spoiler
milieu.
“What do you know of choice? You stand before me, likely having never made a significant decision in your entire life.”
- Marcel Milieu, IMAX enthusiast.
The game escapes description. Things happen in it, of course, as things always do, and the image is not static. The tapestry is chaotic - there’s a marriage, there’s a war, there’s a kidnapping and a kid napping - but this seems to be mere backdrop. There is a shadow, holding very deliberately still, projected against, atop, and into the midst of this milieu; a man stands in the middle of the theatre while the sequence of events, as a film, play out past him, and upon him.
We see this man, who comes to the country of Setanta on a trade mission, sees the king’s daughter, immediately runs off with her, and has his brother Anthony enter the country with a band of soldiers to escort him out. Things, predictably, degenerate. He is opposed by the incensed prince, Norris, who he takes prisoner. He fights his way through the country, against increasingly well-armed opponents, as the Setanta army mobilizes against him. Ultimately, he meets the Setanta general, Fintan, who offers him clemency if only he would let undo his elopement - at this last moment, he refuses to take it, proclaiming resistance against the injustice of the world, and is killed. The adventure is shot through with recklessness; Marcel seems never to consider the outcomes of his actions, or even revels in them the worse they get, as if confirming to himself what suffering he is fated to endure. The final march is equal parts resistance and suicide; but it’s not a martyr’s blaze of glory. It’s the last stand of a man at the end of his rope, who strains against it with all his might but cannot escape it.
This is Marcel. This is who we have to come to watch.
We’ve come to wonder what the hell his problem is.
Where to begin our forensics?
The murder weapon seems to be as good a lead as any.
Propitiation
Marcel wields a weapon called Propitiation.
Wikipedia has this to say concerning the word:
Propitiation is the act of appeasing or making well-disposed a deity,
thus incurring divine favor or avoiding divine retribution.
It is related to the idea of atonement and sometime mistakenly conflated with expiation.
Milieu’s not a story about the gods, or about God, despite Anthony’s peculiar proclivities (he is a devout Catholic) or the repeated invocations of the name of Jesus Christ (who I imagine in this world must have been a traditional sword-lord, given his WTD against lances). There is no deity ever directly invoked or supplicated to in the text. Yet we can’t seem to escape the presence of something unexplained which lurks just out of sight. Human will and faith is given form in this story in the form of Conceptual Weapons, for instance. There’s a tangible importance placed on the intangible this way - some sort of purity of the human spirit, maybe. In particular, the word atonement in that definition rings a bell.
That word is used in Chapter 6, when Anthony is explaining Marcel’s particular pathology to Alice. It seems, just as soon as we’ve begun, we’ve got the answer to our question:
He spoke in an offhand sort of way, like you normally would to a stranger, saying…
that the queen had passed away…
And it was bad for Marcel. You can’t understand, at that age… that death occurs for no reason at all.
He looked around for a culprit… saw no one to blame, turned the frustration inward, and blamed himself.
He said to me that what happened was… a natural and just reward for a family of soldiers trained to kill others, that we could not kill others and expect to get away with it ourselves.
The idea of karma, the desire to atone - those are what I believe form the crux of his beliefs.
So Anthony says. Core of Marcel’s character, laid bare. All things become clear. His mother dies; a child cannot comprehend such a thing. For a child, everything happens for a reason. It’s that same old story; robbed of love, emptiness and guilt calcifies until the limbs can no longer find the strength to move.
But if we close the case here, we should rightfully be accused of profiling. There’s 8 more chapters, after all.
Before we explore those, however, I’m going to briefly return to what was supposed to be the topic of discussion: Marcel’s strongest weapon.
No, not the Paragon Sword.
It is related to the idea of atonement and sometime mistakenly conflated with expiation.
What is expiation?
The act of making amends or reparation for guilt or wrongdoing; atonement.
Expiation is not propitiation; propitiation is not expiation. Marcel wields Propitiation and not Expiation. He never names his blade. Perhaps if he did, he would have called it such. Anthony believes so much: Anthony is the one who identifies survivor’s guilt as Marcel’s shackle. Marcel’s life is one of atonement for the nonsensical death of his mother, who was slain not by any action of man, but by something so lofty and divine as karma. They’re a family of sinners. They kill people cheaply, and they receive no punishment. It’s little wonder that his mother was killed cheaply, too, by something beyond retribution. By something he cannot strike back against; by something he cannot counter.
