The queen's presence now forces us to redefine everything with regard to it. To be sure nothing much has really changed. The children's condition has neither improved nor deteriorated on account of the encounter. What they do after her appearance is the same as what have done prior to it--exploring, path clearing, fighting. What has changed is our perception of that condition. We will continue to see much the same that we have been seeing, but we will not look at it the same way. An easy example is the heroine herself. Thus far in our thoughts she was a pretty but rather strange girl who could do some useful things and who seemed interested in escaping from the castle. Now she is Yorda, the sole daughter of the castle's ruler. But this is the most superficial of the shifts. Thanks to the queen we now have solider grasp on nearly every aspect of the mystery.

Let us begin with the castle. Until now we were lost and we did not know where we were going. Well, we are still lost but we do know where we are going. We are going to the main gate. And since the queen has closed it shut, we need to find a way of unlocking it. We have got ourselves a definite object of aim. Before, we wandered in blind hopes. We wander with a purpose now.

The way we look at the castle has also shifted. Until now the chief impression we got from the castle was that it was very, very deserted. Not only that, it was crumbling to pieces everywhere. It clearly had not been inhabited for a long time. There were some sinister creatures loitering about, certainly, but we could hardly believe these vile brutes were the rightful occupants of so magnificent a keep. No, we did not take them for the castle's original residents. We regarded them as we might house pests--ghostly vermin that had taken over a fortress built by civilized beings, much as rats flourish in an abandoned mansion. When we met the queen, however, we learned that the mansion was not in fact abandoned. The mistress of the house was still living there. The wraiths were not freeloading pests but rather her servants. But the realization raises a baffling question. What sort of homeowner would allow her house to fall into such a sorry state? She would have to be either very lazy, or very incompetent, or else very ill. So it would seem that the queen, as mighty as she is, has got some deep problems. Her rule must be in decline. The castle's condition bespeaks her own.

The castle testifies a great deal more about its mistress. In fact it is almost the only thing that tells us anything about her. Let us backtrack here for a moment and recall what was said about the castle in earlier sections. I said that the castle was hostile to the children, and they had to fight and overcome it to proceed through its maze. I concluded that someone, some evil mind, was behind this evil fortress. Well, we now know who that someone is. But she has once again hidden herself from our senses--totally. So the only way for us to sense her is through her work, that is, the castle. In this way the castle, the only available sign of the witch's presence, becomes equated with the witch herself. That is, what we say about her may also be said about the castle. She possesses stupendous powers--well, the castle is stupendous. She is in decline--so is it. She is not willing to let the pair go free-- neither is it. And if she should die--why then the castle too will die. For all intents and purposes, the castle is the queen. It deals with the children in her place when she is not there.

Or let me put it this way. You must be familiar with the memory of "the scary old man down the street." The scary old man down the street did not mix with other people much. In fact the scary old man hardly ever set foot outside his house. But there his house stood, three blocks down from yours--dark in the shades, with weird plants in dense profusion growing on the lawn, and lights glimmering in the windows till late at night to tell you he lived there. You didn't like going near that house. Kids said he came out at night to dig up the bones buried in the backyard. You ran when you had to pass it by and tried not to look that way. But sometimes accidents would happen. You would hit a ball and it would roll into the scary old man's garden. You would rather give up the ball, except your pals would goad you into retrieving it. So you would go, feeling your back moisten as you got nearer and nearer to the house. Those eye-like windows would seem bigger than usual--the shadows darker somehow--and would that be a crack in the doorway, a faint sound of footsteps...? You would grab the ball and bolt out of the garden. You would fancy a hand behind you, stretching out to grab you. You would not look back until you were safe and away, only then to let out a relieved breath, glad that the scary old man didn't "get" you. But all along you had no idea what the scary old man looked like. You had never seen him. You just knew he lived in that dreadful house of his, with bones in the backyard. The house was the man. You were just as afraid of it as you were of him.

In a similar way the castle--so humongous, so unignorable, so always in our faces--makes up for the queen in her apparent absence. It does everything a villain might be expected to do: threatening, tricking, trapping, and frustrating the heroes at every corner. By fighting it the children in effect fight the queen. Every obstacle they come across is a reminder of the enemy responsible for the obstacle. And with each riddle they solve they have thwarted a piece of her scheme.

