Ergo Proxy - Episode 23:Proxy/Deus ex Machina

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Proxy

To love. To be all powerful. To create. To be flawed. To defy one's fate.
All of these themes have stunning development and exposition. I want to explain the philosophical conclusions and commentary they have, but maybe the best way is to tell the story itself.



Once there was a Proxy.

He was a god among gods. He was given his task by the The Creator itself. The humans who created his world. They forged his life, gave him his soul, and then gave him a planet to shape and populate.

And he did. In his youth, with his divine power, he created a city.

It was a paradise full of citizens and autoreivs.
Everything was perfect.

Everyone had everything they could want and everyone took joy from their vital roles in upkeeping the clockwork miracle that was their city system. It was all carefully balanced. No details were overlooked. Every citizen was carefully sculpted so that they could love their life and their place in the perfect society. No one could ask for more.

And most of all they loved their creator. They loved Proxy One, for the glorious gift of paradise he had given them. They worshiped and venerated him. They cherished and prostrated for him. They loved and idolized him.

And slowly, he began to despair.

He saw the flaws in their perfection. They could never become more than what they were. They could never grow or surpass their pitiful predetermined purposes. They could never create something new or surprise their creator because they were only as good as he had made them, and he had made them soulless puppets.

But it was forgivable because the system they were all a part of was beautiful, perfect, and magnificent. It ran with a simple perfection. Flawless and smooth, it spiraled onward, never missing a beat as all of its parts cycled in perfect synchrony. Proxy 1 watched it and smiled.

His creations began to displease him. They aggravated him. More and more he could little stand to be around them. He did not yet know the full reason why.

Perhaps then he saw citizens that somehow, did have potential to grow. Who defied the system in an attempt to improve themselves and the world they were in. And they were rejected. They were rebuked and destroyed by the system. And Proxy One was angry. He was angry because he began to realize. The system they all upheld was flawed and disgusting too. And all of it is because Proxy One himself

You are a god. You have everything. Can do anything. And yet.
And yet.

Everything you have done was a sham. Everything moldered before your eyes. First tiny flaws, then maggots that multiplied until the whole thing dissolved into a horrible repulsive heap. Something so utterly unholy and it was the best that you, a divine being, created out of pure good intentions. It was supposed to be beautiful. It was. You thought it was. But somehow it never was.

And it crawls toward you, slavering for you to feed it. And you gaze on the sorry thing with hatred and disgust but a twisted sort of love because it is the best you could ever do, even though it also destroyed the-best-you-could-ever-do. It is a reflection of you, and you know that. So you hate it and you love it.

But most of all, you are alone.

You aren't aware of it, just the empty place inside you. The smiles covering up the nothing behind. Maybe it is ignorance, maybe it is denial. Underneath you want someone to seek you out. To see your sorry hide for what it is. Someone to forgive you, and then someone to understand what sort of creature you are. All of your goodwill, all of your flaws. You want them to come and to peel back the layers, and you want it to be painful, but you want to stand naked before someone else and be judged. You want to know whether they would look on you with fear and repulsion or with sadness and love. You want to know which you should look on yourself as. You just want to finally know.

You cannot even see past that. But if you could, you would see what was past the future where you are loved. Where you are seen and understood, and are accepted. Then you can fall down from forcing yourself to stand up for so long. Then you can cry and feel and hope and leave the past behind. Then you can see a future that isn't an endless dark tunnel. Then you can begin to stand up, teach yourself how to walk, and go somewhere else than this painful place.

But that is beyond you. That comes after. Right now, you want to prove that you are real. That you exist. And maybe that you have a right to exist.

You want to touch another life. Have it touch you. Just a shred of contact. A flash of understanding between two. A seed of love, forgiveness, understanding, empathy. That might make it all worth it. Lift you up just enough so you can turn your eyes to see where you are and begin to think.

It hurts to see our creations, our children. They are so malformed. Why can't they be better? They come to us, but we can do nothing for them, and we turn away in loathing and shame. They come to us and profess their love, but they do not understand us and they do not love us and they do not want to love us. They worship us, but that is a worthless thing. We want something deeper. Something they cannot give us, even if they wanted to. They cannot understand us. They cannot understand us.

So we despair. And sometimes we rage at the world we were born into, that let us create but we could not create what we needed to create. We cannot create something to love us. We can only create puppets and toys and they cannot love us.

We found love with another. We loved the other proxy. We turned our back on our hateful world and we left them all behind to lose ourselves in love. I do not know what happened to that love, but it was thin. It was patched together from our sadness, our fear, our hatred, and our despair. It was our escape from it, but all it was, was a way to freeze time. It did not let us leave. It only let us sleep. That love was real, but it was shallow and got us nowhere.