What was Propitiation’s item effect, again?
Actions and Consequences
There is a precise moment in which, and a precise mechanism by which, one loses control. We’ve all experienced it, whether balancing something, walking down steps, or engaging in some other pedestrian activity during which we expect to not be terribly harmed. One moves in accordance with one’s own intuitive sense of the world, presuming mastery and knowledge of the world. Then we miss a step. Our internal model immediately becomes irrelevant, the brain ceases to function. Our heart jumps into our throat. Some people catch themselves, implying we’ve been dropped; others take the fall with grace and speed directly into the dirt.
It’s that moment, the misidentification of the connection between action and consequence, which causes this breakdown.
It’s that moment that Milieu is preoccupied with.
In the first chapter alone, the connection between action and consequence is mentioned thrice. In the introduction, Fintan, the final antagonist and Marcel’s reluctant killer, has this dialogue with Norris:
Fintan: “Are you sure about going through with this, Marquis Norris?”
Norris: “I have been granted permission.”
Fintan: “Yes, but have you considered the consequences?”
In the outro event, Norris says this to Anthony:
Anthony: “If you provoke or threaten my comrades any further, Norris, I can’t be held responsible for the actions that may follow.”
Norris: “When have you ever been held responsible for any of your actions, war-mongrel?”
And later in that same event, Madeleine chastises the townspeople for selling them out and permitting Norris to run rampant against the newlyweds:
Madeleine: “You can’t just avoid the consequences of your actions by following orders, and abdicating personal responsibility!”
In this story, people criticize and are criticized for their inability or ability to take action without thinking of, or facing, or properly receiving, the consequences of such. The severance of action and consequence is most pronounced in Marcel. The pivotal event - his mother’s death - leaves the younger Marcel an intractable puzzle: an event without a cause. So he blames himself.
Except, of course, he doesn’t really, because he can’t. He didn’t do anything. He can’t blame himself in the traditional way, because it was not his fault; nor can he be absolved of this blame in the the traditional way, as, despite identifying himself as the original sinner, there was no real cause for it all. A consequence without a corresponding action. So - what then? The mark left in him does not heal; it sits, and collects rainwater, and over time is weathered into his being. The pain of the event may fade (or may not), but the fact of it remains lodged in his psyche: that there is a world where causation is permanently broken, that what one does has no relation beyond the theoretical to what happens, and that this is that world. The logic that humans have regarding their own agency, the unflagging faith that doing begets, is broken in his mind. More than helplessness, it’s some kind of personalized nihilism. He latches onto karma as a framework by which to explain things, but it doesn’t. It cannot. If there was truly something to answer for, Marcel may well be at peace. But there is nothing.
So it is the case that expiation is not propitiation, and Propitiation is not Expiation. In truth he doesn’t appease the god, the karmic causality, he has constructed in his head; he still kills people without being punished for it. Marcel is still unpunished. Whether or not he is aware of this fact - he likely is, subconsciously - it has permeated into his being. He makes reckless decisions because he is unable to reckon.
The story of Milieu has been mentioned to have a levity to it, where events happen but nothing really matters, and this is perhaps precisely how it all appears to Marcel. He takes actions that he places no weight in, and when things happen, although he is aware, conceptually, that his actions have caused the things happening to him, he is unable to internalize it. So things happen and happen and happen.
I don’t have any desire to go into the details of it here, but there’s the inkling of a sentiment that Marcel doesn’t even really love Madeleine. He makes the motions, of course, but there is little real emotion, affection, or any sense of heart or self in his interactions with her. Perhaps the chief part of this is the fact that Madeleine is less character than caricature - indeed, almost every character but Marcel is in this story - Simone a very striking exception - and that is intentional with Marcel as the POV character.
(I would take a moment to say the obvious: Marcel is suffering from exceptionally bad mental. He is very, very convincingly depressed, borderline dissociative, and is able to perceive the world only through a blurry, muffled lens.)
