Family Trumps Magic

I generally like magic. It's fun, it lets writers play with the laws of physics in flashy and/or interesting ways, and it can create a unique set of problems and solutions that wouldn't work otherwise. Magic certainly has its place in works of fiction. However, I have found one work of fiction that I really enjoyed, right up until it introduced an element of magic.

A Plague Tale: Innocence is a video game that starts as a work of historical fiction. This isn't normally my favorite genre, but the premise of the story is what got my attention. The player character is a teenage girl named Amicia whose chronically ill kid brother is, for an unknown reason, being hunted by the French Inquisition during a plague which is being carried by swarms of man-eating rats. The gameplay mostly sees Amicia and her brother, Hugo, sneak around guards and rats while trying to get to safety and gather the resources they need to survive.

It's a great story, as Amicia is initially frustrated with Hugo's uselessness, but she gradually grows to genuinely care about him, to the point where she'd risk her life to save his and to help find a cure for his illness. However, that's where we get introduced to the magical elements of the story, and it's where the story itself starts to turn South.

As Amicia seeks to understand and cure her brother's illness, she learns that it has to do with something in his blood that gives him the magical ability to control the rats. The Inquisition wants to kidnap Hugo so their leader can use a series of blood transfusions to gain Hugo's rat-controlling powers and take over the world, or at least the local area. They partially succeed, and the High Inquisitor gets rat-controlling powers. The day is saved when Hugo and Amicia bring their own army of rats to fight the High Inquisitor and his army of rats in a video-gamey boss battle that, in my opinion, doesn't fit in with the rest of the game mechanically or tonally.

For most of the game, the mechanics are all about stealth and gathering resources and using those resources to craft tools that make the stealth easier as the children face more complex and difficult stealth challenges over the course of the game. The final fight throws out any pretense of stealth and resource management by having the kids have a direct showdown with the game's villain, armed with a functionally-infinite army of rats. Stealth is not an option in this scenario, and there's no longer any need to conserve resources.

But even worse than not matching the mechanical tone of the game, the final boss fight doesn't match the narrative tone of the story, either. The narrative climax of the story is when Amicia learns that her and Hugo's mother is still alive, when they thought she had been killed by the Inquisition. Instead, the Inquisition had captured the kids' mother and was torturing her for information. Amicia decides not to tell Hugo that their mother is still alive, since they have no way to save her, and knowing that she's alive and in terrible pain would only make Hugo upset. However, Hugo overhears Amicia talking about this, and he decides to run away to find his mother on his own. That's how the Inquisition gets Hugo's blood, and it's how Hugo learns that his illness gives him the ability to control rats.

Yet, there isn't much emotional payoff for any of this drama. Hugo does eventually find his mother, but they're both so physically drained from their illness or imprisonment that it isn't any emotional moment. Hugo also doesn't have much of an emotional moment when he escapes the Inquisition and rejoins Amicia. The fact that she lied to him about his mother's survival and torture to spare his fragile emotions has almost no effect on their relationship.

Instead, they use Hugo's new rat-controlling powers and Amicia's now practically obsolete skill with a sling to fight the High Inquisitor and save their mother and the world. By the end, the video game seemed more like a cliche young adult novel than a story with high physical and emotional stakes and gripping interpersonal drama. The introduction of magic into this story took away the magic it already had. The game already had an engaging story with complex characters. It didn't need unbelievable rat-controlling superpowers to make the game interesting. It already was.

So, I guess this blog post has been more about poor writing than any spiritual lessons, but I kind of just wanted to write about this, and besides, there actually is a pretty good spiritual lesson in here: Family trumps magic. Magic is fun, and it can be interesting, but family is far more important and more emotionally compelling. Gaining Celestial powers will be awesome, but being able to maintain and create eternal families will be even better. There's plenty of room for magic in fiction, at least when said magic fits within the fictional worlds and stories, but family is far more important, in both fiction and reality.