< Back to Main   -   Talking Ico: Part 2 - Final Retrospect

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Final Retrospect

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I first heard of it on this board a few months after I began frequenting it, almost two years ago. I do not remember my exact reaction, nor do I recall the person who introduced me to the theory, but I think I was for the most part amused. His idea was that Ico and Yorda both die at the castle, and the reunion is a sort of their heavenly reward. The sun-washed beach is the afterlife, and the two children we see in the final scene are really the souls of the deceased. I did not say anything at the time. Apart from its juvenile perspective on heaven--it is a place you go to meet your old loved ones, and it will look exactly like this world or however you want it to look--the interpretation seemed to me in such vast disagreement with the flavor of the tale that I was sure no one would take it seriously. A while later I was surprised when I heard it again from another poster. Then I was aghast to see it spread like an epidemic particularly among those folk who seemed to value their mature and hard-nosed approach to life and literature. Apparently this was the enlightened reading of ICO--the sophisticated interpretation which, though admittedly somewhat depressing, a discerning intellect would not be afraid to adopt for fear of having his happy fragile illusions shattered. On several occasions I voiced the unreasonableness of that view. But there was not much I could do in a few measly paragraphs. I could not properly address the part without first taking the whole into the account. The matter became one of my prime motives for this exercise.

If you have read this far, you are used to my rambles. I am going to ramble a bit more. If you happen to subscribe to the afterlife interpretation you will probably want to refute me. I welcome your criticism, but I ask you first to read every word that follows. Should you challenge my points, I will assume you have considered those points and are intimately familiar with them.

Now, you know what I think happens in the ending. I think the two heroes, both pawns in the queen's plot, overcome the fate the witch has imposed on them. Thus he loses his horns (a symbolic event if I ever saw one) and she her enchantment. Each has willingly accepted death for the other's sake, and both are granted life. It is a thoroughgoing old-fashioned happy ending. The trademark of old-fashioned happy endings is in their moral emphasis; for the final reward one must be not only clever or hardworking but virtuous, an idea which has all but faded from modern fiction. This quaint notion is apt to suffer a proud dismissal from those who have "grown past" such "simplistic" and "primitive" outlooks and can no longer be satisfied with them. I have heard many complain that the ending makes things too easy. What they are likely saying is "I don't like this old cliche. I want something more complex and subtle, something not quite so ready-made, something that will make me think." I believe they are going about it the wrong way, but if something to think about is what they want--well, they shall have it.

Let me clarify at once that my rejection of the theory is not owed to any disbelief in life after death. If my open admiration for the writings of C. S. Lewis has not given me away, I am a Christian and assured believer in the existence of real heaven--not the romanticized heaven full of clouds and winged creatures in white robes, but the final concrete realization of the divine in man--and also, much as I dislike to dwell on the thought, in real hell. The reason I called the theory's image of heaven "juvenile" is not that I deem afterlife an immature notion, but rather that the theory looks at heaven as a kindergartener might--that is, she pictures it as a replica of this world from which all the bad and unpleasant things have been subtracted; whereas the great religious traditions, Christian or otherwise, that earned any degree of credential with discerning believers have consistently maintained that in heaven problems have not merely vanished but have been dealt with, solved, and conquered. The sort of afterlife which the theory hints at could only have been conceived by a writer who never gave serious thought to the subject and resorted to it as a convenient high note on which to end his story. The theory, it seems to me, claims to do away with the shallow cliche of a happy ending by substituting an interpretation which is equally shallow, a good deal less competent and vastly more pretentious. Allow me now to elaborate.

If I have read the argument correctly, people's main gripe about the ending is Yorda's survival. Suppose Ico awakened at the beach alone, and the story concluded there? No one would have come up with the afterlife theory then. No one would have had a problem with him alone surviving. It was only when they learned that Yorda too lives that some decided it was too much to believe. Yorda had to be dead. And if she were dead, then naturally he also was dead, for of course they would not otherwise be able to meet on the same plane of existence. Hence this was not a real beach but a manifestation of the spiritual realm. Thus the theory took shape.

