0. How Should We Interpret Part 2 of FGO? Or, What Kind of Reading Does Dystopian Fiction Demand?
As one of the most influential cash-grab mobile games of recent years, Fate/Grand Order has become an important part of the TYPE-MOON empire’s body of work—and perhaps its most controversial one. By the midpoint of Part 2, the narrative pattern promised by its universe of Lostbelts had come into focus. To some degree, the seven Lostbelts present seven contemporary dystopian scenarios, each founded on a possible history of the TYPE-MOON world. The public disputes these scenarios provoke also deserve discussion. When Lostbelt No.3, the Chinese Lostbelt, first appeared on the Japanese server, for example, it was celebrated as “an expression of China’s strength”; when it reached the Chinese server, it was accused of “insulting China.” We could, of course, say that such opinions are merely the mistaken judgments of a vulgar public that does not know how to appreciate dystopian fiction, directed at a none-too-accomplished commercial example of the form. Yet it is difficult to claim that simply understanding and consuming the possibilities to which a dystopian story refers is an adequate way of dealing with such a text.
Slavoj Žižek—the celebrated philosopher whom Graham Harman, a leading figure in speculative realism, once named among the three philosophers in history who could make a living as stand-up comedians—described The Handmaid’s Tale as a work of nostalgic fetishism for the present. On this account, the work does not truly indict or extrapolate the threat of religious fundamentalism. Instead, it uses the dystopian possibility of a religious totalitarian future to fetishize and celebrate a present imagined as “pluralist, open, and progressive.” To my mind, this charge applies even more forcefully to Part 2 of FGO. No matter how often the felling of the Trees of Emptiness is described as an unavoidable war for survival, or how insistently the writers stress the Lostbelts’ “wrongness” in relation to Proper Human History so that players need not feel guilty about “doing evil,” the effect is still to celebrate the world as it now exists. The text is effectively saying: “How wonderful that we were born into Proper Human History, where hope still exists!” It resembles the familiar Japanese refrain, “How wonderful it is to live in Japan!” The ideological struggle against a Lostbelt dystopia thereby regresses into a contest over which history is worse. Critique of dystopian possibility regresses into celebration of a reality whose dominant values couple neoliberal ethics to multiculturalism. The sole improvement is that the legitimacy of the conflict does not appeal to a totalitarian-sounding “correct history” adjudicated by the Counter Force, but rather to each Lostbelt’s own oppression and unsustainable contradictions. Yet even this apparent improvement only makes the story more compliant with mainstream ideology.
But must these texts do nothing except reproduce ideology? If The Handmaid’s Tale were merely “nostalgic fetishism for the present,” why would Žižek try to take the discussion further? After arguing that its plot caters to the obscene, patriarchal enjoyment of its readers and viewers, and that the work in fact celebrates the present, Žižek asks a more valuable question: why does the contemporary United States—supposedly “free, progressive, and respectful of women,” and fetishized with such nostalgia—turn into the Republic of Gilead, a religious totalitarian state that brutally oppresses women? Likewise, whenever we pine for “the good old days,” we must ask why those days developed into a present that can be endured only through nostalgia. The ideological elements that dominate dystopian fantasy are structures already inherent in our reality; indeed, they are aspects of reality itself. They are not other worlds opposed to reality and useful only for making it look good. On the contrary, they are always isomorphic with it. What interpretation of dystopian fiction must guard against is not the possibility that our quiet and harmonious reality might someday slide into horror. We already inhabit the field of that possibility. Precisely those dystopian works that lack textual radicalism must be read radically, so that their critical force can be reactivated.
1. The Final Dark God—or the Final Dark Human?
Asked where dystopia in the Lostbelt universe is most obviously isomorphic with reality, most people would instinctively point to Lostbelt No.3, Synchronized Intellect Nation: SIN. In my view, however, the most important of the four Lostbelts then available on the Chinese server was Lostbelt No.4, Saṃsāra of Genesis and Terminus: Yugakshetra. Its background may be more mythological, but it reveals a crucial ideological structure and the fate to which that structure leads.
The story title of Lostbelt No.4, Saṃsāra of Genesis and Terminus: Yugakshetra, is The Final Dark God. Yet in light of what Section 19 reveals, this “Arjuna as god” must be understood precisely as “the final dark human.”
