Talking Ico: Part 3 - Retrospect - Video Game Chat Fansite

Well, the story has ended. But are we the wiser for it? Do we care that we should be the wiser? It would be perfectly all right, you know, to forgo the dissection and leave the ending the wonderful thing it is. But if you would like further clarification of the mystery, let us take a step back and try to grasp the larger picture. What began as one small child's nightmare has blossomed into the monumental finale of a reign, of an era. Through his trials we witnessed the last hours in the ancient history of the castle. We know nothing of its inception, nothing of its prime. We only know how it fell. Our task--grasping the larger picture I mean--is therefore akin to reading the final chapter of a novel and divining what preceded it, akin to attending the deathbed of a stranger and from it reconstructing his life. Now this is a risky thing to do. We delude ourselves if we think we can produce anything like an accurate history. We must restrain our fancies within the scope of the clues at hand. The moment we overstep it, we have abandoned criticism in favor of fan fiction. Then we will be judging one another's theories based not on whose is more faithful but on whose is more entertaining. I should be quite satisfied if I could arrive at a contour, not a full portrait.

As we continue please remember: I do not claim that the following must be the case. I only submit that there are clues which point to it and none that I can perceive which contradict it. You are welcome to reject anything you find unconvincing.

I begin with the queen, who is the point of origin for all events in the story and the root to which all limbs and branches are to be traced. Just what sort of being is she? She is supposedly near death from age, yet she looks perfectly youthful. That is enough to make me suspect her extreme age. (Here I should like to remind you of the connection made earlier between Yorda and the mythical fairylike maidens, whose appearance invariably belies their age.) She is likely as old as the castle. She built it and maintained it, with increasingly inadequate care as her strength waned, so that upon her death the fortress came unglued. Is she human? I think that an inappropriate question for this particular genre of fiction. Folklore and fairy tales are full of characters who are human in every regard except their possession of certain powers which no human beings could conceivably possess. Sometimes those characters are placed in a race of their own. Sometimes we just call them wizards or witches or sorceresses and be done with it. Here I am more comfortable with the latter.

The queen's disappearance at death does tease my fancies a fair bit. Both she and her daughter give me consistent impressions that they are half spirit--that they have only a thin tie with the physical realm. They have that ghostly quality about them which makes me fancy that if I were to try and touch them my hands might pass clean through their flesh. The queen does appear and vanish like a specter, and in Ico's vision Yorda does rise out of a black pool like some mysterious primordial substance taking on a shape. There is something quite pliable and fluid about their nature. The same is true of the wraiths, whose case is a bit simpler since I am fairly certain they are already dead. Like her underlings the queen, instead of leaving behind a corpse, disbands upon death. I could not say if she was always this way, or if this shows that she has too long been clinging to life by unnatural means. In any case she decided to abandon her failing body and take over her daughter's.

And just how did Yorda come to be? Somehow the idea of the queen procreating like a normal female seems absurd, especially when I consider she has long lived in total seclusion and does not have much of a body left. She may have brought the girl directly into existence by magical means, which would give her enough ground to call her a daughter. Ico might even have taken a glimpse of the past and witnessed her birth, when he dreamed her emerging into form inside the cage. Who knows?--since the children's caskets seem to bear on her climactic transformation, perhaps the purpose of sacrifice was to enable her creation; which, if true, would explain why the queen is willing to let Ico off--she no longer needs the children now that she has Yorda. But now I am guessing much too far beyond what I can reasonably defend. This particular line of guessing, at any rate, has less affinity with fairy tales and more with science fiction. In fairy tales we find a great many instances of a damsel held captive by a witch or some such malignant being without the slightest indication as to how they came under such circumstances. Whenever there is an enchanted castle there is an ogre or a witch who occupies it, or a princess in need of rescue, or a prince who wants his deforming enchantment lifted; we are rarely told where the prince or the princess comes from, what has happened to the kingdoms where they are supposedly royalty, how a hag hunchbacked from old age has a rosy-cheeked maiden for a daughter, or why a towering giant kidnaps a human damsel not tall enough to reach his knees for a wife. It may be as simple as that. ICO is just the sort of nostalgic adventure that can get away with such formulaic set-ups. It is endearing precisely because it is old and familiar, if not completely reasonable. But if you are a type who abhors all things hackneyed, I imagine ICO will not long stay in your thoughts no matter how highly you think of its artistry.