So technically I do not have to explain how Yorda survived. All I have to show is that Ico is not dead, and the afterlife theory is rebutted. The glaring clue that he is still very much in this world is of course his horns, or what is left of them. After the heroic battle he is a rather piteous sight, with stumps stained in crimson where there used to be horns. And if I were to read a bit deeper, I should think he tumbles onto the sand because he is not feeling all that well after his injury; normally he is such a nimble boy. My opponent may then say that since that is how he was at death, that is how he looks in afterlife as well. So I suppose in his vision of heaven people who were decapitated in life would still be walking around headless; burn victims would spend eternity in bandages like Egyptian mummies; and the unfortunate souls who were blown to smithereens on some battlefield would, alas, be consigned to roam the heavenly atmosphere as a million dust particles. My, just what sort of heaven is this?

Moreover, if the boy we are seeing is the boy at the precise moment of his death, bloody wounds and all, how is it that the girl has been restored to her old self? I am told that since she could not have undone her transformation on her own, she must no longer be alive. But then she ought to look now exactly as she did at the moment of her death: black as ebony. So what is going on here? Did God decree that the boy keep his battle wounds but the girl be given back her pristine flesh? And then I am sure someone will come up with a work of fan fiction which will, in some convoluted way, settle the discrepancy--and we are right back to Jack and Bill's neverending discourse into the unknowable. You are not dragging me there.

I am further intrigued by an implication of the claim above, which I doubt many supporters of the theory have considered. They say "We don't see how Yorda has returned to her human form, except by assuming she is now dead." I think what they are trying to say is "Death has purified her of the enchantment, thus leaving her soul in her original state." But hold your thought for a moment. If her human form were her original state to begin with, would it be so hard to imagine her reverting to that form without suffering so cataclysmic an event as death?--that a tainted thing might be made pure again once the impurities melted away? My opponents should beware the double-edged nature of their own claim. They say they cannot imagine Yorda simply changing back to her old form. Yet their theory rides on the very supposition that her transformed state is not a natural condition. Clearly something has undone the spell. Why they insist death must be that something, I cannot fathom.

Let me then look into some evidences the theory points to and see if they are reasonable.

(1) "Yorda will never be able to leave this castle even if you take my life."

So the queen says a moment before her death. We have a name for this sort of statements. They are called taunts. "So you think you've beaten me, eh? Just you see." There is hardly an adventure tale that does not have a variation of this line uttered by the villain. It usually indicates a sore loser. Does that mean she is flat out lying? Not necessarily, though it does make her highly suspect of self-deception. She may well believe it. But please consider the following chain of logic:

-The beaten queen declares that Yorda cannot leave the castle.
-The castle sinks, presumably killing Yorda.
-I see Yorda washed ashore, alive and well.
-But the queen said this could not happen.
-Therefore Yorda must really be dead.
-Therefore that is not Yorda I am looking at; it is her ghost.

I don't care how grandly they phrase their theory. In the end it comes down to "We must be seeing things." And their ground for this stupendous claim? The dying taunt of the enemy! They have decided that the villain's last brag is so trustworthy that it is reason enough to doubt--override--their own eyes.

(2) "Yorda is too weak to have swum ashore."

Let us recall how we find her on the beach. She looks, if I may put it bluntly, like a drowning victim. In fact we suspect her dead at first, and if his grim expression is any sign Ico does too. The storyteller is here deliberately exploiting our knowledge of the girl's frailty to lure us into fearing her dead--with the intent of reversing that expectation, that is, of surprising us. By refusing to allow that she has somehow survived at the sea, one is refusing to be surprised the way the storyteller wants him to be surprised. That is entirely his loss; he must go along with the story if he plans on enjoying it.

(3) "Yorda could not have returned to her human form."