The Indian Lostbelt diverges from Proper Human History after the Kurukshetra War in the Mahābhārata. Disgusted by the war and reflecting upon it, Arjuna attributes its bloodshed and misery to the fact that human evil—everything “defective and unnecessary”—has not yet been eradicated. He resolves to unite the powers of the gods and, through repeated yuga cycles, to construct a perfect world without evil. As an incarnation of Indra, Arjuna continually seizes the divinities of other gods. He eventually consumes the entire Indian pantheon and becomes the sole deity, “the Final Dark God.” Drawing on the divinities of Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and Śiva, the nameless God Arjuna compresses the four yugas—normally lasting 1,728,000,000, 1,296,000,000, 864,000,000, and 432,000,000 years—into four, three, two, and one day. Every ten days, creation and destruction complete another cycle. With the power of destruction, he removes from each new world whatever the god deems “defective and unnecessary.” Its inhabitants spend the first four days of each cycle in a beautiful paradise. The world then steadily decays, reaching the Kali Yuga on its final day as demons of Kali attack without cease. The world is reset, and whatever the god judged evil no longer exists in the new age.
In Section 19, however, the Chaldean Servant Karna refutes Arjuna with a single question: “Would a perfect god be so fixated on my name, as you have been thus far?” After absorbing every divinity in the Indian pantheon, Arjuna has lost almost all of his humanity and come to resemble an automaton that merely maintains creation, destruction, and judgment. Yet his core is not this inhuman divine machine. On the contrary, the actions of the sole god formed from Arjuna are governed by the human Arjuna’s obsession with the Kurukshetra War. What sustains divine will is Arjuna’s desire, and that desire points back to the war as proof of evil—the very evil that god can judge but cannot erase. A justice that desires evil is itself evil at its core.
Yet the fact that the Final Dark God is driven at bottom by human rather than divine desire cannot, as the game would have it, be treated simply as proof of his incomplete divinity. We must instead say that the law of the one God is not a law laid down by god at all, but a human law. Divine judgment of evil is not something sacred and categorically separate from humanity. It is an ideological structure of the human. The sacred domain is produced for human beings; the machinery that excludes sin is human, all too human. We might discuss this machinery through the concept Giorgio Agamben introduces in Chapter 9 of The Open: Man and Animal: the anthropological machine.
2. The Eyes of God…Have Seen
Before comparing Arjuna’s cyclic machinery for excluding evil with the divisions produced by Agamben’s anthropological machine, we must state one obvious fact: in the Lostbelt, Arjuna as the sole god occupies the position of the big Other. Every social activity in the Lostbelt is organized around him. People act and pray according to his demands, seeking divine protection through virtue and devotion. Those who fail to conform sufficiently to divine goodness will not survive the demons’ attacks as the age declines toward the Kali Yuga; or else an injury will cause the god to judge them “defective” and erase their existence. Arjuna is the big Other who mediates every intersubjective activity. By occupying this position, he makes all licit and illicit relations between subjects possible—and adjudicates them all.
Yet the big Other cannot see every evil. Only because there is an obscene supplement the big Other cannot see can the symbolic order continue to exist. At the same time, the big Other’s judgments are often triggered precisely by the sight of something it does not permit. We can hear this in God Arjuna’s words before he unleashes his world-ending Noble Phantasm:
“God…has cast his gaze downward. These defects are unnecessary…and therefore…evil. Begone, evil… You have no place in the new yuga…the new world. I will now…wield the sword…of the god who ends all things. I will cut off the world. From the rift in the world…made by the blade…clear purification will burst forth. Terminus and Genesis…will cycle anew… Sword of dissolution, let your blade fall. Mahāpralaya…”
When Žižek discusses ideology, he often argues that the inherent transgressions the big Other must not see are precisely what sustain the symbolic order. What happens, then, if the position of the big Other is occupied by an agent both able and determined to eliminate the non-beings that violate its surface rules? We know that the beings excluded by the symbolic order take two forms. One is the manifestation of the symbolic order’s own inconsistency. The other is the obscene supplement included precisely in the form of exclusion. The latter is in fact necessary to the maintenance of the symbolic order. The Third R██ch, for example, could not truly extermin██ every J██; the J██s had to remain always in the process of being exterminat██ but never entirely eliminat██ for the ideology of the Third R██ch to reproduce itself. So what would happen if the Na██s really did eliminat██ all J██s in a single stroke? The answer is clear: they would have to identify new J██s among those previously deemed Ar██ns. Agamben’s anthropological machine produces the division between human and nonhuman. It endlessly identifies nonhumans among human beings—or, put differently, produces the human by identifying and excluding the nonhuman. Just as excluding homo sacer is a necessary condition for the formation of a community, so if the excluded were truly erased from existence, new people would have to be marked for exclusion.
