I am approaching this workout with a background in literature and verse. Permit me to show the worth I see in game studies, throughout all techniques. To make this basic, I will offer the verses in their totality, then discuss its importance in addressing the video game’s themes. (Music concept is not my competence).
When you talk I listen to silence
Every word a defiance
I can hear, oh, I can listen to
Think I’ll go where it matches me
Leaving to the nation
With everybody, oh, everybody
Prior to all of us become one
You inform on your own that you’re lucky
Resting never struck me
As something enjoyable, oh, any enjoyable
Stabbing pain for the feeling
Now your wound’s never ever recovery
‘Til you’re numb, oh, it’s started
Prior to all of us become one
Oh we all, most of us become one
Oh we all, most of us turn into one
Oh most of us, we all become one
Oh most of us, we all turn into one
Stop grieving, start leaving
Before we all become one
Run
Oh most of us, all of us end up being
Layer One: The Face-Value Story
Presume what, I’m spoiling the story of Transistor. If you play via the game once in its totality, this tune perfectly maps out the story of the story.
“When you speak, I listen to silence.”– Red’s history is that of a songwriter and amusement number. At the beginning of the game, she has currently shed her voice and should trust the sword (the Transistor), to speak in her place to the gamer. He is greatly suggested to be her fan, whose spirit has actually been shifted from his remains to the blade.
“Think I’ll go where it fits me, Vacating to the country”– The Country (capitalized) describes a euphemism for the inner globe of the Transistor. Or maybe it indicates fatality. Either interpretation is valid.
“You inform yourself that you’re lucky. Resting never struck me as something fun.”– Red might have left as her city collapsed. Red might have gotten away the damage of her world. But she chose to take her anger to the resource and deal with the Camerata (the closest analog we have to villains in this tale, for they include in all in charge fights).
“Stabbing pain for the sensation, currently your injury’s never ever recovery.”– Once again, Red’s companion, the male in the Transistor, is initial located ingrained in his physical body’s death.
Layer 2: The Protagonist’s Grieving
Based upon the above, it is easy to read this song as a discussion between Red and her enthusiast. Pain, pain, rejection, all the emotions that feature death and loss. She’s shed her voice however that’s not the driving motivation behind her retribution plot. She’s upset that they killed her boyfriend and now she’s going to make them pay.
Yet that’s too simplistic an analysis and it does refrain from doing Red justice. Despite her voice got rid of, she continues to share her own choices and her very own company and refuses to compromise on her core beliefs: That her anger is valid and she has to take her very own destiny right into her own hands.
The Transistor believed she would run. Yet when she heads right into the city, his only words are a solemn “I presume we’re doing this”. And that’s not the issue of an exhausted enthusiast. That’s the gravity of the scenario, that’s the despair, that’s the acquiescence. That’s the approval.
Layer 3: Red’s Resistance
If you look at Red’s profile in the video game correct, there is a blurb about just how she never ever suggested for her music to provoke political advocacy and upheaval. She is basically placed on a watch-list because her songs is too galvanizing:
Red has constantly sung from the heart. That is her domain as an artist, as a songstress. She is implied to stimulate emotion and she did it as well damn well.
And, when she is burglarized of her voice, she discovers ways to insist herself and her firm: Throughout the game, there are terminals where the federal government of Cloudbank (her city) periodically polls residents for their point of views. Red does not address the concerns: She utilizes the forums to write her own thoughts. She makes the effort to draft and reword what she is claiming. It is not self-censorship. It is looking for the best words with which to verbalize herself, debating if she must play it secure or if she need to reveal her anger after that and there over a climate poll.
Rather than ranging from the devastation of Cloudbank, Red stays. Red stays to cleanse the mess up. Red remains to take issues right into her very own hands and destroy the Refine– the mythological curious unbearable “devices” that have gone wild and begun to homogenize and strip Cloudbank of its very carefully curated picture.
The Refine. It does not come from people in Cloudbank. It comes from the Camerata and regulating bodies. They attempted to streamline and control decision-making. And when it got up of control, it started to digitize people right into the Transistor.
Red battles. Red eliminates. Red downloads her opponents. They all get published right into the Transistor. When she is through with the Camerata, she alone stands in the devastation that she has functioned. And she is provided the chance to reprise Cloudbank in her vision. However. She recognizes there’s no indicate doing so. What good is a gorgeous world if everybody she recognizes and respects are trapped inside an additional world? If every person she understands is “dead”?
So Red pierces herself with the Transistor, symbolically killing herself (or is it literal?) so regarding belong of the Nation. She relocates away from the modern technology, she ranges herself from the over-engineered evident happiness that is Cloudbank.
Red dies since all her sacrifice failed. But at the ending, we as players and an audience are treated with an ideal scene of her partner– the guy in the sword– and Red herself. And for the very first time, we hear her talked voice, and all she needs to say is “Hey.”
With all this context from the video game, the tune ends up being Red’s original item. It is a track she composed for others, to deal with just how she has actually been a rebel all her life however she just intends to reveal it via something risk-free and contained like her music. Yet when push concerns shove, she verifies that she is equally the track that she writes, sings, lives
All of us come to be the tale we intend to inform. That is how powerful words are.