So we tried to remake ourselves. If we could not be loved for who we were, then we would erase ourselves and become something that could be loved. So we cut out the parts that could not be understood and dropped the pieces that were left into the world we had created. We tried to be one of them. But we could not give up all that we were, for we still wanted to be loved. And wanting to be loved means wanting to be loved for who we are. So we did not make puppets to love us and we did not erase ourselves completely. And so of course our creations turned us away. They should have, because we failed them and are not perfect like we tried to make them. We are not what we wanted to be, and they are not what we wanted them to be, and they see that we are not what we should have been. We are all imperfect and we all hate it in each other and we are sorry we are like this.

We are sorry we failed you. We deserve to be punished just like we wished to punish you when we saw your own imperfections.

And what way is there out of this? The system yet reinforces the system that cannot improve.

The imperfections. The imperfections.

That is how we found our way out. The imperfections created new lives. They created new things that we could not have created ourselves. And we learned to stop looking for perfection and instead look for life. And we learned to see. And then they saw us. Saw us for who we are. Broken but struggling, just as they. And we learned to love one another. And we learned to love the world and through the world, ourselves.

And so we gave up perfection. And we found what we were missing, even though we were a god.


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"The ark an cradle will nurture you, but it will not educate you."

"We discovered the torments of a creator." "And yet, we still loved them."
"The creator wishes to be loved as well." "It's as if I can feel his solitude and despair in the very depths of my soul." "That despair. That pain is the reason they must all be punished."
"You've been manipulated. Buried under the burdens of failed creations and have brought the destruction of man the cusp of its rebirth."
"The Shadow knows. It knows there is a price to pay at the fate of those who would demand a god for a godless world."
"The human race had to be destroyed. They brought this world to ruin, then ran away. Oh how they ran."
"Much in the same way that you ran away from Romdeau, a world of your own making."
"I understand. I know what it is to be rejected, treated like you were nothing."

"I no longer care who I was before I came what I am. I am my self and that is all I need. There's only one truth that really matters to me"

"[We are both definitely Ergo Proxy] But you are not Vincent Law!" "What's wrong with you? They mean nothing to you but failure!"
"This world doesn't deserve to be saved!" "What difference does it make? Do any more need to die!"

"Because I can't let myself forget any more. I'm not talking about remembering the mission that was programmed into me. It's the faces I encountered, the confrontations we had, the love and support given. The life."

"What is it draws you to that existence? It is dark. It's cold. And there's never any knowing what horrors lie ahead." "But that's it. That's what life is. Is all that you said but someone's waiting for me there."

"She plagued you and yet she still loved you. She offered her love to flawed broken souls and in that we found freedom."



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Daedalus and Real play out the myth further. Real, Daedalus's child, is given wings, then flies to close to the sun and dies because of it. (Proxies will die if exposed to blue skies/direct sunlight. This is because, once the earth has healed enough, they are no longer needed.)

"There's no place for the sub-humans out there."
"Bringing mankind back through the proxy system. It wasn't supposed to be the first option."
"Even you and I are obstacles, despite our pain and love. Our souls are ruining everything. We're in their way."
Mankind left earth to survive in space in the Boomerang Project while the earth healed. It is in the name itself "Boomerang," - they always intended to return. However, the proxy project was a safeguard. The domes and the sub-humans were created to help the earth heal and repopulate if the original humans were wiped out during the interim. Hence the word "Proxy" - the agents of the creator. That is why they were programmed as they were.

Proxy One says that Re-L's actions are no longer required. Her services then were either attempting to kill Vincent, bringing Vincent to Proxy One, or simply being a citizen of Romdeau. And she chose her own truth, which was to pursue truth at any cost and to show Vincent that she understands and trusts him regardless of his being a 'monster' or a 'god.'

"Autoreivs were nothing more than bit players. Their revolt helped bring about the system's ruin."
It seems that Autoreivs were never really an option to survive and repopulate the earth. Cogito isn't really designed to make them self-aware and able to survive in the new world, but instead to destabilize and destroy the world. It is spread by the proxy to destroy the domes to make way for the first option. That is it's purpose. (Maybe it has another possibility of make the autoreivs fit to survive, maybe it was accidental. The rest of the autorevis don't really seem capable like Pino, Kristeva, and Iggy were. I don't really know what is up with Pino saying she hears the proxy and the others were told not to listen.

"Its an elegant system."
"In fact, we are left to be some kind of monster. And old world demon in a new age."
And just as they were programmed to create new arks for mankind, they were programmed to destroy themselves when they are no longer needed. They had no place in this new world. It is the Pulse of the Awakening they fight each other and destroy themselves. With the coming of blue skies, they are not allowed to live. With mankind's successful return, it is already set within the project to destroy everything that was in the way. The Domes were set to collapse with the loss of the Proxies and the Cogito. I'm a little muddled how much the Pulse of the Awakening is to make the sub-humans survive on their own and how much it is to make them die off for the coming of the original Humans. "But why did they give us souls? We wouldn't suffer if we had no souls." The practical reasons are these - souls along imagination, innovation and creativity. It is necessary to be a leader and a creator, to have these things. Souls also come from the intelligence and the experience of seeing the creations with their own lives, suffering, and dreams. Souls also imply that imperfection and free will that allows something to learn, evolve, and become greater than itself. Perhaps souls are necessary for a being to be a god as well. Perhaps it is also because the Creators, the Humans, wanted their proxies to be as they are. To dream and to suffer the same way. To be made in their own image. To be understood by their creations....
"The creator wishes to be loved as well. It's as if I can feel his solitude and despair in the very depths of my soul. That despair. That pain is the reason they must all be punished."