The castle is the next. The term castle is obsolete today and is no longer used in nonhistorical contexts except, as a joke, to mean a very large or grand house. But the Medieval castle was less a house or a mansion and more a fortified downtown. And just as the downtown is the heart of a city, a castle implied a broader territory spread around it of which it was the center. That is why we never find two castles of this type in proximity to each other--it would be like having two city halls side by side. To be the lord of a castle therefore was much more than to own a fine home; it meant one was the chief authority in that region. An easy example may be found in the story of PUSS IN BOOTS where the cat ingeniously convinces the king that the miller's son is a great lord. The cat visits each of the fields belonging to a wealthy ogre and threatens the local farmers, the ogre's vassals, to tell the king that the land belongs to a fictional marquis. It then calls on the ogre at his castle, removes him by a trick, and declares the miller's son the ruling marquis of the region with no one to contest his claim of lordship. The cat's deception would have been short-lived had it not secured first the land surrounding the castle.

Let me explain why I brought up all that. The synopsis in the manual tells me that horned children are sacrificed because they are believed to be ill omens. But as I watched the opening sequence I found myself frowning, and thinking something was amiss. The manual suggested that Ico was to be disposed of much as garbage is put out, but it was at once clear to me that this boy was not being disposed of in that sense. He was being deposited--that is, stored for safekeeping. What was more, it was perfectly apparent that the knights were themselves nonresidents at the castle, and that they were following a prescribed procedure: they were to take the boy to the offshore fortress, sail round to the northern isle, enter it via the latticed cavern, reach the upper level by means of the sword and the elevator, and entomb the victim in a crypt prepared just for this purpose--prepared by the queen, I later learned. So it was not the villagers' idea to abandon the children at the castle. It was rather the queen's will that they be brought there. And now the question I must ask is, how could she get the outsiders to comply with this abomination? How indeed, unless she was in a position to exercise power over them? So she made a demand on them, and they obeyed because they feared her. And they feared her because they knew crossing her meant consequences. ("This is for the good of the village," the men tell their prisoner.) Now, I am not at all suggesting that the queen is the monarch of whichever kingdom Ico lives in. I am not even suggesting that she is a landed feudal lord like the ogre the cat tricked. I am only saying that she could not have done what she did without the compliance of the outsiders, and the fact that they did her bidding for generation after generation makes it impossible to doubt that her influence extends beyond the castle. I think it no accident that she is fluent in Ico's speech when her daughter is not.

But what of the pretext of a horned child bringing ill fortune? I see a few possibilities there. It may be that the queen outright lied to Ico's countrymen. Or it may be that the myth began among the countrymen and took roots over the years. For all the queen requires is the obeisance of the town leaders; the rest of the populace need not be enlightened, and in fact convenience would advise that they be kept in the dark. It is not unthinkable that no one besides the queen, not even the horsemen who deliver Ico, knows the true purpose of the practice. We must here realize that the sacrificing has been going on for many, many generations, if the number of caskets in the crypt is any clue. For all that time the queen has lived in seclusion, unseen by mortal eyes. For all that time none have dared to set foot on the isles except to bring a sacrifice every now and then. (That is of course a guess, but I believe a reasonable one. The queen does not seem much fond of human company and still less of trespassers.) Consequently the men now only have secondhand knowledge about the queen. Likely all they know is that a mysterious enchanted castle stands by the sea, fabled to be ruled by a powerful wizard whom no one now living has seen, and their ancestors have been making sacrifices of horned youngsters there since too long ago to remember, and they must keep at it if they are not to incur the wizard's wrath.

So it seems that the queen, despite her current policy of total isolation, once had enough of a presence in the world that she was able to impose her awful scheme on people. There was likely also some traffic between the castle and the shore, or else that stupendous bridge and the elaborate mechanism which operates it should not have been necessary. But one day she decided to cut off the castle from the land. She withdrew the bridge, retired into the dark impenetrable depth of the fortress, and in all probability did not speak with another outsider in person until Ico came along. She became a hermit. But why? I feel certain it was because she was growing decrepit. To explain I should like you to consider the following synopses. You may already be familiar with some if not all of them:

(1) Miss Havisham is deserted by her lover on her wedding day. Realizing that he had been after her fortune all along, she shuts herself up in the manor house and renounces the world forever. She stops all the clocks in the house, keeps the curtains drawn at all time, leaves the wedding table untouched for decades so that cobwebs grow thick on the cake, and refuses to wear anything but her wedding gown which is now yellow and in tatters. Until her death she does not take a step beyond the gate of her own home. (Charles Dickens; GREAT EXPECTATIONS)

