A light in the dark
On losing Catholicism and finding Earthbound.
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One of my most vivid memories from childhood is of lying in bed, late into the night, begging God to please let me be straight.
I’ve never found a single scrap of joy in my Catholic upbringing. That’s not to put down those who do — Faith is a personal, intimate thing, different for every individual who chooses it.
Once I can get a day or two to myself that I can devote to nothing but crying, I’m intent on playing That Dragon, Cancer. I want to understand what it’s like to feel embraced and comforted by something that has always fundamentally alienated me.
But, personally, what saved me in my time of need was dropping Catholicism and finding something else.
Earthbound.
At 13, I was in a dark place. Literally; I don’t know if it was living on a bottom floor apartment on an awkwardly slanted road, or if depression and anxiety just skewed my perception, but my memory of my mother’s apartment is that it was always too dark, the light always seeming to sputter and fizzle into a dim fog.
I was just starting to come to terms with my sexuality. I was finally starting to understand that my attraction to guys wasn’t evil, and though I still had constant night terrors about Hell and God being real, I had almost entirely thrown off my Catholicism intellectually.
But there was nothing to replace it, and at the time, I desperately needed something. I was living in a two bedroom apartment with five people. I mostly had my own room, but I was trapped in a sexually coercive situation I couldn’t talk about for fear that it would lead to my family finding out I was gay.
My mom’s hulking, ancient desktop became my only window into a brighter life. She never understood my activities there. All she saw was me wasting myself on a pointless addiction. Her fear and well-meaning attempts to get me to live a normal life, added to her volatile temper, compounded my problems. I love my mom, but she couldn’t understand me, and there was too much at risk for me to try to reach out.
So, instead, I lived. I didn’t exactly hate myself, and it never occurred to me to want to die. But I felt constantly barraged on all sides, unsafe and unwanted. It was all a house of cards in my head. At any moment, I could be found out, and I’d end up on the street, completely alone. I distrusted my family, and hated my life.
Language barriers turned into shields for me. Living in the US with my dad had given me English fluency, and my addiction to fiction sharpened my mastery to a knifepoint.
I simultaneously isolated myself from the world offline and exploded into it online — if you’ve ever known an overzealous fan of anything, that was me. I flooded the fictional worlds I inhabited with feeling, drank all the sunshine and joy I could from them, trying to fill myself up.
Whenever I wasn’t online, I was dead. I was a functional robot in day to day life — I existed only between lines of text in books and games, in RPGs where I could live other lives and online on forums dedicated to them.
At night, I would think about Hell and Heaven and how both seemed awful to me. Often, in fits of insomnia, I would feel the dark of my room come alive. It would gain weight and close in around me, threatening and watching.
Despite my grandmother’s medallion and prayers, I never felt a God listening to pray to, or an angel coming to my defense. There may have been, for other kids. For good kids.
But I kept facing the dark, unnoticed or unworthy, until the terror of stillness overtook the terror of risk and I would dash for the light switch, to beat back the night for a few hours more. There was no real relief — only the ability to numb myself, to ignore my pain and fear. In the darkness of my despair and isolation, a path out wasn’t just invisible— it was unimaginable.
But then, at some point, a friend got me to play Earthbound.
In it’s code and sprites, I found something unexpected: Hope. The promise that the world did not have to be so grim and dark forever. The possibility of a future full of love. A feeling, somewhere inside me, of something warm and bright.
Light, brilliant and radiant, with all the fury and glory of the sun.
Looking back, I can imagine this is what the Bible alludes to when it talks about a covenant with God.
The star that lights the universe.
Nothing shone to me quite like Earthbound did, but maybe that has something to do with the lens the game has you see it through.
One of Earthbound’s most understated virtues is it’s emphasis on diversity, and that was critical to it’s impact on me.
All of Earthbound’s protagonists are kids — kids who were around my age when I played it. But more importantly than that, they were all different. Surrounded as I was by macho grandstanding and gender roles like iron bars, not to mention racism that was sometimes subtle and sometimes overt, it floored me to see how friendships in this game looked:
Ness is the American Everyboy in a game where psychic powers are the strongest attack against an unimaginable foe. Yet, while a powerful attacker, he’s also one of two main healers, and the only one for much of the game — an unusually nurturing and care-giving role. He struck a chord with me where most male leads could not, defensive and resentful as I was against any traditionally male identity.
