A villain unto a villain: 1000x Resist and repeating history
I’ve never seen a video game make an honest attempt at encompassing a whole life in the way 1000xResist does. One of the earliest pieces of writing theory I remember is that the villain is a human, too — it’s more interesting if they aren’t just after riches or the destruction of the world for the sake of it. the longer I’m on this earth, the more I think villains are actually just after riches and that J.R.R. Tolkien had it right when he wrote about the curse of the dragon’s hoard that warped its owner’s mind beyond recognition. But the point stands — everyone has a story, and that story is complicated.
For video games, it often doesn’t do for the villain to be too complicated, in order to not take the player’s feeling of accomplishment. 1000xResist cleverly begins with what we think of as the villain dying, telling you that you will get to this point. Only by telling you this, it’s basically already hinting that this will not be the accomplishment you would think it to be. As we uncover the layers, the Russian Doll inherent in just one person, we learn that one villain is a universe, and one death is not the end to cruelty.
In 1000xResist, life and death and resistance are all veins that have their beginning in a character’s memories of the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests. Since those protests, war has moved in closer on my life as I have ever known it, and yet I have the luxury of being only economically affected. I don’t know the reality of fleeing or the constant fear of death. I have the luxury of not knowing what any of this does to a person, and how being grassed by friends and losing your national identity affects their ability to give love and receive it. I have wondered, especially this year, how likely the real villain is the one who would start a war on a whim, because that’s what it feels like to me.
Iris’ parents can’t work through their trauma, and they haven’t talked about this inability to their daughter, either. When I first played the game, I thought this behaviour was much closer to that of my parents, people of a generation that haven’t been encouraged to talk through their problems, but then, looking at myself, I realised it takes self-awareness, time and the economic means to do that work. My parents didn’t do it, I am unable to, and it took me several decades to even reckon with the knowledge that something was wrong at all.
At first glance, the issues Iris and her mother have with each other can look like nothing but an Asian parent being stoic and a teenager being obstinate, so naturally you wouldn’t know that both are operating under the influence of the trauma Iris’ mother has experienced. Does this make Iris’ mother the villain of Iris’ story? In many moments, I want to say yes, when I look at my own parents and wish they had done the psychological work that I have to do instead, likely every day of my life.
But then I think of the many forms people, and especially women, have to take over the course of their lives. Family psychology tells us to remember that our parents had whole lives before they had children, but it was 1000xResist, a video game of all things, that showed me how clear a divide we expect there to be — the life before being a mother, and the life after, filled with nothing but nurturing behaviour, while as a child, the life my parents lead before me feels like nothing more than a story. Now that she is becoming older, I catch myself wondering if there are things we need to talk about, if I can still uncover something that will help me make sense of the person she is and the person I am, before it’s too late. But should I be privy to these stories, or shouldn’t my mother be allowed to have a part of her personhood that is just hers, the woman she was before any of her children came along?
Iris repeated her mother’s mistakes unto her children, whose bid for independence from her ended up inflicting the wounds onto Seeker that the Chinese government inflicted on Iris’ mother. Is only a distant onlooker, a watcher like the player in 1000xResist, able to see the cycle repeating?
I worry about this, even as time slowly, silently passed, making me reach and then pass the age at which I felt it was too late to have children of my own, without any opportunity. In Germany, they warn of the rise of far right politics with the phrase “never again is now” — as an onlooker, that seems evident, but to actually behave in a way that stops mistakes from repeating is so much more difficult. 1000xResist also brilliantly shows the moment where someone in power starts to justify their actions, no matter how horrid — at some point, moved by power or group think, we move with the tide, and perhaps, at some point, even the biggest horrors make sense. If they don’t, you’ll have to live with them, in the same way Iris’ mother did.
The way we as people react to or deal with any situation can be quite illogical. It’s as if by a certain point, it’s inevitable, and that worries me. In 1000xResist, “winning” can mean making a final decision to break out of that loop, first by giving up your predefined roles, and then perhaps by surfacing, or by the death of all things.
I think that even at a point when we have chosen death and broken down a social structure, there will always be someone after us, intent on knowing and remembering. It’s how we remember long-gone cultures. We want to remember, because remembering is the way to tell that we weren’t alone. That we amounted to something.
Maybe life is now a tradeoff between our illogical nature that forces us to repeat mistakes and the way we just make meaning for ourselves in the several different roles we inhabit throughout our lives. 1000xResist left me scared, but it forced me to look, to watch, and to confront these thoughts, and maybe that will have made me a bit more compassionate — the biggest compliment I can give a piece of art.