One Minute Past Midnight: Bastion & Healing from Nuclear Devastation
The world has fallen out from underneath your feet. Your home as you knew it is gone in a flash. Where do you go?
In Supergiant Games’ 2011 action RPG Bastion, you play as the Kid, a miraculous survivor of an apocalypse that destroyed the country of Caelondia. You must make your way to the titular Bastion, a floating village where everyone has been taught to go in case of trouble. When you arrive, you meet the game’s narrator Rucks, who explains that the Bastion wasn’t properly prepared and needs energy sources to fulfill its mysterious true purpose. After a brief exposition dump, your quest begins and you’re sent off to fight your way through a series of gorgeously-illustrated ruins.
I first played Bastion when I was 14 years old, and I’ve hardly gone a month without thinking of it since. I learned how to play all its lyrical music on three different instruments. I started writing again after a two-year lull just so I could write Bastion fanfiction. This game sank its hooks into me and never let go.
My grandmother, born and raised in Japan, wasn’t much older than that when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She didn’t live in either of the bombed cities, but she lived near enough to see dead irradiated fish wash up on the shores of her town, to hear word of the hundreds of thousands of civilians who died. She married the first American soldier who seemed to want more than just to sleep with her, joined the flood of Japanese expatriates headed for California and never looked back.
My knowledge of her is piecemeal at best. Flights between California and Minnesota are expensive, so I only met her a handful of times. When she died three years ago, I mostly knew her through the legacy of her unkindness to my father. I barely mourned her. Instead, as I became more and more aware of how she raised her children to be American, or perhaps more importantly not Japanese, I came to almost resent her. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand the mindset of the war bride, trying to construct a narrative that explained why I feel so disconnected from my heritage. How could someone choose to do that to her children? To me? How could she not consider the pain and anger I would feel when I realized how much of my culture had been quietly assimilated into nothingness? There is a painful parallel between my understanding of Japan and my understanding of her, both filtered through a complicated legacy mired by distance and willful separation.
The complexities of diaspora are central to Bastion. You rescue two additional survivors over the course of the game; Zulf and Zia, both of the Ura people, historic enemies of Caelondia. Zulf is a proud Ura, a diplomat sent to keep the peace between your peoples. Zia is the child of a refugee, raised in Caelondia with almost no knowledge of her heritage. She wears the traditional garb, sings some traditional songs, hunches down to play her instrument as if she carries the weight of all that was left behind when her father Venn fled his homeland.
In much the same way, I have come to know Japan through aesthetics — anime and manga, street fashion, music, history, ukiyo-e, architecture, origami, food porn. I can turn to the Internet to see any number of cultural artifacts or go to a museum to observe some in person, but the connection I feel to them is arm’s-length in every way: I am being held, and I am being held back.
Zia was raised never hearing her mother tongue. Venn told her it was “for your own good,” to assimilate into Caelondia, too concerned with her isolation there to think of her isolation from her heritage.
Although my grandmother did the same with her children, my father managed to learn a little bit more Japanese than Zia learned Ura- he knows how to say 日本語はできません, “I don’t speak Japanese.”
When you finish collecting every last energy source and the Bastion comes fully alive, you are taken beneath its surface to observe its true power: Restoration. The Bastion can rewind time, can undo the apocalypse. Rucks shows you a button that can heal the biggest trauma your country has ever faced and, since you did all the work to get it ready, you’re the one who gets to press it. By now, you know who is responsible for the doomsday device that destroyed your nation. You know it was Caelondia herself who built a weapon to preemptively eradicate the Ura before war inevitably broke out again. You’ve even heard rumors that Rucks was involved in its creation, and that it was Venn who sabotaged it to point away from his homeland.
Zia’s there too, to tell you about your other option: Evacuation. You can flee Caelondia’s carcass with your newfound family and consign everyone who died there to nothing more than memory. Were things really even that great before? An armistice between her people and yours that looked more like mutually-assured destruction than peace? There is an underlying terror to her argument, too. If you send us all back, we lose each other. She will again be left with nothing but an absentee father and the echoes of her ancestry growing ever quieter.
When my grandmother died and her things were being sorted through, we asked for “anything Japanese.” Is this collection more authentic than anything I could curate because it was assembled by her? Is it less authentic because much of it was made in China?
I care about being Japanese in negative space, in knowing the pain of it without the fruit, in a way that forbids me and welcomes me and terrifies me. I care about being Japanese because it’s so easily erased from me if I don’t- passing privilege is real, but it comes with its own set of costs. It’s wondering if that white girl who definitely started her high school’s anime club might honestly know more about Japanese culture than I do. It’s thinking that there might really be something immaterial and true about being Japanese that I will never have. My heritage is defined by separation, juxtaposition, a distant cry for help through impenetrable fog, the fact that my grandmother chose to let this happen to me and died before I could confront her and demand she tell me why.
The last time I saw her, the only time I remember seeing her, her voice was near-silent and her legs seemed only as thick around as my wrist. A surgery for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease paralyzed parts of her throat and left her nearly unable to swallow. I was a teenager then, the idea of diasporic trauma still years away, and I regret that I didn’t think to have that conversation with her then.
Later, too much later, I realized I was angry at her. I was angry at whiteness. I was angry that she changed her name when she moved. I was angry at what she stole from me. I was angry that I was powerless in her decision all those decades ago.
The term “power fantasy” pops up a lot in video game criticism. Bastion, you see, is a game that made me feel powerful in a way I don’t get to in my real life. On the most basic level, that’s because I was one person against the world and, through skill and grit and an upgrade tree, I managed to beat the world back.
And then, after all the fighting, I stood there. The Kid and Rucks and Zia and Zulf stared me down from one side, an impossible choice stared me down from the other. Do I trust that this country won’t repeat the same mistake this time around, or do I cut my losses and head for greener pastures? Do I pick Restoration or Evacuation?
Staring at my laptop 6 years ago at 1AM, sobbing, a brutal headache pounding at my temples, I turned to Zia and we left the past behind us.
I chose Evacuation the first time, and I chose it every time after that. I could fabricate an argument that Caelondia was a lost cause that crafted its own destruction out of sheer paranoia, that it was and will always be doomed, but the truth is I’m never able to tear apart the family I built from its ashes. I can’t help but cling to them and the prayer for the better future they symbolize. The real power fantasy at the heart of this game is the idea that I can wake up the day after annihilation and build something beautiful and intimate and important from the wreckage.
I really do believe my grandmother was thinking of that same kind of better future when she left her homeland. That’s the American dream, after all, the grand sales pitch of our country. To take her to task for what was undoubtedly the most difficult choice of her life isn’t fair to her.
Sometimes, all that is left to do is pick up the pieces and do what we can to survive. There is always the hope that, one day, we can heal.
Ty Gale (they/them) is a mixed-race gay trans musician, writer, communist, activist and asthmatic fool who lives in Minnesota. If you enjoy good music, they would really appreciate if you listened to their band 4th Curtis. If you enjoy hot takes and incredibly niche content, their Twitter is @5thcurtis.
Deorbital is a videogame-aligned journal for insightful articles on games, culture, and society. This Winter Quarterly has been funded by readers like you. To support Deorbital in creating more space for under-represented voices in games writing, we are currently raising funds for a full year of publication. Please consider supporting us and our work, by donating HERE.
