessed from the title, Lily is one of many Lilies. Specifically, she's a clone of the original priestess, and it's taken her a long time to wake up because she's "defective." The game hints at this in various ways by making oblique allusions to other Lilies, but you don't understand what these hints mean until very late. Honestly, it's so subtle that most players probably won't realize that the game is giving you hints at all.
I love the theme of "what does it mean to be human," and I mega-love when this theme is explored through the trope of a clone figuring out that it's a clone, especially if it's "defective" and can't successfully pass as a normal human or as the thing it's supposed to be.
Final Fantasy VII took steps in this direction with Cloud, who has one hell of a journey of a character arc. What left me unsatisfied about Cloud's story is that he ends up being totally fine and normal, while the inhuman aspects of his identity are displaced onto the villain, Sephiroth. So, in order to establish his humanity, Cloud has to deny the monstrous parts of himself. This process also involves letting go of the potential for magic associated with this inhuman identity, which is represented by Aerith.
What I'm much more fascinated by is an inhuman character leaning into its monstrosity in order to do something that only it can do for the benefit of others, which in turn makes it just as "human" as anyone else.
When I wrote my fanfic novel Malice, I started with the premise of "what if one of the Blight Ganon clones woke up in modern Hyrule and didn't know it was a clone," and then I followed this story through the process of Ganon becoming more human only to then become progressively less human. There's some serious body horror at the end, but my guiding principle was that the expression of love associated with the gore is what ultimately makes the creature human.
Ender Lilies does this really, really well. As you continue to purify blighted spirits, Lily ever-so-slowly becomes more corrupted herself. It's subtle at first, but by the last third of the game you're like, Damn girl those sure are some tentacles you got there. The character design aspects of Lily's transformation are really cool, and you also start to understand that the character is making a deliberate choice to help people even though there's no real reason for her to do so. In other words, she develops more of a human personality as she becomes physically less human.
And like I said, that's the good shit right there.
