longer.blue

To preface I'm not just doing this randomly. I do sometimes attempt to write fanfic and with Ar Tonelico being my hyper-fixation setting for like ten years now, it features often in the incoherent morass of nonsense I have tumbling around in here. This has to do with a thought that occurred to me as I ruminated on the central plot devices of Ar Tonelico, Reyvateils. Well Ar Tonelico itself is THE inciting plot device of the games, of course, but the Reyvateils are very related to it. To begin, Ar Tonelico takes place on a planet within the universe of EXA_PICO, which I lovingly describe as what happens when the Japanese read String Theory, take that as loose inspiration, and then run with it until they face plant into the creation mythos of Lord of the Rings so hard a Big Bang happens. Particle physics technically does not exist there, everything being made of some form of fundamental energy wave that never really acts like a particle as we understand it. This includes souls. There are canonically infinite types of waves, but only a few are relevant because waves which are too different from the ones you are made of are functionally dark matter and non-interactive. Every entity that exists within the same cosmological "family" of wave types as the setting of Ar Tonelico itself, that being the planet of Ar Ciel, has a soul made of Hymmno Waves. These waves govern a conscious being's identity, personality, thoughts, and feelings, and are even involved in such things as conveying meaning and intent between people. When someone does something with a lot of emotional weight behind it, their Hymmno Waves leak into that action and become a persisting aura on that object. In some cases reading a book that was written with unbridled passion can give you a vague sense of the author's intended feelings. If you scream with enough emotion and focus, you project a little sliver of your feelings into that noise. It's incoherent, and makes little if any sense, but it's there. This is the basis of how Song Magic becomes a thing in the setting. As far as the Ar Cielans are concerned, they can scientifically define such things about a person through analyzing their Hymmno Waves, such as gender. They do in fact artificially create souls in the setting, which is how the Reyvateils are created. In as short a way I can describe it, Reyvateils are a sub-species of magitech homunculi specifically created to have the ability to use Song Magic normal humans simply cannot, due to the fact that humans have very fuzzy and often incoherent feelings due to the complexity and naturally chaotic nature of human souls. Reyvateils are capable of feeling very measured and distinct combinations of emotions and intentions with very high clarity, and this was accomplished by making their souls simplified in comparison to a natural human's. A lot of extraneous and messy stuff was simply not added in. This doesn't tangibly manifest in something you could notice about a Reyvateil on an interpersonal level, they still emote and feel the full range of things natural humans do. All Reyvateils are women. This is on somewhat purpose. See, when the Reyvateils were first invented, they had to create prototypes, and the first designs were women, which they then functionally cloned over and over. The original creators had very cynical and sexist reasons. They didn't want to sow mass panic over a new class of artificial people who live decades longer than normal and can belt out literal facemelters if you piss them off. This is less scary if they are all pretty women. They supposedly intended to make a male pattern prototype eventually, which would have to have a new soul structure made whole cloth because gender is a physical property of the soul you can define, but they never finished it. The apocalypse happened. I'm not getting into it right now. Mass production Reyvateils were all, below the skin (not mentally, mind you), nearly identical even though they all varied in appearance due to some amount of genetic diversity. They underwent several stages of cost cutting that further homogenized them. They are so homogenized that all Beta Reyvateils native to a particular Song Magic tower are sharing a single soul called Beta-6D. This huge soul construct resides in a central cloud server and pinches off little bubbles inside it and each one of those becomes an individual Reyvateil. The addresses containing those individuals are paved over when they die (yes they are designed to die) and sublimated back into Beta-6D. As a result of their design, you can kind of shove a Reyvateil's soul into the hole that a natural human soul would occupy and it would very often fit due to it being a much simpler shape. You can line up the H-Wave pattern of a Reyvateil with the patterns of many, many similar humans in a way you could not so easily with two humans, even nearly identical people so far as their personalities go. This has, uh... consequences. Ar Tonelico, the central feature of the series and the cause of, like... ALL the things that happened in it to some degree, has a design flaw. This big fuckoff magic generator transmission tower can mistakenly identify natural humans as Reyvateils it has in its database. See, Reyvateils can have children. A synthetic Reyvateil can birth completely normal humans with human partners. Some components of a person's soul are inherited through heredity, and if enough of these markers are passed down and happen to line up correctly with that Reyvateil long after she has died, the tower may look at that person and go "Wait, I thought she was dead. Oh well. Fixing her." This happens to a young girl right around when she's in puberty. You then get a child falling into an intense fever coma for like a week, during which her body is being blasted by magic nonstop as her internal organs get reformatted. New things like reservoirs for liquefied magic crystal go in, a mirror of her soul is slapped into the address space her dead Reyvateil ancestor used to occupy, she gets mentally linked to it, and then you have a Third Generation Reyvateil. Now she can do super cool song magic! She now also has super magic cancer and will be irradiated to death before she hits 20. She is a lightning rod with raw energy surging through body 24/7 that she was not meant to deal with and the only thing keeping her alive long term is regular medical treatment to dampen the magical radiation field that is constantly aimed at her all the time. Ar Tonelico is often very grounded in real and tragic consequences for the ridiculous things that happen in it. Now, what has all this long meandering explanation been for? I mean, the fact I mention gender being an identifiable trait you can point at in someone's metaphysical soul in this setting should have given it away. I am a straight cis-het man and I will never have this experience myself, so I understand the following is something I may never "get right". Nonetheless I thought that, as a wannabee author of shitty fanfic and a self-identified ally, I should try. See, I consider this to be functionally identical to how in real life we can scan people's brains and show that an individual's neurological structure and brain activity aligns more closely with their expressed gender identity than their physical sex does. A trans feminine individual would logically have a soul that shows that internally. And if she were a descendant of a Beta, there is a non-zero chance her soul will line up enough that she will be pinged by the tower and then go through the process of being modified into a Third Generation Reyvateil. To what degree this would affect her physically beyond adding the Reyvateil components to her, I can't say because while it's clear in the lore that the tower is specifically trying to "repair" a discrepancy in the physical structure of the person it has misidentified, I don't know if it would go so far as to literally give that person a sex reassignment because who the hell knows if that's even considered a relevant part of a Reyvateil functioning "correctly". But for dramatic purposes, I think that it does. Thus I have decided that the First Tower is shooting invisible Instant Sex Change beams. Why? Well, I don't think it's, like, a good thing that Ar Tonelico would be robbing the bodily autonomy of people due to this godlike power it exercises while following its faulty design. It's already bad that Third Generation Reyvateils exist in the first place. Culturally I think it's likely that any trans individuals who might exist in this society would easily internalize its norms, assuming they must pass and conform perfectly to be "valid". The entire franchise in general is very misogynistic and hetero-normative with a bent toward "noble chauvinism". I often think about how Mute, a Reyvateil in the third game who could transform to become big and muscular, was just present to make jokes about her "looking like a man" when she does it. You better look like our idealized idea of what a girl is. That led me to conceive of the idea of a trans girl becoming a Reyvateil as she grows up and feeling survivor guilt because she lucked out on a magic sex change other people like her would never get, then deciding that she needs to "fix" this for everyone else, mistakenly internalizing the gender conformity of her culture rather than understanding the society itself was wrong and nobody needs to medically transition in any degree to be valid. Everyone's experience and relationship with their gender is different.