Sucker Punch is the story of a young woman trying to escape the jail that her own mind created. After a traumatic event, she is sent to a mental asylum, and there she meets her loyal companions, who will accompany her in their journey to set themselves "free". This journey takes place in an imaginary world, where the residents of the asylum break reality's bounds. The story is another hero's journey to break oneself free from the boundaries of reality's cruelty and to perfect one's very nature. Many typical elements are present within the trailer, including the damsel in distress, the loyal companions, the mentor, and the evil captors. However, the damsel in distress is also the hero, the loyal companions are all insane, and the mentor is the hero's own conscience. And the evil captors don't even exist in both worlds the hero lives in. This is what sets the story apart from the common hero's journey. The heroine is victim to her evil step/father (hmm.... sounds like Cinderella) after her mother dies. She meets friends at the asylum, and they all set a goal to escape the inescapable installation. They go all Inception and share a lucid dream, where they search for the magic items: a map to find their way, a knife to cut the wilderness in front of them, a key to open the proverbial door that leads to the innermost cave, and fire to light the dungeons they will have to pass through in order to escape their minds.
Also, the trailer is rich(?) in bleak tones that give the overall sense of...bleakness that the asylum and the many different worlds share, their only highlight being the 6 girls questing and leveling up to meet the final boss. Of course, the trailer is missing the last two steps of the hero's journey; the innermost cave and the return to society. After all, its a trailer.
Interesting little thing I noticed, the "S" in the movie's logo looks like the symbol for "G" in the musical scale.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Friday, February 11, 2011
A Dark Hero. (Part II)
(Please read Part I first)
Cloud Strife and his world have many archetypes, and one particularly obvious reference to certain greek creation myth. The Planet (also known as Gaia), is a single organism, joined together by a lifestream, which is like a river that contains the life force of everything. Every living being in The Planet contains a bit of lifestream, and when it dies, the lifestream, along with the being's memories, returns to The Planet's primordial river. Lifestream possesses a green color, indicating it's full of life (as it is pure life itself), and because it resembles a giant river, it fits with the river's archetype of life and its cycle.
However, Midgar, the city where the Shin-ra Company rules from, is sucking the lifestream out of The Planet, and nothing grows for miles around the city. Midgar is a dystopian city, stuck in an everlasting night, representing the evils that lurk in it. Midgar's architecture is composed of two levels. The plate level, existing 50 meters above the poor level below it, is home to the rich people. Those living below the plate live like hobos. The rest of the world is green, green, green with life. Midgar is ultimately destroyed, in an event that marks a new beggining for The Planet.
Another interesting thing about Cloud is that the weapon he carries is a giant sword, slightly shorter than himself. This sword represents the burden he carries throughout the story, and how he must overcome it. By bashing his way through the lies he lives, and creating a new life for himself.
Cloud Strife and his world have many archetypes, and one particularly obvious reference to certain greek creation myth. The Planet (also known as Gaia), is a single organism, joined together by a lifestream, which is like a river that contains the life force of everything. Every living being in The Planet contains a bit of lifestream, and when it dies, the lifestream, along with the being's memories, returns to The Planet's primordial river. Lifestream possesses a green color, indicating it's full of life (as it is pure life itself), and because it resembles a giant river, it fits with the river's archetype of life and its cycle.
However, Midgar, the city where the Shin-ra Company rules from, is sucking the lifestream out of The Planet, and nothing grows for miles around the city. Midgar is a dystopian city, stuck in an everlasting night, representing the evils that lurk in it. Midgar's architecture is composed of two levels. The plate level, existing 50 meters above the poor level below it, is home to the rich people. Those living below the plate live like hobos. The rest of the world is green, green, green with life. Midgar is ultimately destroyed, in an event that marks a new beggining for The Planet.
Another interesting thing about Cloud is that the weapon he carries is a giant sword, slightly shorter than himself. This sword represents the burden he carries throughout the story, and how he must overcome it. By bashing his way through the lies he lives, and creating a new life for himself.
A Dark Hero. (Part I)
Final Fantasy VII is the game that revolutionized Role-Playing Games. Not because of its deep gameplay mechanisms, but because of its storytelling. It departed from the common story of RPGs, usually set in a medieval land with magic, orcs, and lots of magical swords. Final Fantasy VII was set in a dystopian land, where an evil corporation controlled most of the Planet, and literally sucks out its life force to generate electricity. This is where our spiky-haired hero comes into play. Cloud Strife, a mercenary, is hired by a terrorist group to blow up a reactor designed to absorb the Planet's lifestream and convert it into the useful movement of electrons. The situation quickly grows out of proportion, and Cloud discovers that the Shin-Ra Company is more than an electrical monopoly, and that the Planet's survival has been jeopardized by the Company's experiments on life's very support structure.
His antithesis comes in the form of Sephiroth, a fallen hero who went evil and insane. Sephiroth is nothing but an experiment conducted by the Shin-Ra Company in an attempt to make a perfect soldier. This revelation made him start to hate everything, and to destroy it all, he embarks on his own quest to become a god.
Cloud is the very image of the dark hero, as his past is unknown even to himself, and his life is nothing more than an illusion. Cloud is described as a puppet by his arch-nemesis, Sephiroth, as every event in the game was planned by none other than him. Cloud distances himself from his travel companions at the beggining of his tale, but quickly learns that they should depend on each other if they are going to save the world. His quest is mostly for redemption, as the life he lived was actually based on his dead friend's memory. By the end of the first third of the story, Cloud is comfortable with the idea of saving the world, but then tragedy strikes, and he is left as a sad little lump of human. He then goes through a journey into his innermost memories, rediscovering who he is, and why he should fight to stop the Planet's impending doom.
Cloud's heroic quest mixes many aspects of several types of heroic journeys. He embarks on a quest for identity, vengeance, and knowledge. All of this mixed into a tragic journey where his sweetheart gets killed.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Welcome!
Yohoho and a bottle of win! Welcome to Ricardo's blog, the only one actually written by a group of monkeys! Hopefully, this will be a unique blog focusing on finding archetypes in mediums never before used for this assignment, such as music, theatre, and...umm...believe it or not...videogames. They got stories to tell too!
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