Before we can understand the tragedy of Karen’s circumstances, we first need to understand what about Scarlet Nexus’ world grounds this particular relationship between attention and agency.
My claim is that Karen Travers’ pathos comes from deserving to be seen, yet not being seen, in a world where agency is derived from the player’s attention. ) The Value of Attention and Being Seen in Scarlet Nexus
SCARLET NEXUS KAREN CODE
(A special, heartfelt thank-you to Bandai Namco for providing With a Terrible Fate with a download code for Scarlet Nexus, which made this analysis possible. Ultimately, we’ll come to see Karen as the natural terminus of video-game storytelling’s genre of antagonists who recognize and rail against their limited agency in worlds governed by avatars and players. Through this analysis, we’ll see that the world of Scarlet Nexus is one that imbues the player’s attention with special meaning and power this will put us in a position, second, to analyze Karen as a tragic figure who is denied that attention: one who deserves to be seen, yet cannot be. First, I motivate the view of Scarlet Nexus as a fiction whose ontology motivates the value of being seen I do this by analyzing the origin and functionality of the Red Strings and Design Children, both within the context of the fiction’s plot and in the structural, metaphorical context of how players and avatars engage with video-game fictions more broadly. We’ll see that the science-fiction and metafictional elements of the game turn Karen’s fate into a uniquely moving and human story about the power of being seen-and how deeply one can be wounded when denied that opportunity. We’re going to focus on reading Scarlet Nexus as a meditation on the pathos of its main “villain,” Karen Travers: I’m going to show you that Karen is a tragic character because his “villainy” comes from seeking agency in a world that has the means to furnish him with it yet denies him, regardless of the worthiness of his cause. Its intricate story represents something subtle, tragic, and deeply relatable: the pain of becoming obsessed with fixing a senseless accident that remains unfairly outside of one’s control no matter how much one tries to make things otherwise. In this analysis, I want to show you that Scarlet Nexus is a beautiful timepiece that functions flawlessly.
Stories that submerge you in complex science-fiction worlds or metafictional content are a gamble: like an ornate, 400-part Swiss watch, a perfectly orchestrated science-fiction or metafictional story can leverage every one of its parts to give us a unique, aesthetically meaningful perspective on the human experience that we couldn’t find anywhere else-but only if the pieces fit together perfectly. (Complete spoilers for Scarlet Nexus follow, along with very minor spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Final Fantasy IX, NieR: Gestalt/Replicant, Silent Hill 2, Kingdom Hearts II, and Final Fantasy XIII-2.) A Comprehensive Theory of Majora’s MaskĬompelling science fiction uses the fantastical to represent the deeply personal, and nothing is more personal than the need to be seen.
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