(2) Roderick Usher is the last living member of an illustrious but cursed lineage. In the insufferable melancholy of his crumbling, once grand family villa he goes slowly mad contemplating the bygone glory of his progenitors and the inevitable end that awaits him. Upon his violent death the house caves in, sealing the doom of the family. (Edgar Allen Poe; THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER)

(3) At his ancient castle in Transylvania where he has ruled for centuries, Dracula plots to restore his waning empire by relocating to a new home, London, where preys are abundant. Failing in his design and pursued by foes, he retreats to Transylvania only to be caught and destroyed at the doorstep of his old home. (Bram Stoker; DRACULA)

(4) Thomas Sutpen is a self-made man obsessed with the dream of creating a personal dynasty in the Deep South. He buys a hundred square miles of land, names it Sutpen's Hundred, and builds himself a splendid mansion through brute will and tenacity. His blind obsession drives him to isolation from the community, tears his family apart, causes his son to murder his daughter's suitor, and finally leads to his own murder at the hands of a tenant farmer. His mansion stands for years as a ghostly remnant of his legacy and is at last torched by the remaining Sutpens who themselves perish in the blaze. (William Faulkner; ABSALOM, ABSALOM!)

(5) From his humble country beginning Charles Foster Kane goes on to dominate the newspaper business and to epitomize success. He erects an artificial mountain for his home Xanadu, the world's largest private residence. Success however corrupts his heart, causing his loved ones to leave him one by one. He dies alone in the palatial solitude of Xanadu. The film opens and closes with a dark, ominous shot of the mansion and its steel fence, sporting a "NO TRESSPASSING" sign. (Orson Welles; CITIZEN KANE)

Now it will be noted that the above scenarios share a remarkable uniformity of tone, theme, and circumstance that is very much echoed in our game. They involve a person of prestige or influence who grows estranged from the world (owing this estrangement usually to the very qualities which had made his success), shuts himself up in a private refuge, and there endures a lonely decline and eventual death. This refuge takes the form of a splendid dwelling equal to the greatness of the occupant. As the occupant decays in self-imposed exile the dwelling also decays, reflecting his condition. It comes to represent the man himself and all that is striking about him--a hulking shadow of the past grandeur and vitality, reeking with intense gloom, haunted by that bleak oppressive air of decay and ruin, and arousing in the beholder an eerie dread akin to what one might feel in a deserted cemetery or in the presence of a corpse. (Note also that all four of the written tales are first-person narratives. Compare the narrators' respective descriptions of, and reactions to, Miss Havisham's manor house, Usher's villa, Dracula's castle and Sutpen's mansion, and you will find the same uneasy dread dominating them all.) You probably know other stories that feature similar scenarios and sentiments--a picturesque but unnervingly somber house, mansion or castle occupied by a mysterious recluse who never shows himself outside his abode and thus becomes the center of fearful speculations, gossips, even legends. Mrs. Bates and "her" motel is a well known example, along with a host of ghost house stories. In fact "the scary old man down the street" we looked at in chapter IX is a playground variation of this very idea. The idea is not merely popular; it is pervasive, for its innate appeal to human imagination.

This image of a grim, alienated recluse brooding inside a prison of his own making is one of those classic motifs which appear time and again in fiction. The pairing of isolation and decay especially is prominent in classic romance tales. (I am using the term romance as a literary genre; GREAT EXPECTATIONS, THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER and DRACULA are all romances.) Each of the aforementioned characters ends up a hermit, unsociable in the extreme and wary of contact with outsiders. Each erects a formidable personal sanctuary to barricade himself against the world. Each meets his end in that very sanctuary, and this death invariably marks the tale's climax. The sanctuary becomes a symbol of its master, sharing his fortune and fate--and in the cases of Miss Havisham, Usher and Sutpen the houses are destroyed following their deaths to signify their complete ruin. All these we find to be true in ICO. In popular adventure films, too, the staple pattern of climax is to have the villain defeated and his lair blown up shortly thereafter. The pattern has been so abused that now it is more or less obligatory. ICO, I think, is a rare example of the classic motif executed faithfully and with admirable taste. That motif allows me to draw valuable inferences regarding the queen which are not strictly provided in the story itself.

