or, the Always-Already Savior

So I’m finally getting around to writing on Earthbound.  I mean, for cereals.  I wrote about it a little over on my personal blog, but I didn’t really have a driving idea, I just wanted to get some feelings out that I couldn’t phrase any better than that.  The simplest way start, I suppose, is simply to ask, Dude, what’s up with the time travel in Earthbound? Time travel isn’t unique to Earthbound, of course.  Chrono Trigger is all about the stuff.  But EB’s time travel isn’t typical, just as most of the game, I suppose, isn’t typical.  We’ll get to the end part, where Ness and friends plain old go back in time, but mostly what I’m interested in is the Your Sanctuaries. I know.  I said time travel, right?  What about the Sanctuaries ?  I think we can read the Sanctuaries as a form of time travel.  Specifically, not the Sanctuaries themselves, but the “memories” evoked by the Sanctuaries when you record their songs. There’s not much of a progression in the memories — my subjective impression, while playing, was that they moved farther backwards, away from the present.  However, looking at a list now, I’ m not sure that’s really true.  Anyway, the memories are such things like “Ness smells a whiff of Steak” (provided you chose “Steak” as Ness’s favorite food — he’s an all-American boy, so you surely did, right?) and “Ness remembers his mother holding him.”  At first they seem like memories — memories of so long ago Ness can’t recall them normally, but contact with the energy of the Sanctuary opens them again.  That’s interesting on its own. But the game doesn’t leave it at that.  Some of Ness’s “memories” should be impossible for him to remember.  The final three are suspect — though it could be argued that “Ness’s mother when she was young” is a memory of Ness seeing his mother, across a room say, when he was just born.  I personally think it’s not, that he’s seeing his mother before he was actually born, but there’s no real evidence either way. However, the final two “memories” are, I think, impossible to explain in the same way.  In Lumine Hall Ness sees his father holding him, and in the Fire Spring (damn you, Diamond Dog), Ness sees himself as a baby.  The fact that he sees these things is the important part:  Ness isn’t remembering his father holding him, he’s SEEING it.  Ness gets these sensations from outside, as though he is peering through time and seeing moments associated with his life in some way.  He’s peering back through time, as though each Sanctuary opens a little window onto some day in his life (or, as with his mother when she was young, possibly before he was born?).

That’s what’s odd about this — because the Sanctuaries theoretically don’t have anything to do with time travel.  They’re about obtaining power to defeat Giygas — the way Ness unlocks that power, in fact, is to fall into Magicant, a world of his own mind, where he must defeat his dark side in order to use the power for good (on its own an interesting take on the idea that power would corrupt — the hero must defeat the corruption in himself, while it wields the power, before he can use it for good).  So what’s up with the time travel?

In fact, what’s up with the power?  Because Dr. Andonuts designs the machine that sends everyone back in time (Dr. Andonuts AND the Saturns), and it’s Paula, the modern-day eleven-year-old priestess who prays for the whole of the world to help stop Giygas, who facilitates Giygas’s downfall.

So what’s up with the Sanctuaries?  Why do they puncture the fabric of time for such seemingly-insignificant glimpses into the past?  Now, we all know those “seemingly-insignificant’ things are what drive the hero on, from Frodo’s memories of the Shire to Kyon’s obsession with Haruhi’s ponytail, but you see my point I hope.  Are the Sanctuaries trying to prove something to Ness?  If so, why the meaningless glimpses?  If they’re not, why mess with time at all?  It seems like Giygas is doing quite enough of that as is.

Pontifus already unloaded a big bottle rocket on the problem of Giygas himself, and without playing the other games I don’t want to try and add much more to what he’s said, but I want to build on one thing he mentioned.

Ness’s head (or at least the head he left behind when he agreed to have his consciousness housed in a robot body[. . .]) occupies the position of iris and pupil. The mirror effect serves to link Ness with Giygas[. . .]

The reminder that Giygas’s “eye” isn’t reflecting Ness as he is at the time, but Ness as he usually is, helps us immensely here.  Ness, when facing Giygas in the past, is in a robot body.  So his image in the Devil’s Machine can’t be a reflection — a literal reflection, anyway.  It is as though Giygas is seeing Ness either in his “true form” or through a window forward into the present.  Given that Ness and Giygas are related in some way (the mysteries of Mother 1, I suppose, but also in a figurative sense in that they once occupied similar positions vis. PSI powers and pressures), it’s as though Giygas has been watching Ness through a time window and that stress has resulted in the Sanctuaries and their time-muddling properties that, in turn, allow Ness to glance backwards to his own past, even that time before he was born when his mother was young and the moment his father held him.

Giygas wanted to protect people, you know.  He was like Ness, and might still be — given that it’s possible Giygas is more mad than evil, and his power is being exploited by the Starmen and Pokey for their own ends.  I shudder to make the comparison, but it needs to be made, if only because it’s so terrible its structure is obvious:  but Giygas is like Anakin Skywalker.

I know, it makes me throw up a little too.  But forget Hayden Christensen for a minute, just remember the story.  Anakin wants to protect his mother, so he agrees to become a Jedi to get the power necessary, he loses his mind a little bit when his mother is killed, and loses it a whole lot when he thinks his new Convenient Female in Need of Protection (Padme) is dead.  That’s Giygas.  And like Luke, Ness has enough good support to avoid a similar fate.  We never do really figure out what Ness is thinking, except that one time in Lumine Hall, but the moments in time he sees indicates his strong ties to his family.  The Mother games are well-named, because their main locus of concern is the family and how it influences the ripples outward from that center.  It might be significant that in a parody game, a Japanese company chose America as its target, given that those two countries are some of the biggest (most vocal) proponents of the nuclear family.  Because Giygas wants his family, he loses his mind, and fixates on Ness when Ness arrives.  However, Ness is also an object of fear — as Ness has arrived to kill Giygas.  So Giygas might be trying to simply defend himself, or maybe even communicate (don’t even get me started on the nature of communication between truly alien groups, I’ll go all His Master’s Voice on your butt).

Ness has, while he’s struggling through Magicant (and everything else), already saved the world, because he did it in the past.  But like FF8′s non-sensical storyline, time might be compressing due to Giygas’s influence.  I have to wonder if he was just trying to find a friend, and another family.  Ness would suit perfectly, wouldn’t he?  His most important times, that he sees through the veil of time, are all about his family.  But hugging someone too hard will kill them just as dead as strangling would.

And one final thought, mostly unconnected to the rest:  Pokey gets back in time just fine with his body intact.  Was it necessary to send Ness and co. back in machines so their human pity might be suppressed?