Love & Deepdives

The first is that I'm interested in critiquing Caleb's myths as a trilogy of works and their relationship to main story. The second is that this is in good faith, this is not some attack on Caleb/XYZ, this is not some attack on Caleb fans whether they be gege-truthers or not. As fans of any form of media, I think it's good practice to examine these things from other angles aside from: I like this or I don't like this.

With that being said, if you come away thinking I am just a Caleb hater or hate Caleb's fans or whatever, you've completely missed the point. His character is SO compelling to me (compelling enough to bring me back to fic writing). My issue is with Infold's writing and game direction. For what it's worth, I literally joined the game because Caleb's character introduction drew me in, loved Homecoming Wings, and I have all his cards (minus Verdant Wetlands because I fucked up). I'm also Chinese, so kindly don't bring in orientalism or cultural arguments (broadly constructed) into this.

I'll start by laying out what I think makes a good myth. In my view, a myth is an opportunity to do the following:

1) expand the audience's understanding of the LI, MC, and their relationship. Whether that's advancing their storyline (ex: Tears of Romirro and Where Stars Scatter) or giving us a new angle to look at the character (ex: Beyond Cloudfall) or both (ex: Lucid Dreams and Sea of Golden Sands). Both is ideal. I'm also not saying that ToR or Dragon myth don't do the other thing, but I digress.

2) be relatively self-contained and accessible enough so that a newer player can understand the meanings and implications for the character and relationship. Since LaDs operates on a limited myth basis, this means that at the bare minimum, a newer player should be able to connect some dots between a LI's free standard myth and the new limited myth. You don't want to make a limited myth so impenetrable that a newer player cannot understand it. You also do not want a new limited myth that is so reliant on a previous limited myth that a new player is completely lost with no way of playing the older myth except on YouTube. This is bad for bringing in new players to a game (especially one that wants to last a while).

3) provide avenues of connection to the main story. Lucid Dreams does this BEAUTIFULLY. As does Sea of Golden Sands. Those myths provide additional things for fans to think about and just serve to further prop up your main plot. This is where I think Infold really suffers from because they do not update the main story often enough for there to be more plot connection opportunities. That will be a running complaint of mine throughout.

To me, without these three, a myth becomes just a longer form AU or side story. That's great for satisfying preexisting fans of said LI, but not so great if you want to have a more coherent and structured plot that advances all characters and moves the story forward. This is where I will skewer the Lumiere myth Twilight's Dawn because it was largely a nothing burger on all these fronts (ily Xav, but that storyline was filler plot at best. Also 400 pulls for R2 oN RERUN WAS NOT IT EITHER).

I was surprised that a lot of Caleb's more typical thematic elements were absent from Yin Yang Sundering. I felt the same way about Edge of Continum too until the very end. There was also zero (0) connection to Caleb's other myths (both Decoherence or Lucid Dreaming). Part of this may be because Caleb has not reappeared in the main story because of the dumb fuck way Infold releases their main storyline but I feel like Edge of Continum and Crimson Spirit got there in the end more or less. So for Caleb to have the only myth out of the five that does not have even the semblance of linkage to his other storylines feels extremely jarring and it sucks as someone interested in his lore! Also Decoherence took place explicitly on Philos, but YYS takes place elsewhere which also struck me as an odd choice, but whatever.

Fate and Sacrifice

My friend Shadow made a great point that Caleb and MC are always switching fates. In Lucid Dreams, Caleb makes himself EVER's pawn so that they leave MC alone. In Decoherence Caleb tried to self-sacrifice to give MC a chance to escape. In YYS, that is consistent again with how MC was supposed to be the sacrifice but he presented himself instead. In the end, regardless of what they do, how much they try to protect one another, they're inevitably separated whether by death or other means. So the overall thematic arc of Caleb's storyline of fate, inevitable separation, and futility are all present. Yay for thematic solidification!

Creation

Infold also keeps building on this aspect of Caleb, MC, and creation (both in Decoherence and YYS). In Decoherence it's MC as the proverbial "Adam" with the creation and destruction cores. In YYS this is shown heavily through the symbol of a lotus (and similarities to Fuxi/Nuwa). This is a really cool plot point present in those myths but kind of absent from CalebMC in the main story except the brief tie-in with lotuses in Caleb's spring 2025 card. Hopefully main story will pick that up at some point, but I'm not holding my breath here.

Caleb and MC in Main Story

In the main story, Caleb and MC were heavily co-dependent. This stemmed from their shared experience of growing up as orphaned lab rats. Even from the beginning it is obvious that Caleb has a self-sacrificial streak to protect and nurture MC (some would argue at the expense of their emotional growth). His personal self-image is deeply and intrinsically tied to his relationship with MC. Everything he's done in the main story (join the DAA because it'll provide for MC, give himself up to EVER for MC, etc) all of his choices are driven by his desire to protect her and shield her from the reality that is having an Aether core in your heart.

The new tension and new wrinkle in their relationship is post-explosion. The tension in Homecoming Wings is predicated on two things:

1) Caleb can no longer do everything for me, who am I without him? This relationship was already starting to crack a little (see: main story pre-explosion).

