#lucrece

I've been playing through the Live A Live remake lately, and I just realized something.

Lucrece is the Gravity Falls of Medieval Europe.

The first seven chapters pretty clearly established that none of this is taking place in a fantasy setting, it's real-world actual Earth from real life. A heavily fictionalized version of Earth, to be sure, but Earth nonetheless (unless I missed the part about the Bakumatsu when Sakamoto Ryoma teamed up with a purple-haired ninja to fight a frogsnake demon, a clockwork cyborg, and a giant koi fish, and yet somehow he couldn't fight off some basic assassins a few years later. :V)

Then you get to the Middle Ages and all of a sudden you're in a medieval fantasy kingdom straight out of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. The characters all speak in iambic pentameter, even the peasants. They worship Gods, plural, in a time and place where admitting you do so anywhere else would probably get you skewered. Two of your party members are straight-up flinging fireballs and summoning angels, a certain kind of grass that doesn't appear in any other chapter is a workable substitute for modern medicine (granted, so are soup dumplings, castella cake and beef jerky, apparently, but still) and the land is infested with little knights riding squirrels, killer plants, dog-people and Actual Dragons, none of which is remarked upon or treated as anything other than business as usual. The big threat on everyone's mind is a demon living in a mountain, while most other countries are more concerned with warring with each other - not that we'd know who Lucrece's neighbours are because other countries are never even mentioned. And that's before Odio completely screws everything up and the land gets overrun by baddies from all across time.

In short, it's very disconnected from Earth in a way that none of the other chapters are, even when taking all the fantasy elements in those chapters into account. You'd be forgiven for assuming it wasn't Earth at all but some kind of alternate dimension. This is where I compare it to the town of Gravity Falls, because:

They're disconnected from the outside world - what happens in Lucrece stays in Lucrece. No-one outside of it has ever heard of it, and no-one inside of it has any care what goes on beyond the borders.

They're a magnet for weird beasties and weird people - people who still worship pantheons in notoriously ultra-Christian medieval Europe, for example. Or someone who'll just take his shirt off in public and give it to the local hero for protection. :V

At some point, they get struck by an apocalyptic event that leaves the entire place infested with monsters even more weird than usual, and yet that event is strictly contained within its borders, unable to spread. This might actually explain why no-one's ever heard of Lucrece, because Odio killed everyone who lived there, wiped away all trace of its existence, and was then in turn killed by seven time travelers.

The big bad responsible for said event has powers of reality-warping, time-transcending scale, have a misanthropic streak, and have tried multiple times across time to screw up history. They're ultimately defeated by a team of ordinary humans (and some non-humans) pulling together with the power of trust and friendship.

[ OMNIS ENIM COLOR OMNINO MUTATUR IN OMNIS ]

She bears the load of lust he left behind And he the burden of a guilty mind. He like a thieving dog creeps sadly thence, She like a wearied lamb lies panting there; He scowls, and hates himself for his offence, She desperate, with her nails her flesh doth tear. (734-39) There is a dark relationship here, a terrible mutual understanding; they have been together somewhere that no one else in the poem has been. We shall see such relationships in the plays, Othello and Iago being a prime example.

The Rape of Lucrece

Lucretia The rape and the suicide Lucretia was the legendary heroine of ancient Rome. According to tradition, she was the beautiful and virtuous wife of the nobleman Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus. Her tragedy began when she was raped by Sextus Tarquinius, son of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the tyrannical Etruscan king of Rome. After exacting an oath of vengeance against the Tarquins from her…