This is why Arjuna cannot identify and destroy every evil in a single cycle. Each time he deploys his Noble Phantasm, he has indeed eliminated everything identifiable as “defective and unnecessary” by the standards of that world. New evil, however, is then endlessly identified among what had previously qualified as good. This is also why Agamben says that the point of discussing the anthropological machine is to think about how it might be stopped. As Wu Guanjun writes in an essay on the concept, “This machine’s meat grinder is about to turn on humanity itself.” Is this not exactly how Karna and Arjuna’s final battle uses the machine’s eventual turn against Arjuna to force the sole god into self-negation? Moreover, endlessly producing divisions and eliminating the nonhuman can only exhaust humanity and the world. The fate of the first little girl the party encounters after entering the Lostbelt offers a miniature of that process. The commemorative Craft Essence awarded for clearing the Lostbelt resembles, in a sense, the wedding photograph at the end of May 18: everyone smiling in that photograph except the unsmiling bride was killed by the martial-law troops of Chun Doo-hwan’s regime. Here, likewise, everything that made the girl smile has been obliterated by the cycle; only the girl herself still smiles in an unknowable dream.
Even apart from the fact that a society will ultimately destroy itself if it continually makes divisions in order to eliminate one part of itself, neither those identified by the activated anthropological machine as beings to be erased nor those who sympathize with them can possibly accept such a system. William Tell, a Servant summoned by Arjuna, realizes that his memory of being forced by a governor to shoot an apple from his son’s head has been erased from the cycle because it interfered with his execution of Arjuna’s rules and was therefore judged “defective and unnecessary.” When the party encounters the world’s destruction for the second time, he rebels against Arjuna and attacks him. A woman in the rebel army led by Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi, discovers a letter from her vanished lover through the manipulative cruelty of Koyanskaya—the Alien God’s Apostle who has opposed Chaldea since the bleaching of human history—and resolves to resist god. Faced with one of Arjuna’s divinity-bearing composite Servants, she cries out hysterically: “How dare you call my lover defective!”
The Servants summoned into the Lostbelt who join the protagonists also plainly possess reasons to be judged defective and nonexistent. Lakshmibai not only leads the villagers in rebellion against Arjuna; the divinity fused with her is Alakshmi, Lakshmi’s elder sister and the goddess of misfortune. Because the Indian Rebellion was ultimately suppressed, Lakshmibai, ruler of a fallen state, also regards herself as an unfit queen. There is nothing objectionable in the authority of Ganesha himself. But the vessel who supplies the dominant consciousness is Jinako Carigiri, Karna’s Master in Fate/EXTRA CCC: a NEET, and therefore, under capitalist work ethics, an unquestionably useless person.
After the party undergoes a second remaking of the world, it concludes that Arjuna’s divine authority cannot be shaken by undermining the people’s faith and obedience: everyone who no longer conformed to divine goodness had already been deprived of existence in the previous judgment. At Aśvatthāman’s suggestion, the party—now defined by god as “evil”—tries to use his Noble Phantasm, Mahākāla Shakti, which draws on Śiva’s authority, to send members back before the cycles governed by Arjuna and conceal them there. By proving that an evil identified by god can remain unseen by god, they will conceptually undermine Arjuna’s perfect authority. Lakshmibai becomes the shell that conceals them; within her, Ganesha’s vessel Jinako Carigiri remains conscious to complete the proof.
3. Even Shut-Ins Are Allowed to See the Sky
In discussing the party’s plan to undermine divine authority through god’s inability to see, I do not wish to emphasize the act of seeing within a perfect symbolic order in which god sees and punishes the defective and unnecessary so that the order appears to approach “perfection”; the previous section has already dealt with that at length. Nor do I wish to dwell on Jinako’s immense sacrifice: after exhausting every game that the god of wisdom’s authority allowed her to access during millennia of solitude, she finally suffers a mental collapse and slips toward delirium. That is merely a plot device for stirring emotion. What matters here is the password agreed upon by the protagonist and Jinako.
As the party races toward the so-called God’s Skyboulder—the disguise into which Lakshmibai transformed—to rescue the two who have endured an unknowably long interval since the past, the protagonist lays the hand bearing the Command Spell against the bottom of the boulder and speaks the agreed password: “Even shut-ins…are allowed to see the sky.”
If we were satisfied with using the Indian Lostbelt’s machinery merely to illustrate Agamben’s anthropological machine, we might fall directly into the problem Zhong Zimo identified on Douban with criticism of the TYPE-MOON universe. TYPE-MOON works already “turn abstract concepts into representations.” To gratify their desire to be interpreted through theory is to strip concepts of their seriousness and reduce criticism itself to a conceptual game. The point I have sought in this text—a point from which to move beyond that game—is precisely this password.
Jinako Carigiri’s status as “defective and unnecessary” is not a verdict imposed only by the distorted Indian Lostbelt. It is also her own judgment, which follows the social consciousness of Proper Human History. A NEET is someone whom nobody needs, a surplus that society does not need. This judgment, founded on public opinion and common sense, has been internalized by the game’s character. When we speak of excluded people deemed “defective and unnecessary,” the NEET is undoubtedly among the figures that come to mind. The password then expresses the protagonists’—or the work’s dominant ideology’s—attitude toward a structure that relentlessly purges the excluded: even a being deemed unnecessary is to be tolerated.