This then is the queen as I envision her: a fearsome sorceress whose reputation once carried far beyond the walls of her castle; whose vigor declined after a long and iron-fisted reign; who then cut off the castle from the rest of the world and sequestered herself; who abided many generations in the stale safety of her ruinous shelter, seeking to revive her powers; and who just might have attempted to regain her old influence once she was restored to youth. For if what I saw is her dominion in a state of severe decline, what might it once have been like when she was at the height of her rule? And here I recall the desolate majesty of her throne room--a portrait of a fallen dynasty, I called it. I recall too the immensely stirring sequence of the isles' destruction, how they caved into the ocean in an almost dignified manner like a wounded behemoth laying itself to rest. It was magnificent visual poetry. The images cried out that something monumental was dying here. And it had almost cheated death--was on the verge of renewal when it was dealt the fatal blow. But what if it had succeeded? What if the boy had not gone back after his friend, had not stopped the queen? Young and strong once more, would she have been content to leave the wreckage of her dominion the way it is? Or would she have, like any sensible despot with the means, turned her attention to rebuilding what she had lost? By ridding the world of the queen Ico may have saved more than Yorda's life and his own. He may have protected from her tyranny the very neighbors who surrendered him to that tyrant. Imagine the astonishment of the next party of delegates that will come only to find the castle gone as though it had never been there! That is what I fancy at any rate, and again you are welcome to dismiss it if you find it groundless.

Finally, we come to the horned children. This is the very first mystery we encountered in the story. It is also the riddle that is least explained. I am afraid I will not be of much help on this one. I could not say even now exactly why the queen wants them, let alone why they are born with their anomaly. Let me list what I do feel fairly sure about.

1. That the queen indeed requires the horned children for some design is certain. I hope this will not be disputed after all we have looked at.

2. That the children are an essential part of that design also is certain. Hence the elaborate arrangement spanning decades if not centuries, and a special crypt prepared adjacent to the queen's own throne room.

3. It seems more than likely that this design is none other than the scheme to prolong her life.

And that, believe it or not, is all. The manner in which she intends to exploit the children is lost to me among a myriad of possibilities and suspicions which can be neither confirmed nor debunked. Most people, myself included, believe that some sort of essence or energy is involved which the queen needs and which only the horned children may yield. Very well, they yield something like that. But how is it used? Why do they have it? How does Yorda figure into this? And how is her transformation at the end related to their caskets? Before you propose your take on it, and I am sure you are itching to, let me assure you that no matter how thorough and obvious you think your theory is, I can suggest an equally plausible alternative which, if believed, will undermine yours. We will in fact not be exchanging theories at all. We will only be pitting one chain of assumptions against another. And one thing about assumptions is that they are perfectly useless in arguments unless the argument is understood to be hypothetical from the outset. Now, hypothetical arguments are often very useful, and even indispensable, in real life. There is always a chance that the hypotheses will be verified or falsified by factual discoveries. But in fiction they lead to mess and rarely, if ever, any resolution. There are innumerable possibilities and no reliable means of testing and eliminating false ones, which is how we deduce truth in real life. The only person who can put the matter to the rest is the storyteller, and he has quite deliberately chosen to whet our curiosity without satisfying it. I am sorry, but it will have to stay unsatisfied.

As I said earlier a contour, not a full portrait, is all I can aim at. I can only hope to determine the subject's rough size, shape, and pose. If anyone speaks of the shade of her hair or the mole on her cheek, you can bet he is not reasoning; he is inventing. For well over a year now I have seen dozens of people on this board contribute their own intricate variants of the mystery, none of which ever seemed to convince anybody else. This is a predictable situation. Whenever a thing seems out of place, our natural inclination is to imagine a scenario that will fit the oddity. This cannot and must not be avoided; we must do it if we are to reason. Problems arise however when we let inventiveness get the better of observation. That is, we might first observe a set of evidences and form a conclusion, A. Then when A is challenged by a conflicting claim we might introduce a modifying provision, B, which would allow us to override the objection and maintain A, albeit in a revised form. And when B is in turn found less than fully illuminating we simply come up with another modifying provision, C, that will fill the gap in B's logic--and so on and on, compounding one revision on top of another, so that by the time we get to H or K we are left with a conclusion that looks nothing like the evidences we started with. And I have seen this happen so many times it is not funny. The aggravating cycle might unfold like this:

Jack: I think all the black wraiths were formerly humans, just like the horned children. They must be the ghosts of people slain by the queen.

Bill: Not necessarily, when you look deeper into it. The queen took the children because they needed some unique essence of theirs. Why would she kill ordinary people also?

Jack: Maybe she didn't kill them for their essence. She probably had them turned into wraiths so she could control them as slaves.

Bill: But what would she need slaves for? The wraiths are pathetically weak compared to their master. What could they do that she herself couldn't?

Jack: Quite possibly she had them build the castle, which must have required incredible labor. Because they are spirits, they must be able to work without rest, sleep or food. One spirit could probably do five men's work, and that for centuries.