In case there is any confusions: Proxy One says that "Vincent is just an after image, left behind by Proxy One's despair, a puppet, a phantom, an impostor --- accept it, you and I are the same." That could mean that the Vincent persona is a mask to hide behind for Ergo Proxy, but it could also mean that Ergo Proxy is the copy of Proxy One. And Vincent says that they are both definitely Ergo Proxy. Proxy One calls Ergo Proxy a prodigal son (sarcastically) and then says that ErgoVincent will live, even though normal proxies are susceptible to the sun's rays. All of that seems to indicate that Proxy One created ErgoVincent (He's not a normal proxy, he doesn't have his own necklace - only Monad's or Proxy One's - he looked and acted and thought like Ergo/Proxy1 until after the journey etc etc)

So that seems a pretty safe conclusion. It gets confusing when it comes to the question of why and when.
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Daedalus.....
He only wished to love and be loved.
"But it was more than [you] could give."
He knows. He knows. He knows he knows he knows, but that doesn't help that it breaks his heart to know it. He loves her, and he loves that she is who she is, and he would't change her or manipulate her. But that means he has to love that she does not love him in return.

And he tries as much as he can to do it. He even does it, but it destroys him from the inside out.

He takes care of her to the end. He tells her everything and tells her to leave him for her own safety as he lies dying. He watches her struggling against her fate after he has given up and he loves her for it. "You never change. It sickens me." And he smiles with such forgiveness and love when she calls his name. He finally gets her to understand. "And as for me... I..." "Deadalus...." "I'm sorry, Daedalus." "I'm sick of your apologies." He just... wants her to love him.... but he loves her for who she is, and she cannot.

Run Re-l!
Very good.



[VIEW SPOILERS]

Deus ex Machina

Proxy One says that he is Vincent and Vincent is him - the quick cuts show the bookstore episode, where Vincent was facing what then seemed to be his subconscious. So it was Proxy One forced Vincent to realize that he was Ergo Proxy.

Well, there are some things to go back and re-read in the previous spoiler tags. A lot of things that you may not have realized were taking place the first time around. But hopefully you know everything there is to know other than the foreshadowing by now. Otherwise I've done a poor job.

[/SPOILERS]


////////////Reactions:

Kristeva's story, while worthy and ought to have more exposure, is straightforward enough that I won't cover it.

Proxy One says that the mask that Ergo Proxy wears is the "mask of one who would deny his fate." This is interesting, because in the beginning Ergo Proxy denied his fate by running away, forgetting his past, and trying to be a citizen rather than a proxy. And at the end Ergo Proxy may be wearing it because he wants to be more than a Proxy, and change the fate that has been allotted him.

"I have faith."
This is a strange thing for Re-L to say to me.
Faith in ... Vincent? Faith in that the future will be changed by our futile efforts? Faith that doing our best, we are making things better and not worse? Faith in a god that learns from its imperfections? Perhaps it is that she knows she cannot face the world alone, and so will now rely on the others she has found that she can trust.

"Because even if your future is inevitable and nothing but pain awaits me. I'm still doing what I think is right."
Another quote that I love, this time spoken by Re-L. I really do believe this.

Once again I feel dissatisfied with how much I put into this (not enough). There is lots more I could and should have explained about plot and mechanics of the universe, but that feels so dry and I can't remember what I have and have not said. There is more to be said about Pino, Re-L and Vincent in a reflection of their growth and realizations. There are other ways to speak about the proxies and the meaning of being an imperfect god. There is Proxy One's twisted narrative. Their is Raul and Pino and Kristeva. There is the idea of truth, fate, and self-created purpose. There is more to be said about love and the meaning of love. There is speculation about what the humans intended and how they will react. There is tracing the chain of creators and created and comparing and contrasting the relationships. Humans, Proxies, Subhumans, autoreivs.... There is the idea of self-awareness and souls emerging. But for some unknown reason I want to publish this tonight and who knows if I will get back to it. Selfishly it is also because I have other less monumental things I want to write about, but this will be my 100th post on this blog. (!!!!!) And I want it to be this one.

The guide should remain a work in progress, but I don't know if I will actually follow through. Certainly it could and ought to be a lot better composed and organized. Certainly I should add images like I mentioned before. I guess I ought to trust myself a /little/ more since I never (ever) thought I would get as far as to write for all 23 episodes.
I should celebrate.


Fun fact - this is now 103 pages long and about 60k words! Whoah! I bet you didn't know you'd read a book-length analysis of this junk! Just one month shy of 2 years in the making (29th November 2012 - 28th October 2014) ***edit: Oh, I also just passed 10k pageviews for the blog as a whole.

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