Now, this substitution only works because we understand all the while that the queen is not really absent. The scary old man is very much in the house, just out of sight for the moment. And it is precisely the fact that he is out of sight that makes him so scary. For when he is to be seen nowhere we imagine him everywhere. Ico and Yorda are trespassers in his garden, looking over their shoulders continually to see if that hand they felt was imaginary. They are captives to the fear that while they cannot see their enemy she can see them, and is at this very moment watching them. She has jumped them once. She can jump them again.

When I first played the game I did not know when and where the queen would appear next. I only knew that she would sooner or later. It was impossible to dismiss her from my thoughts. It was like the first time I watched JAWS--in that film the shark is invisible for the most part, but for that very reason the ocean entire comes to represent the creature; one grows to fear not so much the shark but the very sight of the waters. Thus the queen remains a fearsome villain though she hardly gets five minutes of screen time prior to the climax. In a story of lesser merits so little visibility would make her a very poor villain indeed. In fact games, especially combat-oriented games, are full of weak villains for just this reason. They tend to withhold the villain from the player lest he should be disappointed to find no fresh challenge in the all-important "boss fight." And so we find that the villain often remains veiled until the final moment, with a predictable and self-frustrating result that he is rendered harmless for the majority of the story.

(Remainder of this section was posted on 19 August 2003.)

We have covered the castle and the queen. I think we have said enough about the wraiths too. There really is not much to observe about those creatures. Before we knew of the queen we took them for a sort of demonic termites infesting the deserted fortress. But now we understand that they are under the queen's control and do her biddings. Yes, I think that is enough for now.

That leaves the children. Do we perceive them any differently after the queen's appearance? With Ico the answer is largely no. As to the girl--now she is a different story. Not only have we learned her name and heritage, but we also understand why she wants to leave the castle and why she has her ability. But most importantly we now have some insight into her behaviors. Earlier we touched on her curious and almost total reliance on the boy and left it unresolved for lack of information. The time has come to resolve it. Why does she, despite her more adult appearance, prove so utterly helpless?

Before I give my answer I want to impress upon you that ICO is a game, in which the complexities of the real world are reduced to those predictable patterns we call rules. (And there is no such a thing as a game without rules.) So when Yorda does not lift a finger to help Ico drag a crate or make even a token effort of climbing a chain to lessen his burden, instead of berating her cold indifference we ought to acknowledge that by the game's rules it is not her job to do those things. If this were a novel or a film, no doubt things would have been different. For instance the castle as we have it in the game should be perfectly silly in a novel. It is just too densely packed with puzzles to be convincing. It is somewhat forgivable here because a game must be allowed its peculiar quirks--granted of course that the quirks are consistent--if it is to be enjoyable. (Chess may be modeled after a battlefield, but only the thickest dunderhead would try to justify the "strategy" of having a rook move diagonally. "After all," he might say, "might it not be a clever idea to surprise the enemy by having the archers draw their swords?") The castle is therefore full of puzzles to carry the point across that it is hostile to trespassers. Likewise Yorda is less than agile to carry the point across that she is unused to exerting herself. To explain why I think that is a fair assessment I want us to consider her from two perspectives, one entirely poetic and the other practical.

By a poetic perspective on Yorda I mean nothing particularly grand. I mean the impressions and feelings she arouses in the beholder. Here ICO fans seem to entertain fairly uniform sentiments. Asked to describe the princess in a word, they are apt to use adjectives in the vein of ethereal, ghostly, spectral, otherworldly, elfin, angelic and the like. All these describe a state of being which is either wholly spiritual or belonging on the fringe of the physical realm--something more immaterial than substantial, more transparent than opaque, more fanciful and pliable than realistic or concrete. (I have commented a few times on the girl's extraordinary pallor. Poets and painters alike have long used pale complexion for that delicate, impermanent, or altogether incorporeal quality which certain individuals possess. It is no accident that we tend to imagine ghosts and spirits as translucent beings in muted tones of gray.) The princess' appearance and demeanor are intended to exploit these sentiments. I say exploit because the sentiments existed in our thoughts long before we knew of her; the storyteller fashioned her character in such a way as to tap them. Do you recall how the queen instantly struck a familiar chord in our imagination the moment we saw her? She was technically a stranger but at the same time recognizable--because she fit a type we already knew. Something similar is at work in the way we look at Yorda. We need then to determine the type--that is, the genre--to which she belongs.

