Where is the line between being realistic and embellishing to better fit a story?
I don't entirely like Moebius in Xenoblade Chronicles 3. In comparison to previous villains in the trilogy, they are uninspiring in their surface level personalities and kind of presentation. They are all wearing the same suits with very little deviation, all spouting the same over the top evil lines about controlling the world for their own enjoyment. Many of them we don't even see what they look like under their suits. Outside of the deeper worldbuilding levels of depth and music, i don't find them to be great villains on a narrative level. The same of which I can say about Far Zenith in Horizon: Forbidden West.
But on a commentary level? Let me just give you a quote from the franchise director, Tetsuya Takahashi, on where the inspiration for Moebius came from in the official Xenoblade 3 Artbook:
"I wanted to change a bit how the villains were portrayed. For example, in Xenoblade 1 and 2, the villains had their own pride and principles. It could be a philosophy or even faith. But the villains had their own sense of justice. But for Xenoblade 3, I had a bit of, "what if I brought the enemies closer to reality?". In terms of, "what is reality?", Let's say for example, "those in positions of power". Saying people in positions of power are villains is, well, a bit of a dangerous way to put it. Well, let's just say as a example, in real life society, they are "the system". As Z says, "they can decide on a system, and they can run it". Even for those people in positions of power, I'm sure they have a life story, social ties and such. But what we can see at the surface, what we can feel is their roots. [...] A desire. Desire for control, money, fame, and maybe very rarely lust. That's where it tends to be rooted in, and occasionally, some unsavory people show themselves. What if those people were the villains? [...] We place the Moebius in that position as a representation of that unsavory aspect of reality."
They didn't make Moebius easy to sympathize with. They didn't give them personalities and backstories for explanation of their cruelty. Because we don't see any of that in reality either. In Forbidden West, this is just text in the story by making Far Zenith literally all billionaires.
When characters are well written, people like to say that they feel nuanced and full of depth, that they have an interior life. The problem is that our perception of corporate dickheads is dominated by their grandiosity over humanity. While they may have their own lives, we don’t know for sure because they’re spending all of theirs making sure no one else can. THAT is an accurate depiction of these dumbos but that doesn’t make for “quality storytelling”, does it? Even with that explanation, many people still say Moebius and Far Zenith are shit villains even though they don't have the traits and qualities we associate with compelling stories. Which makes the entire critique fall apart, right? How can we accurately commentate on these real world problems, when their very nature is so antithetical to storytelling itself? Should these games be realistic, or should be embellished in order to read as a “good story” to audiences?
But therein lies another problem. Capitalist/Corporate critique has been embellished/abstracted FOR DECADES, AND PEOPLE STILL DON’T GET IT. I don't need to get into the constant examples of people who think the Alien or Terminator franchises somehow aren't political even though they are constantly pointing fingers at corporations. So often, I have seen critique of our current systems going completely unnoticed because it apparently wasn't obvious or blunt enough to the point of being eye rolling. And you know, normally I wouldn’t really care about this thing, if you can’t discern that x movie is coming from the perspective of such and such minority then skill issue. But I do care here because these critiques ARE important, because those systems these games are calling out are literally killing us in real time.
The amount of stuff Forbidden West (and Zero Dawn by proxy) have willed into existence since their releases, is utterly terrifying. These are not funny haha Simpsons predictions, these are "AI is going to destroy humanity because a CEO got lazy and created a problem he couldn't make other people solve that led to people getting killed" predictions. I know that art is not meant to be activism, that reading and understanding these things is not equivalent to actually fighting them, I'm just worried about people actually getting it. If Xenoblade 3 and Forbidden West have to be this realistic to the point of being deemed “bad writing” in order to get it through these peoples’ skulls that this is all bad, what does that say about critiquing our systems in the first place? That we have to contort reality to fit a narrative which leads to plausible deniability? Is it even possible to critique these systems beyond the base level “system bad”?
I don't really have any answers to this, just wanted to pose the questions. But also I wonder this in regard to the future of critiquing the bad things in our world through art in general. What does it mean that you have to sand off the rougher edges of our current reality in order to fit into yet another box, just like these systems are doing to us? Many people have pointed out, kind of solemnly, that our current reality is moving so fast and in directions so ridiculous that art and media cannot keep up with it, and I think that holds true here.
The problems our world is facing right now are ones that the basic foundations of narrative can’t support? I find that to be not only bleak, but really isolating for artists in general. I know many artists, including myself, who use the medium to help tell their own experiences, to get their stories out into the world. So if this current reality is inherently unstoryable, then we just can’t talk about it? Because not talking about these issues is how they’ve stayed unchanged, how they haven’t been fixed. The first step towards fixing a problem is acknowledging there IS a problem. And if we can't recognize the problem either abstractly or directly, then shit's looking real grim, guys.
