Weird, amirite?
So liek, almost no one reading this likely knows what I'm even going on about, but... I was poking around for I can't remember what, and I came across this discussion on the GameFAQs forums about Mana in Atelier Iris 3
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I think if there's any confusion floating around, it's this vestigial "but doing the heroic and noble thing isn't dark, right?" thing that we have left over from impressions that darkness, being frightening, must be evil. But in this case, darkness just happened to be the heroic and noble thing. 'cause sometimes it is. And that, perhaps, is the theme of AI3 as we see it, anyway.
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I mean, I also think it's way too subtle for GUST to have thought of - the idea of doing a Dark things that's also Good but makes you less Pure - but I like it.
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I definitely like the idea of Iris being less pure because she's stained her fingers playing with the dye, so to speak, but I also agree that I don't give GUST that much credit.
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Hm, I suppose you could pin Iris as the Yin of the party. She's definitely more internally focused - she has to be. She's not about putting out so much light and sound and fury, but about subtler ways to get things done. Her waters run deeper, and perhaps more still.
It still surprised me when I went back to replay the game that she wasn't the main (controllable) character. I had always had it in my head that she was. The game really doesn't strike me as Edge's story.
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He fits the Decoy Protagonist trope, really: the everyman character who is there as a spectator in Iris' story, a viewpoint character for the player.
It's clear that they intended at some point to have there be this big rivalry between Edge and Ash and so on, but nope, denied. True, there's the sense that Edge is pretty ticked off at Ash, especially for attacking Iris and so on, but he never does anything about it because Iris and her life are more important, obviously.
On second playthrough, it really just became obvious to me that Edge = doormat. He'd like to take a stand and tell Iris that he doesn't really want to hear about alchemy (which would be much nicer than the passive-agressive dismissing it), but he's just too much of a doormat.
Regarding Rufina, the question when someone says 'pure of heart' is pure what? ( ... )
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And this is an interesting perspective. I'd never thought of Edge as blindly selfless, but the more I think on it, it's true. He's an Annoying Love Interest with no motivations or appeal beyond that, which is what makes it all the more infuriating that he's the protagonist. It's not his story. He doesn't really have much of a story.
So yeah, I can see him as kind of stripped of much self-concern to the point where he'd be on a similar wavelength with someone whose purpose is to do good acts and not really have a sense of self. Although... the particular manifestation of it in Edge is one that never comes off to me as useful in the way that angelic selflessness might be useful, in the sense that he seems like the kind of person who'll do things for others because he believes that's what's Right, without checking in that that's what would really be useful to them. Which is not a terribly good thing to be espousing as "pure" without any criticism....
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