We touched on this already. For some obscure reason the theory's supporters are convinced that her transformation could not be undone this side of the Jordan, though their view presupposes that her natural form is that of a human. But before anyone can set down what cannot happen, he must have a good idea of what can. If one does not know how A turned into B, how would he preclude the possibility of B turning back into A? And of course we must not forget that B has, in fact, turned back into A; we saw it with our eyes.

We do not know how and why things occur the way they do in this tale. We must be able to trust that we are being shown a consistent reality. Without that faith the entire experience, not just the ending, is suspect.

(4) "Sending Ico away, Yorda stays behind because she knows she cannot leave the castle, just as the queen said."

This is sheer nonsense. If the girl had known that she could not leave the castle, what on earth has she been doing all this time with Ico, braving a hundred deaths for freedom? Her reason for staying is rather simple when you think about it. Up until now she has tried very hard to escape to the outside world. But look at her now. She is a monster. She has no future in the human realm. Consequently she decides to send the boy back where he belongs and herself to stay where she belongs. Would you have acted very different?

(5) "The bolt that strikes Yorda down on the bridge is a mechanism designed to prevent her exit."

This is a bit cleverer but makes no better sense than the last. The bolt comes from a globe fixed atop a gatepost. This is the same contraption the children use to open the gate. If it has been programmed to "zap" Yorda should she try to run, why does it allow her to open the gate in the first place? And why would it wait until she is almost halfway across?--had she been hit only a second later, she would have made it to the shore side of the bridge. I think it is pretty clear. The gate opens in obedience to Yorda's command. It strikes her down in obedience to the queen's.

(6) "The queen must still have made some magical provision that renders it impossible for Yorda to step outside the isles."

This is the biggest speculation yet, and naturally the most unfounded. I think it extremely unlikely. The queen's own behavior testifies to that. She first keeps her daughter caged. Then after the girl breaks free she shows up twice in person, both times at the main gate, and foils her flight. Then she has her turned into stone, blocking all future attempts at escape. These actions do not match her claim that Yorda can never leave the castle. She acts very much like one who knows full well that the girl could leave if she tried hard enough. You would not leash your dog if you thought it could never run away.

In light of all the above I am inclined to think the queen's last words mean that Yorda, the special creature she is, belongs in the castle and is unfit for a life outside. In other words: "If you fancy she can now live as one of your kind just because I am gone, you are mistaken." And that, I suppose, would be reasonable enough a thing to say. In fact Yorda agrees. That is why she stays. Her metamorphosis has convinced her that she has no place after all in Ico's world, which it has been until now her dream to see.

But then, I may be asked, why would the queen say such a thing at all? Why utter a final word so overladen with meaning unless it is true? Surely the storyteller meant to accomplish something by betraying that kind of information at the climactic moment? Why, yes, as a matter of fact he did mean to accomplish something. He meant to get us to expect Yorda's doom. That is, he wanted us to fear for the girl--and fear the very worst.

We must here remember that the game has gone to a great trouble to establish a bond between Ico--that is, us--and his fair companion. That is why it constantly threatened us with her capture. Its principal drama hinges on getting us to grow attached to the girl, and then taking her away. Everything that comes before the pair's separation is meant to train us to be averse to parting with her. And everything that comes after is meant to have us seek, and fervently look forward to, reunion. That relentless anticipation is what makes Ico's lonely quest in the storm so gripping. And the storyteller does not want the anxiety to let up until the very end. He wants the moment of reunion, towards which his entire narrative has been building, to overwhelm us--wants our hopeful tension to break with such unexpected swiftness that we will be left stunned. And we could not be stunned unless we first gave up the girl as lost. For this reason it becomes necessary to drop clues that she may not be able to make it out after all. Else we would grow complacent once the villain is gone, and that is the last thing he wants. We must be made fearful that all is not yet well, and we must see that fear come true. Yorda must perish in our imagination, however briefly--a deliberate downward plunge in order that the ascent to come will be the more glorious. Those who charge that the ending is a shameless copout--a sort of emotional candy--to gratify the dejected audience rather miss the point. Their dejection was set up to be overturned from the beginning; indeed they were only dejected for that purpose. Therefore we cannot recast the ending without turning the story into something decidedly out of its intended character. The theory commits what seems to me the worst mistake that could be committed in making sense of ICO: it spoils the one moment for which the preceding ten hours have been preparing.