Bill: I am not convinced. I am thinking rather that the wraiths are simply her creations. They probably somewhat resemble the children's ghosts because they all depend upon the same magic. I observe that the horned children's ghosts look much the same as they did in life. But the other wraiths are in the shapes of all kinds of beasts. These obviously can't have been people.

Jack: So she took animals and turned them into wraiths--again so she could work them as slaves. And by the way some of them do look like men.

Bill: You know about any animals that are horned, winged, and two-legged? You know about any goat-sized spiders for that matter?

Jack: Well, maybe animals like that exist in Ico's world. It isn't the same universe as ours, you know.

Bill: But these wraiths are intelligent. They use teamwork and strategies to separate the kids and abduct the girl. They can't be animals. You can train animals, but you could hardly send them on a mission to bring back a prisoner, now could you?

Jack: The queen may have equipped them with a sort of quasi-intelligence so as to make them more useful underlings. Besides, given that these are fantasy creatures you cannot overrule the possibility that they were intelligent to begin with, just like the dragons and satyrs of our own myth...

This conversation will never end, so let us take leave of it at this point. By now you are thinking one of four things: (1) Jack is right; (2) Bill is right; (3) neither knows what he is talking about and you are ready to offer your own theory; or (4) the discussion took off on a sensible observation, but it quickly got out of hand. If the last of these is your choice, I am with you. But if you went for any of the rest I must encourage you to reconsider your entire approach to the story. Jack's very first observation, the one that began the debate, was valid enough a theory; it came direct from the clues that are presented to all of us. But everything that came afterwards was no theories at all but scenarios. Both Jack and Bill could probably write thoughtful fan fiction scripts. But as expositors they have failed utterly. What looks like progress of reasoning here is not progress but regress--a steady departure from the clues at hand, and increasing incorporation of elements foreign to the original subject. Jack and Bill think they are moving from the murky to the concrete, from the shallow to the deep, but what they have in fact done is take a concrete observation and sprout a host of murky speculations that will never be settled. They got deep, all right--so deep that they have lost themselves in the depth. I doubt they will ever resurface.

What then, you may ask, is the point of this whole exercise? Does not what I said above apply to all the arguments in this talk? As a matter of fact they do, though I hope to a lesser degree. I bring my own assumptions to my writing. I have offered scenarios of my own. But now you know why I accompanied those scenarios with disclaimers. In the end you must decide which riddles offer reasonably definite answers and which were never meant to be answered. I believe the horned children and the scheme surrounding their evil fate fall into this latter class. It is no use trying to arrive at a complete answer; if you somehow reach one, you and no one else will believe it.

Where ambiguity is the intended effect it will not help us to be specific. Let us not criticize a work in pastel for lacking clean lines. The fuzziness is its charm. You can put it under the microscope all you want and look for the precise, detailed sketch underneath, but you will not find it. The artist did not put it there. He was working with loose strokes from the beginning. And it is a mark of a competent draughtsman to be able to draw loosely and retain control and balance. At first glance the picture seems spare and disorderly. A closer inspection reveals that every stroke, every smudge is there for a reason. ICO may be cryptic, but it is eminently coherent.

Allow me then to paint, with very broad strokes, the larger picture of the tale as I understand it. The queen, having shut herself inside her castle when she grew old and frail, conceived a plan to restore herself to youth. She would usurp the body of a younger person who shared her nature. Her daughter was to provide the body, so she had the girl caged to prevent her escape. She also required additional ingredients for the plan. She found them in the horned children and had them brought to the castle to give up their lives. When she was very close to fulfilling her goal, one of the children escaped and, to her ire, freed the princess. They became partners on the run and friends besides. But the queen easily reclaimed her daughter and got rid of the boy. She no longer needed him, for she was on the brink of resurrection. She did not expect him to return for the girl. But return he did, and in a duel she was vanquished by the very victim she had intended to exploit. With the sorceress gone the enchantment over her domain dissolved, and all that owed its existence to her began to crumble. The princess, realizing her cursed nature, decided to send her brave rescuer back to his realm and share the castle's doom. Soon the very islands disappeared into the sea, forever erasing the queen's legacy from the world. But then something happened which none could have anticipated, not even the queen. When all that she had inherited from her mother had been washed away, a part of the girl remained. She awakened a free and pure creature, no longer under the burden of an enchanted destiny.

The talk got much longer than I had planned. I have just one task remaining, and that is to dispel some fans' suspicion that the pair's reunion takes place after death. I will have to write another segment after all.