Z.A.T.O. // I Love the World and Everything In It
This is a collection of thoughts on the visual novel Z.A.T.O. // I Love the World and Everything In It, created by Ferry // Nopanamaman. It's free and it's about 6 hours of reading. This post contains spoiler discussions for the whole thing, and will probably not even make sense without the context of the game. This isn't a review, just a repetitive and scattered collection of thoughts I had in the 24 hours after finishing it. My review is: it's good, it's short, it Makes You Think, and if you read it then your friends will think you are cool for doing so.
It's so cool how names are used. Every character has a "main" name, but each character calls them something slightly different (i.e., for Asya, Marina calls her Aska, and Vadim calls her Shubina, and Vadim is sometimes Vadik, etc.). There are characters called Classmate A, Classmate B, and so on, and other characters actually call each of them by name, but the name is never put into the name tag from Asya's point of view; they stay as Classmate letters.
When Ira gets too big a dose of the reality of determinism, and her humanity is carved out, the last thing she can do to communicate is say her name over and over. She is clinging to her identity, her last proof that she is a unique human in the world. When Asya reads her a poem about being grounded in the earth, she wakes back up, which triggers her disappearance back into the lifestream-ish "code". It's because Asya convinced her to go the other way, to completely give yourself up to the idea that she is not a separate thing, but a small branch of literally everything.
When we get to the end, Asya has a hallucinated friend, Tosya. We get a little backstory: the people at the lab were spooked by Asya's ability to create things out of nothing (arguably manifest things into reality, arguably create fictional personas). As they're climbing to deliver their final message, they lose their names. Even to the player, the names are replaced in the speaker tags with "Me" and "Girl". The characters say they do not remember their names or why they're there. It's the opposite of what happened to Ira: instead of holding onto your identity to the end, you completely subsume yourself into the greater whole.
I have not read The Gadfly, but I have it on good authority that the novel is about complete self-sacrifice in pursuit of changing the world. It was enormously popular in China and Iran, and was mandatory reading in the Soviet Union. There is something absolutely romantic about this, an atheism that activates the spiritualism circuits of the brain, but Asya's philosophy goes well beyond even that. There's no reason to sacrifice yourself for revolution, after all, if everything is predetermined and you can't change anything.
The sunrise on Mars is a collection of numbers. We can pick a point on the surface, and find the specific windows of time where there's a sunrise happening based on its axial tilt and speed of rotation. The sunrise on Earth is the same, it can also be reduced to numbers, but it can also be beautiful. The only difference is the presence of human observation. All the rocks smashing into each other since the big bang have resulted in subjective experience and consciousness and beauty and love. Asya's insight is that if everything is on rails, it's a wonderful gift to be the bearer of these things despite nothing ever requiring it or needing it. A gift implies a giver, and she wants to show her gratitude.
Asya is a master at the human art of projection, and she does it at three different levels. The biggest projection, of course, is that of a personality onto the universe. There is no reason for subjectivity and consciousness to emerge, so she infers that her own existence is a blessing, and derives an entire consciousness for the universe. Her universe gijinka is not cold and aloof, but is instead more like a god: carefully examining every event on Earth, and reaching into the world to bring about the effects it wants and needs.
The next, smaller, level of projection is the motivations of other people. Her position is basically that nobody is evil, that nobody causes harm on purpose, and in every case where it happens, it's really a misunderstanding and the culprits are not really doing bad stuff on purpose. We get a lot of first-person logic puzzles where she is enduring obvious disrespect and bullying, and she twists the situation internally into one where the bullies are actually being nice in their own way.
The final level of projection is inventing people. Although she only has brief interactions with Ira, she grows obsessed with her and invents all sorts of personality elements around her: what tea she likes, what books she reads, hobbies, preferences, family life, as though she is writing a character. In the case of Tosya, she might have been invented wholecloth, in such detail and with such conviction that she popped into reality in some form. All three of these levels are basically doing the same thing.
If Donald Duck tried this line on Asya, her position would basically be: if love is reducible to chemicals and physics, why on earth would you reduce love to mundanity instead of elevating chemicals and physics to the level of love? In this, and honestly most of her views, I'm right there with her.
Asya refuses the pills that suppress recognition of determinism, and yet doesn't succumb to the hollowing out of her humanity because she has accepted that she's a small piece of the wonderful whole. Humanity, that is, sanity and consciousness, are thought by Marina, Ira, and the rest to exist in the space where mankind has removed itself from the natural world. The universe is the dark cave and we are the torches that let us see anything. That's why the horrible curse of knowledge that there is no such separation removes their humanity, because such knowledge can reduce people to nihilism. When Asya opens herself up fully to determinism, and really boils herself in it, I think she is removing everything that isn't pure deterministic physics from herself. After she has no body, no thoughts, and no name, the remaining humanity is a pure expression of love, confessed to the universe, confessed to her created persona, confessed to the player, and confessed to every human with a functioning radio, all at once.