Before we move on, let me answer the charge that the ending is a copout. Copout means the failure to face some difficulty squarely--cowardly evasion. The theory's supporters claim that ICO's happy ending contradicts its tragic climax. In their opinion Ico and Yorda are dead, and to insist otherwise because it is depressing is cowardliness. They offer the afterlife theory as a manlier alternative.

Let us see if their remedy holds up under scrutiny. Imagine yourself as the screenwriter working on ICO's script. You have just written up to Ico's victory against the queen. You now need a suitable conclusion to the tale. You find yourself in a dilemma. "I have decided that the children are to die at the castle," you say to yourself, "but that will be too much for the audience to handle. I need a gentler exit for my two little heroes. But I cannot in all honestly have them walk into the sunset, either--that will undermine the tragic character of the story. What kind of compromise can I afford here? I've got it--I will have them reunite in afterlife. This way they remain dead, preserving the tragedy, and the audience gets a spoonful of sugar to swallow with the bitter medicine. Wait, I can make this even better: I will portray the reunion in such a way that the absolute majority of the audience will not realize they are looking at an afterlife. Most of them will blithely assume the children's survival. In fact many will come away thinking they have just seen the greatest happy ending to grace a video game! They are happy, and I am happy."

If any writer thus reasons to wrap up his story, I have no respect for that writer. It is a rule of thumb among students of fiction that the other-world is permissible as a setting only when it is an express element of the work's premise--as in Dante's INFERNO where the narrator takes a tour of hell, or Bunyan's PILGRIM'S PROGRESS where the hero sets out on a journey to reach the Celestial City, or C. S. Lewis' THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS whose main character is a devil. But to place the first nineteen chapters of your story in this world and switch to the other for the remaining one chapter, and this only to soften the tragedy of the nineteen chapters that already came, and that with deliberate ambiguity so as to grant yourself the benefit of doubt--that is inexcusable. If a writer ever succumbed to a copout, this is it.

And what about the charge that the ending is sentimental? I will not deny it; it is sentimental. But then the whole story is. One could hardly blame a sentimental tale for having a sentimental finale. If he does not like that type of stories he should keep away from them. But ICO's sentimentality is of the sincerest sort. There is nothing artful or cheap about it. You have felt this yourself. The pleasure you received from the ending was not an abstract satisfaction at seeing the hero and the heroine finally back together. It was an honest and heartfelt joy at finding a friend you feared lost.

But there is another accusation made against the sentimentality of the ending. Some people find it, as I heard someone say on this board, "too syrupy sweet." And this I must deny.

Syrupy sweetness is excessive sweetness. ICO's sentimentality is most emphatically not excessive. I have not seen many adventures so thoroughly understated. Reflect upon the fact that neither of the children is shown smiling even once. The dreariest and most ill-humored of stories rarely go so far to rid themselves of mirth. ICO's appeal is precisely that ability to convey rich emotions without flaunting them. Recall the first time you saw the ending. You found the girl, prone on the sand, and at first you were not quite sure what to make of it. Then you saw her awaken, and you knew she was alive. Your heart swelled. You were happy, you were relieved, you were full of anticipation--and then you stared stone still at the screen as it went blank with her whisper-soft utterance, leaving an unadorned FIN gazing back at you. It might have been a while before you moved. You were in a state of nearly reverential shock. And what was the shock? The shock at seeing the girl alive? That was certainly half of it. The other half was owed to the abruptness of it all. You were floored that the story ended where it did--at that exact moment when a lesser tale might have gone into a dramatic reunion scene. The sweet part of the ending had lasted all of five seconds. You were not even shown the children's reaction to the happy discovery. And you found that this did not at all take away from the ending's impact. Rather it augmented it manifold. Its restraint, you see, is the very thing that makes the ending great. If there is sweetness here it is not indulged in; it takes place in our imagination once the curtain has closed.

