OC [Disc] Wanderer in the Vortex Chapter 5 - The Undiscovered Babylon (spoilers)
Note: Spoilers discussed in this thread.
(Non-spoiler section here)
Hi everyone, I recently finished Chapter 5 of Wanderer in the Vortex, I wanted to discuss it since I enjoyed it a lot. I added a WIP fanart for this discussion to bait you into reading this long post. (Btw, if you're on mobile, you can zoom in on pictures by opening in a new tab)
From what I read, this was the same writer as Melissa, Eva and Iphi's character quests, Mizuki Hiratani, whose writings take on a darker and heavier tone. I dislike stories with negativity for its own sake, but if there is meaning behind it, I can get behind it. I enjoyed Chapter 5. I think it's my favorite Wanderer in the Vortex chapter so far.
Some of the previous Wanderer in the Vortex chapters felt a little tedious and cliche, in particular Chapter 1 with Orleya. It felt very shounen-esque with an "overcome your fears!" hoo-rah kind of character development arc and a very weak villain in terms of writing. But I did enjoy Chapter 2 (Alma/Lele) the most among the previous chapters, followed by Chapter 4 (Alter Tsukiha).
(Spoiler section from here until end)
One of the draws of story for me was Marie. She's a very compelling character to me. There's a deep longing and something exceedingly sad in her words. I think her portrait art was done very well too to convey the depth of her emotions. When she talks to Aldo, she says:
Yes. You promised me a tale of your adventures, remember? Is the outside world very, very large?
Ordinary people laughing happily, singing affectionate songs, holding hands with the people they love...
Walking through the streets in the lamplight, wearing soft shoes.
People who speak about those things with such earnestness and purity talk like that because they've never known that kind of happiness.
When you see her lose it and explode at Mariel, it helps convey how she's more than just a cheerful loving saint-like mother. She's at her limit.
I want you to go home, but you're still here! I feel like I'm going mad!
He's killing himself! And on top of all that, you ignorant outsiders decided to intrude on our life!
In some ways, she reminds me of my own mother. One of my older siblings remembered our mother as someone who was once beautiful, dignified, and sincere. Most of my siblings and I don't talk to her anymore. Both of my parents were deeply sincere and devoted with all of their hearts to what turned out to be a cult that cast them out of the communities they spent the best years of their life building up. Everything that was full of love, hopes and dreams, turned into a crushing disappointment and wounds that I don't think they ever quite fully recovered from (or ever got therapy for).
Not to derail this post into some personal life story, but what I'm saying is based on my experiences, this story feels very real. The dynamic of Marie's religious community, her life, her bitterness and resentment, feels like it was written by someone who experienced it firsthand. It's hard to write that kind of story convincingly. It's a sign of a good writer.
One of the themes I liked in this story was the relationship between knowledge and innocence. When Aldo and company meet Marie and the children, we find out that although they are very happy and loved, none of them know how to read or write.
As they explore the island, they find an abandoned home with diaries from Marie's adoptive father:
Is merely feeding them enough to make you a parent? Does protecting an immature body make you an adult? And what about children? The potential behaviors that the immature have toward adults, or their parents... They only receive. With food... No, perhaps with everything passive... When they are young and lack the knowledge, they can't make decisions. They can't even refuse. Worrying, hating, deciding. What brings them joy? What brings them down? Without knowledge, there is nowhere to go. Without experience, no decisions can be made. My heart aches when I look at her because she shines so bright. Acquiring knowledge without limitation, thinking freely, truly living like a human.
Then... what about the children of the island? I couldn't save them that day, those children whose innocence was forced upon them. Forced innocence is a tragedy in itself. Obedience when there is no other choice is basically distortion.
Marie intentionally keeps these children ignorant, innocent and dependent on her as a sort of revenge on the community who brought about all her suffering in the first place. Ironically, one of her children mistakes her for an imposter and kills her because of the lack of depth of their understanding about their mother as a human being. All their life, they had only known the saint-like side of their mother.
This reminds me of Plato's allegory of the cave. Basically if people are imprisoned in a cave and can only see shadows on the wall cast by fire, then that is their only understanding of reality. They lack exposure to the true reality of things because of their limited knowledge.