That he doesn’t love Madeleine, yet chose to marry her and cause this entire crisis, fits into this image perfectly. I don’t want to go so far as to claim that Marcel concocted the plot as a harebrained suicide scheme. One doubts that he is capable of such a thing; of conceiving of it, of executing it with any sort of dedication or single-mindedness. In truth, the entire plot is driven by his action. That it feels out of control, that he remains the victim of everything that unfolds, that he manages to never once exercise his agency, is masterwork sleight of hand.
The Theatre
We return now to the beginning, which is the end.
Marcel looks Fintan in the face and asks him this: "What do you know of choice? You stand before me, likely having never made a significant decision in your entire life."
And there we have it. There’s Marcel’s big McFucking Problem.
That is Marcel’s own mouth.
Marcel has never made a significant decision in his entire life. He knows this. How could he have? He has completely lost the ability to understand action and consequence. Not in a real sense - after all, even a monkey knows that a dropped apple will fall down. But understanding consequence means understanding that you’re taking an action; that when you do this, something will happen, and that is your desire.
"You think so because you stand in the present, see decisions made in the past that are now unalterable, and so therefore conclude your choices made then, in the prior present, were beyond natural control."
What does he know of Fintan? What do we know? Marcel cannot possibly be remarking on the past of his opponent, who has been on screen for a handful of minutes. It is nonsensical.
It’s chicken and egg. Since he lost his mother and have been unable to rationalize it, all of his decisions have been beyond “natural control”, as he puts it. He has completely become unable to realize his own agency. I would return to a prior observation: the story of Milieu appears to be entirely out of control. Yet Marcel has always had the choice. From the first chapter, Anthony mentions to Norris that Your father granted us safe passage, Norris. And to the very last, the king tells Fintan not to kill Marcel - to let him pass, so long as he loses this foolish teenage idea of marrying Madeleine.
Marcel has been able to do something about everything at just about any moment. Of course this isn’t literally true - when attacked by bandits, when washing down the river - but the plot itself claims that Marcel could have stopped. And he doesn’t. He doesn’t perceive himself as having a choice.
"Yet you stand in the present now, the same present I inhabit, and believe that I have a choice to make, despite leaving me with no choices to pursue. What kind of hypocrite are you?"
Who is denying him the choice? What prevents him from turning his back, giving up this foolish endeavor, for a woman he doesn’t love, from simply going home and eating his food?
Who is Marcel talking to?
Does he actually believe the words coming out of his mouth?
Propitiation, Pt. 2
One last digression, I promise. This is the last time we’re stopping at this dead horse. Get your sticks ready. But don’t beat it quite yet! First I want you to transform it: from a stick into the perfect conceptual weapon.
Let me remind you of what that is:
Marcel: “The strength is based on the strength of the wielder’s convictions. The stronger the wielder’s beliefs are in the things that they fight for, the greater the strength of the weapon.”
Alice: “So if you believe… so essentially… the sword you hold in your hands… is a manifestation of what you believe in?”
Marcel’s belief must be strong indeed, seeing as he’s the most broken unit in the game by a mile. (Elizabeth suffices as a conceptual weapon in and of herself, but that’s a separate discussion on why and in what ways she’s a goddess, naturalistic-dialogue fan club meets on Mondays). Yet you need a fence and two patches of grass to determine which is actually green; likewise, there exists one other point of comparison in the game. No, not the Catholic with three Iron Axes duct-taped to one another.
It’s Perdition, of course, an item so broken the damage numbers are quite literally unreadable. So. Propitiation, meet Perdition.
Has Marcel ever believed in anything in his life until this moment?
Marcel is not incorrect in asserting, in some sense, that this is all “fake”, that they could all lay down their arms and go their own ways. But his understanding ends at the material, and he cannot grasp the intangible. Any grown adult understands that the desires of others - real human beings, although Marcel cannot perceive them as such - have real force, real weight, real value. Fintan asserts all this, plainly: You are accountable for your actions. You cannot run off with a girl you happen to like, without considering in life her position and yours. and Marcel responds: I don't understand what you're trying to say and I doubt you do either.
Once more, with emotion. Marcel knows what these words mean. He says that he would sooner die than live in...society. That is, a society governed by forces that enforce consequence beyond the immediate, enforces them in way that seems to him to be arbitrary; theoretically sensible, but fundamentally uncorrelated. He lashes out.