Paula is the American everygirl to answer Ness. In a clever twist, she turns out to be the most versatile early attacker, and is consistently one of your biggest damage dealers, and she’s the only PSI user who doesn’t learn any healing magic. She embodies femininity in some respects while demolishing the gender norms that would restrict her role in the game.
Like Ness, she eroded the firm ideas of gender and identity being pushed on me, and helped me imagine a character I could be friends with, helped me open my heart to their travels.
Poo is a warrior prince. He’s distinctly Asian, but that specifically mattered less to me than the fact that he was from another culture entirely. As a cultural expat myself, I could kind of imagine how it must have felt for him, existing between two worlds. He was a prince on a mission in his world, while I felt more like an exile in mine, but still, the thread was there.
But all three of them paled in comparison to Jeff.
Jeff has no psychic powers. He’s useful through a set of skills entirely his own, tinkering and making items to help himself and his friends and generally doing whatever he can to help with technology, not magic, on his side. It was easy to see him as a techie dweeb, interested in science more than other kids his age, much like I was. But Jeff was much more important than that for an entirely different reason.
Though not directly stated to be queer himself, he is closely linked to a gay NPC, Tony. Tony is a schoolmate of Jeff’s who is clearly infatuated with him, to the point that he calls you during the game just to speak to him. He shows up several times during the game, and even plays a role in the endgame where each character’s loving relationships turn out to save them.
This blew my gay little mind in ways that took me years to really understand. A gay kid! In a game! It gave me room to dream and build and relate — room to fill in Jeff’s character with some of myself.
As a shy, nerdy kid myself, it was already easy to like Jeff. It was just inconceivable that a hero would be friends with, let alone of a kind, with someone like me. Tony erased that barrier and replaced it with limitless stories, made just for me.
And tearing down those walls let the other characters in more fully, too. Being able to connect to Jeff and Tony so viscerally let me inhabit the world much more fully and honestly than I would have done otherwise. And that allowed the game to influence and expand my worldview in a way nothing else could have.
Not only could these kids with vastly disparate backgrounds come together to save the world, but they could come together to just be kids! To be friends and to care about each other. They can, after all, all play with the same toys — all the characters can use Yo-Yos and slingshots.
These were the characters that served as my gateway to a brand new world. Earthbound is bright, colorful, and welcoming. People are rarely mean or judgmental and always have something funny or interesting to say.
It was kind to me, when nothing else was.
There are NPCs from all walks of life, and although it’s true that Earthbound (and Mother 3) have an unfortunate tendency to stumble into stereotyping, that didn’t factor into the wonder of the variety all around me, or the humanity with which all of it felt presented.
The world was majestic, and the game makes it a point to have you travel to find places of particular wonder and magic — not RPG magic, but the regular magic that you get in real life when you get to experience something unique and beautiful with people you love.
This experience of the world — as a place full of sunlight, where you could call friends from miles away, where love and togetherness and adventure are your birthright — that was what I took away from Earthbound more than anything.
There was no suggestion that these kids needed salvation, no implication that they were bad or flawed. They have insecurities, sometimes they get scared or sad, and they might not always be at their best.
But they’re fundamentally good.
Jeff introduces himself with self-deprecation, but none of his shortcomings stop him from being a worthy ally and beloved friend in the group. Even without magic (or heterosexuality), he’s intrinsically valuable as far as the game is concerned.
That spirit of worthiness pervaded the writing of everyone in the game. There was no original sin to atone for here. The evil that exists in Earthbound exists because of a being driven insane by pain and loneliness — not because of original Sin, but original Sorrow.
Yet, for all of that, the themes of the story might have fallen flat for me if the darkness that lurked around the edges didn’t seem so deep.
Praying in the dark.
Earthbound’s charm works so well because it’s set against a background filled with paranoia and fear.
There’s a reason the game opens with such a foreboding title screen. At the height of 1990s alien conspiracy fascination and hysteria, Earthbound wanted you keep in mind what’s at stake.
Ness meets Paula when she sends out a desperate telepathic plea for him to help her, after she’s been kidnapped by cultists who want to make her their priestess.
Jeff seems not to have a mother and is estranged from his father to the point that he corrects himself when he calls him Dad and instead calls him Dr. Andonuts.
Poo is introduced to us through a horrific sequence in which he meditates while a spirit psychically emulates crushing his limbs, taking his senses, and killing him.