I now come to the most important part of this segment. I ask for your careful attention. If you forget everything else remember what is about to follow.

We have seen that the argument in support of the afterlife theory is in every way questionable. As the debate goes on, my opponent will eventually find himself left only with this in defense of his view: "Well, of course I can't prove they are dead. But then you can't prove they are alive either. Nothing can be proven in a story this vague. But the story is richer, makes deeper sense, when you look at it my way." And that is what it boils down to. Every defender of the theory I have come across is convinced that his is the superior conclusion--that the story improves with his understanding of the ending in place. Let me say it up front: it does not.

Going back through the previous sections of the story, I find that the theory, assumed to be correct, wreaks havoc with their dramatic flow. That the story spends its entirety in preparation for the ending, building momentum towards that final moment, I have already discussed. But even putting that aside, I find myself asked to accept a number of absurd scenarios--scenarios which are not strictly impossible, but which make so little sense that I cannot imagine a writer as competent as the one who penned ICO's script would go with them. If I were to believe the theory, I should have to conclude that the storyteller had Ico lose his friend, backtrack through the core of the isles, brave the elements and climb the cliff, return to his original prison, annihilate his horned brethren, and finally duel the queen and bury her own sword in her heart all in a quest to save his precious companion--only to have him promptly dashed against a wall and die. And what of Yorda? Am I to say that she goes to the trouble of taking the boy in her arms, fleeing the crumbling great hall, operating the elevator to descend to the cavern, finding a boat of which she had no prior knowledge, putting him inside alone and sending him out to the ocean in the nick of time all so she can spare a corpse from the impending destruction of the castle? As if she does not take the unconscious boy out of the tower, knowing it is about to fall, in order to save his life and repay her debt! Certainly both scenarios are conceivable. But which makes a story worth listening to? Which is infinitely lame? And if anyone is about to say "Maybe he is alive at the time but dies out at the sea" or "Maybe she isn't aware of his death"--well, would that be any less lame? Let us not be thick here. If they were both to die at the castle, the proper thing would be to have them die together. A farewell scene of this sort is appropriate only when one of the parties is expected to die while the other is expected to live. If ICO is a tragedy, it is no more than a third-rate tragedy.

Let me offer a more levelheaded rationale as to why the afterlife theory cannot help but ruin the tale. Once I again I ask for your close attention. Thus far we have examined the ending in one exclusive category: happy ending. But there is another class of ending that it belongs to, to which no one seems to pay any attention. ICO has what is commonly called a surprise ending, which we may loosely define as the literary technique of closing a story with some crucial or profoundly affecting revelation.

Why is that important? The reason becomes apparent when we dig into the nature of surprise endings. As noted earlier, surprise involves a reversal of expectation--i.e., you thought such and such were the case, only to be shown that you could not have been further from the truth. A surprise ending therefore requires that the audience be first led to form a false picture of the reality so as to set them up for the revelation to come; hence the queen's repeated claim that Yorda can never leave the castle, and the girl's voluntary acceptance of death. Now it is the nature of every surprise ending that without it the story cannot make proper sense. It is that last piece of puzzle which places all that came before it in the correct light. Consider for instance O. Henry's THE GIFT OF THE MAGI, a short story about a poverty-stricken young couple which features one of the most beloved surprise endings in all of fiction. In it Della, desperate to buy a suitable Christmas gift for her husband Jim, resorts to selling the only thing of value she possesses--her beautiful long hair. With the money she buys a gold chain for Jim's prized pocket watch, an old family heirloom. The story ends with the bittersweet revelation that Jim's gift for her is a set of jewel-studded hair combs she has long coveted. He has sold his watch to buy it.