Yorda's fairylike appeal hails from that class of mythical maidens which includes nymphs, sirens, elves, sylphs and sprites--supernatural creatures bearing more or less the form of human damsels, half spirit and half mortal, at once alluring and chaste, mysterious, capricious, eternally young and carefree. (She even has the pointy ears to show for it!) Traditions invariably place these enchanting creatures in idyllic settings. We think of fairy maidens dancing with bees or napping on flower petals, nymphs singing and playing the harp on the banks of a serene lake, mermaids harvesting pearls in the watery depth. We never think of them engaging in any sort of practical labor; we never picture them farming or chopping logs or cooking. These demigoddesses are too noble and too lighthearted for such mundane--such thoroughly human--activities. The concept rebels against their image. It rebels against Yorda's image also.

From the moment we met Yorda we had misgivings about her nature. She looked human but did not quite strike us as human. She seemed to be made of some finer stuff--so exceedingly delicate as to seem only half corporeal, and at sharp disagreement with the brute rigid surroundings of stones and bricks and walls. If she were introduced to us as an elf or a sylph, we should have thought it quite appropriate. Note here that both "elfin" and "sylphlike" have come to describe just her sort of slim, dainty young woman. Our heroine however is not merely reminiscent of such magical damsels; she is a supernatural being on her own right, a bona fide fairy princess in the rank of full-fledged elves and sylphs--those bewitching otherworldly beauties of folklore, impossibly fair, impossibly delicate, shielded from the humdrum necessities of life which plague ordinary mortals. The vulgar notion of manual labor is alien to a being so elevated. That is something people trouble themselves with. The queen has told Ico that he and Yorda belong apart. Condescending she may be, but she is right. Her contempt for the boy is as much for his being a lowly common mortal as for his horns.

Consequently my view of the girl's incompetence at certain tasks is not that she is dim-witted, but rather that she would have compromised her own image by excelling at those tasks. We must here keep in mind that she is at times preternaturally graceful and at times preternaturally clumsy. How do we reconcile the two? Are they even reconcilable? Well, in my experience a graceful person can prove quite awkward when she is forced to a task she never would have considered--like say a princess who suddenly found herself having to take up sewing or housecleaning. But someone oafish to begin with is oafish always. Elegance can turn sloppy by happenstance. The reverse never occurs.

So here I have the two seemingly opposed portraits of the fairy princess: one showing an unbecomingly inept adventurer who struggles only half successfully to negotiate some obstruction, and the other a picture of innocent beauty and grace, where she frolics with birds on a green sunlit yard by a clear pond and an old windmill, fair and spectral like the mythic sylph, and betraying no intimation whatever of her fugitive plight. Which is the true Yorda? Well, both. But which best demonstrates her nature? Most emphatically I say the latter; this is where she is at home. But we see precious little of that Yorda in the story. Rather we usually see the girl at her least natural and therefore at her most awkward--being manhandled and dragged around, climbing ladders, braving death falls with reluctance, running for her life. I am not surprised that she has come across to some as less than appealing. Their frustration arises from expecting Yorda to be more like Ico. But I think the foundational fact in the pair's companionship is precisely that they share nothing in common aside from their calamity. If on the other hand the frustration is owed to the technical limitations of the game's artificial intelligence, it is beyond my scope and I have nothing at all to say on the subject.

That was my musing on the sheer drama of her being. Next I should like to offer a bit more practical rationale for her demeanor. Before I came to the conclusion articulated above, I too fancied it chauvinist of the game to represent the heroine thus; not only is she a damsel in distress, but she is a weakling and, worse, a simpleton who has to rely on her male companion to do all that requires the least bit of muscle or intelligent thinking. But even then I did not really hold this against her. There was a regal beauty about her person which would not permit flat dismissal--a nobility that would not suit a fool. That she was ignorant was apparent from the start, but I could not believe she was stupid as well. And that distinction between ignorance and brainlessness cleared much of my own misunderstanding.

