thinking about how fucking cool i-no guilty gear is and how much i love her. narratively and design wise. like.
the first two things you pick up from her visual design are that she Fucks, and she plays guitar. That she’s a hedonist, and maybe an artist, or maybe just someone who would hang out at dive bars and play covers and get drunk and have a good time.
and neither of those things ever seem to be true at all, with how she’s portrayed in the stories. She sometimes puts on the whole sultry thing just to sling insults, but for the most part she’s just, serious, and vaguely miserable, and taking part in the Greater Scope Plot and fighting over the Fate Of The World. She never does anything for herself, never does anything for fun. She puts all this effort into using time travel to avert disasters, both in the drama cd and in the xrd sign arcade mode - and from what i’ve heard of the drama cd, she hates doing it, she hates feeling like the Author of the world and not just a participant in it - but eight years later she’s still doing it. She holds deep, deep grudges over who the chosen ones are, who gets to wield the flame of corruption. In Strive, she tries to become God, she schemes and fights hard for it, and she seems bored at best and miserable at worst the whole time.
She wears the visage of a free-spirited hedonist, but she can’t keep herself out of fate-of-the-world conflicts, she can’t seperate herself from what she is, what she was created to be, and what power she has. She spends her whole life toiling away at all these plots to alter the course of the whole world.
And when she’s defeated, at the end of Strive, she asks Sol why the fuck he has a weapon that strong, when he was practically unstoppable already,
and Sol just basically says, “It’s a hobby. A man’s gotta have hobbies.”
And like. I-no just. Doesn’t. She doesn’t have hobbies. She looks like she does, she looks like she wants to, but she doesn’t.
And Requiem is such a fucking cool song lyrically, talking about how her ascent to power is just destroying her, how she flew high so she could see everything but now there is no up or down above the clouds and she can’t breathe - just this self-destructive, obsessive involvement in The Big Picture, pursuing power because she’s Supposed to, and never once thinking about what She Wants.
And through her interactions with Axl, through the lyrics of Requiem, through Sol’s comment about hobbies, and through I-no’s visual design, even through Testament who almost seems to exist as a perfect foil to this concept as someone who has limitless power but just lives small and happy with all the hobbies in the world, we’re just left to wonder -
what if she actually did the things it looks like she does? What if she just, went to a dive bar, got on stage, played Stone Cold Crazy (with the Metallica lyrics just to piss off Frederick somewhere), got wasted, Hecked, and had just a wild, inconsequential, hedonistic good time, and left all the Big Picture behind? But it’s too late for her, because she’s already flown too high.
She’s so fucking cool like,.