A story of this sort places such an emphasis on the closing scene that it is hopeless to assess its character--its theme--until it has quite ended. If, for instance, your copy of ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN or THE ILIAD is missing the last page, you can still get out of those books most everything they have to offer. But if you were forced to forgo the ending of THE GIFT OF THE MAGI or Poe's THE BLACK CAT or Maupassant's THE NECKLACE you would be left with a crippled and incoherent tale. You would be left in want of the most vital part of the story, and your understanding of it must remain fundamentally flawed. Imagine not watching the final sequence of CITIZEN KANE or THE USUAL SUSPECTS. Would it not be all rather pointless? And that is just what a surprise ending is: the point of the story, compressed into a single moment of revelation. So it is that every surprise ending carries the same message at core: "This is what the story is about. Forget what you have seen, heard, and supposed thus far--this is the real deal." ICO is no exception. The surprise arrives at the precise instant we accept that a girl who should be dead is alive. It evaporates when we presume all this is taking place in afterlife. For of course there can be no surprise or revelation in realizing that a dead girl is still technically dead. Likewise there can be no point in showing her twitch her fingers, blink open her eyes squinting at the light, and issue an utterance in her dear old voice at the final moment of the story, unless one means to convey that she who ought to have died has miraculously survived.

But that is not all.

It seems clear to me that those who subscribe to the afterlife theory adopted that view in retrospect. That is, they too assumed the children's survival the first time they saw the ending. It was only when they mulled over it afterwards that they decided that is not the case after all. In other words they decided their initial grasp of the ending was faulty and invalid. I am afraid this has fatal implications for their claim. Let me clarify.

Recall to your mind any story that ends on a thrilling "shocker"--say THE USUAL SUSPECTS or THE SIXTH SENSE. Could these films be watched a second time and still be enjoyed? Yes, they could. (If they could not, the blame is on the the shallowness of the stories or the shallowness of the audience.) But will that second viewing be nearly as jolting and powerful as the first? No, of course not. And any writer competent enough to pull off a surprise ending knows that. He knows his ending will work its magic just once. That is why he must make absolutely certain that the audience will get the surprise at once. He cannot afford to allow misinterpretation. He has but this one chance to make the audience fall out of their chairs. He has to deliver the punch, and all of it, the very instant he unveils the surprise. If the audience has to mull over the ending to grasp it, the ending has failed. It has lost the element of surprise. For surprise, as you know, is an instantaneous event. And it cannot be reproduced; you can never be surprised twice by a thing. Thus by its nature a surprise ending does not expect multiple readings. It operates on the principle that it will not be given a second chance.

Do you see what this means? A surprise ending that leaves the audience scratching their heads, one that has to be interpreted in hindsight, one that has to be seen more than once to communicate itself to the audience, is a fiasco--just as a joke has failed if the listeners have to think long and hard about it before laughing, or worse, if it has to be repeated to get the laugh out of them. And yet this is just what the theory's proponents imply about ICO's ending. What is more, they believe they have enhanced the ending!

Just about one hundred percent of the players perceive--correctly--that Ico and Yorda have survived upon viewing the ending for the first time. A few of them change their minds in hindsight. Now if these few were right, that would mean that ICO's conclusion lends itself to faulty interpretation in one hundred percent of its viewers. It would mean it is a one hundred percent failure as a surprise ending. It would mean nobody understood the ending right away. It would mean the screenwriter put together a surprise ending so unintelligible that only a few would be able to fathom it, and none immediately.

Therefore by arguing for the afterlife theory I should be automatically arguing that ICO's ending is a disastrous denouement to an otherwise lovely tale. I should be accusing the storyteller of the worst error a writer could commit when he is trying to deliver an ending of this sort. Here then is my last plea to those who take that stance. It is one thing to say that an event occurred though you cannot explain how it did. It is quite another to insist that it must not have occurred at all because you cannot account for it. Now if you believe the girl's survival is inconsistent with the rest of the story, you would have been a great deal more sensible to say that the ending is badly written, rather than that it does not happen the way it so plainly does. You are entitled to criticize any flaws you perceive. But, please, let us not go into the nonsense about improving the ending with a fresh interpretation. It has not left that option open to us.