Marcel: Temporary, situational control granted due to sheer luck, that you abuse, call your God-given right… a time will come when like you… [who] kill those who point out their hypocrisy - nasty people like you with no regard for the lives of others - people like you -
People like… who? People like Marcel himself - son of a family of soldiers who kill without being punished for it. Marcel claims that this is luck, all luck, purely situational. He knows that’s a lie. A toddler can grasp the mechanisms by which power is gained, by which loyalty and command and obligation bind people to one another and underneath banners. What frustrates Marcel is that these invisible structures are invisible to him. He has always been confounded by this, and as he goes through life, where others can see something, he remains incapable of perceiving it.
But now is different. He is actually finally aware, at this point, that he has a choice.
There’s a catch: of the two choices, he has exactly one.
If he does walk away, it wouldn’t be his choice. He would escape, once more, without consequences. He would have created an enormous amount of trouble for an enormous amount of people, killed people without them raising a finger in retaliation, and here is his chance to do it again.
Or he can stay, and finally grasp hold of his agency with both hands. He can escape the hell in which causality is absent. He can do something, and be punished for it. He can make a mistake and atone. There is something within his control, an outcome he can predict and internalize. Finally, something makes sense to him. So of course it is natural that he manifests a weapon that reflects the strength of the truth that is now occurring to him, truth that’s found on the hilt of Fintan’s sword. Perdition - destruction - in Marcel’s final moment - is what he believes in.
The time has come when people like him meet righteous comeuppance.
It is, unmistakably, a joyous suicide.
=========================================================================
A sequence of words is too light a thing to bear, all at once, the opinions of those who read it; and so the story as exists in reality exists nowhere else. The copy we have in our heads are necessarily unique - in the process of transcribing it we impart it with defects of our own origin.
That is to disclaim, I read a story that maybe nobody else read, and everything that follows is - in order - fanfiction, self-reporting, and cope. But that’s true of everything. Media is kaleidoscopic, and anyone can see themselves in the disassembled shards of the story once they’ve finished cutting it apart.
I was particularly struck by Milieu for two reasons. One was that it was good, which… and the second reason is that it’s not often I find a piece of media through which it’s easy to self-pathologize. Marcel’s confusion as I read it was something rather familiar to me. It struck me as dissociative in nature - this sense that there is no real self, that the actions taken and consequences suffered are as distantly related to my own actual agency as god. That despite superficially understanding why one thing leads to another, why this domino causes the collapse of that one, that it’s not really real and all chance occurrences stacking up to form the world’s greatest contrivance, and why I had to at the center of it all… that the things that happen to me will continue to happen, regardless of what my own decisions - which I don’t remember making at all, because I’ve never had a choice, of course - and so on.
So, if most of this was mere wishful thinking, or projection from the world’s biggest IMAX enthusiast onto the world’s biggest IMAX enthusiast, my apologies. I like to think, however, that I by and large picked up what Cadbury was putting down. I’ve said before that my most cherished hobby is cooking. When it comes to food, there is no real question of what comes from where, or why I’m doing what I’m doing. The biological need for food is as true a polestar as any humans have.
If you want a Big Mac, that’s the alpha and the omega. You’ll go and get yourself that Big Mac. And that’s truth.
other notes
things that i wanted to discuss/organize my thoughts on but didn’t because i got “bored” (i.e. cognizant of the fact that i have better things to do than spend more than the 5-6 hours i spent writing a review about a random voidhack):
the differences between the three “action-and-consequence” scenes in the beginning - notably, that Madeleine’s criticizing people who have a material stake in their actions, which she apparently cannot comprehend but Marcel does, which is why he soothes her and rushes her away with the same words that he uses as he’s dying at the end - immediately after grasping his own agency as well as Marcel’s tenderness towards Simone, who might be the only other real character in the hack (who is, in some ways, Marcel’s polar opposite - deeply aware of her circumstances and abusing her agency to struggle against them) - and the fact that his words encouraging and consoling her are the same words that he imagines during his death dream maybe some minor commentary on her being one of the few characters who has a conceptual weapon as well
i also left out an analysis of the scene between Marcel and Alice where he explicitly uses the rope tying him to the past phrase regarding his mother’s death which was probably important but uhhhh didn’t know where to slot it in
