Fiction for Utilitarians: Blasphemous

[feotakahari]

"Let me grieve, let me suffer
For one wound on me is one less on you

Let me bleed, let me feel
For a cut on me is a caress for you

Let me cry, let me moan
As all of my tears are only for me."

I find it jarring how many reviews of Blasphemous deny that it has any meaning or message. The general impression seems to be that the purpose of the game is to be violent and gruesome, and all the stuff about religion is a way of tying the violence together. To the contrary, I see Blasphemous as discussing worship of objects, worship of suffering, and the ways in which those two things tie together.

The church of Cvstodia believes that the more beautiful a thing is, the more holy it is. It's not enough to have a rosary; you can be denounced for heresy if you don't have one of the valuable, beautiful ones. It's not enough to mourn the dead; those who are truly holy must be laid to rest with gold and beautiful gems to sanctify their passing. While the common people sicken and starve, the church expends its resources on lavish artworks and ornate architecture.

You're also a collector of objects, but not necessarily beautiful ones. Your various artifacts are defined by the memories they bear. One character died holding beads of candle wax, remembering how he used to collect them in gentler times. Another picked up a single olive off the ground, just so he'd die with something he could call his own. A coin, a seashell, or a broken chunk of tombstone can each provide protection or assistance based on the ways in which they were valued. The implication seems to be that humans will always find something material to place value in, and in and of itself, this is neither good nor bad. The sin is only in greed and selfishness.

The other way in which Cvstodia worships is through suffering. Recognizing your own failings is a painful thing, and so if you're in pain, then "logically" you must be face to face with your failings. No temptation is so small it can't be punished with lashes, bludgeons, or fire, nor is any repentance so great as to end the requirement that you keep suffering. It's a sort of reverse Utilitarianism--the greatest misery for the greatest number.

Suffering may be a fact of life in Cvstodia, but there's a distinction that marks the truly heroic characters: they suffer to prevent the suffering of someone else. Exiled to prevent another's execution, tortured to prevent another's torture, killed to prevent another's death . . . Over and over across the game's flavor text, the righteous give all out of love for their fellows. Naturally, the church subsumes them into its worship of pain, lauding how ready they were to be hurt, and conveniently ignoring when it was the only reason they were hurt in the first place.

Combine the two forms of worship, and a pattern of in-group and out-group emerges. Again and again, it's the highest-ranking men of the church who get to worship through beauty, while those who are poor, female, or uneducated get to suffer instead. Not coincidentally, Cvstodia's decent people are rarely found in the church's high ranks, and the few who make it there tend to die or get exiled. In condemning these power structures, Blasphemous can be read as a call for liberation theology, or perhaps just a call back to what Jesus was preaching in the first place. After all, Jesus didn't surround himself with gold and jewels, nor did he call down suffering on others (save for the occasional moneylender or fig tree.) He died humbly, painfully, and selflessly, for the sake of all mankind.

Comments

[lb_lee]

Our roommate is playing this now, and we came back to this post to reread now that we actually have some clue about the game!

It is... weirdly enthralling to watch? And I look forward to watching more and seeing what I think!

--Rogan/Sneak mush