Child Of Light: An Allegory of Austrian Child Development
Child of Light mystifies many. It’s attention to detail in its visuals, the wayang-kulit-like caricatures and poetic dialogue makes the entire experience appear to be akin to reading a fairy tale. Unlike the common tale which applies predominantly to children, this one is far more symbolic of an young adult’s journey to adulthood.
We see Aurora put through trial and tribulation, but one key moment is when she saves the moon and transforms into an adult. The physical change was rather abrupt and surprising to me; assuming that the physical change was meant to describe something commonplace for the average Austrian young adult, I thus questioned what made seem so. I hypothesized that perhaps there are sizeable differences between the Austrian and my own fundamentally Asian context of development; what one constitutes as an action that transits an adolescent to adulthood could be sufficiently different to elicit surprise at a change.
Let us first analyze the situation leading to the physical change. Aurora has saved the first light of Lemuria, the moon, from the clutches of her evil stepmother, Queen of the Night. The act of saving is significant, but the location at which she does so is equally, if not more so.
Lemuria is a now-fictional ‘lost land’ hypothesized to exist in the 19th century; add this to the fact that the game in itself describes it as a fantastical land accessible via a mirror portal, and you get a sense of extreme physical distance and foreignity. Perhaps one could interpret this as a location external to a household, where everything appears to be foreign and unknown to a child. The child is expected to foray into the world on his/her own, and succeed at saving something. As daunting as this sounds, he/she is not without assistance; the mother will be at hand to help, even in the most unexpected of ways (represented by the presence of a ‘Lady of the Forest’ as compared to the ‘Queen of the Light’).
But what about the moon that the child saves? A moon could be representative be anything, but what is important is that it is something significant to Lemuria and not the other world the Aurora has come from. A child needs to be of some value to the external world, by doing something only he/she can do.
What is then so different between the two cultures that makes me get surprised by the above-mentioned child-development interpretations? A preliminary comparison to a analysis paper on Austrian child development by Sirsch et al. (2009) doesn’t seem to reveal much. The two of the three most significant criteria for one to be regarded as an adult are family capacities and norm compliance. These are normally what one would think of in considering a regular Asian family (with filial piety and conservatism being parallel concepts). As one would expect to statistically see in an Asian context, the apparently conservative standpoint in development results in 55% of Austrian emerging adults and 18% of adults perceive themselves to be in between adolescence and adulthood (Sirsch et al., 2009).
What is particularly significant however, is the emphasis on individualism as a developmental trait. Sirsch et al. (2009) identified that adults, as compared to adolescents, found that individualism was the most important trait for achieving adult status. Despite a potential bias, adults would naturally have the largest say in what reaching adult status would mean; any information provided by one of a lower developmental stage (i.e. adolescent) would be ascribed to have not attained a level of understanding of the higher developmental stage. This individuality is most definitely missing for adults in an Asian context. With Japanese, Korean and even more liberal Singaporean families still practicing collectivistic norms and habits of families and avoiding personal identification, it would be difficult to expect one to ‘save a moon’ existing outside our families’ kingdoms.
Furthermore, according to a research paper on Austrian parent-child relationships by Werneck, H. et al. (2014), there are almost no associations between parental personality and adolescents’ personality. The fact that children develop strong relationships with parents in their early stages of growth yet become distinctly their own people. In an Asian context, however, where children retain values such as relationship interdependency until adulthood, adults would be better expected to share critical traits of their child selves (at least more so than a Austrian one’s). Perhaps the complete abandonment of child-like characteristics in favor of a larger frame appears abrupt because of such.
Child of Light appears to tell a lot about how one develops and perhaps suggests how differently we do so. Regardless of which, it is nevertheless still important to hunt down and save that moon, sun and whatever else.
References:
Sirsch, U., Dreher, E., Mayr, E., & Willinger, U. (2009). What does it take to be an adult in Austria? Views of adulthood in Austrian adolescents, emerging adults, and adults. Journal of Adolescent Research, 24(3), 275–292.
Werneck, H., Eder, M. O., Yanagida, T., & Rollett, B. (2014). Predicting adolescents’ parent–child relationship quality from parental personality, marital conflict and adolescents’ personality. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 11(2), 159–176.