I have heard many speak fondly of Yorda's "innocent, pure" image. Similar praises are often said about young children because they have not (presumably) yet been corrupted by the world. That is really a euphemistic way of saying they are ignorant about the world. Yorda is certainly innocent in that sense, though I think it is one of the less wise euphemisms popularly used. She is very ignorant about the world, and for the same reason as young children: she has had little exposure to it. Her behaviors exhibit the telltale signs of one who was brought up in isolation--brought up caged, if you will--without much if any opportunity to acquaint herself to the surroundings. Consequently she knows next to nothing about the castle where she has lived since birth, which hints that she really is a sort of Rapunzel--shut up alone all her life inside a tower by the old witch, and forbidden all access to the outside. She acts as though she just stepped out of the prison cell for the first time in her life. The reality may not have been so simple, but I suspect the analogy holds more than a grain of truth. I doubt she ever even spoke with anyone but her brooding mother before the boy came along. She received no more education than might be given to cattle. Like cattle her purpose was to grow up to be consumed when the time came. Never until now was she called to apply herself to any endeavor. She is very like a newborn, awakening just now to the bumps and edges of a world from which she has long been sheltered.

And with that I am done covering the noteworthy instances in the tale up to the queen's second appearance. It only remains to get that gate open and greet the climax of the story. Now you may be surprised to hear that. You may think there is still much to go over. In a way you are right. A player would take perhaps eight hours or so to play through the game the first time. The queen is introduced about two hours into the game and does not show herself again until the last hour or thereabout. Most of the exploration and puzzle solving takes place between her appearances. But I have nothing to say of this interval that I have not said already. All the major elements have been introduced. What lies ahead is essentially repeats of the same cycle: enter an area, clear the path, enter the next area, clear the path, and so on. There will be no significant advancement in the plot until the main gate is reopened. Does that mean the narrative is to stagnate until then?

Heavens, no. It just means all the elements are now firmly in place, and it is time for them to come into full play. There is yet a great deal to enjoy. The really fun part is just beginning. But we do not have ponder them in tedious words anymore.

Nor does it mean these hours are a mere ploy to protract the story, like inserting unnecessary events to tell a three-hundred-page tale that needed no more than a hundred. While talking about the puzzles I said one puzzle serves the same functions as any other, but I also mentioned a cumulative effect. In other words the many puzzles strung together yield an effect which no single puzzle could produce. What is that effect?

Half of it was explained earlier: by completing all the puzzles we make a complete tour of the castle. A single puzzle means only an obstacle to clear, but all the puzzles together make a journey. And what a journey it is.

The other half concerns the growing bond between the pair. We can understand this readily. If I got through one perilous venture with another person, I might have found myself an ally, and perhaps a friend. If I got through twenty with the same person--why, we should be inseparable.

The real enjoyment of the game lies in accompanying the children on their journey and watching them forge a bond which I will not try to describe. And we need not take apart any mystery to find it. We have dug through an awful heap of information, true, but none of this was strictly necessary for us to see what the story is about. In fact I cannot grasp the two heroes through reasoning. I know too little about them. I do not know their histories, their habits and inclinations, their thoughts and reasons. But here is a strange thought: I know practically nothing about these two, yet I feel that at some level I "know" them far more intimately than characters from any other games. And some of those characters have their biographical data contrived down to birth date and favorite food. I wonder why this is?

The apparent contradiction is resolved once we realize that we are talking about two different modes of knowing. Ico and Yorda become known to us not by exposition but by impression. When you learn a thing by impression, the foremost part of your attention is not on factual details--what counts is how vividly the thing becomes engraved in your thoughts and fancies. It is a very simple matter. You see a man dive in front of an oncoming truck to save a child, and you receive an impression that he is brave and selfless. You watch a couple seated on a bench holding hands, and you receive an impression that they are fond of each other. You may not hear a word of their conversation, but your impression leads you to conclude the talk must be genial. In the same manner, you watch two children fight the rest of the world to escape a fate they have not deserved, struggling together to make the next hundred steps on their thorny path, and you receive an impression that--well, you fill in the blank. But that is how these characters, though largely strangers to us, become alive in our minds and we grow attached to them. And we need no analysis for that.

Now we must be mindful that impressions can mislead, and that they are poor ground on which to base dogmatic claims. In fact any statement that begins with the words "______ gives me an impression that..." presumes its own inaccuracy. For instance if I said "That girl gives me an impression of being more a ghost than a person," I would not be saying the girl is actually a ghost, or even that she is probably a ghost. I would merely mean "She looks and behaves as if she were a ghost and not a person." An impression makes no stronger a claim of truth than that. I should like you to remember this whenever you hear me speak of my impressions.

So next time we will find the pair at the main gate.