In the Undiscovered Babylon, life on the island and its curse of inedible food and animals represents Plato's cave. On the surface, Marie and the children all live in happiness and love. But they have nowhere to go, and it's a matter of time before their lives end in tragedy. The beliefs of Marie's religious community casts a shadow over their whole lives. Although Marie doesn't share their beliefs, she's still is bound by the limitation of only knowing life on this island. Even if you want something better, you can't do anything about it. There is a sense of utter hopeless futility with Marie and Ivan as they try to chart a course forward for their future. When you turn back time and return to the island to bring about the "true ending", Ivan is furious and exasperated because after hundreds of attempts, the children surviving as mutated plants and Marie living without Ivan, who she loved, was the best outcome that he could see possible. (By the way, the kids being mutated into those plant-like creatures was a truly shocking, horrifying and profane scene, like something from the Twilight Zone or the Outer Limits). Marie can also only conceive of solutions that are predicated on staying on the island, which are mostly gruesome and harsh.
In Plato's cave analogy, people who cannot overcome the difficulties of facing the light turn back to the imprisonment of the cave, because it seems too risky to face the terror of the unknown and retreat instead to the familiar, whether or not that is a better life.
But in the end, Marie decides to try to try to cast a double Pure Cradle with Mariel to purify all of the island so that it's no longer poisonous for them. That was a very emotional scene. Although it doesn't fulfill their initial goal, the light from the Pure Cradle draws explorers to the island, allowing Marie and the children to escape from the island. If I understood correctly, even Ivan survives in the true ending because Marie returns to the clock tower and says, "Ivan, I'm home. I was thinking... Let's talk. Let's look at one another." as she smiles. The minute hand on the clock tower turns, but time doesn't turn back. This time, a future exists for all of them. In a sense, they've left the cave and its shadows, with its distorted representation of happiness, with all the former ways of futility, and found a more true form of happiness outside. Marie (I think) also decides to teach the kids to read and write and no longer keep them in ignorance.
I feel there's other themes which I didn't touch on, but that one stood out to me.
Another piece of writing I liked was where Aldo convinces Ivan to trust them to try something new instead of Ivan sacrificing himself, saying:
I realized, by giving up on yourself, the ones you care about most will be the ones who suffer.
In some love dramas, you see someone sacrificing themselves, but in a grand and senseless way that elevates an ideal of selfless sacrificial love. Although love can be sacrificial, their portrayal of it is executed in away that irritates me because it lacks a sort of understanding about relationships between two people who love each other. To be honest, I was annoyed in Chapter 2 how Alma's mother insisted on sacrificing herself to save Alma, and Alma's father was like well, "if you insist..." I guess you can say that shows that parents love their children so much, but what about how your spouse feels when you something like that? The agony Marie felt when Ivan sacrificed himself to help the kids survive showed that sacrifice can be more complex than just the naivete of only focusing on the nobility of the act. I think those types of commentaries in this story conveys a depth of understanding in these types of themes and relationships of the characters and their choices. (By the way, I had to laugh when you choose between Mariel or Aldo to talk to Marie. It doesn't matter! She'll try to kill you no matter what.)
At first, I was put off by the happy endings in Another Eden's stories and found it to be sometimes too optimistic, thinking "this is isn't how it is in real life." But I don't think fiction has to follow real life all the time, especially if it wants to convey a specific theme or idea. I think one of the purposes of fiction or art in general is to create something beautiful to inspire people to hope in the possibility of a better reality than the one they see in front of them. (This is why you'll see that intellectuals, philosophers and artists are usually the first to go when a dictatorship takes over a society.) Or if not hope, then at least bring a sense of closure or catharsis to something traumatic by a retelling of that event. A doctor who researches trauma, Dr. Van Der Kolk, wrote a book called "The Body Keeps the Score", where he noticed that theater and roleplaying had a powerful transformative effect on people affected by long-lasting trauma. Trauma leaves people stuck in the past, with the traumatic event playing over and over in their mind, as if they were in a recurrent time loop of their own. Even if they try to move on, any events in the present are interpreted as if the traumatic event of the past were happening again. Resolving the trauma allows them to see that the event has passed and to move on with their lives and allow time to proceed for the future to come. This is why you see some people who are into acting come from difficult backgrounds. Frances Hodgson Burnett lost one of her sons to tuberculosis, but later wrote a book called "The Secret Garden," where the healing power of a garden and nature brings life back to two children abandoned by the world. The boy in story is based on her own son, I think. I think Chapter 5 was a story that was personally meaningful for me as well, since it reminds me a lot of my own mother and family.
Anyway, this went on kind of long, but I hope you enjoyed Chapter 5. Though you're free to have a different opinion. What did you think?
By the way, does anyone know what happened to the other people on the island? Like the tower defenders or the parents of the children. Or Marie's adoptive father.
Also, I didn't catch the significance of the sword that Ivan gives to Marie. Why does he have it? Is it supposed to be related to the song that Marie sings?
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