2) Your childhood protector came back different. And he came back scarier, and more guarded. You used to know him like the back of your hand but now he has secrets. How do you move on, how do you evolve now that you no longer have the veneer of a familial relationship with the added element of sexual and romantic tension?

I have a lot of beef as well with Caleb's MC in both limited myths. Both in Decoherence and YYS to a certain extent, Caleb does EVERYTHING and then MC swoops in at the last bit to "set things right". She kind of just exists as a baby deer for like….six chapters. Another thing of note in his myths is that (compared to other the LIs) Caleb and MC are perfectly happy not changing which is an interesting choice from a writing perspective.

Pseudo/Incest

I'm not here to weigh in on the "acceptability" or "morality" of fictional incest or fictional pseudo-cest (see my house rules). I'm also not here to weigh in your choices. If you were jazzed by the solidification of a blood-relationship, I'm happy for you. If you were not happy with that, sorry for your loss. This is not the conversation I am trying have in this little essay. I have two points to make about the usage of incest in Caleb's storylines.

The first is meta. From a meta perspective, Infold shot themselves in the foot with his English localization. They just did. There was no reason they couldn't have started out by saying Caleb is your adopted older brother. It was plenty clear in the main storyline that they knew each other pre-adoption, it was clear that they wound up growing up in the same house, it is clear that prior to main story they saw each other as family. This whole "childhood friend" bullshit really takes out the tension that makes CalebMC so interesting.

What was interesting about CalebMC to begin with is that it started as an exploration of how someone in your life might transition from a familial role to a romantic one (or even commentary about how romantic love cannot exist without other kinds of love). You simply don't have that tension without them being some kind of familial. No one is worried when their childhood friend becomes their lover, but someone would be plenty worried if they felt like they were falling in love with their older sibling (adopted or otherwise).

This is actually is a great example of how creative self-censorship in anticipation of audience reaction actually makes your story worse and less coherent. Sidenote, but their treatment of CalebMC's relationship in his lunars post-birthday has really fallen short for me and it's just not…as interesting :(

The second is the usage of pseudocest/incest as a point of tension. That is EVERYWHERE in his Linkon timeline. That is NOWHERE in Decoherence or YYS. One could argue that YYS is an exploration of what would happen if they just leaned in on all of it, but Decoherence didn't touch on that either. Why is it such a bigger deal in the Linkon storyline? In the main story the use of siblings is meant to serve as a transition from family to lovers (← Shadow's words, which I greatly agree with!). Caleb and MC being siblings in YYS doesn't have the same oomph and isn't used to illuminate anything new in their relationship.

Where YYS also misses for me is that we do not learn anything new about Caleb or MC that was not already present in main story or Lucid Dream. They keep falling into the same futile pitfalls which is the great tragedy but YYS did not add anything new to Caleb as a character or to MC as a character or to their relationship with one another that the players don't already also know. His limited myths really have not offered any new insight into their relationship, their characters, where they might go in the future— none of that is present.

What I think Infold set out to do with this myth is throw away ambiguity about their relationship, that they have a sort of cosmic sibling relationship that transcends brother/sister, husband/wife etc. But throughout YYS they also never refer to each other as husband and wife or as lovers? I know part of it is that for CalebMC their relationship transcends such labels, but they did a whole ghost marriage only to not really bring that up again.

Long story short, I think the myth was fine as a self-contained story and even maybe as an entry point for newer Caleb enjoyers. It falls severely flat for me in the lack of connection to the main timeline plot and a lack of new developments for Caleb, MC, and their relationship. I was similarly disappointed with Decoherence as well for the exact same reasons. Now we have two myths for Caleb that ….just kind of feel like AU cards. As we've seen with AU cards such as Tomorrow's Catch-22 and others, they can be fertile places to explore character dynamics outside of the constraints of the main storyline. YYS doesn't satisfy that (for me) even if we're looking at it only from an AU perspective.

My longer point is that this feels like poor planning on Infold's part with Caleb's character. As a Caleb drop player, I don't feel like Caleb's storyline or character has grown much at all post-Lucid Dreams and Homecoming Wings. It feels like aside from the siblings or not tension, Infold doesn't know what to do with his lunars or his myths. Instead they're mining the tragedy of their parting, just in different dress. His birthday lunar should've been a turning point in their relationship so they can grow, but then in his free 4-star Chasing Summer, they're back to the "wellllllllllll he's my friiiiiienddddd". I think Infold really missed an opportunity to bring something new to his character or just something. Instead, if you've read the main story and Lucid Dreams, you already have a good understanding of Caleb and CalebMC. Decoherence and YYS don't bring anything new that advances main timeline Caleb who is ostensibly the Caleb that should be experiencing growth and change. Again, part of this has to do with the dumb fuck way they've handled main story (which, after two years FINALLY feels like we're past the prologue).

So that's my two cents. The pennies were getting hella sweaty. Happy to chat, but like I said up front, this is meant to be in good faith. I am interested in discussion. Again, your personal measure of what makes a myth good or not may be very different from mine, and I am definitely not presenting this as the be all and end all critique of Yin Yang Sundering.