Ness’ foil, Pokey, stands for all the basest elements of humanity throughout the game — cruel, petty, greedy, willing to hurt others, and interested only in his own power and advantage.
Not just him, either. Plenty of people succumb to or embrace the negativity and evil throughout the game, opposing and hurting you. The game text makes it a point that you never kill anyone, though. Instead, you “make them tame” or “return them to normal”, with the exception of some monsters or supernatural beings.
And, of course, the climactic battle of the game is oft-cited as one of the most disturbing and horrifying in video game history:
There is overwhelming darkness in Earthbound’s world, and it takes immense effort and endurance to overcome. Like real life, it isn’t easy, and it doesn’t let up. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it. It doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful.
There are a lot of people who would say that it’s ridiculous to compare Earthbound to the story of Jesus. But, fundamentally, Earthbound’s story is about the same things — striving against the dark and baser impulses in ourselves, being kind and loving to each other and our world. Enduring great sacrifice to enact a sort of salvation, at it’s climax.
The only difference is that Earthbound doesn’t believe that humans need saving from their own sinfulness. It believes living things can be flawed while still being pure and whole and good.
And playing it didn’t put me in a position to admire a person much better than I for doing admirable things— it put me in a position to identify with and embody the people doing it.
It let me experience the agony, the terror, the despair, and it let me choose to go on anyway. It let me decide that the next pleasant stranger or gorgeous vista would be worth it.
At some point, a friend linked me to the MOTHER vocal album — an album of fully orchestrated songs based on themes from MOTHER, the game that Earthbound served as a sequel to and that was only released in the U.S. in June of 2015, for the Wii U virtual console.
I remember listening to the 8-bit version of Eight Melodies after listening to the version of St. Pauls’ Cathedinal Choir. For the first time in my life, music made me feel moved.
It wasn’t just the first time music made me feel safe.
It was the first time I felt at peace, that I could believe in something enough to make it mine, to make it bigger than myself in my heart so that I could crawl inside and feel warmth and comfort. It was a religious experience.
I’ve never been musically inclined, but my desire to be able to carry this music within me somehow inspired me to learn how to whistle. Even now as an adult, in my idle moments, I often find myself whistling those songs.
They are my daily prayers, my hymns.
The values of caring for yourself, the world, and those you love stuck deep. The view of the world as a fundamentally good place where deep tragedy may strike but can be overcome became my bedrock. And the variety and diversity of characters not only taught me that it was okay to be who I was, but also gave me a perspective naturally disposed to find in anyone something worth loving.
Those are all basic values that religions guide us to aspire to. I still felt adrift and lonely in my life, sure, but now I could hope for something better. In lieu of medication and professional psychological help, I leaned on games, faith, and friends for emotional security and reinforcement.
And eventually, I made it. I finally started to break free from my anxiety and self-loathing enough that I could live my own life, and begin to empower others.
I started a serious relationship over a year ago. About half a year in, I had my boyfriend move in with me when his parents kicked him out. We’ve struggled, but our determination and luck or serendipity have allowed us to make it through, and now he’s starting to really take off on a self-sufficient career that will greatly boost our standard of living.
On the day I thought of this article, I got home and traded stories of the day with him. Our door buzzed outside, and He said “Buzz Buzz” in a silly voice out of nowhere.
He’s never played Earthbound. He has no way to know that Buzz Buzz is the name of the interstellar warrior who travels into the past to warn Ness of Gigyas’ influence on Earth. And yet, he said his name anyway.
If I told him about this, he would dismiss it as a coincidence.
But to me, it’s another link in a chain. Another verse in a song that always sings in whispers. My life is strung together by those magic seconds where by simple happenstance, things just click into place. I’ve grown to trust that rhythm, and it’s yet to lead me astray. It’s the eight melodies, it’s Ness’ thoughts during the coffee scene, it’s the unexpected magic of Lumine Hall. It’s the words to Pollyanna and Flying Man.
My faith fills the contours of my life with joy and meaning. It keeps me steady when my world is in upheaval and pushes me to be the best I can be. It enables me to see the best in people and give as much love as I have to give.
I trusted Earthbound’s light when there was nothing else to trust, and now, while there are still some shadows, that light has grown — please forgive me for this — grossly incandescent.
And when things do get hard, when I struggle to keep afloat and keep those I love afloat, I can remember: Once I walked through the valley of the shadow of death. And there, Earthbound found me, and its story and song comforted me and led me through.
And that’s something I can believe in.