If homo sacer is included in a system through exclusion, then the humanized nonhuman—artificial intelligence, for example—is, in Wu Guanjun’s reading of Agamben, excluded in the opposite way: through inclusion. “Even shut-ins are allowed to see the sky.” That is to say, NEETs truly are inferior and unneeded; only through the system’s mercy can they be admitted to basic rights.
Here we must distinguish several kinds of exclusion. Earlier, I separated the non-being wholly external to the symbolic order from the non-being included in the form of exclusion as the obscene substance of inherent transgression. The difference is that the former constitutes a fissure in the big Other itself and has never been seen by it, whereas the latter is abjected and included by the big Other as a foundation that sustains it—a part the big Other deliberately overlooks. The former can genuinely threaten the symbolic order, but can also be co-opted into the latter. Beings excluded through inclusion occupy a different level from either. The symbolic order symbolizes them as something that does not correspond to what they really are, thereby excluding their radically heterogeneous core.
Wu argues that anthropomorphizing a fundamentally nonhuman entity such as artificial intelligence is precisely an operation in which the apparent acceptance of AI as human excludes its radically nonhuman core. In my example of the NEET, we can see a second operation of the anthropological machine. First, it identifies a form of heterogeneity within the NEET as human and expels it as nonhuman. It then insists that NEETs are human too, fixing this excluded group in place as an inferior class that can be admitted only through pardon and tolerance. By exclusion, the anthropological machine produces the definition of the human and the remainder that must be divided off to form it. When the excluded are readmitted, their irreducible remainder is expelled completely beyond the symbolic order. This is also why I believe the best translation of BLM is not “Black lives are lives too,” but what I call the literal “Black people live better”—although BLM actually expands to “Black Lives Matter,” making the former an interpretive reformulation rather than a literal translation. Black people should be accepted as human while retaining their alterity, not on the terms that “although they do not quite meet the standard of ‘humanity,’ they are at least human.”
Karna’s attitude toward Jinako Carigiri differs from the protagonists’ effort to readmit the excluded in a way that merely excludes them again. From the outset, he never regards her as unreliable or unnecessary. Because of her hero’s charge, Jinako Carigiri personally enters the fight and, under tremendous pressure and fear, continues to stand her ground. The Hero of Charity simply disregards the anthropological machine’s division between those fit and unfit to count as human. He assumes directly that every person can bear their own burden. To become enamored of the marginal or minority identities assigned to the excluded, and to treat the acceptance of marginal cultures and minorities as a demand made upon the system’s justice, is precisely to solidify their inferiority and effective nonhuman status. It wholly excludes the force with which the excluded’s heterogeneity might strike mainstream existence and those whom the anthropological machine recognizes as properly human.
Once we extend the anthropological machine’s identification and exclusion into “exclusion through inclusion,” we can see more clearly the isomorphism between the Indian Lostbelt’s dystopia and the mainstream social consciousness of Proper Human History—its projection of our reality. Identification and exclusion by the anthropological machine are not peculiar to dystopia; they are structures of reality. Readmission that further excludes alterity likewise affirms the outcome of the machine’s operation and proceeds according to its principles. We have thus excavated a structure in the Indian Lostbelt that permits a radical reading, while also identifying an ideological problem shared by the Indian Lostbelt, Proper Human History, and reality outside the game.
4. Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout!
In contrasting Karna’s and the protagonist’s attitudes toward Jinako Carigiri, I do not mean to condemn the protagonist’s position on moral grounds. Indeed, it is even a kind of pandering to otaku. But genuine acceptance of excluded people such as NEETs does not consist in cheap tolerance. It consists in accepting them through a common struggle.
A commercial game cannot, in the end, express a fundamental revolt against reality, so struggle always becomes a contest over which is worse: reality, or an erroneous reality. Yet there is always material that can be interpreted as a radical position. Here, I choose Karna. To my mind, Karna’s trust in Jinako Carigiri and the charge he lays upon her serve a function analogous to the one Žižek attributes to Lenin’s position as the Master in a revolution. Karna authorizes himself through his own action, then uses that authority to demand that those who follow him assume responsibility for their own actions. This master-like command permits action to occur. It recognizes that the excluded rightly possess their own existence and allows them to win that existence through radical action. Of course, we should ask whether a new model can be found that does not require such a “master of the revolution.” If we cannot move beyond the idea that things can happen only when a master’s coercive command permits them, perhaps we will never see the final victory of the slave—the moment when, in Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, truth belongs to the slave.
Faced with the anthropological machine’s production of excluded people, our most basic position must be an absolute refusal to accept its division and then try to readmit those it has excluded. The division itself must be rendered inoperative. It is not that the excluded “also” deserve a minimum of recognition. The excluded themselves “are” everything. As Badiou likes to quote from “The Internationale”: “We are nothing; let us be all! (Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout!)”